The Architecture SIG is Kicking *** July 15, 2006
Posted by Bill in SDForum, SIG Meetings.add a comment
Even though there was no Emerging Technology SIG meeting this month, there’s still plenty at SDForum for Emerging Technology junkies.
For example, I’m excited by the Architecture SIG’s meeting this month. John Kern is going to talk about design principles and architectural precepts for mobile software. It’s a great opportunity for those of us who have sat out the not-yet-occurred mobile revolution to learn a lot from a guy who’s been on the frontlines for a long time.
Even more exciting– John just sent me an e-mail saying the talk is getting better by the minute:
I was talking with Chris Hofmann of the Mozilla Foundation about my talk on the 26th. Along with Doug Turner, they are the guys behind the Mimino (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/). They have agreed to join me. That’s great! My talk focuses on developing applications. Their forte is extending the web to the handset.
Major Kudos to Ron Lichty, the primary chair of the SAM SIG, for continuing to organize and run such an excellent forum.
Zocalo: An Open Source Toolkit for Prediction Markets July 3, 2006
Posted by Bill in SIG Meetings.add a comment
In August, on Wednesday, August 9, to be precise, the Emerging Technology SIG will feature Chris Hibbert, talking about Zocalo.
Here’s the abstract:
Zocalo: An Open Source Toolkit for Prediction Markets
Prediction Markets are a 15-year old idea that have been getting attention recently for their ability to provide improved and continuously updated forecasts. Participants back their estimates of the likelihood of different outcomes with real or play money. The incentives reward honesty, insight, and information sharing. The result is a projection that accounts for the strengths of different opinions, and attends to contributions from people whose opinions would be ignored by polls, focus groups, or official forecasting departments.
These markets are being used in a variety of contexts, including sports betting, predicting Hollywood box office returns, and projecting the spread of infectious diseases. Trials in leading companies have shown that they can improve on corporate forecasts in areas ranging from predicting product sales to comparisons of market demand for different product features mixes.
Like other open source projects, the Zocalo effort intends to make the technology more accessible and to codify the state of the art so additional development can focus on expanding available features rather than reproducing basic functionality.
Mr. Hibbert will show that Prediction Markets would be a valuable addition to any organization that wants to know more about what the employees are doing or what the customers want.
Cool stuff.
No July Meeting July 2, 2006
Posted by Bill in SIG Meetings.add a comment
We had a killer topic and a great panel. Then … as is sometimes the case, things began to shift around. Some panelists cancelled. Other panelists didn’t return our confirmation e-mails . And while some panelists were good citizens, we decided that we weren’t sure we could put on a great SIG meeting this month.
And so we’re cancelling it.
We’ll be back next month (in August) with a great talk by Chris Hibbert (the author of Zocalo).
