Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

Corel announced a new word processing product called WordPerfect Lightning. It a light-weight word processing application (~20MB) with a web-centric design.

Key features include:

• Quick notes: users can WP Lighting as a scratch pad to edit and organize short notes.
• Supports WordPress API: users can use WP Lighting as an editor to publish posts to their WordPress blogs.
• Online collaboration: mulitple WP Lighting users can share documents via the Web (a valid WP online account is required)
• Supports multiple document formats: you can use WP Lighting to view PDF, MS Word, text, HTML etc.

This blog is written using this new application. So far I like it.

Spotted on: Read/WriteWeb

Wii is not only good for entertainment and physical exercise but also for brain rehabilitation. According to Edmonton Journal, doctors are experimenting the use of Wii to treat patient with movement and balance issues.

Dr. Grigore Burdea, a world leader in computer-based virtual reality techniques in rehabilitation therapies, said in five years, he believes every hospital and rehab clinic will have embraced the gaming technology for their patients.

Burdea said some hospitals have used the Wii gaming system to help boost and entertain patients during their hospital stay. But he said the Glenrose is the first hospital he knows of where occupational therapists are guiding patients through golf swings, tennis serves and baseball strikes to help them not only gain lost movement, but to teach their brains to respond quickly to fly balls or swinging fists.

Spotted on Nintendo Scene

Harvard Business Online launched a new web site that is full of useful management and business analysis resources. An official announcement can be found here.

Items on Harvard Business Online that I enjoy:

• HBR IdeaCast: breakthrough ideas and commentary from leading thinkers in business and management
• Innovation & Entrepreneurship: sub-topics includes disruptive innovations, disruptive technologies, entrepreneurship and innovation
  
• Discussion Leaders: blog posts by leading thinkers in business and innovation (Tom Davenport, Tammy Erickson, Eric McNulty, Larry Prusak, Michael Watkins, Bob Sutton and Gillian Corkindale)

Source: Bob Sutton

Two pieces of interesting news about Wii this week:

1. Play Wii Sports for 30-minutes everyday can help you to lose weigh (see also NBC report).
2. Ben Heckendorn took apart his Wii and created a Wii laptop.

I’m not too surprised to see people losing weight after long hours of playing Wii Sports. Though Wii is not currently marketed as an exercise or a workout machine, but I definitely think it has the potential to be marketed as such. Imagine a new Wii console that comes with bikes or real sandbags!

Wii laptop is amazing not because it played any better than the one that is connected to my big screen TV in the living room. It’s amazing because it demonstrated the ingenuity of its creator Ben Heckendorn. By inspecting the design of the Wii laptop, you can tell Ben has spent a great deal of effort to complete this project. He definitely deserve a round of applause — “Well done, Ben!”

There is no reason why your desktop clock must be a digital or analog clock.

Try Pattern Clock.

It shows the current time as a set of four patterns representing the four digits in the time. Each pattern contains 0-9 “lit” dots representing the individual digit.

The time now is 11:43

Video games existed since the 1980’s, but little has changed in the way we play them. With the launching of Nintendo Wii, this is all about to change. This is not a Wii technology review but my thoughts on Wii’s innovative technology and how it may change the way we play and perceive video games. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to think science is more important than arts — because it’s more likely for a person to make a better living for studying science than arts. As I grow older, I come to appreciate arts and understand its value. I now believe arts is as important as science in moving forward the positive development of humanity.

Sir Ken Robinson gave a great talk on why it is important to encourage creativity (e.g., arts) in children education. He pointed out that the current education is set up to produce workers for an industrial society. In the current system, while students are encouraged think and learn, but often they are not encouraged to be creative.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jeffery Phillips is motivated by Carbon Footprint, a concept used for measuring the impact human activities have on the environment, and invented a new concept called Innovation Footprint. Innovation Footprint is a measure of the impact innovative workers have in their respective organizations.

What’s your innovation footprint in your business? Do you contribute more innovation and ideas than you take from the business?

I was surprised to see great similarities between these two concepts. When it comes to reducing green house gases, there are people who pay no attention to the problem, and there are others who worked hard to minimize their green house impact on the environment. Similarly, when it comes to making contribution to their business, there are workers who care less about how much they have contributed, and there are others who strive to make a difference.
An interesting comment posted on Innovation Weblog:

Like our carbon footprint, each of us is either a plus factor, creating value many times in excess of our salary and what it costs to employ us, or the equivalent of dead weight, dragging down our company’s profitability. Which are you?

What’s your Carbon Footprint and Innovation Footprint?