New Florence. New Renaissance.

Changing Retail Payment Habits

New York Times on growing use of PayPal and Google CheckOut and Bill Me Later for on-line retail purchases.

BBC video on fingerprint shopping

Popular Science Best Products of 2007

From engineering to gadgets to alternative fuels, Popular Science lists innovations from around the world.

"Geoengineering" to save the planet

Geoengineering is defined as the intentional, large-scale modification of the global environment...and here are 10 ambitious ideas from ocean seeding to cloud seeding to space mirrors to try and counter global warming....the ideas may be zany or innovative depending on where you sit.

Alexis Madrigal

Extending DSL and copper

"..the new technology could deliver between 100 and 250 megabits per second - compared to current Australian DSL which ranges from one megabit to 20 megabits per second."

Networking News

How would you like to run this data center?

During his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld, Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel highlighted the grids and compute power behind the CERN Large Hadron Collider - expected to be the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator.

Paul called it "the largest science project in the world" and the computing power is mind boggling. At peak, it will need 100,000 cores to process all the mathematical computations. Expected to generate 15 petabytes of data a year - 1% of all information generated on the planet. Will need to support 8,000 physicists in 60 countries who will use the data for their own experiments.

Check out more details in the video of Paul's speech starting around 46.57 and going about 6 minutes.

In the Kitchen with Web 2.0

Anne Zelenka writes about recipe sharing - and scanning - sites.

Of course, as I wrote here, the pros are starting to cook up even more exotic fare.

Update: BusinessWeek on "Cyber-cooking"

The Nigerian Space Agency?

I am kidding, right? Read on at Popular Science

"Nigeria has some pretty practical goals. It isn't looking to land humans on asteroids nor does it want to hunt for water on Mars or take snapshots of Saturn's rings—all those missions are luxuries, Boroffice says. Nigeria's goal is to use space technology to address problems here on earth, and, yes, to make money off it. With the help of China, it recently launched its first communication satellite. The plan is to rent out some of the bandwidth to private telecommunications companies...More clear cut are the benefits of the nation's earth observation satellite (launched in 2003 with the help of British company Surrey Satellites). It's monitoring things like crop health and desert encroachment, which is in turn boosting the nation's food supply.  Boroffice told me that thanks to the earth-observation satellite Nigeria has had more success growing its staple crop, a root tuber that Nigerians use to make tapioca, among other things..."

Smarter Insoles to Help Diabetics

"The insert, which uses smart fabric technology... constantly monitors the temperature across the foot, stores that data, analyzes it for certain patterns and can transmit it wirelessly."

Popular Science

Santa's Blog - get your holiday lists in!

It started with a comment on my Deal Architect blog. From someone titled CEO of North Pole Inc. Bah humbug, I said. Somebody thinks he is Paul Giamatti.

I was about to delete as spam, but as I do when a comment seems at least somewhat plausible (or written by elves), I sent an email to the commenter.

If he responded....

...well, I''ll be...he did respond. And he has a blog!!

Dear Vinnie -

Happy Thanksgiving.

It is interesting that you ask about how many orders we are receiving online... actually less than 2% of my orders come in online.  Another 1% or so come via email.  The vast majority of requests are still delivered by mail or in person when I'm making mall visits.  The overhead is amazing for processing these requests manually; however, I am a little bit of a traditionalist and I still enjoy receiving the old-fashioned written letter.  Our projections show that we have another 6 to 8 years before the volumes become so high that we will have to require online submissions.

In terms of the blog, this is my 3rd season of blogging.  We haven't really put any marketing dollars behind it.  It has all been word-of-mouth driven.   During the off-season, I averaged about 10
readers a day... but I only update my posts once a month.  As we have entered into November the numbers have jumped to 250-275 readers each day.   From the best I can tell, I have a "regular" reader base of about 1,500 in 67 countries representing 6 continents.  Given that I serve a global consumer base of 100s of millions, not exactly the strongest online presence.  But we are working on that... possibly acquiring our own domain name next year and putting some marketing dollars behind the site.

Hope you have a great Thanksgiving.

- Santa

Santa Claus
Chief Executive Officer
North Pole Inc.
www.clauschronicles.blogspot.com

BTW - Please read this friendly reminder in USA Today about sharing personal information even with Santa

The changing face of Venture Capital

InsideCRM catalogs some of the biggest VC writeoffs in the last decade.

In meantime, one of the Valley's storied firms, Kleiner Perkins has been diversifying out of information technology into green initiatives. In an article on Veep and now Nobel Prize Winner, Al Gore joining the firm, is a listing of the firm's green investments in startups innovating in solar, bio-fuel, CO2 reduction to microbes.

Finally, Fortune has an article on the entrepreneurs who founded PayPal (later sold to eBay) who have gone on to incubate and fund some of the hottest web 2.0 properties today. Different kind of angels and VCs.