March 2005

Iotum made the Ottawa Business Journal’s Startups to Watch in 2005 list today.  More details on Wednesday when the full story is out.

Bob Frankston wrote about IVR systems just recently.  He’s so right.  Simply replacing DTMF keys with spoken inputs is really not much of an improvement.  Part of the problem is that as users we are trained to expect the system at the other end to function in hierarchies.  As an example, I recently telephoned Rogers [...]

The apprentice last night was interesting. The task was to build a mini-golf course at Chelsea pier and market it. Magna sealed their victory in the early stages of the contest by quickly executing exclusive cross-promotional agreements with every other vendor on the pier.  At that point, provided Magna executed well, Net Worth’s efforts were doomed to fail. On [...]

Michael Gartenberg thinks that context is the next killer app.  Kind of a misnomer, that, because context, while a powerful tool, is not really an application. Still, Michael’s got the right idea.  He writes: “Digital ubiquity is a reality; relevant access to information, both personal and professional, in multiple venues on multiple devices, is no [...]