New Florence. New Renaissance.

Smartphones made in the US

Not just designed in California…

From The Verge

To accomplish this, Motorola partnered with Flextronics to refab a factory in Texas formerly used by Nokia. In a mere six months, the factory was completely updated and transformed to Motorola's specifications, which included the hiring of 2,500 workers to make it run. Motorola did not actually make a final call to do manufacturing in the US until late 2012, but the factory was operational by August 6th of this year. The factory currently puts out about 100,000 devices per week, but Motorola says that it's possible to scale it to tens of millions of units. Given that more than half of the over 400,000 square foot factory floor sits unused right now, that's not too hard to believe.

 

Nice customer stories from Oracle OpenWorld

This year at OOW, I noticed many more innovative customers profiled.

Here are some of my favorites across various sessions:

Airbus (around 21:00) with streaming data on its planes and related telemetry and UL (around 29:30) around precision data in their testing processes in Mark Hurd’s keynote

 

Ancestry.com (around 22:30) with global growth and multiple data formats for family trees, DNA data, user images etc in Michael Dell’s keynote

 

Lego with social conversations with customers in the CX keynote (around 57.00)

 

Interview with CEO of NYSE Euronext about volumes and velocity and how it is a "technology company"

 

The evolution of the projector

Every few weeks lately, I have been thinking about projectors.

Had to do a presentation recently where they did not have a HDMI cable for my Ultrabook, so they took my slides and put them on an older laptop. The show continued but had me wonder how many sites still have dated projectors, many still stuck to their ceilings.

Checked our son into his dorm for the semester, and between 8 of them they share a 20x20 room to use as a study, game room, theather - whatever. Then I wondered which pico projector would work between all their Macbooks, Ultrabooks, iPads, iPhones, Android phones?

Thumbing through a Consumer Reports Electronic Guide I see this Sony camcorder, which also doubles as a projector. Neat, why did we not have it when our kids were younger?

Yes, projectors have come a long long way. This presentation from Prezi is a nice reminder (btw I use the Prezi presentation app on my iPhone)

 

Smartphone POS on Delta flights

I ordered a sandwich on my Delta flight today, and when in a few minutes courtesy of the GoGo wi-fly service I had the receipt for the purchase in my email box

19,000 Delta cabin crew are being issued the Windows Phone 8 device, Nokia Lumia 820.

According to Delta

“This solution was developed by Microsoft, Avanade and AT&T after months of development and feedback from flight attendants. The Windows Phone 8 devices will include a Delta-specific customer experience developed by Avanade on the Microsoft Dynamics for Retail mobile point-of sale platform and will operate over Wi-Fi and AT&T's 4G LTE Network. The agreement includes plans to expand the solution over the next three years to the newest Nokia devices.”

Photo Credit

Underutilized Google Services

Lifehacker points to 5 Google aids most of us don’t even know about – thanks to Michael Fauscette for pointer

• Have spoken conversations with Google Translate
• Track stocks over time with Google Finance
• Learn about your world with Google Earth
• Create advanced notifications with Google Alert
• Educate yourself with Google Scholar

The Amazon “Mayday”

Rather than just settling for voice recognition and virtual assistant technology, Mayday (in the new Kindle Fire HDX) taps into one of Amazon's most well-known and prided characteristics: 24/7 customer service.

Filed under the Settings menu, Mayday opens a small pop-up box on the screen, connecting the user directly to a live customer service agent for free at anytime from anywhere with an internet connection. The user can see the customer service agent, but not vice versa, to which Bezos quipped that customers won't have to worry about what they're wearing when trying to get answers quickly.

Customer service agents can see the user's screen on their end and direct the user step by step, offering help for complicated tasks from configuring VPN access to simpler activities such as adjusting the lock screen. The one thing they can't see, assured Amazon reps, is sensitive data. Any time a user has to enter a password or credit card information, the user's screen is blacked out on the agent's side.

Amazon is also aiming to promise response times within 15 seconds or less, and Bezos specified that Amazon will be ready for a heavy wave of requests at launch as well as on Christmas Day, the customer call center's busiest time of year.

