New Florence. New Renaissance.

Daft Punk

Time (sub required) on the band which has a new album Random Access Memories

"We never actually made music with computers," says one-half of Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter, on the phone from their Daft Arts compound in L.A. This is surprising given the digital sheen that glistens over so much of their music. But he and his partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo made Homework in an "experimental lab, with wires everywhere," also known as Bangalter's childhood bedroom in Paris. "We used hardware and analog equipment that behaved in weird ways"--i.e., temperamental, largely Japanese machines attempting to mimic drums and bass guitars and failing into the future. Homework attracted attention from budding-genius directors like Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The resulting videos embodied Daft Punk's synthesis of rigid structure and loose-limbed whimsy, featuring skeletons dancing on Q*bert platforms, tomato-sauce tutorials and lovelorn bloodhounds.

Much crisper Google Earth

"The Landsat 7 satellite suffered a hardware failure early in its life that introduced striped artifacts into all of its images. By analyzing a large number of images we were able to virtually eliminate these stripes, as well as clouds and other atmospheric effects. The process was very similar to how we produced the global time-lapse imagery of the earth that we released last month."

"Mining data from a large number of Landsat images of each area allowed us to reconstruct cloud-free imagery even in tropical regions that are always at least partly cloudy."

"We prioritized recent data when it was available, so this update also includes refreshed imagery in many regions of the world, especially in areas where high-resolution imagery is not available, including parts of Russia, Indonesia, and central Africa."

Google Lat Long

Photo before/after of location in Saudi Arabia

Technologies in Writing New Book

A book on tech enabled innovation should itself benefit from tech enabled innovation...here's new tech I have used since the last book 18 months ago.

This book has called for customer interviews around the world. So, glad I have been able to use Vonage World for my calls from the US and Viber for my travels overseas. Amazing how little extra each has cost.

For my interviews I have used the Zoom H4N. Up to 8 gb in audio files so far.

Glad I have Google Drive to store all that data.

I have dictated parts of the book using the microphone feature on the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini keyboard. For the next book going to use the iPad more for interview recording also and not lug the Zoom around.

Low-Cost, Long-Haul

Can the new Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 equipment herald a new breed of international, long distance carriers?

BBC on plans of Norwegian carrier NAS

"When we did the calculations we could not get the numbers to add up with the old aircraft. We needed the new aircraft. The others did not have the possibility of the Dreamliner and the A350. Before, when you attempted to do low-cost when flying more than eight hours, it just didn't work."

Proteome Sequencing

It’s a far more complex field than genomics, studying how proteins are structured and expressed, how they change and communicate. When you tie genome sequencing to proteome sequencing, it adds billions of data points across millions of patients. That’s both good and bad.

With a fire hose of information that big, you can develop better drugs and look for better biomarkers: anything in a patient’s blood, urine or saliva—from proteins to enzymes to red-cell count—that indicates the presence of a disease. But fire hoses are hard to handle, and that’s where Big Data comes in.

The combination of massive computer power and sophisticated algorithms that can manage staggeringly complex problems—from predicting precisely where a tornado will touch down to making your Web search more efficient—is the next great wave of data processing. Companies like Roche, Illumina, Life Technologies, Pronota and Proteome Sciences are expanding their bioinformatics platforms to develop new diagnostics and new drugs based on them. Sometimes a diagnostic and a drug are developed in tandem, a model known as Dx/Rx. These new proteomic-derived agents are designed to target everything from sepsis to Alzheimer’s disease to cancer and offer the opportunity to deliver bespoke medicine, tailored to your molecular structure. It’s Savile Row biology.

Time (sub required) 

Photo Credit

Android and the Internet of Things

Zemlin points to SAIC Motor, a Chinese car company, as a case study. With a team of about six software developers, SAIC developed an Android infotainment system for its cars. “I ran into them at this trade show where they were placed next to all these other carmakers with massive software teams,” Zemlin says. “They said, ‘We just have six dudes and Android.’ ”

Philip DesAutels, the vice president for technology at Xively, a just-launched cloud computing service that simplifies the work needed to get a device to transmit data, has studied the Internet of things for years. He says there are five times as many downloads of Xively’s Android-specific software as there are of its software made for Apple’s iOS. His favorite product: an Android-based agricultural irrigation system where a network of tiny, waterproof computers in the field regulates water valves. “With Android, you get something that is power-efficient, it’s easy for developers to do the user interface and touch controls, and it’s easy to get data in and out,” DesAutels says. “There’s just a bigger community behind it than with anything else.”

Bloomberg

The 50 most powerful enterprise tech execs

Congratulations to Larry, Dave, Marc, Zach, Aneel and the rest on this Business Insider list

The Strayer Scale

From AAA this study about distracted driving

It’s not what most of us tech savvy folks want to hear …

"Compared to the other activities studied (e.g., listening to the radio, conversing with passengers, etc.) we found that interacting with the speech-to-text system was the most cognitively distracting. This clearly suggests that the adoption of voice-based systems in the vehicle may have unintended consequences that adversely affect traffic safety."

(The OSPAN task is a complex span task that required participants to
simultaneously perform a math and memorization task)

How brands are digitizing retail

Call it the Appleization of brick and mortar, where retailers from Michael Kors to Staples to Pep Boys are dazzling consumers with the futuristic in-store shopping experience the House That Jobs Built gave rise to. In fact, a decade ago and just a few blocks from the AT&T flagship, Apple opened its own gleaming, digitized space on the Magnificent Mile—but Apple is no longer the coolest kid on the block. Today, that distinction belongs to AT&T—though there's plenty of competition from the likes of Nike and Burberry, which have unveiled souped-up stores here in recent months, as well as Apple, which, buzz has it, is prepping its own overhaul.

Employing the latest technology at point of sale is nothing new—for years businesses from car rental companies to Nordstrom department stores have unhooked from the wires. But the trend has gone from merely ringing up sales via mobile devices to a deeply immersive in-store experience—fully digitized but crucially featuring that face-to-face element customers like Shafron demand.

Ad Week

Packaging Innovations

The Best in Packaging blog catalogs several of what it considers packaging innovations last year. One that really impressed me was the self-boiling egg packaging below, but check out the blog for plenty more

"The Russian design firm Kian came up with an egg packaging, called Gogol Mogol, which is more than just an egg carton. It “boils” the egg in the packaging.This unique egg carton concept is made out of recycled paperboard, while the packaging also holds a means to “boil” the eggs stored inside, as Gogol Mogol egg carton comes with a not-specified substance under the first paperboard layer, separated by a membrane which can be removed when a small label is pulled off. This causes the substance to mix and followed by a chemical reaction, which is enough to heat up the egg stored inside."