Air Conditioning

People knew they wanted air conditioning much before they were able to create a machine that could do it. The first serious attempt to build the air conditioner took place in the 1830s in Florida. Compact Disc: Changing the Music Industry

The first phonograph was invented in 1877 and twenty-one years later, the audiocassette was invented. As the twentieth century progressed, scientists began to look for a more efficient and higher quality method to reproduce sound. Diesel Engine

Rudolph Diesel was a graduate of the Technische Hochschule in Munich. In Britain, where Parson turbine had after two centuries produced a new and much-needed variant of the traditional steam engine, there was no pioneer work at all. Not until 1897, when FW Lanchester introduced a more evenly balanced engine with a carburetor in which air was drawn over a series of wicks dipping into a basin of petrol, was there any significant British improvement, and by then German engineers had fully developed the basic design.

Electrocardiograph

To assist in studies of the hearts electrical behavior, a Dutch physician named Willem Einthoven invented the electrocardiograph. This extremely sensitive instrument, basically a gavanometer, has become the standard apparatus used in the examination and diagnosis of heart disease (Feldman & Ford 236).

Geiger Counter

During the period following World War II, the entire world suddenly became interested in atomic energy and radioactivity. In the U.S, the Geiger Counter sparked a craze, and as D. S Halacy said the Geiger Counter became an atomic age status symbol (52). Helicopter

The Russian-born American aeronautical engineer Igo Silorsky was one of the most important pioneers in aviation. He built the worlds first four engine aircraft and in the 1930s played a leading role in developing amphibious aircraft.

Integrated Circuit

Unlike the transistor, the integrated circuit was not a major technological breakthrough, in the sense that the process of inventing it does not hold an intriguing story. Rather, the integrated circuit, or IC, is and important inventions because of the many applications dependent upon it. Jet Engine

The development of the turbojet engine by a young British test pilot and aeronautics engineer, Frank Whittle, revolutionized every aspect of the aeronautics industry, from the military aircraft and guided missiles to passenger airlines and helicopters. Kodak Process

With the inventions of the flexible roll film and the Kodak camera in his pocket, the American pioneer George Eastman placed photography into the hands of the man in the street. His celluloid roll film was also crucial to the development of motion pictures.

Laser

The word laser comes from an acronym of the words light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Although the first demonstration of this brilliant theory did not involve light amplification, the concept was the same. Microwave Oven

The idea of using these waves for food was accidentally discovered by Percy LeBaron Spencer of the Raytheon Company when he found that radar waves had melted candy in his pocket. Experiments showed that food cook be heated more rapidly using microwaves than in a conventional oven. Nylon

The du Pont research chemist, Wallace Hume Carothers, invented nylon, the first true manmade fiber. Its manufacture was the starting point of the synthetic textile industry that grew up after World War II, revolutionizing fashion and industrial fabrics.

Optic Fibers

The idea of communicating with light is nothing new. For centuries, people have used light as beacons, and developed simple codes using various lanterns. After the Revolutionary War, the French setup an optical telegraph system, consisting of signal arms in towers built at equal distances. Penicillin: Nature Got it First

The number of people who have been treated by the drug many considered as a Miracle Drug is innumerable. Almost certainly, of the various many antibacterial agents that have been discovered over the century, penicillin probably treats more strains of bacteria than any other does. Radio

Today, almost 100 years after the first transatlantic radio signal was sent, radio waves surround the world we live in. Radios, cellular phones and televisions among other things, which use radio waves to transmit their signals, have become commonplace in the modern world. As a result, communication between people, whether it is from country to country or from one house to another, has changed the lives of many.

Space Shuttle

Manned spacecraft was first considered possible in the 1950s. They were perceived as big machines that could, like aircraft, be used many times. But the idea of putting humans into space was made political when the United States and the USSR started a cold-war space race. Television

The idea of transmitting pictures over telephone lines and radio waves has been around since the telephone and radio themselves. Many people had ideas to have picture phones so that people could see each other while conversing. While the idea of a picture phone has yet to take hold, the television has flourished and is considered a common, household device. Vacuum Tube: A Bridge to the World of Microelectronics

The vacuum tube was one of those inventions that was hailed as a revolutionary technology, but as soon as a replacement came very few people even remembered it. Nevertheless, the vacuum tube enabled many technological breakthroughs to be made in the first half of the century.

