This textbook is intended for SPI (software process improvement) managers and - searchers, quality managers, and experienced project and research managers. The papers constitute the research proceedings of the 16th EuroSPI (European Software Process Improvement, www.eurospi.net) conference held in Alcala (Madrid region), September 2-4, 2009, Spain. Conferences have been held since 1994 in Dublin, 1995 in Vienna (Austria), 1997 in Budapest (Hungary), 1998 in Gothenburg (Sweden), 1999 in Pori (Finland), 2000 in Copenhagen (Denmark), 2001 in Limerick (Ireland), 2002 in Nuremberg (G- many), 2003 in Graz (Austria), 2004 in Trondheim (Norway), 2005 in Budapest (Hungary), 2006 in Joensuu (Finland), 2007 in Potsdam (Germany), 2008 in Dublin (Ireland), and 2009 in Alcala (Spain). EuroSPI established an experience library (library.eurospi.net) which will be conti- ously extended over the next few years and will be made available to all attendees. EuroSPI also created an umbrella initiative for establishing a European Qualification Network in which different SPINs and national initiatives join mutually beneficial collaborations (ECQA - European Certification and Qualification Association, www.ecqa.org). With a general assembly during October 15-16, 2007 through Euro-SPI partners and networks, in collaboration with the European Union (supported by the EU L- nardo da Vinci Programme) a European certification association has been created (www.eu-certificates.org, www.ecqa.org) for the IT and services sector to offer SPI knowledge and certificates to industry, establishing close knowledge transfer links between research and industry.

"I can’t think of a more acute observer of the wild Silicon Valley saga than Mike Malone. He has seen it all from up close."
–Tom Wolfe, author of A Man in Full and The Bonfire of the Vanities

"Mike Malone is to Silicon Valley what George Orwell was to the Spanish Civil War."
–Paul A. Gigot, Editorial Page Editor
The Wall Street Journal

"One hundred years from now, when people talk about Silicon Valley, they will be using Mike Malone’s words."
–Tom Siebel, Chairman and CEO, Siebel Systems

"Malone has done it again! By compiling these gems from the past, we can revisit his powerful insights for the future. Thank you, Mike Malone, for helping to shape this legend we call ‘The Valley!’"
–Dr. Eric Schmidt Chairman and CEO, Google, Inc.

"In an area that has had too much hype, Mike Malone consistently provides the provocative, penetrating analyses and insights that brilliantly withstand the test of time. He is an impeccable source of enlightenment."
–Steve Forbes, President and Editor in Chief
Forbes Inc.

"An absolutely fascinating insight into life in Silicon Valley. It’s a beautiful combination of history, gossip, insight, and anecdote. It reads like a modern John Aubrey."
–Anthony Hopwood, Dean
Said Business School, Oxford University

Platform capitalism is coming for the money in your pocket Wherever you look, money is being re- placed by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data-the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities? Tokens opens up this new and expanding world. Exploring the history of extra- monetary economies, Rachel O'Dwyer shows that private and grassroots tokens have always haunted the real economy. But as the large tech platforms issue new money-like instruments, tokens are suddenly everywhere. Amazon's Turk workers are getting paid in gift cards. Online streamers trade in wishlists. Foreign remittances are sent via phone credit. Bitcoin, gift cards, NFTs, customer data, and game tokens are the new money in an evolving economy. It is a development challenging the balance of power between online empires and the state. Tokens may offer a flexible even subversive route to compensation. But for the platforms them- selves they can be a means of amassing frightening new powers. An essential read for anyone concerned with digital money, inequality, and the future of the economy.

