[ILUG] OT: Wisdom of Crowds Applied

[oscar cassetti]

First of all sorry for the off topic:

We have decided to run an experiment based on The Wisdom of Crowds by
James Surowiecki relating to the technical direction of our company,
Phorest (www.phorest.com). The concept for the experiment came from an
idea we had, that if the opinion of a crowd is smarter than the
smartest people in it - what would happen if the strategic direction
of our company was decided by the crowd? Surely with enough
information they would do a better job than we could? Or at the very
least the crowd would be represented at meetings as a person - albeit
the "smartest" person in the room. We thought to start with the
current dilemma/debate facing the company - what technology to use in
the next version of our core product - Memento (Touchscreen based,
management software with POS and Appointment scheduling for hair and
beauty salons).

The next version of our core software will be web based. There are two
issues to take into account. Firstly, it will be a touchscreen GUI and
needs to be instantly responsive. Therefore we will be building a very
thin client (that rarely gets updated) so that we only send requests
back to the server when completing an operation. Secondly because it
is a POS system, it needs to keep working in a limited capacity if the
Internet goes down, To deal with this, we will be able to queue
certain requests in the thin client ( e.g. a sales transaction) until
the PC is back online. The team has good experience in Java, Delphi
and Ruby. So what language and database should we use?

Please use this link to vote:

http://pub19.bravenet.com/vote/vote.php?usernum=1594379615&cpv=2


Thanks
Oscar Cassetti


www.phorest.com

2005 Dublin City Enterprise Award
2004 PDC Hothouse Program Runner Up
2003 Coca-Cola National Enterprise Award

Innovative. Passionate. Customer Focused.