February 2012
92 posts
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Five Energy Technologies To Watch
Technological breakthroughs could have a large impact on energy, and not just transitioning to sustainable energy sources.
Grid-scale storage of electricity — very expensive techniques to store electrical power by converting to potential energy (like compressed air or pumped water) may be replaced by flow batteries, liquid-metal batteries, flywheels, and ultracapacitors, dropping price of...
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Onshore Wind May Be Cheaper Than Oil This Decade
Damian Carrington via guardian.co.uk
Electricity produced by wind turbines in the UK may be cheaper than that generated by burning gas within five years, even if the climate-warming pollution from the latter is allowed to be pumped straight into the air. That is one startling implication of a comprehensive analysis produced for the Guardian by experts at Imperial College London and the UK...
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How Big Will Phone Screens Get?
At first, screens larger than Apple’s 3.5 inch iPhone was a smart differentiation, but when will the expansion end?
Rob Pegaro via Digital Dialogue
[…] worldwide shipments of phone displays 4.5 in. or bigger will balloon from 9.48 million last year to 159.45 million this year
Samsung Galaxy Note with 5.7 inch screen
Could it be that screen size expansion might be motivated by...
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WatchDevium Dash — the smart phone car stereo — is a Kickstarter funded project now.
This will become ubiquitous. Sony, Pioneer, or Alpine should buy this company now. Or Apple.
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“Honestly, this kind of thing scares the shit out of me.”
– Response from sapphirescribe to our post on the London billboard that uses ‘vision’ to judge onlookers sex, and only shows a specific video to women.
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Emerging Trends by World Economic Forum
I’ve summarized a list of emerging tech trends that Andrew Maynard summarized from the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies assessment:
Informatics for adding value to information [Big Data]
Synthetic biology and metabolic engineering
Green Revolution 2.0 – technologies for increased food and biomass
Nanoscale design of materials
Systems biology...
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“The iPad is terrific; I have one. I use it to read books or watch TV but I don’t...”
– - Meg Whitman, CEO of HP, cited in HP’s PC Addiction by Jean-Louis Gassée via Monday Note
I think these are words that will haunt Whitman for the rest of her life, like IBM Chairman Tom Watson’s famous line,
I think there is a world market for about five computers.
HP is caught in a...
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Mobile Social Networking
According to Comscore’s 2012 Mobile Future In Focus report
64.2 million U.S. smartphone users and 48.4 million EU5 smartphone users accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile devices at least once in December 2011, with more than half of these mobile social networking users accessing social media almost every day.
[…]
more than half of those in the U.S. and nearly...
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LinkedIn Connect Fail Syndrome →
marksbirch:
I get my fair number of connection requests across the Internet, particularly from LinkedIn. I would have dumped LinkedIn a long time ago, but it actually has been a decent way to keep track of what people are doing professionally. The problem I have with LinkedIn however is when I get messages…
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it’s more important to know when to detect chaos than predict things. ‘Chaospotting’ is a valuable skill. It’s the next Trendspotting.
— Ale Lariu (@alelariu) February 22, 2012
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Khoi Vinh on The Future Of News
5 Minutes on The Verge: Khoi Vinh
Q: How should media publishers deal with the fact that readers are increasingly getting news, links, and more from a range of sources filtered through social networks? Is anyone doing it particularly well?
Vinh: I think news organizations have to get really, really serious about creating a social software product that leverages their product in a ...
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WatchThe Future Of News via Time for Chicago Ideas Week
Ayman Mohyeldin, Joe McGinniss, James Warren, Evan Ratliff, Kara Swisher, Richard Stengel
Most impressed with Swisher’s recounting of being the first (only, at the time) at the Wall Street Journal, first up in the video. ‘People wanted the news, but they didn’t like the newspaper.’
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Stowe Boyd: how about 'Slow Capitalism' →
Nice piece by TFA Curator Stowe Boyd yesterday. I (Gerd) love the term ‘slow capitalism’ and Stowe hits the nail on the head with his comments on not looking to further enrich the 1% with a new form of the same thing. I still think that Al Gore’s sustainable capitalism manifesto makes some very good points, as well; they just may be slightly more realistic:)
...