In this strategy-packed guide, top e-business consultant Scott Fox reveals the powerful but simple methods for striking it rich on the Net. Exclusive interviews with dozens of "mom and pop" entrepreneurs prove how easy it is to get started and build a million-dollar enterprise. Readers get:

- an inspiring guide to e-business opportunities, including "instant e-businesses" that require no start-up capital or technical training

- proven strategies for making money from home and turning hobbies into businesses

- low-cost web marketing and product tips

- legal and financial advice

- detailed vendor recommendations

- years of expertise and experience in one easy-to-use book

"Internet Riches" also offers an innovative action plan for brainstorming new business ideas, and fun exercises to help readers determine the best moves for their particular situations. Filled with practical pointers and motivational interviews, it's the most powerful guide ever to finding financial freedom online "Buy the book and get a free membership in Scott Fox's Internet business coaching and training Forum at ClickMillionaires.com. Ask questions, develop your business ideas and online marketing strategies, meet fellow entrepreneurs, and get personalized help from Scott Fox and his team--all free with purchase."

Insurance intermediaries can help consumers to economize on information and transaction costs in insurance markets. This book analyzes conduct and performance in the market for insurance information services by applying search theoretical and industrial organization approaches. Based on a sample of 927 insurance intermediaries, coverage empirically studies the factors that affect the quality of the information services provided by them.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and extended post-proceedings of the Joint ERCIM/CoLogNet International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming, CSCLP 2005. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections on global constraints, search and heuristics, language and implementation issues, and modeling.

In 2003, consumption of IT goods worldwide was $1.5 trillion. Asia represented twenty percent of this total. Even more telling, Asia produced about forty percent of these goods. The continued rise of Asian IT innovation will pose a challenge to the eminence of traditional IT centers, notably Silicon Valley. Making IT examines the causes as well as the major consequences of the dramatic rise of Asia in this industry. The book systematically analyzes each country's policies and results, on both a national level and, more importantly, in the innovation regions that have developed in each country: Japan's excellence in technology and manufacturing skills; Bangalore, India's late start and sudden explosion; Taiwan's Hsinchu Science-based Park's entrepreneurship and steady growth; Korea's Teheren Valley's impressive development of large companies; Singapore's initial reliance on multinational firms and its more recent switch to a home-developed strategy; and China's Zhongguancun Science Park's encouragement of investment from foreign firms while also promoting a domestic IT industry. The book outlines the difficulties in the IT industry, including Japan's tendency to keep out most foreign firms and China's poor protection of intellectual property. Developed by the team that brought readers The Silicon Valley Edge, Making IT analyzes why this region has an advantage in this industry, the similarities and differences in the countries' strategies, why companies have clustered in specific localities, and most important, what will be changing in the coming years. Making IT should leave no doubt that the United States and other countries competing in the global economy will face enormous challenges-and opportunities-responding to the rise of an innovative Asia.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley have long been uncomfortable bedfellows. Out of fear of pirating and lost profits, entertainment companies have historically resisted technological changes. Conversely, high-tech companies, more concerned with technological progress, have largely ignored the needs of the entertainment industry. Nevertheless, those products that we now take for granted, such as DVDs, MP3 players, and the Internet, are all due to the synergy of technology and entertainment. The switch to digital and web formats for entertainment represents huge potential market opportunities for both Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It has opened up new possibilities for entertainment and expanded the way content is created, distributed and consumed. Consider the phenomenon of YouTube and its wildly popular user-created content, or the ability to download movies and TV shows from sites such as iTunes and watch them on your iPod or computer, anytime and anywhere. The dual forces of consumer demand and rapidly changing content distribution are combining in new ways to create changes that will strike at the very foundations of the entertainment and technology industries. Depending upon how entertainment and technology companies respond, these changes can help them prosper or put them out of business. Media companies will have to become more like technology companies; and technology companies will need to change too. Because content creation, distribution and consumption are ever more tightly linked, Hollywood will need to understand what's happening in Silicon Valley and vice versa; changes in one industry will reverberate through the other. Some companies such as AOL and Time Warner have tried and failed (at least so far) to harness these forces, while a few companies such as Disney, Intel, and Google have recently taken the initial steps. But many more companies wait, afraid to change but knowing they cannot conduct business as usual. With an insider's knowledge, researcher and consultant, Philip Meza insightfully clarifies what managers and investors in media and technology companies will need to do in order to successfully navigate today's tricky environment. Coming Attractions? Hollywood, High Tech, and the Future of Entertainment discusses the history of the key forces driving the relationship between entertainment and technology today and into the future.

