New Florence. New Renaissance.

Zynga’s hybrid and highly elastic Cloud

Zynga, the social gaming company famous for FarmVille and popularity with Facebook users launched CityVille in 2010.

“IT staff watched participation on CityVille build slowly the first few days—at that pace, it might have taken two years to reach the first million participants. Then registration started to ramp up. Four months after launch, CityVille had brought 20 million new users to Zynga’s daily computing workload. Planning data center capacity for that kind of unpredictability is a slippery exercise. That’s why Zynga instead launches games using Amazon’s EC2 infrastructureas a service, so it pays only for the capacity it uses and is ready for spikes. But that’s not the end of the story. Once a game hits a more predictable level, Zynga brings it in house, onto what it calls Z Cloud, servers it runs using a private cloud architecture similar to what Amazon runs.”

InformationWeek

Innovation in European postal services

“Some of these newly energized mail services used the savings to pursue new business lines. Deutsche Post bought DHL, a package deliverer that competes with FedEx and UPS. "More than half of our workforce is outside of Germany," says Markus Reckling, executive vice-president for corporate development at Deutsche Post. "It's pretty much the same thing for our profits."

Many used their extra cash to create digital mail products that allow customers to send and receive letters from their computers. Itella, the Finnish postal service, keeps a digital archive of its users' mail for seven years and helps them pay bills online securely. Swiss Post lets customers choose if they want their mail delivered at home in hard copy or scanned and sent to their preferred Internet-connected device. Customers can also tell Swiss Post if they would rather not receive items such as junk mail.

Sweden's Posten has an app that lets customers turn digital photos on their mobile phones into postcards. It is unveiling a service that will allow cell-phone users to send letters without stamps. Posten will text them a numerical code that they can jot down on envelopes in place of a stamp for a yet-to-be-determined charge. “

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit

On Memorial Day

Photo Credit below  Vietnam Veterans Memorial

ReadWriteWeb's collection of how tech is changing the military - obviously there is plenty more which is classified

U.S. Army Turns to Social Media to Recruit

Army Develops Android Phone for Battlefield

Using Public Data to Fight a War

U.S. Military Can Restore a Country's Internet - Whether It Likes It or Not

iPhone App Lets Soldiers Map Their Battlefields

DARPA and Raytheon Building New Ad-Hoc Mobile Network for the Military

 Android Phones Go to War

Military-Grade Augmented Reality Could Redefine Modern Warfare

 

 

Religious War: iPhone vs Android phones

I happen to have an Android phone – the HTC EVO - and think it has one overwhelming advantage – the Sprint 4G network, but here is Business Insider’s view of 10 things iOS does better.

How our cars have benefited from Indy 500 innovations

“From rearview mirrors to turbochargers, devices first tried on sleek and powerful racers in the past 100 years have become part of our plainest sedans.”

USAToday

Photo Credit

Travel & Leisure’s Coolest New Tourist Adventures

“Take 11 11 Lincoln Road, for example. The word “garage” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Dreamt up by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron, it’s better described as a modernist, open-air “parking sculpture.” The eye-catching mixed-use venue has become Miami’s it-spot for dinner parties and events while its hip shops, restaurants, and public art lure daytime crowds.

Another traditional, everyday space—the plaza—has been radically made over in Seville. Architect Jürgen Mayer’s trippy, fantastical design for the Plaza de la Encarnacíon looks like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The undulating blonde timber structures have a honeycomb roof that shelters a marketplace, bars, and archaeological exhibits. It gives both locals and tourists a new reason to explore Seville’s medieval center and corresponds to a greater design awareness.”

Read/see more here including Abu Dhabi’s Capital Gate in photo

Around the SuiteWorld in 3 minutes

OK, so much smaller and much less splash than the Sapphire event I wrote about earlier in week, but for a first event and a much much smaller company, NetSuite had plenty of innovations to announce at its SuiteWorld earlier in May. Here are some of the highlights.

 

 

NYC’s Digital Future

This initial report crafted by the city’s new Chief Digital Officer, Rachel Sterne and of course the Mayor makes interesting reading.

Google: From Paper Mill to Efficient Data Center

"(Google's) new data center in Hamina, Finland, takes advantages of the facility's surrounding environment by using ocean water to cool its servers.

Google Senior Director of Datasite Construction and Operations, Joe Kava, relays that the building, purchased in 2009, was actually a paper mill that came equipped with granite tunnels for sucking in water."

Techland

 

 

Under Armour’s Smart Shirt

“It weighs less than 4.5 oz and is made from the same material as the rest of the company’s line of compression-based apparel.

Yet just below the sternum, the shirt also contains a removable sensor pack called a “bug” that holds a triaxial accelerometer, a processor and 2 gigabytes of storage. The information collected can be broadcast via Bluetooth to smartphones, iPads and laptops so that scouts and trainers can view the power and efficiency of each athlete’s movements. Heart-rate and breathing-rate monitors are placed on both sides of the sensor pack, helping to gather even more intel from the body’s core.”

Wired