New Florence. New Renaissance.

The rebooting of the TV business

Time (sub required) on the revived show whose new season streams starting today

"In a real way, it's not just Arrested Development that's being rebooted here; it's the entire TV business. Netflix, which earlier this year premiered the Kevin Spacey political drama House of Cards (at a reported production cost of $100 million for two seasons), is betting big on a future in which original TV comes through the Internet, via computers, set-top boxes or sundry iThingies. When Arrested was canceled, it was a blip in network-TV history. But the revived version could be the biggest thing in whatever TV is about to become.

One advantage of streaming is the data. "We track viewing to the second," says Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos. "We know who's watching, how many episodes you're watching, what devices you're watching on, how long your viewing sessions are." All that data, Sarandos says, was telling them that whereas most canceled cult shows maintain a small, diehard fan base, Arrested Development's was getting bigger."

And the impact on production

"So Hurwitz (who co-directed every episode of the new season with Troy Miller) shot scenes like jigsaw pieces, depending on who was available. Hurwitz recalls, "Some days our call sheet would say Episode 406, 408, 409, 412 and 401. Bateman, whose straight-arrow, white-sheep-of-the-family Michael Bluth appears in every new episode, worked out a front-loaded schedule to shoot all his scenes before leaving in late October to direct his first movie."

Art by a thousand cuts

Standley, 44, starts by sketching the geometry of a piece on paper, then drawing its four key layers in CorelDRAW vector-graphics software. The rest of his craft is progressing between those way-points by drawing intermediate paper layers. "That's where the left side of the brain takes over and I get into the tiny detail." Standley's largest piece, Demeter, (in photo) is 134 layers deep and took three months to make. He's not worried about his niche being commodified, though: "It's not like everyone has a laser."

Wired UK

Photo Credit

Google's Moonshot Factory

"As the polymath engineers and scientists who work there are fond of saying, Google X is the search giant’s factory for moonshots, those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things. Google X (the official spelling is Google [x]) is home to the self-driving car initiative and the Internet-connected eyeglasses, Google Glass, among other improbable projects."

"The biggest moonshot of all may be the skunk works itself: With X, Google has created a laboratory whose mandate is to come up with technologies that sound more like plot contrivances from Star Trek than products that might satisfy the short-term demands of Google’s shareholders. “Google X is very consciously looking at things that Google in its right mind wouldn’t do,” says Richard DeVaul, a “rapid evaluator” at the lab. “They built the rocket pad far away from the widget factory, so if the rocket blows up, it’s hopefully not disrupting the core business.”"

"Google X seeks to be an heir to the classic research labs, such as the ­Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb, and Bletchley Park, where code breakers cracked German ciphers and gave birth to modern cryptography. After the war, the spirit of these efforts was captured in pastoral corporate settings: AT&T’s Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, for example, became synony­mous with breakthroughs (the transistor and the personal computer among them) and the inability of each company to capitalize on them."

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit

Infrascanner 2000

After years of testing, the U.S. Military is ready to implement a handheld device that detects brain bleeding immediately after a traumatic event, such as a vehicle accident or explosion. The Infrascanner 2000 uses infrared light to determine if a person has a brain hematoma or bleeding. Infrared light penetrates up to three centimeters into the head and detects the optical density, which is different for hematomas compared to a healthy brain. It gives a positive or negative reading in about two minutes.

Prompt medical care after a traumatic injury can be the difference between life and death -- what's known as the "golden hour." That hour is even more precarious for soldiers injured in combat who may be far from a hospital. With the Infrascanner, combat medics can assess patients to see who needs urgent medical attention, possibly saving lives and resources.

Fortune

Photo Credit

McKinsey's "Disruptive Dozen"

a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond.

VC for Spytech

Fortune (sub required) on some of In-Q-Tel's portfolio

Palantir builds tools that can bring massive amounts of disparate data into one place, allowing users to find patterns -- in phone records and financial transactions, for example -- that would otherwise be invisible.

(Sonitus Medical) is developing a miniature wireless-communication device that sits in a person's mouth where no one can see it. (Photo of its SoundBite in the mouth hearing device which uses bone conduction to imperceptibly transmit sound via the teeth)

Oculis software uses a webcam to check whether anyone nearby is looking at a computer screen and, if so, alerts the user with a pop-up window.

(Adapx's) digital pens allow users to record information in real time, then connect the pen to a PC or cellphone and share the info.

These are the good old days

With all the doom and gloom around us it is easy to forget what a remarkable life we enjoy when it comes to comfort, health, food, appliances and more. I have long said this is what Florence must have felt like during the Renaissance (hint - this blog's title for last 8 years)

Here's 31 charts which will make you smile that you are alive today, including my favorite below. It's good to be Moen, Kohler, Grohe, Toto and others who make the nice spas and even the humble showerheads.

Thanks to Steve Wendler for the pointer.

