New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Real Star Show

While the stars mingle at the Oscars, The Moon, Venus and Mercury are aligned in the night sky

Photo Credit John Green and the ULAO project

The NBA Tech All Star

Orlando hosts the NBA All Star game on Sunday. Even more impressive was the participation in the tech summit this past Friday – CNN, Cisco, Disney, ESPN, eBay, Youtube, Zynga and so many more giants from media, gaming, consumer tech

Back to the future at Daytona

After clinging to carburetors for decades after they were regularly found in passenger cars, NASCAR finally is making the switch to fuel injection.

It was a major change for teams and their engine builders, making right now an exciting time for guys like engine builders. Doug Yates, the CEO of Roush Yates Engines, said he has more data than ever to analyze and can make far more adjustments to affect the engines' performance.

"It's very exciting from an engine builder and an engineer's perspective, having new technology in NASCAR." Yates said

Huffington Post

Photo Credit

Yes there is an app for that - even an Oscar nominee

William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg used to work at Pixar. They've since taken their movie and tech knowledge and started their own venture, Moonbot Studios. You'll hear a lot about them -- and Moonbot -- soon, because Oldenburg and Joyce are Oscar nominees. (

Moonbot's animated short, called "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," has been nominated for the golden statue.  It's the studio's first project, and it comes with its own app.

Yes, a movie with its own app Not just a website, a full-blown, interact-with-the-characters app. Moonbot's founders are as into their animation skills as they are the mobile technology side of things.

NBC

Photo Credit: Apple

Book Excerpt: Endgame – “Welcome to the NFL”

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in late March (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . This is the final summary chapter in the book.

Charlie Feld, whom we introduced in Chapter 15, should be long retired. In the past three decades, as CIO at Frito-Lay, then at the firm he founded, The Feld Group, he influenced IT at countless companies. He has since formed the Feld Group Institute, which tells his view of the technology world on its website:

“The journey of (technology) innovation and sophistication has been nothing short of breathtaking. What has not been so spectacular has been the evolution and maturing of a management framework that would enable the efficient application of these rich technologies within large enterprises. Every
decade these enterprises have become more dependent on IT but the potential still far exceeds the ability of most organizations, industries and governments to harvest IT.”

He says, in an interview, IT in most companies has become one dimensional, and is often just cost or compliance focused. “In the big leagues, you cannot choose to play just defense or just offense. You have to build teams with multiple roles and skills.”

“Welcome to the NFL,” says Feld.

Elite Technology Teams

The National Football League is a good analogy for building elite technology
teams. In the NFL, for any given play a team cannot have more than 11 players on the field. A team roster is 53 players, although on game day only 45 can be declared active. There are offensive units, defensive units, and special teams. There are at least 20 different roles including quarterbacks, guards, defensive ends, and placekickers. There are countless coaches who help hone the skills of the already elite athletes who play at the professional level.

Beyond the IT skills where Feld calls for attention, as we have seen in earlier chapters, an elite technology team needs great industrial designers like Jonathan Ive at Apple. It needs superb talent like Tony Prophet at HP to manage logistics in the complex global technology supply chain. It needs more of those operational geniuses like Jim Miller at Google to manage hyperefficient data centers and real estate in a world where physical presence continues to be hugely important. It needs economists like Todd Stockard at Valence Health who are comfortable with morphing business models, financial executives like Gordon Coburn at Cognizant, who can drive out massive waste in technology spending. It needs attorneys like Benjamin Kern because legal design often trumps product design in technology markets. It needs marketing folks like Jerry Grasso at Lexmark who are socially savvy. It needs “crossover” executives who have experiences at technology vendors and users like Tony Scott at Microsoft and Vijay Ravindran at The Washington Post Co.

The NFL is an appropriate analogy in other ways. The league defines rules for drafting players and recruiting free agents. It has other rules for player decorum on the field and off. It has rules for everything. We are about to enter a phase of more tech-savvy regulators and market watchers. We saw glimpses of government efficiency and innovation in the examples of the country of Estonia, the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s Office, and Roosevelt Island. As Robert Hoffman points out in Chapter 18, “Tech-savvy policymakers are coming of age. The twentysomethings that first connected Capitol Hill to the information superhighway are now in positions of authority.”

NFL commentary has evolved significantly with instant replays, Skycam angles, and other technology. When 3M showcases its “Periodic Table,” with its 46 technology platforms, technology analysts can only become savvier. There are plenty of blogs and smaller specialty analyst firms that are defining new rules for the watched and the market watchers.

The NFL analogy rings true even more after the 2011 owner-player dispute. As the months-long lockout ended, the Players Association issued a video featuring 13 players from various teams delivering personal messages to fans thanking them for their patience and support. The society surrounding the NFL with fans and their “fantasy leagues,” the players union, the cities that host the stadiums, and the charities the teams support all significantly influence the game. In the same way, the society around technology is complex and varied. There are thorny ethical, legal, and other issues we will increasingly have to factor in to our technology design.

Any Given Sunday

Chapter 20 showed a letter that Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, sent to his shareholders and it is full of technology terms and trends. Amazon is definitely a technology elite company. It is the largest online retailer. Its Kindle, eBook sales, and Amazon Web Services revenues make up 10 percent of its revenues and are some of the fastest growing products in its store. It would be fair to say that Amazon focuses today as much on Apple and Google, as it does on Walmart or Sears or Barnes & Noble.

