New Florence. New Renaissance.

Michael Jackson, RIP

I guess it is only fitting that his death caused traffic jams on the web and on Twitter. 60% of amazon music CDs sold the day after were his. On the current iTunes Top Ten Albums chart, he's taken over seven spots.

It is remarkable the influence Michael Jackson had on consumer technology for over 4 decades. From Motown records to MTV videos to all kinds of Halloween special effects spawned by Thriller, the special effects on his Dangerous tour even the morphing faces at the end of Black or White in the video below.

Whatever you may think of his quirks, he was one heck of an innovator.

The "Gateway Recession"

“We’ll look back on this recession as much more than an ugly economic moment. History will view it as The Gateway — a portal connecting two very different eras.

…The signs are everywhere. Post-Gateway players: Obama; Amazon; Zappos; Jet Blue; Twitter; Facebook; blogs; Craigslist; broadband; Wikipedia; DVRs and iTunes. Pre-Gateway: GM; The New York Times; the Republican party; shopping malls; print advertising; excessive executive pay; TV networks; boards of directors full of aging plutocrats; and the TV-centered Washington chattering classes. Like the US Civil War, which separated an agrarian society from an industrialized economy, or World War I — a death knell for many European elites — the Gateway Recession is exposing fundamental weaknesses in long-standing political, cultural, and economic institutions. “

George Colony (of Forrester) blog

hat tip to Jon Reed for pointing this

Extreme Endurance Flying

"Nine days: That's the longest any airplane has stayed in the air. Burt and Dick Rutan's Voyager set the record in 1986 by flying 24,986 miles around the world without refueling. But nine days of uninterrupted flight won't cut it for Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced-research organization. It's challenged the aviation industry to come up with an unmanned surveillance and communications plane that can circle targets for half a decade — and do so on nothing but solar power."

Popular Science

Crowdsourcing at the Guardian

“Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.

How do you catch up?

If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.”

Nieman Journalism Lab

The UPC turns 35

“Originally developed to help supermarkets speed up the checkout process, the first live use of a U.P.C. took place in a Marsh Supermarkets store in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974, when a cashier scanned a package of Wrigley’s gum. It ushered in extraordinary economic and productivity gains for shoppers, retailers and manufacturers alike, with
estimated annual cost savings of $17 billion in the grocery sector alone, according to one study.”

One of the world’s best-known symbols, the U.P.C. comprises a row of 59 machine readable black and white bars and 12 human-readable digits. Both the bars and the digits convey the same information: the identity of a specific product and its manufacturer. “

GS1 US

3-D “Augmented Reality” Magazine Cover

“Launch the viewer window, and hold the cover of the (July 09 Popular Science) magazine up to your computer's webcam -- you'll see a 3-D landscape dotted with wind turbines pop off the page; by blowing into your computer's microphone, you can even make the turbines spin faster.”

In collaboration with GE Ecomagination

PC less web printing

Canon has allowed you to do it from their office copiers for a while now.

Now HP makes it personal.

“The $399 printer -- HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web -- is a Web-connected all-in-one (print, fax, copy, scan).   An LCD touch screen on the front of it connects online to HP's App Studio, a riff on the digital app stores popularized by Apple, BlackBerry and most recently the Palm Pre.

The apps let you view and print data without booting up a PC.  Early participants in the App Studio include Google, coupons.com, Fandango (movie tickets) and Nickelodeon. (USA Today is providing a news app.)”

USA Today

Photo credit InformationWeek

Sheraton: Putting Social Back into Networking

Sheraton conducted extensive guest research during the revitalization process, allowing significant insight into the guest profile. A Sheraton guest is often educated, affluent and experienced at traveling, the results showed. At an average age of 44.3 years, the guest population sits at the intersection of Generation X and Baby Boomer. Perhaps most importantly, Sheraton found that its guests would like to spend more time in social spaces and will use technology when it intersects with a personal need or fulfills a desire. "We found that our guests are social and like being around others," says Harper.  "We saw technology as an enabler, so we decided to put the two together."

HTMagazine.com

Technology at Wimbledon

“But beneath the grass of Court 14 a series of hi-tech bunkers are practically throbbing with server towers, laptops and flatscreens, ready to collate, interpret and distribute endless data gathered from every match of the Wimbledon tournament.

These stats are collated and converted by the computers in the bunker into graphics for the broadcasters, information for the commentators and players and a real-time fix for all the tennis addicts around the world keeping an eye on Wimbledon via its website.

They will also drive tweets for the tournament's first official Twitter feed - for those who like their live match info in 140 character soundbites.

But it's the "Seer Android Beta" designed for G1 Android mobiles of which the technologists are most proud. Alan Flack describes it as "the app that can read your environment".

The idea is that G1 users who attend the tournament will be able to get extra information in text form on their handset about everything that is closest to them - such as where the nearest loos are and how long the queue is for strawberries.

It uses the phone's inbuilt GPS and digital compass to figure out exactly where the phone user is standing and where the handset camera is pointing. It then takes a video feed from the camera and superimposes the extra info on top of it. “

BBC

“Wicked Problems of a New Global World”

New York Times writes about a gathering organized by John Kao, founder of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation ( see also his video below about the entity)

“…governments are increasingly wading into the innovation game, declaring innovation agendas and appointing senior innovation officials. The impetus comes from two fronts: daunting challenges in fields like energy, the environment and health care that require collaboration between the public and private sectors; and shortcomings of traditional economic development and industrial policies.

Innovation policy, to be sure, is an emerging discipline. It lacks crisp definitions or metrics. The most explicit embrace of it has been outside the United States, though the Obama administration is taking some initial steps. Its new budget directs the Bureau of Economic Analysis to develop statistics that “uniquely measure the role of innovation” in the economy. And the government’s new chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, speaks of building “innovation platforms” to spur growth.

The rising worldwide interest in innovation policy represents the search to answer an important question: What is the appropriate government role in creating industries and jobs in today’s high-technology, global economy?”