Migrating Old Home Movies to the Cloud

"Surrounded by chip companies and Web startups, YesVideo’s 25,000-square-foot Santa Clara production facility sticks out. It hums with the staccato rhythms of old movie projectors and slide carousels. There’s dedicated floor space for VHS, Betamax, 16mm, and Super 8 film, and even standard 8mm film, a format invented in the 1930s. One room is devoted to photo albums, with each page digitized using a high-resolution camera. In another, used to convert slides, YesVideo engineers have cut holes in the sides of a half-dozen vintage Kodak Carousel projectors and inserted Nikon D10 digital cameras to directly capture each slide. The company buys many of its retro players and replacement parts on EBay. “You won’t be able to recreate this business in about three years” because there won’t be enough working equipment, says YesVideo engineer Rolf Breuer."

BusinessWeek

Nutanix: Server/Storage Hybrid

"We have brought the storage into the cluster, and we have commoditized it," says Ting, and this is why the US government, financial services firms, healthcare companies, and educational institutions are running a lot of proofs of concepts with the NX-3000 series of appliances.

About 25 per cent of the iron is going to Uncle Sam, which is in many cases putting server clusters into vehicles to get image and signal processing at command posts or into the field in Humvees, in some cases.

Virtual desktop infrastructure was the obvious early-use case for Nutanix machines, and it is still driving a lot of deals, but Ting says the company is seeing companies dump Microsoft workloads such as Exchange Server and SQL Server on the boxes, and has just closed a deal this month with a Global 2000-class company for 1,500 server nodes to run an analytics workload."

The Register

Thanks to Anshu Sharma for pointing out Nutanix's rapid growth in the market

 

Electric Daisy Carnival

Bet this is on my son/friends itinerary west...if not they will likely catch the Orlando version in November

From the event organizer, Insomniac it is an "enhanced music festival experience by transforming the (Las Vegas) Speedway into a fully immersive carnival adventure featuring theatrical performers, including fire twirlers, aerialists, dancers and stilt walkers. Vibrant large-scale art installations and state-of-the-art lighting and sound production will span across seven stages inside the 1,000-acre complex creating a complete audiovisual experience for festivalgoers."

BTW the NYC version was this past weekend (here is the Rolling Stone report), Chicago is next weekend, London is July 20...

 

 

MIT TR’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies

“Our definition of a breakthrough is simple: an advance that gives people powerful new ways to use technology. It could be an intuitive design that provides a useful interface (see “Smart Watches”) or experimental devices that could allow people who have suffered brain damage to once again form memories (“Memory Implants”). Some could be key to sustainable economic growth (“Additive Manufacturing” and “Supergrids”), while others could change how we communicate (“Temporary Social Media”) or think about the unborn (“Prenatal DNA Sequencing”). Some are brilliant feats of engineering (“Baxter”). Others stem from attempts to rethink longstanding problems in their fields (“Deep Learning” and “Ultra-Efficient Solar Power”). As a whole, we intend this annual list not only to tell you which technologies you need to know about, but also to celebrate the creativity that produced them.”

MIT Technology Review

SapphireNow: The Students from Hasso Plattner Institute

During his keynote at SapphireNow last week, Dr. Hasso Plattner generously gave about 15 minutes to demos from two teams from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, an entity he started funding 15 years ago to develop systems engineering skills (watch that portion at 53.45 in this video) 

To me what is interesting is this reflects a new source of talent for advanced analytics/Big Data skills. Along with a growing base of other math/stat graduates around the world, crowdsourced data scientists from entities like Kaggle, new specialty analytical integrators like Mu Sigma, customers have far more choice than the “old faithful” SAP consultants and service partners, who are trying to migrate from their transactional and infrastructure heritage.

The New Yorker Innovator issue

The New Yorker is always pleasant to flip through, and the annual Innovator issue especially so.

This year it includes articles on the Ivy League push to offset the threat of MOOC, mushrooms as packaging and more.

High-tech foodie

Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, is a fascinating man I had profiled in The New Polymath.

Here's a really intresting interview with him (sub required) about his foodie side and his 6 volume, 2,400 page tome 

Some excerpts:

"A big menu for us is 30 to 50. I believe in rapid pacing. We have small courses, and we keep them coming. So we'll do 30 courses in 2½ to 3 hours."

"A lot of what we do involves cooking at low temperatures. That's fundamentally enabled by the fact you can make a digital thermostat that controls temperature really, really well. But not everybody can buy a $10,000 professional oven or a professional water bath for doing sous vide. There should be toaster ovens and other appliances, both small and large, that use controlled temperature technology."

"One reason to invent new kinds of food is to get people proper nutrition without costs -- costs in money, calories, fat, carbon emissions, take your pick. Eating is such a central problem for mankind that there will be invention in the basics of what we eat. By the way, this has already happened in the past. Everyone on earth eats food that isn't native to where they're from. In Italy, they eat polenta and tomatoes. They're both from South America. In China, Szechuan food has lots of chilies. Guess what? Those are also from South America. And if you go around the world, almost everyone eats an ersatz diet."

Photo Credit

“Frugal Innovation”

The lo-fi repair techniques are improvised and crowdsourced in Mumbai from a growing network of "repair wallahs". Want to know whether a particular chip is malfunctioning, but you can't afford a costly oscilloscope? Simple: spray foam on the chip and watch closely where the froth melts first. Check the pattern against the picture in the manual and bingo: a diagnosis.

