New Florence. New Renaissance.

Intel Science Fair

"Some of the world's most gifted teenagers are gathering in Atlanta to participate in Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair. Their projects range from transmitting invisible data to extracting fuel from waste."

Voice of America

A Bluetooth lawn mover!

"This fourth-generation LawnBott from Kyodo America improves upon its predecessors in nearly every category: even though it weighs ten pounds less than the entry-level LB2000, it offers up a greater coverage area, increased cutting width, greatly improved incline climbing capability, longer runtime, and best of all, a Bluetooth radio for programming or direct control by cellphone."

Engadget

Data Center Makeover

If you had told me 5 years ago, the boring data center would be one of the hottest areas in the technology industry I would have laughed.

But several trends have converged to make it so

• Cloud computing - Microsoft's Mesh offering this morning in response to what amazon, Joyent and others have been pioneering
• Breakthrough designs - Google, Sun and others , in particular, have been rethinking traditional raised floor and other accepted best practices in data center design
• Green Computing - the focus on lower energy consumption and a willingness to consider alternative energy efficient locations like Iceland
• Virtualization - VMware was one of the hottest IPOs last year, but there are several other vendors in the space
• DC Consolidation - Really aggressive consolidations like HP's internal moves from 85 data centers to 3 pairs worldwide with related savings in everything from real estate to network costs.
• Standardization - with ITIL - decades of data center operations and yellow books being formalized and best practices shared
• The move to services  - part of a broader desire for clients to reduce their capex IT spending and buy it more as as an opex service - SaaS, HaaS, PaaS
• Remote monitoring - the ability to monitor key components of network, database etc from cheaper, remote locations
• New tax incentives - seems like every state in the US and every savvy emerging country wants to attract data centers with incentives

RFID and luggage tags

"..passengers submit their luggage at the check-in counter, as before, and the ground staff attaches a paper strap to it. But the strap now has an integrated radio chip with antenna, microprocessor and a memory to record all the relevant information."

"The system uniquely identifies the radio chip even when it is situated in an awkward position because, unlike a bar code, it does not require optical contact to be scanned."

"The system, which has been exhibited at the Terminal Passenger Expo in Amsterdam, scans RFID chips with a success rate of 99.9 percent — far higher than that of the bar codes previously used."

Physorg.com

Popular Science: Inventions of the Year

A Zero-Emissions Moto-Unicycle

The Uno accelerates with a simple lean and turns like a street bike on side-by-side wheels

A Multi-Rotor Wind Turbine

Doug Selsam's Sky Serpant uses an array of small rotors to catch more wind for less money

A Lifesaving Beacon for Miners

Russell Breeding finds lost miners with the same tech found in guided missiles and the Nintendo Wii

A Sewage-Proof Diving Suit

Sealed-up suits for divers in dirty seas

A More Natural Artificial Foot

Jerome Rifkin's K3 Promoter mimics the jointed motion of a real foot for easier walking

A Living Air Filter

These filters use plants and fans to clear the air of toxic chemicals

A Rocket Engine for the Masses

An off-the-shelf powerplant for the burgeoning private space industry 

A Homebuilt Tumor-Killer

This machine uses radio waves and nanoparticles to zap cancerous tumors ( 

A Better Bridge Beam

John Hillman put a concrete arch inside a plastic case to build stronger, longer-lasting bridges 

A Steam Engine for Your Car

This engine uses superhot steam to make a cleaner, more efficient car

 

A Degree in Digital Reporting

"Straying far afield from its core business of reporting the news, NBC News is getting into the education business....

The goal is to attract about 100 students across three campuses to the yearlong program, which begins Sept. 22, and charges tuition of $35,366. NBC gets an undisclosed percentage of that, Ms. Pitts said. 

NBC News employees, from camera operators to correspondents to NBC News’s president, Steve Capus, will be actively involved in the program, with a weekly presence in the one-year program, Ms. Pitts said. The intention is to be “a living laboratory for students,” she said, adding that “there is something from our professional perspective that is unique.”"

