New Florence. New Renaissance.

iPad in the classroom

My friend Tom Raftery, the “Greenmonk” who blogs on Sustainability, happened to mention his wife, Pilar Carnicero Marquez has been using her iPad in the classes she teaches in Spain. I invited her to describe her experience and I was impressed with the school’s innovative roots and how Pilar continues that tradition. Here is her guest column: 

“My school is called "Colegio Aljarafe" It is in Mairena del Aljarafe, a town 7-8 km from Seville. The school was founded in 1971, just a few years before the death of Franco and the transition to democracy in Spain. It was founded by a group of teachers and parents that wanted a school different  to the schools of the time: a non-denominational school, open to all races and cultures, a school to educate the students to participate, act freely, be close to nature and cooperate in their daily work.

There are around 1200 students in the school from 3 to 17 years old.

I teach different courses: Science to 12 and 14 years old (1º and 3º ESO) and Biology to 16 years old (1º Bachillerato). I use the iPad in many ways:

• I project presentations on different topics  using Keynote. You can find some of them in my blog,
• I show them videos from Youtube on different science topics
• I record my students´daily progress using the application Numbers. The use of the iPad has made much easier for me to record the students´work, specially with the younger kids who need daily supervision. Before I had the iPad I  recorded their work in two different ways: the results of examinations and project work corrected by me at home in the laptop, and the marks for the daily homework in paper. Every term I had to pass all the information recorded in paper to the computer in order to calculate their final grades. It was impossible for me to walk around the classroom carrying my laptop (even the light Macbook Air) and entering marks for each student. With the iPad this has changed, it is light, much easier to carry around and it´s easy to work on the screen.
• I have also used the iPad with them outside of the classroom, to show them different constellations and the position of planets during astronomy class using pUniverse. All the classrooms in our school are open to outdoors, there is no indoor corridor, so that they can see the trees and the sky from any place in the school. So, just stepping out of the classroom in autumn and winter mornings (we start at 8:15 am), I have been able to show them how to use the traditional planisphere (the analog star charting device) combined with applications like pUniverse or Star Walk in the iPad and the compass from my iPhone.
• We have also used it to record videos and take pictures in the school events, like the soccer league before Christmas. I also plan to use it to record video films made by my students in a collaboration and exchange project that we have with an Austrian school.

The kids love it. They all find it interesting, some of them downloaded at home applications that they have used with me in class like pUniverse. Occasionally, I let them use it  in class, to find information or to look for science news, etc, and even the most troublesome kids focus when the iPad in his/her hand. I am only sorry that there is not an iPad for every child in the classroom! There would be no need to carry heavy books and copybooks any more!.”

Photo Credit: Christina Abril

Book Excerpt: Case Study 17 Google’s Green Initiatives

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 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Each also has a case study. Here is the excerpts from the Google case study, for Chapter 17 which focused on being Sustainable. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

“Jim Miller has an impressive resume. His career includes stints at:

Intel, at the birth of the Pentium; Amazon.com, in the early stages of e-commerce; Cisco, when broadband exploded; First Solar, as part of the green/solar resurgence; and now Google, where as Vice President for Worldwide Operations he is in the engine room for the emergence of cloud computing.²²

Most of his employers prior to Google had hardware/logistics elements. So as he was being recruited by Google, he wondered how different it would be to work for a software company for a change. Even after months of due diligence on both sides, “My job offer letter had so few details about the operations I would be running, that I had to take a leap of faith in joining Google,” says Miller. That is no surprise, since Google is extremely secretive about its global operations.

Of course, this “software” company has lots of physical assets in its data centers, self-driving cars, and leased satellites that Miller is admirably qualified to optimize. And they are at a scale that challenges even a rocket scientist like Miller. “

“So, Google buys electricity directly from a renewable project developer in the form of a power purchase agreement, or PPA. Their first PPA was with NextEra Energy Resources. Google agreed to buy 114 MW of wind power for 20 years from a project in Ames, Iowa, directed to a data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. In Oklahoma, they added just over 100 MW of wind power for the data center in Mayes County. Since then, Google has announced another commitment of $38.8 million with NextEra in North Dakota.

This is where the energy reselling is involved. Google sells the power acquired under the PPAs back to the grid at the local, wholesale price. Today, because generic “grid” power is cheaper than renewable power, this may result in a slight net loss for Google, but longer-term, Google is betting the economics will reverse. In the process of selling, Google strips the renewable energy credits (RECs) to apply in the next step.”

“Google has been investing in various start-ups to gain access to other forms of renewable energy. BrightSource and eSolar focus on concentrated solar energy and use swiveling mirrors to reflect sunlight to heat towers of water. The resulting steam is used to generate electricity.

The investments in AltaRock Energy and Potter Drilling were to get access to enhanced geothermal energy. The principle is to drill deep enough to get to the hot core of the earth, then pump water into it and use the resulting steam to create energy. Think of them as manmade geysers.

Google also invested in a company called Makani Power which is leveraging high-altitude wind. One of their concepts is to fly kites with propellers. As the propellers spin they act like turbines, and the power is circled down a cable back to the ground.”

“In 2010, Google took over a former paper mill in Hamina, Finland, and retrofitted it into a data center. It continues to use a seawater tunnel that was built for the paper mill in the 1950s. The seawater passes through four different straining systems. This reduces corrosion from the salt and other minerals in the seawater before it reaches the heat exchanger and is used to cool the data center. On the way out, water then moves to a tempering building, where it mixes with a separate source of the seawater, so it is cooled before returning to the Gulf of Finland. The goal is to “return to a temperature that is much more similar to the inlet temperature, so as to minimize environmental impact in this area.”²⁷

Google’s experience at Hamina and with every new data center it opens around the world adds to a sizable bag of tricks from a decade of running data centers. It increasingly shares with the world some of the best practices it has accumulated. “

“Google has also built the largest corporate installation of solar panels at headquarters campus in Mountain View, CA. Over 9,000 solar panels means that the “installed capacity of this solar grid is 1.6MW. . . . In one day the system generated 9,468 kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is enough electricity to power 83,000 hours of flat-screen TV viewing each day.”³⁰ Google was an early adopter of Bloom Energy’s boxes on its campus, “Over the first 18 months the project has had 98 percent availability and delivered 3.8 million kWh of electricity.”³¹

Photo Credit: Google

The most beautiful college libraries

Thanks to John Hagel, I saw this gorgeous Flavorwire gallery of college libraries, from the historic like The Long Room at Trinity College in Dublin Ireland, to a modern one at Free University in Berlin, Germany. Well worth a peruse. Frankly, well worth visits.

PS - even more interesting are the passionate reader comments

The Logitech Cube Mouse

Gone are contoured molding and mechanical buttons, replaced in the Cube with a rectangular design and touch-sensitivity. The touch panel acts as the main mousing interface, enabled by what Logitech calls its Flow Scroll software.

Lift the mouse off your work surface and the Cube becomes a presentation device. Logitech doesn't mention a laser pointer in the Cube (perhaps in the Cube 2?), but it will at least let you click to advance through a slide deck.