Venkatraman believes that Rai and his fellow workers hold the key to transforming innovation in emerging economies. They also see this so-called "frugal" innovation having a wider impact: the methods used in the workshops of Manila and Mumbai will turn Western norms of production and design on their heads.

The frugal ethos aims to build  products that, despite limited resources, solve a real local problem. What if the future is products that aren't insanely great, simply ones that are "good enough"?

Wired UK

Creative and Enterprisey

FastCompany lists its annual 100 Most Creative People, and beyond the usual media, consumer products designers it is good to see several cloud, data, mobile, healthcare and other enterprisey wizards make the list including

1 Ben Silver, Principal, FiveThirtyEight

30 Bob Mathews and Gary Chow, Radio Frequency Engineers, AT&T

42 Susan Chapman, SVP of Global Real Estate, American Express

74 Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO, Workday

94 Yvonne Greenstreet, SVP of Medicines Development, Pfizer

95 John Hering, CEO, Lookout

99 Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist, Bit.ly

100 Leslie Bradshaw, COO, Guide

Dean Kamen: the restless entreprenuer

Nice Fortune (sub required) interview with the serial inventor where he talks about Segway, Slingshot, First Robotics and his views on educating our young 

"If you have an entire generation of kids growing up who are immersed in a culture that creates superheroes from the worlds of sports and entertainment and nothing else, then these kids will work hard to emulate the skill sets of those role models. The problem is very, very few kids will ever make it in those fields.

We started this thing in 1988 in a gym in Manchester, N.H., with 28 teams. This year we'll have more than 23,000 schools from about six countries competing. We have 120,000 corporate volunteers and 3,500 corporate sponsors. I'm working with will.i.am and his i.am.angel foundation to try to get First into every school in the country."

Photo credit of Kamen with his energy-efficient Stirling engine (being branded Revolution) that he used in Bangladesh to create electricity with methane gas generated by cow dung.

 

Underwater networks

Seaweb nodes are capable of exchanging information through dozens of kilometres of water. Such long ranges, however, require the use of low-frequency sound waves, which reduces the data rate. Joseph Rice, the project’s leader, says a Seaweb node can send a low-resolution photo to another one 5km away in five seconds—two seconds to emit the sound waves, and another three for them to travel that far. In seawater acoustic waves carry only a few thousand bits of data per second, but they travel at 5,600kph (3,500mph)—five times the speed of sound in air.

It is hardly broadband, but it can be used to connect submarines and warships to sensors and roving subsea drones, also known as unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Mr Rice imagines that UUVs might deploy sensor nodes and could visit them when required to download the data they have collected in large quantities. Sensors could also alert UUVs of any unusual readings that require investigation.

The Economist

Photo Credit

Spuds and Wi-Fly

Boeing's Project SPUDS (Synthetic Personnel Using Dielectric Substitution).

 

Stayin' Alive

"During cardiac arrest, blood cannot carry oxygen to the brain, causing brain cells to decay irreparably, making recovery uncertain. CPR, in which circulation is manually stimulated to delay brain damage, has long been considered the last chance for patients. With ECMO, however, those same patients can be brought back from the brink and kept alive while doctors work towards diagnosis and treatment, making CPR seem primitive by comparison. This hi-tech method of resuscitation is known as ECPR and could mark a revolution in medical practice if adopted by hospitals worldwide."

The Guardian story about Dr Sam Parnia who specializes in resurrection and has a new book out called The Lazarus Effect

Thanks to Troy Angrignon for sharing link

Monetizing your movements

"Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. carrier with more than 98 million retail customers, shows how such a program could come together. In late 2011, the company changed its privacy policy so that it could share anonymous and aggregated subscriber data with outside parties. That made possible the launch of its Precision Market Insights division last October.

The program, still in its early days, is creating a natural extension of what already happens online, with websites tracking clicks and getting a detailed breakdown of where visitors come from and what they are interested in.

Similarly, Verizon is working to sell demographics about the people who, for example, attend an event, how they got there or the kinds of apps they use once they arrive. In a recent case study, says program spokeswoman Debra Lewis, Verizon showed that fans from Baltimore outnumbered fans from San Francisco by three to one inside the Super Bowl stadium. That information might have been expensive or difficult to obtain in other ways, such as through surveys, because not all the people in the stadium purchased their own tickets and had credit card information on file, nor had they all downloaded the Super Bowl’s app."

