New Florence. New Renaissance.

Coolest Cooler

The result is the world’s smartest all-purpose party starter. It stores food and drinks, sure. But it also touts a blender (“for vodkaritas,” Grepper offers), an LED lid light (“to see if you’re reaching for beer or Clamato juice”), a USB charger (“so nobody’s phone dies”), a Bluetooth speaker (for tunes) and big wheels designed to navigate many terrains (beach, parking lot). “I just want to make the coolest cooler out there,” says Grepper. Hence the name: Coolest Cooler.

Time

 

Rings as wearable tech

Like many professional women, Christina Mercando keeps her smartphone in her purse, which meant she was constantly digging it out to check for important notifications. But what if she could get that info from something she was already wearing, much as pants-wearing men can feel a phone buzz in their pocket? That’s the thinking behind Ringly, a line of rings that can be programmed to glow when wearers get an email from their boss, a text from their Uber driver or any number of other can’t-miss communications. Mercando, a former product and design manager at eBay, raised more than $1 million to realize her vision. So far, the concept is working: the first 1,000 Ringly rings, which debuted in June, sold out within 24 hours.

Time

 

Santa’s new helpers

At a 1.2-million-square-foot warehouse in Tracy, Calif., about 60 miles east of San Francisco, Amazon this summer replaced four floors of fixed shelving with the robots, the people said. Now, “pickers” at the facility stand in one place and wait for (Kiva) robots to bring four-foot-by-six-foot shelving units to them, sparing them what amounted to as much as 20 miles a day of walking through the warehouse. Employees at some robot-equipped warehouses are expected to pick and scan at least 300 items an hour, compared with 100 under the old system, current and former workers said.

WSJ

Biometric Security for Home Computers

Myris, a sleek handheld iris scanner, brings biometric security to home computers. The device plugs into a USB port and takes a split-second video of both eyes, scanning more than 240 points in each. A government-grade encrypted digital signature syncs with passwords stored on Myris, and never on your desktop. Once it verifies a match, it automatically signs the user into accounts through a browser extension. Since no two irises are alike, the chance of a false positive is less than one in two trillion.

Popular Science

Women who changed science and the world

Nice poster series of 12 inspiring ladies I saw courtesy of Txchnologist

An excellent airport gets better

I recently crossed the Delta 3 million lifetime milestone. The majority of those miles originated in the efficient airport that is Tampa International – TPA. It is consistently ranked as one of the best in the country and it is good to see the local aviation authority is looking ahead to 2017

From the Tampa Bay Times

TIA's top executive was showing off architectural renderings of what the airport will look like when its $943 million expansion and renovation project is completed in 2017. TIA officials said the new renderings are very close to what the finished product will look like…The new renderings showed that glass and steel will be added to the concrete exterior that has dominated the airport's architecture since the main terminal opened in 1971.

Needed an ERP for Security

Cisco and McAfee have rolled out products intended to function as central hubs. Cisco’s is called the Platform Exchange Grid, and McAfee’s is the Threat Intelligence Exchange(see video). In February, CSG Invotas introduced Security Orchestrator, a program that unifies security data onto a single screen and can automate some functions. An employee in the IT department can push a button to reset a compromised user’s password instead of having to do it manually. “Our tool turns that data into actions, and when we turn that data into actions, it doesn’t require people to do what machines do a whole lot better,” says CSG Invotas’s chief information security officer, Peter Clay.

BusinessWeek

 

Motorized Shading

Some people have a lot of trouble waking up in the morning, especially when the bedroom blinds are keeping the room dark. Motorized window coverings can be programed to automatically open when your alarm goes off, or, if you don’t need to wake at a specific time, they can be synced with a smart home system that triggers the blind to open at sunrise (based on an astronomical clock). You can use the sun to warm your living room in the morning, and insulate it in the evening, by setting your shades to automatically open when the sun is shining on one side of the house, and close when the sun has moved away. If you’re worried about furniture, rugs or art fading from sun exposure, automated shades can keep those damaging rays away without you having to be home to close anything.

Electronic House

The video below shows some of Lutron’s innovations in shades

 

 

Cisco’s Cloud Connector

With Intercloud, Cisco is reprising the strategy that brought it success in hardware. In the 1990s its routers were in demand because they let various proprietary technologies work together—an IBM network could communicate with an Apple one.

More than 3,700 people have been pulled from all corners of Cisco to work on Intercloud. The company has set aside $1 billion to develop or acquire technology and to persuade cloud providers to join the Intercloud ecosystem. So far 40 partners, including Deutsche Telekom (DTE:GR), have signed up, and a handful of organizations, among them Johns Hopkins University and real estate investment trust Boston Properties (BXP), are using Intercloud.

BusinessWeek

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One-way ticket to Mars

Most of the armchair aliens shared a demographic, the young-man Marsophile: guys with tattoos across their necks and arms, goatees and mustaches, variations on the Weird Al look. But there were also older women in the room, and kids too young to drive. What brought them together was an abiding belief in Lansdorp’s central message, that humans should be expanding onto other planets, and they should do so now. A few years ago, President Obama announced that the U.S. would put astronauts in orbit around Mars by the mid-2030s, but budget cuts and sequestration have slowed the project down, if not killed it outright. Even if NASA gets the mission back on track, the agency has said it will only send humans to Mars if it can also bring them back—a maddening bit of bureaucratic circumspection for the crowd assembled in Washington, D.C. “The technology to get you back from Mars simply doesn’t exist,” Lansdorp said, stirring up his audience, and it may not exist even 20 years from now. “We need to do this with the stuff that we have today, and the only way we can do that is by going there to stay.”

Popular Science

Photo Credit