New Florence. New Renaissance.

From Space, everyone can hear you scream

UrtheCast’s (pronounced Earthcast) 4.5-foot-long camera, designed to handle the radiation and extreme temperatures of orbit, will record 90-second videos 150 times a day as the spacecraft circles the planet, Larson says. A second camera will continuously snap still photos. Together, the stills will cover a 47.3-kilometer-wide swath of the planet and generate 2.5 terabytes of data a day, the equivalent of about 270 full-length movies. UrtheCast’s engineers will condense and post the visuals to the company’s website an hour or two later. “With our images, you can see things moving and changing,” Larson says.

Powered by the space station, UrtheCast will be able to shoot images at night, something existing providers’ solar-powered satellites don’t do, Larson says. “That’s something unique. There’s a great application potential,” says Timothy Puckorius, chief executive officer of Earth Observation Technologies, which plans to act as UrtheCast’s account manager for some government clients.

BusinessWeek

 

The Water Challenge

Bloomberg Businessweek Chairman Norman Pearlstine and his panel: Ahmet Bozer, President, Coca-Cola International (KO); Jae So, Manager, World Bank Water and Sanitation Program; Carlos Riva, CEO, Poseidon Water; Thomas Powers, Commissioner of Water Management, Chicago; and Jeff Sterba, President and CEO, American Water.

"Well, desalination is used all over the world, generally for very specific applications. Naval ships use it. But the scale that we’re talking about—our plant in California will supply about 8 percent of San Diego County’s water."

"In Chicago a quarter of our distribution system is over 100 years old. That manifests itself to everyday people in the form of breaks and leakage. From 1890 to 1920 we were installing water mains at a rate of about 75 miles a year. And over the last 10 years we were only replacing them at about 30 miles a year. With our new program, over the next decade, we’re going to replace nearly 1,000 miles of water main. And just in doing that, we conservatively estimate that we’ll be able to provide enough water for an additional 400,000 residents."

"One of the reasons that in developing countries water utilities cannot make ends meet is that people don’t pay their water bills. And these are sometimes the most powerful people in the country. (Laughs.) Ek Sonn Chan, who runs the Phnom Penh Water utility in Cambodia, looked at the situation and realized that there was no way he could make the utility viable until customers started paying. And he started cutting people off. He cut off the military. He cut off the powerful ministers."

"In many countries where the World Bank works, agricultural water is essentially free, or very, very low-cost. At some point, if we’re providing water to the same rural communities but the farmers get it for free, you will find situations where the farmers will then sell the water they get to the municipalities and the villages for human consumption."

More in article here

 

 

The Space Race

One of the most vexing problems in space research is that so little has changed in 50 years about the way we get to space. Consequently, space access remains both expensive and rare. It has still not reached the stage where scientists can themselves routinely travel there to conduct research, unlike oceanographers, who routinely reach the deep ocean, or geophysicists, who venture to the poles.

All this is poised to change. The advent of for-profit commercial spaceflight—most recently highlighted by the successful launches of the Dragon space cargo capsule, built and operated by SpaceX, to the International Space Station (ISS)—will likely transform space research. Scientists will enjoy lower launch costs, far more frequent access to space and the opportunity to personally run their experiments in orbit. These advances will not only help the big space research enterprises at NASA and the Japanese and the European space agencies, they will also probably make space access affordable to a broad, global base of nations, academic institutions and corporations.

Scientific American (sub required)

click image to enlarge

The Big Data of the NFL draft

Each NFL team runs between 60 and 70 offensive plays a game. Another 10-15 special plays.  Multiply that by 18 players a play ( 9 offensive, 9 defensive). Vary that by unique situations – injuries, how far behind a team is, the audibles a quarterback calls which affect availability of players for next few plays. Multiply that by 16 games a season, 4 in pre-season. Players retire, contracts end – the talent management challenge is constant and complex.

The annual NFL draft (which ended last night) is a major source of new talent for teams. The data they have on each player is impressive. 4 years of college stats. Many more – 40 yard dash, bench press, vertical leap – from the annual NFL Combine (like in graph below)

The NFL draft was designed to bring “parity” to the league so the weakest teams get the early picks. But there are all kinds of trades. So, you end up with an unequal scenario this year where “of the 254 picks, the San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks and Green Bay Packers each made 11, tied for the most by any team. Those three franchises all reached the Divisional Playoffs in 2012.”

And you thought Geno Smith’s ill advised tweets or Manti Te’o’s imaginary girl friend affected their draft chances? Maybe – but likely very small factors compared to the mountain of data the teams crunched through in making their choices.

