New Florence. New Renaissance.

Art by a thousand cuts

Standley, 44, starts by sketching the geometry of a piece on paper, then drawing its four key layers in CorelDRAW vector-graphics software. The rest of his craft is progressing between those way-points by drawing intermediate paper layers. "That's where the left side of the brain takes over and I get into the tiny detail." Standley's largest piece, Demeter, (in photo) is 134 layers deep and took three months to make. He's not worried about his niche being commodified, though: "It's not like everyone has a laser."

Wired UK

Photo Credit

Google's Moonshot Factory

"As the polymath engineers and scientists who work there are fond of saying, Google X is the search giant’s factory for moonshots, those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things. Google X (the official spelling is Google [x]) is home to the self-driving car initiative and the Internet-connected eyeglasses, Google Glass, among other improbable projects."

"The biggest moonshot of all may be the skunk works itself: With X, Google has created a laboratory whose mandate is to come up with technologies that sound more like plot contrivances from Star Trek than products that might satisfy the short-term demands of Google’s shareholders. “Google X is very consciously looking at things that Google in its right mind wouldn’t do,” says Richard DeVaul, a “rapid evaluator” at the lab. “They built the rocket pad far away from the widget factory, so if the rocket blows up, it’s hopefully not disrupting the core business.”"

"Google X seeks to be an heir to the classic research labs, such as the ­Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb, and Bletchley Park, where code breakers cracked German ciphers and gave birth to modern cryptography. After the war, the spirit of these efforts was captured in pastoral corporate settings: AT&T’s Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, for example, became synony­mous with breakthroughs (the transistor and the personal computer among them) and the inability of each company to capitalize on them."

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit

Infrascanner 2000

After years of testing, the U.S. Military is ready to implement a handheld device that detects brain bleeding immediately after a traumatic event, such as a vehicle accident or explosion. The Infrascanner 2000 uses infrared light to determine if a person has a brain hematoma or bleeding. Infrared light penetrates up to three centimeters into the head and detects the optical density, which is different for hematomas compared to a healthy brain. It gives a positive or negative reading in about two minutes.

Prompt medical care after a traumatic injury can be the difference between life and death -- what's known as the "golden hour." That hour is even more precarious for soldiers injured in combat who may be far from a hospital. With the Infrascanner, combat medics can assess patients to see who needs urgent medical attention, possibly saving lives and resources.

Fortune

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McKinsey's "Disruptive Dozen"

a report from the McKinsey Global Institute, cuts through the noise and identifies 12 technologies that could drive truly massive economic transformations and disruptions in the coming years. The report also looks at exactly how these technologies could change our world, as well as their benefits and challenges, and offers guidelines to help leaders from businesses and other institutions respond.

VC for Spytech

Fortune (sub required) on some of In-Q-Tel's portfolio

Palantir builds tools that can bring massive amounts of disparate data into one place, allowing users to find patterns -- in phone records and financial transactions, for example -- that would otherwise be invisible.

(Sonitus Medical) is developing a miniature wireless-communication device that sits in a person's mouth where no one can see it. (Photo of its SoundBite in the mouth hearing device which uses bone conduction to imperceptibly transmit sound via the teeth)

Oculis software uses a webcam to check whether anyone nearby is looking at a computer screen and, if so, alerts the user with a pop-up window.

(Adapx's) digital pens allow users to record information in real time, then connect the pen to a PC or cellphone and share the info.

These are the good old days

With all the doom and gloom around us it is easy to forget what a remarkable life we enjoy when it comes to comfort, health, food, appliances and more. I have long said this is what Florence must have felt like during the Renaissance (hint - this blog's title for last 8 years)

Here's 31 charts which will make you smile that you are alive today, including my favorite below. It's good to be Moen, Kohler, Grohe, Toto and others who make the nice spas and even the humble showerheads.

Thanks to Steve Wendler for the pointer.

Migrating Old Home Movies to the Cloud

"Surrounded by chip companies and Web startups, YesVideo’s 25,000-square-foot Santa Clara production facility sticks out. It hums with the staccato rhythms of old movie projectors and slide carousels. There’s dedicated floor space for VHS, Betamax, 16mm, and Super 8 film, and even standard 8mm film, a format invented in the 1930s. One room is devoted to photo albums, with each page digitized using a high-resolution camera. In another, used to convert slides, YesVideo engineers have cut holes in the sides of a half-dozen vintage Kodak Carousel projectors and inserted Nikon D10 digital cameras to directly capture each slide. The company buys many of its retro players and replacement parts on EBay. “You won’t be able to recreate this business in about three years” because there won’t be enough working equipment, says YesVideo engineer Rolf Breuer."

BusinessWeek

Nutanix: Server/Storage Hybrid

"We have brought the storage into the cluster, and we have commoditized it," says Ting, and this is why the US government, financial services firms, healthcare companies, and educational institutions are running a lot of proofs of concepts with the NX-3000 series of appliances.

About 25 per cent of the iron is going to Uncle Sam, which is in many cases putting server clusters into vehicles to get image and signal processing at command posts or into the field in Humvees, in some cases.

Virtual desktop infrastructure was the obvious early-use case for Nutanix machines, and it is still driving a lot of deals, but Ting says the company is seeing companies dump Microsoft workloads such as Exchange Server and SQL Server on the boxes, and has just closed a deal this month with a Global 2000-class company for 1,500 server nodes to run an analytics workload."

The Register

Thanks to Anshu Sharma for pointing out Nutanix's rapid growth in the market

 

Electric Daisy Carnival

Bet this is on my son/friends itinerary west...if not they will likely catch the Orlando version in November

From the event organizer, Insomniac it is an "enhanced music festival experience by transforming the (Las Vegas) Speedway into a fully immersive carnival adventure featuring theatrical performers, including fire twirlers, aerialists, dancers and stilt walkers. Vibrant large-scale art installations and state-of-the-art lighting and sound production will span across seven stages inside the 1,000-acre complex creating a complete audiovisual experience for festivalgoers."

BTW the NYC version was this past weekend (here is the Rolling Stone report), Chicago is next weekend, London is July 20...

 

 

MIT TR’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies

“Our definition of a breakthrough is simple: an advance that gives people powerful new ways to use technology. It could be an intuitive design that provides a useful interface (see “Smart Watches”) or experimental devices that could allow people who have suffered brain damage to once again form memories (“Memory Implants”). Some could be key to sustainable economic growth (“Additive Manufacturing” and “Supergrids”), while others could change how we communicate (“Temporary Social Media”) or think about the unborn (“Prenatal DNA Sequencing”). Some are brilliant feats of engineering (“Baxter”). Others stem from attempts to rethink longstanding problems in their fields (“Deep Learning” and “Ultra-Efficient Solar Power”). As a whole, we intend this annual list not only to tell you which technologies you need to know about, but also to celebrate the creativity that produced them.”

MIT Technology Review