New Florence. New Renaissance.

Maker Faire

"Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It’s for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things."

May 3-4, San Mateo, CA

Update : Guy Kawasaki took lots of pictures

Refinery City

Not in oil-rich Middle East, but on the west coast of India. When it is done it will process 5% of the world's gasoline. Fortune has a photo gallery.

Wanted: Bicycle Mechanics

New York Times on how NASA through various contests is benefiting from innovative amateurs outside tis ecosystem of professionals and contractors. Crowdsourcing comes to space. The 2008 contests are listed here.

Camcorders - Basic and Crossover

At one extreme you have the Flip, a barebones video recorder for around $ 100.

At the other extreme, MIT Technology Review writes about products from the Red Digital Cinema Camera which may make standalone digital cameras obsolete.

Virtualization of Mobile devices

"Handset makers could use virtualization to more easily replicate the features found in one another's devices and confront the threat posed by Apple, which introduced the iPhone in 2007. Virtualization could also help cell-phone makers offer more features at a lower price.

Currently, programmers have to rewrite every application—be it a game, social networking service, or other feature—for each of the various operating systems...So Motorola could grab a Web-browsing application written for one system, an e-mail application for another, and calling features designed for a third OS, and elegantly integrate them onto one phone. That could significantly speed up the phone-design process.

Virtualization also helps a phone run with fewer chips. Today, mobile phones typically require a combination of a baseband processor, which enables the phone to communicate; an applications processor, responsible for running applications like e-mail; and a multimedia chip, which handles graphics, audio, and video. But a virtualized phone can accomplish all of the above with just one or two processors instead of three.

Virtualization software will help (enhance security by letting) operators give preference to "trusted" applications."

BusinessWeek

The Ultimate Fashion Contest

NASA is calling for next-gen space suit designs for its next-gen Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle which will carry astronauts to the International Space Station and longer term to the Moon and Mars.

Should be able to withstand tears on the vehicle (given how astronauts float around in the weightlessness), and the radiation on the moon and who knows what on Mars. And of course allow astronauts to play golf and look cool while doing it :)

See-saw to power African schools

BBC News

"Design student Daniel Sheridan has created a simple see-saw which generates enough electricity to light a classroom.

The device works by transferring the power, created by a child moving up and down on it, to an electricity storage unit via an underground cable."

Earlier I had written about kids also powering water pumps.

The $ 100 Genome

"It currently costs roughly $60,000 to sequence a human genome, and a handful of research groups are hoping to achieve a $1,000 genome within the next three years. But two companies, Complete Genomics and BioNanomatrix, are collaborating to create a novel approach that would sequence your genome for less than the price of a nice pair of jeans--and the technology could read the complete genome in a single workday."

MIT Technology Review

Blockbuster's makeover

It is trying to acquire Circuit City and get more into selling electronics. But it also wants to compete with Starbucks by offering cappuccinos, Kinko's by offering Wi-Fi...it is testing various new concepts as this Dallas Morning News story outlines.

IT-Olympics

At Iowa State University...200 students from 25 Iowa high schools will participate in events in 3 categories - cyber-defense, robotics and game design