old habits die hard

Two weeks ago some people in Igalia took part/attended some lectures on entrepreneurship. Those events are always good places to meet fresh and innovative people and this event wasn’t different. I attended some lectures on free software and disruptive business models really interesting but perhaps a hotspot in those lectures was my chat to Chema about research laboratories and their impact in organizations/corporations and how they are related to pymes and startups. If you attend this kind of events regularly you know that research and innovation are strategic drivers to keep your business growing.

While Ignacio de la Vega sketched his ideas showing some slides, people could see one slide about the active researching in enterprises. Ignacio talked about the research laboratories and how they are key factors to get continuous innovation in huge corporations. Meanwhile, I remember some basic problems to introduce a research laboratory in your business and how they’re becoming obsoletes.

If you’re playing an innovative role in your market, motives don’t matter, it can be a good idea introducing a place where you coordinate and link all your scattered attempts. But if it’s a good idea then why main corporations are failing. I think they’re making al least two huge mistakes.

First mistake is forgetting about the social innovation and how those enterprises are understanding the “lab without walls” concept. Nowadays a lab without walls is not enought. It must be open but it must be a transparent project too. Goals must be clear.

Second mistake is about change. Huge corporations, Enterprises and Universities conceive and, the worst of all, build this concept with strict geographic barriers and non disclosure policies in mind.

Nowadays bootcamps, hackfests, hackathons, etc. give a boost to a lot of open/free software communities/enterprises. Research is futile without Innovation but Innovation appears anywhere. Ideas crisscross among enterprises cause people live and understand a new social moment. Enterprises can’t stop this revolution. They must contribute.

In my opinion innovative enterprises must understand their “new” laboratories as comunication tools interfacing their business to other knowledge groups and enterprises. Laboratories shouldn’t be closed room with very expensive hardware inside alone. Sharing and evolving common and different ideas produce free innovation.

This weekend I decided to hack my personal n810. Previously I had surfed some promising applications to support meetings and coordination tasks on n810 but reading about this toy you have just realised that it lacks of crypto support to store your data with the default factory settings.

In short, keeping your private and sensitive data such as contact list or spreadsheets in this device is a non desirable action when you forget it at airport or it’s stolen. By the way, I decided to set up up LUKS and it’s working like a charm

This is my baby girl Carla. She was born one month ago in A Coruña (Spain). Our life have just changed

Two weeks ago i had a talk with Alex & Berto, two emacs gurus here in Igalia, about fast editing with old and new editors. They introduced me some basic emacs commands while highlighting some emacs‘ awesome possibilities in coding. Really an amazing editor!

My limited experience in emacs don’t let me cook bacon & egss with this editor (yet!) but i got to customize my .emacs for quick blogging adding only two lines. Now, i can blog up a post while editing/coding easily.

To blog with emacs you only need a weblog supporting xml-rpc (WordPress rocks!) and this lisp package. Notice you can need some extra packages matching mt.el’s dependencies too but all information is self-contained in mt.el (installation, customization, requirements, etc.)

ohppss! … i almost forgot to say this post was blogged in emacs

Hi there, my name is Javier Muñoz and i am the blogger behind docendo discimus, my personal weblog in Igalia.

It’s my final intention to offer some value to community writing down ideas, comments and any random subject shaking my brain. Other topics you may find might occasionally be drawn from my other personal interests but science and technology will be the mainstream here.

I hope you enjoy this one and another Igalia’s personal blogs a lot but now … it’s time to blog!