New York Times

PBS Series on "Green Options"

Starting tomorrow on the Nightly Business Report (6.30 in most US East Coast cities) PBS is running a 4 part series on Green Options:

Tuesday - discussion around bio-engineered crops as food and fuel compete

Wednesday - Florida sugar cane as source for ethanol

Thursday - a bacterium which can turn scrap, pulp etc into ethanol

Friday - a Japanese team trying to harness methane hydrate - a frozen gas

"Velib" comes to Washington

Washington is about to emulate the bike-sharing program in Paris I wrote about here. Clear Channel Outdoor and the District Department of Transportation are steiing up 10 locations to start with where you can rent bikes for up to 3 hours. Annual subscription of just $ 40.

Learn more here

U.S. Firms Competing in a New World

Jeffrey T. Macher, at Gerogetown and David C. Mowery at U. California at Berkeley have edited a book published by the National Academies Press on innovation in global industries from semiconductors to bio tech to financial services.

BusinessWeek has a gallery which shows the industries and US position in them.

Emergency Services 2.0

"Fast forward to October 2007, when wildfires ravaged the state again and residents banded together, this time in a way that wasn't possible in the seventies. 

Armed with an array of online "social media" tools such as blogs, annotatable maps, photo sites and instant messaging services, they were able to gather and disseminate information on, for example, the progress of the fire, the location of evacuation areas and shelters, and which schools and businesses were closed - information unavailable through traditional channels. "

New Scientist (sub required)

Technology Gifts for Mom

Forbes.com has a gallery of geeky gifts

Photo of 1934 US stamp courtesy of Heindorfnus-Shoebox

The New HTC Touch Diamond

Could this be the iPhone Killer? PhoneMag has details on the new HTC offering.


TechDigest has comparisons between the Touch Diamond and the iPhone.

I currently have the AT&T Tilt, a HTC predecessor, and before that had the HTC 8125, so I would lean towards the HTC, but let's not forget iPhone 2 will catch up in at least some features such as 3G support, GPS, etc.this summer

Google Ocean?

"The tool--for now called Google Ocean, the sources say, though that name could change--is expected to be similar to other 3D online mapping applications. People will be able to see the underwater topography, called bathymetry; search for particular spots or attractions; and navigate through the digital environment by zooming and panning"

CNET News

Innovative Financial Technology

Courtesy of Paul Kedrosky I saw what the U. of California Berkeley is interested in researching around tech as it affects finance - algorithmic trading, advanced search, collective intelligence and more.

"Who says big ideas are rare?"

"It was the dinosaur-bone story all over again. You sent a proper search team into territory where people had been looking for a hundred years, and, lo and behold, there’s a T. rex tooth the size of a banana. Ideas weren’t precious. They were everywhere, which suggested that maybe the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for invention—genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany—wasn’t necessary at all."

Fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell in New Yorker

Souping up the Asus

"If you want a super-light laptop, you have to pay for it, and you have to use Windows. That’s been the (frustrating) conventional wisdom—at least until late last year, when the Taiwanese company Asus rolled out the Eee PC (pronounced as though it were a single long “e”), a two-pound, seven-inch laptop starting at a mere $300. The tradeoff: It comes with just two to eight gigabytes of flash memory instead of a conventional, larger hard drive, and a simplified Linux operating system that essentially is usable only for e-mail, Web browsing and typing.

But then the hackers got hold of it. Within days of the Eee’s release, forums on a fan site, eeeuser.com, were buzzing with homebrew upgrades to remedy its shortcomings—users discovered ways to solder extra memory inside, attach additional gadgets, and install other operating systems. If you’re willing to do a little tinkering, you’ll find that big things will come from its small package."

Popular Science Blog

Replacing wires between chips with laser beams

"Sun has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact....

The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today’s supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors."

NY Times

Unsung technologies

PC World lists 10 technologies that are indispensable but do not get their fair share of discussion:

• Unicode
• Digital Signal Processing
• Managed Code
• Transistors
• XML
• Non-volatile RAM
• Lithium Ion Batteries
• VoIP
• Graphics Acceleration
• High-speed Net access (DSL, FTTP)

Shake it like a Polaroid picture!

