Carlson School Holiday Flash Mob

Very cool video of a recent flash mob in the atrium of the Carlson School of Management. The performers are from the U of M School of Music, Campus Singers, Men’s and Women’s Choruses and the University Singers. I miss this place…

Microsoft’s Vision of the Future

Very cool video from Microsoft showing their vision for future devices, information technology, and interfaces.  The graphic design used in the interface concepts is beautiful.  I hope we get to see these types of technologies in the near future!

eCommerce Discussion Questions

MBA 734 & MIS 330

For your last blog post, please discuss one of the business models you found interesting form this week’s presentations of our final projects.  Please do not discuss your own proposed business model.  Highlight the strengths of the business model and provide some suggestions for improvement.

eCommerce Discussion Quesitons

MBA 734 and MIS 440

Prediction markets are only effective if a lot of people participate.  What are the best ways to encourage more traders and trading within internal company prediction markets?

If you’re not familiar with prediction markets yet, read the NYT article in the syllabus, check out the Wikipedia page, and I highly recommend experimenting with some prediction market trading before class.  You can trade futures and options on movies and Hollywood stars for free on the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) or vote to predict political events on Intrade.net.

eCommerce Discussion Question – Threadless

MBA 734 & MIS 440

What are the similarities and differences between a community-driven product development process and a traditional product development process within a firm?

eCommerce Discussion Questions

MBA 734

LinkedIn recently hit 100M users. If you were in charge at LinkedIn, what would be your strategic goals for the next several years?  How would you achieve them?

MIS 440

What’s the best way for companies to engage with their customers using social media?

Quick and Dirty HTML and CSS Tutorials

For anyone looking to get into basic web programming, Lifehacker has a couple of great introductory tutorials on HTML and CSS.  Both tutorials include short demo videos, about 15 minutes each, and accompanying blog posts to help you through the tutorial.  You’ll need a text editor to follow along; Lifehacker recommends TextMate ($39.95, Mac) and SublimeText (Free Version, Windows & Mac).  Others that I’ve used and liked are Notepad++ (Free, Windows) and TextWrangler (Free Version, Mac).  Lifehacker also has a five lesson series of introductory tutorials on general programming concepts, mostly using JavaScript, that is worth checking out if you’d like to learn more.  Also, if you’re a GMU student you have a small amount of web server space available to you for hosting simple web documents.  You aren’t allowed to use any JavaScript or other scripting languages for security reasons, but you should be able to use HTML and CSS to make yourself a web page.

Everyone’s an innovator.

Link back to the Joy of Tech comic page –  Everyone’s an innovator.

McKinsey’s Interactive Trends in Business Web 2.0

McKinsey Quarterly put together a nice interactive presentation that mashes up data from the past four years of their surveys on Web 2.0 technology use by businesses (access the Business and Web 2.0: An Interactive Feature).  To get full access to McKinsey’s articles, including the one that summarizes the data from this year’s survey, you need to register for a free account – but it’s worth the slight hassle.  It’s interesting to see that technologies such as prediction markets and microblogging have gone from 0% penetration in 2007 to 7% and 19%, respectively, in 2010 while the use of wikis and blogs by businesses has doubled in the past four years.  Furthermore, 65% of the companies in 2010 think that investments in Web 2.0 tech will continue to increase.

eCommerce Discussion Questions

Questions for both MIS 440 and MBA 734

How do Wikipedia’s processes for creating and modifying articles ever lead to high-quality results? In other words, since anyone can easily edit Wikipedia, how is it that good (and usually accurate) content emerges?