To net it out, Amazon has a wide range of attributes that allow it to compete on multiple fronts: offense, defense, and special teams. The seesaw battle between Amazon and Walmart has been fascinating to watch. In 1999 Walmart sued then fledgling Amazon for hiring several of its technology and logistics executives. Nonetheless, Walmart seemed unstoppable. BusinessWeek asked in 2002, “Will Wal-Mart Take Over the World?,” giving credit to its extremely sophisticated use of information technology.

By 2007, that technology advantage had shrunk. A technology fund manager observed, “For years,Walmart was held up as a shining example of cutting-edge thinking in retail technology. But today, when I hear about a retailer doing something cutting edge, it’s never Walmart being talked about.”

For a while, Walmart’s online business sputtered while Amazon’s exploded: “Walmart’s lackluster online history has deep cultural roots. The organization has long been dominated by store managers who feared e-commerce could cannibalize in-store sales, and thus their bonuses, according to a former Walmart.com senior executive.”

Now, in a turnaround, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, are running @Walmartlabs “to speed with innovations such as smartphone payment technology, mobile shopping applications, and Twitter influenced product selection for stores.” Yes, these are the same executives who founded Junglee, which Amazon acquired in 1998, and were influential in those formative days at Amazon. Walmart, Sears, Barnes & Noble, and other traditional retailers are also trying to fight Amazon (and other Internet retailers) by lobbying for taxes on Internet sales (an attractive proposition to many states in these fiscally strapped times) and on sales by its affiliates. They are also wooing its affiliates to join their ecosystems.

And that brings us to another concept the NFL has encouraged— “parity.” It has salary caps across teams. Weaker teams get to draft better players the next year. There are few “dynasties.” So, Amazon’s advantage may be as fleeting as was Walmart’s. Technology may have its own version of parity. This is giving rise to “Phoenix” strategies.” In Chapter 3, we saw several examples like Aircell, Delta Airlines, GM, and others where technology is giving them a fighting chance to regain past glory.

The Coming Upheaval

We live in exciting times. To some degree the current landscape is the throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, when we dreamed of competitive advantage through technology. Sabre, the American reservation system, and American Hospital Supply were spoken of fondly for changing their industries.We have a similar opportunity now, but in most organizations the IT group is much more focused on the back office, not on product or revenue or growth.

In reverse, we have technology vendors with an entitlement mindset. Even as Apple and Amazon have shown dramatic business model innovation, too many technology vendors continue with older business models, and feel entitled to their compensation levels. So they cling to 90 percent software gross margins, $5,000 a gallon for printer ink, and 50 percent margins on so-called cheap offshore talent. Either they learn to disrupt themselves or they will get disrupted.

Dramatic changes are needed if you aim to become one of the technology elite.

And a Final Word from Coach Bear Bryant

Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, one of the most revered football coaches, was quoted as saying: “Show class, have pride, and display character. If
you do, winning takes care of itself.” Unfortunately, technology, with the riches and recognition it brings, also seems to bring plenty of arrogance. Coach Bryant’s words are more good advice for building an elite technology team.

Conclusion

Beyond the 12 attributes we discussed in Part II, more demanding regulators
and market watchers and changing societal expectations are all going to influence our definition of technology elite in the near future. 3M’s “Periodic Table,” Amazon’s technology-rich shareholder letter, UPS’s self-definition of being “half a transportation company, half a technology company,” Apple’s benchmarks for retail excellence are the language the technology elite will increasingly use with many of their stakeholders—their customers, investors, regulators, and society at large.

The "Nike Spring"

Nike's "Galaxy" Air Foamposite Ones caused a riot at the Florida Mall in Orlando yesterday. They were introduced to align with the NBA All-Star games here this weekend. 

A year after the Arab Spring, we are fighting for truly innovative products:)

 

Weight Watcher’s New Formula

This new formula distinguishes among calories and ascribes values to a given food based on its makeup of protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. From an eater’s perspective, the formula brings both good and bad news. Members receive more points under the new system. But many foods cost more points now, including alcohol. The name change—from Points to PointsPlus—may have made the program sound like a minor upgrade, but the kernel underneath is entirely new. The program has effectively declared war on processed foods, which include obvious targets like breakfast pastries and fast food. But it also makes enemies of seemingly benign (or even healthy) foods, like orange juice.

Oranges, on the contrary, are encouraged. In fact, they’re absolutely “free,” zero points, as are all other fruits and most vegetables. That’s because they offer a lot of food per calorie and are loaded with fiber, which makes us feel full even though it passes through the body essentially unprocessed.

Wired

Automation at FloraHolland

Good friend Brian Sommer sent me this from a trip to Benelux he just came back from:

"Just outside Amsterdam's Schiphol airport is the FloraHolland flower auction house. It advertises itself as "the largest flower auction in the world". The facility in Aalsmeer is huge and heavily automated. From what I observed, approximately 48 containers, most of which hold 100 cut flowers each, are placed on a wheeled rack of about 4' X 4' X 8'.  Large, almost endless trains of these racks are moved through 2 massive, automated auction rooms. Each auction room has 2 concurrent auctions underway. According to FloraHolland, this site and 5 sister locations auction off some 8+ million racks/trolleys worth of flowers annually. From what I observed, each trolley's contents are auctioned off every 3-5 seconds.

