Category: Innovation

03
Aug

Monster Inc., reinvent or die?

In the late nineties the recruiting industry had been turned upside down by the start of many online job-posting websites, including the launch of Monster.com. Over a decade later the online recruiting industry seems to reach a dead end. The former giant and market leader Monster Inc. is tumbling and the CEO Sal Iannuzzi does not give confidence to have a turnaround strategy in place. He even declared publicly to sell the whole or parts of the company in March this year (Source: Reuters).
In yesterdays investor call the company announced that the 2nd-Quarter profits have decreased 56%. The market cap has dropped below $800 million, I can still remember when Monster’s market cap was over $3 billion last year.

Such a change is always an opportunity, too. While the quarterly revenues of Monster Worldwide fell to $237 million, LinkedIn’s revenues are steadily growing and have reached $230 million at the same quarter.

From an outside perspective it looks sad to see that Monster Inc. is not able to reinvent itself and look forward rather than trying to protect old-thinking. It’s a bit like the music industry when peer2peer sharing, napster and later iTunes came along. They have time, money and smart people to change and lead into a successful future. But my feeling is that Sal Iannuzzi is lacking of a powerful vision and dynamic leadership. Two things which is needed to turn such a big “ship” around.

I don’t know who will be the future leader of online recruiting, but LinkedIn seems to be running the right path, as they are heavily investing in its product and technology. Furthermore LinkedIn has acquired Connected, Rapportive and Slideshare – all relevant building blocks to build a future proof company.

Although I have left RECOMY, I will keep watching the innovators in this market. As an entrepreneur I am especially looking at startUps like Identified, Jibe, Jobvite, BranchOut, BraveNewTalent or Talent.me.

30
Jan

Send your Lego Man to space for $ 400 USD

Amazing. Two young boys send their Lego Man into near space with a $ 400,- USD construction. They used a balloon to send the Lego Man including a wide angel video camera almost 25 km into space.

Article by LA Times: Two Canadian high school students have successfully launched a Lego man almost 80,000 feet above sea level–high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.

Now the results of their experiment have gone viral, racking up more than 600,000 views on YouTube in just two daysand inspiring the young engineers to make their small astronaut his own Facebook page–Lego Man in Space.

The Toronto Starreports that the two teens, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed, were inspired to do the project about a year and a half ago when Ho saw a YouTube video of MIT students who sent a balloon to near space. Ho wanted to see if he could do it too.

The friends spent four and a half months working on the project, mostly on Saturdays. In a video interview with the Star, they said the hardest part was making the parachute, which they decided to hand-sew, even though neither of them had any sewing experience.

They also constructed a lightweight Styrofoam box to carry three point-and-shoot cameras, a wide-angle video camera and a cellphone with a downloadable GPS app. They purchased a professional weather balloon for $85 online. The helium that would lift it up came from a party supply store. For launch, they put two mitten warmers in the Styrofoam box to keep the cameras working at that altitude. The whole project cost them about $400.

After the balloon was constructed, the two waited until weather conditions would ensure that the Lego man would land in Canada and not somewhere in the U.S. because they didn’t want to take their chances with U.S. Homeland Security, the Star reports.

Ho and Muhammed estimate that it took their balloon craft one hour and five minutes to climb 80,000 feet before it finally popped. The descent took a little more than 30 minutes.

Besides online notoriety, the two also received a congratulatory note from Lego.

27
Oct

Success in Social Recruiting

Yesterday I hold the first official keynote as CEO of RECOMY about “Success in Social Recruiting”. I presented some insights in our development at RECOMY and showed and explained a lot of screenshots of our brand new social recruiting platform. For this public version I had to take most of these screenshots out (as you can understand) since we are not public, yet.

I also gave three tips on how be be successful in Social Recruiting:

  • 1. Build your Talent Community
  • 2. Activate your Network
  • 3. Track your Results

You can see the full presentation below.

17
Jun

What is happening each minute on the internet?

We live in exciting times. In one minute – 60 seconds – on the web…
… 70 new domain names are registered.
… almost 100.000 tweets on twitter are posted.
… more than 370.000 voice calls are happening on skype.
… more than 13.000 iPhone Apps are downloaded.
… more than 600 new videos are uploaded to YouTube.
… almost 700.000 status updates on facebook are posted.
… and over 170 million eMails have been sent.
etc. etc.

