New Florence. New Renaissance.

Moby’s “Open Source” album

innocents is the 11th studio album from the electronic music iconoclast: a lo-fi, melodic meditation on vulnerability and humanity. What you make of it is up to you. Download new music from innocents. Then, enter your email to unlock 3 bonus tracks, 3 short films, art, and the album’s entire stem library. A song is only a starting point. You decide how the world will hear it.

BitTorrent

Open Innovation at Shell

Through TechWorks' Boston Innovation Centre in the USA, Jurgens dreams of bringing the kinds of robots that operate in space to Earth. These would to work in off-shore applications, underground and in exploration roles.

Another area Shell is deploying the outside-in approach of open innovation is with seismic surveys – the kind looking for natural gas. Each of these surveys produce vast amounts of data – up to ten terabytes – that needs to be crunched. But it's also useful to visualise it. "We're talking with companies in the gaming industry and also specialists in Hollywood," says Jurgens.

Robots searching for gas, game designers visualising seismic data, and an energy giant supporting startups? Sounds like Shell's open innovation platform is on to something.

Wired UK (sub required)

click on image to enlarge text

Android and the Internet of Things

Zemlin points to SAIC Motor, a Chinese car company, as a case study. With a team of about six software developers, SAIC developed an Android infotainment system for its cars. “I ran into them at this trade show where they were placed next to all these other carmakers with massive software teams,” Zemlin says. “They said, ‘We just have six dudes and Android.’ ”

Philip DesAutels, the vice president for technology at Xively, a just-launched cloud computing service that simplifies the work needed to get a device to transmit data, has studied the Internet of things for years. He says there are five times as many downloads of Xively’s Android-specific software as there are of its software made for Apple’s iOS. His favorite product: an Android-based agricultural irrigation system where a network of tiny, waterproof computers in the field regulates water valves. “With Android, you get something that is power-efficient, it’s easy for developers to do the user interface and touch controls, and it’s easy to get data in and out,” DesAutels says. “There’s just a bigger community behind it than with anything else.”

Bloomberg

Energy efficiency apps marketplace

Among others, these include apps that keep track of tenants' utilities, monitor buildings' energy performance and display the amount of carbon emissions each building, or group of buildings, is responsible for. The idea -- expressed as "See a bigger picture" by Panoptix -- is to help building owners and managers see energy trends across buildings, making it easier for them to find ways to reduce energy consumption, for example, or to see anomalies that could indicate fixable problems.

The apps are all based on Johnson Controls' Panoptix energy-management platform, introduced last year. The company earlier this month made its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to developers so they could begin designing apps for the marketplace.

GreenBiz

Photo Credit Johnson Controls

Getty Images: The Google of the visual web

“Before Getty bought iStockphoto, it had some 150,000 customers a year. Now it has 1.3 million. “About 900,000 of them are small and medium-sized businesses, many of whom weren’t using images legally or at all,” Klein says. Fifteen years ago, Getty uploaded a few hundred photos a day; now it uploads tens of thousands. Getty used to license or sell 100,000 images a year; today it’s 30 million to 40 million.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Photo Credit Getty Images

Amazon – and new ecosystems

from CEO Jeff Bezos’ 2011 shareholder letter (a tweet from John Hagel reminded me)

“The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity – to pursue their dreams. That’s a big part of what’s going on with Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon, and Kindle Direct Publishing. With AWS, FBA, and KDP, we are creating powerful self-service platforms that allow thousands of people to boldly experiment and accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible or impractical. These innovative, large-scale platforms are not zero-sum – they create win-win situations and create significant value for developers, entrepreneurs, customers, authors, and readers.”

BTW – his annual letters are becoming classics like the ones Warren Buffett sends out on his Hathaway Berkshire investments or Bill Gates for the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation on the state of global health.  I included Bezos’ complete 2010 letter as an exhibit in my new book.

Photo Credit: slide on AWS from Annual Shareholder meeting

The .NET Gadgeteer

"is a rapid prototyping platform for small electronic gadgets and embedded hardware devices. It combines the advantages of object-oriented programming, solderless assembly of electronics using a kit of hardware modules, and quick physical enclosure fabrication using computer-aided design."

Microsoft Research

It is an evolution of a concept Bug Labs has pioneered - see previous post here

The $ 32,000 startup

From BusinessWeek

"But Park and Bahn did. How? To start with, they crowdsourced the design. Instead of hiring a bunch of marketing people, as tech companies usually do, they asked their user community for volunteers to help conceive a new site. Then they selected a handful of the most eager users and trained them on the basics of Silicon Valley-style product management. Next, Park and Bahn needed to find a designer. They used 99designs.com, which hosts design competitions, for a two-week contest that attracted hundreds of designers, yielding a design they used as the theme for the new site. The contest, prize, and designer's time cost $9,200.

They broke up Web development into two tasks: front-end engineering (turning design artwork into code) and back-end engineering (making the code actually function). They built their technology on top of WordPress, phpBB, and Drupal—which are free, open-source platforms. Front-end engineering usually requires sophisticated coding done by contractors who earn as much as $100 an hour. Instead, the Beat The GMAT team turned to a service called PSD2HTML.com—which converts Photoshop design files into HTML and CSS code. This service costs $160 to $220 per Web page, totaling $4,500. For back-end engineering, they hired four developers from Hungary and Ukraine on the outsourcing website oDesk. They paid $15 to $20 per hour. The entire back-end engineering cost $18,000."

Facebook’s “Open” Data Center

“Just weeks before switching on a massive, super-efficient data center in rural Oregon, Facebook is giving away the designs and specifications to the whole thing online. In doing so, the company is breaking a long-established unwritten rule for Web companies: don't share the secrets of your server-stuffed data warehouses.

Ironically, most of those secret servers rely heavily on open source or free software, for example the Linux operating system and the Apache webserver. Facebook's move—dubbed the Open Compute Project—aims to kick-start a similar trend with hardware.”

MIT Technology Review

The new data center, in Prineville, Oregon, covers 147,000 square feet and is one of the most energy-efficient computing warehouses ever built. The building is carefully positioned so that, during both winter and summer, prevailing winds deliver air to the intake vent seen here along the building’s side.

See more from Larry Dignan at ZDNet

20 years of Linux

from the Linux Foundation