New Florence. New Renaissance.

The Auto-Mobile is here

“Google isn’t the only company with driverless cars on the road. Indeed, just about every traditional automaker is developing its own self-driving model, peppering Silicon Valley with new R&D labs to work on the challenge. Last year, a BMW drove itself down the Autobahn, from Munich to Ingolstadt (“the home of Audi,” as BMW’s Dirk Rossberg told me at the company’s outpost in Mountain View, California). Audi sent an autonomous vehicle up Pikes Peak, while VW, in conjunction with Stanford, is building a successor to Junior. At the Tokyo Auto Show in November, Toyota unveiled its Prius AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), which can be summoned remotely. GM’s Alan Taub predicts that self-driving cars will be on the road by the decade’s end. Groups like the Society of Automotive Engineers have formed special committees to draft autonomous-vehicle standards. Even Neil Young is getting in on the act: Roboticist Paul Perrone has been busily revamping the rocker’s ’59 Lincoln Continental to drive itself. “Everyone thinks this is coming,” says Clifford Nass, director of Stanford’s Revs Program.”

Wired

The Energy Star “Most Efficient”

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is pleased to announce the final 2012 recognition criteria for the Most Efficient of ENERGY STAR. In the second year of this pilot effort, eight product categories will be eligible for recognition: air-source heat pumps, boilers, central air conditioners, clothes washers, furnaces, geothermal heat pumps, refrigerator-freezers, and televisions.”

see more of the letter here

Seven equations that rule our world

“THE alarm rings. You glance at the clock. The time is 6.30 am. You haven't even got out of bed, and already at least six mathematical equations have influenced your life. The memory chip that stores the time in your clock couldn't have been devised without a key equation in quantum mechanics. Its time was set by a radio signal that we would never have dreamed of inventing were it not for James Clerk Maxwell's four equations of electromagnetism. And the signal itself travels according to what is known as the wave equation.”

The New Scientist article (sub required) then goes into details of the 7 equations below

The Real Star Show

While the stars mingle at the Oscars, The Moon, Venus and Mercury are aligned in the night sky

Photo Credit John Green and the ULAO project

The NBA Tech All Star

Orlando hosts the NBA All Star game on Sunday. Even more impressive was the participation in the tech summit this past Friday – CNN, Cisco, Disney, ESPN, eBay, Youtube, Zynga and so many more giants from media, gaming, consumer tech

Back to the future at Daytona

After clinging to carburetors for decades after they were regularly found in passenger cars, NASCAR finally is making the switch to fuel injection.

It was a major change for teams and their engine builders, making right now an exciting time for guys like engine builders. Doug Yates, the CEO of Roush Yates Engines, said he has more data than ever to analyze and can make far more adjustments to affect the engines' performance.

"It's very exciting from an engine builder and an engineer's perspective, having new technology in NASCAR." Yates said

Huffington Post

Photo Credit

Yes there is an app for that - even an Oscar nominee

William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg used to work at Pixar. They've since taken their movie and tech knowledge and started their own venture, Moonbot Studios. You'll hear a lot about them -- and Moonbot -- soon, because Oldenburg and Joyce are Oscar nominees. (

Moonbot's animated short, called "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," has been nominated for the golden statue.  It's the studio's first project, and it comes with its own app.

Yes, a movie with its own app Not just a website, a full-blown, interact-with-the-characters app. Moonbot's founders are as into their animation skills as they are the mobile technology side of things.

NBC

Photo Credit: Apple

Book Excerpt: Endgame – “Welcome to the NFL”

I am excerpting on this blog roughly 10% of my next book, The New Technology Elite due out in late March (and available for pre-order on Amazon – see badge on left) . This is the final summary chapter in the book.

Charlie Feld, whom we introduced in Chapter 15, should be long retired. In the past three decades, as CIO at Frito-Lay, then at the firm he founded, The Feld Group, he influenced IT at countless companies. He has since formed the Feld Group Institute, which tells his view of the technology world on its website:

“The journey of (technology) innovation and sophistication has been nothing short of breathtaking. What has not been so spectacular has been the evolution and maturing of a management framework that would enable the efficient application of these rich technologies within large enterprises. Every
decade these enterprises have become more dependent on IT but the potential still far exceeds the ability of most organizations, industries and governments to harvest IT.”

