Since my recent story on using your mobile phone as your personal medical assistant, I have read a story on using your phone as a breathalyser and and police attempting to use mobile phones to track your movements.

Whilst there seems to be a lot being said now about commercialisation of inventions, there’s not a lot about how you encourage creativity and new inventions.

Rethink(ip)’s story on Proactive Invention Management by former Hewlett Packard patent portfolio manager Bill Meade has some interesting themes. I particularly liked the observation that sometimes facilitators can actually get in the way of what they’re trying to achieve: in his case, the lower his overt involvement, the more successful the group discussion and number of ideas generated. Perhaps facilitators are actually at their best when no one notices what they are doing.

He also discusses his notion of "invisibias" (or invisible assumptions) about inventors. He describes 3 assumptions that should be adopted to counter invisibias:
1. We don’t know who the most prolific inventors should be
2. We don’t know when an inventor will come up with an idea.
3. We don’t know what field an inventor will invent in.

His article reminds me of the concept of "skunk works": small groups of inventors working on secret projects and the story of how Apple got a graphing calculator.

UPDATE 30 October: Business Week has a story on innovation labs

Wired News has a story on what tech trends the futurists are picking.

I always approach "trend" articles with reservations: are they stating the obvious or are they trying to name a trend based on preliminary data?

For example, two of the trends are simplicity and convergence.  These have been around for a while and are waiting for breakthrough execution, although it appears the iPod is a pretty good example of simplicity.

The most telling comment is from the person who says he’s waiting to make his next purchase.

The USA Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) has issued a guidance note, “Authentication in an Internet Banking Environment.”

US bank regulators will require banks to strengthen security for Internet customers through authentication that goes beyond typing in user names and passwords, which have become too easy
for criminals to obtain.

Bank Web sites are expected to adopt some form of "two-factor" authentication by the end of 2006, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council said in the guidance note.

In two-factor authentication, customers must confirm their identities not only through a PIN but also with something they physically have, like an electronic hardware token with numeric access codes that change every minute.

Australian banks have already started offering tokens for business customers.

UPDATE; 21 October: The US Federal Reserve has sent a letter to US banks telling them that they have until the end of 2006 to conform to the FFIEC guidelines.

The blogosphere can sometimes sound like an echo chamber: an idea or issue is picked up and discussed and becomes a "meme".

So when "Web 2.0" became frequently used it was natural that it would become a conference.

So what is Web 2.0? Evelyn Rodriguez describes Web 2.0 as the web as a participatory platform.

Tim O’Reilly, one of the inventors of the term, sets out to define the term in this article and provides a useful meme map. He concludes by listing the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models.