New Florence. New Renaissance.

Would your company have known you were in a Mumbai hotel this week?

Times (of London) OnLine

"Ever since 9/11, business travel agencies and travel technology companies have been developing so-called traveller tracking systems that are supposed to keep tabs on the location of a company’s travellers at any given instant. Yet these sophisticated systems are only as good as the information that goes into them.

Business travel agency HRG says that more than 200 business travellers whose trips it had arranged were in the city when the attacks happened. The company’s director of client management, Stewart Harvey, said: “We had some travellers in those two hotels and we were able to pick them out and send reports to our clients telling them who was in the city and who was in what hotel. We gave them names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers.”

Photo of the fires at the Taj Mahal hotel during the terror attack in Mumbai this week - credit The Big Picture

Wi-Fi Wine

"An automated wireless precision monitoring system that uses sensors to check soil moisture, air temperature and humidity is being commercialised by Italian company Netsens, set up in 2005 as a spin-off from the EU-funded GoodFood project.

Currently in use in several Italian vineyards, Netsens’ Vine-Sense system allows vintners to accurately time harvesting, fight pathogenic attacks, cut water consumption and lower the cost of chemical treatments without even having to visit the vineyard. "

Phsyorg.com

Innovation - in Management Gurus

"You have heard of Peter Drucker, Jim Collins and C.K. Prahalad. Here we introduce the next generation of management experts who are changing the way business gets done"

Fortune

Technology and Thanksgiving

Macy's Parade goes interactive - with content delivered via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi

Mashable has a list of 14 web resources for the holiday including cooking sites and iPhone apps

All 3 NFL games today are on HD. If football is not your cup of gravy, here are some of the best Thanksgiving themed movies

And of course, for the day after - this site has specials from most retailers to get you ready for Black Friday

Photo Credit of runner Polly at home.com

Reinventing the house call

via Webcam

"Dr. Schoenberg expects it to be popular among retired physicians or those who have practices but want to see a few more patients when they have a free hour on a Saturday afternoon. “Then, if they decide they want to watch ‘Lost,’ they’re finished,” he said. “That flexibility is why we’re getting such a favorable response from physicians” who have felt shackled by the burdens of scheduling, chasing down payments, filing with insurance companies and paying for office costs and malpractice insurance."

Augmented Reality

"AR incorporates three key features: virtual information that is tightly registered, or aligned, with the real world; the ability to deliver information and interactivity in real time; and seamless mixing of real-world and virtual information."

"AR-like technology is also finding its way into industrial manufacturing. Inter­Sense, a Bedford, Mass.–based company, offers process-verification systems that use sensors and cameras to track the positions and motions of tools as workers do their jobs. Computers then compare the actual tool movements with ideal procedures to detect errors or confirm correct completion, information that is then provided graphically to the workers in real time."

Scientific American

The Amazon Web Services start-up competition

Yieldex won from the 7 finalists leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build their infrastructure and business - for the grand prize of $100,000 in cash and AWS credits.

The cloud computing pioneers are detailed here.

Now this could be "unified communications"

"TelCentris, a company based in San Diego, hopes to untangle this mess by providing VoxOx, a single piece of software that can be used to communicate with contacts in a wide variety of ways."

MIT Technology Review

Did that just click?

The coolest feature of the new Blackberry Storm is its SurePress keyboard. The most disappointing - no Wi-Fi support.

Consumer Reports has its first impressions of the new phone launched with Verizon Wireless. 

The efficient - and goofy looking - LED Bulbs

"Within the next several months, several of the world’s biggest lighting companies, including Osram Sylvania and Philips, will introduce LED replacement bulbs to various world markets, including the United States.

While the bulbs will be praised for their energy-saving characteristics and long lives, most consumers will immediately think, “These things look weird....

...Those funny fins are a “heat sink.” Because LED light sources generate all their heat through the rear, manufacturers are adding heat sinks to dramatically increase the surface area and let the heat dissipate rapidly. Without them, the LED fixture would lose its color accuracy and have a dramatically shortened life."

New York Times

Photo of the SoL™ MR16 from Lighting Sciences