New Florence. New Renaissance.

Will new spectrum phones cause digital distortion?

As the FCC auctions the 700-megahertz band of the UHF spectrum (and other major countries around world similarly retire analog TV and sell off that space), New Scientist (sub required) weighs in with some concerns which could ruin a future Super Bowl party

"...a next-generation broadband cellphone operating at around 250 milliwatts will easily swamp the incoming 0.5-milliwatt signal for an indoor digital TV aerial, if the two are operating at close frequencies.                                                                           
Interference could also happen even if a UHF mobile device is not on an adjacent frequency to the TV channel, but is simply in the UHF range. Many mobiles use cheap oscillator circuits that produce unwanted harmonics that can cause interference as much as 12 MHz on either side of the frequency it is operating on."

"New" does not mean "better" around world

Only 30 percent of Dutch working age adults believe that new products or services will improve their lives in the next six months, compared with 60 percent of United States consumers, and 80 percent in India and the United Arab Emirates, according to The Institute for Innovation & Information Productivity...

interesting implications for technology marketers and innovation project leaders

Widget World

Wikipedia defines widgets as "a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation."

Fast Company  lists some of its favorites

A tenfold improvement in battery life?

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to give rechargeable lithium ion batteries   --used in laptops, iPods, video cameras, and mobile phones--as much as 10 times more charge. This potentially could give a conventional battery-powered laptop 40 hours of battery life, rather than 4 hours.

"Include a Joker in every Brainstorming session"

FastCompany interview with John Morreall, a professor at the College of William and Mary,  and founder of Humorwork

"A bunch of paint engineers were moaning and bitching about how hard it is to get paint off a house. One guy says, "Why don't we just put gunpowder in the paint and blow it off the house?" That led people to think, "What could we do that would be the equivalent of gunpowder?" They came up with a chemical they added to the paint and when you wanted to remove the paint you did a light wash with a second chemical over the first one. That didn't blow it off the house, but it allowed it to drop off."

EU facilitates language and man-machine translations

 

"The European Commission is offering translation software developers free access to around one million sentences translated between 22 of the European Union's 23 official languages."

New York Times

Virtual Trade Shows

Don't enjoy spending time traveling to Orlando or Vegas for conferences and then walking for miles and miles at the exhbiits?

Unisfair, a Second Life type environment, offers an alternative - the company just closed $ 10 million in funding.

Worst Innovation Mistakes in a Recession

Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek lists 10 things not to do, even though expedient, in a recession - like firing talent, boards replacing growth oriented CEOs with cost cutting one,  stop new product development.

Diabetes Devices

BusinessWeek

"Medical-device manufacturers and industrial designers alike are increasingly using popular consumer electronics, from MP3 players to cell phones, as inspiration for easy-to-use and unobtrusive diabetes-management tools. The goal is to provide diabetics with equipment that fits as seamlessly into their lives as, say, an iPod, complete with an intuitive interface and a "cool" design factor that encourages patients to monitor their health and self-treat the disease."

"Lecture Browser"

Last week I was struggling to find a segment in the video of one of the keynotes I had seen  at Oracle OpenWorld...so I reviewed the video a few times ...

Would have been so much easier with this technology developed at MIT  " a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology.  You can search for topics, much like a regular web search engine. If any results look relevant, you can play the video starting at the relevant point and see the synchronized transcript."