New Florence. New Renaissance.

FastCompany’s version of innovation

Not just your usual suspects like Apple and Google, but a “Polymath list” with all kinds of interesting industries, companies and products represented:

Trader Joe’s: “stores carry 4,000 different products, compared to  typical grocery stores' 50,000. This meticulous stocking helps it sell  $1,750 per square foot--twice as much as Whole Foods.”

“In early 2010, Burberry was the first to simulcast its runway shows in 3-D”

“A ton of phones can provide 20 times more gold than a ton of  gold ore. The company's recycling process is based on methods long used by Dowa to get metals from raw ore.”

“SynCardia makes the Total Artificial Heart, the only complete heart-replacement device approved by the FDA.”

“Nike rescued 13 million used plastic bottles, melted them down, and  wove them into polyester. Then they created high-performance jerseys  (eight bottles per shirt) worn by nine teams during last summer's World Cup.”

“The complexity of Russian, with its Lego set of prefixes and roots, forces Yandex to create more nuanced algorithms.”

“Amyris has made headlines for producing renewable synthetic fuel, but few know about the company's health-care vision: saving the lives of malaria patients.”

“If you witnessed mind-boggling visual wizardry at the cinema in 2010, chances are you can thank Double Negative. The London firm created awe-inducing imagery for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Iron Man 2, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Inception”

“the demographic that most over-indexes on the usage of mobile devices in this country is young Hispanic males, period. Second, Latinos have adopted social media at a faster rate than the rest of the population. Those two things are very good for us (Univision) because the young Hispanic demo is a huge part of our audience.”

“The genius of Snøhetta buildings is in their "architecture of engagement"; in other words, these designs consider a structure's social experience -- how the user enters, passes through, and lives in a building -- to be as important as its form.”

“Brazilian-born Neeleman (of Jetblue fame) launched Azul ("blue" in Portuguese) to bring the low-cost airline model to Brazil, where the growing middle class--about 100 million strong--helps fuel Azul's growth.”

“Stamen's big dream is even loftier: to use data-visualization techniques to make information on crucial scientific topics, such as climate change, accessible to all.”

“Seventy percent of the world's cocoa comes from West Africa, but less  than 1% of the world's chocolate is made there. Tim McCollum  and Brett Beach--introduced to Madagascar and each other while in the
Peace Corps--founded Madécasse in 2008 to keep more economic benefit within the island nation.”

Dual-Pol Radars and Tornadoes

“Called dual polarization, the upgrade will play a big role in spotting tornadoes, meteorologists said, because the new technology can see the unseen.

Dual-pol radars are so precise that they can see individual types of precipitation, such as hail and rain — a level of detail that will come in handy during severe weather.”

"As long as it gets lofted high enough for the radar to see it and sample it, it has a really distinct signal in dual-pol," said Paul Schlatter, the NWS meteorologist in Norman that is training forecasters on the new radars.

This will come in handy if, say, a tornado is cloaked in a rain cloud, making it invisible to the naked eye — and current Doppler radar.”

Mother Nature News

Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services – oh my!

Clearly, we are not in Kansas anymore when we see Jeff Bezos of amazon lead off his annual shareholder letter with that …and then continue throughout his letter

“The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly
incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time.”

“Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. Thanks to a thoughtful and far-sighted team of engineers and architects, this approach was applied at Amazon long before SOA became a buzzword in the industry.” (BTW my last book goes a bit into their SOA project)

and summarize with

“Now, if the eyes of some shareowners dutifully reading this letter are by this point glazing over, I will awaken you by pointing out that, in my opinion, these techniques are not idly pursued – they lead directly to free cash flow.”

Thanks to Ravi Ramakrishnan of HP for bringing it to my attention.

Electronic eyeglasses

“If you're one of the many who wear prescription eyeglasses with bifocal or progressive lenses, your life could soon become much simpler, thanks to a company called PixelOptics.”

“The glasses use a thin layer of liquid crystals sandwiched between two plastic layers. Electric current from a built-in rechargeable battery alters the focal power of the lens sandwich when you tilt your head or tap the frames. A 6-to-8-hour charge can run the emPower glasses for more than three days.”

Consumer Reports

Corning’s Gorilla Glass – decades of waiting, now a rocket!

It is one of Corning’s hottest products with sales likely to be $ 1 billion this year and new markets planned beyond electronics into cars and apartments.

But the Corning site tells a fascinating story of “Chemcor” invented over 40 years ago “which withstood 100,000 pounds of pressure per square inch and could be bombarded with frozen chickens at high rates of speed and not so much as chip, let alone crack and break.” mostly hibernated. A forecasted market for autos and space never blossomed.

