Village Gamer

Editor’s Note: I’ve read and reviewed many, many books in the past few years. Over the next week or so, I will be sharing reviews with our readers of the books which, while they may be older, in my opinion, the information their pages contain is still relevant to today’s world – and in some cases may have been predictive of current times.

Design of Things To Come-How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products
Authors: Craig M. Vogel, Jonathan Cagan, Peter Boatwright
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Wharton School Publishing June 18 2005

Design of Things To Come is a must-read for anyone involved in business. This book not only goes through the innovative process, it covers other important information such as the wide variety of trademarks, from logos to trade dress. The authors have put this book together, and shared their knowledge in such a way that the principles they discuss can be used by practically any business to grow its market share.

This is the type of quality book I have come to expect from Wharton School Publishing, and one that I will make use of for many years to come. As a business owner, I was pleased to see many of the processes I have been doing correctly, as well as seeing many areas where we could improve – and the many ways in which they could be improved. The book is in no way overly-repetitive, and is written so well that it does not need an ample supply of diagrams to illustrate what the authors are trying to say.

Every page of Design of Things To Come contains useful information, and outlines innovative practices which can be easily adapted to the business at hand. The authors, in my opinion, have produced a goldmine for those of us who want to push our companies forward to the next level and beyond. Their advice on team building, motivation and rewards is invaluable. This is especially important for companies such as mine, which are globally situated and depend heavily on team work. This book also served to remind me of marketing and research practices I had learned way back in school, but had pushed into the background. Design of Things To Come has enabled me to get a lot of my primary focus back and work towards realigning, restating, and in some cases redeveloping areas of my business which were falling through the cracks. Read the rest of this entry »

Canada – As always, it’s nice to start our Fridays with some cool links and information from our favourite tech info guru, Bradley Shende of MEDIA2O and ConnectedLife. Bradley appears every Friday morning on Global BC’s morning news show. Today’s cool links included BoardTracker and BoardReader – two great services for busy people. Be sure to catch his segment next week for more great info. You can view past GlobalTV ConnectedLife segments on Global’s site – just scroll down the index and choose Connected Life. Also, congratulations are in order to Bradley and Sarah, who are expecting twins in a few months’ time.

Ubisoft has launched the official dev blog for James Cameron’s Avatar The Game. There isn’t very much content up yet, but UbiGabe is working on it. The dev blog promises the latest news, links and info regarding Avatar. UbiGabe says he is also looking forward to telling some of the secrets which have been kept, well, secret about the game. Avatar is also available now for pre-order at most game store locations, and will be available for Xbox 360, PS3 PSP, DS and Wii.

Also announced by Ubisoft today is a chance to win a trip to Ubi Montreal to play Assassin’s Creed 2 with the developers. The cryptic details were released on Twitter, with a coded URL to follow. We will share the link with you right here – good luck in the contest. All you need to do is have an account on Ubi.com, grab and share the widget and hope you win. If you win, take us with you – we’d greatly appreciate it.

Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning has released their comments about the recent Ubisoft Toronto announcement.
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