Research and advisory firm, Gartner Inc identified social networks and web mashups among the top ten most disruptive technologies that will shape the future of information technologies [1]. Gartner defines a disruptive technology as one that causes major change in ‘the accepted way of doing things’, including business models, processes, revenue streams, industry dynamics and consumer behaviour. We are currently developing two products that belong to each of those two categories. What and why are we developing products that feature disruptive technologies ?

I don't normally blog this often but while I was browsing the tagcloud on the Internet Intelligence Data Analytics (i-IDA) [1], I noticed that the term Education (which came next to Economics on our taxonomy) had grown significantly larger - meaning that there were more content which carried terms associated with Education.

Clicking on the term 'Education' leads me to a web page produced by i-IDA listing contents which had words associated with Education sorted according to date. Within this list, there was a report on the Malaysian Higher Education Minister praising Malaysia’s top local universities’ improved ranking in the Times Higher Education-QS (THE-QS) World University Rankings 2008 [2]. I visited the THE-QS World University Rankings website [3] and was very happy to see that my alma mater, the University of Bristol [4], is ranked top 32 among the world's universities. My wife's Australian National University is ranked 16, whilst my former correspondence's Cornell University is ranked 15 and another's University of Manchester is ranked 29 and another's Imperial College London is ranked 6. My sister's University of St Andrews is ranked 83, whilst her twin's University of Nottingham is ranked 86. So what does it take for these universities to be ranked in the top 100 of the world ?

Many people have asked me what was the purpose of developing the internet Intelligence Data Application (i-IDA) [1] ? So that I can provide a straight answer every time, I have put this to blog. i-IDA is a tool for collecting information published on the internet, processing it and providing an analytical presentation so that experts in the field can provide strategic insight. This is part of the intelligence cycle process which roughly translates as knowing what other people know. The United States of America's Central Intelligence Agency [2] and Federal Bureau of Investigation [3] are users of the intelligence cycle. One of the key feature for i-IDA is the tagcloud [4]. Other intelligent people have used tagclouds to analyse the speeches of Senator McCain and Senator Barack Obama in the run up to the United States of America Presidential Elections.

This month the Software Unit launched an alpha version of its' internet Intelligence Data Analytics (i-IDA) [1]. The purpose of i-IDA is to help people make sense of the millions of textual data on the internet. i-IDA uses multi-hierarchy taxonomies, multi-lingual ontologies, time-series charting, content relations and advert associations. There is still a long way to go especially in setting up our own multi-lingual ontologies which combines several languages into a structured categorisation of subject matter and keywords. So what does it have to do with Sabah trouncing Terengganu 52 - 1 ?