New Florence. New Renaissance.

FitBit One – a marvel of miniaturization

I used to call my beagle Peanuts my FitBit. We walked together for hundreds of miles. With his passing last week, it is so nice that my nephew gifted me a FitBit One for Christmas.

The more I look at the little device and the data it is constantly communicating to my iPhone, the more admiration I get for all the technology jammed into this little package.

The components from an iFixit teardown include

• STMicroelectronics STM32L 151 ARM-based SoC microcontroller

• Nordic Semiconductor nRF8001Bluetooth chip

• Accelerometer labeled 8304 AE D42 oW

• Measurement specialties MS5607-02BA03 altimeter

• Polymer Li-Ion Battery

• PCB mounted vibration motor

It also comes with a tiny USB Bluetooth dongle to synch with a laptop for initial set up.

Enough admiration of tiny components. Need to rack up some large metrics that Peanuts would approve.

Popular Mechanics 2013 Breakthrough Products

Its top 10 products including the Cub Cadet RZT-S Mower

“It's a steering-wheel-controlled, zero-turn mower that is entirely electric-powered. A 48-volt battery pack powers four brushless motors—two for the rear wheels and two for the blades inside a 42-inch deck. The design enables 60 minutes of near-silent operation, which is ideal for early-morning mowing, when temperatures are cooler. A steering wheel, rather than traditional lap bars, operates all four wheels for ultra-responsive control. Once the mower is fully discharged, it plugs into a standard wall outlet for overnight recharging.”

Santa, where's my Koenigsegg?

In the best of years, the company builds only 12 or 14, each one tailored to a specific buyer.  Earlier this year, the company built the 100th car in its 19-year history. Nicknamed the Hundra (Swedish for Hundred), the 1,030-horsepower, carbon-fiber Agera S was constructed from more than 4,000 custom parts and finished with stripes of 24-karat gold leaf, applied by an artisan flown in from Italy

Bloomberg Pursuits

Qualcomm’s remarkable agility

I heard Norm Fjeldheim, CIO of Qualcomm describe the many pivots the company has had in its 3 decade history and I thought he would be perfect to talk about changing business models in The Digital Enterprise and he kindly agreed.

Fortune describes the company’s even more impressive set of planned pivots:

“Is Qualcomm getting into the fashion business? In late 2013 it launched the Toq, a "smartwatch" that sends email and other notifications straight to users' wrists. Pronounced "talk," the new device was a departure for the semiconductor company, which has largely remained behind the scenes even as its technology ignited the smartphone revolution. But the Toq wasn't the chipmaker's only deviation from the norm. Lately it seems Qualcomm is doing everything it can to shed its image as a nerdy purveyor of microprocessors and radio chips for phones and wireless networks. Long a stalwart at telecom trade shows, Qualcomm last year secured the keynote slot at the glitzier Consumer Electronics Show, serving up a wide-ranging presentation that previewed its forthcoming watch, highlighted an all-electric Rolls-Royce charged up by Qualcomm technology, and touted an augmented-reality application demonstrated by Sesame Street's Big Bird. It also unveiled a software platform that allows all sorts of household gadgets to communicate with one another.”

Netflix + Dreamworks Animation

This will begin with the December Netflix debut of a new original series, Turbo F.A.S.T., based on the upcoming feature film Turbo, which will hit theaters on July 17. It will also offer Netflix exclusive streaming rights to a selection of DreamWorks animated films, including The Croods and their movie version of Mr. Peabody and Sherman, coming to theaters in March 2014.

For Netflix, the contract, which is the most significant first-run content deal in its history, is part of their ongoing efforts to beef up their selection of children’s programming, which is very popular among parents as it offers a commercial-free alternative for younger, more impressionable viewers.

Cartoon Brew

Remember Everything

Appropriate post to remind everyone about their last minute gift list:)

"Dressed in his standard uniform--jeans and a company T-shirt under a sport coat--Libin begins telling the audience what it already knows: Evernote is growing rapidly. The service now has 75 million registered users, 35 million of whom have signed up since August. Evernote, Libin explains, is also partnering with 3M to let users digitize and store anything they can scribble on a Post-it note via the snap of an iPhone camera. But he isn't done. He's got Evernote backpacks, Evernote messenger bags and Evernote wallets to announce. These aren't cheesy conference swag; they're products customers can buy online. "We're a fashion brand now," Libin says. "Nobody saw that coming."

Evernote, for the uninitiated, is a nine-year-old service that allows users to upload notes--text, images and audio recordings--and organize them in online notebooks. As the company's elephant logo and "Remember everything" tagline suggest, Evernote's mission is to help users boost their memory by capturing every scrap of information they care about and preserving it indefinitely in the cloud. The app's search function can quickly and accurately recognize words within pictures, making it simple to turn to Evernote to find something you may have jotted down during a meeting the way people turn to Google to find Web pages."

Time (sub required)

The Vanity Fair Century

Very nice issue with perspectives on each decade from an eclectic group of observers

Diplomacy and Digital Signatures

On Tuesday, December 10, Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip and Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen sat down at their respective desks in Tallinn and Helsinki and concluded what they claim is the world's first digitally signed international agreement.

The agreement appropriately is about government e-Services.

According to Estonia e-Government

“As one of the central agreement of the Memorandum of Understanding, the national data exchange platforms will be developed together with Finland from now on. The greatest benefit arising from such platforms is that the citizens and institutions are required to provide data only once and hereafter, the data can be easily and securely shared.”

Thanks to Rein Krevald for pointer. He has previously been source of other Estonia stories for my books and blogs.

Photo Credit

Homejoy – the Uber of home cleaning

The premise of Homejoy is fairly simple. Go to the website or download the app, create an account, and pick a time you want your house cleaned. The rate is $20 per hour plus a $5 supply fee. A key selling point is that the housecleaners themselves are insured and vetted by Homejoy. Like Uber’s drivers, however, they’re not technically employed by the company. Instead, they work as freelancers who set their own hours and receive assignments based on availability.

For investors, Homejoy’s appeal would seem to rest on its potential to create efficiency through transparency. (Google Ventures and Levchin didn’t immediately return requests for comment.) Homejoy, Cheung says, provides a highly visible way for the vast workforce of independent cleaners to make themselves known and demonstrate their competence. “We’re essentially organizing all the independent cleaners onto our platform,” Cheung says.

Wired

Technology to protect Kenya’s elephants

Goss’s team has put GPS tracking collars on 15 elephants throughout the reserve and can follow them online via Google Earth. If the animals stray into areas frequented by poachers—or nearby grazing land for cows that belong to the semi-nomadic Maasai tribe—Goss sends in one or more of his three drones. In his flatbed truck, he touches a button on his iPad 3 display labeled “take off,” and the $300 Parrot AR.Drone takes flight. About 2.5 feet long and 1 foot wide, the unarmed spycraft has four rotors that can carry it high above the savanna. It can spot poachers and divert elephants, which are typically frightened by the quadcopter’s buzzing rotors. “We realized very quickly that the elephants hated the sound of them,” says Goss, 28. “I’m assuming that they think it’s a swarm of bees.”

Bloomberg