New Florence. New Renaissance.

Empowering the Poorer Farmers

It is incredible how dirt-poor farmers are in many Asian and African countries.

So it is good to see examples like the ITC e-Choupal initiative in India and the Senegal Manobi initiative - swinging some of the leverage to the farmers by bringing them market information through use of web and mobile technology.

The Monovelo

You too can own the monowheel - one of the stars of the closing ceremony at the Beijing Olympics

Photo credit: zimbio

If I was 25 again...

...I would join a SAP customer and lobby to become part of the SAP Imagineering Fellowship program. SAP experimented with the program last year with Colgate-Palmolive and is in the process of expanding to a handful of newer customers. 

I say that after I spent another hour with Denis Browne heads that group for SAP. I had lunch with him a few weeks before. This time we appropriately in a "virtual meeting" (using Adobe's Connect) and he gave me a 50,000 foot view on some of the projects his group is working on:

• Widgets which allow for much more graphical presentation of enterprise CRM and other data
• Presentation of external RSS and other feeds alongside internal enterprise data
• "Mirror worlds" which link virtual and physical models via SAP's configurator and other functionality
• Enterprise Knowledge Networking - "Facebook" in a corporate setting
• "The Business Internet" - leveraging RFID and other sensors in the enterprise 
•  A crowd-sourced "Idea marketplace" to allow for prioritization of ideas for the Group

As Dan Farber wrote last year, none of this is really that revolutionary and I have been impatient with SAP's rate of innovation - but as Denis likes to frequently point out, SAP is the custodian in which thousands of customers put faith, so any innovation has to be filtered with that caution. Which brings us back to the Fellowship program. One way to make customers more comfortable is to have them second employees.

Denis invited me to come to his his lab at Palo Alto for a hands-on visit . When I go, I will try and sneak around to see if they have "Back to the Future" technology there which can turn my age back to 25:)

Innovation in Chocolate

"As a software developer who worked with NASA, Timothy Childs built vision-tracking systems for the space shuttle. Now he has a new venture that he says is out of this world: chocolate.

As demand for premium chocolate soars, a crop of confectioners are changing the industry with Silicon Valley-style innovation, antique German equipment and an obsession with the cocoa bean."

TBO.com

More on the company's "beta-bars" at NY Times

and its blog

The camera never blinks

and nowadays it is everywhere.

Dennis Howlett on his 6 ways of creating video.

With the coming explosion of citizen journalism, Comcast's limit of 250 gb a month will soon start to look mean.

'Disruptive Civil Technologies"

A reader pointed me to this National Intelligence Council analysis

"To support the development of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2025, SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (SRIC-BI) was asked to identify six potentially disruptive civil or dual use technologies that could emerge in the coming fifteen years"

Biogerontechnology

Energy Storage Materials

Biofuels and Bio-Based Chemicals

Clean Coal Technologies

Service Robotics

The Internet of Things."

The Google/HTC/T-Mobile G1

The first to use the open-source mobile OS, Android Google has been promoting

BusinessWeek's reporting

PC World has a picture gallery here

Detailed specs of the phone are here

My initial analysis of its likely 5 year TCO

The BMW Oracle America's Cup Trimaran

"The boat is 27 meters (90 feet) long by 27 meters (90 feet) wide, the mast is 48 meters (158 feet) tall and the mainsail is approximately 500 square meters (5,300 square feet)."

"...the boat itself is the size of two basketball courts."

"It can hit 36 to 40 knots in the right conditions"

“The learning curve is steep – just massive. A boat of this size and power is a new ball game for most of us.”

International Herald Tribune and YachtPals

Also see the video of the multi-hull  Larry Ellison the major investor showed during his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld

The Oracle HP Exadata Machine

Larry Ellison used his entire keynote at Oracle OpenWorld to showcase the HP and Oracle Exadata "database machine" aimed at massive database sizes - see video here.

"In effect, query-handling intelligence has been shifted from the database server to the storage server, which is closer to the data itself. The move allows only results to be passed from storage over to the database system, instead of blocs of data from a voluminous table of a large, 100 Terabyte or 200 Terabyte database."

InformationWeek

A model for Hurricane Evacuation

"To coordinate a hurricane response, emergency managers have to rely on locally-drafted evacuation plans and guidelines provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). After the chaotic and poorly planned evacuations carried out during the 2005 hurricane season, new planning procedures were introduced. FEMA also now uses a computer model to estimate how long it will take to clear a city based on its population, although this model can't advise on when and how best to evacuate it."

"A researcher at MIT is now testing software that combines an unprecedented amount of data to help emergency managers make faster, more informed decisions. "

"The software is also flexible, allowing emergency managers to input their city's demographics and geography. And it adopts a novel approach, categorizing a city's population into different demographics, such as the elderly, tourists, hospital patients, and families with children, for separate evacuation. In addition, says Metzger, the model considers details of available evacuation routes. For example, as there is only one highway that leads out of Key West, FL, emergency managers would need to phase out evacuations to avoid congestion. This allows the software to provide more finely tuned recommendations, he says. The software can even advise emergency managers when to start bringing in supplies, where to set up shelter locations, and when to call in the National Guard."

MIT Technology Review