The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
Issue No. 23 - 30 April 2010
In This Issue:
Errata
Gartner's IOM Conference
Protecting RFID Tags
Foldable Displays
A Standard for Web Fonts
German-Indian Research Partnership
Michael Elkins on KM Success Factors
Read Recently...
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Errata
The article on "Silly Patents" in the last issue caused two readers to react. Strictly speaking, the title should have read "Silly Patent Applications," although some of these so-called nuisance patents do get approved by examiners who do not find the relevant prior art, or do not have the background to see the idea as obvious. Secondly and embarrassingly, "Tweeter" should have been "Twitter."
Real Conference on Virtual Issues
Gartner's "IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit 2010" will be held in Orlando, Fla., on June 14-16. It will focus on virtualization and on best practices involving ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base). Click here for more information.
Protecting RFID Tag Content
When RFID tags were first introduced for retail applications in 2005, for example for inventory control in clothing stores, one obstacle to their proliferation was their price; another was the concern that a tag could be easily read to gather data beyond the initial purpose -- e.g. to track where the wearer of the clothes went later (see the Security Concerns section of the comprehensive Wikipedia article on RFID). During the CHI 2010 conference in Atlanta in mid-April, a University of Calgary researcher demonstrated different ways to restrict access to tags. See this Computerworld article for details.
Toward Foldable e-Books?
While we continue reading on our Kindles, iPads, and perhaps even on plain old paper, the search for economical and readable flexible displays continues. Technology Review discusses the latest effort by HP Labs: a color display that bounces off ambient light (as paper does) instead of using backlighting. Don't resell your e-books yet: the expected commercial availability is in 2012 or beyond, and only for large signs and billboards (er... why does it need to be flexible, then?)
News Alert: "Microsoft" and "Standard" in the Same Sentence
No, it may not be impossible. Have you ever been annoyed by fonts that are rendered differently in different browsers? Or, as a site designer, by the very small number of standard font faces available? Microsoft is throwing its weight behind the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) standard being developed by the W3C, and everyone is hailing this unexpected move, according to CNet News.
From the Acronym Generation Department
The new German-Indian Partnership for IT Systems (GRIP-IT) was launched at a workshop in Bangalore on April 21. The event was hosted by SAP and has the German ERP company's footprint all over it, in spite of the official sponsorship by a government authority. It is also interesting to note, in the SiliconIndia article announcing this, that the argument for locating research in India is voiced... by a key German participant, not by an Indian official. The P.R. department found an "R" to make a catchy acronym, but is a little lacking in the diplomacy area.
Speaking in the e-Radio
Michael Elkins, President of the Kestral Group and expert in content management and records retention, was recently interviewed about Knowledge Management by Ilya Bogorad of BizVortex. You can read the interview's abstract and listen to the 23-minute recording here. Michael referred a lot to Schlumberger's experience and success with KM.
Read Recently...
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."
-- Wayne Gretzky, tweeted by Armond Mehrabian (@Armond_M),
lean/agile software development consultant

"An entire generation of software developers will grow up and think natively in graphs. And that's a big deal."
-- James Governor (@monkchips),
tweeting about Facebook's Open Graph initiative