New Florence. New Renaissance.

"Highly Autonomous Driving"

Popular Science has a gallery of smart cars of the future including the Audi AIDA Display

"The product of a joint venture with two Massachusetts Institute of Technology labs, AIDA feeds inputs from multiple sensors to a central artificial intelligence that “observes” your habits and behaviors and tailors your car’s performance to them. AIDA can learn your favorite routes and stops, remember and remind you of important events, and over time anticipate other desires; it might know, for instance, which day you like to go to the grocery store because that’s when the wild Alaskan salmon arrives."

 

“Islamic Science Rediscovered”

Exhibition now running at the Tech Museum in San Jose

“Long overlooked or often misattributed, the remarkable contributions of Muslim scholars in science and technology have quietly floundered as no more than common footnotes of world history. Visitors educated in the Western world will be surprised to learn of discoveries and inventions in the Muslim World which predate by years, sometimes centuries, discoveries thought to be developed in the West.”

The Social Business Index

“Erik’s (The Dachis CTO) team has built a platform that crunches hundreds of millions of data points in near real time to deliver a view on how social a given company is –  how they compare to their industry, their competitors – broken down as best in class by company, subsidiary, geography, department and brand. Culling from APIs, data buys, data partnerships, page scrapes, crowd-sourced data, company contributions, and our own internal data team, we now offer the Social Business Index (SBI) to anyone who wants to get a view into how your company’s brand is performing on the social web.  Over 100 leading companies participated in the early access program to get the data refined and help develop useful insights for its use.  The SBI offers insights for 26,000 brands from over 20,000 companies by analyzing over 100 million social accounts world wide, and hundreds of millions of other sources.”

Susan Scrupski on the Dachis Group blog

Photo Credit

The Startup Genome Compass

“Earlier this year, Blackbox released the Startup Genome Report, a 67-page analysis of more than 650 startups, created in collaboration with researchers from Stanford and Berkeley, that seeks to determine which startups succeed and fail, and why. Since then, they've expanded the report to include roughly 3,200 high-growth Internet startups, and based in part on that data, today launched the Startup Genome Compass (SGC), a benchmarking tool designed to help entrepreneurs keep track of their startups's progress and know what to do next.

Rather than make decisions based on an arbitrary whim or advice from others, SGC bases its recommendations on hard data. Every month, entrepreneurs can benchmark their startups. After filling out a questionnaire, SGC will automatically classify your startup by type and stage, compare it to other similar startups, and generate a personalized Genome Report across 25 key performance indicators, including metrics on your customer, product, and team value, as well as metrics related to your business model and finances.”

FastCompany

Photo Credit

Did Supercomputers predict the Arab Spring?

"A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt. (The photo below shows Media "sentiment" around Egypt fell dramatically in early 2011, just before the resignation of President Mubarak.)

While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict.

The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden's location."

BBC

The Amazon Strorefront: 7-Eleven?

As part of the test delivery system, when an Amazon package is delivered, the customer gets an email notification with a bar code. The email can be brought up on a smart phone and brought to the designated 7-Eleven location. At the store will be a system of lockers to store packages in, and a machine that can read the barcode. Once the barcode is scanned, the customer gets a PIN which can then be used to open the locker door for the package.

Consumer Reports

AT&T's Network of Possibilities

AT&T has more than 13 million emerging devices on its network - including those for health monitoring, pet and child tracking and other uses. Read more at USA Today. Thanks to Sameer Patel for bringing it to my attention.

This commercial shows other areas where AT&T is headed with its "network of possibilities"

 

Google's Energy Patterns

Google is the first major Web company to reveal exactly how much energy it uses—information that will help researchers and policy makers understand how the massive explosion of Internet usage and cloud computing is contributing to global energy consumption.

Google uses 260 million watts continuously across the globe....equivalent to the power used by all the homes in Richmond, Virginia, or Irvine, California (around 200,000 homes), and roughly a quarter of the output of a standard nuclear power plant.

(Stanford Prof) Koomey, who estimates that the company owns about 3 percent of servers worldwide and uses only 1 percent of electricity for data centers worldwide. "They're operating more efficiently than other data centers," he says.

MIT Technology Research

 

Technology at the 9/11 Memorial

Plenty of technology to go with the Memorial being unveiled today

A webcam of the Memorial and Museum

Google Earth has a 3D model of the Memorial and landscape of nearby New York downtown

The reflecting pools have technology from Siemens and Delta Fountains

3,000 plus names of those who died in the 1993 and 2001 attacks are inscribed on bronze panels on each side. The names are inscribed in such a way to allow light to shine through.

An on-line visitor pass reservation system (also allows for donations)

 

Google Catalogs

"Available now at Apple's App Store, Google Catalogs lets you flick your finger through 50-odd store catalogs, ranging from women's fashion and apparel, jewelry, beauty products and home décor and design to men's fashions, kids and baby clothing and gift ideas. Many familiar brands are offered, including the likes of Macy's, L.L. Bean, Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Urban Outfitters, Patagonia, Fossil and Bare Necessities.

Users can view catalogs by theme, month, featured catalogs or those tagged as "favorites."

Once you tap to open the catalog, it takes a couple of seconds to load (just the first time) and you'll flick from right to left to turn the pages, pinch to zoom in and out for greater detail or tap on the small white tags for more information. This extra info includes close-up photos of the product (usually in multiple colors and/or designs), price, description, links to buy online or find a store nearby by loading Google Maps from within the app."

USA Today