New Florence. New Renaissance.

Tech Crunchies awards

The best of social networks, gadgets, widgets, Office 2.0 were honored last night at the Tech Crunchies awards in San Francisco. Candidates in each category are listed here. A video of some of the winners is here

And it was organized by "new media" like TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb and Venture Beat.

Definite innovators.

Enterprise Wikis and Borders

It's about a job you may be interested in applying for, but Zoli's post on Atlassian is worth a read to see how enterprise wikis are being rapidly adopted across borders - and the startup itself provides an example of the "micro-multinational" phenomenon.

Macworld summary

Tom Krazit at CNET summarizes what Apple plans to introduce - Air, a really light, thin Macbook; iTunes movie rentals, Time Capsule and external hard drive and wireless access point, and new iPhone apps.

Fastcompany.TV

Robert Scoble, a pioneer in blogging, is joining a "new, interactive, online video community called FastCompany.TV"

With traditional networks and now "open source" videos via YouTube, do we need yet another broadcast channel? 

With Robert, you know every new mobile gadget and web widget will get exposure so for consumer tech innovation watchers that is great. Besides, he intends to use newer video and broadcast technologies   " like Qik, Kyte, Seesmic, Mogulus, DotSub". So, yes, expect him to pioneer new trends in broadcast and content

"The Saudi Arabia of Biofuels"

Fortune Magazine, paints a fascinating picture of Brazil's agriculture - particularly soybean, and its role in the food chain and in the fuel chain - and how it "outfarmed" the American Farmer.

Let's go fly this high-tech kite

"Turning ocean winds into gold while cutting greenhouse emissions in the process might sound like some sort of alchemy for the 21st century.    

"The 132 meter (433 ft) long MV "Beluga SkySails" will make its maiden voyage in January across the Atlantic to Venezuela, up to Boston and back to Europe. It will be pulled by a giant computer-guided 500,000-euro ($725,000) kite tethered to a 15-metre high mast."

"Under favorable wind conditions, the 160-square meter kite shaped like a paraglider is expected to reduce fuel costs by up to 20 percent or more ($1,600 per day) and cut, by a similarly significant amount, its carbon dioxide emissions."

Reuters with associated video

How teens - and grown ups - communicate

2007 was the first year, mobile bills exceeded those on land lines

Surprisingly, landline wins with teens as they communicate according to this Pew survey:

Talk to friends on landline phone: 39%
Talk on cellphone: 35%
Spend time with friends in person: 31%
Instant message: 28%
Send text messages: 27%
Send messages on social-network sites: 21%
Send e-mail: 14%

Remaking Engineering Education

Charlie Bess at EDS points to a Purdue University article and ponders what the engineers of tomorrow need to be taught.

Non-entertainment games

BusinessWeek

"the software giant will release a platform called Microsoft ESP based on Flight Simulator, a 25-year-old video game from Microsoft Game Studios. ESP allows corporations to design customized training simulations. The first target market: aviation companies that cater to the U.S. military and other clients. It's the first time a major software company has entered the "serious"—or nonentertainment—games arena with a product to help other corporations build their own employee-training video games in-house via a simple, Windows-based program."

Top 10 Technologies you've never heard of

Video From the CES show this week in Vegas moderated by Sean Captain of Popular Science