Is Software Innovation only a matter of money?

In the Project Daily blog Ty Kiisel talks about "If the Largest Software Vendors Won’t Fund Innovation, Who Will?".

I think software innovation is not just a matter of how much you spend on your projects. It is more a matter of imagination and creativity, which might only be slightly related to the money you spend. On the other hand it's true that need some or a lot of money to push your product into the market. But that's not innovation.

Does SW make you healthy?

Unfortunately not. But it can help health care in various ways.

Stakeholders spend more and more money for Health Information Systems with Personal Health Records, Telemedicine and other types of SW that enables advanced information and knowledge management for better life.

In a recent interview Bill Crounse, MD Senior Director, Worldwide Health, has talked about the not-so-far future of health SW, see the video here.

At SIRM, we made first steps into health software for Thailand last year and we will continue to work in this field.

MS-Word for Ontologies?

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the release of a novel add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 that enables the incorporation and annotation of texts with an ontology. This sounds revolutionary and if it works as expected it may ease our efforts to find useful knowledge in the Web. Just that.

Microsoft's announcement

How it works

Where you get it

And sorry, it's only available for Word 2007.

Who drives software innovation?

Bruce Richardson has an interesting point to make - more than one, actually - about who will continue to drive software innovation. In his blog, he analyzes the smaller/faster vs. the bigger/more influential organizations.

The question remains somewhat open to markets like Thailand, where a lot of localized SW versions are implemented that are not merely versions of smaller/faster or bigger/more influential drivers but new solutions on its own.

One result of this local kind of driving force is a novel ontology on lunisolar calendar data, which is populated with the help of a astronomical algorithm. With this ontology it should be easy to provide a basis for different applications, e.g. the data preparation of log files in societies with lunisolar calendars. One could easily discard data from holidays derived from lunar phases etc.

Interesting information about lunar calculations can be found on Andy Hoerstemeiers instructive site.