Web in 60s

14
Apr

What are the most important conferences to meet world and industry leaders?

Global, Economic, Political:

1. Bilderberg
2. World Economic Forum – Annual Meeting in Davos
3. DLD
4. TED
5. Clinton Global Initiative (CGI)

Business:

1. Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference
2. All Things D
3. Monaco Media Forum
4. Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting
5. Summit Series (skewed to younger entrepreneurs and mentors)

Social Entrepreneurship
Skoll World Forum

Tech:

1. Techcrunch Disrupt
2. Leweb
3. The Lobby
4. Fortune Brainstorm TECH
5. South by South West – SXSW (Interactive)
Germany: Next Conference

By Season:

January:
DLD (Munich)
World Economic Forum (Davos)

February:
TED

March:
Abu Dhabi Media Summit (Abu Dhabi)
South by South West – SXSW (Austin, TX)

April:
Summit Series (varies)

May-June:
All Things D (San Diego and now Rancho Palos Verdes)
Bilderberg conference (varies)
Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder’s Meeting (Omaha)
Next Conference (Berlin)

June-July
Aspen Idea Festival
Fortune Brainstorm Tech (Aspen)
Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference

September:
Techcrunch Disrupt (San Francisco)
The Lobby (Hawaii and now Mexico)
Clinton Global Initiative (NYC)

November:
Monaco Media Forum

December:
Leweb (Paris)

28
Mar

BMW launches Car Sharing Service DriveNow

You may already be familiar with the success of the Car Sharing Service “ZipCar”. Now BMW is entering this space with its own competitor, called DriveNow. The big difference are (of course) the cars, because DriveNow is the first premium car sharing service offering BMW and MINI cars.
http://drive-now.com/

All Details about DriveNow:
The BMW Group and Sixt AG are planning a unique and innovative car sharing venture. With effect from April 2011 onwards – initially in Munich and later in Berlin – the two companies intend to join forces in offering a modern mobility concept under the brand-name DriveNow; this new product will combine vehicles and service of the highest quality with simple, flexible usage. DriveNow is the first car sharing concept to place an emphasis on efficient premium vehicles and comprehensive service. Vehicles may be hired and dropped off wherever the customer needs them, thus clearly differentiating DriveNow from products offered by other competitors.
Continue Reading..

29
Nov

A future vision of screen technology

This future vision not shows how screens will look like, but also how we exchange data, consume news, send files from your pc to your mobile.
Enjoy.

09
Nov

Mobile UnConference

My friend Rocco Georgi is co-host of a great event called “Mobile UnConference“. Unfortunately I cannot attend as I am preparing the next Cross Innovation Academy (XIA) which will be November 18 & 19, 2010. But should take the time to join the Mobile UnConference in Düsseldorf it will be exciting, fascinating and informative.

Here are more details:
The Mobile Unconference is the ultimate chance to meet other developers, entrepreneurs, startups and technology companies to discuss the latest trends in mobile software. No frills, no strings attached, no marketing-speak, only regular folks who make the mobile world more
interesting every day. This is an UNconference and it’s all about its participants – anybody can grab the microphone and talk about something interesting there!

The event is organized by Mobile Enterprise Network Europe, MobileGamesBlog.com, Codeglue, Mangrove, PavingWays and Vodafone Germany and goes together with the Vodafone Developer Day and MobileMonday on the same day, November 15, 2010.

Mobile UnConference

14
Oct

Zoom: Endemol is merging Reality TV with Social Media

Endemol’s new highlight is Zoom a new format that fuses TV and social media. This social experiment sees five contestants followed by cameras 24 hours a day. They stay in their own home and follow their usual routine, making public every moment of their every day life. The fate of participants will be determined by a ‘Social Community Index’ which counts their popularity on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Read Full Press Release from Endemol.

02
Sep

WEF Technology Pioneers 2011 announced: GetJar, foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, Spotify etc.

The World Economic Forum has announced the Technology Pioneers 2011. 31 companies have been named Technology Pioneers. I met Rodolfo Lara Torres who is in charge of the Technology Pioneer Program a few times and posted an interview in 2009.

