Friday, September 24, 2010

Innovation

I recently picked up a book I got at a trade show a few years ago called "The Art of Innovation" (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Innovation-Lessons-Creativity-Americas/dp/0385499841). It tells the story from inside Silicon Valley. Around the same time I came across this article by Bruce Nussbaum that claimed Innovation died in 2008.
I read that article on my iPhone using a cool FREE app called ReadItLater (http://readitlaterlist.com/) that allows you to quickly save articles for reading later and it optionally strips the article to plain text (a must for quick reading on the iPhone).
Last week a business partner's iPhone started messing up and he could not type some of the letters because of an issue with the touch screen. Dragon to the rescue. A free iPhone utility app from Nuance, the publisher of Dragon Naturally Speaking. A super clean interface (one big record button). You click it, say what you want to text or email to someone, Click the big Done Recording button and voila...there is your text. Extremely accurate, cool and innovative.
Then yesterday my friend Tom sent me a link to Google Fast Flip (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/). Another cool and free way to consume a bunch of information quickly. It essentially grabs the first page of all major news articles, groups them into categories and allows you to qucikly flip through them and read the first page and click to read the full article! Awesome.

So is innovation dead...no I think not. If there is still any question look at the military UAV's or the dog robot.