New Florence. New Renaissance.

Dreamforce Plaza

The event last week shut down Howard Street in San Francisco to accommodate a cloud which decided to visit earth. Salesforce says its Plaza had the biggest structure ever inflated in North America. 79,000 square feet of turf was brought in to surround it – and with the rain that joined the cloud, most attendees sloshed around it like little kids. The rain also did little to dampen the enthusiasm of 9 bands that played there during the event.

Here is a time lapse video of the structure set up

 

And a video of the structure at the color saturated Welcome reception on Monday night

 

Thanks to Brielle Nikaido of Salesforce.com for the factoids and the videos.

Magazine Renaissance

It is a truism that the march of technology has killed Main Street media.

Well, the New Florence blog has chuckled at that comment for years now as it has benefited from my monthly trip to the magazine section at Barnes and Noble. Such a wide range of technologies covered across the publications. This summer for the book project, I interviewed the CEO of Burda, the German publishing house. He described how with business model and staffing changes many of his properties had survived the digital transition.

Larry Dignan of ZDNet was telling me how the iPad (and other tablets) has allowed several publications to be reinvented. The amazing color saturation, the interactive graphics, the embedded videos are all making the reading experience so much more enjoyable. Indeed, many of the graphs on New Florence these days come from my subscriptions on the iPad – the one above of Miami smoke art from Time, and below of the Hermes clock from a supplement in Wired.

So, I am tempted to sign up to NextIssue – it promises unlimited and archive access to 122 well known magazines for $ 14.99 a month. My only hesitation is it will make me think about cutting back those B&N trips.

The incredibly innovative BMW i3

Another electric car. Ho-Hum?

Guess again

The BMW i3 is different in many ways as TechRadar discusses

“Open all the doors (including the back "suicide" doors) and you can look right through the whole car. There's no transmission tunnel, of course, so the floor is flat, again contributing to a sense of airiness.”

Then there are dual screens, and the “iDrive with the i3's own version of BMW ConnectedDrive. BMW is pitching the i3 as coming with "connectivity as standard". Indeed, all i3s get Bluetooth, DAB radio, iDrive Touch, cruise control, BMW Business Navigation, BMW Online, BMW Apps and Advanced ConnectedDrive as standard.”  The Remote mobile app rounds out that experience.

The New York Times adds

“BMW outfitted it with materials Mr. Walter said were meant to soothe: seats clad in fine leather, sustainably harvested bamboo across the dashboard and recycled bottles on the door panels.”

“BMW says that the i3’s electric motor produces 170 horsepower and 184 pound-feet of torque, and that the car’s battery will charge fully in about three hours. Its range is 80 to 100 miles, depending on driving style, and an optional gasoline-powered range extender — a 650-cubic-centimeter 2-cylinder BMW motorcycle engine that includes a two-gallon gasoline tank mounted in the front of the car — adds another 100 miles or so to that, Mr. Walter said. The small engine is tucked next to the electric motor at the rear of the car.”

Faster, cheaper data visualization

Nice article in Data-Informed on Todd Mostak who has done fascinating global event analytics even though his background is in economics and anthropology, not computer science

“Through World Map, Mostak worked for the Japan Data Archive, a project to collect data from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The project uses MapD to display several data sets on a map instantly.

Mostak is working with Harvard to visualize the Kumbh Mela, a 55-day Hindu religious festival that happens only once every 12 years that will see more than 80 million people attend. Mostak and MapD will visualize anonymized cell phone data to analyze crowd flow and social networks.

An example of TweetMap, displaying tweets about “hockey” in December 2012.

World Map also serves as a platform for Mostak’s first visualization project, TweetMap, which allows users to look at Twitter heat maps from 125 million tweets sent in three week span in December of 2012.”

Photo Credit

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Technology at the Auto Show

I spent a couple of hours at the Motor Trends 2014 Model Auto Show in Tampa today. I was hoping to see the hydrogen cell Hyundai Tucson (my wife has earlier model) and the BMW electric i3. Both have been sighted in CA this week, but not yet in FL.