"Beam a photograph from a cellphone to the printer and, with a gentle purr, out comes the full-color print — completely formed and dry to the touch.

The printer, which connects wirelessly by Bluetooth to phones and by cable to cameras, will cost about $150. The images are 2 inches by 3 inches, the size of a credit card.

Inside, no cartridges or toner take up space. Instead, there is a computer chip, a 2-inch-long thermal printhead and a novel kind of paper embedded with microscopic layers of dye crystals that can create a multitude of colors when heated.

The unusual paper is the creation of former employees of Polaroid who originated the process there. They spun off as a separate company, Zink Imaging, in 2005 after Polaroid’s bankruptcy"

New York Times

The College Tour Goes High-Tech

Newsweek

How big a hall would you need to bring together some 50,000 students and their parents, as well as college admissions officers, guidance counselors and financial-aid experts? No room required: the crowd participated in CollegeWeekLive, a virtual two-day college fair held this week that built on a smaller "test" event held last fall.

I don't know - may be convenient but I was looking forward to taking my daughter to some of these pretty campuses including the breathtaking Pepperdine one in Malibu, CA.

More LARTE

I coined the term LARTE a few years ago - Location Aware Real Time Enterprise.

While we have seen lots of good applications of telemetry in various supply chain and logistics areas, I have been delighted to find growing applications. As in healthcare - in tracking patients, employees and assets as this AeroScout case study shows and even in underground mining as this Ekahau case study shows.

I also saw this paper recently (purchase required) about how "position sensing" can help optimize clinical processes.

Giving the enterprise a jolt of double espresso :)

The Best of InterOp

I had a flying trip through the expo at InterOp in Vegas this week -I was presenting at Software 2008 which was co-located there this year. Good to see InformationWeek catalog the best of what was on show.

ChannelWeb has a gallery of 25 interesting photos from the event - including the "sign crawl" - the sign advertising the "booth crawl" at the expo to get the audience to sample the sprawling expo - and the beer.

Laptops as earthquake sensors

MIT Technology Review

"Desktop computers don't have built-in accelerometers, but they can easily be outfitted with inexpensive USB shake sensors...

The Quake Catcher Network's software will analyze shakes sensed by a computer's accelerometer and report only big movements to the central server, ignoring the vibrations from a passing truck, a bump to a table, or even a minor earthquake. The pattern of signals received by the server should allow the network to recognize a significant earthquake, Lawrence says. The location of networked computers will be identified by their IP addresses and from reports from users."

Google Artist Themes

Want  or Oscar de la Renta or Lance Amstrong to grace your iGoogle page?  Check out the artist themes they have lined up like designer Diane von Fustenberg below

Restoring Mondrian's Classic

New Scientist (sub required) on the intricate work repairing Victory Boogie Woogie by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian - estimated to be worth about $ 50 million.

"One problem is the pigments themselves: products of a lab rather than a mine. Think of the blue pigments used by, say Renaissance artist Giotto: azurite, lapis lazuli - they were grated stones, Brunetti says. "Contemporary materials are organic, many of them polymers.""

"The mixed-media nature of modern art is making conservation even more difficult. Paint and canvas have given way to new means of expression; everything from rubber and steel to the man-made fabrics on an unmade bed."

The most published author in the history of the planet

"Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing. 

Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows" 

No kidding. Wonders of search and digital publishing technology! 

New York Times.

"Secure your ID" Day

I recently found this unbelievable high-capacity, high-tech German shredder. Start a new shredder-as-a service business.

Just in time for "Secure your ID" day - tomorrow,  May 3.

Better Business Bureaus across the U.S. and Canada are coordinating a community service event to fight ID theft and provide consumers and small businesses the tools and advice they need to protect themselves every day.  Check your local BBB for free document shredding services on that day.

Innovation in the Heartland

While the big technology companies get most of the media attention, and Web 2.0 companies most of the blog attention, it is good to see Business Solutions Magazine recognize 8 channel integrators who deliver RFID, VoIP and other innovations to SMEs in the heartland.

