New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Economics of Spam

MIT Technology Review

"A new e-mail-forwarding service called boxbe.com tackles spam using an economic approach: users charge a fee for access to their inboxes.

To use the service, you need to sign up for a boxbe e-mail address. In the process, you fill out forms about your interests, income, and geographic location. The more information you supply, says Loder, the more your inbox is worth to an advertiser.

Boxbe doesn't replace your existing e-mail; instead, it acts as a public e-mail address that you can put on your blog or MySpace profile. Your boxbe e-mails are then forwarded to your more private account at, say, Yahoo or Gmail."

InfoWorld top 100 projects

Lots of technology innovation across verticals and using a variety of technologies from virtualization to VoIP - in this InfoWorld survey.

50 Years of New Scientist

The great magazine has developed a retrospective on science and technology in the 50 years of its existence. It summarizes the decades as:

1950s - Atoms to television

1960s - The space race to contraception

1970s - Ozone hole to climate change

1980s - AIDS to Chernobyl

1990s - Hubble to Dolly the sheep

2000s - The Genome to Titan

Hyperlinking to Reality

A "Nokia research team has demonstrated a prototype phone equipped with MARA software and the appropriate hardware: a global positioning system (GPS), an accelerometer, and a compass. The souped-up phone is able to identify restaurants, hotels, and landmarks and provide Web links and basic information about these objects on the phone's screen."

Read more at MIT Technology Review

Smart R&D Spenders

Nice Booz Allen study on how quality, not quantity, of R&D spend matters - saw it courtesy of Sadagopan.

The evolution of Thanksgiving

As we live in the world of social networks where news travels amazingly fast, I have always been fascinated at how the first Thanksgiving in 1621and which was spread over 3 day has grown virally and morphed over the centuries. Today we fly cross-country, we watch football on high-def, we cannot wait to start holiday shopping on the web - oh, and we have compressed the dinner into one hour. And we have ethnic variations as the holiday has become increasingly secular. 

And the world has become far more complex - needy folks locally and our troops far away. But so much to give thanks for. Even if it means accepting that President Lincoln was a re-incarnated Hindu and chose Thursday as the day for the national holiday.

Thanks, my virtual reader friends for putting up with my rants and my raves. And, here's to hoping to more in-person get togethers in our travels - as I did last week in CA with several fellow bloggers - Charles, Bruno and Zoli.

Cheers.

Innovation and Discipline

Michael Schrage at MIT questions free thinking, nurturing cultures as contributing to innovation.

"Inspired by MIT's research on lean manufacturing, the IT Process Institute surveys zeroed in on the controls, not the metrics, the elite used to define and assure process discipline. Two controls towered over all others in impact and importance: Do you monitor systems for unauthorized changes? And are there defined consequences for intentional unauthorized changes? No ambiguity or nuance here. The key discriminator between the best and the rest was that elite performers rigorously monitored and punished unauthorized changes. They had situational awareness of change."

"The findings quantified distinctions between IT shops that live for the average and the few that take process leadership seriously. Elite IT performers weren't just two or three times better than median performers—they were seven or eight times better. High performers—roughly 13 percent of the 98 sampled—contributed on average eight times more projects, four and a half times more applications and software, four and a half times more IT services, and seven times more business IT changes. They implemented 14 more changes with half the failure rate."

Mobile Phones and Disaster alerts

Two planned applications for mobile phones around disasters and pandemics - courtesy of MIT Technology Review

Wireless Energy

MIT Technology Review

"a power base station would be plugged into an electrical outlet and emit low-frequency electromagnetic radiation in the range of 4 to 10 megahertz,...A receiver within a gadget--such as a power-harvesting circuit--can be designed to resonate at the same frequency emitted by the power station. When it comes within a couple of meters of the station, it absorbs the energy. But to a nonresonant device, the radiation is undetectable."

Depressing Innovation

It is quite innovative, but somehow this plan to deliberately release pollution  into atmosphere to cool the planet is well -  hazy.  Even the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself "not enthusiastic about it."