New Florence. New Renaissance.

Next book update

The book is going through the publisher's edit cycles, with eta in stores end of January. It is anchored around 12 attributes of what I define as the tech elite and fleshed out by 17 case studies and 4 guest columns. The case studies are roughly half tech companies – operational aspects from Apple, Google, HP, Lexmark etc – and half tech “consumers” that are embedding tech in their products and services – UPS, 3M, Virgin America, Boeing etc. The guest columns are by CIOs, tech attorneys and professors. The chapters themselves have other examples from over 100 countries/industries.  The book has been invigorating – so much innovation in so many areas. Hope to share the countless “wows” with my readers. I will start blogging selected excerpts from the book starting next week.

Kinect and 3D Tracking, Reconstruction, and Interaction

"This project investigates techniques to track the 6DOF position of handheld depth sensing cameras, such as Kinect, as they move through space and perform high quality 3D surface reconstructions for interaction."

Microsoft Research

 

The Amazon Fire

"The Kindle Fire tablet doesn't quite match the aesthetics of an iPad. It doesn't sport the same delicate curves or metallic body, for example. But most people won't care. What's most exciting is that it comes close to matching the iPad experience for a fraction of the price—$199 compared to $499 for the basic iPad 2—and it offers easy access to Amazon's vast array of digital content.

Like the iPad, the Fire has a color touch screen, can play video, and runs apps. It uses Google's Android operating system, but it's a heavily modified version of that system, so the experience is very different from that on other Android tablets. But the most important difference is Amazon's use of cloud technology and the content libraries it's built up over the last few years to deliver content to the Fire."

MIT Technology Review

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