New Florence. New Renaissance.

“Frugal Innovation”

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

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

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

Wired UK

Managing peaks and valleys of alternate fuels

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

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

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

Mobile Healthcare and Rio's Favelas

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

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

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

Photo Credit

Sleep and Web Pods at Abu Dhabi airport

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

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

SmartPlanet

Not DUMBO - Smarto

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

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

 

Linguistic Revolution

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

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

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

New Scientist (sub required)

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

The tricky rules of cyberwar

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

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

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

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

The Water Challenge

Bloomberg Businessweek Chairman Norman Pearlstine and his panel: Ahmet Bozer, President, Coca-Cola International (KO); Jae So, Manager, World Bank Water and Sanitation Program; Carlos Riva, CEO, Poseidon Water; Thomas Powers, Commissioner of Water Management, Chicago; and Jeff Sterba, President and CEO, American Water.

"Well, desalination is used all over the world, generally for very specific applications. Naval ships use it. But the scale that we’re talking about—our plant in California will supply about 8 percent of San Diego County’s water."

"In Chicago a quarter of our distribution system is over 100 years old. That manifests itself to everyday people in the form of breaks and leakage. From 1890 to 1920 we were installing water mains at a rate of about 75 miles a year. And over the last 10 years we were only replacing them at about 30 miles a year. With our new program, over the next decade, we’re going to replace nearly 1,000 miles of water main. And just in doing that, we conservatively estimate that we’ll be able to provide enough water for an additional 400,000 residents."

"One of the reasons that in developing countries water utilities cannot make ends meet is that people don’t pay their water bills. And these are sometimes the most powerful people in the country. (Laughs.) Ek Sonn Chan, who runs the Phnom Penh Water utility in Cambodia, looked at the situation and realized that there was no way he could make the utility viable until customers started paying. And he started cutting people off. He cut off the military. He cut off the powerful ministers."

"In many countries where the World Bank works, agricultural water is essentially free, or very, very low-cost. At some point, if we’re providing water to the same rural communities but the farmers get it for free, you will find situations where the farmers will then sell the water they get to the municipalities and the villages for human consumption."

More in article here

 

 

Seoul: City in major hurry

It is the new can’t-miss building in the heart of Seoul. Like the bandages on a plastic-surgery patient, the last of the protective fencing has been peeled away to reveal the capital’s latest architectural creation. City Hall, a vintage vestige of South Korea’s ruthless onetime colonial overlord Japan, has been restored. Over a cold stone shoulder, as formidable as the all-powerful mayor who works within, now rises a tsunami of glass and steel, the future poised to obliterate the past in the next 60 seconds. It took five months to build. This is the new face of Seoul.

“Pali! Pali!” everybody likes to say. Faster! Faster! South Korea has been sprinting down the road to recovery since the end of the Korean War. As fast as PSY’s “Gangnam Style” anthem, mocking Seoul’s Ferrari-and-furs nouveaux riches, galloped to the top of the Western music charts this year, the city has emerged as one of the most hip (and most underrated) cultural capitals in the world. Cruise-line-proportioned flagships, architecturally bombastic headquarters, museums celebrating traditional houses to handbags, haute and hot restaurants are all competing for the attention of its 10 million increasingly affluent residents.

NY Times Magazine

Mondevideo's startups

FastCompany

Tiny Uruguay has such a small local market, companies there must think globally. Luckily, they're prepared to do so: Local education rates are rising, and expats such as Wi-Fi pioneer Pablo Brenner are returning. (He founded the country's first VC firm, Prosperitas Capital Partners.) These are some of the winners in this emerging tech hub.

Inetsat: A full-service TV content distributor, providing a platform, low-cost servers, and cloud-based monitoring to local TV networks at reduced cost.

Cubox: A software development studio founded by Evan Henshaw-Plath, who was also the first employee at Odeo, the company that would become Twitter.

Clinixon: A low-cost, cloud-based system for small health clinics to monitor their patients' progress.

Photo Credit