No problem, there was plenty of other technology at the show

Seat controls in the “low-end” Mercedes CLA 250

 

Heads up display and other displays everywhere in the “high-end” Hyundai Equus

Emissions technology in Subaru Forester

Paint technology for Kia line up

Steering-by-wire technology in the Infinity Q50

UX technology in Cadillacs

Fuel efficiency technology in Fords

Panoramic sunroof on the Range Rover

Social media tech at the Chevy area

Tablets for Motor Trends magazine subscription

Mobile app for show with floor plans and plenty of other detail

Graphic Recording

I was impressed with the ImageThink artist who synthesized in real-time the Plex sponsored Cloud Manufacturing summit I attended last week. My write up about the session is here.

ImageThink has some other use cases for such “graphic recording”

• Introduce a new project with a splash
• Bring your team up to speed in a hurry
• Eliminate confusion or miscommunication among team members
• Distill complex data into one clear image
• Add creativity and excitement to your presentation
• Make a brainstorming meeting more productive and actionable
• Create an engaging video for a website or trade show

Photo Credit Click to enlarge

Innovation at Electrolux

Two years ago, Electrolux institutionalized what it calls an “innovation triangle,” bringing together the design, research and development, and marketing departments to jointly hammer out decisions on new products. Management in Stockholm embraced the idea after it was successfully pioneered by the company’s Brazilian unit. The company tests potential designs with focus groups. Anything with a less than 70 percent approval rating is deemed not ready for prime time.

The introduction of the UltraCaptic illustrates the process. Bagless vacuum cleaners are rapidly gaining market share globally, and Electrolux wanted to introduce a model that would stand out from competitors such as Dyson and Hoover. In watching people vacuum their homes, researchers looked for things that were annoying, says Anton Lundberg, an Electrolux vice president who oversaw the effort. “One of the pain points was, when you emptied the dust, you saw particles flying around.”

BusinessWeek

GoGo Wi-Fly evolves

In my last book I had called Aircell a “digital phoenix” for breathing new life with its GoGo service:

GoGo, the wi-fi service being offered by many U.S. airlines (like Delta, discussed further on, and Virgin America, discussed in Chapter 6) leverages Aircell’s experience with airphones that we had in most seatbacks in the 1990s. Aircell paid the FCC about $30 million to acquire licenses for the air-to-ground frequencies. That allows it to differentiate from the satellite services of Row 44 that Southwest and others utilize. Planes transmit via underbelly blade antennae to 92 cell towers that can be accessed around the country and up to about 100 miles over international waters.

Now, the service is poised to improve in a couple of ways

a) Speed : To keep up with the much speedier ViaSat service being introduced by JetBlue,  Gogo’s new service “will use a combination of cellular towers and satellites to beam 60 megabits per second to each plane. Its original service offered 3 mbps to each plane, which is currently used by 1,700 aircraft. They launched an updated product last year which beams 10 mbps, this product is currently being used by nearly 300 aircraft.”

B) Aircell’s roots: “The company announced today its Text and Talk feature, which allows passengers to send texts and make phone calls over its in-flight network using their own smartphones.

To get the service working, passengers have to download the Gogo Text & Talk app from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store when they are on the ground and then when they are up in the clouds they can connect to the service. The app connects the phone to a network, which then allows the phone to access the device's phone and texting capabilities.”

A Tale of Two Cities and their “Bridge”

Charles Dickens updated

Melissa O'Hearn's photo diary of two magnificent cities (including the perennial favorite of many – the Musee D’Orsay below) and the Eurostar which links them.

Highly recommend all three of them!

Threat Intelligence Sharing

White paper from IID on the promise and challenges of sharing threat intelligence.

Couple of quotes from the paper

John Scarrow, Microsoft's General Manager of Safety Services: "The bad guys move fast... So the data needs to move extremely fast if you really want it to have a lot of value."

Maarten Van Horenbeeck, ex Google and Chairman of FIRST "There are a lot of stakes involved in balancing between maintaining the privacy of individual users and still being able to share certain information on security incidents so others can protect themselves,"

The paper discusses three stages of collaboration:

• Proactive Measures constitute the sharing of Internet hygiene recommendations,
  suspicious phishing/malware IP addresses and software vulnerability/patch updates.
• Incident Response includes crisis management and threat mitigation.
• Post-Attack Inquiries consist of working with international, federal, state and local
  authorities on cybercrime investigations and prosecutions.