The degree of automation within this facility is impressive. Underground and
overhead moving systems are supplemented by a small army of people driving a
number of powered devices. Surprisingly, with all of the automation, people
and movement, it is actually a fairly quiet place. I expected to hear
trolleys colliding, people barking out requests, etc. but it was an amazing
exercise in highly controlled chaos.

Thousands of growers cut and ship flowers to this facility. Inbound trucks
are unloaded and flower trolleys are queued for auction. Post-auction, the
trolleys are moved to a picking area where individuals assemble on different
trolleys the items purchased by bidders. Picking is powered by bar code
technology and other methods. Once a buyer's orders are gathered, the
trolleys are staged for outbound shipping with many shipments destined to
move through Schiphol to flower markets globally. It is not only a great
tourist experience but a marvel of efficiency, technology and logistics.
Every warehouse distribution software vendor would be lucky to have
FloraHolland as a reference."

The Socks in Silicon Valley

Brilliantly colored and patterned socks have been spotted on entrepreneurs including Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive (colorful stripes); Jim Breyer, an early Facebook investor at the venture capital firm Accel (red and purple); and Om Malik, the founder of GigaOmniMedia, a blog network (polka dots).

And they can be found on social networks like Path, Instagram and Twitter, where techies like to show off images of their natty ankles.

Lee Sylvia, a sock buyer at Sockshop and Shoe Company, which has stores in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, Calif., said that sales of wild socks were up, an observation echoed by other local sock specialists.

New York Times

PS - the article missed Marc Benioff's rainbow socks

Google’s HUD eyeglasses?

Note: Not officially confirmed by Google

“They will also have a unique navigation system. “The navigation system currently used is a head tilting to scroll and click,” Mr. Weintraub wrote this month. “We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.”

The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees. The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed.”

New York Times

The Old Farmer’s Almanac

“Since 1792, The Old Farmer's Almanac has spoken to all walks of life: tide tables for those who live near the ocean; sunrise and planting charts for those who live on the farm; recipes for those who live in the kitchen; and forecasts for those who don't like the question of weather left up in the air.

The Almanac, North America's oldest continuously published periodical, comes out every year in September.”

From its website, which also provides daily forecasts and in keeping with the times, the Almanac is now available on the Kindle, and on its web store you can buy devices like the GroMeter in photo.

Update: My friend Jevon MacDonald introduced me to Peter Rukavina's web work for Alamnac including this mobile app, My Local Almanac

Impossible Chemistry

New Scientist (sub needed) discusses 5 broken chemistry rules including that of quasicrystals, the focus of the 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner

The Toto Washlet

I was remiss to not write about the spectacular new property, Aria in Las Vegas where the Tibco Tucon conference was held last year. Then, Dennis Howlett went back a couple of weeks later for the Workday conference and was upgraded to a suite.

He particularly raved about the toilet.I filed it away and during the SuperBowl learned Tom Brady, quarterback of the Patriots and his supermodel wife, Gisele have some thing similar in one of their pads. It is the Toto Washlet (in its many variations).

Fair warning - it may gross you out, but it certainly qualfiies as a "smart" toilet

 

 

Long ride for some gum!

Half a century ago, John Glenn went out for a pack of gum. That's the way he described it, anyway. "Well, I'm going down to the corner to buy some chewing gum," he told his wife Annie, just as he told her before every mission he flew as a fighter pilot. It was a little incantation that always brought him home safely, and it worked again on Feb. 20, 1962, when Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth, flying a Mercury capsule so tiny that you didn't so much ride in it as wear it.

Time

The Online Pinboard

Pinterest, the website which lets people collect and share photos online with a “virtual pinboard,” has steadily amassed a very dedicated following of users that spreads far beyond the app-obsessed early adopter crowd. On Tuesday, a new study out of content sharing company Shareaholic showed just how powerful the Palo Alto, California-based startup has become. Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined.

GigaOM

Psychedelic Bean

Chicago's "Bean" - its Millennium Park Cloud Gate sculpture - reflects through tomorrow Lumious Field, another piece of art and choreographed music by Luftwerk.

Photo Credit Chicago Tribune

Dear Santa,

can I retroactively redo my 2011 list? Want these, please that I saw courtesy of Jeff Nolan

 

Heathrow Airport’s Pods

Visitors to London for the Olympics this summer will see the future in public transport.

The World Economic Forum Top 10 Technologies

The annual list put together by the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies in order of greatest potential to provide solutions to global challenges

1. Informatics for adding value to information

2. Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering

3. Green Revolution 2.0 – technologies for increased food and biomass

4. Nanoscale design of materials

5. Systems biology and computational modelling/simulation of chemical and biological systems

6. Utilization of carbon dioxide as a resource

7. Wireless power

8. High energy density power systems

9. Personalized medicine, nutrition and disease prevention

10. Enhanced education technology

Book Table of Contents

Some readers have asked about a TOC. Sorry, should have shared earlier. The links are to the excerpts I have posted in previous weeks.

Preface

Part I The Convergence of Technology Production and Consumption

Chapter 1 The New Monday Morning Quarterback
Case Study: UPS—That’s Technology “Amore”

Chapter 2 The “Industrialization” of Technology

Case Study: HP—The Quest for a “10 Out of 10” Supply Chain

Chapter 3 From Amazon to Zipcar: No Industry Untouched
Case Study: Roosevelt—Innovation Island

Chapter 4 Australia to Zanzibar: No Country for Old Products
Case Study: Estonia’s “Tiigrihupe”—Tiger Leap

Chapter 5 Convergence, Crossover, and Beyond
Guest Columns: Crossover Executive Perspectives
Perspective 1: Tony Scott (CIO, Microsoft)
Perspective 2: Vijay Ravindran (Chief Digital Officer, The Washington Post Co.)

