New Florence. New Renaissance.

"Wii goes Enterprise"

Courtesy of Thomas Otter, I saw this post (and related video) where Colgate technical folks played with the "Wiimote", Ruby on Rails and SAP's Business Warehouse - and came up with ...well, not sure anything practical yet. But it is good to see enterprise technologists who generally focus on "Keeping lights on" experiment. And as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, good to see SAP give credit to tis customers, not try to just showcase its own innovations.

Customer Service Elite

BusinessWeek identifies its list of 25 companies, across industries, which top its surveys of customer service. Not all are expensive brands - read how they innovate their customer service delivery.

Virtues of Virtualization

InfoWorld has a whole issue focused on server, storage, application and desktop.

EMC is getting ready to IPO VMware - a company it acquired in 2003 - and is growing at a phenomenonal rate.

12 "Crackpot Ideas" for the Enterprise

InfoWorld highlights ideas from solid state drives to autonomic computing.                  

"IT is no stranger to this spirit of experimentation. An industry in constant flux, IT is pushed forward by innovative ideas that yield advantage when applied to real-world scenarios. Sure, not every revolutionary pose sets the IT world afire....it's in that tenor that we take a level-headed look at 12 technologies that have a history of raising eyebrows and suspicions.We assess the potential each has for transforming the future of the enterprise."

Personal Supercomputers

"Last week, Intel announced a research project that made geeks jump with glee: the first programmable "terascale" supercomputer on a chip. The company demonstrated a single chip with 80 cores, or processors, and showed that these cores could be programmed to crunch numbers at the rate of a trillion operations per second, a measure known as a teraflop. The chip is about the size of a large postage stamp, but it has the same calculation speed as a supercomputer that, in 1996, took up about 2,000 square feet and drew about 1,000 times more power."

MIT Technology Review

"In my language"

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Medical Correspondent for CNN  ran a piece about Amanda Baggs and blogged about her this week. New Scientist wrote about her and how technology is evolving to help.

But you have to catch Amanda's own video on YouTube (please watch it completely).

"Amanda has what doctors call low-functioning autism. If it were not for a device that synthesizes words as she types on a keyboard, we would not have been able to communicate with her at all."

And communicate she does. In her language - and ours.

25 Startups to Watch

Business 2.0 on a range of enterprise, mobile, web 2.0 start ups.

Long distance churches

I have wirtten before about Churches and webcams and blogs.

New Scientist has a nice column on long distance preaching and social networks and the struggle to stay "reverent while also being relevant"

Second Life on your Mobile

MIT Technology Review

"Second Life software for cell phones and IPTV devices could not only allow thousands of members to track the world's virtual goings-on remotely, but it could also open up possibilities for those who don't always have access to a PC that meets Second Life's stiff technical requirements."

Careful not to do it in New York...where officials are worried cell phones are jeopardizing your first life.

MySpace as 911

New Scientist

"Dialling emergency services when a major disaster strikes is a typical first response. Now US computer scientists are recommending useful follow-up: logging on to a social networking site, such as MySpace, to share information and survival tips."

Another perspective at MIT Technology Review