ZDNet

Carrier Aggregation

Australia’s Telstra and its mobile network supplier Ericsson have completed a live network trial of a new LTE technology that essentially splices two entirely different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum together, creating a kind of super-connection to the mobile network.

Telstra isn’t the first to the use the technology, an LTE-Advanced technique called carrier aggregation. That honor goes to SK Telecom, which was able to boost its LTE network to 150 Mbps theoretical speeds in June by combining its 800 MHz and 1800 MHz spectrum, the same selection of airwaves held by European operators such as Everything Everywhere in the U.K. and in Germany, Deutsche Telekom. South Korea’s LG U+ followed SK’s lead in July with its own souped-up LTE systems.

Bloomberg

“Sophisticated Simplicity”

I heard that expression during a Oracle OpenWorld HCM session yesterday and initially reacted to it as a throwaway marketing tagline. But the simple switch Larry Ellison demoed to the turn the in-memory functionality on in his Sunday keynote and keynotes today by Thomas Kurian and John Fowler really brought that out in spades.

Thomas showcased the widest “as a service” in the industry – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

He had an associate demo the ease of infrastructure provisioning – compute, storage, database, and tools - click graph to enlarge for clarity

He then had another associate demo the confluence of sales, service and marketing data, and partner functionality

John in his portion showed off the convergence of compute, storage and network at the hardware level

He also showed the way Oracle continues to push Moore’s Law a bit further than the industry has thought possible.

Of course, customers will need financial sophistication to combat the likely lock-in that comes from such concentration of single vendor solutions but you have to laud the sophistication and the efforts of masking all this complexity.

Sophisticated simplicity, indeed.  

Startups as resumes

Time (sub required) on the many small deals Apple, Twitter, Yahoo! and Walmart (in graph) have done

"In most cases, the acquirers don't care about the products they've bought. (To prove it, they often instantly shut them down, as Yahoo did with Rockmelt's smartphone browser in August.) What they covet is the expertise of the acquisition's founders and engineers and sometimes the technology they've created or the data they've collected."

Global Shipping: Massive Boats, Slow Steaming

"The Triple-E’s capacity is 18,000 TEU. (Most containers today are 40 feet long, so the number carried will be closer to 9,000.) Laid end to end, a single Triple-E’s shipping containers would stretch for 68 miles. “In the late 1990s we were like, ‘Oh my God, a 6,000-TEU ship,’ ” says Peter Shaerf, a managing director at AMA Capital Partners, an investment bank specializing in the maritime industry. “Then you go to 13,000 and now 18,000. I don’t know where it stops.” Practically speaking, a Triple-E, in one trip, could take more than 182 million iPads or 111 million pairs of shoes from Shanghai to Rotterdam. Such a trip would take 25 days and burn 530,000 gallons of fuel. That comes to 0.003 gallons per iPad."

"The Triple-E was able to meet the efficiency requirements without any revolutionary propulsion or metallurgical technologies. Rather, Maersk used a set of clever tweaks to adapt existing ship features to its size. On the most basic level, the ship was designed to maximize container space. The bridge tower, with the crew accommodations inside, was moved forward, so that containers could be stacked higher without obscuring the pilot’s view of the sea ahead. The engine was moved aft to shorten the propeller shaft, allowing more containers to fit in the hold. “It’s quite a simple little trick,” says Troels Posborg, the Maersk naval architect who drew up the preliminary design for the vessel."

"Much of the efficiency will come simply from going slower. Just as in a car, decreasing a ship’s speed, up to a point, is more fuel-efficient. The effect is more pronounced at sea because boats are pushing through water as well as air. As naval architect Charles Cushing explains, “that means if you go, say, from 20 knots to 23 or 24 knots, it will double the fuel requirement, and if you go up to 25 or 26 knots, it’s going up four or five times.” The Triple-E is designed to cruise at 16 knots. Building a ship for slow steaming meant the engines could be less powerful and the hull wider, allowing for more containers. According to Posborg, the company considered 500 different hull forms."

Bloomberg