Aha Mobile is an iPhone app that gives you real-time traffic information you can use safely while driving.  It includes social media/crowdsourcing elements and it even helps you find the nearest public bathroom!

Here's an actual, practical example of how a company can come up with better solutions by applying Agile principles throughout their business.

This month we are happy to feature Innovation Games by Enthiosys, serious games that help companies understand their customers better.  These games are a fun way to give customers a voice into the product development process.  But don't let all the "fun" fool you: these are powerful tools with bottom line impact.

I am not sure if this is good news or bad but recent rulings show that courts are increasingly more willing to uphold Open Source licenses.  People who have taken them seriously have suffered the consequences.

We first published this reading list on June 9, 2009 of books for people interested in creating great workplaces.  This is the first update to the list to include my review of The Starbucks Experience by Joseph Michelli (hint: not recommended)

I cannot recommend The Starbucks Experience, by Joseph Michelli.  This book is little more than a long infomercial for a company that does not need one.  What Starbucks has done, and continues to do is extraordinary, but this book does not do it justice.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Blogs, Luke Hohmann talks about how Innovation Games can help improve the Democratic (political) process.  The nice thing is that they can also be used to improve the democracy@work process.

Last Wednesday I attended a social mixer put together by an organization called CHispPA.  The name is a play on the word chispa, meaning spark in Spanish.  The event was great, with lots of smart, successful people from all walks of life.  It certainly did "spark" a lot of high quality connections for me.

There are a bunch of myths out there about software development, but one that's more insidious and pervasive than the others.  According to this myth, to solve most problems, just "write a good spec."  As a good friend of mine says, "it is IMPOSSIBLE to write an accurate enough spec."

Just in case, I waited until the end of the week to install the new software on my iPhone 3G (no S).  Luckily, the process took a long time but it was pretty uneventful and I didn't have to throw my iPhone against the wall or anything like that.  On the other hand, I've been putting it through its paces this morning and by now I am not as impressed or excited about this new release as I was on Fri when I started the installation.