MIT Technology Review

Photo Credit Verizon on audiences for its Precision Market Insights (click to enlarge)

The Renaissance in airline terminals

4 terminals in a month of travel that tell me we are seeing a Renaissance in airline terminals – lots of creativity going into their design

Virgin America, SFO Terminal 2

“Virgin America is known for its modern and stylish design, including its signature cabin moodlighting (which transitions based on outside light and is intended to soothe and relax guests and even gradually awaken them on red eye flights) and white kiosk check-in tables and ticket/gate counters with a concierge desk look and feel. T2 offers living room-like gate spaces, imaginative lighting and world-class art installations. In line with the airline’s touch-screen entertainment, food on-demand, power outlets and fleetwide WiFi, T2 offers high-tech amenities like free WiFi and elevated laptop work stations with power. Similar to Virgin America’s own in-flight menus (which were named best in the U.S. by Travel + Leisure), T2 offers the best in local and organic dining. Lundberg Design additionally collaborated with Virgin America on its teammate lounge, baggage offices and other T2 areas, which are designed to achieve the highest possible LEED® Platinum-certified status.”

 

Jetblue, JFK Terminal 5

“The Marketplace at T5 is the venue for a range of concerts, events and installations throughout each year. Through our signature Live from T5 program, produced in partnership with Superfly Marketing Group, JetBlue customers have the chance to see international music stars perform up close and personal. To date, Live from T5 has presented Taylor Swift, James Blunt, Robyn, Jason Derulo and Raphael Saadiq, among many others.”

Delta, Sonny Bono Concourse, Palm Springs

You get into the spirit of the desert life with outdoor bars, open air walks from security to gates, and not forego tech wi-fi and even a CNBC store

Delta International, Hartsfield Terminal F, Atlanta

“Williams describes the design of the (new terminal opened in 2012) as simple and clean, with subtle exterior and interior architectural curves to provide the feeling of flight.

Functionally, the building is all about intuitive wayfinding, specifies Hellwig. "You always have a sense of where you are and where you're going," he says. From the parking garage, passengers can see to the curbside. Inside the ticketing hall, a high, curved ceiling and angled ticketing counters direct ticketed travelers toward the security checkpoint, which features a glass wall looking onto the airfield.”

Managing peaks and valleys of alternate fuels

Thanks to Dan Keldsen, I saw this Forbes article on Denmark's impressive 1 gigawatt and growing wind power capacity, but I was as impressed with the thinking that has gone into managing the peaks and valleys common to wind, solar etc energy generation.

"One critically important element used today is hydro storage capacity in neighboring Norway (which is supplied by 99% hydro) and Sweden (over 50% hydro), supported by robust interconnection transmission lines.  When excess wind energy is generated, power is often transmitted to these neighboring countries.  In turn, they simply throttle back their hydro plants and store more water behind dams for later use.  When more electricity is needed, power can flow the other way.  In this sense, Norway and Sweden’s hydro systems serve as large batteries in a larger interconnected system.

A key domestic tool on the demand side -with the potential for soaking up huge surpluses – is increased use of electricity to heat water in the country’s extensive district heating systems.  Research suggests that up between 20 and 30 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electric energy could be stored as useful heat in hot water.  If this technology is adopted when wind prices are low or even potentially negative, it can supplant the need for fossil fuel-based heating.   It is estimated that 30 GWh of heat storage would provide enough absorptive capacity for 5 GW of installed wind capacity.  This electric heating technology is already in play in a number of the district heating loops served by combined heat and power plants, with the development of enormous insulated water tanks."

Mobile Healthcare and Rio's Favelas

"Researchers at the New Cities Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Paris that seeks to tackle the most intractable issues facing the world’s fastest-growing cities, joined by a small team of health-care workers from Rio de Janeiro, recently concluded an 18-month trial in one of the poorest parts of the city, the favela of Santa Marta, a community of 8,000. Santa Marta was chosen for its unique geography and its remoteness—the rows of shanty homes appear to tumble down this hillside community where, until recently, there was no sewage, running water, or electricity to the upper reaches of this slum community, and access to even basic health care for the sick and elderly almost always involves an arduous slog downhill and up again."

"Equipped with a backpack of nine mobile medical devices, many of which were developed by General Electric, a New Cities Foundation backer, a team of 11 doctors, nurses, and nursing assistants climbed the winding streets of Santa Marta to conduct regular medical health checkups with 100 elderly patients. The patients suffer primarily from hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, the kinds of chronic health-care disorders that affect the poor and elderly in most parts of the developed world, as well.

Inside the backpack was $42,000 worth of equipment, ranging from the high tech—GE’s V-Scan (in photo), a pocket-size ultrasound device to conduct abdominal and heart tests and, for younger women, obstetric readings, plus another GE device, the Tuffsat, a pulse oxygenation and heart rate oxymeter—to the everyday: a tape measure, stethoscope, and thermometer. Using the backpack, the e-health-care workers were able to detect among the patients 20 different diseases, such as hypertension and diabetes, within minutes. And underscoring the advantage of using mobile health-care technology, the e-health team was able to obtain blood tests on-site and have the results within three minutes, a procedure that can take as much as 15 days. Also, the test results were recorded and added to the patients’ existing medical file."

Photo Credit

Sleep and Web Pods at Abu Dhabi airport

Complete with a partial or fully enclosed sliding shade to separate you from the hustle and bustle of airport crowds, ten of the pods have been installed in Terminal 3 and in the Al Dhabi Lounge in Terminal 1 at Abu Dhabi International Airport, with another 35 on order.

