Recipe and cooking apps are aplenty, but it is hard to use an app while cooking and having wet or dirty hands. This may not be a big deal to experienced cooks, but for the beginners it is a catch 22. They want to follow the recipe, but get lost between steps, timing and multiple things that sometimes need to happen in parallel. Technology to the rescue.

Imagine a pasta cooking application on an iPhone. You pick a recipe, chose how soft you would like it and what sauce you would like to make for the pasta. Finally, before you start, you put your Bluetooth headset in and say “Start”. Application, recognizes the key phrase and starts walking you through the recipe. The sequence will - roughly -  look something like this:

Seems like it would be a valuable service to have a website that people could record their names on. Given that most the podcast speakers know the people to be mentioned one way or another, it would not be to difficult to send them an email request to hit a website that allows to record that name. Then, every time they need to pronounce the name, they could consult the website and save the time to all the listeners with bad attempts and apologies.

I am studying for Prince2 foundation exam and it is very obvious that Prince2 is expected to be introduced from the top down. The embedding - which means introducing Prince2 into an organization - talks about securing executive commitment, building high level strategies and other nonsensehigh-commitment steps. And the corresponding templates are all overwrought, with actual content appearing somewhere towards page 3 or 4 only. My view on project management is quite different.

Gamification can be roughly explained as applying game mechanics to the real-world scenarios in order to entice people towards particular goals. This subject (new field?) has been getting a lot of attention lately. It has not hit popular press quite yet, but seems to be gathering steam fast. Companies such as Foursquare use the concepts from gamification approach quite well. What is interesting to me is that once one looks at the world through the lenses of gamification, it is easy to notice the core concepts being discussed in seemingly unrelated literature that predates the term.

I was asked to guest blog for TAUS about my research/work project UNCORPORA. The article has now gone live. It might be interesting for people interested in UN languages, natural language processing or (by following links) XML geeks.