New Florence. New Renaissance.

AMR's Top 25 Supply Chains

AMR Research has released its annual list of the Top 25 supply chains. This year, cell phone manufacturer Nokia took top honors, while Apple made the list for the first time. Familiar leaders like Procter & Gamble, IBM, Wal-Mart and Toyota also scored high.

Read more at Supply Chain Management

Google's Year-End Zeitgist

"We're bidding adieu to 2007 with a look back at the breaking news, the big events and the must-have gadgets that captivated us this year (give or take a few weeks; we compile this list by early December). To get a glimpse of what's been on our collective consciousness, we mined billions of search queries to discover what sorts of things rose to the top. We encourage you to check out our findings to see if you, too, reflect the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times."

Google Zeitgist has all kinds of factoids like Ron Paul was the most searched Presidential candidate, the most searched for lawsuit was that related to Borat and other useful and useless stuff...

[email protected]

With 36 partners, the European research project [email protected] is currently the biggest organized research effort in the area of wearable computing. Wearable computing describes the application of hardware and software which is worn like or integrated in clothing and not carried like a cell phone or PDA."

Wearable computers are being tested in 4 test studies Healthcare, Emergency Rescue, Aircraft Maintenance and Production Management and Training.

Next-Gen Data Centers

"Google threw out the book on data centers and went back to basic heat transfer and electrical theory, he explained, eliminating everything not strictly necessary and coming up with a minimalist design."

Dan Farber at ZDNet

Mesh Network to help with the Hajj

I spent a couple of years in Saudi Arabia in the 80s and every time you flew into Jeddah airport you could see the huge Hajj open format terminal designed just to handle the millions of pilgrims who came for a couple of weeks each year.

So, it is good to see technology in the way of a mesh network at least help with some of the logistics, and  provide the pilgrims web access. The dates of the Hajj rotate with the Hejira calendar and in some years they could be in the middle of the brutal desert summer. A bit of online access can only be a welcome distraction.

A camera for Alzheimer's?

"An entire day's events can be captured digitally on a memory card and downloaded onto a PC for subsequent viewing. Using specially designed software, the Microsoft researchers can convert the pictures into a short movie that displays the images at up to 10 frames per second, allowing a day's events to be viewed in a few minutes."

"All Alzheimer's patients have a deep anguish due to their perceived, although usually not confessed, inability to remember their recent past. Being able to go through the recent events may have a reassuring effect."

MIT Technology Review

"Earth from Above"

via Google Earth

Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the famous aerial photographer goes even higher than his balloon to bring stunning views of various places on Earth.

"Embrace the Edge"

"Only yesterday, it seems, teenagers stayed in touch outside of school on the telephone or at the mall. Now they log in to a growing number of social networks. Until lately, derivatives and hedge funds were marginal players in the financial marketplace. Now they shape market movements on a daily basis. These examples make a fundamental lesson clear: Embrace your edges or fall quickly behind. Companies avoiding the edge will find their core markets and capabilities under attack from edge players who can deliver more value at lower cost."

a Businessweek column by John Hagel and John Seely Brown

The Boomer Tech Market

USA Today on how technology vendors from Nintendo to Microsoft are waking up to the 50+ demographic

"Many 50-plus consumers "have been using personal computers and Sony Walkmans since they were 20 or 25 years old," he says. "They've spent years updating their cellphones, buying MP3 players, installing GPS navigators in their cars and shopping for the latest gadgets."

Combine that tech history with this demographic's colossal size (now more than 91 million) and its trillions in spending power — and it adds up to a massive sales opportunity for tech companies, most of which have not courted older adults before."

See previous post on technology and aging populations.

Your Life Decoded - for $ 1,000

"The advent of retail genomics will make a once-rare experience commonplace. Simply by spitting into a vial, customers of these companies will become early adopters of personalized medicine. We will not live according to what has happened to us (that knee injury from high school or that 20 pounds we've gained since college) nor according to what happens to most Americans (the one-in-three chance men have of getting cancer, or women have of dying from heart disease, or anyone has for obesity). We will live according to what our own specific genetic risks predispose us toward."

Wired on 23andMe