Part II Key Attributes for the New Technology Elite: Three Es, Three Ms, Three Ps, and Three Ss

Chapter 6 Elegant: In a World of Flashing 12s
Case Study: Virgin America—Redefining Elegance in Flying

Chapter 7 Exponential: Leveraging Ecosystems
Case Study: RIM’s Evolving Ecosystem

Chapter 8 Efficient: Amid Massive Technology Waste
Case Study: Facebook’s Hyperefficient Data Center

Chapter 9 Mobile: If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Xiamen
Case Study: The Boeing 787 and HCLTechnologies

Chapter 10 Maverick: No Rules. Just Right.
Case Study: Apple—A Thousand “Nos” and Ten Gutsy “Yeses”

Chapter 11 Malleable: Business Model Innovation
Case Study: Valence Health

Chapter 12 Physical: Why Test Driving Is Still Important Even in a Digital World
Case Study: Taubman Shopping Centers

Chapter 13 Paranoid: But Not Paralyzed
Case Study: Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform

Chapter 14 Pragmatic: When Attorneys Influence Technology Even More than Engineers
Guest Column: Legal Considerations in Technology Product Launches—Benjamin Kern

Chapter 15 Speedy: In a New Era of Perishability
Case Study: Corning—The Gorilla® Glass Rocket Ride

Chapter 16 Social: Amid Chatty Humans and Things
Case Study: Lexmark Genesis—A Printer for Our Social Times

Chapter 17 Sustainable: Mining the Green Gold
Case Study: Google’s Green Initiatives

Part III Outside Influences on the Technology Elite

Chapter 18 Making Regulators More Tech-Elite
Case Study: 3M’s “Periodic Table”

Chapter 19 Society’s Changing View of Technology
Guest Column: Smart Products Consumers Can Trust—Professor Mary Cronin

Chapter 20 Market Analysts Morphing
Case Study: Amazon 2010 Shareholder Letter

Endgame: “Welcome to the NFL”

Digital Menu Boards

California-based Straw Hat Pizza had been considering a move to digital menu boards to liven up its presentation and possibly spur greater in-store sales. When its home state of Cali enacted legislation (later adopted nationwide) requiring restaurants to display nutritional information alongside each item on the menu board, management had the catalyst they needed to make this bold move.
The challenge then, was finding a management solution that allowed Straw Hat Pizza corporate to maintain control over branding elements, while allowing store owners to easily make changes to certain areas, such as posting a greeting for a birthday party. It also had to be powerful enough to incorporate video, as well as text and graphics.

Hospitality Magazine

Photo of signage at a Courtyard by Marriott hotel from Four Winds

 

Aviation art

A Boeing 787 jet took corporate loyalty to new heights when it "drew" the letters "787" followed by the company's logo across several thousand miles of North American skies. The etching of the letters and logo, while not visible from the ground, can be seen in the flight path plans.

"Boeing's 19 hour test flight of the 787 Dreamliner was a great opportunity to test the limits of the 787, FlightAware's flight tracking, and the FAA's flight plan system," FlightAware Chief Executive Officer Daniel Baker tells Yahoo News. "It was the longest domestic flight we've ever handled and it required three FAA flight plans to accomplish, not to mention dozens of people coordinating the flight overnight."

Yahoo News courtesy of Bill Wohl

Software transforms robots

The HBRC meeting was at Willow Garage of Menlo Park, California, the six-year-old company that is driving much of the software revolution. Willow Garage's major contribution has been the PR2: wheeled robots 1.5 metres tall with boxy torsos, two long, jointed arms with pincer hands, and a pan-tilt camera for a head. They are widely regarded as the most advanced general-purpose robots ever built.

Willow Garage reasons that by providing such capable hardware, roboticists are freed up to focus on the software. "We care about turning robots into a software problem," says CEO Steve Cousins. "Software is what makes devices hum."

New Scientist (sub required)

High-Tech Valentine's Day

Interesting gifts including a USB blanket, TelyHD which lets you Skype video conference using a TV, a his and hers DNA portrait (below) and more 

Digital Life

Photo Credit DNA11

Book Excerpt: Chapter 20 Market Analysts Morphing

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 18 through 20 focus on how society, regulators and analysts need to also evolve in a world of the “technology elite”. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

Of course, analysts need to balance “knowing too much” against the growing tech talk they are increasingly being exposed to. Mark Little, Senior Vice President of GE Global Research, uses terms like Biomimetics in presentations to financial analysts. That refers to the discipline of science mimicking nature, as in GE drawing innovative inspiration for moisture repellants from the lotus leaf. As we saw in the UPS case study in Chapter 1, its CEO tells investors “we’re about half a transportation company, half a technology company.”

As we saw in Chapter 2, Tony Prophet of HP explains to financial analysts the gory details of its global technology supply chain. We saw in Chapter 18, David Meline, CFO of 3M, present to Wall Street a slide on 3M’s “periodic table” that summarizes 46 different areas in which it offers technology products.

