Novartis is the latest pharmaceutical company to throw some wikinomics at its approach to research and development. After investing millions of dollars trying to unlock the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes, the company released all of its raw data on the Internet, for free.
To some, this will sound peculiar. After all, type 2 diabetes […]

[Read more →]

The jury has weighed in on the Alcatel-Microsoft case, forcing Microsoft to fork over $1.5 billion to Alcatel for violating two audio patents held by Lucent Technologies (which merged with Alcatel). Ironically, the patents cover standards for converting audio into the open MP3 format that spawned the digital music revolution back in the early 1990s. […]

[Read more →]

Further to the whole Apple-Cisco saga, New Paradigm colleague Paul Barter has an interesting piece in the Financial Post that recounts Apple’s long history of intellectual property snafus. Paul goes back to beginning where Apple ran into trouble with Beatles’ record label over the Apple trademark. He then goes on to discuss Apple’s run-ins […]

[Read more →]

An Apple customer, only known as APPLENEWBIE, sent in his sons computer for repair (the computer wouldn’t turn on) but when he got the computer back it had someone else’s hard drive inside with all their personal data still on it. The resulting story, the timeline for which I have laid out below, is a […]

[Read more →]

More Google news, this time with a Canadian connection. Turns out Google just bought Adscape Media for US$23 million. Now headquarted in San Francisco, the company was founded in Ottawa and its R&D and design operations remain in the capital.
Google’s angle? Like Microsoft, its sees online gaming as a largely untapped venue for marketing […]

[Read more →]

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is set to expose politics and possibly the next election to the world of social networking. On January 16th 2007 a group called Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) was started on Facebook. Today the group has grown to almost 260,000 members and hopes to reach 1 million members by […]

[Read more →]

Virgin’s Richard Branson has joined forces with Al Gore to launch an innovation challenge to find new approaches for reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The goal is to find an efficient way of removing one billion tones of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually - for ten years. Innovators have 5 years to […]

[Read more →]

Another Wikinomics reader Stacy Becker wrote in to alert us to a Minnesota-based citizen’s project called Map150 that is working to reinvigorate local democracy. Becker rightly argues that “citizens have tons of really important information that never finds its way into expert-driven policy-making processes.” “This information is critical,” she says, “if we are to solve […]

[Read more →]

One of our readers, Martin Kunert, wrote in to point out an “omission” in Wikinomics:

You mentioned the wikiized film created by the Beastie Boys in 2006. The first wiki-based film was in fact mine - VOICES OF IRAQ - made in 2004, where sent 150 DV cameras into Iraq and had Iraqis film their […]

[Read more →]