After a long winter of anticipation, my fourteen-year old daughter started the summer season of wakeboarding.  She ended last summer a strong beginner, still shaky and tentative across the wake.  But this weekend, she surprised everyone with her one-handed stunts, her jumps across the wake and speed in her turns.  It was clear she had been "working" on wakeboarding in her mind, long before she got in the water.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "We learn to swim in the winter and skate in the summer".  A testament to the power of our imagination to guide and teach.  It is this mental capacity for anticipation that helps instruct and allows us to believe something can be possible. Of course, not everything we imagine comes true.  But it is true that if we don't imagine, it will never be so.

Last weekend a Seattle area man was jogging in the Cougar Mountain Park, a network of 52 trails that wind around some pretty dense Northwest terrian.  He left his house at 7:00 am and drove to the trailhead. His wife called police at 11:00pm that night when he didn't return home.  King County Sheriff's crews searched all weekend with teams of rescuers including dogs.  After no sign was found, they called off the search Sunday night.

The next day the missing man wanders into his home.  He claimed he fell down a ravine and laid unconscious for three days.  By his account, he made his way out of the park and walked the five miles home. 

What really interested me however was the flurry of e-mails on the Seattle PI website "sounding off" about this guy's disappearance.  132 people took the time to comment on-line about their theories of what was really going on behind this mystery.  From having a girlfriend on the side to noting the temperatures at specific elevations on the mountain and speculating hypothermia, people were relishing the ability to comment on this story.

I'm sure these engaged readers are exactly what the PI longs for. But it was almost as if these contributors were shouting into the dark.  Who really listens, reads or cares about their theories? It was clear from the repetition that they weren't even reading each other's comments. Some claim these chat sites are signal of the deep disassociation between people in our culture.  Aren't they all just lonely anyway?  But I wonder if this isn't just too simple of an answer.  Perhaps it's the universal need to express ourselves that the web exploits.  Or maybe stream of consciousness writing is cathartic.  But whatever the reason, it's clear that shouting in the dark will be around for as long as the web exists.

It's not news that Microsoft purchased aQuantive, a digital marketing and advertising firm, for an unprecedented $6 billion dollars.  But what is less well-known are the humble beginnings of aQuantive. It's one of those inspiring stories that keeps entrepreuners hopes alive.

The founder of aQuantive, Nick Hanauer began the firm almost 10 years ago.  His family owned Pacific Coast Feather - a pillow and comforter manufacturer.  They were trying to come up with ways to drive more traffic to the company's website and came up with the idea of compensating people who referred others to their website.  The concept was so successful Hanauer eventually spun it off into a advertising concern that, in addition to other things, helps clients track the effectiveness of their on-line advertising.

This story breaks a couple of myths about success in the web world.  The first is that you have to be an on-line business straight out of the box.  It points up the ability to package newly created IP and serve it up in an interesting way.  The second myth is that you have to be a computer science, math or engineering mind to score big.  While it's certain Hanauer and his team bought those resources along the way, the nexus of the idea came from old-fashioned ingenuity.  Something everyone has the rights to. 

What I love about these new web-based pieces of software is that the competition goes up and the price comes down.  Now for a subscription rate, small to large firms can run business management software for a fraction of the cost of a custom-wide, enterprise-wide solution. 

One company to check out is www.eproject.com.  They provide for $45.00 a month a rich project management tool that you access via the web. It allows for on-line collaboration and data sharing. This software is targeted to businesses, like salesforce.com but Google offers free Docs and Spreadsheets programs over the web.

The pure freedom to sell creative products to whomever will buy them - that's what you've got to love about the net.  Have you heard me talking about the Democracy of Genius?

I don't know about you, but most of my Microsoft Office tools have a boatload of features I never use.  I guess that wouldn't matter much if the nasty features didn't clutter up and confuse the functions I use everyday.  I suppose that's one of the reasons I Iike to operate both PC and Mac platforms.  When my eyes tire of Office's complicated messages, warnings and incessant beeping, I can switch over and rest my eyes on my 'muse' computer - my G5.

My husband calls working on the Mac an erotic experience.  And I agree.  It's lithe.  It's elegant.  It's sexy. I can't stop touching it.  Certainly this is a testiment to the power of design.  But I'm my view, it's a deeper lesson about the power of beauty.

In my model for creative thinking, The Sage is the skill of being able to take complicated information and invent by simplifying it.  When a product or service becomes overly tangled and complex, it's a sign that innovation is possible.  And when something becomes more elegant, it becomes more beautiful.  And beauty has been a standard currency throughout the ages.

That's why so much software is migrating to the web.  It allows for elegance and simplicity and dare I say beauty.  Next time, I'll explain some new software products worth exploring if you're craving erotic experiences during your work day. (You get what I mean.)