As more companies talk that way to investors, the more tech-savvy Wall Street analysts will have to become. In the end, it comes down to what Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon points out in his letter later in this chapter: “Now, if the eyes of some shareowners dutifully reading this letter are by this point glazing over, I will awaken you by pointing out that, in my opinion, these techniques are not idly pursued—they lead directly to free cash flow.”

*****************

Dr. Paul Kedrosky is an investor, author, entrepreneur, and a technology analyst for CNBC. On his blog, Infectious Greed, and in presentations at various industry events, he covers a wide range of technology and financial topics.

His perspective on analysts keeping up with technology:

“Wall Street’s sell-side (those that work for investment banks and publish much of the stock research we see) has a very low competency hurdle when it comes to domain expertise. As long as your results are non-toxic (that is, you make money for the firm), and your clients and trading desk don’t hate you, that’s all that matters.”

“There are some very good analysts with deep domain expertise who make terrible picks, and there are very bad analysts with no/errant domain expertise who make good picks. Further, the financial side of the Street more than trumps the industry side, so being able to geek out about thin-film polysi is much less important than having a developed cash flow model from 2011‒2015.”

*****************

Gartner, the technology research firm, covered the Amazon outage mentioned above extensively and has reports for its clients with titles such as “Protecting Sensitive Data in Amazon EC2 Deployments.”

But search the Gartner database for 3M and you get very few hits. In Chapter 18 we saw 3M says it has products in 46 different technology platforms. Gartner is the largest technology research firm. What gives?

The reality is the research analyst marketplace is itself morphing. Over the course of the book we have mentioned firms like Redmonk, Horses for Sources, iSuppli, and other specialized analyst firms. In the Lexmark Genesis story in Chapter 16 we saw how they targeted technology blogs for their product launch, rather than traditional technology media and analysts.

**************

Chris Selland a former analyst at Yankee Group in the 1990s and later at Aberdeen Group says:

“During the ‘90s, there was a tremendous thirst among corporate executives for better understanding of how they could leverage technology and particularly this newfangled ‘World Wide Web’ thing.”

“But during the past 10 years that’s been changing dramatically—the typical executive today has a much better understanding of technology, and much less motivation or desire to read a 100-page report that takes a team of analysts 6 months to develop.”

“Today’s best ‘analysts’—those who deliver the most true insight and perspective—are almost entirely individuals, not big brand-name firms. Many models for confederating analysts and influencers are being brought to market. I participate in two confederations of independents. The Enterprise Irregulars which is a loosely connected discussion group for many (including the author of the book) former big-firm analysts, and Focus Research which has applied a community and Q&A model to the market.”

The future of firefighting

Headmounted display (HMD) Augmented Reality (AR) technology

The Scientist

How appropriate that during tonight’s Grammys Chipoolte played this Willie Nelson’s cover of Coldplay. Sustainability. Multiple genres of musicians. So many angles covered.

Turning a plastic bottle into a bulb

saw this from Philippines courtesy of Dennis Howlett

 

and similar concept in Africa

 

Freestyle Fountain tour

I went to pick up a sandwich for my son at Firehouse Subs and the manager proudly gave me a tour of the Coke Freestyle machine they introduced a few months ago. I have blogged about it a while ago, but it was good to get a tour

- Designed by the Italian design firm Pininfarina (its signature is at the bottom panel) which is better known for working with Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo among other automakers.

- We knelt down as he demoed the innovative nozzle (Radius which develops medical drug delivery devices helped develop the PurePour Micro-dosing technology used to pump, mix and meter fluids with a high degree of accuracy of more than 100 sparkling and still flavors) and the rinsing process after each drink is poured

- While kneeling I noticed a handicapped sign – thoughtfully the machine allows someone in a wheelchair to mix their own beverage

- He was raving about the wireless card which tells Coke about the specific flavors to be refilled and the equipment service Coke provides.

Not everyone is sold…there are Coke purists who will not drink from that fountain. Plastic bottle of Coke for them or they leave. I asked him if he had tried all the flavors and he went “fizzy drinks in moderation”. Not for his customers, though!

Photo Credit

Edible Innovations

From Jell-O to Jiffy Pop, TV dinners to Tupperware (1963 party in photo), product design has radically altered the way we carry, cook, and consume food. While many food innovations fail the test of time (see a brief review of this past year’s new products and designs), some endure to become cultural icons of the most visceral kind—smells, tastes, and experiences that are part of our lives and social interactions to a degree that rivals the cultural contribution of any smartphone or electronic gadget. The following slides offer some of the innovations that have changed our food experience over the past 100 years.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek gallery

“Third major prosecution wave” on Wall Street

Time magazine (sub required) profiles Preet Bharara, the chief Federal cop in the South District of NYC, and how he is building on previous Wall Street prosecution waves credited to Rudy Giuliani and Eliot Sptizer.

What was really interesting to me in the article was the number of technology companies his targets were sharing insider information about/from (Apple, Intel, Nvidia, Flextronics).

I would also love to be a fly on the wall to see the technology behind the surveillance of VoIP, mobile and conference calls his office carries out and the fraud detection software and analytics, satellite, sensor, infiltration and other technology they have access to. For my next book!

Book Excerpt: Guest Column 19: Smart Products Consumers Can Trust

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 18 through 20 focus on how society, regulators and analysts need to also evolve in a world of the “technology elite”. Here is the guest column in Chapter 19. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

Mary J. Cronin is a Professor of Information Systems at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College. Dr. Cronin has more than 20 years’ experience in managing and advising technology-intensive organizations. During this time she has written extensively about online privacy and data security issues, including the impact of smartphone apps, RFID, smart products, and geotracking.

