News & Comment
2021 December 1 - Joined Up Business Announce Ideation Toolkit
Ideation is one of the most difficult processes to manage. Creativity does not come on tap; entire projects may be shelved because of an apparently intractable problem. History shows that some of these intractable problems actually had simple solutions. Joined Up Business' Ideation Toolkit provides a number of techniques and concepts that can help break through 'insoluble' problems. The toolkit will initially be available to staff and customers; it is expected to be published in our book on Design Thinking due out next year.
2021 April 26 - World Intellectual Property Day
National patenting agencies use the day to promote themselves, often under the umbrella of promoting innovation. What they don’t advertise is their huge backlogs of unexamined patent applications, or the ridiculous requirement to file duplicate patents, at great expense, in each separate country. What you’ll not find on their websites is the admission that novel businesses are risky; with uncertain earnings many, if not most inventors, find that the difficulties presented by the patenting regime are too high and their innovation is stopped dead.
If we really want our inventors to be able to earn a living from their work, if we really want more innovative companies, if we really want the economy to grow from innovative companies, we need to change the patent regime. Some politicians have tried, but without sufficient support from their colleagues progress has been slow or non-existent.
2020 December 10 - NetRexx celebrates its 25th anniversary
NetRexx, arguably the world's best programming language is 25 today. The NetRexx programming language is the most intuitive language for building cross platform programs that run on the Java environment.
The original language Rexx, now known as Classic Rexx, was born in the mainframe world in the late 1970s and quickly amassed a core of devotees who wanted to program in a non bureaucratic language that is easy to master. It was often called "IBMs biggest secret", not because IBM wanted only its own developers to benefit from it, but because it was never a marketing priority. Rexx was gradually ported to other big blue platforms, and clones appeared on a variety of operating systems, but its achilles heel was lack of portability.
The Java cross-platform environment provided the ideal solution to this problem. NetRexx was created to take advantage of this opportunity and to provide the language with the benefits of object orientation. Although IBM allowed free download of NetRexx, it was not given the promotion it deserved and its user's tended to be former Rexx programmers who had seen the light, rather than folks from the Java or unix worlds.
After years of negotiations, on the 8th June 2011, IBM handed NetRexx over to the Rexx Language Association (RexxLA) to promote as Open Source under the ICU License. The RexxLA, which promotes a number of versions of Rexx, offers NetRexx at a dedicated site www.netrexx.org.
[Rexx languages are preferred technology at Joined Up Business.]
