New Florence. New Renaissance.

Komatsu’s Serendipity

"The (GPS and other sensor)technology, dubbed Komtrax, lets Komatsu track where its heavy machinery is anywhere in the world. It also records how much fuel every vehicle consumes and the amount of strain on the most heavily used weight-bearing parts.

Komatsu originally wanted to monitor its leased equipment and prevent theft, but the data proved useful in unexpected ways. These days the company relies on Komtrax to figure out how much wear and tear its machinery is getting and when it should dispatch staff to perform maintenance for customers. That record is good to have when calculating the resale value of vehicles that get traded in. But Komtrax's biggest benefit is the real-time snapshot it provides of construction activity in every country where Komatsu does business. “

BusinessWeek

The Wii as airport security tool

“The Wii balance board is part of a $20 million Homeland Security-funded project called Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST). Researchers hope that using sensors to detect passenger heart rate, breathing, shifty eyes, body temperature and yes, fidgeting, could help security figure out who might have something to hide.

Some sensors take the temperature profile of people's faces for signs of stress. Others track eye movement, pupil size, and blinking.”

Popular Science

Garmin Connect

Good friend Sig Rinde shared the results of a recent bike ride in S. France. The amount of detail is so impressive –  I swore he had an elaborate set of monitoring gear.

Unbelievably, his Garmin Forerunner 305 available at amazon for $ 164.74 does the job just fine – along with a USB connection to load the data to Garmin Connect.

 

Reinventing the Coke machine

Courtesy of reader Bala Somasundaram, I see a radical change in the vending machine. No, not just the external design in the new Freestyle Dispensers

As InformationWeek says

“Freestyle will let Coke more easily test new drink flavors and new beverage concepts, such as adding various vitamin combinations to flavored waters and juices. 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. The dispensers collect data on what customers are drinking and how much, and transmit that information each night over a private Verizon wireless network to Coke's SAP data warehouse system in Atlanta. The company will use the data to develop reports that assess how new drinks are doing in the market, identify differences in regional tastes, and help fast-food outlets decide which drinks to serve.”

QSR Magazine adds

“Flavor aside, the machine is just plain cool. It operates on the same Windows CE system used in smart phones. Its body is inspired by Italian auto design and its touchscreen akin to something you might find on iPhone. The Freestyle I used is capable of creating 90 unique drinks from 20 SKUs, yet its supplies require 40 percent less storage. More importantly, the Willy's I visited has seen beverage business increase in the double digits since the machine appeared.

What really has me excited though is Freestyle's potential at the drive-thru. Coke theorizes  this machine might be the push the industry needs to move to touchscreen ordering at the loop. Can you imagine pulling into your local drive-thru and customizing not only your meal, but also your beverage.”

Tracking troublemaker elephants

"Rangers in Kenya have outfitted elephants with cellphone- and GPS-equipped collars that send warning messages when the pachyderms (like repeat offender Kimani in photo) are about to raid farms."

""For every elephant we've collared, there are 20 more that also raid crops," Wall says. "We hope that curbing the behavior of the major troublemakers will rub off on the other elephants."

Popular Science

Tracking VIPs at the Super Bowl

"Using a form of hyper-accurate GPS system, U.S. Fleet Tracking will keep tabs on between 80 and 100 limousines, buses and vans carrying VIPs across the Tampa Bay area during Super Bowl week.

Team owners, for instance, can dial into the system from any Internet-connected computer to watch where their team buses are going and when."

Tampa Tribune

Photo of Transceiver from U.S. Fleet Tracking

Wi-Fi Wine

"An automated wireless precision monitoring system that uses sensors to check soil moisture, air temperature and humidity is being commercialised by Italian company Netsens, set up in 2005 as a spin-off from the EU-funded GoodFood project.

Currently in use in several Italian vineyards, Netsens’ Vine-Sense system allows vintners to accurately time harvesting, fight pathogenic attacks, cut water consumption and lower the cost of chemical treatments without even having to visit the vineyard. "

Phsyorg.com

Join me at 27.956508,-82.524175

Social Networking meets Location Services via Yahoo's Fire Eagle

"Fire Eagle is about helping you take your location to the Web and giving you control over how, when and with what your location is shared. You choose which applications can share and update your location. You choose how much information you want to share – from as broad as country or state, to as detailed as zip code or cross streets, and everything in between. You choose when and how to update your location."

Pinpointing origins of gunshots

"Nobody called the cops, nobody dialed 911. But when newly installed technology picked up the sound of gunfire in York, Pa., last month, it quickly directed police to a precise location where they found a 21-year-old man who had been shot three times. He was rushed to a hospital where he recovered from his wounds.

Chalk up another success for ShotSpotter, an unusual, fast-growing Silicon Valley company whose system for pinpointing the origin of gunshots is now getting deployed in cities across America — including neighborhoods in Oakland, San Francisco and East Palo Alto. This technology, first introduced in Redwood City in the mid-1990s but widely adopted only recently, is also being tested by U.S. forces in Iraq."

Inside Bay Area

Find a parking space on your PDA

"This fall, San Francisco will implement the largest mesh network for monitoring parking to date. Around 6,000 wireless sensors from the San Francisco company Streetline will be fixed alongside as many parking spots, monitoring both parking availability and the volume and speed of passing traffic. The city hopes that displaying information from the sensors on Web maps,smart phones and signs on the street will reduce the traffic and pollution caused by circling cars."

MIT Technology Review