After a pilot test phrase is complete — to see whether disgruntled or tired passengers are willing to pay AED 45/hour ($12) to sleep — the chairs are due to be upgraded to include a secure storage space, Internet access and sockets to charge electronics.

SmartPlanet

"De-extinction"

Thanks to John Hagel, this interesting TED talk of the possibility of a Jurrasic Park like de-extinction process.

 

Not DUMBO - Smarto

The (Brooklyn) area (which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) is home to 500 tech and creative firms within a 10-block radius, employing over 10,000 folks, says Alexandria Sica, executive director of the DUMBO improvement district.

Etsy, the site for artisans to sell their crafts online, is the most well-known. Other DUMBO occupants include up-and-coming firms such as Maker's Row, which helps companies find manufacturing partners, and app developer Tendigi.

 

Robotic Valet

Hey, if we can move to autonomous cars, why not allow robots to park and save us the wasted time and dings so common in today’s parking?

 

Willie Sutton 2.0

Not to celebrate crime, but this global tech enabled heist that milked $ 45 million from ATMs in 26 countries is well - nothing if not innovative, Graph shows withdrawals of one of the "foot soldiers". The masterminds - and presumably the tech geniuses - are still at large.

"The process started when hackers used complicated computer tricks to breach the networks of two credit card processors that handle transactions for prepaid debit cards, according to authorities.

These cards are generally used by employers to pay employees or by charitable groups to distribute disaster assistance, authorities said. The accounts accessed by the cards are loaded with a specified amount of cash — but the hackers tweaked the virtual security protocols to drastically hike the limits or to do away with them entirely.

From there, the hackers sent the stolen information and PINs to the foot soldiers. The cashers took the information and encoded it onto useless plastic cards — anything with a magnetic stripe, like an old bank card or a gift card sold by a retailer. Next came the flash-mob part of the process, as the “cashers” descended on ATMs according to an intricate plan and used the wired cards to withdraw as much money as they could carry.

All the while, according to authorities, the hackers and brains behind the operation were monitoring each henchman’s take through computer networks. Cash crews in the two heists cleaned out ATMs in countries including Russia, Japan, Egypt, Romania, Britain, Sri Lanka, Canada and Colombia — 26 nations in all."

 

 

 

Code for America

Once they've had about a month of training--mostly to prepare them for the culture shock of moving from Silicon Valley to city hall--the fellows are dispatched to work in their chosen cities, which themselves have to apply to earn a spot in the Code for America program. The work is meant to go deeper than just improving a city's official website or putting the mayor on Twitter. City governments generate a vast amount of data, everything from bus routes to property-tax records to police reports, but much of that information tends to molder away in archives, untouched except by those motivated citizens willing to make public-records requests. Code for America, which is part of a broader movement to improve the way governments function, aims to liberate that information and find creative ways to use it--and to do so inexpensively. With municipalities under increasing financial pressure from a combination of sagging tax revenue and federal spending cuts, that's a powerful draw for city officials. "We can no longer do things in the old way," says Karen Boyd, communications director for Oakland, who notes that the city has seen staffing reduced by 25% over the past 10 years. "Technology is moving in a new direction, and government needs to move that way too."

Time (sub required)

Photo Credit Code for America

Biomimicry and aviation

Biomimicry is the art of technology mirroring nature as in this story about seahorse tails inspiring the next generation agile robot.

Even more impressive is this Airbus description of how the water repellant features of the Lotus leaf, the curling wings of the eagle (and their inspiration for winglets in photo), the serrated wings of the owl, the grooves on a shark’s skin and many other features found in nature have influenced aviation. 

Linguistic Revolution

"Typing onto screens is becoming a dominant driving force behind the evolution of language, and this has brought vast ingenuity to bear on turning typed language into a medium as efficiently dynamic as spoken language itself."

"Beyond these lie many hundreds of increasingly baroque versions, targeting particular groups, services, ideas and idiolects – and extending deep into the cultural mainstream. One of the best-selling dance music bands of recent years is called LMFAO (slightly too profane to spell out in full here). In a still more typing-centric move, there's even a British indie band whose name, Δ, is pronounced "Alt-J" courtesy of a shortcut on the Apple keyboard used to produce the symbol for their name."

"Together, the "z" ending and deliberate misspelling of "lol" as "lul" denote a subversive strand in online culture. As embodied in the name of the notorious hackers' collective, LulzSec (standing for "Lulz Security" and boasting the motto "the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense"), to do things "for the lulz" is to act in a spirit of anarchistic-bordering-on-nihilistic delight."

New Scientist (sub required)

and then there are the countless emoticons - another modern addition to language. Photo Credit

Flammable Ice

“Methane hydrate is a sherbetlike substance that can form when methane gas is trapped in ice below the seabed or underground. Though it looks like ice, it burns when it is heated. “

“Jogmec estimates that the surrounding area in the Nankai submarine trough holds at least 1.1 trillion cubic meters, or 39 trillion cubic feet, of methane hydrate, enough to meet 11 years’ worth of gas imports to Japan.

