New Florence. New Renaissance.

“The New Small”

No question, I enjoy researching and writing about  mega, compound innovations. My book had plenty of that happening at GE, BP, and other big companies (and countries like China and Germany). Honestly, though, some of my favorite anecdotes in the book came from small companies like Spanning Sync and iCurrent (since acquired by Washington Post), small towns like Lafayette, LA and small countries like Macedonia. And I love to blog about local small businesses we patronize such as

Frenchy’s who rents out waverunners

Bamboo Express, our Chinese takeout place

Scott Galloway, our UPS franchisee

So, I enjoyed reading my friend Phil Simon’s new – his third - book.  From Chapters 7 to 16 he profiles many small businesses from dentists to restaurants. The before and after chapters are more set up, definitions of technology sectors, business philosophy etc – needed but I would have enjoyed even more case studies.

I got to know Phil as fellow Wiley author – his second book was also with Wiley. This time around, he “thought small” and self-published with initial support from several friends and fans using Kickstarter – and got as much as he probably would have got as advance from a traditional publisher, without giving up 85% of royalties . He has a nice ecosystem of editors and other book resources and knows how to use social media effectively.

So, in many ways the book is about himself – an entrepreneur using increasingly ubiquitous and affordable technologies. As he says “the book’s voice is that of a small business owner (yours truly) addressing other small business owners who are curious about what they can do to increase revenue, reduce costs and attract and retain highly desirable employees”

Technology at the Oscars

“The theme of this year’s show on ABC is “You’re Invited,” and the normally staid Academy has been working overtime to lift the veil on its big night. It’s live-streaming backstage moments on a newly revamped Web site, Oscar.go.com. A new app will feature footage from the Governors Ball, the Academy’s official, exclusive afterparty. Fans can submit questions for nominees to the Academy online; a few mothers of nominees — “mominees” — have even been corralled to post on Twitter.”

New York Times

Glass – the less heralded Silicon

Glass has been on our minds quite a bit recently. My wife took a visitor to the Hot Shop at the Morean Arts Center and the local Chihuly exhibition.

Getting my son’s new car ready has reintroduced me to car tinting and sensors and antennae embedded in  windows.

And then I see this Corning video – A Day made of Glass. Plenty impressive what is being innovated with glass.

Florida: The surprising diversity in technologies and technologists

Thanks to the many industry events Orlando attracts, most technologists get to visit my home state. But ask them about technology here and they will likely talk about a visit to Epcot or a drive to the Kennedy Space Center. Actually, given the state’s agricultural bounty, our weather which attracts many a senior citizen, the water which surrounds us we have an impressive diversity in cleantech, healthtech, marinetech in addition to plenty of spacetech, telecommunications and infotech Disney, NASA and others have historically attracted.

Enterprise Florida, which is the official economic development organization for the State of Florida, invited me to guest blog and I happily pointed out some of our technology bounty.

Read my guest blog to see some of the lesser known technology hives inour state. And If you are looking for a great place to expand to or set up anew no matter what the technology thread, I think you will find Florida a pleasantly surprising option to consider.  Contact the Enterprise (or send me an email and I will make appropriate introductions) - we promise to impress!

Below: Photo of Lake Nona Science and Technology Park mentioned in my guest blog. Photo Credit: Space Coast Business

Technology at the Daytona 500

5 years ago I blogged about the race

“NASCAR stock car racing has always been about the driver, not as much the car. NASCAR bans high-tech wizardry during the race”

We have come a long way since at the recently repaved 2.5 mile course

A blind driver drove a specially rigged Ford Escape on the course as part of the weekend festivities. You can watch it on your iPhone. You could have driven the race – virtually. And of course, you can plan your own team and drive the course anytime in the game below:

Good Housekeeping – Most innovative home products

Products from the last decade

• Brooks Brothers No-Iron shirt
• Huggies Little Swimmers
• Olay Daily Facials
• OXO Measuring Cups
• Crest White Strips
• Dutch Boy Twist and Pour Paint
• Uncle Ben’s Ready Rice
• Tide To Go Pen
• Target Pharmacy’s ClearRx Bottle
• Wii Fit
• Scotch Fur Fighter

Obama’s Polymath Valley dinner

Not sure how much he got from just a 90 minute dinner, but impressive the brain trust that showed up in a wide range of infotech, biotech, cleantech representation he had there last night.

Carol Bartz, president and CEO, Yahoo
John Chambers, CEO and chairman, Cisco Systems
Dick Costolo, CEO, Twitter
John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO, Oracle
Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix
John Hennessy, president, Stanford University
Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO, Apple
Art Levinson, chairman and former CEO, Genentech
Eric Schmidt, chairman and CEO, Google
Steve Westly, managing partner and founder, The Westly Group
Mark Zuckerberg, founder, president, and CEO, Facebook

HP Labs annual report

“Hewlett Packard has issued its 2010 annual report for its research and development arm and outlined its big bets for the years ahead….

among them:

Cirious: An enterprise cloud platform. The idea behind Cirious is to make HP a service provider for cloud computing players so they can develop, host and manage their services easily.

Automated security: HP’s goal here is to add analytics to security management and automate things like threat detection, governance and fixes.

IT Informatics: HP Labs is aiming create a unified store of corporate data sources for IT managers to visualize resources. With these informatics, IT managers can automate systems and mine sequences and data.

Live business intelligence: HP Labs is eying a LiveBI Platform that takes data management and fuses it with analytics and execution.

Taming information overload: HP says it wants to highlight “non obvious patterns and implications” to provide insight. The research effort revolves around contextual relevance, timeliness, scale of information and gauging importance of data.

CeNSE (Central Nervous System for the Earth): HP aims to “provide a new level of environmental awareness” via a network of cheap sensors and data storage gear. That infrastructure will be enhanced by analysis tools. The goal: Create “a Moore’s Law for sensing,” says HP, which is focusing on the networking fabric to make this effort work.

Next-gen data centers: The goal here is to create automated and programmable data centers that integrates novel computing platforms, scalable systems and programming platforms.”

ZDNet

The Progressive Snapshot

Progressive Insurance has long pioneered auto insurance innovation, They were the first to serve customers at the accident scene starting way back in 1990.

Their latest innovation is “Snapshot”

From Online Auto Insurance News

“The program–available now in 29 states and used by more than 100,000 policyholders–allows Progressive consumers to save up to 30 percent on premiums.

Consumers’ evaluations are based off of driving data collected by a small telematics device that connects to the car’s electronic diagnostic port. After the first 30 days of driving with the device in place, the data is parsed to see how far the motorist drove, what times of day he or she drove and whether any activities–like hard braking–occurred.”

Walgreens – making prescription refills a breeze

We have enjoyed Walgreens voice activated refill system – punch in prescription code and wait for a text message the order is ready to pick up. Our local branch has a drive through with chutes like banks do where you can send credit cards and receive the pill packages.

The website makes refills even easier since you can pick off a list of previous prescriptions and click on each medication to get information compiled by Wolters Kluwer Health.

Now, in the mobile age Walgreens has added Refill by Scan which allows you to scan the bar code from a previous prescription using an iPhone or Android phone.

Photo Credit