LinkedIn is a useful tool for small-business people too and this Open Forum post discusses 10 ways your business can benefit.

There has been much excitement around the “Internet of Things” concept for some time now.  The idea is that rapidly improving sensor technology is turning the physical world into a giant information system that can be integrated into the cyber-world.  There certainly have been many movies created around this theme.

This vision is slowly turning into reality with senors, actuators and networks becoming better and more pervasive.  Real opportunities are also opening up for entrepreneurs with the foresight to build solutions around this internet of things.

Read this recent McKinsey report for insights into emerging sensor driven business models.  Also view this YouTube video of an event at the Stanford Business School called The Internet of Things: Sensors Everywhere.

BBC tech correspondent examines where the Web is headed in Where Next for the Web?

Apparently, it is going to get smarter, ubiquitous, increasingly mobile and largely cloud-based.

A $1-million prize offered by Netflix – an online movies rental service – has been claimed by a team of algorithm developers.  Netflix had offered the prize three years ago to anyone who could improve the accuracy of its recommendation engine by 10%.

Netflix, like many other successful online businesses, relies on an algorithm to predict its customers preferences and recommend other movies for rental.  Well over 50,000 contestants have attempted to rise to Netflix’s 10% challenge over the past three years.  Two teams finally managed to improve Netflix’s recommendation engine by an identical 10.06%.  Team Bellkor  – consisting of seven researchers who had pooled their resources after working independently – managed to pip its rival team Ensemble to the post by a mere 10 minutes!

Update:

As a follow-up to this hugely successful prize challenge, Netflix has announced a second contest with another million dollars up for grabs.  This time, they are encouraging developers to optimize software to predict a user’s movie preferences based on demographic information such as age, gender & domicile.   Check out the Netflix Prize site for more details.

The New York Times also ran an interesting article on the emergence of the “prize economy” where organizations of various stripes are offering multimillion dollar prizes for advances in a range of fields.

Coca-Cola remains top of the heap in Interbrand’s 2009 list of Best Global Brands.  IBM, Microsoft, GE and Nokia make up the rest of the top 5 in the list which remains unchanged from the 2008 ranking.

Interbrand brands itself as the largest global brand consultancy and produces the Best Global Brands list annually.  It ranks market-facing brands with at least one-third of revenues originating outside its home country through a combination of traditional financial analysis and various measures of the brand’s strength.

Asian representation in the list is mainly through a handful of better-known Japanese brands – Toyota (8), Honda (18), Sony (29), Canon (33), Nintendo (39), Panasonic (75) & Lexus (96).  South Korea’s Samsung (19) and Hyndai (69) also fared well.

A New Zealand accounting executive found out just how damaging capital letters can be.  She was fired for sending confrontational e-mails filled with capital letters.  For added measure, she also “provocatively highlighted phrases in bold or red”.

At some point. most of us would probably have been at the receiving end of similar fully-capitalized rants.  But how exactly did this all-caps style become associated with yelling?

This BBC Magazine article provides an interesting peek into the development of capital letters.  In the beginning capped letters were actually reserved for formal writing.  Nowadays, however, being too liberal with capitals can apparently be a capital offense!

“Cyberloafing” – the act of accessing the Internet for personal purposes on company time – is set to increase in Singapore.  So claims a report in today’s Business Times quoting a conference paper by a local academic.

Such activity could well be a drain on productivity, but the paper does point out that not all types of cyberloafing is bad for business.  In fact, browsing the web has been shown by several studies to have a positive effect on cubicle life in general.  It allows people to cope with life and work stresses and may even contribute to increasing a worker’s “business intelligence”, thus boosting productivity.

The effect of checking and responding to email, however, is not quite so clear-cut.  As it requires time and effort to manage emails, it can generally be a drain on productivity.  However, companies concerned about cyberloafing should avoid knee-jerk reactions such as a blanket ban on all personal web usage. The net result of such a response would almost certainly be negative in terms of general morale.

The only sustainable response to this challenge is to start managing by objectives – not tracking input.  In other words, set clear goals and objectives for you team and measure productivity by how well these goals are met, not by much much time is seemingly put into achieving them.

The Internet genie has long escaped the bottle – don’t waste your time trying to stuff him back in. Instead, focus your effort in leveraging the technology to boost your business’ competitiveness.

Google is not letting the tough economic climate cloud its long-term vision. Declaring that “the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies”, Google announced the launch of Google Ventures – its latest venture capital fund.

Google Ventures will be focusing on early stage investments in young start-ups. It is expected to invest up to US$100 over the next 12 months – not just in the internet and software space, but also in areas such as clean-energy, bio-tech and health care.

So, if you believe you’re on to the next big thing and could do with a financial leg-up, why not pitch your vision to Google Ventures?

Still wondering what Web 2.0 is all about?

Here’s a rather creative attempt at explaining the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 without any words from the folks at Not in Words:

Google recently announced in its blog improvements in its search technology which shows that it is getting serious about semantic technology.  Semantic technology is considered by many to be the future of the Web.

In essence, semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data, content and application code.  Through this, software is supposed to be able to provide more intelligent and responsive interaction than with traditional informational technologies alone.

In the search space, the holy-grail of this “meaning-centered” approach is to enable so-called “natural language queries.”  This is the idea that you can ask natural questions or discuss things at a conceptual level as you would with another human-being and expect the search engine to understand you and provide relevant responses.  This is very different from how search is conducted currently where you basically search for keywords that you guess would be relevant to your topic.

In Google’s case, the new technology can apparently “better understand associations and concepts related to your search” – thus enabling Google to offer you even more useful related searches.  This will be presented as an expanded list of useful related searches and the addition of longer search result descriptions.

For more insight into the Semantic Web, check out this “Introduction for Noobs” by Manu Sporny below: