New Florence. New Renaissance.

Manufacturing’s next act

Mention “Industry 4.0” to most manufacturing executives and you will raise eyebrows. If they’ve heard of it, they are likely confused about what it is. If they haven’t heard of it, they’re likely to be skeptical of what they see as yet another piece of marketing hype, an empty catchphrase. And yet a closer look at what’s behind Industry 4.0 reveals some powerful emerging currents with strong potential to change the way factories work. It may be too much to say that it is another industrial revolution. But call it whatever you like; the fact is, Industry 4.0 is gathering force, and executives should carefully monitor the coming changes and develop strategies to take advantage of the new opportunities.

McKinsey

 

Smart lighting

Lighting, like everything else, has gone digital. Instead of creating light with wires and gas inside a hot enclosure, we now use semiconductors known as light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Diminutive and durable, they’re a far cry from Edison’s ­incandescents—and they’re enabling a lot of competition. Soraa, a lighting company founded in 2008 by Nobel Prize in physics winner Shuji Nakamura, sells commercial lights to California Pizza Kitchen and Starwood Hotels. ­Ketra, a six-year-old startup, provides lighting for the Art Institute of Chicago and Tiffany & Co

The rapid shift has the incumbents scrambling. In March, Philips announced plans to sell its LED component-making division. Siemens spun out Osram through an initial public offering. Rumors suggest that GE’s lighting division could be for sale. (The company denies it.) “The rapid transition to LEDs has caught the major manufacturers a bit unawares,” says Will Rhodes, a market researcher at IHS Technology. “Their traditional business is falling faster than their LED business is taking off.”

Fortune

 

Search beyond the box

But app indexing is not just Google introducing another corpus into its search engine. The mobile app-sphere is where people live these days — not so much the web. Google must be there. Huffman knows this. “Google should be the premiere place in user’s minds for finding apps, discovering great apps and finding the content and the capabilities inside of those apps,” he says.

The company faces challenges in doing this. For one thing, it had to figure out how to rank apps in search results. Google has endless experience ranking websites, but it has had to come up with new signals to identify the apps most likely to have the best information. (Apps with lots of downloads and high user rankings are more likely to have better information, and Google ranks the deep links within those apps more highly.)

Another potential hurdle is getting total buy-in from developers, who must not only allow Google to scrape their content, but actually do some work to make their apps integrate fully into Google’s scheme. This seems like a no brainer. After all, if the data in your app surfaces in a Google search result,users are more likely to use that app. What’s more, Google has started to give results from apps that are not installed on a user’s device. For instance, if you are searching for a recipe, Google might give you a deep link to a cooking app you don’t have. In those cases, there’s an opportunity to download the app. “So we actually are kind of promoting your app in line,” says Huffman.

Medium.com

Three steps to an answer: (1) holding and tapping the phone while “Blurryface” plays on Spotify and (2) asking Google who’s singing lead, will (3) surface the frontman of Twenty One Pilots. Note that at no point is the Google app or a browser involved

LA tech

California has always been a bit of an obsession for the tech industry, but most of the attention has been focused in a northerly direction. That’s slowly changing: Los Angeles is coming into its own as a tech hub. When Cornerstone OnDemand, a local business-­software company, went public in 2011 and quickly reached a $1 billion market cap, “people realized that this is for real,” says founder and CEO Adam Miller. “It became socially acceptable to work in tech in L.A.”

Fortune

“The In-Memory Revolution”

I am reviewing Dr. Hasso Plattner and Bernd Leukert’s new book. I am doing it more to make sure I get a 360 degree perspective for my SAP Nation sequel.

Not surprisingly, there is not much new on S/4HANA, recent as that is. In fact, that portion reads more like a marketing brochure. They don’t use the word “simple” much but there is plenty of promise of “non-disruption”. There is insufficient focus on migration or destination economics other than it should be lighter in data, ergo TCO should go down.

What is nice, and the reason it qualifies for New Florence is the “Big Data”/HANA use cases profiled – medical research insights, fraud detection, omni-channel retail at Burberrys, margin management at Conagra,  hurricane damage prediction for insurers and consumer sentiment analysis among them. I wish they had profiled these 3-4-5 years ago, when they would have stood out much more in the Analytics category of this blog where other products/vendors have been showcasing similar examples. Again, in the use cases, there is little focus on what it cost these customers.