Here are the honorees:

Content Management Channel Innovator Winner Profile - MS Sharepoint to provide visibility into the AP workflow

Data Collection Channel Innovator Winner Profile - RFID and Bluetooth to help a police department track evidence assets

Managed Services Channel Innovator Winner Profile - More efficient managed services

Point Of Sale Channel Innovator Winner Profile - move to a much more intuitive POS system

Network Security Channel Innovator Winner Profile - a more secure network for a campus

Storage Technologies Channel Innovator Winner Profile - storage to handle richer images and growth at an offshore survey firm

VoIP Channel Innovator Winner Profile - adding Enhanced 911 capabilities to a VoIP network

Wireless Channel Innovator Winner Profile - a wireless mesh network

Thanks to Jay McCall, an Editor at the magazine, for alerting me to the list and congratulations to the innovative firms. 

Babbage comes to the US

"The project took seventeen years to complete. The calculating section was finished in 1991 in time for the bicentenary of Babbage's birth, and the printing and stereotyping apparatus was completed in 2002. The project had a drama worthy of Babbage - funding crises, manufacturing challenges, impossible deadlines, and technical puzzles."

"The complete working Babbage engine is on public display at the Science Museum in London. A duplicate engine and printer, a 'second original', was recently completed for a private benefactor of the project, Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer and Group VP at Microsoft. Myhrvold has generously agreed to delay delivery of the Engine to him and lend it to the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California, where it will be displayed and demonstrated until May 2009."

Computer History Museum

HP's Memristor breakthrough

"The existence of the memristor, short for 'memory resistor', was first suggested in 1971, but only now have researchers succeeded in creating a real, working example. They hope that the new components could revolutionize computing, promising an end to frustrating waits for your computer to boot up."

Nature

Photo credit - HP via USAToday

Maker Faire

"Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things."

May 3-4, San Mateo, CA

Update : Guy Kawasaki took lots of pictures

Refinery City

Not in oil-rich Middle East, but on the west coast of India. When it is done it will process 5% of the world's gasoline. Fortune has a photo gallery.

Wanted: Bicycle Mechanics

New York Times on how NASA through various contests is benefiting from innovative amateurs outside tis ecosystem of professionals and contractors. Crowdsourcing comes to space. The 2008 contests are listed here.

Camcorders - Basic and Crossover

At one extreme you have the Flip, a barebones video recorder for around $ 100.

At the other extreme, MIT Technology Review writes about products from the Red Digital Cinema Camera which may make standalone digital cameras obsolete.

Virtualization of Mobile devices

"Handset makers could use virtualization to more easily replicate the features found in one another's devices and confront the threat posed by Apple, which introduced the iPhone in 2007. Virtualization could also help cell-phone makers offer more features at a lower price.

Currently, programmers have to rewrite every application—be it a game, social networking service, or other feature—for each of the various operating systems...So Motorola could grab a Web-browsing application written for one system, an e-mail application for another, and calling features designed for a third OS, and elegantly integrate them onto one phone. That could significantly speed up the phone-design process.

Virtualization also helps a phone run with fewer chips. Today, mobile phones typically require a combination of a baseband processor, which enables the phone to communicate; an applications processor, responsible for running applications like e-mail; and a multimedia chip, which handles graphics, audio, and video. But a virtualized phone can accomplish all of the above with just one or two processors instead of three.

Virtualization software will help (enhance security by letting) operators give preference to "trusted" applications."

BusinessWeek

The Ultimate Fashion Contest

NASA is calling for next-gen space suit designs for its next-gen Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle which will carry astronauts to the International Space Station and longer term to the Moon and Mars.

Should be able to withstand tears on the vehicle (given how astronauts float around in the weightlessness), and the radiation on the moon and who knows what on Mars. And of course allow astronauts to play golf and look cool while doing it :)

See-saw to power African schools

BBC News

"Design student Daniel Sheridan has created a simple see-saw which generates enough electricity to light a classroom.

The device works by transferring the power, created by a child moving up and down on it, to an electricity storage unit via an underground cable."

