LEGO: Serious Play

Team Building often has very little to do with building, and much more to do with establishing pecking orders based on the ability of individual team members to assert themselves, and not on their ability to offer valuable contributions. Beyond all the usual lip-service of management seminars, LEGO Serious Play claims seminar attendees will find themselves “…building landscape models with LEGO bricks, giving them meaning through storymaking, and playing-out various possible scenarios, which deepens understanding, sharpens insight, and socially “bonds” together the group who “plays” together.” Using LEGO for team building really appeals to me, and I would love to attend one of these seminars. If anyone has attended please leave a comment! The site can be found under http://www.seriousplay.com/.

Crowdsourcing: Predictify.com

Whilst attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was quite astounded to see how effective a service like Twitter could be for getting answers to random questions fast. Of course, a certain critical mass of followers is required for it to work, but it actually works quite well. Taking this basic idea of tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, Predictify.com is a site dedicated to “crowdsourcing”, or asking the many to predict answers to particular questions. You can even earn a little money by participating, and you can include witty comments on why you predicted a certain result, all displayed in a nice scatter-graph at the end. I personally think this is a “wicked cool” idea as they say, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of this approach in future in our private lives and in the enterprise.

newsmap: Brilliant visualization of Google News entries

If a picture paints a thousands words, how much information can you get in a glance? Well, a lot more than you get in your standard, somnial slideware exposes to be certain! The creator of newsmap probably asked himself the same thing when he put the site together and came up with a wonderful way of displaying the relationships between articles and related articles entered into Google News, offering deeper contextual insights into the data presented. Take a look at newsmap under http://www.marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/.

“The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch

I woke up early to watch an inspiring video suggested as a breakfast session by a good colleague this morning, and was not disappointed. “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, a pioneer in the area of virtual reality, follows a tradition at some American universities to offer leading professors the opportunity to give an hour speech as if it was going to be their last lecture. An incredible Tigger-like individual, the twist with Randy’s speech is that it will be his last lecture.

Also, if you would like to learn programming in a fun, intuitive way, take a look at the Alice environment Randy talks about at www.alice.org.

Composition: Hyperscore (MIT)

I first encountered Hyperscore on one of the many fascinating TED.com video podcasts. It is a product of the MIT Media Lab and enables anyone irrespective of age, physical conditions or training to compose music in an intuitive and fun way. The software costs US$79 to download, but whether you actually buy it or not, it’s well worth simply checking the Website: http://www.hyperscore.com/. Alternately, you can take a quick look at the TED.com video: Releasing the music in your head (Tod Machover & Dan Ellsey)

Common Craft: Video Podcasting

The Common Craft is quite legendary as far as simplifying technology goes. Back to the roots…well…pulp…paper…errr…anyway, well worth a look!

Digital Love Song

This is so terribly funny for anyone who uses MSN, IM, Skype, or any other chat medium…All I can say is ROFL!

Binary Toys

Very cool little desktop creatures that apply the laws of physics and a dash of AI to stick-figure-like automatons you can play with on your desktop. You can get Binary toys for free under: http://www.binarytoys.com/.

Plan Projects with MIT’s Simile Timeline

Brilliant visualization tool from the MIT Simile project that any would-be project manager or life-hacker should not be without, and free of charge at that! Link: http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/.

Free Online Family Tree

Those interested in putting together a family tree in a collaborative Web 2.0 way, can do so cheaply and effectively at http://www.itsourtree.com. The resulting trees are exportable to major genealogy-software formats so even if the Website were doomed to failure, your work can be stored offline and imported into a new application. I’ve been playing around with it for a few months now and I’ve got around 130 odd people in there…quite odd actually…