Xerox Blogs

When Document 2.0 meets Document 0.0

Francois Ragnet

One of the first "documents" to have ever existed (pre-Document 1.0 !) is being "resurrected" and made avaliable through (relatively) modern Document technology. The oldest surviving copy of the New Testament is being made whole again, online this time. The Codex Sinaiticus was written in the 4th century, and parts of it were spread across the world - in Britain, Russia, Germany and even a monastery in Egypt's Sinai desert. The British library will make the full text of this Codex available to Web users by next July. I always use the Gutenberg Bible as a milestone in the Document history, but this one is even more powerful ! I am looking forward to see how the Codex Sinaiticus web site will come up - hopefully contrasting the Documents with lots of cool Document 2.0 technologies (annotation, collaboration, rich content, etc...) !

I'm in ur browser, chatting in 3D

Jonas Karlsson

New virtual world platforms have been popping up almost daily for the last couple of weeks: Vivaty, Lively, JustLeapIn, ExitReality, WebFlock, and I'm sure I forgot a couple. This is a new generation of virtual worlds, eager to show that they've learned from the mistakes of Second Life: Browser based! Embeddable in your web page! More fun graphics! Integrated with FaceBook! Right now (and I realize it is still early), they just seem like more 3D chat rooms, similar to what Meez and IMVU have been offering for a while. To me, this type of platform is not that interesting. I want to be able to create things with other people, and explore environments and tools that others have built. So, I tend to dismiss those environments that seem to focus on just chat - they obviously don't get it! Of course, IMVU reports that they have more than twenty million users, so maybe I'm the one who doesn't get it (or, perhaps, people are different and like different things. Looking at Richard Bartle's classification of player types - Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, might help us understand what type of person prefers what type of virtual world). Some of the new-comers are showing glimmers of moving beyond the simple chat rooms: Lively will allow Google Gadgets to be integrated in the 3D space, ExitReality automatically converts a web page into a 3D environment, and JustLeapIn "premium" room templates are much larger than the rooms of of other platforms, allowing plenty of opportunity for exploration. However, I want to point out a story that's told about Second Life's beginnings. Philip Rosedale, describes how at a meeting where an early version of Second Life had been demonstrated, the agenda moved from the demo to a discussion about finances. However, the screen stayed on as "background entertainment" (cutting and pasting Rosedale's story below from 3PointD):

What happened was, we were watching the background, and we realized this city was emerging, very, very fast, it was this incredible thing. We all started getting drawn more and more back to the screen. We started talking about it, and a snowman showed up, Andrew built a snowman, and I don’t know if it was broken at the beginning, but then somebody else built a sort of burning man, with a bunch of small snowmen bowing down to the greater snowman, and so you could see this jazz thing happening in real time. There had never been a canvas in which two people could paint that way at the same time, much less three or four or five. That was this moment of change in that board meeting where we said, you know, it’s not necessarily about the wind working really well. It’s actually about people making things together. What’s going to come out of this is cities and intention and collaboration and community, because the capability this thing provides is mysterious in the degree to which is allows people to do things together.

What enabled this "moment of change" was the in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration. Chatting in a 3D environment may be good, but extending that chat with 3D forms of expression gives us a whole new way of communicating.

5 worst fonts!

Scott Titus

http://www.keriprint.co.nz/blog/index.php?blogid=1&archive=2008-07 I liked this blog, which looks pretty new. While I thought you might laugh and relate to the font discussion, I really liked the second post regarding print! Let's make sure we keep all our print in NC! It helps us all!

China and Your Intellectual Property Risk

Lynette McTigue

As manufacturers continue to make investments overseas and integrate a global supply chain, intellectual property theft will remain a common issue. A recent article in the Economist highlights the significant increase in lawsuits in China for IP infringement. Over 15,000 lawsuits, up over 200% since 2003, are now active. China has made investments to improve the infrastructure within the Chinese judiciary system to handle this new surge in activity. However, the main beneficiary in this splurge continues to be Chinese lawyers, allowing a significant potential for continued corruption. The risks of intellectual property theft and counterfeiting have not stopped manufacturers from flocking to China in order to gain the benefits of the workforce and its low wages. As organizations continue to make these decisions, they will be forced to mitigate the IP theft risk. The Wall Street Journal suggests that the starting point to protecting yourself against the loss of intellectual property is to educate your employees. Intellectual property rules can be difficult to comprehend and the proper training and a well established IP security process can alleviate many issues. Unfortunately, most organizations do not have a trade secret management system in place that governs how employees handle IP information. In order to reduce the risk of intellectual property infringement companies will need to start effectively implementing such processes. Check out Xerox’ Thought Leader on Security - Dave Drab, CISSP. The whitepaper Enterprise Security – Tightening Your Grip on Trade Secrets outlines managing trade secrets for legal security. By applying the discipline of counterintelligence to their security model, manufacturers can more effective in managing trade secrets across the globe.

New Opportunities to Manage Overhead Costs

Susy Mark

McKinsey Quarterly just published an article titled “Managing Overhead Costs”. The message was clear. The high-tech had telecom industry is facing a prolonged period of extreme competition. This competitive pressure and the current economic conditions require business to implement a “new approach” to managing cost. Sustainable cost reduction should be targeted for the overhead functions i.e. finance, HR, IT and legal. Some interesting statistics were shared. From 230 S& P 500 companies that publicly announced cost reduction programs only 10% succeeded in maintaining their improvement in cost over 2 years. And only 25% of the companies expanded their business while improving their margins. One of the cost programs that produced sustainable cost savings over 3 years included IT Outsourcing. As I read CIO Magazine, E-Week, and some of Gartner’s recent publications a common theme for 2008 is cost management. I support McKinsey's focus on longer term programs, outsourcing as a vehicle, and targeting overhead functions because programs supported by process, metrics and contractual obligations tend to deliver sustainable results compared with episodic actions. Cost out initiatives are not new news to IT, Finance, Legal, and HR. However, there are new ways to find millions in savings in these areas; one new way is to outsource document processes related to these functions. Not only can you control cost but you can also look for new ways to expand your business. Here are some thought starters on Document Outsourcing.

A Sustainable Business

Julian Troake

Most Financial Services companies are studying their impact on the environmnet and looking for ways to improve the sustainability of their business. Last December the American Banker wrote aboout how financial institutions can make green from being green. Cutting out waste and reducing power consumption can keep costs down and helping to improve the environment can improve good will amongst your customers. Now there is a new tool to help companies measure the impact that their office is having on the environment. Called the sustainability calculator it evaluates the office devices such as printers, copiers and multifunction devices and then identifies possible reduction of energy use, paper and solid waste etc. It's even more interesting to listen to a thought leader on the environment talk about how you can help make your business more sustainable.

Welcome to the new blogs.xerox.com

admin

We've made a few changes by now having individual blogs for our Xerox bloggers. Each blogger now has their own URL. Please take a look at our growing list of blogs at blogs.xerox.com.