CNET

Technology and the State of the Union speech

i watched the President’s speech last night on the web enhanced mode (Youtube version below) with graphs, factoids on the right.

It was good to see the camera pan in on various people in the audience who represent different aspects of the tech spectrum – Mark Kelly, NASA Astronaut, Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, Laurene Powell Jobs, Jackie Bray and Bryan Ritterby described in the excerpts below.

There was plenty of technology in the speech including the following (full transcript here)

“Jackie Bray is a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic. Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College. The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. It paid Jackie's tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant.

I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did. Join me in a national commitment to train two million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job. My Administration has already lined up more companies that want to help. Model partnerships between businesses like Siemens and community colleges in places like Charlotte, Orlando, and Louisville are up and running. Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers - places that teach people skills that local businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.”

“Let's also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren't yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.”

“Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don't gut these investments in our budget. Don't let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.”

“ In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world's leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

When Bryan Ritterby was laid off from his job making furniture, he said he worried that at 55, no one would give him a second chance. But he found work at Energetx, a wind turbine manufacturer in Michigan. Before the recession, the factory only made luxury yachts. Today, it's hiring workers like Bryan, who said, "I'm proud to be working in the industry of the future."”

The Perception Analyzer

You have likely seen it on CNN or other networks to measure reactions of focus groups to political candidates and their commercials. What’s interesting is the evolution of the device since 1984 here courtesy of Dialsmith

Bill Gates' Annual Letter

His widely anticipated Foundation annual letter focuses quite a bit this year on innovation in agriculture

"Despite the rich world’s distance from farming, food-related issues are important for all of us. In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was in high school, people worried that we simply couldn’t grow enough food to feed everyone in the world. A popular book that came out in 1968, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, began with the statement: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…” Fortunately, due in large part to the Green Revolution, this dire prediction was wrong.

But the world’s success in warding off famine led to complacency. Over time, governments in both developed and developing countries focused less on agriculture. Agricultural aid fell from 17 percent of all aid from rich countries in 1987 to just 4 percent in 2006. In the past 10 years, the demand for food has gone up because of population growth and economic development—as people get richer, they tend to eat more meat, which indirectly raises demand for grain. Supply growth has not kept up, leading to higher prices. Meanwhile, the threat of climate change is becoming clearer. Preliminary studies show that the rise in global temperature alone could reduce the productivity of the main crops by over 25 percent. Climate change will also increase the number of droughts and floods that can wipe out an entire season of crops. More and more people are raising familiar alarms about whether the world will be able to support itself in the future, as the population heads toward a projected 9.3 billion by 2050."

 

Goodbye Kodak, Hello FujiFilm

A guest column from my fellow blogger Michael Krigman, who also happens to be a great photographer as you can see from his gallery here and in this post.

After 131 years great American photographic icon, Eastman Kodak, filed for bankruptcy. Some might say that Kodak never made a successful transition from traditional film to digital cameras, but that’s not exactly correct, because American inventor, Steven Sasson, created the first digital camera for Kodak. I think the Economist put it more accurately, explaining that Kodak had become a “complacent monopolist,” enjoying its profitable film franchise and not keeping up with changing market trends. While Kodak invested in marketing, Japanese competitor FujiFilm created even better films, diversified through acquisition, and changed its business model to attack digital photography directly and with strength.

As Kodak struggles for survival, FujiFilm is enjoying a renaissance period of innovation. For Nikon and Canon, FujiFilm’s innovation with sensors, the heart of any digital camera, poses a genuine threat. Only the future will reveal whether FujiFilm can make serious inroads against established competitors, but there is no question the company will push Nikon, Canon, and every other digital camera manufacturer to make fiercely better products. As a photographer myself, I think it’s great.

In 2011, FujiFilm released the X100, a small, lightweight camera with outstanding image quality. Despite usability quirks and missing features, the camera became an instant and viral hit among photographers.

For those accustomed digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras from Nikon and Canon, the X100 is a breath of fresh air – it just feels natural to use. One photographer called the X100, “the greatest digital camera ever made and may just be the greatest camera I have ever owned.” Another said, “The images I get from my Fuji X100 are nothing short of amazing.”

I purchased an X100 and absolutely loved it until last week, when I unceremoniously dumped this small camera wonder. Why, you ask, did I get rid of the beloved small camera? Because FujiFilm just announced a better replacement, called the X-Pro-1. This new machine promises even better image quality than its predecessor, while retaining small size and adding the flexibility of interchangeable and high quality lenses. It’s a winner and I’m in line to buy one immediately on release.

As Kodak fades, FujiFilm embodies a new generation of photographic technology driven by genuine innovation rather than strict adherence to marketing formulas. A powerful lesson is hidden in this story.

The scourge of social spam

Fighting social spam requires manpower because spammers move quickly. At Facebook, the company's site-integrity team spends its days and nights scanning for spikes in what users report as spam, and other unusual activity, such as friend request rejections. Every day, Facebook says it blocks 200 million malicious actions, such as messages linking to malware.

About once a quarter, Facebook gets hit with a big attack—and it's all hands on deck until the spam is destroyed, say employees. Weeks like that turn into "a very intense battle," says Mr. Stein. A poster on his team's wall features a unicorn slaying a spam monster.

Wall Street Journal

Giant Solar Flares

From NOAA

The radiation storm that began early this morning has continued to rise very slowly throughout the day but has remained at the S3 (Strong) level.  It should be at or near its peak and is expected to begin to decrease soon.  We are still awaiting the arrival of the Coronal Mass Ejection which is still expected at about 9am EST (1400 GMT) on Tuesday.  The SWPC forecast is for Moderate (G2) level geomagnetic storming with G3 levels possible.  An animation from the WSA-Enlil model showing the Coronal Mass Ejection and its trip from the Sun to the Earth is shown below.

Book Excerpt: Sustainable: Mining the Green Gold

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 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Here are excerpts from Chapter 17 which focuses on being Sustainable. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

Tony Prophet of HP, whom we met in Chapter 2, says it is a source of personal pride for him that the HP supply chain is sustainable. The comment is noteworthy given the dimensions of the HP supply chain are already extremely complex. It goes way beyond tackling carbon and other emissions from its products to those in its supplier operations and product packaging. HP’s numbers are impressive—1.4 billion KWH of electricity customers saved from 2008 through 2010 using high-volume HP desktop and notebook PC families; recycled over a billion ink cartridges using HP’s “closed-loop” process, which uses plastic from returned cartridges to make new ones; over 2 billion pounds of other electronic parts recycled since 1987.⁴

Prophet also talks about fair labor practices around the world and sourcing of “conflict minerals.” He says that at a time when demanding analysts like “The Greenmonk” expand the definition of “sustainable” for the high-tech industry.

