Thinkovation

So… having built a pretty dandy benchmarking engine, how do we make it easy for other people to consume it? Blathering away over a triple-grande-caramel-machiato-with-enough-extra-caramel-to-kill-a-dog, I happened to mention to Jonathan, that we could create a google gadget interface to the application… Naturally, this statement ended with “How hard could that be?”

Well, I’m in the process of finding out…

As it happens, I’m off to a great start - Thanks to this - an utterly superb intro to gadget writing.

If you’re at all gadget curious, I’d recommend the seoish tutorial… it rocks.

Katy Ring has joined us at Bathwick.

On a personal note, I can’t tell you how delighted and excited I am. Katy is an amazing person to work with - and I’m over the moon.

Here’s the press release:

Bathwick Group Press Release:

For Immediate Release

5.6.2008

Dr. Katy Ring joins The Bathwick Group

Dr. Katy Ring has joined the Bathwick Group as a Principal analyst in the IT Services field. Highly regarded internationally as an analyst with insightful and challenging views on the development of the IT services market, Dr Ring will be responsible primarily for developing Bathwick’s new Global IT Services research programme, due for launch in Q4 2008.
Jonathan Steel, CEO at The Bathwick Group, said “I am delighted to welcome someone of Katy’s calibre to Bathwick; her experience and ability adds a sharp edge to Bathwick’s IT Services research and consulting business.”
Latterly with NelsonHall, Dr. Ring spent 12 years at Ovum leading research into the opportunities for emerging software and services markets as well as developing the company’s Outsourcing Practice. Prior to her tenure as a Principal analyst and Practice Leader at Ovum, Katy was a journalist with publications such as Computer Weekly and Computergram, and was founding editor of Software Futures.
Commenting on her appointment at Bathwick, Dr Ring said, “It is refreshing to join a research organization committed to developing research that is both commercially relevant and intellectually engaging. The Bathwick Group has the operational agility, professionalism and cultural audacity to enable its researchers to think differently. I am very excited by the opportunity to build a Global IT Services programme here.”

Dr Ring holds two degrees: an Honours degree in politics, philosophy and history from the London School of Economics and a PhD in the popularisation of science from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Last week, we ran a two day conference on Green IT, to take a look at the agenda look here

A great mix of attendees and speakers - including a number of analysts from other firms, Rakesh Kumar and Nino Moscardini from Gartner, Martin Hingley from IDC and Andy Lawrence from the 451. This has prompted a couple of questions from attendees - “Why allow other analysts to muscle in on your action?”. The simple answer to this is, because they’re smart, they’ve got something valuable and important to say, and the Bathwick group is absolutely committed to working and collaborating with other smart analysts. It doesn’t need to be “formal”, it doesn’t need to be an “alliance” - Let’s get on and do stuff.

And Reuters ran a piece on the event -> here

There I was, stuck at Heathrow, with 5 hours to kill. I’m not about to “cross over” and go to departures because, well - I have to admit - I want t o be able to “nip out” for a breath of “fresh air” once in a while.

So what do you do? Wandering around Terminal 4 in search of somewhere to sit down and do some work, I saw a sign saying “Yotel“, which advertised cabins for £25.00 for four hours. Intrigued, I wandered in…

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One of the many reasons I promote homeworking for certain types of job (it isn’t suited to “any job” by any means) is that it improves your carbon footprint.

I was challenged on this by a client recently, who asked “what about the additional heating of your home?”

So I did a bit of analysis (it being wot I do..) This is a superficial analysis - just looking at the commute and the additional home heating. I’ll do a more detailed model for all costs (electricity to run your home computer etc - although many of these are offset by the fact that you’d be running a computer if you were in the office anyway).

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Stephen O’Grady, James Governor, and Michael Coté have made it into LinuxWorld’s top leaders in Open Source. See Here

Redmonk is a small firm that has a huge influence with the OSS and developer communities - They’re way more influential than many much much larger firms…..

IBM has today announced that it will establish the first Cloud Computing centre for software companies in China, at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China.

The initiative is the result of an agreement between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

“The announcement states;

IBM will work with Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited; the Wuxi municipal government; and its business partners to build the China Cloud Computing Center, which will be a shared facility providing each software company in the park with its own virtualized computing resource. For example, a company will be able to use the allocated resource for designing, developing and testing its software products. Such virtual environments can replace the traditional data center model, in which each company owns and manages its own hardware and software.

While this is one of many announcements that IBM has made with respect to its investment, and business interests, in China (And you can expect to see LOTS of announcements from IBM concerning projects that it is kicking off in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries, as well as in other emerging economies like Vietnam, and continental Africa over the coming 12 months) - I think it’s important because it highlights a number of things that western companies, and indeed western governments, seem to completely misunderstand.
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