Walkman: The Doomed Tape Recorder

The Walkman was one of those inventions that was very fortunate to get out of the bottom drawer in Sonys development tier. Thought to be a failure by the Tape Recorder Division, if it were not for the companys honorary chairman, the Walkman might have never made the impact that it did. Xerography: Changing the Way Offices Work

Chester F. Carlson hoped that his electrophotographic process, originally dismissed by many corporations trivial and unnecessary, would make office work a little less tedious and a little more efficient. In 1948, after twenty-one American corporations failed to see the potential of Carlsons early prototype, Haloid, a small company based in Rochester, New York decided to invest in it.

The A-Z of Knowledge Technology

A: Artificial Intelligence. Remember in the 1970s when AI was going to be the pervading knowledge technology? Things did not happen like that, because AI lends itself only to specific types of problem - it struggles in dealing with "common sense". However, developments in areas like natural language processing, neural networks, genetic algorithms (even ant algorithms) mean that it is holding a definite niche in knowledge discovery such that insurers can more accurately asses risk, or retailers identify clusters of products that are bought together. B: Bayes and Boole. Not the name of a travel agent, but of two people who set some of the foundations for modern search engines. The Reverend Thomas Bayes (c. 1702-1761) developed a treatise on probability. Search engines like Autonomy use a Baysean approach (frequency of word use, clustering etc.) to ranking the relevance of documents, and because no natural language analysis is involved, it can deal easily with multiple languages. George Boole (18151864) is known for Boolean algebra (AND, OR, NOT). But how many of you actually get beyond the front page of Google to its "advanced search" where you can filter your search results by applying the underlying Boolean constructs? C. Content Management. These systems (CMS) have revolutionized the development of websites and intranets over the last few years. The basic notion is one of entering once, and using it many places. Information is granularized into small reusable chunks. A single Web page may be composed of many individual content items that can be personalized to the users' needs. There is growing convergence between what were once separate solutions of document management and information portals. In all of these good metadata to describe the components and their uses is important, so expect semi-automatic classification of content (see Retrieval) to assume a greater role. D. Document Management. Since many electronic document management solutions (EDMS) have embraced the features of content management systems, where does that leave document management? Well, documents are still the dominant way that many professionals evolve and publish their knowledge. A good document management system will also manage many legacy documents, files in different formats and those scanned in. Overall, though, the main trend is towards segregation of function, so that different components of EDMS and CMS can interoperate in a broader portal environment. E. Email. For all the developments in CMS etc., email is probably still the dominant means of knowledge sharing within and beyond organizations. More email was sent in 1999 that all the previous yearx combined. The main problem today is coping with this email deluge, much of which might not be relevant to the user's immediate needs. AI comes to the rescue in terms of filtering agents and natural language analysis that identifies experts and categorizes key concepts for later retrieval, as in systems like AskMe and Tacit's Knowledgemail. F. Framework. A framework provide positioning of all the technology options relative to each other. One that I find useful has three dimensions 1) phase of the knowledge life cycle: create, discover, gather, classify, store, retrieve, use; 2) level of use: individual, team, organization, inter-organization; 3) type: highly structured (as in database), semi-structured (e.g. metadata plus

