Google Wave Bots and Gadgets

To fully explore the power of Google Wave, try the bots and gadgets that extend Wave in various different ways. To use the bots, add them in the conversation; gadgets can be added from the menu.

Some Google Wave Bots:

tweety-wave@appspot.com lets you access your Twitter account.

aunt-rosie@appspot.com translation bot, translates in real time what you write in different languages.

Some Google Wave Gadgets:

Checky – Basecamp-like checklists with drag-and-drop.

Napkin – Example of Flash/Flex Wave Gadget

Ratings – Lets participants rate and review a topic (movie, restaurant, etc) in a wave and shows a tally of the result.

Likely – A simple like/dislike gadget that can be added to a blip for intuitive user rating. It tells you how many people have liked, how many have disliked, and what you selected. You can also change your selection.

For more Wave Bots and Gadgets, just use Google search, Google Wave Bots and Google Wave Gadgets

Managing the risks of innovation

A.G Lafley (former P&G CEO and current Chairman of the board) and  Ram Charan write in The Game Changer: How Every Leader Can Drive Everyday Innovation about the gulfs between silos that separate ideas and make innovation lousy.

One gulf separates technology people, who produce and shape ideas, from the upstream marketing people who do the segmentation and study consumer behavior. A second exists between those who produce final prototypes of an innovation and the commercialization people who have to take it to the first moment of truth. Eliminating these gulfs and creating simultaneous interactions among experts for making the right trade-offs – through a smooth functioning integrated process of innovation -reduces risk and expands the opportunity.

Lafley and Charan mention eight ways to anticipate and minimize the risks of innovation:

  1. know your customer
  2. do prototyping
  3. do rigorous consumer testing
  4. manage the portfolio of innovation projects
  5. be open to experimenting
  6. identify the killer issues early
  7. learn from the past
  8. use metrics to measure innovation