New Florence. New Renaissance.

Real men don't pump gas

Musk presided over an event at Tesla’s Los Angeles design studio that he billed as a “title fight” between the Model S and gas-powered cars. In front of an audience of hundreds of Model S owners, Musk unveiled a new type of automated battery-swap system in which machines grab the flat battery pack from the bottom of the Model S and replace it with a brand-new, fully charged one. During a live demonstration, Tesla managed to perform a battery swap on a Model S in 1 minute and 33 seconds, and then a second Model S in 1 minute and 36 seconds. All the while, a Tesla employee was being filmed at a gas station as he refueled a 20-gallon tank in an Audi, taking more than 4 minutes to fill up the car. Musk insisted that Tesla had scoured the city for the fastest gas station to make the test fair.

“There are people that take a lot of convincing,” Musk said. “Hopefully, this is what will finally convince people that electric cars are the future.”

BusinessWeek

 

Changi Airport: The Best in the World

All of this is what the management refers to as the “Changi experience.” No, Changi isn’t beautiful, exactly—it’s humane. And humanity is something at which the staff works overtime. “Every day on the ground at Changi we conduct surveys,” Tan says. “We know when things don’t work.” Even objects offer surveys: every restroom, for example, has a wall-mounted screen that says please rate your experience. Below that is a row of simple faces ranging from grinning to frowning. If you tap anything lower than “good” (a smile), you’ll get a questionnaire: Wet floor? No toilet paper? The real-time feedback means problems are solved very quickly.

And, in theory, if you simply stand around looking perplexed, one of more than 200 iPad-wielding Changi Experience Agents—men in purple blazers and women in pink—will buttonhole you, ask what’s wrong, and attempt to fix the problem. I had coffee with a couple of them who told me stories of helping passengers who’d missed their flights or whose relatives were trapped in passport control with visa issues, or were simply looking for an outlet to charge a cell phone.

In a small, densely populated nation like Singapore, little things count. Many of Changi’s best innovations are small and considerate, such as the charging stations with rows of little lockable boxes, so you can safely leave your cell phone while you wander the terminal. There are free foot-massage machines (socks on, please) on every concourse. Even the acres of carpeting are part of the thoughtful culture: you can tell you’ve crossed from one terminal to the next when the pattern shifts.

Travel and Lesiure

Photo Credit of charging station. There are others of the buuterfly and orchid gardens and of slides and pools at the airport on that page

The Economist on the new world of Marketing

"This helps explain why marketers are feeling both potent and panicky. Instead of just lobbing messages out into the void, they must now act as customers’ “ambassadors”, says David Edelman of McKinsey, a consultancy. And that is tricky.

Most middle-class consumers will be Asian within a couple of decades. Pop culture can pop up as easily in Gangnam as in Harlem. Technology keeps giving marketers new ways to reach consumers and learn about them. The ensuing flood of data may drown creativity, some fear. Under constant pressure to prove that what they do is effective, “the next generation of marketers may not be able to be as intuitive and creatively inspiring as their predecessors,” worries Grant Duncan of Spencer Stuart, a recruitment firm.

The biggest shock, say marketers, is the schooling in humility that comes with round-the-clock conversation. Consumers are in charge. They can comparison-shop from their couches or badmouth brands via Facebook. They will not tolerate shoddy quality or sloppy ethics. In 2010 Nestlé fought campaigners who said the palm oil used in Kit Kat caused the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforest. Now it is at pains to be orang-utan-friendly. British snackers can scan a QR code on some Kit Kat packets to assure themselves that the cocoa is harmlessly sourced.

But deference is double-edged. Brands want deeper and more profitable relationships with consumers in exchange for the trust they hope to inspire. Marketers are stretching their notions of what brands stand for and smudging the distinction between advertising and entertainment. The lines between marketing and other disciplines within a firm are fading. Brands want to be antidotes to cynicism. But this will not divert marketers from their main task, pungently summed up by an ad exec: “to figure out and fuel consumer desires like they’ve never been fuelled before.”

The Economist

Silicon Fen in Cambridge, UK

There are now over 1,500 technology companies, employing more than 53,000 people, in Cambridge's "Silicon Fen". They're attracted by a combination of entrepreneurialism and innovation "unrivalled probably anywhere outside the US", according to Charles Cotton, technology investor and author of The Cambridge Phenomenon: 50 Years of Innovation and Enterprise. For more than 50 years -- since Tim Eiloart and David Southward set up Cambridge Consultants in 1960, in Eiloart's words to "put the brains of Cambridge University at the disposal of the problems of British industry" -- the city has been host to some of the most important names in the UK's technology sector, including Acorn Computing, Sinclair Research, Aveva, ARM and Autonomy. To date, it has produced 12 companies with market capitalisations of more than $1bn (£600m). ARM Holdings alone has a £13.5bn market cap; and Autonomy sold, controversially, for $11bn (£7.2bn) to HP.

