« Atlantawag vs. Valleywag | Home | Seven Core Competencies for Enterprise Innovation »
TAG Georgia Technology Summit
By John | February 28, 2008
Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the Technology of Georgia (TAG) Technology Summit. It was held in Marietta at the Cobb Galleria convention center, and Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics, was the keynote speaker. Wikinomics is a great book, and I was delighted to find that Don presents as well as writes. In the Q&A after his presentation, I had the opportunity to make a few comments and ask two questions. I noted that “the best advertisement I could make for his book is that, whenever someone asks me, ‘How can you make money on free software?’, I tell them to read Wikinomics.” He said that I was a wise man. 
Then I asked him the following two questions:
1) What are the three to five Trojan horse technologies that can successfully penetrate the corporate “Legacy-based” enterprises. He said that there are no magic bullets but that his best guess is Wiki-Workspaces. I really do think that he is brilliant, but he does kinda have wiki-on-the-brain syndrome. That’s alright though–I love wikis too.
2) The second question I asked was what could he say about the IT opportunities in China. Obviously, I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear it from an expert. His answer was simple and not as explosive as I expected: everyone should visit China at least once. I agree (almost half the population in the world lives in China and less than 20% of them are using the Internet), and, if I were 20 years younger, I would pack my bags and learn Mandarin on the flight over.
When I was chatting with Don later, I asked if he had ever met Macolm Gladwell because his writing reminded me a lot of Gladwell’s. He said that he did know Malcolm but that he actually quotes Gladwell in one of his other books. I told Don that I would pay to hear Gladwell recite the yellow pages. He agreed.
One of the other activities throughout the morning was a contest for the top TAG companies. Ten TAG-selected local companies gave three-minute pitches before the attendees voted for their favorite company. Here are the companies that were in the competition.
SparkIP.com is a data-rich site with extensive mapping and analytical features. We realize it may be a bit overwhelming for the first-time user, but with some practice, you can quickly navigate to interesting information in a variety of ways. Today the site supports searching over 4 million patents and patent applications along with technology listings (licensable technologies) posted by participating organizations – universities, research labs and corporations.
The Appcelerator Platform is our flagship product. It’s a next-generation, open source web platform that fundamentally changes the way rich Internet applications are developed.
Damballa monitors the Internet fabric to pinpoint BotArmy formation and rallying activity. Born out of pioneering research from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, Damballa is the most effective means of directly addressing the bot compromise dilemma. Damballa’s approach focuses on BotArmy communications and rallying behavior. Traditional security products are signature-based and LAN focused and thus are ineffective against BotArmies that continuously morph their own code and distribute their activities across multiple LANs. It is the constancy of the command- and-control systems that transforms a collection of compromised hosts into a BotArmy. Damballa provides unrivalled security to Global 1000 clients and OEM partners by delivering actionable, real-time intelligence to address the BotArmy threat.
PlayMotion! is the leading provider of immersive, motion-based interactive experiences. Founded in 2002, and located in Atlanta, Georgia, PlayMotion! quickly set the gold standard for motion-based interfaces. Using nothing but the human body, our technology allows the user or player to interact with games in the most natural way possible.
We are an Atlanta-based technology company offering comprehensive foodservice solutions ranging from Point of Service to Back of the House management systems including inventory management, procurement, menu planning, nutrition analysis, warehouse distribution and more. Our product offering provides clients with fully customizable and scalable software solutions able to meet the needs and budget of any foodservice operation.
Omnilink Systems provides the real-time location of people and valuable assets through unique location-based services technology that goes beyond traditional GPS. Our judicial solutions are transforming offender monitoring by providing officers with immediate visibility to offender locations anytime, anywhere. Government agencies across the country rely on Omnilink Systems’ single-unit solutions to effectively manage offenders in a variety of alternative sanctions programs. Through our network of value-added solutions partners, Omnilink’s commercial solutions provide the real-time location of people and critical assets when their safety and security are of paramount importance.
Dude… If you want to be a technology innovator you really need to get a web site going…
Suniva develops, manufactures and markets high-efficiency silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells for clean, earth-friendly power generation and is dedicated to driving down the cost per watt of solar generated power. Our world-class team has decades of PV industry experience, a unique development approach and innovative proprietary processes that enable us to deliver leading edge solar cell performance while dramatically cutting the cost of the PV value chain. Suniva has a primary goal of driving mass adoption of ultra high-efficiency PV technology which has significant economic, social and environmental benefits.
TerraGo Technologies empowers organizations to fully leverage investments in geospatial data by providing tools that eliminate technology boundaries so that anyone, anywhere can have access to intelligent, interactive maps.
The Weather Channel Interactive
Since 1982, The Weather Channel has brought timely weather information to the world. Beginning as a 24-hour, 7 day television network devoted entirely to weather, it has expanded across several mediums to bring the breaking weather to its viewers and users.
I thought that The Weather Channel, Appcelerator, and Damballa were really cool, but Playmotion and SparkIP really stood out from the crowd in my opinion. Playmotion, if it “plays” its cards right, could be the next big WII sort of thing. Instead of using a device, it uses infra-red and digital high speed cameras to simulate movement. The owner told me that it started out with an SDK from the beginning and that he really believed in building a community around their technology. Nintendo recently just figured this out. I was really interested in SparkIP because it did something really simple and relevant, a “Why didn’t I think of that?” kind of thing. It simply applied enterprise search (Lucene) to the USPTO database for patents. Actually, it also has some secret sauce with its cluster graphs. I voted for Playmotion and SparkIP, and I think that Playmotion won.
The day ended with Michael Gelb , the famous author of “Innovate Like Edison” and “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.” Maybe it was late in the day, but Gelb didn’t blow me away the way Tapscott did. His books do sound very interesting, however, and, if they are on Audible.com, I might download them before my next long car ride.
All in all, the conference was a lot of fun, and TAG looks like an exciting organization that I might join. I have been in Atlanta for only a year, but I think that I will invest some more time into following TAG. And you know that I will certainly be blogging about it along the way.
Topics: don tapscott, tag, tag georgia technology summit, wikinomics | 3 Comments »
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:07 pm
[...] a little out of the realm of IT Management, but still touching base as needed, John tells us about a visit to the Technology of Georgia Tech Summit, namely, about [...]
March 6th, 2008 at 12:35 am
I also highly recommend Duncan Watts Six Degrees if you like the Tipping Point you really should look at this article:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html
March 6th, 2008 at 5:15 am
Thanks
John