New Florence. New Renaissance.

1968 – a great tech vintage year

I have written many times – and the blog’s title says it – we are living in a New Renaissance. But while there’s lots of gasps about what Paul Allen has to say about Bill Gates in his new book, in the excerpt in Vanity Fair, I found this nugget about another very exciting year in the near distant past for tech.

“That year, 1968, would be a watershed in matters digital. In March, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first programmable desktop calculator. In June, Robert Dennard won a patent for a one-transistor cell of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, a new and cheaper method of temporary data storage. In July, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel Corporation. In December, at the legendary “mother of all demos” in San Francisco, the Stanford Research Institute’s Douglas Engelbart showed off (video below) his original versions of a mouse, a word processor, e-mail, and hypertext. Of all the epochal changes in store over the next two decades, a remarkable number were seeded over those 10 months: cheap and reliable memory, a graphical user interface, a “killer” application, and more.”

Now playing in MLB stadiums!

“Professional sports teams are attempting at a furious rate to lure fans away from the comfort of their couches to live games. And sweet technological upgrades to their home venues become a bigger selling point every year.

Roughly a dozen Major League Baseball clubs followed that strategy by making tech-centric improvements to their ballparks in advance of the 2011 season, which kicks off Thursday. Notable upgrades include ballpark-wide Wi-Fi access (Chicago White Sox) and LED high-definition ribbon boards (Arizona Diamondbacks). “

CNN/Wired

Photo via Daktronics which provides LED and other displays to many teams

A battery that charges in seconds

“Imagine being able to charge your cell phone in a matter of seconds or your laptop in a few minutes. That might soon be possible, thanks to a new kind of nanostructured battery electrode developed by scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The researchers found that their electrode can charge and discharge up to 100 times faster than existing devices while holding the same amount of energy.”

“The Illinois researchers made their electrode by coating a surface with tiny polystyrene spheres just a few hundred nanometers across, packing the spheres together into a regular lattice structure. Then they filled the gaps between the spheres with nickel and dissolved the polystyrene. That left a three-dimensional metal scaffold, which they thinned down so that the metal made up just 6% of the total volume, and they then coated a thin film of the storage material onto the scaffold. The team used this technique to make cathodes for lithium-ion and nickel-metal hydride batteries, with the former used in many consumer electronics devices such as laptops and cell phones whereas the latter are used in many electric vehicles.”

ScienceNow

Ushahidi: Indispensable in crisis situations

“Ushahidi (which calls itself a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping) arose in 2007 as a tool for monitoring government violence and riots after a disputed election in Kenya, and was later adapted to map ethnic violence in South Africa. It soon took off as a ubiquitous crisis-mapping platform. Most recently it has been used to document events related to the Japanese earthquake and highlighting areas where people might be trapped and where supplies can be obtained.

Earlier in March, a volunteer task force used it to generate a comprehensive crisis map for the conflict in Libya. Other users have included media outlets like the BBC, which used it to map events in floods in Cornwall, in the U.K.; and the Chicago Tribune, which used it to map events during a blizzard.”

MIT Technology Review

Photo of Libya mapping via Ushahidi blog

Color Labs: Turning strangers into friends?

WSJ

“Unlike Facebook, Color eliminates the acts of "friending" and selecting privacy settings. That's because when it is turned on, Color collects global positioning, gyroscope, ambient lighting and other data from phones to determine who else is in close proximity.

That means users will temporarily join the group of people at a birthday party or rock concert—even strangers on a train. Phones running the Color app automatically share photos and videos taken with other phones running Color nearby.

"Instead of seeing your friends online alone in front of a PC, we allow people to interact with each other in real life," said Mr. Nguyen, who previously founded online music start-up LaLa, which was acquired by Apple Inc. in 2009, among other companies.

Of the $41 million that Color raised, $25 million came from Sequoia and $9 million came from Bain Capital Ventures, with the rest from Silicon Valley Bank. "Color is at the confluence of the mobile, social and local phenomena," said Sequoia partner Doug Leone, of the 30-person start-up, which is seven months old.”

The EPA RadNet

As radiation from Japan approaches the US, the EPA monitoring network is getting attention

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency established RadNet (previously known as ERAMS) by consolidating a number of existing radiation monitoring networks. The RadNet program was initially responsible for monitoring radiation associated with nuclear weapons testing, but the program was later expanded to include monitoring radiation emergencies, following trends in environmental radioactivity levels, and providing data for dose calculations. During the years since it began, RadNet has developed an important environmental radiation database containing almost thirty years of data. These data have been accessed and studied to provide information about releases of radioactivity to the environment, from weapons tests and nuclear accidents to natural releases such as fires around a DOE site.”

Auto-measurement of stress in emergency calls

“The team, from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands Defence Academy and TNO Defence, Security and Safety, developed a computer algorithm to prioritize the calls. They "trained" it using four different techniques, incorporating recordings of actual calls in which the final outcome was known. The algorithm measures parameters such as the speed at which the caller is speaking, rises and falls in the pitch and tone of their voice, and their rate of breathing.”

Gizmag – saw it courtesy of Tim O’Reilly

Robonaut 2

It went up on the recent space shuttle to the International Space Station. Quite a combination of technologies brought together by private/public sector engineers from NASA, GM and Oceaneering Space Systems.

“Robonaut 2 (R2) is a state of the art highly dexterous anthropomorphic robot. Like its predecessor Robonaut 1 (R1), R2 is capable of handling a wide range of EVA tools and interfaces, but R2 is a significant advancement over its predecessor. R2 is capable of speeds more than four times faster than R1, is more compact, is more dexterous, and includes a deeper and wider range of sensing. Advanced technology spans the entire R2 system and includes: optimized overlapping dual arm dexterous workspace, series elastic joint technology, extended finger and thumb travel, miniaturized 6-axis load cells, redundant force sensing, ultra-high speed joint controllers, extreme neck travel, and high resolution camera and IR systems. The dexterity of R2 allows it to use the same tools that astronauts currently use and removes the need for specialized tools just for robots.”

Revenue Model Innovation

while it is buried in his book on the “freemium” model I think there are nuggets for every business to consider in this Fast Company interview with Saul Berman of IBM.

The most important takeaway is there are plenty of innovation opportunities beyond product. I blogged about the Doblin list of 10 innovation areas 5 years ago.

Insurance innovations

Nice article in McKinsey Quarterly (registration required) about insurance industry technology innovations

including:

“We know of one insurer that is drafting plans for low-cost, one-day ski insurance policies. The purchase process would be extremely simple: via cell phones, customers would send an instant message with a photo of an ad to a number displayed on it. Policy charges would then be added to their phone bills.”

“Ultimately, sensors installed in customers’ vehicles could track other kinds of higher-risk activities (for instance, parking in high-theft areas). As technologies evolve, some of these features, delivered by GPS in mobile devices, may soon be commonplace. Similarly, health insurers are studying ways to track their customers’ activities, such as diet and exercise, to fashion insurance packages that reward healthy behavior with lower rates.”

“One large auto insurer has launched a prototype insurance project that combines a wide range of technologies. Deceleration sensors and GPS devices in vehicles can detect a collision, identify its location, and automatically notify the insurer. A tow truck is dispatched to the accident scene while additional sensor data help evaluate the damage remotely. Software programs determine the payments and automatically dispatch them, bypassing a range of adjustors and clerical staff. The insurer forecasts a 30 to 40 percent reduction in process costs thanks to this automated process.”