New Florence. New Renaissance.

Glass: Enterprise Edition

Those still using the original Explorer Edition will explode with envy when they see the Enterprise Edition. For starters, it makes the technology completely accessible for those who wear prescription lenses. The camera button, which sits at the hinge of the frame, does double duty as a release switch to remove the electronics part of unit (called the Glass Pod) from the frame. You can then connect it to safety glasses for the factory floor—EE now offers OSHA-certified safety shields—or frames that look like regular eyewear. (A former division of 3M has been manufacturing these specially for Enterprise Edition; if EE catches on, one might expect other frame vendors, from Warby Parker to Ray-Ban, to develop their own versions.) “We did a lot of work to lighten the weight of the frames to compensate for the additional weight [of the Pod],” says Kothari. “So the overall package with Glass and the frames itself actually comes out to be the average weight of regular glasses.”

Other improvements include beefed-up networking—not only faster and more reliable wifi, but also adherence to more rigorous security standards—and a faster processor as well. The battery life has been extended—essential for those who want to work through a complete eight-hour shift without recharging. (More intense usage, like constant streaming, still calls for an external battery.) The camera was upgraded from five megapixels to eight. And for the first time, a red light goes on when video is being recorded. (Inoculation against Glasshole-dom!)

Wired

 

Geeky Media: Daniel Stone

Part of series on journalists, STEM specialists, authors who explain technology in sports, autos, healthcare and other aspects of life and work. I look forward to watching/reading/hearing their stuff. Many in this list have come recommended by readers – so please nominate others.

This time it is Daniel Stone who writes about food, agriculture and environmental science for National Geographic. 

 

The Jesus Battery

As (Bill) Joy explains it, Ionic’s innovations combine the advantages of the familiar alkaline batteries we buy at the drugstore (cheap, safe, and reliable) with those of the more expensive, fire-prone lithium batteries in our computers and phones (powerful, rechargeable, and more earth-friendly). He claims Ionic’s new approach is a big step to cheaper, safer, and more efficient batteries will not only power our devices and vehicles, but also enable an “energy internet” based on renewable sources.

Wired

 

There must be 50 ways to talk to Alexa

I asked Alexa on my Fire TV remote "what’s the difference between the Dot and the Echo", and she responded “sorry I don’t know”

The Verge is more helpful and writes

• If you want a speaker, go with Echo
• if you want a screen, go with Show
• if you just want a digital assistant, go with the Dot
• if you want a different form/factor, try Triby which brings you Alexa in a digital white board for your fridge, or GE which brings it in a circular lamp (see below)

Alexa now has over 15,000 “skills”. Expect a growing list of devices to allow you to converse with her.

 

Virtual Reality Tours of Smart Homes

There’s no better way to experience home technology than to touch it and use it, but virtual reality is the next best thing, and stands to help homeowner better understand what they’re buying and how it will work. It’s another movement in the smart home industry to simplify the process of integrating smart products and systems into a home.

Electronic House

 

Space Camera Drone

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has disclosed images and movies taken by the JEM Internal Ball Camera called 'Int-Ball' its first camera drone that can record video while moving in space under remote control from the ground. The recorded images and videos can be checked in real time by flight controllers and researchers on the ground, and then be fed back to the onboard crew.

It aims to realize 'zero' photographing time by the onboard crew in the end.

Augmented Reality in Retail

The (Adobe) group has recently developed a trio of HoloLens demonstrations that show the kind of visualizations augmented reality can achieve in a retail setting. These include:

Traffic paths. Using the HoloLens, store managers can view augmented data above the floor of a store showing what percentage of people have traveled down those paths. This would likely be recorded with beacons or cameras.

Digital mirror overlays. By overlaying graphics onto a smart mirror, a store manager can see information about user demographics, such as how many items have been tried on in which color, and how many of those purchases converted

Giving voice agents an augmented display. The great thing about voice agents is that we don't need to be staring at screens to use them. However, screens provide a canvas for rich information display and interactivity that isn't practical with voice output, at least today. By taking advantage of a virtual display, HoloLens users can interact with an agent such as Cortana and see visualized analytic information about their businesses wherever they might be in a room.

ZDNet

Iceberg drift

Thomas Rackow and colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, are following the block with keen interest.

They recently published research in which they modelled the drift of icebergs through Antarctic waters - taking into account the different influences that act on small and large objects. There are essentially four "highways" that bergs travel, depending on their point of origin.

A-68 should follow the highway up the eastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, leading from the Weddell Sea towards the Atlantic.

"It will most likely follow a northeasterly course, heading roughly for South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands," Dr Rackow told BBC News. "It will be very interesting to see whether the iceberg will move as expected, as a kind of 'reality-check' for the current models and our physical understanding."

BBC

Simulated highways: Small to medium bergs (Classes 1-3) generally have a lifetime of a couple of years; the big bergs (Classes 4-5) are mostly all gone after 10 years

Hasso Plattner’s brilliance

Nice post on SAP’s in-memory journey

“Towards end of 2006, close to 40 years after SAP was started, Hasso started speculating how to redo an enterprise system if he were to start from scratch and spent an entire day with his students to explain parts of how an accounting system worked then and what needed a redo. Hasso chuckles,“because I am a renegade and I wanted to do something different, I made a proposal to completely get rid of all aggregates, 40 years of aggregates, which was too radical a proposal then. I then made a proposal for all systems to take the time away from the line items and leave the day and aggregate. For every single line item, take the time away.” Hasso was convinced of his hypothesis that eliminating time of day would not result in any information loss from the transaction as in normal enterprise systems it shouldn’t matter whether something happened at 923 in the morning or 330 in afternoon. The challenge that he set for his students was to build a database to be so fast that we could build any aggregate the user community wanted on the fly within a reasonable response time on transactional data. The exercise to the students was to look at z processing, meaning for a given customer, looking down from the customer, get all orders, shipment, invoices, payment in a very short response time running sequentially through large database using secondary indices (what was already being done for 40 years). And what started as a research project marked the beginnings of SAP HANA. The dominating ethos was “Change the system fundamentally and yet use the traditional database technique.””

Here is Dr. Plattner presenting on some of the concepts at the 2010 SapphireNow. He was way ahead of the enterprise world.

 

Geeky media: Tom Standage

Part of series on journalists, STEM specialists, authors who explain technology in sports, autos, healthcare and other aspects of life and work. I look forward to watching/reading/hearing their stuff. Many in this list have come recommended by readers – so please nominate others.

This time it is Tom Standage at The Economist. I enjoy reading the magazine’s Technology Quarterly and Mr. Standage as Deputy Editor certainly can take some credit for it.

He is also responsible for the newspaper’s digital strategy and the development of new digital products, including Espresso and Economist Films. He joined The Economist as Science Correspondent in 1998 and was subsequently appointed Technology Editor, Business Editor and Digital Editor. He is the author of six history books, including “Writing on the Wall” (2013), “The Victorian Internet” (1998) and “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” (2005). He studied engineering and computing at Oxford University and has written for other publications including the New York Times, Daily Telegraph, Guardian and Wired, taking a particular interest in the internet’s cultural and historical significance.