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Yale Alumni Magazine: A Fungus That Eats... →
A group of Yale students discovered a fungus in the jungles of Equador — Pestalotiopsis microspora — that can eat polyurethane: plastic. And apparently it can eat plastic even in the oxygen-free setting at the bottom of a landfill. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn the plastic into CO2, though.
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“Occupy” Named 2011 Word of the Year ow.ly/9akoH via @VocabularyCom #OWS
— #OCCUPYWALLSTREET (@OccupyWallStNYC) February 20, 2012
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The Human-Environment Dialog in Award-winning... →
A recent study by J. Allen Williams and colleagues found that the depiction of the ‘built environment’ — cities, homes, buildings — has increased in Caldecott award winning books since the ’60s, when ‘natural’ settings were about half of all images. Today, the depictions of the built environment occur twice as frequently as the natural:
via Wiley
...
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'Living' Buildings
Rachel Armstrong is a TED Senior Fellow, and she imagines a world where buildings — and other built objects — might be based on materials that act something like living things. For example, buildings could be coated with materials that are modeled on living things, like oil and alkali mixed together forming ‘protocells’:
Jessica Griggs via NewScientist
Q: How could you put these protocells to...
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The Opportunities and Friction of Ultra-Fast...
Interview with Gerd Leonhard on Radio New Zealand’s morning show Nine to Noon, Feb 21st, 2012 (link).
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Data is the new oil - and 'publicy' is the new...
Guest article on The Orange Rag by Gerd Leonhard, one of the keynote speakers at next month’s LawTech Futures event in London: “When observing the explosive growth of the mobile Internet, the ubiquitous availability of ever more powerful digital devices as well as the global boom in social networking, it becomes patently clear that there is a common economic force behind these...
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Peak Telecom?
Martin Geddes says we’re at ‘Peak Telecom’ — the maximum point of expansion of telecom companies, just before the Internet gobbles them up and changes the economics drastically, commoditizing them into pipe:
Peak Telecoms by Martin Geddes
We’re at “Peak Telecoms”
The telco voice and messaging business is on the verge of going into meltdown. As this...
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The Future of Broadband: Telemedia, Futurist Gerd...
View more presentations from Gerd Leonhard. Keynote at the “The Future with High Speed Broadband” conference in Auckland, New Zealand, February 20th, 2012
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Test tube hamburgers to be served this year - Nick... →
The world’s first test tube hamburger will be served up this October after scientists perfected the art of growing beef in the lab.
My response to this news is halfway between ‘Ewww’ and ‘Cool’.
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Stowe Boyd: The Decade Of Publicy (must read) →
I am aware that my recent inquiries into privacy and ‘publicy’ are a bit anthropological at their core, rather than technological or software-design based. Claude Lévi-Strauss sets the stage for this inquiry, perhaps, when he wrote “The anthropology of the future is the study of ourselves.”
The…
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Al Gore Pushes 'Sustainable Capitalism'
Al Gore has taken on the root cause of most of our modern societal ills: unsustainable business practices. He and David Blood, a partner with Gore in Generation Investment Management, have written a Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism:
Before the crisis and since, we and others have called for a more responsible form of capitalism, what we call sustainable capitalism: a framework that seeks to...
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Driverless Taxis Are The Future →
Over at stoweboyd.com, I conjecture that driverless taxis will be a turning point for city life, and could lead to even greater density in future cities as less space would be devoted to cars.
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Smartphones Reach 66% Penetration Of 24-34 US...
Survey: New U.S. Smartphone Growth by Age and Income | Nielsen Wire
While overall smartphone penetration stood at 48 percent in January, those in the 24-34 age group showed the greatest proportion of smartphone ownership, with 66 percent saying they had a smartphone. In the same age group, 8 of 10 of those that had gotten a new device in the last three months chose a smartphone. Among those...
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Mobile Is Not Getting Ad Dollars It Should
Advertisers continue to spend way too much on print, and are missing the growth of mobile:
via Flurry
… iOS and Android smart devices have experienced twice the uptake rate compared to that of Internet adoption, and four times the rate compared to that of PC adoption. Following this unprecedented adoption, advertising dollars are beginning to flow into mobile. A recent IAB study...