Drawing from the detailed case studies of India and five ASEAN countries, this volume establishes the complementary role of innovation system and trade regime in promoting production and use of ICT and draws lessons for other developing countries that adopted a liberal trade regime to catch up with the ICT revolution.

Technological advances and innovative perspectives constantly evolve the notion of what makes up a digital library. Archives and the Digital Library provides an insightful snapshot of the current state of archiving in the digital realm. Respected experts in library and information science present the latest research results and illuminating case studies to provide a comprehensive glimpse at the theory, technological advances, and unique approaches to digital information management as it now stands. The book focuses on digitally reformatted surrogates of non-digital textual and graphic materials from archival collections, exploring the roles archivists can play in broadening the scope of digitization efforts through creatively developing policies, procedures, and tools to effectively manage digital content.
Many of the important advances in digitization of materials have little to do with the efforts of archivists. Archives and the Digital Library concentrates specifically on the developments in the world of archives and the digitization of the unique content of information resources archivists deal with on a constant basis. This resource reviews the current issues and challenges, effective user assessment techniques, various digital resources projects, collaboration strategies, and helpful best practices. The book is extensively referenced and includes helpful illustrative figures.
Topics in Archives and the Digital Library include:

• a case study of LSTA-grant funded California Local History Digital Resources Project
  
• expanding the scope of traditional archival digitations projects beyond the limits of a single institution
  
• a case study of the California Cultures Project
  
• the top ten themes in usability issues
  
• case studies of usability studies, focus groups, interviews, ethnographic studies, and web log analysis
  
• developing a reciprocal partnership with a digital library
  
• the technical challenges in harvesting and managing Web archives
  
• metadata strategies to provide descriptive, technical, and preservation related information about archived Web sites
  
• long-term preservation of digital materials
  
• building a trusted digital repository
  
• collaboration in developing and supporting the technical and organizational infrastructure for sustainability in both academic and state government
  
• the Archivists' Toolkit software application
  

A fast-growing social media marketing company, TechCo encourages all of its employees to speak up. By promoting open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy, the firm has fostered a uniquely engaged workforce and an enviable capacity for change. Yet the path hasn't always been easy. TechCo has confronted a number of challenges, and its experience reveals the essential elements of bureaucracy that remain even when a firm sets out to discard them. Through it all, TechCo serves as a powerful new model for how firms can navigate today's rapidly changing technological and cultural climate. Catherine J. Turco was embedded within TechCo for ten months. The Conversational Firm is her ethnographic analysis of what worked at the company and what didn't. She offers multiple lessons for anyone curious about the effect of social media on the corporate environment and adds depth to debates over the new generation of employees reared on social media: Millennials who carry their technological habits and expectations into the workplace. Marshaling insights from cultural and economic sociology, organizational theory, economics, technology studies, and anthropology, The Conversational Firm offers a nuanced analysis of corporate communication, control, and culture in the social media age.

Cyber security involves protecting organisations from cyber risks, the threats to organisations caused by digital technology. These risks can cause direct damage to revenues and profits as well as indirect damage through reduced efficiency, lower employee morale, and reputational damage. Cyber security is often thought to be the domain of specialist IT professionals however, cyber risks are found across and within organisations. Unfortunately, many managers outside IT feel they are ill equipped to deal with cyber risks and the use of jargon makes the subject especially hard to understand. For this reason cyber threats are worse than they really need to be. The reality is that the threat from cyber risks is constantly growing, thus non-technical managers need to understand and manage it. As well as offering practical advice, the author guides readers through the processes that will enable them to manage and mitigate such threats and protect their organisations.

This unique guide to Plone covers everything from installing Plone (on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux) to writing code for the system. As part of the Apress library of Python programming and content management tools, "The Definitive Guide to Plone" is authored by a member of Plone's core development team, Andy McKay.