Another nice touch – a spiritual foreword by Clayton Christensen, “Mr. Disruption” which plays to the S/4 message of simplification through removal of aggregates

“I am a religious person, and I regularly think about whether God is pleased with my life. In one of these ponderings recently, I had an important insight: God does not need accountants in Heaven. Because we have finite minds, we need to aggregate data into bigger numbers to have a sense for what is going on around us. For example, I can’t keep track of all of the specific invoices we have sent to our customers, So thank goodness, we have an accountant who can count up all these into a single number which we call “sales.” … I realized, however, that because God has an infinite mind, he doesn’t need to aggregate above the level of individuals in order to have a perfect understanding of what is going on in the world. And this implies that when he measures my life, he will only discuss with me what I have done to help other people — because he doesn’t aggregate above the level of the individual.”

Finally, a production note: Amazon has not had the book available for weeks now. Springer, the publisher, still does not have the eBook version out, and as of last week was not shipping the print version to the US (that may have changed). I had to escalate within Springer to get a copy. Hopefully, readers will have an easier time. 

I would certainly recommend reading the use cases. At  $79.99 the print version is priced more for a college course, but if it is released on the Amazon Kindle, it would certainly be a good one to borrow from their online library.

“Knowledge is Beautiful”

Relishing a walkthrough of my copy of Knowledge is Beautiful – a superb collection of visualizations by David McCandless

Google Project Soli

On its surface, the idea behind Soli is similar to Leap Motion and other gesture-based controllers: A sensor tracks the movements of your hands, which control the input into a device. During a demo at the session Friday, Soli's founder, Ivan Poupyrev, showed how the sensor could recognize gestures and allow people to control functions of a smartwatch without touching a display.

But unlike other motion controllers, which depend on cameras, Soli is equipped with radar, which helps it "track sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy," ATAP says. This helps keep Soli tiny — small enough to fit within a tiny chip that can be incorporated into wearables and other devices.

Mashable

 

 

Technology at the library

My daughter got a nice tour (thanks to librarian Clement Ho) this weekend of the library at American University in Washington, DC.

Impressive all the scanning, poster, 3D and other printing technology, the loaner devices and materials the students can avail of.

My favorite was the Bookeye 4 scanner with the cradle so you don’t have to contort books to scan them

“One secret behind Bookeye 4's superior quality images is that it employs a linear CCD with dual reflecting mirrors that move instead of the lens; all but eliminating distortions inherent with both film and digital cameras (e.g. chromatic aberrations, barrel and pincushion distortions). Another reason for Bookeye 4's superior image quality is that the lens always remains perfectly perpendicular to the book whether in the flat or 'V' position, thereby enabling the scanner to digitize each side of the book in perfect alignment. The end result is a scanner that captures documents precisely from edge to edge while gently preserving the subject matter.”

a close second was the LocknCharge FUYL cells to store and charge laptops and mobile devices

 

I drooled about all these loaners - not listed Google Glasses which are also in inventory

 

I would like to borrow these :)

 

colorful reminder the world is still pretty analog!

The Mars Shot

I spent a couple of hours at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The highlight was the IMAX, 3D documentary Journey to Space. It is impressive how in less than an hour they brought out highlights from the Apollo moon shots, the Space Shuttle/International Space Station/Hubble telescope era and the next phase of Orion rockets and the goal to reach Mars.

These have been stepping stones for each others – how the inflexibility of the Apollo generation space suits is helping design the next-gen, how Apollo era rockets are guiding design of the much more powerful Orion rockets, how long term stays on the ISS are helping plan for physical and mental health on the much longer Mars shot, how the innovative Bigelow expandable Kevlar type space module and solar arrays will facilitate the long journey, the robotics like the Rover which will precede humans, the audacious attempt to redirect an asteroid into a stable orbit around the moon, where astronauts can explore it and return with samples.

And then you walk out and see the exhibits of the Mars Rover and the Apollo lunar module and various rockets and like me you likely get goosebumps. A manned Mars shot is likely in the next two decades – and I mean a round trip.

Go see the movie at an IMAX near you. Here’s a listing of theaters where it is running.

 

Seafood Traceability

Barrios is one of about 250 Chilean fishermen who have signed on with Shellcatch, a San Francisco startup seeking to profit from the growing demand for sustainable seafood. The company hopes its technology will combat the overfishing and fraud that threaten the international seafood trade. The Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that one out of five fish taken from the ocean is caught illegally, depleting stocks of certain species to levels that imperil their survival. Whether it’s to avoid fines for fishing without permits or going over their quota or simply to boost profits, fishermen often try to pass off one type of fish as another. Oceana, a U.S. nonprofit, ran DNA tests on 1,200 fish samples and found that one-third had been mislabeled, according to a 2013 report. “We think technology in the seafood space can disrupt the way business is being done, which currently involves large amounts of species fraud and illegality,” says Shellcatch founder Alfredo Sfeir. “Technology allows you to know the people behind your fish. That’s how it used to be.”

Bloomberg