This year a few New Media and Web companies are listed aswell, e.g. foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, Cleantech is dominating the Pioneer List. Here are the WEF Technology Pioneers 2010:

CLEAN TECH
Digital Lumens, USA
Digital Lumens integrates LEDs, networking and software into a single “smart” system that promises improved efficiency, control and operational oversight of lighting at industrial facilities. The system can reduce customers’ lighting-related energy use by up to 90%.
http://www.digitallumens.com/

Ecovative Design, USA
Ecovative’s vision is to grow sustainable products that directly replace plastics. Its products require far less energy to create, can be grown from many different regional feedstocks and can be composted without processing in backyards and gardens.
www.ecovativedesign.com

Ferrate Treatment Technologies, USA
Ferrate Treatment Technologies (FTT) makes a patented reactor small enough to fit into the back of a pick-up truck that can disinfect up to 20 million gallons of water a day and do the job more cheaply than harmful chemicals or competing technologies. The ferrator strips electrons from liquid iron to make ferrate; the most powerful, multi- purpose environmentally-friendly water and wastewater treatment chemical known.
www.ferratetreatment.com

Flexoresearch Group, Thailand
Flexoresearch has developed a series of novel blended enzymes that recovers pulp/fibre from laminated paper waste, such as milk cartons, and uses it to replace the virgin pulp now used to make new paper. The recovered pulp/fibre can also be used in building materials and to make vehicle brake pads for the automotive industry.
www.flexoresearch.com

Novacem, United Kingdom
The cement industry alone is responsible for 5% of man-made CO2 emissions and, up until now, has not had low-carbon solutions to deploy at scale. Enter Novacem, which has developed a new type of cement which absorbs more CO2 than it emits during production.
www.novacem.com

On-Ramp Wireless, USA
On-Ramp Wireless’s Ultra-Link Processing (ULP) System enables the low-power monitoring and control applications used in smart grids, industrial sensing and location tracking.
www.onrampwireless.com

OPOWER, USA
OPOWER has designed a behaviour-based, energy- efficiency program that helps utilities motivate their customers to save energy.
www.opower.com

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, Canada
Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies has developed a new generation of wastewater treatment systems that not only helps treatment plants run more efficiently but also solves major environmental issues and provides a new revenue stream for municipalities: commercial fertilizer.
www.ostara.com

Quintas Renewable Energy Solutions, Nigeria
Founded by a physician dismayed at the loss of life when power outages occur during childbirth and surgical operations, Quintas develops inverters specially designed to meet the challenges that poor and erratic power generation and distribution pose to people in Nigeria whose businesses and daily activities require continuous power supply.
www.quintasenergies.com

TaKaDu, Israel
Water scarcity is one of the biggest issues facing the world. There is not only not enough clean drinking water to go around, the world loses much of what it does have through leaks in ageing water networks. More than four and a half billion gallons of water are lost in transit every day in the United States, according to the US Geological Survey, and 25% to 35% of water is lost every year worldwide, according to the World Bank. This is where TaKaDu comes in. It is tackling the multibillion dollar problem by bringing a smart grid approach to the water sector.
www.takadu.com

Tendril, USA
Tendril helps both consumers and utilities manage energy consumption. Its smart grid technology helps utilities achieve better load balance. And, the company’s technology, a software-as-a-service model, provides a two-way communication link between energy utilities and their customers, giving consumers more specific information about their energy use.
www.tendrilinc.com

Topell Energy, Netherlands
Topell Energy has developed a highly efficient method of making solid biofuel from woody biomass, a process known as torrefaction. Torrefaction of biomass cuts transportation costs and renders the conversion of biomass into power and heat more efficient. Torrefied biomass is an environmentally-friendly and practical alternative to fossil coal.
www.topellenergy.com

Transonic Combustion, USA
Transonic Combustion makes a fuel injection system that offers automotive manufacturers a near-term, cost- effective solution to vastly improve fuel economy of new cars and trucks, and help meet stringent emissions regulations.
www.tscombustion.com

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW MEDIA
Aster Data, USA
Companies are now amassing terabytes and even petabytes of data. As volumes explode, traditional databases have become bottlenecks, hampering corporations from getting deep insights into consumer behaviour, real-time fraud analysis and patterns and trends that could improve their business. Aster Data, founded by three PhD students at Stanford University, is helping companies overcome this challenge by providing an innovative new technology to store and rapidly analyse huge volumes of data.
www.asterdata.com

