New Florence. New Renaissance.

Technology at the Lowe's store

While Margaret cruised the garden section I walked around our local Lowe's for Labor Day sales.

There has to be more tech in a Lowe's store than at the Best Buy or Apple Store.

Iris Connected Home items

Smart appliances of all sorts

Infrared grills

Next-gen tools

Software enabled paint choices

Electronic Displays at every corner

Enhanced POS 

Most innovative cities

BusinessInsider’s list of 18 innovative cities including Amsterdam where 38% of all trips are made by bike. Other cities include Singapore, Helsinki and San Jose.

Ultrasound shopping

This is the age of invisible apps “that just notify us when something is going on,” as trend spotter and venture capitalist Mary Meeker said recently. Cyriac Roeding, 41, started reaching out to shoppers in 2010. Shopkick’s cofounder and CEO, and a German expat, he did so via ultrasound, a high-frequency signal that communicates with the app, verifies shoppers are inside the store and offers them kicks. “I’d done some soul-searching,” says Roeding, who wondered, “What’s the intersection of mobile and the physical world? The answer was easy: It’s called shopping.”

Forbes

 

The Hermès mystique

Twice a year more than 1,000 store representatives come to Paris for an event called “Podium,” where they select which pieces of merchandise they will carry. The family has decreed that each flagship store must pick at least one item from each of the 11 métiers–thus pushing them beyond handbags, scarves and ties to perfume, jewelry, watches, home accessories. In giving these managers an elaborate menu to choose from, each store boasts merchandise unique to itself. The moneyed globe-trotters who constitute the Hermès customer base constantly find themselves on a worldwide treasure hunt. For example, only in Beverly Hills can they find a $12,900 basketball, and the $112,000 orange leather bookcase was sold exclusively at the Costa Mesa store. So when they fall in love with that $11,300 bicycle there’s a pressure to get it, since the company’s website, while ahead of many luxury competitors, offers just a smattering of the Hermes product line.

Forbes with a story of the long time French luxury goods innovator

Photo Credit of my favorite Hermes product – their small pattern silk ties

The Big Data of the Napa Earthquake

Impressive how easy it has become to find and graph the multi-dimensional impact of any event, in this case the 6.0 earthquake Sunday in Napa Valley. 

USGS chart of the epicenter and neighboring impact

Jawbone tracking of earthquake impact on sleep patterns in the area

Fine Wine 50 index which shows a blip on Monday, on the right of the graph, given Napa's importance to the wine industry. 

18F – Agile in Federal IT

If federal agencies regularly come to 18F for “agile” software development — a term for a rapid, highly iterative project management process — they might eventually make that a priority when seeking IT contracts with outside tech companies, Tangherlini said.

The group was also formed to advance a collaborative, creative approach to software development, said Greg Godbout, 18F’s senior team lead. The code for FBOpen, and all other 18F projects, is posted publicly online on Github, a software code repository, and the team encourages developers at other agencies to use the code to build new features into their own Web sites.

Washington Post

A Garmin and FitBit in your sneaker

When in an unfamiliar neighborhood, you might turn to your GPS-equipped smartphone for navigational help, or, if you’re feeling gregarious, you might ask a stranger for directions. Soon you may not have to do either: Your shoes may subtly guide you on your way.

That’s the promise of Lechal, a new kind of sneaker that vibrates to signal which way you should turn. Developed by the Indian startup Ducere Technologies, the Bluetooth-enabled shoes will sync with an app that uses information from Google Maps to steer the user toward her destination. A buzzing on the right foot signals an upcoming right turn, a vibration on the left means turn left.

In addition to serving as personal tour guides, the shoes will be personal fitness trainers, recording such data as calories burned and miles walked, as well as signaling when to speed up or slow down to achieve specific exercise goals.

BusinessWeek

 

Cruise Liner in the Sky

“People get on the A380 and they absolutely love it,” he says. The upper deck on the Emirates version, he adds, is “just one big party.”

(Other carriers configure their A380s differently, with some including economy seating in the upper deck.)

The son of a tanker ship captain and an economist, Mr. Clark joined Emirates in the mid-1980s. His basic insight about the A380 is simple: It can be a canvas for a new kind of luxury flight experience. It was Mr. Clark who came up with the idea to install two showers for first-class passengers. Airbus engineers thought the idea was crazy because it would require more fuel to fly the water for the showers. But he dismissed their objections. The showers would immediately distinguish the plane from anything else in the air.

He also put a large bar on board, along with a pair of semicircular couches, equipped with seatbelts in case of turbulence.

New York Times

Arccos Virtual Golf Caddy

The Arccos ($399, arccos.com), which goes on sale this month, is like having your very own caddie, except it doesn't carry clubs or polish balls. This set of 14 gumdrop-shape sensors, which stick into the top of your golf clubs like thumbtacks, keeps track of your game and suggests appropriate clubs to use. It's similar to a competing product called Game Golf, but that model requires you to clip a vibrating beeper-like device to your pants; when I used it, I was never sure if my shots were registering or my table was ready at the Olive Garden.

Leveraging my smartphone's GPS via Bluetooth, the Arccos app not only figured out what course I was on, it knew I was at the 18th hole, 393 yards from the green. (The app has access to maps of 17,225 golf courses in the U.S.—which the company says is all of them.)

WSJ

Sapphire Mobile Screens

Apple Inc. created the blueprint for a smartphone when it covered the touch screen of its first iPhone in glass instead of plastic. Now, it is betting $700 million that sapphire, a harder and more expensive material, can replace glass and better protect future devices.

The first sapphire display screens for the forthcoming larger iPhone and smartwatch are expected to roll off production lines this month at a Mesa, Ariz., facility that Apple opened with materials manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies Inc.At full capacity, the plant will produce twice as much sapphire as the current output from the nearly 100 manufacturers world-wide, says Eric Virey, a senior analyst at French research firm Yole Développement.

WSJ