Seoul: City in major hurry

It is the new can’t-miss building in the heart of Seoul. Like the bandages on a plastic-surgery patient, the last of the protective fencing has been peeled away to reveal the capital’s latest architectural creation. City Hall, a vintage vestige of South Korea’s ruthless onetime colonial overlord Japan, has been restored. Over a cold stone shoulder, as formidable as the all-powerful mayor who works within, now rises a tsunami of glass and steel, the future poised to obliterate the past in the next 60 seconds. It took five months to build. This is the new face of Seoul.

“Pali! Pali!” everybody likes to say. Faster! Faster! South Korea has been sprinting down the road to recovery since the end of the Korean War. As fast as PSY’s “Gangnam Style” anthem, mocking Seoul’s Ferrari-and-furs nouveaux riches, galloped to the top of the Western music charts this year, the city has emerged as one of the most hip (and most underrated) cultural capitals in the world. Cruise-line-proportioned flagships, architecturally bombastic headquarters, museums celebrating traditional houses to handbags, haute and hot restaurants are all competing for the attention of its 10 million increasingly affluent residents.

NY Times Magazine

The Tesla Mobile App

Ray Wang gave me a demo in Orlando last week of the Tesla mobile app which allows you to "interact with your Model S to monitor charging, pre-condition your car on very hot or cold days, and even honk the horn to find your Model S in a crowded parking lot."

I think he honked his Model S in California because he said his wife texted him "cut it out".

Demos always cause trouble :)

Photo Credit - Ray Wang

 

Infor-Art

Every visit I make to an Infor faciility - as in the NY HQ earlier this year - or event - as in Inforum this  week, I am blown away by the aesthetics in every aspect of its operations. The excellent taste of CEO Charles Phillips and creativity of executives like Chip Coyle and Marc Scibelli and the imprint of the captive agency, Hook and Loop is pervasive:

The NY HQ - the stunning lobby

The Innovation Hub at Inforum - the white couches spread around the event provided a nice contrast to the Infor logo reds

The growing ads at major airports

The User Experience of the software

The broader role of Hook and Loop, the captive agency

Photo Credits: Infor

Mondevideo's startups

FastCompany

Tiny Uruguay has such a small local market, companies there must think globally. Luckily, they're prepared to do so: Local education rates are rising, and expats such as Wi-Fi pioneer Pablo Brenner are returning. (He founded the country's first VC firm, Prosperitas Capital Partners.) These are some of the winners in this emerging tech hub.

Inetsat: A full-service TV content distributor, providing a platform, low-cost servers, and cloud-based monitoring to local TV networks at reduced cost.

Cubox: A software development studio founded by Evan Henshaw-Plath, who was also the first employee at Odeo, the company that would become Twitter.

Clinixon: A low-cost, cloud-based system for small health clinics to monitor their patients' progress.

Photo Credit

Digital Marketing and Talent

Fascinating interview with Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, co-CEOs of the talent agency, William Morris Endeavor which shows the continuing power of creative talent and content even as digital media takes many twists and turns.

"All this disruption to distribution is good for us, because content matters more, and therefore as agents we have more power.

We define content very broadly. Representing chefs, designers, makeup artists--it's all important. How do you think about their business in multiple distribution platforms? Do you need Vogue? Could you have a makeup artist and a fashion person and a thing that's taking care of the technology to create opportunity for clients in a different way? That's the kind of thing we think about all day.

You're defining Hollywood as the movie business! We sit in the entertainment business, and that goes from Chill and Uber all the way up to the movies.

When everyone has Internet-connected televisions, it's gonna be the Wild, Wild West. Is there going to be a Coke app then? Is Coke gonna then have some of its own original stuff? Will they buy that stuff? Music? Will Coke come to us? Will they do it themselves? Will there be a Rihanna channel, like there is right now? That's why we've created the Audience [a social media management firm]. How is all of this going to be discovered? Platforms like Path, which we're an investor in, and Facebook, Google+, and Tumblr enable discovery through social. But we are not going to pick a horse right now. We want to see how it evolves. The great thing is that the "dying" business, this traditional business that we're all in? It's pretty fxxxin' good"

Test-Tube Meat

But producing in vitro meat — muscle tissue that’s cultured from animal cells and grown in a laboratory — has none of those hang-ups. In fact, it’s mouthwateringly efficient compared with existing methods of meat production, using 45% less energy and 99% less land, according to some estimates. It’s even endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In 2008 the advocacy group promised a $1 million prize to the first producer that could mass-market lab-grown meat — proof that vegetarians who currently shun pork might be open to, say, lab-grown bacon.

Nobody has claimed that prize yet. But physiologist Mark Post and his team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who have already grown small amounts of meat tissue, say they’re months away from producing the first in vitro burger. Their challenge — aside from convincing consumers that lab meat isn’t as gross as it sounds — will be cost. Proper cell cultivation is pricey (development expenses for the burger are estimated at north of $100,000), so it’ll be tough to scale with conventional farming, which produces 50 billion hamburgers each year in the U.S

Time