A separate rough estimate by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has put the total amount of methane hydrate in the waters surrounding Japan at more than 7 trillion cubic meters, or what researchers have long said is closer to 100 years’ worth of Japan’s natural gas needs.

“Now we know that extraction is possible,” said Mikio Satoh, a senior researcher in marine geology at the institute who was not involved in the Nankai trough expedition. “The next step is to see how far Japan can get costs down to make the technology economically viable.” “

NY Times

Crowd-sensing apps

An application called MoboQ does exactly this by linking social networks with location data to let users ask time-sensitive questions about specific locations, and get them answered by complete strangers on the spot. This is crowd-sensing: a way of tapping into networks of distributed human beings.

But there's a catch. This hip social-media app is not the offspring of Silicon Valley, but the product of a Shanghai technology incubator called Diggerlab. It is only available in China with Sina Weibo, a Twitter-equivalent which boasts 400 million members. MoboQ lets its users ask questions about specific places in the physical world and then finds up to 15 Sina Weibo users best positioned to answer, based on their recent activity on Weibo and Jiepang, China's equivalent of location-based service Foursquare. You need to be signed up to MoboQ to ask a question, but anyone on Weibo can answer it.

Western firms are racing to come up with similar products. In an experiment run on Twitter last year, Jeff Nichols and colleagues at IBM's Almaden lab in San Jose, California, polled people on Twitter whose Foursquare accounts identified them as being at airports across the US. The team sent unsolicited tweets to ask how long it took them to clear airport security. The team mapped the data they gathered from the project, giving them a detailed overview of how quickly people were being cleared.

New Scientist (sub required)

Big Data and HR

NY Times on an emerging discipline of work-force science

"Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies.

Digital technology also makes it possible to conduct and aggregate personality-based assessments, often using online quizzes or games, in far greater detail and numbers than ever before.

In the past, studies of worker behavior were typically based on observing a few hundred people at most. Today, studies can include thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers, an exponential leap ahead."

Every Data Center as one Computer

The origins of Nebula One go back to Kemp’s days at NASA, which he joined in 2006 as director of strategic business development. In 2007, he became a chief information officer, making him, at 29, the youngest senior executive in the U.S. government. In 2010, he became NASA’s chief technology officer. Kemp spent much his time at NASA developing more efficient data centers for the agency’s various computing efforts. He and a team of engineers built the early parts of what is now known as OpenStack, software that makes it possible to control an entire data center as one computer.

Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, has three Nebula Ones, which it uses for research projects such as an effort to improve parking in big cities. Researchers at PARC have been analyzing huge amounts of data to create models that show when workers, delivery vehicles, and shoppers tend to use certain parking spots. The idea is to create parking spots with modifiable, electronic signs that can turn, say, loading zones into regular parking spots over the course of a day. “You need to spin up a large simulation, get the results, present them, and then sit back for a while,” says Roger Hoover, an engineer at PARC. With the Nebula One, an engineer can shut down one simulation and then start up a new project in a few seconds. Similar things are possible on Amazon.com’s EC2 service or Microsoft’s Azure, but those services can be expensive and slow when you must send large amounts of data back and forth via the Internet. “What we do just will not work on Amazon,” says Surendra Reddy, who leads the cloud technology work at PARC.

BusinessWeek

 

Ironman 3: a Tech Orgy

Saw the movie today. Loved the quote in one of the scenes "Ever since the guy with the hammer fell out of the sky, subtlety kind of went out the window."

Yup, no subtelty in the movie tech:

a) Plenty new hardware - all kinds of upgraded suits which Ironman can summon though sensors he injects into his arm and plenty of them that act like unmanned drones. DisneyLand's Innovention section allows visitors to virtually try on the Mark 42 in the movie with its repulsor blasts.

b) Holographic maps - of the world and a cool one of a brain projected from marbles no less. If you thought the holographs were cool in 2 (as in below) you are in for a bigger treat this time

c) There is plenty of time for Jarvis, his Siri (which btw is "Just A Rather Very Intelligent System")

d) "Exteremis" - a military nanotechnology serum - plays a big role in the movie

e) In Japan, viewers can watch the movie in 4DX cinemas with wind, fog and bubble effects, tilting seats that move with the action and, yes, odor projectors.

Sadly, I watched it in POTS - plain old AMC theater with soda:)

 

The tricky rules of cyberwar

Michael Schmitt, lead author of a new NATO manual, talks to New Scientist (sub needed) how international law applies to cyberattacks and when an armed response is legitimate

“We were researching military cyber operations and cyberlaw in 1995, ran a major conference in 1998, and published a book in 2000 to get international legal debate going. But then 9/11 happened, and everyone forgot about cyberlaw. Suddenly, we were concerned only with counterterrorism law: could we cross borders to go after terrorists? Is it lawful to conduct attacks in Afghanistan? That focus continued until 2007 when the cyberattacks on Estonia, a NATO member, brought down its computer networks. That was a big wake-up call.”