Wired UK

Photo Credit

AmazonFresh: Webvan 2.0

Former Amazon and Webvan officials say Amazon drew three big lessons from the Webvan debacle: expand slowly, limit delivery to areas with a high concentration of potential customers, and focus relentlessly on warehouse efficiency (with its Kiva robots)

The opportunity for Amazon is huge. The grocery business in the United States generated $568 billion in retail sales last year, with online accounting for less than 1 percent, and it's among the last major retail sectors that the online giant has yet to tackle.

But the risks are large as well. Groceries are a notoriously low-margin business, and the aggressive expansion of discounters like Walmart has made the business even more cutthroat than it was in Webvan's day.

Reuters

How Technology is reinventing Fashion

From The Next Web via Emanuele Quintarelli

"Burberry allowed attendees of the London Fashion Week runway show special events streaming at global Burberry boutiques in spring/summer 2011 to order items right off the runway through an iPad application and get them much earlier before the same items are scheduled to arrive in the shops. Pre-ordering from the catwalk, as well as analysing the looks that got the most positive buzz online, is an excellent way for both designers and buyers to get a sense of which might be the strongest looks from the show. In this way tech is helping fashion revitalize a very old trend – trunk shows and private views for VICs ( Very Important Customers) – on a much greater scale"

"Threadless was one of the first e-tailers to let the crowd in on their creative process by letting them vote on their favourite t-shirt designs to go into production. Many fashion brands have tapped into the power of creative platforms, like Polyvore, which leverages its active community for crowdsourcing contests. Moxsie was of the first brands that put customers in the role of the buyer, with its regular scheduled Buyer Chats on Twitter and Modcloth did the same on Facebook, taking things a step further by producing a whole collection based on user-generated designs."

"Fitting Reality, which pitched only a few days ago at Bizspark Europe, builds virtual fitting rooms with Microsoft Kinect technology. Irish start-up Von Bismark, uses the Kinect camera and Intel’s AIM Suite facial recognition software to turn a digital display into an interactive mirror, where users can touch and move around physical goods. Major cosmetics brands, like L’Oreal, Maybelline and Shiseido have already started testing special kiosks (mostly in the Asian market) that enable shoppers to virtually try on makeup by simply taking a picture."

 

Google's Project Loon

"Each balloon is 15m (49.2ft) in diameter - the length of a small plane - and filled with lifting gases. Electronic equipment hangs underneath including radio antennas, a flight computer, an altitude control system and solar panels to power the gear.

Google aims to fly the balloons in the stratosphere, 20km (12 miles) or more above the ground, which is about double the altitude used by commercial aircraft and above controlled airspace.

Google says each should stay aloft for about 100 days and provide connectivity to an area stretching 40km in diameter below as they travel in a west-to-east direction."

"It says that balloons could one day be diverted to disaster-hit areas to aid rescue efforts in situations where ground communication equipment has been damaged."

BBC News

Evolving the XBox

"The Xbox One is a black rectangle with sharp edges—it looks like the monolith in 2001—and the accompanying controllers have a similar aesthetic. The onscreen interface will appear familiar to any current Xbox owner, although the machine can flip between applications much faster than the 360. Voice commands allow users to switch between games, movies, TV, and music, instead of having to close one before opening another. Apps can run simultaneously, allowing a basketball fan to watch a game in one window while tracking fantasy stats in a second. These features, along with some displays of the Xbox One’s graphics engine, were met with applause from many attendees at the launch event. That’s a refreshing change, given the tepid reception to other Microsoft offerings (see Surface tablets, Windows smartphones, and even Windows 8)."

Bloomberg

Finland's next blockbuster: Supercell

Zynga’s Facebook smash Farmville, released in 2009, had more than 32 million daily users at its peak in 2011, pushing the company to more than $1 billion in revenue the year before it went public. (Soon after, the shift to mobile punched a massive hole in its user base; in February, Zynga reported a net loss of $209 million for 2012.) On mobile platforms, Angry Birds creator Rovio, with headquarters in nearby Espoo, Finland, made its money by pushing tons of ads to free players, and a little more by charging users an extra buck or two to download an ad-free version. By contrast, Clash of Clans players looking to climb past the first few easy levels are paying $100 a pop for a chest of gems usable as currency in its virtual store; Hay Day’s trunks of gold coins cost $80 each. As Supercell’s coders roll out a new level of advancement for players each month, both games have remained top-five iOS store grossers since December, according to Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of market-research firm App Annie.

BusinessWeek

Supercell's games “Hay Day” and “Clash of Clans” have both been top-five iOS store hits since December

An iPhone - that drives

Fortune (sub required) on how auto tech is evolving

AT&T, for one, is selling its single worldwide SIM cards directly to automakers for in-factory installation, allowing for connections wherever a vehicle is sold.

Mercedes-Benz became the first carmaker to offer in-car Facebook integration last January.

Audi (has) incorporated Google Earth in its cars, overlaying a bird's-eye satellite view of the surrounding terrain onto the old navigation screen.

Updatable software -- much like that of a desktop PC -- has made its way into autos. The systems can be upgraded wirelessly or via a USB key.

The Chevrolet MyLink system, for example, exists largely to import apps, maps, music, and contacts from an individual's handset.

Ford's Evos concept car, a glimpse of the future, has a program that monitors the driver's heart rate, watching for info overload.