When I starting writing about online privacy in the 1990s, the declaration that “There is no privacy on the Internet—get over it” was still controversial. Today’s upsurge in social networking and the ubiquity of targeted online advertising and customer profiling makes the lack of online privacy abundantly obvious. However, recent developments indicate that the privacy policy pendulum may be swinging back in the direction of online consumer protection.

In December 2010 the FTC issued a report on “Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change,” which repeated the well-known reality that “many companies—both online and offline—do not adequately address consumer privacy interests.” But for the first time the report proposed “a normative framework for how companies should protect consumers’ privacy.”

In particular the FTC endorsed a browser-based “Do Not Track” mechanism that would provide a simple way for consumers to disable tracking of their online behavior across all Internet sites. Various Do Not Track bills that would give teeth to the FTC framework have been working their way through Congress and state legislatures during 2011. In anticipation of stricter privacy enforcement, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are already providing some Do Not Track features in their latest browser releases.

But a browser-based privacy solution won’t address the much larger consumer information sharing issues posed by connected devices and products that are called smart products or more generally the Internet of Things. At a time when smart connected products are generating unprecedented amounts of data about the daily lives, locations, health, and habits of consumers in their homes, in their cars, on mobile networks, and in every location that they might visit, the tracking of online browser behavior is just the tip of the iceberg.

**************

The major new privacy challenge for this decade is the continuous, automatic, and invisible tracking of individuals by multiple smart devices. In the aggregate, consumer-owned smart products collect and report data at a level of precision and frequency that vastly outstrips the consumer information collected online.

The number of smart products owned by a typical consumer is growing at a rapid pace. Home health monitoring and smart energy systems for the home are still in at early adoption stage; by the end of this decade they are likely to be as common as Internet-connected TVs and smartphones in middle-class U.S. households. Smart devices will inevitably develop more sophisticated behavioral tracking and data reporting capabilities and in the absence of privacy guidelines, vendors will use those capabilities to the fullest. Until smart product privacy gets more attention, consumers are unlikely to realize extent of tracking and highly personal data collection that is enabled by the smart products used in their daily routines.

Smart Products That Consumers Can Trust—A Business Opportunity

Rather than waiting for the government to mandate smart product policies, companies would be well served in adopting and disclosing consistent and verifiable guidelines for the permissible use, duration of storage, and data security protection measures taken to protect all of consumer information that is collected by their connected products. Smartphone, automotive, home entertainment, and other smart product vendors should also disclose the privacy practices of their ecosystem partners who develop applications and peripherals for their products.

Providing clear information to consumers about smart product data collection capabilities and offering buyers a spectrum of service and privacy options can provide new business opportunities for vendors. Leveraging the communications capabilities of smart products in ways that allow owners to talk directly to the vendors will create a new form of value and encourage even more data sharing. Many consumers would opt to accept the vendor’s stated data collection processes, in exchange for value-added services, improved customer support, and the personalization that such data collection enables. Those who opt out might do so only temporarily. Having control and choice about data sharing would make buyers more comfortable with using the smart product in a variety of ways.

J.C. Penney’s Business Model Innovation

So when Penney's newly appointed CEO, Ron Johnson, declared in mid-January that most of the original prices in his store have long been "fake" and inflated, the only surprising thing was that he had the guts to admit it. More surprising: Johnson said he was going to make changes.

Instead of facing infinite discounts and promotions--there were 590 different "sales" at Penney alone in 2011--the department store's shoppers will now see just three price categories. One will represent discounted seasonal items that change monthly. Another is clearance merchandise marked down on the first and third Fridays of each month. But the majority of goods will be offered every day at 40% or 50% less than the prices Penney used to charge. In retail parlance that's called EDLP, as in "everyday low price."

Time (sub required)

Photo Credit of Penney’s new logo to go with its “fair and square” pricing model

Remember Atari?

“The gaming pioneer -- which spearheaded arcade games and home video-game consoles -- is reinventing itself to adapt to the era of mobile and social games.

Atari has been synonymous with games and gaming since Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded it in 1972. The company's products, such as "Pong" and the Atari 2600, helped define the computer entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.

About five years ago, the company got away from developing its own games to focus on publishing and distribution.”

CNN

The WaterShed green home

The winner of the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, the U. of Maryland entry has many green features:

• Split-butterfly roof, well-suited to capture and use both sunlight and rainwater;
• Constructed wetlands that filter stormwater and greywater (household water with limited contaminants);
• Green roof to retain rainwater and promote efficient cooling;
• Photovoltaic array to harvest enough solar energy to power WaterShed year-round;
• Solar thermal array to fulfill all domestic hot water needs;
• “Edible landscapes” that support community-based agriculture;
• Patent-pending indoor, liquid desiccant waterfall for high-efficiency humidity control;
• Efficient, cost-effective, durable and time-tested structural system.

Fujitsu’s 2 inch mobile printer

The FTP-628WSL210 thermal printer features both Bluetooth and USB interfaces to support connectivity with a variety of mobile computing devices for field sales, medical, retail and industrial receipt and label printing applications.