Atlassian, Australia
Atlassian builds software to help technical teams collaborate more effectively. The company, which has made seven acquisitions in the last eight years, raised an additional US$ 60 million in venture capital in July 2010. It has over 20,000 paying customers in 134 countries, including Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, major investment banks and Formula One teams.
www.atlassian.com

foursquare, USA
Foursquare is a popular online service combining location, gaming and social networking that lets people “check in” and report their location to help find friends or tips about the place they are visiting.
www.foursquare.com

GetJar, Lithuania/USA
GetJar is the second largest apps store, after Apple’s. The company’s key point of difference is its open market approach, which allows it to deliver applications to telephone across all major platforms such as Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Symbian. It offers more than 70,000 mobile applications to consumers in more than 200 countries. The company has so far generated more than 1 billion application downloads.
www.getjar.com

Knewton, USA
Education is beginning its Internet moment. Within 10 years all educational textbooks are expected to be digital, delivered through powerful e-readers. Students everywhere will be able to take accredited Web-video classes led by some of the world’s best teachers. Knewton’s mission is to bring data mining to this transition, by offering analytic tools for teachers and adapting concepts to the way individual students learn.
www.knewton.com

Layar, Netherlands
Fancy knowing what the Berlin Wall looked like before it fell? Thanks to Layar you can, by simply pointing your mobile phone at the location. The company helps people better understand context through an emerging mass medium called augmented reality.
www.layar.com

NetQuin Mobile, People’s Republic of China
Today’s smart phones are tiny computers, complete with operating systems, storage and wireless access to company’s internal networks, making them an enticing target for hackers and Internet criminals. That is where NetQin Mobile comes in. Based on a cloud security platform, the company delivers mobile security services, including anti-virus, anti-spam, privacy protection, data backup and restoration, and online virus scan to 51.5 million users worldwide. The company controls 68% of the market in China for mobile security – it is the only provider of anti-spamming service to China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator ? but some 30% of its user base is outside of China.
www.netqin.com

OpenDNS, USA
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a 25-year-old crucial part of the Internet’s infrastructure, which encompasses the routing system used to transfer data, such as e-mails. OpenDNS’ mission is to push control of the DNS to the periphery, enabling consumers and network administrators to secure their networks from online threats, reduce costs and enforce Internet use policies without the use of software or costly appliances.
www.opendns.com

ReputationDefender, USA
ReputationDefender specializes in helping consumers and business shape how they are seen online. It sells different security products on a monthly subscription basis, allowing consumers and businesses to monitor information about themselves across the Web, bury undesirable information and promote vetted content to the top of research results.
www.reputationdefender.com

Scribd, USA
John Adler, Founder of 2008 Technology Pioneer Accuray and inventor of the CyberKnife, encountered a lot of barriers to publishing one of his papers in a medical journal. The peer review process and glacial pace were frustrating. Adler realized that what he really wanted was to quickly make his paper accessible to as many people as possible. Adler’s complaints led his son Trip and his classmate from Harvard to create Scribd, a Web 2.0 document-sharing site that aims to make it easy for anyone to publish original work on the Web and find a readership.
www.scribd.com

SecondMarket, USA
In the last decade, the time from company formation to initial public offering has extended from five to 10 years, leaving employees, founders and venture capitalists with limited means to get liquidity in the interim. SecondMarket gives the marketplace an alternative
to going public or selling companies. It is the world’s largest centralized marketplace and auction platform for trading illiquid financial assets that cannot be traded in the public markets.
www.secondmarket.com

Spotify, United Kingdom
Spotify, founded by European serial entrepreneur Daniel Ek, is a digital music service that works across multiple hardware platforms, offering music fans an alternative to the two other main options now available: Apple’s iTunes and piracy. It has rapidly grown from a small Swedish music service to an international company with 7 million users across six European countries, generating more revenue for rights holders than Apple iTunes in some territories.
www.spotify.com

Vortex Engineering, India
Vortex Engineering develops automatic teller machines for rural environments, adapting them to run on lower amounts of power and to dispense soiled banknotes.
www.vortexindia.co.in

LIFE SCIENCES AND HEALTH
Adimab, USA
Adimab was founded by two of the world’s leading yeast biotechnologists, Dartmouth’s Tillman Gerngross and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Dane Wittrup, with the goal of significantly speeding up the drug discovery process while improving the overall quality of therapeutics. The two professors have built an antibody discovery and optimization platform that is broadly applicable to all disease and can be accessed by the entire pharmaceutical industry.
www.adimab.com

