Tag Archives: business

Many organizations are making technology decisions as reactions to 2009′s economic malaise. Instead, tech firms, energy companies, and even hospitals should proactively design two years ahead with the economy’s future turnaround in mind, says Mick McManus, CEO of Rhiza’s parent company MAYA Design. Learn more in this online feature for the Wall Street Journal (also featured in MITSloan): Read more »

Some more cool tools:

• BusinessWeek has launched Business Exchange, a user-filtered news aggregator separated into professional interest topics. (My personal favorite – the urban planning feed.)
• NYCGo has collected myriad New York City travel brochures into one interactive map so popular that heavy traffic crashed the site soon after it went live. [via New York Times City Room]
• “Some map makers have found a way to draw people to their detail-oriented field: have a party. It involves replacing beer — at least for part of a day — with a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit to build on OpenStreetMap, a project that uses volunteers to map the world.” [via PCWorld]
• Mapof.it creates short, human-readable URLs for several mapping sites. [via LifeHacker]

Obviously, Rhiza Labs makes the coolest participatory Web tools around. And, there’s a lot of creativity in the web world. We’re particularly impressed with:

• The National Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Visions for Transforming America, an interactive map showing older neighborhoods that are ripe for revitalization, those neighborhoods’ metropolitan contexts, and slideshows illustrating paths to reinvestment. [via Rooflines]
• LiveMocha combines social networking with web-based software that helps users learn foreign languages within an online learning community.
• “The Printed Blog, a Chicago start-up, plans to reprint blog posts on regular paper, supplement with local ads and distribute it free in big cities.” [via New York Times]
• 99Problems.org, a project of the League of Young Voters Education Fund, is soliciting reader contributions to generate one blog entry per day documenting issues the Obama administration should tackle sooner than later.

Check these out to see a few more ways that social media is changing the way we plan, learn, communicate and do business — and stay tuned for future round-ups.