The printer is powered by either a 3.7VDC lithium ion battery or a 120/240 VAC adapter. With 1.6A power consumption, the unit will print 6 rolls (100m) of paper on a single battery charge.

Hospitality Technology

Photo Credit Fujitsu

The Social Media Bowl: The Monday Morning Quarterback

Last week I posted on how the Super Bowl was actually more of the Social Media Bowl. A colleague described Twitter last night as the world's "biggest sports bar". 

Bluefin Labs provides an analysis of social media chatter last night such as the fact that David Beckham trumped Clint Eastwood and otherads as in photo below.

Jeremiah Owyang and his colleagues at Altimeter provide commentary on integration between the commercials with social, mobile and web brands including

• Brands Heavily Invested in Promoting Traditional Websites
• Surprisingly, Many Did Not Promote a Call-To-Action
• Only a Sixth of Ads Explicitly Promoted Social Media
• Hashtag Marketing Emerged to Stimulate Continual Engagement
• Cutting Edge Marketers Teased with New Marketing Tactics, including Shazam

Lighting Design

Nice discussion between leading designers on LEDs, day lighting, solar lighting, net-zero buildings and more courtesy of Metropolis magazine.

Photo of Pantheon from a presentation on Daylighting Basics by Benya Lighting Design

Book excerpt: Chapter 19 Society’s Changing View of Technology

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in February (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Chapters 18 through 20 focus on how society, regulators and analysts need to also evolve in a world of the “technology elite”. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

At one extreme is Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who, with his wife Joanne, encourages their kids to be comfortable with all kinds of technology. “The parents and kids publish a combined nine blogs. They bring a duffle bag on family trips just to carry all the cords, adapters, and batteries for their electronic devices.”¹

And then at the other extreme there are what USA Today calls the “Tech-Nos,” including folks like Joan Brady: “No, she doesn’t e-mail. And, really, she does not need you to call her and read the latest e-mail joke to her. She knows what she’s missing, and she’s grateful for it every day.”²

It is estimated that the number of U.S. mothers who have used midwives to deliver babies naturally has doubled over the past several decades. At least some insurance companies are starting to pay for alternative healthcare like acupuncture and chiropractic care—relatively low-tech services. (Of course, in a sign of the times, we now have laser acupuncture and expert systems to suggest precise acu-points to be needled depending on the ailment being treated.)

Then there are other customers that are cynical of technology—with good reason. Banks sold automated teller machines (ATMs) as customer self-service, and then tacked on fees for that self-service. Companies are now selling electronic invoices as “green” and progressive but then trying to tack on fees for that “privilege.” Hollywood has made money on the same content in VHS, DVD, and now BluRay formats. Customers feel that their privacy is not protected and their lives are subject to surveillance as technology increases in products. These customers are not Luddites—just wary.

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Starbucks has for some time marketed its coffee shops as the “third place,” a place where people hang out beyond their homes and offices. Part of the allure was wi-fi availability in most of its stores. Apparently, it has become the first place for some of its customers. Starting in August 2011, some busy Starbucks coffee shops in New York City have started blocking electrical outlets to discourage laptop users from hogging space and to free up seats for other customers.⁶

In 2011 in the UK, a 20-year-old XBox player died from a clot suspected to be deep vein thrombosis typically associated with lack of mobility on long plane flights. His father said he would often play for 12 hours at a time.⁷ In 2005, a South Korean player died after a marathon three-day gaming session. On its Xbox Live site, Microsoft has a lengthy “Healthy Gaming Guide,” which recommends a healthy lifestyle, taking frequent breaks, and correct body postures, among other advice.⁸

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In 2009, Wired magazine writer Evan Ratliff “vanished,” and the magazine offered a bounty of $5,000 to anyone who could find him. The magazine posted clues as to his whereabouts, and it was fascinating to watch:

What had started as an exercise in escape quickly became a cross between a massively multiplayer online game and a reality show. A staggeringly large community arose spontaneously, splintered into organized groups, and set to work turning over every rock in Ratliff’s life.¹²

What was scary about the whole exercise was how many digital fingerprints Ratliff was leaving even as he was trying to stay underground. Even scarier was how even amateur sleuths were ingenious enough to trace him.

In comparison, there are professional sleuths like the start-up Social Intelligence, which generates reports on job applicants or monitors existing employees. It does so based on employer predefined criteria, both positive and negative. “Negative examples include racist remarks or activities, sexually explicit photos or videos, and illegal activity such as drug use. Positive examples include charitable or volunteer efforts, participation in industry blogs, and external recognition.”¹³ They search social networks, blog entries, videos, photos, comments, and other forms of user-generated content available publicly on the Internet.

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Given the gap between the technology avalanche and society’s ability to absorb it, we will need a new generation of therapists, new career counselors and new professors to teach ethics to technicians. We will need more people like Kelly Chessen, who is a former suicide hotline counselor and now DriveSavers’ official “data crisis counselor.”

Part psychiatrist and part tech enthusiast, Chessen’s role is to try to calm people down when they lose their digital possessions to failed data drives. Chessen

The auto industry is back!

I was telling my wife that the last few years have been wonderful for auto consumers – the maturation of Korean automakers, Toyota’s safety issues, GM and Chrsyler’s financial woes have in many ways been good for consumer leverage.

If you consider the Consumer Electronics Show and the Super Bowl as bellwethers, the auto industry was prominent. At the 2011 CES, GM and Ford were very visible. This year, Mercedes had a keynote. At the 2011 SuperBowl, Chrysler launched its powerful “imported from Detroit” campaign and VW had the much loved Darth Vader ad.

