New Florence. New Renaissance.

McKinsey's "Disruptive Dozen"

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

These are the good old days

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

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

Thanks to Steve Wendler for the pointer.

Electric Daisy Carnival

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

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

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

 

 

The New Yorker Innovator issue

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

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

Creative and Enterprisey

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

1 Ben Silver, Principal, FiveThirtyEight

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

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

74 Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO, Workday

94 Yvonne Greenstreet, SVP of Medicines Development, Pfizer

95 John Hering, CEO, Lookout

99 Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist, Bit.ly

100 Leslie Bradshaw, COO, Guide

Dean Kamen: the restless entreprenuer

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

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

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

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

 

"De-extinction"

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

 

Infor-Art

Every visit I make to an Infor faciility - as in the NY HQ earlier this year - or event - as in Inforum this  week, I am blown away by the aesthetics in every aspect of its operations. The excellent taste of CEO Charles Phillips and creativity of executives like Chip Coyle and Marc Scibelli and the imprint of the captive agency, Hook and Loop is pervasive:

The NY HQ - the stunning lobby

The Innovation Hub at Inforum - the white couches spread around the event provided a nice contrast to the Infor logo reds

The growing ads at major airports

The User Experience of the software

The broader role of Hook and Loop, the captive agency

Photo Credits: Infor

SciTech in Time’s Most Influential People

Plenty of politicians and artists in Time’s annual list of 100 most influential people in the world, but I was impressed with how many scientists and technologists show up in the list. The other nice thing is influential folks write about the nominees in the list – so Bono writes about Jonathan Ive of Apple, and Richard Branson writes about Elon Musk, even as they compete for space travel business.

The science/tech nominees are:

• Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung
• Kevin Systrom, Instagram
• Ren Zhengfei, Huawei
• Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, Minecraft
• Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX
• Sam Yagan, Match.com
• David Einhorn,, Greenlight Capital, activist investor in Apple and others
• Ted Sarandos, Netflix
• Sheryl Sandberg, Google
• Linus Torvalds, Linux
• Jonathan Ive, Apple
• Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!
• Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, Coursera
• Perry Chen, Kickstarter
• Roya Mahboob, Afghan Citadel Software
• Jared Cohen, Google ideas
• Don Yeomans, NASA
• Christopher Fabian and Erica Kochi, UNICEF
• Kai-Fu Lee, Innovation Works (incubator for Chinese startups)
• Peter Theisinger and Richard Cook, NASA (Mars explorer)

And even in the others you see plenty of technology with Jay Z’s ventures, Wang Shu who is blazing new architecture trails, and even Bryan Cranston in his role on Breaking Bad

The Only Good News from Boston: Mountains of Evidence

It is small consolation to those who lost their lives or their limbs, and to countless others whose memory of an icon of spring in Boston is forever scarred, but the reality is the FBI led investigation into the Marathon bombs should have a staggering amount of evidentiary data to sort through:

• Video from police and hotel, store, parking cameras around the area
• Thousands of video clips and photos from family and friends of over 15,000 runners who had finished the race just before the explosions
• DNA and explosive and design "signatures" from the bombs
• Cell phone traffic from/to the site at time of incident
• Airline manifests
• National security analysis of "chatter" before and after incident
• Medical reports from local hospitals
• Tips being called in by citizens
• Satellite coverage of the race
• Pattern analysis by the countless federal, state and local agencies

Photo Credit