My feeling is that innovation is a very personal thing which occurs at an individual level, which manifest as a new idea or thought in someone's mind.
If the organization has an encouraging environment where the people feels free to  share ideas, without being judged or ridiculed - then we can conclude that a culture of innovation exists in the organization.

On the other hand, if the organization has some processes in place to seek out people who might have a view or opinion on things then we can say that the innovation is cultivated in the form of a process.

An interesting example of innovation seeking as a process was shared by one organization where submission of ideas into an intranet based tool is encouraged, the ideas are collected together and analysed, in the end some ideas get implemented as well as commercialized. There was also a mechanism for reward for originator of the idea.

So while culture allows  seeding of innovations,  process allows propagation and  commercialization. In the end we should also not forget the caliber of individuals – quality of whose thoughts would define the quality of innovation too !

Well this is the most recent entrant into the immortally mean '1000 technical insult' series.

With so much of cloud around the-cloud, it surely has become a topic of interest,  "and ... by the way...we are also into cloud", is very soon going to killer punch phrase to be thrown around in those business networking meets.

Cloud Computing

The simplest of the explanation for cloud is :

For people who are aware of SaaS (Software-at-a-Service) model, wherein a user rather than buying a license to use it, gets the software from a provide on rent.

Similarity cloud is nothing but Haas (Hardware-at-a-Service) model. The proposition is simple, you dont need buy an expensive hardware to use it, just log on to the cloud service provider and make use of any machine be Linux, HPUX, Mac.

This is very attaractive to the developer community, say you want to develop an iPhone application but are hadwarely-challenged - cloud can give you the proverbial ray of light.

Big names in cloud computing is Amazon, Google,  Joyent etc. To know more about you may go to any of these :

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

http://www.joyent.com/

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm

Time Limit 2 hours : 1 hour designing + 1 hour coding/testing

Difficulty Level : Easy

There is a writing pad company ‘JJ Printers’ who want to publish a new series of funky writing e-pad.  Users would access index.php and the e-pad page would be printed on the browser that can then be printed.

Snapshot of the writing pad is given at the end of the document.

The requirements are

1. There will be 20 rows and 64 columns in this writing pad
2. Each column and row comprises of ‘_’  (underscore) character
3. There is a gradient in color across a row starting from ‘#000000’ (black) to ‘#f8f8f8’ (towards white)
4. End of a given row or line should be with a ‘red’ dot

Your task is to write a php code (index.php) to accomplish the view.

Seldom you would  know of an artist who does not enjoy his craft and yet produces masterpieces. To learn an art you have to adhere to some rules and disciplines.

Programming also requires a proper discipline.

My mentor, who was himself was an ace programmer, told me that just like in karate there is gradation in terms of belt, similar is the gradation of programmers. When I was curious to know more about it, he told me this:

As a white-belt (or noob as known in the gamer's world) you have a tendency to jump into the war without any planning. As soon as a white-belt programmer sees a programming challenge, he hands starts itching to code. He tends to do hand-combat and solve the problem on its way down. Even if he wins the war he looses a lot of blood.

With time and introspection and proper guidance one moves up towards the black-belt. He starts to partition planning and execution. He keeps his keyboard far far away and creates a (game) plan and uses various (military) strategy like divide-and-conquer, factoring etc to break/weaken the problem. My mentor use to sum it will by telling "once you have planned properly then coding is nothing but a final mechanical exercise - which is generally done on a keyboard ".

Which Belt Are You !

All said and done, at Stratbeans we strive for the following :

1. Taking our team's programming skill away from white-belt AND closer to black-belt

2. Making Programming a fun exercise !

§ Cost effective Search Customer Acquisition to drive interested customers to

§ Sustained Search Engine Optimization efforts leading to higher natural rankings

§ Highly visible Affiliate Marketing to introduce the concept and website to target

§ Targeted Email Marketing to reach customers personally

§ Incremental Optimization of the Online Product to ensure enhanced customer

§ Rigorous Web Analytics to measure and improve the online performance

Sameer has also been featured as one of the participants.

To read more please visit http://www.yourstory.in/entrepreneurs/participants/1962

YourStory.in - The Most Popular Entrepreneur Challenge 09

Aptana (www.aptana.com) is an open source web authoring application. We have recently started using it for our YUI-centric development. It is nothing less then a gem and for most of our need is a "dreamweaver killer / replacement".

Enjoying working on Aptana.

For people who are not aware of google docs, its a online document creation and sharing tool from google. The document google supports are like .doc, .ppt, .xls etc. To know more about it visit http://docs.google.com.

When we first heard about google waves from a twitterized geek, we thought google wave, to be nothing but a taller version and extension of existing google docs.

We were wrong ... we underestimated it.

When we looked at the detail of wave, then we realized that this is not an extension but a product in altogether different dimension.

That brought us to the analogy. Some products are like planets, which fit neatly into an existing solar system. However, then there are products which are like solar system that have other products revolve around its orbit.

Google wave looks to be a 'solar system' where many future and current applications like flickr, chat etc would orbit.

Wave has concepts like Wave, Wavelets, Blips, Robots etc. Those interested can refer to this link http://code.google.com/apis/wave/guide.html

Our feeling is that wave is modestly termed as wave, in fact it has a potential to be a complete tsunami which could very easily wash away many currently flourishing products and applications.

For instance discussion forums as we see them today can potentially change with google wave. Most of the big discussion forums of today are dying under their own weight. After a point it becomes difficult to manage them and its for its users begin to find the content cluttered and repetitive. Google Wave with its 'robots' etc has the potential to redefine discussion forums.

Google has an old habit of offering their services and accesses to a limited number of people. Dont know if they do it to infuse an artificial demand for their products or they have a sound technical reason to do that

Regardless, if you are interested in getting your hands dirty as a developer please visit http://code.google.com/apis/wave