Ion Torrent, USA
Ion Torrent is pioneering a radically faster and cheaper approach to gene sequencing by marrying simple chemistry to powerful, proven semiconductor technology. The company is the third headed by Rothberg to be named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Rothberg is credited with inventing massively parallel sequencing. His team at 454 and the Baylor Genome Center was the first to make public the sequence of
an individual human genome. He is also credited with initiating the Neanderthal Genome Project with Svante Paabo.
www.iontorrent.com

Medicine in Need (MEND), South Africa
Millions of people in the developing world die needlessly each year because of infectious diseases such as TB, HIV and malaria that could otherwise be prevented or treated. Medicine in Need (MEND) aims to ensure the world’s poorest people get access to effective, life-saving drugs and vaccines by reformulating existing products to make them more suitable to administer in developing countries and by assuring that new discoveries in these areas yield sustainable products that can be commercialized.
www.medicineinneed.org

Molecular Partners, Switzerland
Molecular Partners is working on novel medicines based on designed ankyrin repeat proteins (DARPins), a promising class of non-immunoglobulin proteins that can offer advantages over antibodies in drug discovery and drug development.
www.molecularpartners.com

Neuronetics, USA
Despite major advances in treating depression, nearly 30% of patients do not benefit from drug therapy and more than one-half report side effects that lead to non-compliance with medication such as sexual dysfunction, weight gain and sleep disorders. Neuronetics has developed the NeuroStar Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Therapy System, which uses magnetic field pulses to stimulate nerve cells in an area of the brain that is linked to depression. This stimulation increases brain activity and releases neurotransmitters which are known to elevate mood. The treatment is typically administered daily over four to six weeks to patients who have not responded to traditional treatments; it is free of systemic side effects.
www.neuronetics.com

30
Aug

Google Products #Fail

Get an overview of all products were Google was not successful – Google Products #Fail. At the Google Graveyard you can find Google Catalog, Google Video Player, Google Answers, Google Wave, Google Audio Ads, Dodgeball, Jaiku (Now Part of Google Buzz), Google Page Creator and many more….

But for true Innovation, failure and mistakes are very important. So we’ll see what the people at Google will invent in the future.

Google Products #Fail

25
Aug

Infographic: Tracking Google’s Acquisitions.

Ever wondered what companies Google bought during the last couple for years. There is a complete list of acquisitions by Google on Wikipedia, but I also like the following Infographic “Tracking Google’s Acquisitions”.

Google Acquisitions - Venture Capital

21
Jul

Biomimic Marketing

The new trend in Marketing. Getting a touch of nature into your technology products. Imitate and mime biological structures, gestures and movements and merge it with the latest 3D animation methodoligies – The Result: “Biomimic Marketing”.

Biomimic Marketing in Action – Watch this example from AT&T:

1stAveMachine-CelebrateSpring from MotiongraphicLAB on Vimeo.

Another example of Biomimic Marketing is BMW’s Concept Car “Gina”:

15
Jul

Apple Flatscreen TV

After the launch of the iPhone 4, what does Apple work on right now?

Steve Jobs said at the “All things digital” (D8) conference last month that “Apple TV is still a hobby”. Jobs explained that the market is complicated due to the diversity of key players and a complex distribution system. Between the lines you could understand that Steve Jobs is thinking about a controllable and user-friendly system. An ecosystem which Apple already created in the Music (iPod) and in the Mobile (iPhone) market.

So that’s why I created a fast scribble of an “Apple Flatscreen TV” which I would mount onto my living room wall. My draft of the Apple Flatscreen TV would have a 50″ LED Screen with an improved small remote control, connectivity to my iPad, iPhone and other Macs in the house, a wireless connection to a Bang & Olufson speaker system and a big harddrive of approx. 5 TB.

Is Apple already working on such an “Apple Flatscreen TV”?

Apple Flatscreen TV

13
Jul

GE’s $ 200 million open innovation challenge

Today GE announced the start of a $200 million open innovation challenge that seeks breakthrough ideas to create a smarter, cleaner, more efficient electric grid, and accelerate the adoption of more efficient grid technologies. GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt unveiled the challenge, the “GE ecomagination Challenge: Powering the Grid,” here today.