Today, Toyota will run the commercial below. They are ready to reinvent just about everything in life. Yes, the industry is back!

The physics of the “Gronk Spike”

We may see it tonight!

“Picture, he said, the human arm as a lever; the longer the arm, the faster the rotation at the end, i.e. the hand; the faster the rotation, the greater the force. Gronkowski’s sculpted arms extend four inches longer than the arms of an average man. As Gronkowski moves to spike the ball, his arm travels “along a 130-degree arc with an angular velocity of 1,900 degrees per second.” This, Thaler said, is faster than a professional golf swing and comparable to a pitcher throwing a 90-mile-an-hour fastball.

The ball leaves Gronkowski’s hand at 60 miles an hour, about two feet from the ground, and the ensuing collision with the turf quickly changes the football’s momentum. The force, then, or the rate of change of momentum, Thaler concluded, was about 650 pounds.”

NY Times

Book Cover

Do judge this book by its cover:)

The printing process has commenced. Early copies expected March 12.

A book on innovation should be colorful and cheerful. Download the PDF attached below if you don't have a magnifying glass to read the flap text or the back cover executive endorsements.

Download Cover February 3 2012

Book Excerpt: Case study 18 - 3M

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in March (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . Each also has a case study. Here is the excerpts from the 3M case study, for Chapter 18 which focused on how regulators have to deal with ever more technologically complex organizations they watch over. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

3M, a company founded in 1902, is a remarkably diversified entity. David Meline, its CFO , broke out the $ 27 billion in 2010 revenues at an investor conference in June 2011. They were distributed across industry sectors: 32 percent from Industrial and Transportation sectors, 17 percent from Healthcare, 14 percent from Consumer and Office, 14 percent from Displays and Graphics, 12 percent from Safety, Security and Protection Services, and 11 percent from Electronics and Communications.

Geographically, it got 35 percent of revenues from the United States, 23 percent from Europe, 31 percent from Asia Pacific, and 11 percent from Latin America. .

As Meline got to slide 14, he presented a table similar to one we studied in Chemistry class. But instead of H for hydrogen and Au for Gold it showed 46 3M “technology platforms”—Bi for Biotechnology, Op for Optical Communications, and so on

3M innovates by finding “uncommon connections” of these platforms to create unique solutions for customers across all six of their focus industry sectors shown above.

From slide 15 on, he was back presenting financial numbers.

That one slide though, drove home 3M’s amazing technology diversity. 3M is fundamentally a science-based company. With more than 55,000 products, 3M continues to demonstrate an uncanny ability to combine highly innovative technologies in new and unexpected ways.

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How does a company so diverse communicate with its customers and market watchers? One creative way has been to present its “Periodic Table” on its website, allowing viewers to drill into each platform.

Table 18.1 extracts 10 of those platforms, and you can see the breadth of markets it supplies technology products and components. This shows less than a quarter of its platforms.

Photo Credit: 3M

The Social Media Bowl

Super Bowl is about parties with friends, Been there, done that, year after year, till last year. Last year, in recovery, I stayed home and watched it with a laptop and a smartphone. It was an eye-opener – I was amazed at the number of tweets about commercials that evening and the commercials which pointed to Facebook pages and Android apps, not to their websites and other integration between traditional and social media. This year promises to surpass that. Here are 5 of many more links on what’s in store.

Google Playbook

Social Media blitzes the Super Bowl

USA Today Facebook Ad Meter

Road to the #Superbowl

Social Media Command Center

So, on Sunday I plan to repeat what I did last year. The only question is does not going to a party that evening qualify as social or anti-social?

Insight-as-a-Service

Evangelos Simoudis, a VC at Trident Capital blogs

“Insight as a Service refers to action-oriented, analytic-driven solutions that operate on data generated by SaaS applications, proprietary corporate data, as well as syndicated and open source data and are delivered over the cloud.”

“Since I wrote that initial article on Insight as a Service, several companies such as Acteea, 9Lenses, JBara and Totango, as well as a few that are still in stealth have developed such solutions, while companies like Host Analytics, 8thbridgeand Dachis Group have created Insight as a Service offerings to complement their existing SaaS solutions.”

“The Hacker Way”

One of the most interesting things in the Facebook S-1 filing with the SEC is this section which describes the unique development culture Mark Zuckerberg can take credit for:

"As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.”

Photo: from Facebook S-1 filing summarizing its vital stats

Flying Men over Manhattan

seen the men buzzing Manhattan? They are a stunt put together by the viral marketing firm Thinkmodo for the movie Chronicle which comes out tomorrow. 

But guess what - you can get your own....

 

Photo Credit

The Crunchies awards

I watched some of last night's TechCrunch sponsored annual celebration in San Francisco of startups and VCs. Plenty of innovative companies from Dropbox to Nest to LinkedIn profiled previously on this blog were honored.

You can watch the whole event here

 

Talk about rapid implementation

30 storey hotel built in 15 days. And made from green materials and designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake. Don’t you wish ERP projects moved at even a fraction of that speed?

Five Health Gadgets to help with that resolution

It’s January 31 – if you are ready to give up that weight loss New Year’s resolution, here are 5 gadgets to help including the Withings wi-fi scale. Check out the Time gallery for Striiv, Fitbit and others.