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Tom Raftery has been pushing for sustainability for a long time. An Irishman who lives in Spain, Raftery bleeds green. After a stint at the Cork Internet Exchange, a “hyperefficient data center,” he is now an analyst at Redmonk and looks for environmental improvements across many industries, but particularly in technology. Typical of his comments is this one:

Facebook has a very efficient data center in Prineville, Oregon [as we discussed in Chapter 8]. Its PUE is 1.07, which is near the theoretical maximum (of 1.0), but it is powered by Pacific Corp, 63 percent of whose electricity is generated by burning coal—very definitely not Green. Same with Microsoft’s Dublin, Ireland, data center—again a very respectable PUE of 1.2, but run on the Irish electricity grid, 87.5 percent of which comes from fossil fuels—again, not Green.

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There is a reason why Raftery calls his iPhone choice “a funny one.” In many sustainability forums, Apple is the devil personified. It does not help that the company rejected in 2010 a resolution that would require it to publish a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) report centered on its greenhouse gas emissions, toxic waste, and recycling. Apple’s “Board of Directors recommended shareholders vote against the resolution because they believe Apple has addressed sustainability reporting and that a formal report would add little value and involve unnecessary time and expense.”⁵

Jeff Swartz, CEO of Timberland, the shoe company, has commented on his blog,

CEOs of publicly traded companies in the fashion industry don’t get the “pass” that comes to the supercool Apple leaders and their ubercool company. Meaning, my shareholders and my consumers insist that we create profit, quarter by quarter, and that we do it . . . in a sustainable fashion, both in terms of environmental practice and in terms of transparency and safe working conditions in the supply chain. Why does a bootmaker get held to a higher standard than an iPad maker?

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Hollywood introduced us to the moral issues in Blood Diamond, a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. That movie was set in Sierra Leone, but the action has since moved east in Africa, particularly to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, around a number of minerals we need in our high-tech devices.

The bland industry term for that is “conflict minerals,” but as the Huffington Post reported:

It’s a war which most people know nothing about, despite the fact that we’re all directly connected to it. Armed groups are fighting over the lucrative minerals that power our cell phones and laptops, leaving a trail of human destruction that has no equal globally since World War II.¹³

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The Mountain Pass Mine in the Mojave Desert in California has plentiful deposits of bastanite, from which several rare earths are extracted. Mining operations ceased at Mountain Pass in 2002 amid environmental concerns, although processing of previously mined ore continued at the site. Mining has since restarted to the consternation of environmentalists. The dilemma is minerals critical for newer cleantech versus environmental risks for which the mine was closed in the first place. And are we replacing one dwindling resource, fossil fuels, with another, rare earths? Is that really sustainability?

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An area where some tech companies have shown sustainability creativity is product packaging.

Dell claims that it slashed over 18 million pounds of packaging from 2008 to 2010 by focusing on a “three C’s” packaging strategy: cube, content, and curbside recyclability.¹⁸ The cube involves the reduction of size so that packaging is more efficient, from the size of the boxes that hold a product’s components to the number of items that can be moved per shipping pallet. Dell has also boosted the percentage of recycled products that goes into its packaging content. The company increased its usage of recycled foam, and has used more recycled plastic as well. An estimated 9.5 million half-gallon milk jugs went into Dell’s packaging—enough to stretch about 1,500 miles. Bamboo, a fast-growing, sustainable plant material, has also made its way into Dell’s packing materials. The third is focus on materials customers can easily recycle in their neighborhood garbage collections.

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Jeremiah Stone, in the SAP Labs division of the software company, provides a perspective on how the definition of sustainability has evolved in just the last couple of years.

In Stone’s words:

When we launched our program in late 2008, SAP’s starting position was a strong solution set in environment, health, and safety management with its long-time partner, Technidata. Otherwise, it was a blank sheet as far as our sustainability portfolio was concerned.

First, we predicted a strong shift from sustainability reporting to performance management solutions, particularly around greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and reduction in energy consumption. Second, we expected that this increased focus on GHG emissions and corresponding energy costs would drive significant investment in carbon footprint and energy management solutions. Finally, we expected to see an accelerated demand for solutions addressing Design for Environment (DFE), and sourcing driven by stricter procurement policies.

Two major factors have delayed market maturation following our initial investment. The first was the “great recession” of 2009, and second was the failure of COP-15 (the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Convention) to deliver a global carbon reduction framework. These two factors have led to a slowed proliferation of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSO) with significant budgets for IT purchases or projects, and a cautious carbon legislation climate particularly in the United States and Australia.

In contrast, the BP Macondo well blowout, several mining disasters, and multiple food contamination scares from China to Germany have increased short-term awareness of operational risk and product compliance and stewardship. Further, the continued growth of the global consumer, or “middle” class continues its march unimpeded, driving demand for commodities ranging from rare earth minerals required for production of high tech gadgets to increased energy required to feed these gadgets and increasing proliferation of modern housing and facilities.

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Ray Lane, lead cleantech partner at Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm, provides his perspective on the changing definition:

You can see the evolution in the decade Kleiner Perkins has been investing in cleantech. We started out with biofuels, solar and wind. We next invested in conversion tech, coal to gas, thermal electrics, and waste heat to energy. Now we’re investing in storage, fuel cells, etc., and in water. Two years ago we hadn’t done anything in water, and now we’ve done three investments in clean water. We are also focused on agriculture from productivity of seeds to producing sugars.

Accelerating Data Speeds in Data Centers

Inside the huge data centers operated by Internet companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, information is processed at blistering speed, but it still has to be moved between different machines through relatively slow wiring.

In theory, this bottleneck could be avoided by adding wired links between racks, but that would be very expensive and, short of a complete architectural redesign, not particularly practical. Transmitting data wirelessly would be simpler, but achieving the required speed would normally require a line-of-sight connection, which is impossible in a packed data center.

Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Intel's labs in Oregon have come up with a clever solution: bouncing wireless signals off the ceiling, which they say could boost data transmission speeds by 30 percent.

MIT Technology Review

Yahoo's Political Predictions

Data scientists at Yahoo are using prediction markets—along with polls, sentiment analysis on Twitter, and trends in search queries—to create the mother of all political prediction engines. The project involves Web-based prediction markets like Intrade, in which large numbers of people bet on the outcomes of elections.

The researchers behind this effort, David Rothschild, an economist at Yahoo Research, and Dave Pennock, a computer scientist at Yahoo Research, call their effort the Signal. They plan to produce data visualizations that best convey probability to a lay audience, and to publish work on machine learning and fundamental economic models based on the effort.

MIT Technology Review

Graph Credit: The Signal

Apple reinvents the textbook

“In a special press conference in New York on Tuesday, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller announced the free iBooks 2 app, an attempt to unify online databases and the printed word into a single educational tool.

With rich, engaging content and powerful annotation capabilities, digital textbooks will help American students better compete with peers abroad, Schiller said.

Though many teachers have embraced the company’s iPad and thousands of education apps available for it, adoption has been limited in scope, Schiller said. A formal platform to obtain this kind of content will accelerate adoption.”

ZDNet

Photo Credit Gizmag

Burger King tries home delivery

Lots of science and technology in this innovation (though many nutritionists would disagree) Burger King is trying out – on-line ordering, packaging, GPS for delivery etc.

a test report from The Washington Post

“I opened the burger container but only saw the lower half — the patty topped with pickles, onions and ketchup. The other half, with the bread top and lettuce and mayo, was hidden behind a trap door. The reason should be obvious to even amateur burger eaters: putting the whole sandwich together for even a five-minute drive would result in a soggy mess.