Since Google has become the verb synonymous with searching on the internet, it's often surprising to people that there are other search tools and perhaps some of them even better. 

I've written before about Cha-Cha, Jeff Bezos' recent foray into the field.  Cha-Cha includes an on-line chat function that does help you feel a bit more confident that someone can virtually hand-hold you through some difficult queries.

Another search tool I like is the newly revised ask.com.  They tout a more intuitive algorithm which in fact is the centerpiece of a new advertising campaign.  I found that when I used it, I liked it's vertically designed interface and that it did a great job finding what I was looking for.  It was a relief that I didn't have to troll around and waste time as it seemed to find the heart of what I needed.  The WSJ even stated that ask.com will be refining the algorithm to incorporate user feedback as well. 

Is ask.com a reason to break the Google-habit?.  Seems like Google is watching too.  The advertising on my search was for Google services.

When you buy a new Dell, there is a surprising choice available.  The open source Linux option is Ubuntu - and you can get it pre-installed in your new Dell.  What makes Ubuntu popular is that can customize your interface and as an open source product - you can collaborate with others and shape the software the way you want it. 

http://www.ubuntu.com/  is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. What I find interesting is not just the competitive challenge open source products present to business model's like Microsoft's. But Dell wouldn't be offering this option if the market wasn't clamoring for free tools like Ubuntu.  Our cultural ethos is increasingly valuing participation or in other words a democracy where all ideas are heard.  The democracy of genius at work.

While open-source products may be free, there are also costs involved; specifically the time it takes to learn the new product, navigate the community and customize what you want.  And perhaps there are costs to society as well in the form of lost jobs and productivity. Regardless, the popularity of open-source products also provides a window into the deep shifts in a culture in which virtually everyone and anyone can participate.

The time is coming when the web's capabilities will challenge us 'knowledge workers'.  I've been recently fascinated by the work of Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web language HTML and the current Director of the World Wide Web Consortium among other posts at places like MIT.  In talking about the future of the Web, he talks about the Semantic Web or Web 3.0 technologies.  Two new languages, in particular RDF and Web Ontology Language (OWL), will allow more intuitive and synthetic use of information on the web.  The web will be able to access databases, spreadsheets and provide more specific and generative functionality. 

While these innovations are a number of years away, it still provides us with a distant early warning that we need to concentrate on 1) building a deep knowledge of expertise and 2) developing our creative capabilties.  We may not see the advent of artificial intelligence, but if we see only a portion of that come to pass, we'll need to focus on what makes us uniquely human to stay relevant.  We'll need to skim off the top the things that make us artists in the human enterprise and build these skills with intensity and passion.

The Economist published an obituary of the father of the MRI, Paul Lauterbur, who died this March.  What makes the story of his life so inspiring is not just his glorious ability to invent, but the tenacity he had to evangelize his invention.

He submitted a paper to the scientific journal Nature in 1971 depicting images that showed the early basis of MRI technology. But it was rejected.  That same year, he became the president of a company that attempted to market MRI machines that struggled and nearly failed. Undaunted, he shopped his invention around the world and at the end of his life 22,000 MRI machines were peering into the atomic spacial structure of the human body.

In my model of invention, The Fool perseveres because of the driving conviction that they have something valuable to share.  You can imagine both the angst and the sheer force of character that propeled Lauterbur to pick himself up off after failure and keep trying.  He had the best interest of the humanity to push him. And BTW - he won a joint share of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2003. 

OK.  I’m embarrassed.  Last night I had a brain freeze while helping with algebra homework.  Solve for x:  49x⁴ – 25x² = 0.  I tried factoring it like a quadratic.  No luck. I was in a rush so I decided to turn to tutor.com just to get unstuck.  This is an on-line chat for homework help.

After about a five minute wait, I probably should have turned it off, but I have faith in 'chat' and the power of the on-line community and I wanted to make it work.  My tutor came on and asked me for my question.  I typed in my equation.  The response came back, ‘You’re in the right direction’.  I hadn’t given any direction yet.  I wrote in how I had factored it unsuccessfully. ‘Good try’.  Later another cheerleading response.  Maybe she was penalizing me because she could figure out I wasn't a kid?  But finally, I realized this tutor may not know what to do either or it would take weeks to get there.  So I deftly ended that session and called my brother-in-law at work.  I think I could hear him rolling his eyes. He quickly snorted, ‘Annette, first factor out the x² !’.  Oh, yea.

I’ve been writing an article for a business magazine in Asia on the intersection between human and web intelligence.  I guess I had stumbled into this busy intersection on tutor.com.  Sometimes there is nothing faster, better, cheaper, more fulfilling than the old-fashioned act of accessing the brain of someone who loves you.

Oh. The answer to the equation is x = ± 5/7