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IPad Killing Printer Use, Paper Sales [Survey] →
emergentfutures:
Paul Higgins: has certainly happened with me. I will email documents to GMail that I need to read or take to meetings. I will send documents to my iPad that I use to run workshops - run sheets, timings , etc. Also send presentations to my iPad into Prezi Viewer so I can practice them on a train or plane. The important difference to my laptop is ease of carrying and the speed of...
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Broadband: ecosystems, not egosystems - updated
Update: With truly expert timing, actor Stephen Fry has drawn attention to the state of broadband in New Zealand on the very day the Commerce Commission kicked off a conference looking at the future of the technology.
“Fry, in New Zealand for the filming of The Hobbit, tweeted at around 6:30 this morning that New Zealand’s broadband is ‘pathetic’ and that kiwis should...
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There are ~4B US screw-in sockets, and today only 1/4 have an energy-saving bulb sto.ly/wAikN3 We could shut 30 power plants save $Bs
— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) February 20, 2012
[pulled from Building a Better Bulb: Lighting Revolution Advances by Dave Levitan: Yale Environment 360, citing Noah Horowitz.]
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Amory Lovins Lays Out His Clean Energy Plan via...
Amory Lovins Lays Out His Clean Energy Plan via Yale Environment 360
For four decades, Amory Lovins has been a leading proponent of a renewable power revolution that would wean the U.S. off fossil fuels and usher in an era of energy independence. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, he talks about his latest book, which describes his vision of how the world can attain a green energy...
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Physicists Create a Working Transistor From a... →
Scientists are exploring the ‘room at the bottom’ that Richard Fyenman alluded too, years ago, down in the infinitesimal space of quantum computing.
John Markoff via NYTimes.com
Australian and American physicists have built a working transistor from a single phosphorus atom embedded in a silicon crystal.
The group of physicists, based at the University of New South Wales and...
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Book Recommendation: The App Effect
Recommending: “Almost overnight, display devices and multi-touch have become the normal user experience. The biggest constant however are our personal apps. In this book we sketch out these major developments in technology and human information behavior. And, in particular, focus on their business impact.
Apps on display devices are “merely” the heart of the issue. What really matters is...
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The rise of the new reporter - Dan James via 12... →
NESTA put together 12 predictions for 2012, and one was the rise of the new reporter: the data journalist.
Dan James via 12 Predictions For 2012 — NESTA
The task of the data journalist is to filter and interpret these huge datasets to make a compelling story. And this is where it gets interesting, because data journalism gives us a new way to make facts compelling. Traditional...
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China At A Turning Point?
Two pieces in the NY Times raise serious questions about China and its pivotal position in the world economy:
China Takes New Step to Prime Its Slowing Economy - David Barboza via NYTimes.com — China cuts the reserve ratio requirement for the biggest Chinese banks to 20.5% from 21%, hoping to free up capital for investment. However, there is a large and growing amount of unreserved debt in...
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Information Camouflage →
Nathan Jurgenson coins the term ‘information camouflage’ (in Predictive analytics and information camouflage): companies that mine data about us, discern a pattern they can exploit, and then conceal that knowledge by randomizing the torrent of ads and promotions they send our way so they can conceal that they are on to us, since if we knew we’d change our mental filters.
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'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into U.S. Speech - Marissa... →
A new trend in speech patterns in young American women has been investigated, and it is clear that ‘vocal fry’ — low, staccato vibration of the vocal chords during speech — is rapidly increasing, as shown by recent research conducted at Long Island University, NY:
Marissa Fessenden via ScienceNOW
More than two-thirds of the research subjects used vocal fry during their...
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What Apple Can Do With $98 Billion in Cash - Tom... →
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently commented on the company’s $98B cash reserves, and said that the board is in active discussions about what to do. One of the most obvious alternatives is to buy other companies. I think Twitter is a great fit, but Tom Taulli looked at the iCloud strategy that Apple is pursuing, and he sees a strategic fit with Salseforce.com:
Tom Taulli via InvestorPlace
Then...
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So, what would your plan for Greece be? — Daniel... →
Davies structures the Greek situation as a build-your-own-adventure game, where ‘you are a member of the One World Government, and you have been given the assignment of coming up with a solution for the Greek crisis.’
Play the game. I wound up at 53: the full Argentina.
As Felix Salmon said, though, ‘given political realities, there is literally no real solution to the Greece...