New Florence. New Renaissance.

Campuses: The Valley's Next Design Frontier

It seems Apple’s (AAPL) design-obsessed co-founder may have another enduring legacy besides the trendsetting gadgets his company produces. Since Jobs presented plans for new headquarters shaped like a giant spaceship (photo below) to the Cupertino City Council two years ago, several other cash-flush tech companies, including Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG), Samsung Electronics, and Nvidia (NVDA), have released blueprints for monumental new campuses. Although each appears to be its own unique architectural wonder—not surprising considering the high-wattage talent tapped for these projects—they all share an eco-consciousness that could become the most distinctive feature of this new West Coast aesthetic.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

QR Wall Paper

“For the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov lined the 12m x 12m Russian Pavilion with hundreds of QR codes. "They may look ornamental, but QR codes are packed with information," says Tchoban, 50. "We decided to use this to explain Skolkovo, the new Silicon Valley of Russia."

The pair are master planners of Skolkovo -- a high-technology business area currently being built near Moscow. Their pavilion uses 35 unique codes, each of which contains information about the digital city, due for completion in 2017.”

Wired UK

The Reinvention of Search

Multiple companies are developing search businesses with a vertical (i.e., market) orientation. These businesses are becoming significant, and most of them do not belong to Google. This phenomenon is somewhat stealthy because these vertical search businesses usually don’t advertise themselves as “search”.

Forbes

The article discusses Kayak, Amazon, LinkedIn and others

Photo Credit: Kayak.com

Seattle: Cloud capital of the world

Google plans a major recruiting effort to increase its Seattle-area engineering staff by as much as five times. There is already fierce competition among tech companies for talented engineers, and many of those with skills in cloud computing work at Google’s rivals in Seattle (at Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure)

“We’re not the first in this rodeo, but we have the history of Google,” said Brian Goldfarb, Google’s leader of cloud platform marketing, who joined the company last year after a decade at Microsoft. “We have the best data centers on the planet. You can’t really give engineers a bigger, badder thing to work on.”

New York Times

Photo Credit from Google's Kirkland campus

Tech in Fortune’s Corporation All-Stars

Apple, Google and Amazon are 1,2,3 in Fortune’s list of most admired corporations. IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, Intel, Accenture, EBay, Facebook and Cisco also make the list of 50.

50 Shades of Caffeine

(Caffeine) now comes in so many forms that it’s hard to keep up: soft drinks, obviously, but also energy drinks, energy shots, chewing gum, sports gels, and nasal sprays. In all of them, the marquee ingredient is a white powder, delivered to our bloodstreams by a sophisticated global supply chain that few of us know anything about.

The scale of this industry is as eye-opening as a NoDoz. Americans plow through more than 15 million pounds of powdered caffeine annually—enough to fill a freight train 2 miles long, all 270 cars loaded to the brim.

Wired

Click on graph twice to enlarge

The Big Data of the Japanese tsunami

On the second anniversary of the disaster, The Japan Times reports

"Some information technology firms, media organizations and manufacturers combined resources last September for a project called Shinsai Big Data. Shinsai means “earthquake disaster,” and the “big data” is the information that was tracked on that fateful day from mobile phones, car navigation systems and social media. The volume was massive, and making sense of all the darting vectors and spinning integers is a daunting task, but experts in various information and infrastructure disciplines has been sifting through it all, not only to understand what happened on the ground that day but also what sort of measures can be implemented to prevent the same scale of suffering when it happens again."

"There were 180 million tweets in Japan on 3/11. How should the authorities sort through such a mass of information? What sort of privacy considerations do they need to follow with regard to cellphone and GPS readings? Should it be made available to conventional media? Or are TV and radio less useful than they are thought to be? One of the more chilling findings of the Big Data project is that in the aftermath of the nuclear-plant accident some people actually moved toward areas of heavier fallout in response to mainstream media reports, which, due to their organizational size, are less nimble and flexible than targeted social media. Knowing what to pay attention to could save a lot of lives."

 

Fan-alytics

Williams has all that information. He’s spent the past three years developing new camera software that scans facial expressions to identify fan behaviors — think cheering, jeering, talking on a cell phone — in real time at a stadium. So a company can measure, for example, how many eyeballs are attached to a Jumbotron ad (are fans looking?) and how well it’s being received (are they laughing? Smiling? Fiddling on their phones and ignoring it?).

In other words, it’s like Nielsen ratings for crowd behavior at a sports event. Says one NFL executive, who watched Williams unveil his creation at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference in early March: “That information is incredibly valuable.”

Time

Click image twice to enlarge

Technology and St. Patrick's Day

(San Francisco) Mayor Lee will march in the St Patrick’s Day Cork (Ireland) parade, and on the previous day (Saturday 16th ) using Cisco TelePresence will virtually lead the San Francisco parade via a live stream to the crowds watching on their mobile devices and smartphones in San Francisco’s Civic Plaza.

It’s the first time a Mayor will lead St Patrick’s Day parades on both sides of the Atlantic, and it’s just one part of a fun and technology packed weekend that could see Cork become a ‘future city’.

WebWire

Meanwhile, Skobbler, creators of the mobile navigation app GPS Navigation 2 for the iPhone, reviewed its data library to determine the most popular New York City bars for celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Based on GPS search queries from last year's holiday, the company determined that the top three bars in (San Francisco) descending order were O'Reilly's, 622 Green St.(in graph below); the Chieftain Irish Pub & Restaurant, 198 5th St.; and Kells Irish Restaurant & Bar, 530 Jackson St.

And AVG Technologies (AVG) used the occasion of St. Patrick's Day to promote its AVG AntiVirus Free for Android software, which allows you to lock, locate and remotely wipe data from your smartphone (not unlikely people will lose their phones on the day of merriment)

Investor's Business Daily

Photo Credit

 

Evolving security beyond anti-virus

“Rather than using a blacklist to block known threats—the conventional method employed by antivirus software—FireEye works by assuming everything is suspect and testing programs in a safe “sandbox” before allowing them to run on a machine. In November, the CEO of the major security vendor McAfee left to join FireEye, which claims that nearly 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies are its customers and has raised more than $100 million in venture capital funds.

FireEye is far from the only startup gaining traction as malware becomes more targeted and as the latest methods of the most sophisticated hackers become more quickly democratized and disseminated.”

MIT Technology Review

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