Nice move, Burger King.

I thought the fries would be lukewarm, but they were hot and crispy. The chicken for the salad was packaged separately in a thermal wrapper — another nice touch. The soda was bottled, which was fine with me, even though I usually prefer fountain drinks.”

Rejoice, Aviation Fans

Great to see ANA’s charter long-haul 787 flight non-stop from Tokyo to Frankfurt. The 787, a case study in my next book, is a significant leap forward in passenger comfort, fuel efficiency, and other aviation functionality.

And good to see FlightAware has been evolving to provide many more non-US flights, cancelation data around major storms, mobile versions.

 

The OnLive Desktop: MS Office on iPads

OnLive, better known for bringing games to our TVs and iPads, is moving into personal productivity. OnLive investors include Warner Bros., Autodesk, Maverick Capital, AT&T, British Telecommunications (BT), The Belgacom Group, HTC and Juniper Networks.

ZDNet on the new service:

“What makes this service and iPad app so unique is that it allows you to run Windows and Microsoft Office, even if you don’t own either one. The free service gives you full access to the Office apps, and up to 2 GB of free document storage. Paid service with greater storage capacity is in the works for those who need more space.

Using Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in OnLive Desktop is just like using them in Windows, because that’s what you are doing. The iPad 2 is just the window into the OnLive system.”

Photo Credit: OnLive

Turning wood into sugar

Renmatix (which recently raised another round from BASF and Kleiner Perkins) has a unique method for converting non-food biomass, such as wood chips, municipal waste, or grasses, into fuels or chemicals. Methods tried by other companies, including using specialty enzymes and heat-driven chemical processes, have by and large failed to scale up. The result is that nearly all biofuel, such as ethanol, is made from corn or sugar cane.

Like others, Renmatix first creates sugar water, which is then fermented in standard equipment to make ethanol or other chemicals. Its process first dissolves wood chips in water and then exposes that slurry to high temperature and pressure. That breaks off some of sugars found in the hemicellulose of the plant. A second step at higher pressure and temperature then converts the rest of the cellulose into sugars.

CNET

 

 

Book Excerpt: Warren Buffett and Technology

Time magazine has a nice profile this week on Warren Buffett:

Genes, luck and birthplace may have helped make Buffett the world's third richest man. But in the past year, his good fortune has also turned him into one of America's most unexpected radicals.

Buffett has had an aw-shucks attitude towards technology – or it would seem. Excerpts from my book:

“Can any industry hide from technology-driven disruption? Some would argue the legendary investor Warren Buffett has done well by staying
away from investing in tech companies (or those susceptible to technology-driven turmoil). In his words, “In business, I look for economic
castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats.”

Buffett prefers to stick with investments in companies like Coca- Cola because, as he says, it is “very easy for me to come to a conclusion
as to what it will look like economically in five or 10 years, and it’s not easy for me to come to a conclusion about Apple (or other tech company).” And he says that in spite of his friendship and board counsel from Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

Look at Coca-Cola, though, as it rolls out its Freestyle vending machines. “The dispensers each contain 30 cartridges of flavorings that mix up 100 different drink combinations. The cartridges are tagged with
radio frequency ID chips, and each dispenser contains an RFID reader.”7

Or Burlington Northern Santa Fe, another of Buffett’s investments, which has used technology to lead the rail road industry, including “[a warning system that] uses satellites to detect speed-limit violations,
improperly aligned switches, and missed signals. If a conductor doesn’t respond appropriately, the system is supposed to stop the train automatically.”

Another example is Procter & Gamble, which is pioneering new forms of social media marketing. It is also extending its Tide franchise into the fragmented dry-cleaning business with stores that use email promotions, provide 24x7 secure locker access, “greener” cleaning options, and other technology innovations. The accomplishments of its CIO, Filippo Passerini, are described further in Chapter 10.

Next there is GEICO, one of Buffett’s earliest and most lucrative investments. GEICO disrupted traditional car insurance by selling via mail rather than agents. Today, it is a technology marvel with elaborate call centers; many of its customers manage their GEICO interactions mostly by web or mobile device and its claim adjusters are equipped with Toshiba Toughbooks and digital cameras. In a likely Buffett-inspired knock on our technology-obsessed lives, GEICO is not, however, afraid to run commercials that show people doing dumb things with their smartphones!”

Photo Credit: Time

The Virtual Sky

The main focus in developing the virtual sky was to simulate natural lighting conditions on a cloudy day. To achieve this goal, the researchers carefully examined natural light to find out how – and how quickly – the light spectrum changes when clouds move across the sky. “The LEDs allow us to simulate these dynamic changes in lighting in a way that is not directly obvious to the naked eye. Otherwise the lighting might distract people from their work. But it does need to fluctuate enough to promote concentration and heighten alertness,” says Bues. The results of a preliminary study indicate that users find this dynamic lighting to be extremely pleasant.

Physorg

SpaceX and spacecraft reusability

Very nice interview with Elon Musk in New Scientist (sub required)

The urgency in Musk's voice makes it clear that reusability is what truly motivates him where SpaceX is concerned: "That we don't really have it with space travel has been a choice and I think a tragic one," he says, his voice tinged with regret. "It's meant we've not gone beyond Earth's orbit in a generation. I want to change that. Rapid reusability is what will take us to Mars."

 

Next-Gen Cruise Life Boats

In light of the Costa Concordia disaster, expect more of a review of life boats on large cruise shops. Fortunately, newer ships like the RCCL Oasis of the Seas (see previous blogs here and here already have.)

“The (Schat-Harding) CRV55 boat is 16.7 m long and 5.6 m wide. Built from fibreglass reinforced polyester using a vacuum technique, the boat weighs 16 tons in its stowed condition and 44 tons when fully loaded. Two 70 HP diesel engines give the boat a speed of 6 knots, and the catamaran hull and twin rudders provide excellent manoeuvrability.”

‘These revolutionary boats and davits have been specially designed for the RCCL Genesis project ships …to improve the safe evacuation of the 8,000 plus passengers and crew who will be sailing on these ships. These new boats will be safer and quicker to board for large numbers of people. They will also be easier to get away from the ship, because the davit does not have to move, and they will be safer once in the sea as they have twin engines and full built-in buoyancy.’

Maritime Journal

The future of war

CNN slide show of far-out defense tech including the DARPA Vulture program is working to enable an "airborne payload" to remain in the sky for more than five years at a time, performing intelligence, surveillance and communication missions.

Electronic Olfaction

Fascinating read in American Scientist (sub required)

“Detecting and classifying odors can be extremely useful. When it comes to food, odors can signal freshness, fermentation levels, even the authenticity of products. Odors help with pollution monitoring, the detection of land mines and other explosives, even the medical diagnostics of breath samples. But it’s not always feasible to use trained human sniffers to get these jobs done. David R. Walt, Shannon E. Stitzel and Matthew J. Aernecke describe the technology behind electronic noses and what they are capable of.”

