Announcing NetBase and illumin8

We have renamed Accelovation to NetBase, check out our new homepage: http://www.netbase.com. I loved the original name, a lot of customers did too, but in the end it was just too hard to spell. NetBase reflects our continued vision of organizing and interrelating digital information for today's knowledge workers.

More importantly, we launched a new product this week with our partner Elsevier. Called illumin8, this new web-based research tool is designed for R&D professionals to extract and analyze solutions from Elsevier's rich scientific content and from the internet in general.

I fondly hope that the widespread use of illumin8 will lead to unprecedented levels of economic prosperity in the world by accelerating the fundamental step of innovation, namely connecting those in need with solutions to address those needs.

For the official press release, check out:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home/companynews05_00878

Chindogu

My partner Dee recently showed me a book on Chindogu, the Japanese art of ironic invention. They should be considered inventions in that they are solutions to problems. However the problem they solve can oftentimes be fanciful or the solution itself may ironic drawbacks that makes them effectively useless. Chindogu is often called the art of unuseless invention (wikipedia).

One that solves a questionable problem is a pair of shoes where the sole of the shoe has dog paws so that the wearer can feel more like a dog leaving paw prints in the sand. That was in the book I read.

I was thinking this morning about my mouse and how it must go hungry all the time. I mean my computer mouse. So I decided to give it something to munch on. I changed one of my desktop icons into a piece of a cheese. I click that icon pretty frequently so it will allow me to feel I'm taking care of my pet.

Maybe I'll think about removing this blog posting some day. That's because one of the other properties of Chindogu is sometimes the inventions embarrass the user :-)