New Florence. New Renaissance.

16 Cameras in One

A quick glance registers the L16 as innocuous. It's really just a black, rounded rectangle topped with a silver button. But when you notice the 16 different circles (17 if you count the IR sensor) on its face, the L16 becomes an almost threatening piece of technology to look at.

Light has taken advantage of what founder Rajiv Laroia calls "a silent revolution" in the photography world. Thanks to the need to put better-quality cameras in smartphones, the process of miniaturizing camera modules and molding high-quality plastic lenses has brought things to a place where — with a little computational photography — you can make something like the L16. Light sees it as a DSLR replacement, something that you can throw in your bag to save yourself from lugging around extra lenses and equipment. But really it's more of an experiment, one that you can preorder now for $1,299, and one that won't ship until late summer 2016.

The Verge

 

 

NASA’s free patents

US space agency NASA is offering startups a license to 15 categories of patented NASA technologies for free.

The move follows Google's offer earlier this year of 'free' patents to select startups - and it could be just as valuable given the 1,200 patented technologies available for license under NASA's new Technology Transfer Program.

NASA hopes the program will make life easier for cash-strapped startups short on intellectual property, which would effectively be repurposing NASA's existing patents for new commercial products or services.

ZDNet

Singapore’s transit experiment

“It’s a bit more direct than a bus that stops thirty stops,” he says. “Beeline stops for a maximum of five stops, sometimes three, and then is straight on the expressway. It’s not as personal as a taxi, but if you get 15 people on a bus, that’s a big win from an environmental sustainability point of view.”
It also tackles another problem: seating. “Sometimes you don’t know if you’re going to get a seat on a public bus, so wouldn’t it be great if you could pre-book a seat using an app? Now you can.”

The team is currently crowdsourcing the routes, finding new demand from housing blocks which previously had to make multiple changes on their morning commute. There are five trial routes, with more planned, and the app encourages people to request new routes. “If enough people want it, we’ll activate it,” he says. So far 7,000 people have made suggestions, with the most popular routes ‘trending’ on the app to encourage bus companies to launch new services.

GovInsider

Not your dad’s Oracle OpenWorld

To me, the last few Oracle OpenWorlds have melded with each other. I usually avoid the band evening so typically associate each with a sporting event. So last year, the local Giants were on their way to winning the World Series, in 2013 America’s Cup sailing fever pervaded the event, in 2012 CEO Larry Ellison used his keynote to highlight a pretty impressive command of athletes who had dominated the London Olympics.  

This year, something else is dramatically different. The large number of non-IT tracks is striking. HCM, Modern Finance, SCM, CX, Industry specific tracks are being hosted at a nearby hotel away from the main Moscone Center venue. There are a staggering number of sessions – over 2,500. Many of the customer panels have NO CIOs – all are line of business executives. In the HCM panel I am moderating tomorrow, the guidance has been to focus on HRO hot buttons not so much cloud/IT architecture issues.

Oh, it is still an IT-centric conference, but impressive how business conversations are being intermingled with Java, Exadata and encryption discussions.

Pixar as research firm

Pixar is as much a research firm as it is an animation studio, and a new exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City does an expert job at showing us how. For Pixar: The Design of Story, the movie studio supplied Cooper Hewitt with 650 renderings, mockups, illustrations, and storyboards of its characters and landscapes, along with background. Taken together, these artifacts illuminate the painstaking level of research that goes into the creation of every character, right down to the folds in an old man’s jacket sleeve, or the texture of the curls in a heroine’s hair.

Wired

Photo Credit

Brilliant personal assistants

He starts simply, asking for the time in Berlin and the population of Japan. Basic search-result stuff—followed by a twist: “What is the distance between them?” The app understands the context and fires back, “About 5,536 miles.”

Then Mohajer gets rolling, smiling as he rattles off a barrage of questions that keep escalating in complexity. He asks Hound to calculate the monthly mortgage payments on a million-dollar home, and the app immediately asks him for the interest rate and the term of the loan before dishing out its answer: $4,270.84.

“What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?” he asks. Hound figures out that Mohajer is fishing for the population of Washington, DC, faster than I do and spits out the correct answer in its rapid-fire robotic voice.

Wired

 

 

Cool Prosthetics

Most prosthetic manufacturers build their products with a certain amount of blandness so their artificial limbs won’t stand out. So much effort is put into making them appear natural that some artificial limbs are so real realistic that they are indistinguishable from a real limb when viewing them at a distance. While most manufacturers take this realistic approach, UK limb maker Open Bionics is going to the opposite extreme, creating brightly colored, kid-friendly prosthetic hands that are branded after popular superheroes and movie characters.

Digital Trends

The Steve Jobs movie

When I reviewed the Walt Isaacson 2011 book on Steve Jobs I wrote

“Stylistically, I would have loved for him to have the started the book around 2000 and spent 3/4 of the book on the amazing string of Apple and Pixar achievements since then, and SJ’s own just as amazing willpower and strength through all the medical procedures he endured, and woven in as appropriate snippets from SJ’s previous history. But Walt presents a chronology from birth so the first half of the 600+ pages is somewhat plodding and repetitive.”

From that pov, the new Danny Boyle (director)/Aaron Sorkin (screen adaptation of the book) movie does even worse, because it ends in 1998. Jobs matured as he aged, and he surrounded himself with a cadre of superb executives like Jony Ives and Tim Cook who have marched Apple to even greater heights.

But I wondered how a director like Ridley Scott, would have handled this movie which is woven around 3 product launches. After all, Jobs was Mr. “One More Thing” – the man who singlehandedly made product launches an immaculate art form. We would have likely seen much more of the event production details, maybe even the gory details that go into manufacturing and logistics behind millions of units of a new product.

I specifically invoke Ridley, because my only nitpick about “The Martian” was I wished he had added 10-15 minutes of Matt Damon in depressed, gloomy moods as he fought fear, loneliness, feelings of being abandoned – shades of Tom Hanks in ‘Castaway”.

Boyle/Sorkin, in contrast, only seem interested in the human angle – and there focus mostly on the negative aspects of a younger, less mature Jobs. And the movie takes liberties with facts – e.g. Joanna Hoffman, a prominent character in the movie, was long retired when the iMac was launched in 1998 – and I started to wonder how much was Hollywood fiction.

Not sure the movie adds much to our understanding of the Man.

 

 

Technologies which have revolutionized sports

Readwrite discusses technologies which have most impact on sports – the teams and the fans

• Video Technology
• Portable sensors
• Drug testing
• Aerodynamics and thermodynamics
• Data Analytics

Photo Credit

The changing face of popular websites

The Washington Post has a nice analysis of the changes in Top 20 sites over the last two decades

“The first year here is 1996, when the web was … young. Several of the top 20 sites were college sites, thanks to colleges having invested early in the internet. AOL and Yahoo were there too, as they have been ever since. Mostly, however, the list is garbage nonsense like “GNN” and “Teleport,” which we don’t even know what they are. Notice the ascent of Excite and CNET. They’ll be interesting in the next part of the graph.”

Click on graph to expand