David McCoy

Met with Wordster people today. Small company that will deliver in November. No VC money. 4th start up for the founder: Dr. Anindya Datta. “We will do to the dictionary what Wiikipedia did to the encyclopedia!” Sounded kind of audacious. I saw the demo: ontology-backed corpus scrapped from the web and crowd-source input. Visual/spatial representation [...]

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Today, I attended a conference entitled, “Computing at the Margins.”  The subject was simple:  How can computing be used to help those on the margins of society?  It seems arrogant and audacious to define some group as “being on the margin” only if you are stuck in the Frankfurt school of political correctness.  For those [...]

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Back in March 2008, Jackie Fenn and I interviewed Dr. Thad Starner, a true pioneer in wearable computing.  Here’s the link to the interview we host on Gartner.com.  Note, you don’t have to be a paying client to read our “Gartner Fellows Interviews.”  We fellows make these available as part of our Brand-Culture-Ideas-People initiative.
I met [...]

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I guest lectured tonight at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business – my other alma mater.  The topic – naturally – was business process management, and for over two hours, I subjected these undergrads to the history of BPM:  How the market of 1999 – 2003 emerged from the roots of application integration and [...]

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Syncretism is a term that is often used in discussions of how one religion adopts aspects of another.  It’s not often used in a positive way, as in, “Wow fellow syncretist!  Aren’t you glad we’ve adopted all these alien practices and created a mish-mashed perspective that makes everyone happy?”  However excited I am about religious [...]

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Scenario: Driving home late last night.   Listening to NPR when I could find it.  Heard a commentator say something to the effect of, “No Democratic president has ever won office without carrying the state of Missouri.”  Sudden urge to rip the radio from the dash and never listen to any newscast again.
I just searched for [...]

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In Q1 2008, Jim Sinur and I will release research on the different approaches to business rule representation. This is going to be a fun research effort – lots of theory, lots of hands-on testing.  This is also a misunderstood area.  For instance, some users think that a natural-language (NL) approach to rule representation is [...]

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More on that German word I like so much…
Say you have been hired to design and develop a new management system to be marketed to homeowners’ associations.  Pretty nice job, eh?  Every association on the planet is a potential customer. So you start analyzing the requirements and applying process management techniques, just like a [...]

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Industrial disdain is my pessimistic play-on-words, highlighting the dark side of industrial design.  Simply, industrial disdain is when the designers are not required to use that which they design.  The design may result in, say, a government building, an inexpensive car, or a new office chair.  The design is developed by a disinterested party who [...]

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Take a look at that thing I am holding in my hand.  That black, glassy-looking piece of "stuff" is garbage…trash…waste.  Let me be clear: I am not making a value judgment; I am stating a fact.  Dr. Louis Circeo gave us all a similar chunk of trash during our lunch meeting the other day.  He [...]

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