As virtual worlds begin to move from the fringe to the mainstream, there is considerable excitement and hype surrounding the movement. But it does beg the question: what real value do virtual worlds present to users and businesses?
An upcoming issue of Cutter IT Journal will address this question. We will examine virtual worlds in terms […]

We recently published the results of our annual Cutter Benchmark Review survey on trends and technologies for the coming year. This is the third yearly issue of CBR where we ask our contributors to look forward to the coming year and see what technologies and IT trends we can expect to endure, which ones are […]

Please indulge me momentarily and pardon this esoterica. By the time you finish reading this, I hope I will have shown the need for this “scenic detour.”
For a long time thinkers and practitioners in the area of knowledge management have made a distinction between knowledge that is tacit and knowledge that is explicit. Knowledge and […]

The optimists among us would like to think that the abundance of information, easily transmitted, will result in companies that are less hierarchical and more democratic. That perhaps the firm as we know it will become extinct. I was, for a brief, tongue-in-cheek moment, one of those optimists.
Others, like Andrew McAfee at Harvard, suggests that […]

I read a lot about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0–about how companies need to fully embrace the concept of “openness.” And I agree that Enterprise 2.0 offers companies an innovative way to foster significantly better collaboration. But the truth of the matter is that a lot more control is needed in the business/Enterprise 2.0 world (compared to […]

The short post that I put up deals principally with making social networking websites work: Attracting traffic, converting traffic to loyal, trusting repeat users, and then monetizing this trust in various ways. Rebecca Herold raises very interesting issues. As we learned from the cartoon in the New Yorker in July of 1993, “On […]

Social networks seem cutting edge. Perhaps Second Life should be viewed a replacement for travel, bigger than gaming and movies combined, the next social force, like email. Perhaps MySpace will replace the Yellow Pages, iTunes, even America’s malls as a communications mechanism, meeting place, and sales channel for America’s teenagers. Maybe even […]

In April of this year Steve Barnett and I published two papers in the Cutter IT Journal on Resonance Marketing, the art and science of developing product offerings that resonate with customers’ wants and needs, cravings and longings. Resonance products represent such ideal fit with customers’ individual preferences that each becomes sort of a […]

Last week’s webinar “Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications” discussed the characteristics of various development approaches for building new-style, “live look-and-feel” web apps using Ajax, Flex or Google Web Toolkit (GWT). In particular we discussed how GWT alone among these alternatives provides a “single system image” to the developer, allowing him or her to […]