New Florence. New Renaissance.

Near-Supersonic Gulfstream 650

Ok, so my time machine shows I am 4 years away and my ATM machine shows I am $ 60 million short, but my fantasy machine shows me in my new 650 (click image to enlarge).

I would not have to bend my 6 ft 2 frame, and I could fly non-stop 7,000 miles at up to near-supersonic 700 miles an hour. I could take 17 of my best friends in the largest space on a business jet.

We would cruise at 51,000 feet way above most commercial traffic and weather. We would have 28x20.5 inch panoramic windows - 16 of them. And not worry about running out of much. Gulfstream says they have redundancy everywhere - "a toilet always flushes; water is always available; and an entertainment source always works".

And all kinds of technologies in the cockpit and cabin. Read more from Gulfstream here.

Wi-Fi usage trends

Interesting data points on global hotspots - US is biggest country concentration, London is the biggest city, Chicago O'Hare the airport with most usage

Bill Gates Vision for 2018

at Infoworld

Tablets and virtual worlds. Some would argue we will be there by 2013.

Fortune's Most Innovative Companies

Usual suspects - Apple, Nike etc and some you may not have included - Burlington Northern and ProLogis.

Fortune

11 Cloud Computing Vendors to Watch

CIO Magazine cites a Forrester analysis

1. Akamai
2. Amazon
3. Areti Internet
4. Enki
5. Fortress ITX
6. Joyent ( a sponsor of this blog)
7. Layered Technologies
8. Rackspace
9. Salesforce.com
10. Terremark
11. XCalibre

The Google Leprechaun!

 Happy Paddy's Day!

So I was noodling around the web this weekend and came across Shamrock, TX.
On historic Route 66 no less...

I go to Google Maps to see how far it might be from Dallas, and what do I find?...in Street View a leprechaun and a shamrock! (click picture to enlarge)

Technology and US Politics

Shawn Otto is still trying to the get the Presidential candidates to come debate on science and technology issues on April 18 in Philadelphia. Several industry leaders presented the case in this press event video.

In the meantime, news on the convergence between politics and technology

Meg Whitman, ex CEO of eBay will co-chair John McCain's national campaign

Jim Foster, who just won the Illinois congressional seat pre-maturely vacated by former Speaker Dennis Hastert, has written code in assembly, Fortran, and Visual Basic.

TechNet, an industry group recently commended Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR), Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) for their contributions to helping the national technology and innovation agenda.

Shawn urges folks to email, call, and write the 3 Presidential campaigns here:

• Email, call the Clinton campaign at (703) 469-2008 and write to Hillary Clinton for President 4420 North Fairfax Drive Arlington, VA 22203
• Email, call the McCain campaign at (703) 418-2008 and write to John McCain 2008 P.O. Box 16118 Arlington, VA 22215
• Email, call the Obama campaign at (866) 675-2008, and write to Obama for America P.O. Box 8102 Chicago, IL 60680

 

The Irish and Foam

The spectacular Water Cube which will host the swim meets at the Beijing Olympics had its inspiration in the Weaire-€“Phelan structure - work around foam bubbles engineered by two physicists at Trinity College in Dublin.

A few years ago, scientists were confounded but confirmed that bubbles in Guinness do actually move downwards. The irish sure know their foam - and how to grow shamrocks in them...

Steve Jobs' Passion

Series of quotes from Steve Jobs in latest Fortune - on line version in a picture gallery

A must read...

"We've got the miniaturization from the iPod. We've got the sophisticated operating system from Mac. Nobody had ever thought about putting operating systems as sophisticated as OS X inside a phone, so that was a real question. We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not."

"So you can't go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There's a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, 'If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse." "

"We do no market research. We don't hire consultants"

"We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good"

"My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects."

"When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself."

""Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we've got less than 30 major products. I don't know if that's ever been done before."

"That allows us to innovate at a much faster rate than if we had to wait for Microsoft, like Dell and HP and everybody else does. Because Microsoft has their own timetable, for probably good reasons. I mean Vista took what -- seven or eight years? It's hard to get your new feature that you need for your new hardware if it has to wait eight years."

"So what we do every Monday is we review the whole business. We look at what we sold the week before. We look at every single product under development, products we're having trouble with, products where the demand is larger than we can make. All the stuff in development, we review. And we do it every single week. I put out an agenda -- 80% is the same as it was the last week, and we just walk down it every single week. We don't have a lot of process at Apple, but that's one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page."

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

" "At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar."

""Well, you know what? It's been that way with [almost] every major project at Apple, too.... Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, 'I just don't love this. I can't convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we've ever done.'"

"I cannot tell you how important that was after so many years of laboring and seeing a 4% to 5% market share on the Mac. To see something like that happen with the iPod was a great shot in the arm for everybody."

"The Mac faithful will drive to a destination, right? They'll drive somewhere special just to do that. But people who own Windows - we want to convert them to Mac. They will not drive somewhere special. They don't think they want a Mac. They will not take the risk of a 20-minute drive in case they don't like it."

"So we could write all these different kinds of software and make it work seamlessly. And you ask yourself, What other companies can do that? It's a pretty short list. The reason that we were very excited about the phone, beyond that fact that we all hated our phones, was that we didn't see anyone else who could make that kind of contribution. None of the handset manufacturers really are strong in software."

"We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time."

Searching as a team

Next frontier in collaboration?

"People planning travel with their spouses, she says, or students working on research projects with classmates all too often find themselves repeating work others have done or fail to find sites that others have identified. Morris is designing a tool that could begin to help with this problem."

MIT Technology Review