Photo: Working by scent alone, a hunting dog is able to track the path of a stuffed pheasant. The animals were in darkness until the dog found the pheasant. The path of the dog (red) and the pheasant (yellow) are shown in this time-lapse photograph. It’s not an easy task to quantify a scent or measure it in a visible manner, but researchers have been making great strides with artificial-nose systems that they hope will accomplish these goals. They have taken inspiration from the adaptability of mammalian olfaction, including the canine system, in developing odor-sensing devices that can identify scents based on the unique pattern of responses they generate in an array of sensors.

First set of book reviews

Books go through waves of reviews – executives, media, US readers, international readers. You appreciate them all because people take the time from their busy schedules to read, then provide feedback. Over the last couple of weeks I have received the first set of reviews for the upcoming book – comments from executives and influencers I respect. Most read a late draft of the book over the holidays so I am particularly thankful.

Here are some

Michael McNamara, CEO, Flextronics

“Technology enabled innovation is the future, but make no mistake, that future is here today.  Mirchandani uses technology athletes to inspire us in that even the things we may think are impossible, are in fact either a current or near future reality.”

Phiroz Darukhanavala (Daru),  VP and CTO, BP plc

“This book will inspire and energize you. Countering the prophets of doom who proclaim the “death of IT”, Mirchandani vividly illustrates through dozens of case studies that IT and related digital technologies are thriving in organizations big and small, public as well as private, changing the very nature of business products and processes. To the CIOs of organizations currently focused on spending millions of dollars on supporting traditional IT, this book is an urgent wake-up call that the emerging CIO role is to lead their organizations boldly into this digital world…… or else risk getting swept away by the relentless tide of new technology.”

Francisco D’Souza, President & CEO, Cognizant Technology Solutions

“In The New Technology Elite, Mirchandani reveals the secret sauce that separates corporate leaders from laggards, market winners from also rans in the unforgiving global economy.  He neatly deconstructs the creative spark, innovative thinking and excellence of execution that successful companies must continuously master to translate smartly conceived and efficiently delivered technology solutions into market outperformance and sustainable competitive advantage.  Doing so, reminds us that while technology innovation may start with tightly orchestrated ideation in the dark recesses of the virtual back office,
success is often determined by the industrial scale that is unleashed to create products and services that deliver vibrant and intuitive user experiences, as well as rich and utilitarian capabilities, that anticipate customer needs, today and tomorrow, and measure up to, if not exceed, rising consumer and business expectations.”

Peter Fingar, Business Strategy Advisor and author: Business
Innovation in the Cloud and Enterprise Cloud Computing.
(www.peterfingar.com)

“Mirchandani has done it again. After opening our eyes to compound technology innovations in his last book, The New Polymath, he now instructs us to become technology prosumers (producers and consumers), no matter what our business or industry. Traditionally technology consumers for back-office automation, smart companies are now learning to embed smart technology in their products and become technology producers that delight their tech-savvy customers. Carpe Diem, or
become a footnote in business history. Mirchandani tells us why and how."

Chris J. Murphy, Editor, InformationWeek

“This book isn't for those who want to stick to "IT as usual." Mirchandani uses real-world examples to catalog the wide range of forces driving IT leadership to adapt or fail in the digital economy.”

Timothy Christen, CEO,  Baker Tilly

“Today, every company must ‘rethink everything’ from their core processes to their fundamental business models. In his new book, Mirchandani shows countless examples of how new technologies have removed historic barriers thus allowing companies to rethink everything. Mirchandani’s book is a must-read for business leaders who want to inspire and re-dedicate their workforce. More importantly, it will serve as a guide to the new ways with which collaboration, innovation, technology and more will fundamentally, permanently and perpetually change the businesses of today. If your firm has the will to change, this book has the guidance.”

Click first, focus later

With Lytro’s Lightfield technology

Somebody left the gate open!

Factoids about the spectacular Citi rock climbing commercial – Watch below first, then watch the spoofs it has inspired courtesy of CNN's Jeanne Moos.

 

Sensors to detect volcanic ash

“NILU's Fred Prata says his sensor comprises a pair of fast-sampling infrared cameras - one seeking telltale IR absorption at a wavelength of 10 micrometres and the other at 12 micrometres. Software combines these to detect silicate-containing ash particles of 2 to 40 micrometres in diameter, the size that wrecks engines. This, Prata tells me in the airstrip's tin hangar, measures the ash "dose" ahead of the plane, how far away it is and its altitude. Combining this with lower-resolution satellite data allows the crew to work out an alternate course. His tests last week were encouraging, with a very low false-positive rate, but needs testing at airliner speeds and altitudes.”

New Scientist (sub required)

Book Excerpt: Case Study 13 Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform

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 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Each also has a case study. Here is the excerpts from case study, for Chapter 13 which focused on being Paranoid about security and other threats. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

In late July 2011, Mike Tassey and Rich Perkins drove over 1,700 miles from their homes in the Midwest to Las Vegas, NV. The drive was mostly uneventful. There were hundreds of miles of flat farmland at the front end and hundreds of miles of desert at the other end. The big excitement was a crack in the car’s windshield, thanks to a mud-covered pickup truck dropping baseball size chunks of mud, rocks, and gunk onto the highway in front of them.

They were carrying some yellow cargo that could have brought law enforcement scrutiny. No, there was nothing explosive. If the law had run a background check, it would have soon found both Tassey and Perkins had fairly high-level security clearances. Both have worked for the U.S. Air Force and other federal agencies.

The cargo was definitely explosive, but in a different sense. Tassey and Perkins were carrying an FMQ-117B U.S. Army target drone to the Black Hat/DefCon conference in Las Vegas.

The 14-pound, 67-inch wingspan drone is by itself dated technology. It was first shipped in 1979 for surface-to-air defense training. The 2 x 6 cell 22.2v 5000 mAh LiPo batteries allow it to fly for less than an hour at a time, compared to the drones that go across the world in today’s battles.

It was the payload and capabilities that impressed the tough-to-impress security audience the conference attracts each year. (The audience is by definition paranoid. Many pay cash for the conference and register under assumed names.)

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

Says Tassey:

What we call our Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform is a proof-of-concept UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) designed to demonstrate the ability of a relative layman to utilize off-the-shelf and open-source components to craft an autonomous platform from which to launch attacks against wireless clients, networks and cellular phones on the ground.

We made several modifications, but did not use any custom manufactured parts. As an example, we modified the airframe to utilize the electric motor to quiet the UAV so that we could operate nearly silently. We added an off-airframe processing capability that can reside anywhere on the Internet. This capability makes use of the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), which allows the use of NVidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) present on inexpensive video cards to process mathematical data at incredible speeds.

Most of the hardware and software is easily available online. The average enthusiast can build and operate this. The whole package cost us only around $6,000 to put together.

Says Perkins:

The thrust of the concept was that organizations spend large amounts of money on physical security (locks, doors, fences, guards, etc.), which is focused on the “bad guy” being a person with a backpack, a car in the parking lot, or an imposter with a laptop. The more we looked at the state of security the more it became obvious that no one is looking up at the skies.