Earlier I had written about kids also powering water pumps.

The $ 100 Genome

"It currently costs roughly $60,000 to sequence a human genome, and a handful of research groups are hoping to achieve a $1,000 genome within the next three years. But two companies, Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix, are collaborating to create a novel approach that would sequence your genome for less than the price of a nice pair of jeans--and the technology could read the complete genome in a single workday."

MIT Technology Review

Blockbuster's makeover

It is trying to acquire Circuit City and get more into selling electronics. But it also wants to compete with Starbucks by offering cappuccinos, Kinko's by offering Wi-Fi...it is testing various new concepts as this Dallas Morning News story outlines.

IT-Olympics

At Iowa State University...200 students from 25 Iowa high schools will participate in events in 3 categories - cyber-defense, robotics and game design

Cosmic Collision

"Astronomy textbooks typically present galaxies as staid, solitary, and majestic island worlds of glittering stars. But galaxies have a dynamical side. They have close encounters that sometimes end in grand mergers and overflowing sites of new star birth as the colliding galaxies morph into wondrous new shapes. Today, in celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope's 18th launch anniversary, 59 views of colliding galaxies constitute the largest collection of Hubble images ever released to the public. This new Hubble atlas dramatically illustrates how galaxy collisions produce a remarkable variety of intricate structures in never-before-seen detail."

NASA Hubble Site

Enterprise RSS Day of Action

That's what we are honoring today.

Delta's new economy CozySuite

Delta plans to introduce new economy seats on its long-distance flights

"Intensive  3D  sculpturing  of the backshell  profile has  allowed for better space and comfort only ever dreamt of in the economy cabin before."

"A first for the economy cabin, a seat design offering you a truly relaxed sleeping position. It has a contoured shoulder area specifically profiled for sleeping. The shape was derived from numerous prototype and passenger trials to minimize the step-back of the seats. You do not feel like the seats
are even staggered, allowing interaction between you and other passengers, while reinforcing a high level of privacy."

Not soon enough, though - by 2010.

Product features and Photo Credits: Thompson Solutions

"Dismantling of the Last Mile Barrier"

"GigaBeam, a technology company in Herndon, Va., has come up with an alternative: millimeter-wave technology, which transmits data over wireless connections at one gigabit per second — 1,000 times as fast as a D.S.L. connection."

Read more at New York Times

Technology firms dominate top global brands

Google, Microsoft, China Mobile, Apple and Nokia are in the top 10 global brands in an annual survey by Millward Brown Optimor.

Another 18 technology firms show in the other 90 in the top 100.

Click image to enlarge and read the list

Web 2.0 Expo

The Big Daddy event kicked off today in San Francisco. While people are still arguing about what exactly Web 2.0 is, it is also time to celebrate the hundreds of creative companies launched in the lat few years.

Click below to enlarge the photo below from stabilo-boss.

"Transmedia Storytelling"

FastCompany on the emerging geek leadership in Hollywood

"Today's audience, steeped in media and marketing, sees through crass ploys to cash in. So the Geek Elite are taking a different approach. Rather than just shill their products in various media, they are building on new and emerging platforms to expand their mythological worlds. Viewers watch an episode of Heroes, then follow one character's adventure in a graphic novel. They tune in to Lost, then explore the island's twisted history in an online game."

Greener Planes

In the short term, a revolution in jet engines is about to occur, with radically different designs that use gears to cut fuel consumption, noise and pollutants. And those new engines will power planes built more and more with carbon composite materials, which are lighter and may also be safer than the aluminum they replace.

In the longer term, the fuel itself may change; scientists are looking for an aviation version of ethanol, something that can be made from plants rather than petroleum.

New York Times

Earth Day

In time for Earth Day, Fortune has a nice gallery of 11 green ideas.

You can order the Earth Day poster at this site.

Yahoo! rolls out mobile voice search

"...technology from vlingo, a start-up based in Cambridge, Mass., would allow people who have BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series to scour the Web with their voice, using Yahoo's mobile search engine, known as oneSearch."

San Jose Mercury News