free text), unstructured (free text), tacit (in people). Some technical solutions apply only to a given cell or row. Others, notably enterprise solutions or 'suites' cover a broad spectrum. Activity within the framework is like an ecology, with some cells growing in importance, others withering; with some vendors extending their scope and various rationalization taking place in adjacent cells (c.f. Inktomi's recent acquisition of Quiver - search engine adds classification, and Microsoft's acquisition of XDegrees P2P software) G. Groupware. A name that is going out of fashion, but the problem is that there is a confusion of other names e.g. collaboration software, bulletin boards, computer conferencing etc. that often mean different things to different people. Essentially groupware covers a range of collaborative software solutions that span time and space. Some of the synchronous tools e.g. instant messaging, chat are becoming an important part of the enterprise tool set. Groupware is often an add-on to portal and other software, However, some organizations prefer to have dedicated and low cost solutions that are optimized for specific purposes c.f. Shell's use of Sitescape for online communities, or eRoom (project rooms) used by companies like Ford and Aventis. H. Humans. Perhaps one the best technologies. Humans are generally smart and have common sense. Most of an organization's knowledge is tacit knowledge. Therefore, perhaps when considering KM technologies, we should spend more time looking at technologies that help humans share and evolve their knowledge better, rather than focusing on those that capture human knowledge into databases. I. Intelligent Agents. The reverse initials of AI, but using AI techniques, typically to scour the Web and find relevant information and to alert users of updates. Many solutions that started as search engines (e.g. Verity and Autonomy) are now broader in scope and have intelligent agents that assess what a user is working on and alert the user to links to relevant content - a forerunner of truly adaptive systems that infers what a user is working on and offers appropriate assistance (but can you put up with the interruptions?). J. JIT (Just In Time) Knowledge. Remember 'push' technology? Well, in one form its still hanging in there (just!). One of the poisoners of 'ticker tape' feeds for PCs - BackWeb - now offers 'polite' communications and flash alerts. Another form - email - pushes at you every day (even every minute of every day), but can you find that relevant email afterwards? Users want the relevant knowledge at the time they do a task. Therefore, perhaps the best approach to JIT is really excellent Retrieval (q.v.). K. Know-bot (knowledge robot). More online shopping sites now have online 'assistants' to help you with your selection and purchase (see eGain's "assistant". These use techniques like case-based reasoning to assess your situation and offer suggestions, giving you also the option to talk to a real human as well. Yoda's helpdesk at Lucas Arts is another example. So why not extend this idea to in-house help-desks and knowledge centres? L. Learning Objects. This is another case where increasing granularity (modularization) is boosting efficiency. With the growth of elearning, it makes sense to package the knowledge needed by the learner into relevant chunks. These can operate several levels, from a learning object addressing a small item of leaning taking just a minute or so, to a full lesson that combines

serval other objects in a particular combination. Companies like Cisco and Dow are reported to have saved tens of millions of dollars by reorganizing their leaning material this way. M. Mobile KM. As mobile phones and PDAs get smarter and access greater bandwidth, the scope for mobile knowledge management increases. More executive on the move will want access, not just to email, but corporate and external information resources that can be downloaded on the move and read it on a small screen (another reason for organizing core information repositories into small sized chunks). Combined with location specific knowledge, a whole new angle KM is emerging. N: Natural Language Processing. Its a very active field at the moment with lots of bright computational linguistic graduates starting up highly promising start-ups with one of three predictable results: going under, joining forces with others in the create-classify-retrieve information chain or being so good that one of the big portal vendors takes them over. (Rarely is the fourth option - growing a successful business in its own right - achieved). Most experts reckon that for auto-classification statistical (clustering, pattern matching etc.) algorithms perform best today, though NLP promises more in the future. The problem is going from syntactics (structure of language) which they do well at to semantics Meaning). Us humans have a lot of common sense that eludes computers. Think about it might interpret the phrase "Harry flew to New York on a cheap ticket"! O: Open Standards. Do you know your SCORM from your SOAP? As we strive to share knowledge between computers, we need common definitions, not just of information entities, but business processes, XML schema etc. The advent of web services is also creating a growing need. At its lowest level basic exchange protocols like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) are needed. Other level include description layer (WSDL, ebXML), discovery layer (UDDI) and management layer (ADS). Then there are resource description standards (RDF) and metadata standards (e.g. Dublin Core). Still confused. See the Web services primer or type your acronym into Webopdeia. SCORM by the way is Shareable Content Object Reference Model - used to describe elearning objects. As for common standards? Who was it who said: "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose between." P: P2P (Peer-to-Peer). You might immediately think of the now defunct Napster which made it easy to share files between PCs without downloading from a server. But P2P is growing up. Think of all the wasted time and bandwidth when sending email attachments. What if they were on someone else's PC accessible for you to download. One application of P2P is sharing idle computer cycles, as is happening with SETI and cancer research projects. In the field of knowledge management it lets you share your files collaboratively. Groove Networks (backed to the tune of some $60million of Microsoft funding) are a marekt leader in P2P collaborative workspace software for corporates. SmithKlineGlaxo has a trial to connect its 10,000 scientists this way. Q: Question boards. You don't know the answer to something? Then pose your question on a question board, such as that which is part of AskMe's expertise finder. Using fuzzy matching, the system will try and find the answers to some frequently asked questions. It will also list names of people who from their written material it believes are experts on the subject. This kind of