No one is looking up because, until recently, the technology and the skills needed to create a viable unmanned cyber-attack drone were out of the reach of anyone not affiliated with the government or part of a specialized group of researchers at a university.

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

Tassey says over the course of the project that “We have found that there are quite a few groups doing UAV research for imagery and radio projects from around the world.”

Whether their device is used positively or negatively, they deserve credit for raising the level of paranoia around tech security.

Summarizes Perkins:

“We want people to stop thinking that they can be complacent and make assumptions about security, because the bad guys aren’t complacent at all. They are creative, intelligent, and always take the path of least resistance. It is truly a case of ‘If we can do it . . . so can they.’”

Photo Credit: Perkins and Tassey

The largest move since WWII

Mind boggling the logistics of the withdrawal from Iraq

“At the peak of the United States’s war in Iraq, the U.S. military had more than 170,000 troops, 500 bases replete with tents and toilets, kitchens and motor pools, and an airline that flew hundreds of times a day across the country.

Moving day has lasted more than a year.

The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq after nearly nine years of war is believed to be one of the largest removal jobs in history. At the start of the year logistics experts calculated there were nearly three million pieces of equipment to be moved, from airplanes, helicopters and tanks to laptops and lights.”

Reuters

Photo Credit of Khabari Crossing into Iraq being closed after last US convoy left

Predictive Policing

Shades of pre-crime in the movie ….Scientific American (sub required) has a nice article on the reality today.

Memphis has been using a predictive policing system called Blue CRUSH to lower crime rates there. Since the system was instituted citywide in 2006, violent and major property crimes are down 26 percent.  

Predictive policing techniques raise questions about whether they might be used to deem individuals guilty before they commit a crime. In addition, criminologists do not know how well they truly work.

Google Search, plus Your World

Different people should start seeing different search results more frequently now that Google Inc. is importing content from its 6-month-old Plus service, a product that the company introduced in an attempt to counter the popularity of Facebook's online hangout and Twitter's short-messaging hub. Google's main search results page also will start highlighting more content from an older online photo service called Picasa.

AP

KO-SU mobile education

Gerlinde Gniewosz, who I interviewed for the section on the Apple App Store ecosystem in my new book, sent me this invite below. I will not be in London but BETT sounds like a really interesting show with all kinds of educational technology.

CES: Year of the Ultrabook

PCs dead because Jobs said so and Apotheker paused? Nobody remembered to tell Intel. USA Today

“Intel revealed more than 75 ultrabook designs are in the works for 2012 during a press conference at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Companies such as Acer, HP, Samsung and Toshiba (in photo) have already jumped into the ultrabook business.

What makes the ultrabook so special? According to Intel, the devices sport a super-thin body of less than an inch thick with 14- to 15-inch screens and Core processors.”

The Atlantis prepares to become a museum piece

Space shuttle Atlantis, which only five months ago flew the final mission of NASA's 30-year shuttle program, is now being prepared for its public display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Its insides being pulled out to ensure it is safe for exhibit, as well as significantly lighten it for its planned steep-angled display.

See photo gallery before the final shut down at collectSPACE

Book Excerpt: Chapter 13: Paranoid – but not paralyzed

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 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Here are excerpts from Chapter 13 which focuses on being Paranoid. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

The concept of jailbreak on the iPhone has evolved into what’s called rooting on Android devices. “Rooting is the process by which you regain administrative access to your phone. Even though Android is an open source operating system, you still don’t have full ‘root access’ to do what you please. Back when the iPhone launched in 2007 the hardcore techies quickly realized the true potential of the device, and the cruel software limitations that Apple had sealed it with. What became ‘Jailbreaking’ on the iPhone was quickly translated to other platforms as well, and when the world saw the first Android back in 2008, the term ‘Rooting’ was born,” says the Android Authority blog.⁴

The teardowns and the rootings pale in comparison to the much more malicious hacking that targets digital products and websites.

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

The repeated and public humiliation of Sony by hackers over a matter of months shocked the technology world. Its PS3 game console was once considered invulnerable. “But in December 2010 at the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin a group of European programmers calling themselves fail0verflow revealed they had finally broken specific lower levels of the PS3’s encryption system that let them run their own programs on the console

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

Actually, the infosec world is very well aware of what are called Common Weaknesses. “MITRE maintains the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration)” website, with the support of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division, presenting detailed descriptions of the top 25 programming errors, along with authoritative guidance for mitigating and avoiding them.”¹⁰

The errors make for exotic language such as “Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an SQL Command” (“SQL Injection”) and “Buffer Copy without Checking Size of Input” (“Classic Buffer Overflow”).

The big problem, of course, is that the CWE site catalogs more than 800 programming, design, and architecture errors that can lead to exploitable vulnerabilities. Hackers, the white-hat and the malicious kinds, continue to add to that already long list of 800.

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

Richard Perkins and Mike Tassey were told that an in-flight hacking platform was impossible. In response, the pair showed off their wi-fi hacking, phone-snooping, homemade UAV at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas in August 2011. They call their creation the Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform; it is described in detail in our case study later in this chapter.

Researchers have demonstrated that certain pacemakers that use a wireless signal for easy tweaking are vulnerable to anyone with the correct reprogramming hardware. Doctors use these wireless programming devices to make subtle adjustments to the heart helpers without the need for further surgeries. Unfortunately, the signal they use is unencrypted, meaning that anyone who finds a way to obtain such a device could literally manipulate the heart of a patient, causing cardiac arrest or even death. ¹¹

At the same Black Hat conference, Don Bailey and Mathew Solnik presented how they had “found a way to unlock cars that use remote control and telemetry systems like BMW Assist, GM OnStar, Ford Sync, and Hyundai Blue Link. These systems communicate with the automaker’s remote servers via standard mobile networks like GSM and CDMA—and with a clever bit of reverse engineering, the hackers were able to pose as these servers and communicate directly with a car’s on-board computer via “war texting”—a riff on “war driving,” the act of finding open wireless networks.”¹²

^{********************************************}

After Apple had its well-publicized antenna issues with the iPhone 4, it took a handful of journalists on a tour of its wireless testing lab.

“Apple’s wireless lab has 16 different anechoic chambers—think of them as bank vaults, padded with foam shaped into pointy cones to stop all reflections, designed to create completely radio-neutral environments. Each of these chambers is estimated to have cost $1.2 million. The existence of this lab used to be secret,” an Apple PR representative pointed out. “Now it’s not.”¹⁴

^{********************************************}

In 2008, as he was getting ready to unveil his 400,000-square-foot “SuperNAP’ in Las Vegas, Switch CEO Rob Roy remarked he expected it to be filled by the world’s most prominent companies. He was promising 100 percent, not 99.99 percent, uptime—the Holy Grail in enterprise computing.¹⁸

That, of course, demands extreme security measures.

