Innovation CHEF

The Danish Company Dong Energy have just awarded a significant contract to the UK based SeaJacks company to put their monster ships the Kraken and Leviathon into the Irish Sea to facilitate the installation of wind turbines on Walney 1 and Walney 2 windfarms, which are to be located in the Irish Sea.

The  two wind farms will have a total capacity of 367MW, coming from 102 turbines. Walney I is set for completition at the beginning of 2011. Walney II is expected to be completed in 2012. The total power produced will be the equivalent of the yearly consumption of about 250,000 households.

British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said: ‘This is another green light for green energy. It’s a vote of confidence in the support the Government has put into backing renewable energy.

Windfarms may not be everyones first choice but this is clearly a huge step forward for clean energy and with the anouncement of the world’s first 1GW, offshore wind farm supplying enough power for around 750,000 homes – or a quarter of the Greater London homes, the UK is making the most of natural resources, resources shared by Ireland.

Are the similar bold moves ahead for Ireland?

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Is this the next generation of email? Google have just announced a new magical in-browser communication tool. Google Wave is their new tool for communication and collaboration on the web and was announced at the Google I/O conference. Follow the link for the video announcement with show and tell.

Having promised something special for the conference the Google team seem to have delivered.

It’s a hybrid of email, web chat, IM, and project management software enabling a unification of personal web based communication. Conversations can happen in real time – keystroke by keystroke.

Looking a lot like Gmail but with an IM feel and lots of focus on contacts and everything being shareable – instantly. Drag and drop from your desktop to share files.

This has the potential to displace a lot of collaboration tools used today and with Google might behind that we all might be on the wave very soon.

Check it out here.

If you ran the Microsoft Powerpoint program this would make you very worried. It’s a very cool looking presentation application that zooms, jumps and flies about in a very attractive fashion.

There will be a follow up post on this Video.

I’m generally not a powerpoint fan, preferring a good set of markers but to stand out from the crowd check it out.

The 24 Hours of Innovation is a non-stop, online marathon of innovation initiatives around the world. The event takes place during a full day and night on May 15-16 from 10.00 am to 10.00 am (CET).  The InnovationChef Blog will be contributing a special post to the  “My half time pep talk for 2009″ blog action.  We will also be contributing our talents to the program as well as trying to take in as many of the innovations on display. This should be a great event. You can confirm your interest and participation on the LinkedIn event page.

The 24 hours are divided in time slots, each one featuring an exciting innovation ranging from an innovation award to creativity sessions, an innovative auction, start-ups, and interviews with global thought leaders. Everyone can follow and join the 24 Hours of Innovation on www.boardofinnovation.com, from where theevent will be covered cross-media on blogs, traditional media, twitter, slideshare, ustream, coveritlive, flickr, scribd, vimeo,…

This is a simple, effective and yet revolutionary approach to a bane of the modern world: slide making! I got tired of endlessly changing font sizes, fighting with formating and  trying to draw simple shapes. All this was for company internal memos to limited audiences for a limited time. I skipped out on Powerpoint, and have saving myself a lot of time and frustration!

One of the most commonly used applications in the modern world is Powerpoint. Tastes vary but it is pretty much the standard tool for visual presentation making. An excellent deconstruction of the dangers of slide only communication is in Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence
. I love the guys work and recommend all his books very, very highly. They are expensive but are a combination of Art, Design and Elegance in a way rarely seen in text books.

How do I save time with my slide making? I use felt tip pens. I draw out the slides. It takes much less time and is every bit as effective for your internal presentations. I then scan them in for email distribution and archive. Easy as that.

There are a few drawbacks – editing can’t be done easily, collaboration is more difficult & I don’t recommend it for external customer presentations or for looking for funding.

80% of the time I can get my message across with markers. I have really nice Stabilo Pen 68 Tin of felt tip pens that have lasted a couple of years and are always open on my desk.

I think this presentation took me 15 mins. including making the silly graph!

Try it for your work group!

LifeHacker, the brillant resource that it is, brings news of my favourite new thing GTD (Getting Things Done) and a favourite old thing The Daily Show.  I know The Emergency is the latest innovation from Ireland in the field of satire but the Daily Show is hard to beat.

It turns out that Rob Cordry is a huge fan of GTD and of Twitter and of lots of other productivity tools as well as being a funny guy on a really good show.

Also (but not for the children) is the Daily Show on Inventions they have covered.