He says, in an interview, IT in most companies has become one dimensional, and is often just cost or compliance focused. “In the big leagues, you cannot choose to play just defense or just offense. You have to build teams with multiple roles and skills.”

“Welcome to the NFL,” says Feld.

Elite Technology Teams

The National Football League is a good analogy for building elite technology
teams. In the NFL, for any given play a team cannot have more than 11 players on the field. A team roster is 53 players, although on game day only 45 can be declared active. There are offensive units, defensive units, and special teams. There are at least 20 different roles including quarterbacks, guards, defensive ends, and placekickers. There are countless coaches who help hone the skills of the already elite athletes who play at the professional level.

Beyond the IT skills where Feld calls for attention, as we have seen in earlier chapters, an elite technology team needs great industrial designers like Jonathan Ive at Apple. It needs superb talent like Tony Prophet at HP to manage logistics in the complex global technology supply chain. It needs more of those operational geniuses like Jim Miller at Google to manage hyperefficient data centers and real estate in a world where physical presence continues to be hugely important. It needs economists like Todd Stockard at Valence Health who are comfortable with morphing business models, financial executives like Gordon Coburn at Cognizant, who can drive out massive waste in technology spending. It needs attorneys like Benjamin Kern because legal design often trumps product design in technology markets. It needs marketing folks like Jerry Grasso at Lexmark who are socially savvy. It needs “crossover” executives who have experiences at technology vendors and users like Tony Scott at Microsoft and Vijay Ravindran at The Washington Post Co.

The NFL is an appropriate analogy in other ways. The league defines rules for drafting players and recruiting free agents. It has other rules for player decorum on the field and off. It has rules for everything. We are about to enter a phase of more tech-savvy regulators and market watchers. We saw glimpses of government efficiency and innovation in the examples of the country of Estonia, the Hillsborough County Tax Collector’s Office, and Roosevelt Island. As Robert Hoffman points out in Chapter 18, “Tech-savvy policymakers are coming of age. The twentysomethings that first connected Capitol Hill to the information superhighway are now in positions of authority.”

NFL commentary has evolved significantly with instant replays, Skycam angles, and other technology. When 3M showcases its “Periodic Table,” with its 46 technology platforms, technology analysts can only become savvier. There are plenty of blogs and smaller specialty analyst firms that are defining new rules for the watched and the market watchers.

The NFL analogy rings true even more after the 2011 owner-player dispute. As the months-long lockout ended, the Players Association issued a video featuring 13 players from various teams delivering personal messages to fans thanking them for their patience and support. The society surrounding the NFL with fans and their “fantasy leagues,” the players union, the cities that host the stadiums, and the charities the teams support all significantly influence the game. In the same way, the society around technology is complex and varied. There are thorny ethical, legal, and other issues we will increasingly have to factor in to our technology design.

Any Given Sunday

Chapter 20 showed a letter that Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, sent to his shareholders and it is full of technology terms and trends. Amazon is definitely a technology elite company. It is the largest online retailer. Its Kindle, eBook sales, and Amazon Web Services revenues make up 10 percent of its revenues and are some of the fastest growing products in its store. It would be fair to say that Amazon focuses today as much on Apple and Google, as it does on Walmart or Sears or Barnes & Noble.

To net it out, Amazon has a wide range of attributes that allow it to compete on multiple fronts: offense, defense, and special teams. The seesaw battle between Amazon and Walmart has been fascinating to watch. In 1999 Walmart sued then fledgling Amazon for hiring several of its technology and logistics executives. Nonetheless, Walmart seemed unstoppable. BusinessWeek asked in 2002, “Will Wal-Mart Take Over the World?,” giving credit to its extremely sophisticated use of information technology.