The Wall Street Journal described some of the security at the facility:

The guards . . . are not your typical rent-a-cops. These are Switch employees recruited from the Marines and other military services—buff, dark-uniformed hunks who sport sidearms inside the building and automatic weapons outside. They never smile.¹⁹

Switch could be guarding against threats from hostile countries, but even more against industrial espionage.

^{******************************************}

Actually, Apple and other technology companies have the tight security to protect against many different ways trade secrets are compromised. A paper by Mark L. Krotoski of the U.S. Justice Department²¹ highlights some of the scenarios based on prior cases and investigations

Stephen Hawking turns 70

Remarkable man and career. In addition to many degrees, he is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

From his bio

"has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science."

Below a talk about the universe at TED

 

Move over Bellagio!

As the Burj Khalifa, the highest building in the world, celebrates its 2nd birthday, my friend Mark Czarnecki visiting Dubai also points out the nearby fountains put on just as spectacular or better show than the Bellagio in Vegas. 

CES: The new car show

“When I heard that Ford was giving a keynote at CES 2011, I expected that the automaker would just be trotting out a new version of its Ford Sync infotainment system. No one expected the Ford Focus Electric to roll onto the stage when it did. The announcement of a new car at a consumer electronics show was unprecedented and blew our minds.

This year Mercedes-Benz is giving a keynote presentation this go-round, and you can bet that it's got something big up its sleeve, so not to be outdone by Ford. Expect the luxury automaker to be highlighting its new connected service, integration with Google Maps and Street View, and its wide array of driver assistance and passenger safety technologies.”

CNET

Book Excerpt: Case Study 8: Facebook’s Hyperefficient Data Center

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 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Each also has a case study. Here is the excerpts from case study, Facebook’s Prineville Data Center for Chapter 8 which focused on Efficiency. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

“Our server chassis is beautiful,” says Amir Michael, Manager, System Engineering at Facebook.

That’s beautiful in a minimalist kind of way. “It’s vanity-free—no plastic bezels, paint, or even mounting screws. It can be assembled by hand in less than eight minutes and thirty seconds.”

Michael is describing the design principles behind Facebook’s data center, which opened in April 2011 in Prineville, OR (previous data centers were leased).

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

Everything in the center’s design was driven from a cost and efficiency perspective, and most of the components were designed from the ground up to Facebook’s specifications.

The chassis, for example, is 1.5U form/factor (2.63 inches tall) compared with standard 1U (1.75 inches tall) chassis. That allows for larger heat sinks and larger 60 mm fans as opposed to 40 mm fans. Larger fans use less energy to move the same amount of air. That takes 2 to 4 percent of the energy of the server, compared to 10 to 20 percent for typical servers. The heat sinks are spread at the back of the motherboard, so none of them will be receiving preheated air from another heat sink, reducing the work required of the fans.

The racks are “triplet” enclosures that house three openings for racks, each housing 30 of the 1.5U Facebook servers. Each enclosure is also equipped with two rack-top switches to support high network port density.⁷

Prineville enjoys dry, cool desert weather at its altitude of 3,200 feet. In what is likely good application of feng shui, the data center is oriented to take advantage of prevailing winds feeding outside air into the building. The data center thus takes advantage of the free, natural cooling, and in winter, heat from the servers can be used to warm office space. On warmer days, when they cannot use the natural cooling, they use evaporative cooling. Air from the outside flows over water-spray-moistened foam pads. There are no chillers on-site—common in most other data centers thus saving significantly on capital and ongoing energy to run them.

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

But Hamilton’s next statement really makes the center really stand out. “What made this trip (to the Prineville data center) really unusual is that I’m actually able to talk about what I saw.”

He continues:

In fact, more than allowing me to talk about it, Facebook has decided to release most of the technical details surrounding these designs publically. In the past, I’ve seen some super interesting but top secret facilities and I’ve seen some public but not particularly advanced data centers. To my knowledge, this is the first time an industry leading design has been documented in detail and released publically.⁹

Facebook calls it the Open Compute Project. They elaborate: “Facebook and our development partners have invested tens of millions of dollars over the past two years to build upon industry specifications to create the most efficient computing infrastructure possible. These advancements are good for Facebook, but we think they could benefit all companies. The Open Compute Project is a user-led forum, to share our designs and collaborate with anyone interested in highly efficient server and data center designs. We think it’s time to demystify the biggest capital expense of an online business—the infrastructure.”¹⁰

^{************************}

This is a remarkable move on the part of Facebook. As we will discuss in Chapter 13, Apple’s iCloud data center was not even visible on Google Earth until a few days before the iCloud public announcement. A giant 500,000-square-foot facility was kept “hidden.” Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others have also traditionally been secretive about their operations.

Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s director of hardware design, was quoted as saying, “Facebook is successful because of the great social product, not [because] we can build low-cost infrastructure,” he says. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t help others out with this.”

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

One quibble that environmentalists had with the Facebook center is that it is fueled by the utility Pacific Power, which produces almost 60 percent of its electricity from burning coal. Greenpeace ran a campaign for Facebook to “unfriend” coal. As we discuss in Chapter 17, Google, through its energy subsidiary, has negotiated several long-term wind-power agreements. It sells that energy in the open market at a loss but strips the Renewable Energy Credits and applies them for carbon credit to the conventional power it also uses to run its data centers. Towards the end of 2011, Greenpeace won a moral victory as Facebook promised a preference for access to clean and renewable energy in picking future sites for data centers. Facebook has also recruited Bill Weihl, formerly Google's "Energy Czar".

Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s director of policy communications, provides an alternative perspective on clean energy:, “As other environmental experts have established, the watts you never use are the cleanest and so our focus is on efficiency. We’ve invested thousands of people hours and tens of millions of dollars into efficiency technology and, when it is completed, our Oregon facility may be the most efficient data center in the world.”

Photo Credit: Facebook of 450w power supply

The Intel/Qualcomm faceoff

A looming clash between Intel Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. will take center stage at the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Las Vegas, with both chipmakers seeking to control the future of mobile devices.

Qualcomm Chief Executive Officer Paul Jacobs will demonstrate notebook computers based on his company's chips on Jan. 10, highlighting a push into an area dominated by Intel. Later that day, Intel CEO Paul Otellini will take the same stage to announce phones featuring his chips, renewing a decade-long push to get into a market that Qualcomm controls.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Brookstone: Integrated QR

I walked into a Brookstone at a mall last week. Wow – amazing the wide range of iPad accessories, bluetooth headphones, RC copters and other electronics.

I smiled they still have paper catalogs. How retro! So I flipped through one and noticed 5 QR codes on the back cover. Now that is more contemporary.

At home, I notice that a blogger, Brian Klais actually tested each of the QR codes and has a bunch of suggestions for Brookstone.

Importantly Brian says “Despite the lessons and opportunities outlined, I do sincerely congratulate Brookstone on their pioneering use of integrated QR. It’s only through cutting-edge experimentation like this that the brands of tomorrow will teach their consumers how to connect with them today through mobile.“

The Hexagon Project

It was dubbed "Big Bird" and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.

The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.

So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves.

AP

Technology and Music

Music has been on my mind a lot lately. Specifically, the intertwining of music and technology.