The global challenge invites technologists, entrepreneurs and start-ups to share their best ideas and come together to take on one of the world’s toughest challenges – building the next-generation power grid to meet the needs of the 21st century. The challenge is one of the largest ever and is open immediately at www.ecomagination.com/challenge.

“Innovation is the engine of the global effort to transform the way we create, connect and use power,” Immelt said. “At GE we have invested broadly and deeply in digital energy solutions and see this as a substantial market for us, but we can’t do it alone. We want to work with our partners to make sure we have a comprehensive digital energy offering. This challenge is about collaboration and we are inviting others to help accelerate progress in creating a cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid. We want to jump-start new ideas and deploy them on a scale that will modernize the electrical grid around the world.”

The Challenge, launched in collaboration with leading venture capital firms Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer and RockPort Capital, and Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired magazine, is part of GE’s ecomagination initiative, a global commitment to build innovative clean energy technologies and will help fund the most promising ideas. Proposals are sought in three, broad categories: Renewables, Grid and Eco Homes/Eco Buildings. Select Challenge entrants will be offered the opportunity to develop a commercial relationship with GE through:

  • Investment: the $200 million capital pledge of GE and its partners will be invested globally into promising start-ups and ideas
  • Validation: evaluate entrant’sbusiness strategy through in-depth discussions with GE’s technical and commercial teams
  • Distribution: explore partnership opportunities with GE to scale a business and create global reach
  • Development: leverage GE‘s technical infrastructure and GE Global Research Centers to accelerate technology and product development
  • Growth: explore opportunities for utilizing existing GE customer to take Challenge products to market

The $200 million commitment will help bring these new ideas to market by providing businesses and individuals with theopportunity to secure growth capital through GE investment and/or investment by participating venture capital firms. It is open to anyone aged 18 years or older and all legally formed entities.

28
Mar

A Digital Business Card for Events

Would you use a digital business card? The participants at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2010 did. During the two day conference the participants where getting used to connect their digital business cards, called “Poken”, instead of exchanging printed address cards. In the following interview Stéphane Doutriaux, founder of the innovative Social Business Card company, explains the technology and gives you some insights about the company.

Poken is a technology that utilizes a proprietary Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to allow the exchange of online social networking data between two keychain accessories. It is a perfect tool for Events and Conferences. Each person involved in the exchange must have his or her own poken. The primary information exchanged via the poken is a ‘social business card’, a digital replacement for a physical business card. By touching two devices together, a unique ID is exchanged that links to contact information on the Poken website. Contact information acquired by use of the poken can be uploaded to the poken website using a built-in USB connector.

In addition to the contact information found on a typical business card, links to users’ social networks can also be added. Examples include Twitter, Facebook, StudiVZ, LinkedIn and 40+ other social networks. Users of the Poken website can use a ‘social dashboard’ to manage, and interact with their contacts. Pokens are used for social networking, personal identification and as a device for loyalty programs. Bloggers and social media addicts have taken it up for networking event such as tweet-ups. Corporations such as BMW and IBM use pokens at their conferences, to enhance interaction with the conference attendees and to facilitate business networking.

23
Mar

DLD Women Conference 2010

The DLD announced a new conference this week, called „DLDwomen – The Female Decade”. The inaugural event will take place in June 2010 at the centre of innovative technology in Munich, Germany. DLDwomen is organized by the DLD team as a new format and extension of the successful annual DLD Conference and builds upon its creative network and competence.

In the following Video Interview Steffi Czerny, one of the hosts of the famous DLD conference, talks about the passion behind this new event. She also explains what role Digitalisation, eHealth and Leadership plays in the era of “womenomics”. The interview was filmed at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2010.

The chairman of the event is Dr. Maria Furtwängler-Burda. DLDwomen is focusing on the “Female Decade” and the so-called “womenomics” and is about new opportunities, new markets, the new lifestyle and future developments of women’s role that are being influenced by today’s digital age and social transformation.

More about DLDwomen at http://www.dld-conference.com

07
Oct

48% of Books sold on Amazon are electronic Books (eBooks)

Amazon.com Inc is introducing Kindle, its wireless electronic reader, for over 100 countries globally. Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said that for every 100 customers who buy a book, some 48 buy it as an e-book — up from 35 five months ago.