By 2007, that technology advantage had shrunk. A technology fund manager observed, “For years,Walmart was held up as a shining example of cutting-edge thinking in retail technology. But today, when I hear about a retailer doing something cutting edge, it’s never Walmart being talked about.”

For a while, Walmart’s online business sputtered while Amazon’s exploded: “Walmart’s lackluster online history has deep cultural roots. The organization has long been dominated by store managers who feared e-commerce could cannibalize in-store sales, and thus their bonuses, according to a former Walmart.com senior executive.”

Now, in a turnaround, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, are running @Walmartlabs “to speed with innovations such as smartphone payment technology, mobile shopping applications, and Twitter influenced product selection for stores.” Yes, these are the same executives who founded Junglee, which Amazon acquired in 1998, and were influential in those formative days at Amazon. Walmart, Sears, Barnes & Noble, and other traditional retailers are also trying to fight Amazon (and other Internet retailers) by lobbying for taxes on Internet sales (an attractive proposition to many states in these fiscally strapped times) and on sales by its affiliates. They are also wooing its affiliates to join their ecosystems.

And that brings us to another concept the NFL has encouraged— “parity.” It has salary caps across teams. Weaker teams get to draft better players the next year. There are few “dynasties.” So, Amazon’s advantage may be as fleeting as was Walmart’s. Technology may have its own version of parity. This is giving rise to “Phoenix” strategies.” In Chapter 3, we saw several examples like Aircell, Delta Airlines, GM, and others where technology is giving them a fighting chance to regain past glory.

The Coming Upheaval

We live in exciting times. To some degree the current landscape is the throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, when we dreamed of competitive advantage through technology. Sabre, the American reservation system, and American Hospital Supply were spoken of fondly for changing their industries.We have a similar opportunity now, but in most organizations the IT group is much more focused on the back office, not on product or revenue or growth.

In reverse, we have technology vendors with an entitlement mindset. Even as Apple and Amazon have shown dramatic business model innovation, too many technology vendors continue with older business models, and feel entitled to their compensation levels. So they cling to 90 percent software gross margins, $5,000 a gallon for printer ink, and 50 percent margins on so-called cheap offshore talent. Either they learn to disrupt themselves or they will get disrupted.

Dramatic changes are needed if you aim to become one of the technology elite.

And a Final Word from Coach Bear Bryant

Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, one of the most revered football coaches, was quoted as saying: “Show class, have pride, and display character. If
you do, winning takes care of itself.” Unfortunately, technology, with the riches and recognition it brings, also seems to bring plenty of arrogance. Coach Bryant’s words are more good advice for building an elite technology team.

Conclusion

Beyond the 12 attributes we discussed in Part II, more demanding regulators
and market watchers and changing societal expectations are all going to influence our definition of technology elite in the near future. 3M’s “Periodic Table,” Amazon’s technology-rich shareholder letter, UPS’s self-definition of being “half a transportation company, half a technology company,” Apple’s benchmarks for retail excellence are the language the technology elite will increasingly use with many of their stakeholders—their customers, investors, regulators, and society at large.

The "Nike Spring"

Nike's "Galaxy" Air Foamposite Ones caused a riot at the Florida Mall in Orlando yesterday. They were introduced to align with the NBA All-Star games here this weekend. 

A year after the Arab Spring, we are fighting for truly innovative products:)

 

Weight Watcher’s New Formula

This new formula distinguishes among calories and ascribes values to a given food based on its makeup of protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat. From an eater’s perspective, the formula brings both good and bad news. Members receive more points under the new system. But many foods cost more points now, including alcohol. The name change—from Points to PointsPlus—may have made the program sound like a minor upgrade, but the kernel underneath is entirely new. The program has effectively declared war on processed foods, which include obvious targets like breakfast pastries and fast food. But it also makes enemies of seemingly benign (or even healthy) foods, like orange juice.

Oranges, on the contrary, are encouraged. In fact, they’re absolutely “free,” zero points, as are all other fruits and most vegetables. That’s because they offer a lot of food per calorie and are loaded with fiber, which makes us feel full even though it passes through the body essentially unprocessed.

Wired