Thanks to Tom Wailgum, I see Ben Worthen’s article in the WSJ about rock stars at industry events. Surprisingly he did not mention Salesforce.com which has profiled different genres - Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, will.i.am – at its events.

I speak to Krishnan Chatterjee, who heads marketing for HCL and he tells me about the band he is part of in Delhi, India.  Jeff Bartman gives me something for my next visit to Bay Area “The Fox Theatre in Redwood City for the weekly 7pm blues jam. Admission free. The place is packed, the music is amazing & half the players are tech execs. Fun night.” I  am reminded of a previous post where Richard Hunter of Gartner talked about a piece Esther Dyson wrote about musicians in tech world.

I see Madonna is the half time entertainment at the upcoming SuperBowl. And see GoDaddy will have a commercial with version 2.0 of the Pussycat Dolls. As with last year, I expect many more technology vendors to have Bowl commercials and rock stars in them.

I review an edit of my next book and see several pages on technology and music and how Apple, Amazon and Google have influenced it in recent years.

Probably the most frequent reminder are the chimes outside our house. A new neighbor stopped by and gifted them a week ago. Made by the supposedly "”low-tech” Amish, on breezy days there is no sweeter sound!

 

 

Reengineering the server supply chain

And because they purchase such a large number of machines, they can afford to design their own in tandem with original design manufacturers (ODMs) in East Asia. These ODMs are the same companies that build machines for Dell, HP, and other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). In essence, Google and Facebook are cutting the Dells and the HPs out of the equation, causing a major shift in the market.

With Facebook “open sourcing” its server designs under the aegis of the Open Compute Project, giving them away to anyone who wants them, more and more companies are exploring this direct-to-East-Asia route, including not only large internet companies but also financial outfits, biomedical companies, and other outfits that require large numbers of servers. Goldman Sachs, for instance, is one of the big names leading the Open Compute Project.

Wired

Book Excerpt: Chapter 8 – Efficient Amidst Massive Technology Waste

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 6 through 17 cover 12 attributes of what I call the elite. Here are excerpts from Chapter 8 which focuses on being Efficient. Note: the text is going through the publisher’s edits and subject to change.

“It was the meeting where our IT council gave me the green light to proceed with a major global project to consolidate 80 different HR systems across the world. We had settled on our existing ERP vendor’s software,” says David Smoley, CIO of Flextronics, one of the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturers.

“I thanked them for approving such a large project and then I surprised them. I told them I may come back to them in the next month with a ‘better, faster, cheaper’ option.

“Mind you, this was after we had already spent months of evaluating options, systems integrators, building budgets and business cases. But we have a ‘fail faster’ culture here at Flextronics, so they were more intrigued with what I may come back with than surprised.”

In the month prior to the meeting described above, Smoley had been introduced to Workday, then a startup.

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

What is remarkable is that Smoley had the courage to turn down a preapproved project and go with something far more efficient. Unfortunately, too much in technology gets funded year after year with “safe” choices. It becomes “entitlement spend.” The old adage used to be “No one got fired for buying from IBM.” Today, that saying has become a little broader—to include IBM, Verizon, SAP, Accenture, and other large vendors. Too many IT executives live in fear of one of their smaller vendors going out of business.

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

Nestled between a Target and a Lowe’s in a Tampa, FL, shopping center is a much smaller nondescript office. During some hours, this office does more business than either of those two giant retailers. It is the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s branch office. It issues driver’s licenses, collects property taxes, issues fishing licenses, and does several more things. While there are separate queues for many of the services, the agency increasingly has employees who can handle multiple transactions in one session. Of course, for many of the transactions, you need not come in. You can do business with them by mail, phone, or on the web.

Doug Belden’s site says, “his goal as tax collector is simple: To save taxpayers money through consolidation and efficiency while improving service at the branch offices. His objective is to make the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s Office the most modern and efficient office in the state.”¹

Walk into that branch, and there usually is a mass of humanity, and your ticket number may be in the 600s. Your heart sinks as you get ready to settle in for a few hours.

Twenty minutes later your number comes up. Five minutes after that the agent has scanned four pieces of personal documentation you have brought. In another five minutes you have a polycarbonate driver’s license with digitized photo, state holograph, two-dimensional bar code, and magnetic strip. In those five minutes, the system has been running validations against various state and federal databases. These are part of the checks under the Federal Real ID legislation requirements, and for that, licenses issued by the county are among the first in the country to carry a gold star, which shows compliance.

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

Sukumar, on the other hand, is obsessed with what he calls “social design,” and his quest to deliver 500 percent productivity on Cognizant projects.

Think of avalanches. A snowball starts small, but then gathers mass and gradually turns into a massive avalanche. That is the basic inspiration behind Social Design. What we do individually should (positively) impact hundreds and thousands of others.

One of my favorite examples is CDDB (short for Compact Disc Database). When an individual ripped tunes from a CD, before CDDB you had to manually track names, artist, etc. Each user around the world did that and did in their own format with their own typos. CDDB started to track unique signatures of each tune on its servers and matching them to album, artist and other information. So when later users ripped the same tune, they could download that same information. Think of the massive productivity that delivered across millions of users.

It would be nice to move to a “productivity income statement” where we charge the IT department $1 for each data item users enter and in return we charge users $1 for each data item that the system prefills for them. Think how differently we would think about enterprise systems if we did that.

Brad Feld by the numbers

Brad Feld is a VC and a great resource for authors like me (I interviewed him and others he introduced me to in my upcoming book).

He is also an amazing tracker of key aspects of his life – his exercise, nights on road, books read as this blog post shows. He uses Daytum and updates his data as part of his daily morning routine.

At the end of the year the results look so satisfying (and deceptively easy), and a great baseline to define goals for the next.

Rationalizing the Calendar

Happy New Year! Here’s something to jog your brain after a night of celebration. A proposal for a new calendar which would keep most major holidays on the same day of week each year – the  Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar.

“In it, March, June, September and December would have 31 days, all the rest 30. Christmas would always fall on a Sunday. Halloween would become Oct. 30 and always fall on a Monday.

Hanke, who has helped seven countries introduce new currencies, estimates the change could save "roughly $130 billion" merely by decreasing the chance of interest-calculation errors resulting from incorrectly counting the number of days in a given month.”

USA Today

Photo Credit: Google

It's all fun and games

Like all media businesses, the games industry is changing fast. What makes it different from the rest is that it has welcomed change and innovation and thrived on it. It is now growing in all sorts of unexpected ways. For example, the best players can earn money (sometimes a lot of it) from “e-sports”—that is, video games played professionally, in front of a crowd. And after years of talk about an imminent “virtual reality” revolution, it is the games industry that has perfected cheap, convincing simulations of the real world. Technology pioneered by games is now being put to use in fields from military training programmes to molecular biology and virtual showrooms for cars. The industry has even spawned a management technique, “gamification”, that applies the psychological principles of game design to motivating workers and engaging customers.

The Economist

Photo of logo of MLG Orlando tournament held in October 2011

 

The Digital Doctor