He emphasizes the customization of Plone and shows how to fully integrate Plone into an existing website and application. If you want to adopt Plone for some or all of its features, pick up this invaluable reference and start learning right away!

Medical imaging and medical image analysisare rapidly developing. While m- ical imaging has already become a standard of modern medical care, medical image analysis is still mostly performed visually and qualitatively. The ev- increasing volume of acquired data makes it impossible to utilize them in full. Equally important, the visual approaches to medical image analysis are known to su?er from a lack of reproducibility. A signi?cant researche?ort is devoted to developing algorithms for processing the wealth of data available and extracting the relevant information in a computerized and quantitative fashion. Medical imaging and image analysis are interdisciplinary areas combining electrical, computer, and biomedical engineering; computer science; mathem- ics; physics; statistics; biology; medicine; and other ?elds. Medical imaging and computer vision, interestingly enough, have developed and continue developing somewhat independently. Nevertheless, bringing them together promises to b- e't both of these ?elds. We were enthusiastic when the organizers of the 2004 European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) allowed us to organize a satellite workshop devoted to medical image analysis.

Truth is often stranger than fiction, especially when it comes to the workplace. In "Cube Farm, "author, Bill Blunden, recounts his three years in Minnesota, performing research and development for Lawson Software. Riddled with intrigue, duplicity and collusion, this story offers a trench-level view of a company in the throes of internal rivalry, and suffering from a string of failed projects.

If you have ever suffered at the hands of an incompetent manager, or toiled in a dysfunctional environment, then this hilarious account will appeal to you. "Cube Farm "provides "lessons learned" sections, at the end of each chapter, which delve into the basics in corporate self defense. Table of Contents THE IVY LEAGUE ADVANTAGE BLAZING A TRAIL TO MINNESOTA FIRST IMPRESSIONS THE ILLUMINATI VANISHING ACT THE KING'S NEW CLOTHES THE GREAT ESCAPE IT'S THE NATURE OF THE BEAST A FIXED FIGHT THE Y2K TIME BOMB!

Constraint programming is the fruit of several decades of research carried out in mathematical logic, automated deduction, operations research and arti?cial intelligence. The tools and programming languages arising from this research ?eldhaveenjoyedrealsuccessintheindustrialworldastheycontributetosolving hard combinatorial problems in diverse domains such as production planning, communication networks, robotics and bioinformatics. This volume contains the extended and reviewed versions of a selection of papers presented at the Joint ERCIM/CoLogNET International Workshop on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming (CSCLP2003), which was held from June 30 to July 2, 2003. The venue chosen for the seventh edition of this annual workshop was the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) in Budapest, Hungary. This institute is one of the 20 members of the Working Group on Constraints of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). For many participants this workshop provided the ?rst opportunity to visit their ERCIM partner in Budapest. CoLogNET is the European-funded network of excellence dedicated to s- porting and enhancing cooperation and research on all areas of computational logic, and continues the work done previously by the Compulog Net. In part- ular, the aim of the logic and constraint logic programming area of CoLogNET is to foster and support all research activities related to logic programming and constraint logic programming. The editors would like to take the opportunity and thank all the authors who submitted papers to this volume, as well as the reviewers for their helpful work.

This volume contains a collection of papers that provides a unique, novel and up-to-date overview of how software agents technology is being applied in very diverse problems in health care, ranging from community care to management of organ transplants. It also provides an introductory survey that highlights the main issues to be taken into account when deploying agents in the health care area.

The intended audience includes graduate and postgraduate students specializing in artificial intelligence and researchers interested in the application of new technologies.

This monograph extends Realization Theory to the discrete-time domain. It includes new results and constructs a new and very wide inclusion relation for various non-linear dynamical systems. After establishing some features of discrete-time dynamical systems it presents results concerning systems which are proposed by the authors for the first time. They introduce General Dynamical Systems, Linear Representation Systems, Affine Dynamical Systems, Pseudo Linear Systems, Almost Linear Systems and So-called Linear Systems for discrete-time and demonstrate the relationship between them and the other dynamical systems. This book is intended for graduate students and researchers who study control theory.

