No, I'm not talking about Alfresco, my employer. I think what we're doing is exceptionally cool, but two other companies from the "island of shopkeepers" are pushing the envelope on innovation. They're not just bringing open source to existing markets, but actually building new markets with open source. Oh, and both are GPL, which makes me happy. :-) The companies? Openads and GNU Radio. What do they do? GNU Rad No, I’m not talking about Alfresco, my employer. I think what we’re doing is exceptionally cool, but two other companies from the “island of shopkeepers” are pushing the envelope on innovation. They’re not just bringing open source to existing markets, but actually building new markets with open source. Oh, and both are GPL, which makes me happy. 🙂The companies? Openads and GNU Radio.What do they do? GNU Radio is a collection of software that when combined with minimal hardware, allows the construction of radios where the actual waveforms transmitted and received are defined by software. What this means is that it turns the digital modulation schemes used in today’s high performance wireless devices into software problems.What does this mean? It means an infinite number of things. The company builds very cool applications on top of this base functionality. Like the ability to track shoppers (via their mobile phones) as they walk through your store, helping you to optimize displays and what-not. That’s just the beginning. As for Openads, it has actually been around for six or seven years. The Openads community has grown rapidly to become the web’s largest ad space community. Tens of thousands of people are making their websites pay! The highly sophisticated and FREE Openads adserver software gives site owners everything they need to generate revenue from their websites. Publishers get complete control of banners and campaigns along with a highly sophisticated tracking system for gathering statistics, all from the one simple screen interface.Think Doubleclick. Then think about it completely free. And that’s when you smell the disruption, and it smells good….I’m going to be interviewing the founders of both projects over the next few weeks, and will post more when I’ve done so. In the meantime, it’s great to see innovation alive and well in open source land…and in the UK. Johnny Rotten was right – there really is anarchy in the UK. 🙂 Open Source