question/response system is increasingly used by companies to reduce the costs and improve the quality of post sales customer support. Have you sent a support email to Dell recently? R: Retrieval. The days are rapidly disappearing (though you sometimes wouldn't believe it) when the result of search gives you 1 million unsorted hits. Using classification software and taking advantage of a taxonomy (see T), guided retrieval is becoming more the norm. You can restrict search to selected branches or levels of a taxonomy (as in Semio) or you can have your search results clustered into those that share related concepts (to see this at work try Northern Light. Such 'smart' or 'intelligent' searching is estimated to cut in half the time that people spend searching for relevant information. S: Semantic Web. The Web as we know it today may be totally different in five years time. After all, the Web as we know it today is less than a decade old. The inventor of the Web Tim Berners-Lee is the driving force behind the W3C project to build the semantic Web "a gigantic brain" which understands relationships between web resources (through resource descriptions and ontologies) and will create an environment that supports intelligent agents seeking knowledge and performing transactions. Will it work? Well XML is here today and that was similarly a pipe dream just five years ago. T: Taxonomy. A hot issue in knowledge management at the moment, simply to get better access to information through classifying and organizing it in a specified way. There is specialist software to help manual construction of taxonomies (e.g. Multites); others that support with collaborative taxonomy development (e.g. Wherewithal), and many more that do automatic classification (e.g. GammaSite) and/or work interactively with the user in fine-tuning terms after some initial automatic classification (e.g. Semio). No portal vendor who claims to be comprehensive is without some form of taxonomy support software. U: Usability. It seems amazing, that despite years of research and a high level of HCI (humancomputer interface) knowledge that there are many lousy computer software applications and hard to use intranet and Internet sites. Forget the hefty sums you have to pay to usability experts like Jakob Nielsen. Read his Alertbox articles at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ and then go and check your website against the evidence based guidelines a thttp://www.usability.gov (US Cancer Research Institute). If you are feeling flush with funds, then invest in some end-user testing at a usability lab - or to do it on the cheap just observe users at the screen). V: Visualization. Whether its knowledge maps. search results, taxonomies, conceptual relationships, then visual output can help many people enormously. At a fairly basic level many KM professional use MindManager as a day-to-day brain mapping tool. Many text mining tools, such as InXight, allow you to check relationships. Other interesting devices are contour maps generated by Aurigin's Themescape or maps of social capital (knowledge connections) that are mapped by Orgnet's InFlow. Such tools are not still as prevalent as they should be, but with number crunching hardware and high performance video drivers, there's no reason that they should grow more popular - perhaps one problem is that everyone has their own preferred visual format.

W: Who. In reviewing technology vendors for this A-Z, I also came up with an A-Z for vendors. There are familiar names like Automony, Broadvision, Convera etc. But there are many small niche companies like 3Path (P2P), Akiva (idea management), Bungo (virtual team workspace) and Cipher (intelligence gathering software). No space for them all here, but if I get enough interest, I might upload the one line entries from my database of around 300 vendors. By the way, things are a bit light at the XYZ end - I could only come up with XDegrees (which Microsoft acquired on 8th September so that leaves an X-gap!), Yagi and ZyLabs. Any better offers? X: XML Topic Maps. Topic Maps are an ISO standard (ISO 13250) for describing entities and their relationships. There are three basic classes of XML tags - for topics (types and names), instances and associations (such as "made of", "part of", "lives in"). In one sense they are an extension of taxonomies that add additional richness i.e. they are ontologies. Proponents say that topic maps make it easier to understand the relevance of information and convey meaning. Some tools to create and manipulate Topic Maps are now available and Ontopia. Y: Yellow Pages. An expertise directory. Creating these has typically been a chore in many organizations, though there is software that makes it easier. We like the approach that BP used which is now available as SigmaConnect from Adept) (http://www.sigmaconnect.com). More automated solutions are the expertise finders (e.g. AskMe and Sopheon's Organik) but these don't have the human touch of a personal directory entry. Z: We are now at the end, or are we? The volume of information in the world grows exponentially. A year ago I got a 100 gigabyte drive for my computer. I though the storage space was infinite compared to what I had been using - but now I'm not so sure. So we have gone through: kilobytes (1,000); Megabytes (1,000,000) and now most of us are familiar with gigabyte (109). Then there's: 1012 - Terabyte - a few years ago the world's largest data warehouse was around 10Tb 1015 Petabyte 18 10 - Exabyte. The estimate of data in the world in 2000 was 22Eb, but it is increasing at around 4Eb a year, so my nomination for Z is Zillion - "a very large but unspecified number".