Component-based software development, CBSD, is no longer just one more new paradigm in software engineering, but is effectively used in development and practice. So far, however, most of the efforts from the software engineering community have concentrated on the functional aspects of CBSD, leaving aside the treatment of the quality issues and extra-functional properties of software components and component-based systems. The 16 revised chapters presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book; together with an introductory survey, they give a coherent and competent survey of the state of the art in the area. The book - the first to focus on quality issues of components and component-based systems - is organized in topical parts on COTS selection, testing and certification, software component quality models, formal models to quality assessment, and CBSD management.

A summary of research carried out in the CHOROCHRONOS Project, established as an EC-funded Training and Mobility Research Network with the objective of studying the design, implementation, and application of spatio-temporal database management systems. The nine coherent chapters by leading research groups are written in a tutorial style, making the research contributions of the project accessible to a wider audience interested in spatio-temporal information processing. Following an introductory overview, the book presents chapters on ontologies for spatio-temporal databases, conceptual models, spatio-temporal models and languages, access methods and query processing, architectures and implementation of spatio-temporal DBMS, interactive spatio-temporal documents, and future perspectives.

XPAgileUniverse2003isthethirdconferenceinaseriesrunninginNorthA- rica and attracting participants from all over the world who are interested in the research, development and application of agile software processes. Agile app- aches value people and interaction over processes and tools - moving software engineering from the process-oriented software development approaches of the 1990s towards people-oriented approaches that we are starting to see more and more in this decade. Agile approaches stress a holistic view of software deve- pers as being involved in analysis, design, implementation and testing activities, while more traditional, tayloristic approaches separate these tasks and assign them to di?erent "resources. " Tayloristic approaches create knowledge-sharing problems as information gathered by one person needs to be handed over - usually in the form of documentation - to the next person in the chain. Agile approaches reduce the number of hand-o?s and, thus, decrease the amount of required documentation for knowledge sharing. While deemed a novelty only a few years ago, agile methods are now be- ming established in the software industry and are being applied in more and more application domains. While agile approaches move into the mainstream of software organizations, we are only now beginning to understand their bene?ts, areas of applicability, and also their dangers. This year's conference will increase this understanding and provide a better base for industry practitioners as they assess the e?ectiveness of agile methods in their environment.

The refereed proceedings of the IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms, Middleware 2003, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2003. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 158 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on peer-to-peer computing, publish-subscribe middleware, adaptability and context-awareness, web-based middleware, and mobile and ubiquitous computing.

The refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases, SSTD 2003, held at Santorini Island, Greece in July 2003.

The 28 revised full papers presented together with a keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 105 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on access methods, advanced query processing, data mining and data warehousing, distance-based queries, mobility and moving points management, modeling and languages, similarity processing, systems and implementation issues.

Territories of Profit compares Dell Computer, the dominant computer manufacturer of the late twentieth century, and G. F. Swift, the leading meatpacking firm of the late nineteenth century, to reveal how communications revolutions in different periods enabled businesses to innovate their operations, reorganize the structure of the firm, and reshape the geography of profit-making. By depicting the parallel experiences of Dell and Swift, which both deployed revolutionary communications technologies in their business systems and transformed patterns of development through their innovative advances, the book challenges simplified representations of the contemporary economy as historically unprecedented. Territories of Profit also incorporates information from interview sources within Dell to portray the "Dell Model" in ways never before revealed in existing studies of the PC maker.

The refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Multiple Classifier Systems, MCS 2003, held in Guildford, UK in June 2003. The 40 revised full papers presented with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. The papers are organized in topical sections on boosting, combination rules, multi-class methods, fusion schemes and architectures, neural network ensembles, ensemble strategies, and applications