“Although it is sometimes hard to apply the existing law, it generally works. The US government has said cyberspace is the "fifth dimension" of warfare after land, sea, air and space, but in consultation with computer scientists and electronics engineers, we rejected that notion. In any cyberattack there will be tangible objects involved – someone will be at a computer, electrons will course through servers and so forth. So laws governing the use of objects in territories are sufficient.”

Logo of NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia.

Mobile apps worth paying for

Time has a list of mobile apps worth paying for

Photoshop Touch ($4.99, iPhone, Android).

Fantastical ($4.99, iPhone). replacement for the iPhone’s stock calendar app, Fantastical lets you type or speak items in plain English,

Evernote Premium ($5 per month or $45 per year, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry).

Instapaper ($3.99 for iPhone, $2.99 for Android).  The app strips out ads and other detritus and renders everything in crisp typography that makes even epic-length articles easy on the eyeballs.

TripIt Pro ($49 per year, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry). instant alerts about flight delays and gate changes—and the feature notifying you when you’re entitled to a postpurchase fare reduction might actually save you money.

Scanner Pro ($6.99, iPhone). (n photo) ..lets you snap pictures of printed documents (like expense receipts) with your phone’s camera, then upload crisp, cleaned-up digital versions to cloud services like Dropbox.

Tweetbot ($2.99, iPhone).  options like the ability to temporarily mute a person’s tweets—handy if someone you follow for sports commentary suddenly starts blathering about politics or vice versa.

The bright spot in horse racing

Did you enjoy the Kentucky Derby? Everything seems fine in the world of exotic hats and mint juleps.

Actually as Time points out the equine industry is not in good shape. One notable exception is Keeneland. I had the pleasure of presenting at its stage where thoroughbreds are auctioned, and wrote about how the place is innovating with technology.

Time writes:

When you talk about the fittest in horse racing, you're talking about Keeneland, the picturesque park in the heart of horse country, Lexington, Ky. The place is so beautiful, it makes your heart canter. And if it feels like a movie set, that's because it is. Much of the film version of Seabiscuit was set on the Keeneland grounds. A flight to quality in horse racing will mean, in essence, more tracks like Keeneland--Thoroughbred theme parks where families might take their children, where lovers might go on dates, where sentimentalists might find fuel for fancies of glorious days that never were but should have been. Fans will enter beautiful grounds steeped in racing's rich lore to find clean bathrooms and appetizing restaurants. Going to the track will be an event, with live music and lots of pageantry. The season will be short--Keeneland holds only about 32 days of racing each year, half in spring, half in fall--so that every race can feature strong horses and large fields.

"It's about the integrity of the experience for everyone from the fans to the trainers to the owners to the animals," Keeneland CEO Bill Thomason told me as his spring 2013 meet was drawing to a close. When the last race was run on April 26, the results spoke for themselves: A record $158.6 million was wagered at the track and off-site, a 19% increase over last year. Average daily attendance was over 17,000 for a meet total of 278,000--another record. Despite construction snarls on the road leading to the track, more than 30,000 fans turned out each Saturday, and the meet's most prestigious race, the Blue Grass Stakes, drew the second largest crowd in the 89-year history of the race. The only larger crowd was the one the year before.

Electronic House's Home of the Year

This massive (42,000 sq ft) Arizona estate impresses at every turn. A replicated mine shaft guides visitors down a hallway to a high-end home theater and 19th century saloon. Oil-rubbed keypads fuse with the texture of the walls and instruct the lights precisely how to illuminate to best showcase the stunning architecture. Outside, the mixture of diverse elements continues with amusement park-like water slides, Vegas-style water features, turn-of-the-century gas lamps and a grotto outfitted with a flat-panel TV and surround-sound. It took an army of craftsmen to unify the assortment of styles and features in a way that’s pleasing to the eye, and it would take a robust, professionally programmed home automation system to make each area a cinch to monitor, manage and control.

Read more and see many of the rooms here

A music tuner app

It’s not necessarily the first tuner to incorporate visualization, but Sandler thinks (Tunable) has a good chance of being the first one musicians will find useful from the moment they open it. In addition to the pitch history, Tunable also includes a tone generator and a metronome--a fairly sophisticated little kit of tools--but there’s practically zero learning curve for figuring them all out. Much of that is owed to the app’s simple, sharp UI, which draws from an unlikely source of inspiration: an old Ideo concept for futuristic digital books.

FastCompany

Note to Carjackers: Avoid Mercedes Cars

"For all the feet on the street chasing the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, a key break came when the victim who was carjacked and released by the Tsarnaev brothers on April 19 told the cops his Mercedes could be tracked with one quick call to Mercedes-Benz. They called and an hour later the police had the vehicle surrounded. A shootout ensued and when it was over, older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dead, apparently either from gunshot wounds or being run over by his brother.

Boston police aren’t saying much. Mercedes-Benz provided a few details, since the general workings of its mbrace2 telematics system are well-known and described on the Mercedes-Benz USA website. Mercedes’ mbrace is a telematics application best-known for upgradable over the air (OTA) updates, without the need for a dealer visit."