Fast forward to 2005 - “The project began with phone calls and some basic research in 2005. By 2006 it had become a formalized project moving full speed ahead as an innovation project driven by market demands for not just cell phone covers – which had been plastic (easily scratched) or soda lime glass (easily chipped and then broken) – but also for notebooks, GPS devices, portable music players, smart phones and more.”

“In order to get to that combination of high volume, Hollywood-esqe thinness and sheet quality, the team had to develop a new composite of the glass formula that would allow them to do the fusion-draw production in Harrodsburg, Ky., instead of the slot-draw production the project had started with in Danville, Va. From February of 2007 to May of 2007 the team sprinted through trials and research to develop the new composition that, amazingly, worked on the first try”

Why everyone can learn from Cirque du Soleil

Shame on this innovation blog for not profiling Cirque much earlier. But I could not ignore long after a Twitter exchange yesterday with Tom Peters (“Mr. Excellence”) in which he said “Cirque management excellence almost equals performance excellence. (Talent recruitment-development equal to GE.)”

There is much to learn – since much has been written about Cirque.

There is Lyn Heward’s book “The Spark” – she was President and COO of Cirque du Soleil’s Creative Content Division

There are case studies –recent ones at Financial Times and Arik Hanson;  longer, more dated one ones from ICMR (2007), Harvard Business Review (2002) and in Blue Ocean Strategy the best seller by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

Of course, the best way to learn is to go see one of their shows in person.

The Civil War – on your iPad

“In a first for a non-news app, "The Civil War Today" brings the history of this tragic conflict to life by revealing the story in real time-beginning two days ago with the April 12, 1861 attack on Fort Sumter, and unfolding day by day over the next four years, exactly as the events happened 150 years earlier. The app weaves the iPad's multi-touch interface together with original narratives, photographs (some never before seen), battle maps, diaries, letters, and other emotional first-person accounts to immerse the user in this dark chapter of American history in a way never before possible.”

San Francisco Times

iTunes preview and photo credit

 

Royal Wedding 2.0

“The royal household is encouraging technologically inclined viewers to interact on the day sending messages of congratulations via a Twitter hash tag, #rw2011, and launching an official YouTube "wedding book" where anyone can submit a video of congratulations.”

Facebook users can also click an "I'm attending" button on the social networking service's The British Monarchy page to show their interest.”

Guardian

In the meantime, enjoy the T-Mobile tasteful spoof of the event

Technology at the mall

I had been to the Apple and the AT&T stores there and a few of Fritz Eichelberger’s regular tech socials here but during a recent visit to our local International Plaza I was impressed to see many more tech stores.

Hey, wasn’t brick and mortar was supposed to be dead by now? So I contacted Nina Mahoney, Marketing Director at the mall.

Here’s what she had to say

“Taubman Shopping Centers (owner/developer of International Plaza and Bay  Street) have changed over the last decade to become more destinations for both shopping and entertainment. 

People actually want to touch and feel the product which is so important  for fashion and electronics!  Any customer can order the various Apple items on-line, but they would rather see the new product now, experience  it and feel the item, talk to the professionals and buy the hot product now.

People come with friends and family to enjoy our many experiential stores (Disney's newest prototype store, Apple, Bose, Sony Style, Destination Maternity, Fit 2 Run. Lush, Sephora, MAC, etc.) along with a wide choice of 16 full service restaurants.  Many tell us they feel like they are on vacation while
shopping/dining at IP (shoppers call us IP)! 

IP has a lobby lounge appeal with beautiful furniture throughout for shoppers to relax and catch up on emails if necessary.  We've had mall-wide/parking lot wide wifi for over 5 years (free to Brighthouse Network customers); Starbucks and Yogurbella also have hot spots.

We also offer a highly interactive Children's Play Area that is also very educational. Families will travel past other shopping centers to bring their children to our play area.

We've hosted a number of Sharp touring events and a Sony Reader event; plus we were the first shopping center company (10 years and running) to create and sustain a weekly e-bulletin (e-blast) service for shopper who could customize which store offers they received.”

Photo Credit

Software Easter eggs

“Admit it: you're secretly jealous the kids get to have all the fun at Easter, searching for hidden (and edible) Easter egg surprises. Well, I'm here to help you get the thrill back -- sans the eating part. I'll show you how to unlock software Easter eggs: little games, jokes and shenanigans that programmers have hidden deep within their source code, activated by secret keyboard/mouse combinations.”

Check out David Ramel’s hunt. Happy Easter!

Photo Credit