It looks like the Japanese have implemented our old "Emulet" idea:

Wearable Sensors Help Analyze Behaviors of Factory Workers

DSS Co Ltd, a Japanese firm that edits and processes digital maps based on survey data, started a service of recording the actions of factory workers for long hours and visualize them.

Toasters unplugged!

Nikkei Electronics:

Showa Aircraft Industry Co Ltd developed a contactless power supply system that is an electromagnetic induction type and can supply power even when two coils are placed adjacent to or 1m apart from each other.
The company had a demonstration of lighting ten 100W incandescent lamps using coils that are 60cm apart from each other. In addition, when a metal frying pan was placed between the coils, it did not heat up. The size of the coils was 50 x 50cm, and the thickness was about 5cm.

Bill Gates talks about Feynman physics lectures and mentions, among other things, his involvement with Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures:

That's been really exciting to take this idea of gathering top scientists from a broad set of areas and think about problems that can be solved. And in the case of the foundation, you know, Nathan (Myhrvold) has used that ability to convene great scientists to look at things like how do you deliver vaccines without having to use as many refrigerators, or how do you pasteurize milk in a better way, some very interesting things. And then I also sit down with that group when they're looking at their rich world applications, including things around energy, and one of those has actually led to creating a company called TerraPower, which is focused on a new, very radically improved nuclear power plant design, which is a hard thing to get done, but extremely valuable if it comes through.

A further confirmation of the hypothesis that mobiles are going to displace PCs as the next innovation platform for personal computing:

For the first time criminal hackers may have succeeded in creating a network of "zombie" cellphones, infected without the owners' knowledge with software that can be used to send spam or carry out cyber attacks.

via NewScientist.

Tricky Question of the Month

via Cnet:

Say goodbye to spark plugs, a 19th century technology about to be supplanted by lasers. The UK paper The Telegraph reports that Ford is working with the University of Liverpool to develop a laser ignition system for internal combustion engines. That's right, engines with frickin' lasers strapped to their heads.

10 years from now, what kind of spark plug will you get with your electric Ford car? ;)

Not much progress for Microsoft's Bing (via VentureBeat):

Comscore’s latest search engine rankings reveal that Microsoft’s newest effort Bing is taking a little — but just a little — market share from Yahoo in the U.S.

Bing moved 0.4 percent over the last month to account for 8.4 percent of the total search market. Meanwhile, Yahoo declined by 0.5 percent to 19.6 percent. Google, Ask and AOL remained flat at 65 percent, 3.9 percent and 3.1 percent respectively.

Even with Microsoft's resources going after an established market leader is really tough. Practically hopeless for startups.

Lack of communication paralyzes strategy rather than tactics. This year, Tour de France organizers decided to ban radios from Stage 10 of the three-week race across four European countries. Team managers were unable to provide their riders with up-to-date information about competitors'. As a result, General Classification(GC) leaders (riders competing for the overall win of the Tour) could not make strategic decisions. Alberto Contador, who is currently the second in GC with 6 seconds behind the first place, said that "there was a degree of chaos", and "to ride without radios means that a fall in an evil moment may rob you of victory".

On the other hand, sprinters and riders low in GC didn't mind the ban because it gave them a chance to surprise leaders at the finish line.

Who won?
Mark Cavendish, the world's best sprinter today.

Another illustration to the superiority of the junk food business model:

By 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world for McDonald's, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast food.

see a related 10X diagram in my earlier post.

Another possible reason why brainstorming feels good:

...unpredictable rewards were more pleasurable than predictable ones...this must be occurring at a subconscious level.

Gregory S. Berns, Samuel M. McClure, Giuseppe Pagnoni, and P. Read Montague. 2001. Predictability Modulates Human Brain Response to Reward. The Journal of Neuroscience, April 15, 2001, 21(8):2793–2798

backtrack

A case study for typical inventor mistakes: payload mis-identification.

Ray Kurzweil describes his approach and demonstrates a "forward-looking" implementation of a text-to-speech application for the blind:



Assignment for BUS 75 students:

What is the problem the inventor is trying to solve?
Can you improve on his solution?
How would you approach the problem in a "system" way?
Can you name a US company that markets a better solution?

More background material for the Greatest Innovations course:

Over the centuries, New York City has survived crisis after crisis—the British defeat of the Dutch, Leisler’s Rebellion, the 1863 draft riots, the 1929 crash, the attack on the Twin Towers. But none of these shocks struck as hard as the American Revolution. New York’s recovery from that shock stands as a testament to the importance of human capital in reinventing a city.

Infrastructure for efficient distribution of goods and information seems to be the key for the reinvention cycles (e.g.):

Manhattan’s largest industry today, printing and publishing, also grew out of its port. It wasn’t just that books, like any other good, had to be shipped to their customers. It was also that European ideas came to the United States by sea. For example, New York’s shipping prominence allowed the Harper brothers to get pirated British books before their Philadelphia competitors could. The Harpers’ ability to access bootlegged books easily was an early example of Gotham’s role as America’s most international city—a role that it still plays.

via Greg Mankiw's blog.

Ray Kurzwell, arguably the Edison of our times, talks about patterns of exponential growth in information technology (YouTube video). He illustrates his predictions with various graphs, including successive accelerating S-curves (screen shot below):

Interesting throughout.

The snob effect in startups with strong academic IP.

"When do start-ups that exploit patented academic knowledge survive?", a 2003 paper by Atul Nerkar and Scott Shane that shows that radical innovation backed by strong IP has a much better chance to survive in a new rather than established market.

Abstract:
Researchers have generally suggested that new technology firms should exploit radical technologies with broad scope patents to compete with established firms, implying that new firms founded to exploit university inventions will be more likely to survive... However, the existing empirical evidence indicates that the effectiveness ... of new firm strategy is contingent on the industry environment, specifically industry concentration. In this paper, we explain why this industry-specific relationship should exist and use a unique data set of new technology ventures originating at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to test our arguments.

Ungated version.

If you are into it.

From Explaining Creativity (2006), by Keith Sawyer:

Many of these [creativity] studies found that the most important characteristic of creative people is an almost aesthetic ability to recognize a good problem in their domain. They know how to ask the right questions. That’s why highly creative people tend to be creative in one specific domain: it takes a lot of experience, knowledge, and training to be able to identify good problems. p. 47.

That's why I strongly emphasize search for high-value problems in all my courses and invention workshops. The Reverse Brainstorm, the Three Magicians, the 9-screen view, the 10X Diagram, the 5-element analysis - all these tools are necessary for accomplishing what creative people have to do: recognize a good problem. Furthermore, these tools allow you to go beyond the basic creative ability and recognize a good problem outside of your domain of expertise.

Of course, only if you are into it.

From "Cortical Computing", by Greg Snyder:

A back-of-the-envelope calculation is useful. A human cortex has a density of about 10¹⁰ synapses/cm². Today's microprocessors pack roughly 10⁹ transistors in 1 cm² of complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS). Thus, to build biological-scale neuromorphic circuits, electronic synapses will have to be about one-tenth the size of an average transistor. This is one important reason intelligent machines are not (yet) walking around on the street.

A 10X change in computing is coming. From what I know, the hardware side of this change is going to happen within the next 10 years. But it will probably take a lot longer for the software to catch up.

Also see: DB Strukov & KK Likahrev, 2006. A Reconfigurable Architecture for Hybrid
CMOS/Nanodevice Circuits. FPGA’06, February 22–24, 2006, Monterey, California, USA.