Extremetech

Photo of tweet by Mercedes-Benz US CEO Steve Cannon

Boeing's century of innovation

If you are a fan of aviation, you will enjoy a walk through of Boeing's century of innovation - including the 2007 first flight of Boeing X-48B Blended Wing Body (BWB) unmanned research aircraft below

Why fossil fuels are winning

While alternative energy companies have been innovating, the carbon fuel companies have been innovating even faster.

From an NPR story:

"An engineer named George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, spent years searching for a way to free natural gas from this source rock. He finally succeeded when he figured how to drill horizontally, into and then along a layer of source rock. That allowed him to access the gas throughout a layer of source rock with a single well. Then he used a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" to create tiny cracks in the rock that would allow natural gas to flow into and up the well."

"The common wisdom in the industry was that the process Mitchell had invented for natural gas wouldn't work for oil. Oil molecules are bigger and stickier than gas molecules, so petroleum engineers believed it would be impossible to get them to flow from source rock, even if the rock were cracked by fracking. But Mark Papa, the CEO of a small oil and gas company called EOG Resources, didn't accept that.

EOG snapped up land in a similar formation in South Texas known as the Eagle Ford Shale for $400 an acre when his competition thought it would never produce much oil. That land now goes for $30,000 per acre. Papa thought the Eagle Ford might hold 500,000 barrels of oil. The Department of Energy now predicts it holds 3.4 billion. Some even expect 10 billion, which would make it the biggest oil field in U.S. history."

"The drilling-services company Baker Hughes has designed a bit that can change directions underground, without having to be drawn back up to the surface, reducing drilling time by as much as 40 percent.

Behind the drill bit, attached to a long line of steel known as the "drill string," is an array of sensors. The sensors bombard rock with subatomic particles and measure the gamma radiation that bounces back. They assess how easily electricity flows through the rock and underground fluids. They analyze the magnetism of the rock and how it vibrates — both up and down and side to side — while drilling."

"To the layman, it looks like dumb iron, but you'd be shocked about what's inside," says Art Soucy, president of global products and services at Baker Hughes.

All this information is sent to engineers via fiber-optic cables. They run the information through supercomputers as powerful as 30,000 laptops to create a picture of the earth thousands of feet below the surface."

"And when the drilling is done, the rig itself can "walk" a hundred feet or so to another location and start drilling again. In the past, rigs had to be taken down and reassembled, which could take days. New rigs are built on sliding "shoes" that allow hydraulic lifts to shuffle the rig forward in short steps."

The future of on-demand marketing

The McKinsey vision of how digital marketing will evolve

Customized Crowdsourcing

A paper on how to improve the role of the crowd in manhunts beyond the Reddit experience during the Boston bombing

"we examine data from our recent success in the U.S. State Department's Tag Challenge, which required locating and photographing 5 target persons in 5 different cities in the United States and Europe in less than 12 hours, based only on a single mug-shot. We find that people are able to consistently route information in a targeted fashion even under increasing time pressure. We derive an analytical model for global mobilization and use it to quantify the extent to which people were targeting others during recruitment."

Ideo's David Kelley

The legendary David Kelley of Ideo shares his background, philosophy and more in this Fortune (sub required) interview

"By 1991 our clients were asking for an integrated offering of design and engineering, and we were collaborating with two firms to fulfill that demand. Merging with them was the best way to help our clients. We had an all-company contest to come up with a name, and we all resonated with the word "idea." "Ideo" was a prefix, and we toyed around with calling ourselves Ideo-Space, and other words that sounded like ideology, but IDEO stuck on its own.

We have a methodology called "design thinking" that results in innovation from a human point of view, and the companies that were willing to take risks gave us a chance. One of the IDEO designs I'm most proud of is the Heartstream portable defibrillator, which we did in 1996. We designed it so that a naive user could pull it off the wall and listen to instructions on how to save a patient's life.

As time passed, we moved from product work to what I call services, experiences, and environment. In the early '90s companies started asking us how to help transform and design their organizations to foster greater innovation. We call it organizational design. Our biggest project now is transforming the education system of the country of Peru. We're designing new schools, the curriculum, and making sure the finances work."

Big Data and Story Telling

One of the best sessions in the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference I attended in March was one which started with a 8 minute clip on how ESPN analysts come up with all kinds of interesting new metrics in a variety sports (WAR in baseball, Win shares and BPI in Basketball, QBR in football).

It then follows a panel discussion of how sports media balance the math with the jock factor.Every industry can learn from the pioneering work being done in sports analytics.

 

Google Now

The point of Google Now is to give you answers without making you search at all. One way it does this is by integrating with your Google account, pulling calendar entries, restaurant directions, sports scores, and more into a tidy at-a-glance package. If you’ve got a flight later in the day, Now will keep your boarding information handy--and send you a reminder of when you need to leave, factoring in real-time traffic data between your location and the airport. On Android, it’s continually running in the background, ready to be summoned up at any moment. And on that platform, it’s tightly integrated with Google Search, not only allowing you to ask for answers by text or voice but also learning from those queries and serving up more relevant information to you based on what you’re looking for.

Fast Company