Thanks to CrunchGear for posting this video. Wish I knew how they did it…

Duh? Ok, maybe it wasn’t that obvious but to those of us in the trenches you’d have to be pretty blind not to realize this is a big area in the enterprise. The study is pretty high level but interesting nevertheless.

Other areas of focus by large enterprises include web services/SOA, open source, offshoring/globalization and software industry consolidation. No surprises in that list either. So the good news is no new major trends for 2008, just the maturation of some ones we’ve been seeing for awhile now.

I personally think open source is the one to watch as more players enter the application space. Thanks to Rough Type for bringing this study to my attention.

I was recently invited via an email from Omni Hotels to check out their new, sorta-social networking portal which they have called “Live Like a Local”. The intent is to allow anyone to upload tips on cities around the world where Omni has a hotel.

Ignoring the fact that the execution in this example is really poor (basically no content, poor SEO page optimization, etc.) I think the bigger question is whether an individual hotel brand such as Omni can hope to compete for traffic with the likes of Virtual Tourist, IGoYouGo, Trip Advisor and of course, my site TravelGator who already have thousands of attractions for hundreds of cities around the globe.

I’m guessing the folks over at Neighborhood America, the company hosting the Omni site think so as they’ve built a business based on the assumption but I’m not so sure. For specific categories I think it might be possible to get some level of audience participation in a brand, but in other areas - travel being one - where there are very established players the major brands would be better of partnering as opposed to going their own.

I’m thinking this is an experiment by Omni Hotels that is going to go nowhere.

So the secret is out - the reason Apple does such great design work is that they do ten, count-em ten, nearly full designs for each feature they come up with.

I tried to to find the presentation that was done at the South by Southwest conference in March that talks about the Apple design process but couldn’t come up with it so this article by BusinessWeek will have to do.

Maybe this was common knowledge and I just missed it (entirely likely), but while trying to convince Google that even though I’m currently physically in Mexico, I still want to search in English, I discovered that you can actually tell the Google search engine that you want to converse in “Elmer Fudd“.

You’ve got to give a company credit when they allow their programmers to implement functionality like this. Other options included “Bork Bork Bork!” (the Swedish Chef), “Hacker” (didn’t get it - lots of random numbers and letters…maybe I need another character font installed), “Pig Latin” and of course given the density of engineers at Google, “Klingon“.

I expected to see binary as well but perhaps there wasn’t enough screen real estate to handle it.

Somehow I missed this demo from the beginning of March but it was just so damn cool I had to post it anyway. I really cannot wait until the Apple App Store launches.

A short post as I’m actually on vacation this week but I caught an article in the San Jose Business Journal that profiled a new solar roof that eBay has installed across a number of the company’s buildings. It is a 649.6-kilowatt installation consisting of 3,248 solar panels.

Very cool. I’ve been looking for an excuse to put solar on my house for years but the financials just don’t work yet. I guess that is the difference between living in Boston and San Jose.

Google recently published a list of 10 user experience principles that they aim to follow when designing their applications.

They are (don’t you just hear the Letterman drum roll in the background…):

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams
2. Every millisecond counts
3. Simplicity is powerful
4. Engage beginners and attract experts
5. Dare to innovate
6. Design for the world
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind
9. Be worthy of people’s trust
10. Add a human touch

For the most part all of this makes sense to me. It is pretty hard to argue with “Be worthy of people’s trust” after all. They are also all rather high level so most things that Google does are going to fit pretty well within the principles.

The one I did think was a bit funny was “Delight the eye without distracting the mind”. I’m curious as to whether any graphic designers even work at Google since everything they produce looks like it was done by an engineer who had taught himself PhotoShop. I’m an engineer who has taught myself Photoshop so I should know.

They have some work do to on #8.