New Florence. New Renaissance.

Art on wheels

Jaime Colsa owns a transport company that delivers ordinary consumer goods — computers, food, drinks. The contents of his trucks aren’t eye-catching, but his vehicles certainly are, adorned with paintings showing cartoonlike faces, dogs, brightly colored geometric patterns, spirals and landscapes.

These trucks that crisscross Spain have been painted by artists as part of the Truck Art Project. Financed by Mr. Colsa, the project aims in part to bring street art back to its roots.

New York Times

 

 

 

Drones and Houston Recovery

Pilots working for Fort Bend County, to the southwest of Houston, have used drones to assess damage to roads, bridges, and water treatment plants—and posted the footage online. Other local governments and agencies, including fire departments and state environmental quality officials, have worked with drone operators to identify flooding and drainage problems.

Meanwhile, insurance companies are launching their own fleets of drones, in efforts to tally up and verify claims. Allstate will use hundreds of drones in its Harvey-related deployment, its largest since it began experimenting with drone assessments a few years ago, says Justin Herndon, a spokesperson for the insurance company. “We’re going to be there for a while.”

Wired

 

Florida’s technology boom

Augmented Reality arguably has even more upside, with startups like Plantation-based Magic Leap whipping the world into a frenzy over its in-development product that promises to project objects onto the everyday world.

Companies like Aventura-based Nearpod may make an even bigger dent with software that lets students interact with course material like never before. Founded five years ago, Nearpod boasts a classroom VR platform that nearly six million students have used and was first put to the test in Florida. One big reason Nearpod came to Florida was that the Miami-Dade school system was an early tech adopter. For instance, when Apple launched the iPad, some district schools started buying tablets for every student. “We were very lucky to be here,” says Nearpod co-founder and CEO Guido Kovalskys.” Earlier this year, seeking a better talent pool and a lower cost of doing business, Nearpod boldly moved its management team from Silicon Valley to Florida.

Inc

 

Swiss textile artisans and automation

Forster Rohner’s workshop in St. Gallen echoes with the hammering sound of thousands of needles stitching embroidery destined for the likes of Dior, Valentino, and French lingerie maker Chantelle. The 11 machines all have hundreds of needles, and the biggest can embroider pieces as long as 15 meters (49 feet). Each is staffed by two people who program the desired patterns and step in to fix problems such as broken needles or thread.

In the next room, about a dozen women sit at tables prepping material for the machines and examining the finished products, delicately fixing any flaws, while a few specialists sew the most-detailed pieces by hand. A couple of doors down there’s an archive of a half-million sketches and samples stacked floor to ceiling in boxes, folders, and books with yellowed pages, some dating to the 1800s. Drawings and cloth are laid out on a large table where designers study historic patterns. Upstairs, researchers develop products such as fabrics embedded with pressure sensors, tiny lights, or filaments for heating. “What makes us special is the design,” Forster says.

BusinessWeek

Forster Rohner is pioneering smart apparels as video below shows

 

 

Software Defined WANs

Legacy WANs feature a protocol called Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) for distribution between, for instance, headquarters in St. Paul, a branch office in Fresno, California, and a factory in Lynchburg, Virginia. MPLS is pricey. But, until SD-WANs came along, it was the best option. The expense of MPLS is justified if what is being transferred is the gross sales for the day or other mission-critical and sensitive data. It isn’t if the content is the final standings of the company softball league.

SD-WAN solves this challenge by enabling the less demanding data to be transported by less expensive broadband. SD-WANs agilely segregate data so that sales receipts still get MPLS treatment -- while the details of how the accounting department victory over the shipping department are sent over far cheaper broadband connections.

There is a related benefit. Traditional WANs are routed through data centers because that’s where data and applications historically are stored. Many corporate functions are migrating to the cloud, however. SD-WANs are not burdened by this legacy topography and can connect remote users directly to those assets.

IT BusinessEdge

 

The ISS gets a supercomputer

The Space Station orbits Earth (and sees a sunrise) once every 92 minutes. Soon it will have a computer that can keep up.

The HPE supercomputer headed to the ISS uses 2-socket “pizza-box” servers from the HPE Apollo 40 family with Broadwell class processors and a high-speed 56 Gigabit per second interconnect. With a speed of over 1 TeraFLOP, while it's not going to give serious competition to the world's fastest supercomputer (China's Sunway TaihuLight), this really is a supercomputer.

You can't just plug this into the ISS's solar-array-charged 48 volt DC power supply. The computer uses NASA-supplied power inverters to feed it the 110AC the computer needs to work.

Cooling the supercomputer was another obstacle. “Typically, an HPE computer similar to this one would be air-cooled. But for the ISS, HPE created (and the astronauts will be installing) a water-cooled ‘locker’ – not your standard datacenter rack enclosure,” says Dave Petersen, the mission’s co-principal investigator for hardware and SGI’s product design and compliance engineer.

HP Enterprise

Royal Mail goes EV

Royal Mail is trialling nine British-made fully electric commercial vehicles this month, transporting packages between mail and distribution centres in the capital.

The firm hopes that the trial will increase Royal Mail's efficiency, and reduce vehicle emissions.

While the trucks will have human drivers, they are 'autonomous-ready', which suggests that Royal Mail deliveries could one day be made by driverless vehicles.

However, Royal Mail says it has 'no current plans' to roll out the technology.

Daily Mail

 

 

Farm to Fridge

“So we asked the question: what if Walmart could help busy families like mine ensure my fridge was always well-stocked? What if we created a service that not only did my grocery shopping and brought everything to my home, but even went so far as to put it directly into my fridge? And, what if it was even more convenient because this “in-fridge delivery” happened while I was at work or off doing other things?

In setting out to solve this challenge, we’re excited to be testing new delivery ideas with companies like August Home. As one of the leading providers of smart locks and smart home accessories, they’re a great partner to test these new concepts, like delivering packages inside customers’ homes and putting groceries away in their refrigerators.”

Walmart Today

 

The Digital Grocer

It could be called the “ply” model — as in, “ply your wares with digital technology.” This model seeks to offset the scale advantages of Amazon and Walmart by leveraging the distinctive capabilities of a local grocery store: a supply chain fed by full-truckload shipments (which Amazon lacks); dynamic pricing and promotion (which Walmart disdains); and the ability to command intensive loyalty from shoppers, because of its local community knowledge, customer segmentation, and product customization. To compete in the coming decade against the twin disruptions of Amazon and Walmart (and their equivalents), today’s grocers and supermarkets need to return to the customer-centric mind-set of their 19th-century predecessors, while making the most of today’s digital tools.

Strategy+Business

Airborne Wireless Network

Airborne Wireless Network recently achieved the first flight test of its high-speed broadband airborne connectivity network, using a temporary mobile mast system to emulate a ground station and two Boeing 767s carrying airborne equipment. The plan for the network is to put aircraft to work as airborne repeaters or routers, eventually creating a flying network or, as the company calls it, “a digital superhighway in the sky.”

The company believes that its airborne network will allow users all over the world—including those living in rural areas and island nations, and those on ships, oil platforms and aircraft—to tap into the network. Airborne Wireless Network won’t provide connectivity services to end users but will act as a wholesale carrier and work with companies to offer retail services.

AIN Online