Investing in Innovation
(Reuters in Second Life)
Yesterday I had the pleasure of catching Nic Fulton speak about the work his team is doing over at Reuters labs. Although I always assumed that Reuters was a news outlet, it turns out their biggest competitor is Bloomberg. They are about finance, everything else is a byproduct of that.
Nic showed some of the interesting work they were doing at the labs, the kind of work you can only do when you have massive amounts of data at your disposal and bosses that let you tinker, experiment and even occasionally fail. They are doing some very neat work around mobile journalism (turns out the N95 doesn’t do well with sand storms) and experimenting with video face recognition by partnering with a Ukrainian company called Viewdle. Viewdle was originally working for the KGB but needed a new revenue source after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Everyone should check out Newsbeats, a daily news audio track coupled with ambient music so that you stay informed while also having a beat for your workout. Reminds me of Negativland.
On the subject of huge companies staying agile, check out open.nytimes.com, very geeky musings on open source technology by developers within the NYTimes. The paper’s investment in open source is so significant that they have released a few of their own packages, DBSlayer and XSL Cache.
