To iPhone or not to iPhone?

Last Sunday my lovely wife and I took our hogs for a spin (see picture). The ride brought us from our home in Littleton MA (home now to the new IBM Mass Campus), along the railway tracks until we climbed west across Oak Hill (the northern tip of a long ridge of hills called Shrewsbury Ridge by geologists) and onto the quaint town of Harvard MA.

From The hogs 8/9/...

What was different about this particular ride was I had my new 3G iPhone with me. Part of what attracted me to the new iPhone was the integrated GPS. So as our hogs wind out way through the pre-fall countryside to the sounds of the new Coldplay album, I was also able to track our route using a iPhone application called GPS Kit (which I purchased and installed on the phone using the App Store). This cool application then allows me to email the GPS data of our route and you can see the result below in Google map. Click on the picture of the map to bring up the actual map and data.

Now by the time we reached Harvard and its quaint general store I wanted to know a lot more about GPS so I plugged it into my nifty iPhone Wiki application called Wikipanion (it reformatted the wikipedia page to be more iPhone friendly). From this I learned two things:

• Did you know that President Ronald Reagan make the GPS system available for public use following the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983,

• Did you also know that the pix above of our hogs was taken outside that quaint Harvard general store and since I took it with my iPhone camera is it also geotagged and you can see it on the map here

Now I know all you Apple Inc haters out there are screaming for blood at this point, and to be honest I am a long time hater myself. But... and this is a big but, this is one beautiful piece of hardware. Apple have long understood the importance of the combining the artistic and the aesthetes of the right brainers with the technical know how of the left brainers and none of their product show this more clearly than the iPhone.

So in answer to the question posed by title of this blog, to quote Auden from his poem The Unknown Citizen ‘The question is absurd’ ... get up off you caboose, forget that you will need to sacrifice your children college fund just to cover the monthly AT&T bill, get inline with the rest of the great unwashed and get one :).

Enabling asset consumability: Is your wardrobe good, bad, or ugly?

Another colleague and friend of mine Celso Gonzalez and I have just published a paper on dW Rational Edge on some of our thoughts around enabling asset consumability. Here is the abstract


Enterprises are often good at producing or creating assets and artifacts but are typically very bad at reusing them. This article describes a way to facilitate asset and artifact consumption by better understanding the context in which they are used.


The full text can be found in the July issue:
Enabling asset consumability: Is your wardrobe good, bad, or ugly?