New Florence. New Renaissance.

Oracle DaaS – Data-as-a-Service

Oracle invited me to moderate a panel in their DaaS launch today. Watch the whole hour for some great perspectives on this exciting new market category, and our panel starting around 26.00.

Talking to Steve Miranda and Omar Tawakol before and after I got even more excited about the concept

a) There is a new generation of data asset entrepreneurs like Omar (whose company, BlueKai Oracle acquired) who are about separating signal from noise– under NDA I have been briefed by other entrepreneurs focused on supply chain, HR and other DaaS. Scary smart folks.

b) Watching Omar talk about all the social and other marketing data feeds, Steve talking about feeds from machines and wearables, you realize we are not anymore in the Kansas of internal, structured data so many companies are still heavily invested in

c) How rapidly business and deployment models are changing. While the old model of “buy hardware, install software, load data, clean for quality – pay for all that” is not going away the speed of getting started with and the economics of DaaS are going to be compelling

d) How effortlessly Oracle with its decades of data management experience and horizontal and vertical application knowledge could play in a wide range of DaaS categories. 

“Pyramids of the 21st Century”

Fortune on the largest US data centers

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UTC – an innovation conglomerate

We’re standing in a cavernous airplane hangar not far from the United Technologies headquarters in Hartford, Conn. In a couple of hours Chênevert will be hosting the company’s annual investors conference, and the building is filled with impressively huge displays of the conglomerate’s well-known industrial brands. Nearby is a Sikorsky S‑76D helicopter, an SUV-like 13-passenger aircraft favored by the energy industry for ferrying workers out to oil platforms. Not far away is a Carrier industrial air-conditioning system powerful enough to keep an entire office complex chilled. And then there’s the drivetrain of an Otis elevator — similar to the ones that will be hoisting the 50 double-decker elevators in the 117-story Goldin Finance building under construction in Tianjin, China, and expected to open in 2016.

To Chênevert, however, the star of the show is the newest jet engine from Pratt & Whitney (yet another venerable United Technologies business unit).

Fortune

Move over Silicon Valley

Businessweek highlights promising startups from around the world including

“Barcelona-based Scytl makes software that anonymously counts election ballots cast online for national, state, and local contests in 35 countries. ”

“Sydney-based Atlassian, a leader in bug-tracking and project-management software, counts Twitter, NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover team, and 80 of the Fortune 100 among its 35,000 customers.”

“Most high-end camera lenses found in iPhones and other mobile devices come from Taiwan’s Largan Precision.”

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SmartThings

If this narrative sounds familiar, that’s because it is: companies have been promising the dawn of the smart home–a futuristic dwelling full of gadgets working seamlessly to satisfy your every whim–since the ’50s. Yet early efforts failed to deliver because of clunky tech and consumer wariness.

SmartThings, which launched in 2012, has arrived amid a legitimate sea change in home automation. In the past few years, the rise of cloud computing has made it easier than ever to build gadgets that connect to the so-called Internet of Things, meaning they can be monitored and controlled from afar, usually with their own smartphone app. There’s also been an uptick in the production of sensors and devices that enable you to smartify objects that are dumb. (Think plugging a desk lamp into an adapter controlled by your phone, or rigging a door with a motion detector that pings you about intruders.) By 2018, the research firm IHS Technology predicts, people will have installed 45 million smart-home services. “We’re really starting to see major volume here,” says Lisa Arrowsmith, an IHS associate director. “It’s an exciting time.”

Time (sub required)

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Antidote for overdoses

The hand-held device, called Evzio, delivers a single dose of naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of an overdose, and will be used on those who have stopped breathing or lost consciousness from an opioid drug overdose. Naloxone is the standard treatment in such circumstances, but until now, has been available mostly in hospitals and other medical settings, when it is often used too late to save the patient.

The decision to quickly approve the new treatment, which is expected to be available this summer, comes as deaths from opioids continue to mount, including an increase in those from heroin, which contributed to the death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in February. Federal health officials, facing criticism for failing to slow the rising death toll, are under pressure to act, experts say.

NY Times

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Driverless Truck

Move over Tesla – here is the Daimler 2025 Truck

“The driver still needs to start the vehicle and enter the flow of traffic. But once the Future Truck reaches 80 k.p.h., or 50 m.p.h., a prompt in the system asks the driver to activate what is called the Highway Pilot, which effectively takes over.

Equipped with sensors in the front that have ranges of 70 to 250 meters, or 77 to 273 yards, and cameras capable of capturing images in more than one direction, the Future Truck can identify single- and double-lane roads, pedestrians and objects — moving or stationary — and respond to them.”

 

Olfactory Code-Breakers

Smell – the final frontier of sense when it comes to UX design

“For years, scientists assumed that humans could detect some 10,000 different scents. A recent study from Rockefeller University, however, suggests that our noses are far more sensitive than we ever thought. By creating odor mixtures in which some smells overlapped, then asking volunteers to pick out which ones didn’t, researchers determined that we can actually detect more than 1trillion smells.

Monell scientists work tirelessly to crack the code of these scents. Trimmer and her colleagues are trying to figure out what odors light up which combinations of receptors and how genes influence that process. She says they know the receptor combos for at least 40 odors. Less than a trillion to go.

In the hallway outside Monell’s molecular biology lab, industrial-size refrigerators are packed with tiny tubes containing the DNA of different types of olfactory receptors. Inside the lab itself, wooden shelves and cabinets bear fragrant chemical concoctions meant to stimulate the cells.”

Spirit Magazine

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iPads and Ohio State’s marching band

Some band members and alumni were skeptical about bringing computers onto the practice field. One complaint: Students have for years rolled up their sheet music and jammed it into the horns of their instruments when they’re not playing, and you can’t do that with an iPad. Other, less specific grousing seemed to center on the concern that the use of tablets marked the first step toward a marching band full of robots. The band has worn the same uniform for 135 years; tradition is important.

Waters insists the iPads won’t change the core of the band’s performance. “This makes the process more efficient, but an iPad can’t perform a halftime show,” he says. “What they’re doing out there is an art form we’ve been perfecting for 135 years, and that’s not going to change.”

BusinessWeek

Video below of Michael Jackson tribute by the band

 

The “Steve Jobs of toilets”

Yoshiaki Fujimori wants to be the Steve Jobs of toilets.

Like iPhones, app-packed commodes are objects of desire in Mr. Fujimori's Japan. The lids lift automatically. The seats heat up. Built-in bidets make cleanup a breeze. Some of them even sync with users' smartphones via Bluetooth so that they can program their preferences and play their favorite music through speakers built into the bowl.

Three-quarters of Japanese homes contain such toilets, most of them made by one of two companies: Toto Ltd. 5332.TO -0.08% , Japan's largest maker of so-called sanitary ware, or Lixil Corp. 5938.TO +1.88% , where Mr. Fujimori is the chief executive.

Now Mr. Fujimori is leading a push to bring them to the great unwashed. In May, Lixil plans to add toilets with "integrated bidets" to the lineup of American Standard Brands, which Lixil acquired last year for $542 million, including debt.

WSJ (sub required)

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