New Florence. New Renaissance.

2021 – Best Restaurants

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about restaurants from the World’s 50 Best site

Top 8 below – need to make a trip to Copenhagen for just this reason!

2021 – Best Vehicles

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about cars, SUVs and trucks from Motor Authority

“We're in the middle of a changeover from the internal combustion engine to electric propulsion. The good news for auto enthusiasts is power comes easily for EVs. The bad news is they'll mark the end of manual transmissions and rumbling V-8 soundtracks. As the market turns toward more and more luxury and performance EVs, we'll have a decision to make here at Motor Authority: At what point does an EV win our Best Car To Buy award?

This could be the year. After driving 24 luxury cars, trucks, and SUVs that were new or significantly updated this year, we've narrowed down the list of nominees for the Motor Authority Best Car To Buy 2022 award to eight vehicles, including three EVs. We'll announce our winner, be it gas- or electron-powered, on Jan. 3, 2022.”

One of the 8 in the running is the Rivian R1T electric pickup truck which Motor Trend has also named its Truck of the Year

2021: A new world of enterprise software

Coming out of the pandemic I expected massive changes in software world and we started to see glimpses of that in 2021. Here are some standout examples:

I have been blown away at the speed at which IFS has re-branded, made several acquisitions and launched several new products. Before Dennis Howlett had retired in March, he told me "Darren Roos (the CEO of IFS) and his team have managed to take what was really quite a moribund company and turned it into something that’s relevant for the 21st Century,"

Their year end recap provides a high-energy summary in under 2 minutes. I talked to their CMO, Oliver Pilgerstrofer this week and the results are showing up very strongly in their leads pipeline and even more impressively, in a tight labor market, in their recruitment pipeline.

"Vinnie Vertical" has been screaming for years for vendors to develop and showcase operational, not just back office, functionality for various industries. I saw several vendors start to talk about “vertical clouds” and I was particularly impressed that SAP arranged this 8 episode line up for Analyst Cam. 

I saw new thinking around ecosystems. They are increasingly fragmented across ISV partners, SIs, resellers, App stores and developer networks. Tyler Prince  at Salesforce provided a perspective on the additional payback when you leverage cross-currents across all of them. Differently, I have been impressed with how Workday Ventures has ramped up investment in startups and beyond funding, opening up access to Workday customers. Watch Barbry McGann present on their philosophy.

Much of the media attention has gone to a tech vendor exodus from Silicon Valley. In reality, every vendor had to face up to office location challenges as we moved to hybrid work models. I was impressed with two conversations – one with Monty Hamilton of Rural Sourcing and Raju Vegesna of Zoho - both have been favoring secondary and tertiary towns and encouraging “rural revival”

More examples coming as I recap more from the over 100 episodes of Burning Platform and Analyst Cam during 2021. And I expect a torrential flow of changes coming in 2022.

It's not your Dad's software industry. 

2021 – Best Inventions

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about inventions from Time magazine

“To assemble our list of 2021’s Best Inventions, we solicited nominations across a variety of categories from TIME’s editors and correspondents around the world, and through an online application process. We then evaluated each contender on a number of key factors, including originality, creativity, efficacy, ambition and impact.

The result is a list of 100 groundbreaking inventions—including vaccines for COVID-19 and malaria, an emotional support robot for hospitalized children, an environmentally friendly dye for jeans and a brand new pasta shape—that are changing how we live, work, play and think about what’s possible.”

2021 – Best Books

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about books from the Wall Street Journal

The page above links to its reviews of its 10 selected books.

2021 – Breakthrough of the Year

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one from Science

"In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen’s dream and is Science’s 2021 Breakthrough of the Year."

Video below has more, and the runner ups

2021 – The Year in Search

One in a series of Best of 2021 posts, this one about trends from Google Search

Recap of 2021

For the rest of the year, New Florence will profile daily a “Best of 2021” books, movies, inventions, hotels courtesy of pubs like National Geo, Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast Traveller

But, first a recap of my 2021 and outlook for 2022 – it is an excerpt from the Curmudgeon Christmas I recorded with Dennis Howlett and ran on the Deal Architect blog

Longest treetop walkway

Stretching 1.5 kilometers (slightly less than a mile), Senda dil Dragun connects the villages of Laax Murschetg and Laax Dorf in southeast Switzerland, with an elevated trail that soars above the forest floor. Senda dil Dragun, which appropriately translates to "Way of the Dragon," opened to the public on July 11 and has since welcomed over 45,000 visitors.

Travel and Leisure

Even More West Coast on the East Coast

Recent Instagram galleries (with 10 photos each) of recent weekend trips along the West Coast of Florida

Venice Beach

West Coast Birds

Brandon

Estero Island

South Seas Plantation, Captiva Island

Raymond James Stadium, Tampa

Holiday Boat Parade, Tampa