Month: July 2004

Adoption Rates for New Ways of Working. New technologies and processes abound in the legal market: e-discovery, portals, customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management, practice group profitability analysis, matter-centricity, online training, to name a few. What can we learn from the past, both to predict the future and to guide how we manage the new?… Continue reading Adoption Rates for New Ways of Working

Developments in Full Text Searching. Regular readers of my blog know that I have a long-standing interest in the potential of full-text search technology for both litigation support and knowledge management applications in large law firms. With the seeming explosion of new companies offering advanced full-text approaches, I have been trying to sort out what… Continue reading Developments in Full Text Searching

Brits to form new deep black counter-terrorism unit (The Times). A dedicated special forces unit is being assembled alongside the SAS and SBS to infiltrate and destroy Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network. The unit, nicknamed the “X-men”, has already begun recruiting and is expected eventually to comprise some 600 men and women from all three… Continue reading The Times

DNC Wi-Fi Update. Reports from the field indicate that the Democratic National Convention Wi-Fi coverage is abysmal, other connectivity hard to find: Contrary to pre-event reports, there is Wi-Fi at the DNC. However, they haven't done much to make it robust, and the ENG (electronic news gathering) spectrum overlap is probably killing the signal, too.… Continue reading DNC Wi-Fi Update

The Way of the Cache. There is a post at the Mambo forums about benchmarking different PHP content management systems. The winners were Drupal and e107 because they support HTML caching. This is clear evidence that so long as it is practical to cache the rendered HTML, the speed of your PHP code is irrelevant.… Continue reading The Way of the Cache

When hotel information technology system goes bad. What happens when a company buys into the “Information Technologies don't matter” strategy? A customer-relations disaster like what my family experienced this weekend. The Sandman Suites (sandmanhotels.com) in downtown Vancouver had an IT system meltdown. Here's what happened. We took my parents up to Vancouver. Crossing the border… Continue reading When hotel information technology system goes bad

SJ Mercury: Humanitarian effort yields brilliant technology, teamwork. Dan Gillmor. Led by Cmdr. Eric Rasmussen, a Navy doctor who has been working on humanitarian projects for years, the team demonstrated some of what's possible. The technology ranged from advanced wireless networking to powerful collaboration tools. Some came from companies selling proprietary products. Others were based… Continue reading Humanitarian effort yields brilliant technology, teamwork

Redesigning the Personal Video Recorder. Personal Video Recorders, like Tivo, have changed their owners’ viewing habits to the point of shifting advertising strategies. However, current PVRs have some significant interface drawbacks. Teehan+Lax, a Toronto UX consultancy, recently launched a free 40 page report about the user experience of two current PVRs, and show UI comps… Continue reading Redesigning the Personal Video Recorder