New Florence. New Renaissance.

Technology and Florida Orange Juice

Whenever I see a Tropicana Premium carton in Ireland or a Tropicana Twisters package in India, I marvel at the supply chain which facilitates that.

What's the big deal you may ask in our world of global logistics?

Well, we have 3 orange trees in our backyard and I can assure you the joy of a fresh squeezed glass of juice is the end result of a messy process of fertilizing the trees, harvesting the fruit with long fruit pickers and ladders (and stooping to pick up ones that fall and rot), washing, slicing, squeezing and disposing plenty of peel and seed. Not to mention keep the juice sanitary from risks like salmonella.

Now take that process and scale it - Florida is estimated to have 100 million citrus trees - and you can see the automation opportunities in the industry.

Start with the harvesting - a very labor intensive process. The Oxbo set of shakers and pickup equipment can work day and night and collect a million pounds of fruit a day, or the work of 120 laborers. 

Then you get into the processing, and the steps that would humble most brewmasters - getting the aroma, the color and the taste just right, the flash pasteurization, the handling of all the by-products (including using the peel to create a form of ethanol)

Then there is the state of the art packaging and shipping via refrigerated rail cars and other containers.

Finally, there are plenty of sustainability initiatives in the industry - in the growing, processing and packaging steps.

Nothing like a glass of fresh Florida juice. But as you enjoy the juice around the world, enjoy it even more as you think of the technology along the way that make that possible.

GMail Labs: Experimental features

 Features to make GMail even more helpful such as Goggles, which makes you solve math to make sure you are still awake or sober before you send mail ; the addict feature forces you to take a 15 minute break by blocking your screen; and still others useful such as the recent addition of texting from a chat session.

But the emphasis is on experimental - as Google says these features are experimental and:

• They may break at any time.
• Similarly, they may disappear temporarily or permanently.
• They may work so well that they graduate and become regular features.

"The vision to believe and invest in things unseen"

from President-elect Obama's radio speech as he rounds off his planned science and technology team.

It includes "Dr. John Holdren as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). He also announced Dr. Harold Varmus and Dr. Eric Lander as the other co-chairs of PCAST, which the President-elect said he hopes will be “a vigorous external advisory council that will shape my thinking on the scientific aspects of my policy priorities.” Addtionally, he named Dr. Jane Lubchenco as his choice to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

He previously announced Dr. Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy

The Globalization of R&D

"As business becomes increasingly global, corporate innovation strategies are becoming more global as well: Multinational companies are spending a significant — and growing — share of their research and development money outside the countries in which they are headquartered. Booz & Company’s annual Global Innovation 1000 study found that in 2007, the top 80 U.S. corporate R&D spenders deployed an estimated US$80.1 billion of their $146 billion R&D funds overseas. The top 50 European companies spent $51.4 billion of their $117 billion total outside the continent. In Japan, the top 43 Japanese firms exported $40.4 billion of their total $71.6 billion to other countries."

Booz Annual survey of R&D spend

What do you do with your digital camera?

Popular Science has some interesting uses for your camera - like taking a photo of where you parked, of recipes so you can buy everything you need at the grocery store, as a mirror!

Other uses I recommend

- Taking pictures of flip charts from meetings
- Worldcard which OCRs images from business cards into Outlook contacts

Motorola's Emergency Strategy

"The APX is in fact a half-dozen devices in one, including a cell phone, a PDA, GPS receiver, and a number of traditional radios. Software inside the APX automatically detects which frequencies are being used by emergency personnel to enable communication. Today, first responders routinely carry two radios in order to communicate with one another. Motorola says this device is also backwards compatible with even decades-old technologies in use by police and fire departments around the country, including the company's last generation of P25 products.

Motorola also designed the radio to be upgradable, either through a built-in hardware expansion slot, or software updates available for download. Potential new applications include GPS-enabled location tracking or the ability to upload mug shots of, say, potential suspects directly from the radio. Says Bob Schassler, corporate vice-president for Motorola's government and public safety division: "these devices have life spans of between 10 and 15 years, so we're trying to make the APX as future-compatible as possible."

BusinessWeek

Maybe carmakers should "stop making cars"

Forbes on Cars as a Service

"These days domestic car executives are fixated on keeping their companies alive. But deep in R&D departments employees are casting their thoughts in new directions. Can they reinvent the car for a congested, urbanized world with vexing climate and energy problems? One idea, dubbed "mobility on demand," is based on the premise that in the future, urban motorists will buy a service, not a product."

Photo of a MIT idea of a stackable electric car

Beyond ID Cards

Business Solutions Magazine on how they are evolving to "visitor management, access control, and time & attendance solutions"

The Mercedes SplitView

"Mercedes has announced today that starting in the summer of 2009, S-Class models will feature a new technology they're calling SPLITVIEW.  Developed in collaboration with Bosch, SPLITVIEW will allow both the driver and passenger to view two separate programs via the same COMAND display.  For example, let's say the vehicle's operator is in the process of viewing navigation directions, the front passenger can simultaneously watch a film on the exact same 8-inch display...

...The COMAND screen shows two different images simultaneously by placing pixels adjacent to one another, after which a filter masking the display divides this mixed image so that depending on seating position, either one image or the other can be seen."

 

Stealth Bomber 2.0

Popular Science (subscription required) on the Air Force's secret plans for the next-gen Stealth due at the end of the next decade.

Among the factoids - the current B-2 runs on 1982 vintage 286 chips...

The radar signature of the next one could be one-tenth of a mosquito...

Biggest likely controversy - if it is unmanned would we trust its nuclear payload?