Although Amazon does not release sales or profit figures for the Kindle, analysts believe it commands No. 1 market share in a growing market fueled by more online activity and a lingering slump in publishing and retail bookselling. The devices have proven popular with readers and travelers who like the convenience of downloads and avoiding heavy books, but high prices have kept many potential users at bay.

Amazon has an agreement with AT&T wireless for the international version, under which the carrier handles global network relationships, Bezos said. The new device is designed to work with the globally popular 3G GSM standard. The wireless coverage includes a wide array of countries, including China and Indonesia, for example, so the device will work in those countries although units won’t be shipped there.

Although Amazon does not release sales or profit figures for the Kindle, analysts believe it commands No. 1 market share in a growing market fueled by more online activity and a lingering slump in publishing and retail bookselling. The devices have proven popular with readers and travelers who like the convenience of downloads and avoiding heavy books, but high prices have kept many potential users at bay.

Via Reuters

07
Oct

Amazon’s eBook Reader Kindle will be rolled out in 100 Countries globally

Amazon.com Inc is introducing Kindle, its wireless electronic reader, for over 100 countries, including China and most of Europe, intensifying a battle for the burgeoning digital book market.

The move, announced on Tuesday, gives the world’s largest online retailer the widest global reach among its competitors, including chief rival Sony Corp. The Kindle will sell for $279 in other countries. Amazon also said it would cut prices for its U.S.-only Kindle by 13 percent to $259 from $299, bringing its cost closer to its rivals. The new price is $100 lower than it was a year ago.

Amazon — which regards the Kindle as a pivotal growth driver — said over 200,000 English-language books from a host of publishers as well as more than 85 international and U.S. newspapers and magazines would be available on the international device, which begins shipping October 19.

“Our vision for Kindle is every book ever printed, in print or out of print, in every language, all available within 60 seconds,” Chief Executive Jeff Bezos told Reuters. “That’s a multi-decade vision,” said Bezos, visiting a Kindle office in the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino.

Analysts have pondered the likelihood of Amazon developing the Kindle into a tablet-like device for tasks like emailing, texting and surfing the Web, thus competing with devices reportedly being developed by Apple Inc.

But Bezos reiterated his intention to optimize the reading experience, saying the company rejects compromise, whether it be a touchscreen that affects legibility or computer displays that eat up too much power. At the same time, Amazon is working on making Kindle digital books available on more devices. Besides the Kindle, those books can now be accessed on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

“We want you to read your Kindle books on laptops and smartphones, anything with an installed base,” Bezos said. He said he was not “in principle” against making the works available on rival devices like Sony’s, but was focused on platforms with “large installed bases.”

E-readers are expected by some to be the hottest gadget this holiday season and Bezos said he had “a lot of confidence” that it would be a “great holiday quarter for Kindle.” Forrester Research estimated 3 million e-reader devices would be sold in the United States in 2009, up from an earlier estimate of 2 million. That could double in 2010, bringing cumulative sales to 10 million by end-2010. The research group predicts that Amazon will take 60 percent market share in 2009, followed by Sony at 35 percent.

In July, Credit Suisse estimated revenue and gross profit from the Kindle could reach $420 million and $35 million, respectively, in 2009, representing some 8.4 percent of Amazon’s total revenue.

Via Reuters

08
Sep

Taking augmented reality to the next level: the digital contact-lense

digital contact lense - augmented realityGetting information as fast as possible and on the spot is the trend. So what could be more direct than having information fired directly into the eye?

A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight. Today — together with his students — Babak A. Parviz, bionanotechnology expert at University of Washington, is already producing devices that have a lens with one wirelessly Radio Frequency powered LED. To turn such a lens into a functional browser, control circuits, communication circuits and miniature antennas will have to be integrated. These lenses will eventually include hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye: words, charts, imagery enabling the wearers to navigate their surroundings whithout distraction or disorientation. The optoelectronics in the lens may be controlled by a seperate device that relays information to the lens’s control circuit. Another use could be the monitoring of the wearer’s health and biomarkers f.e. cholesterol, sodium, kalium or glucose.

Digital Eye lense - augmented reality

A few barriers have yet to be taken in order to produce such a device. Materials are not compatible with one another; all components have to be assembled onto about 1.5 square centimeters of flexible, transparent polymer; and of course the lens needs to be completely safe for the eye. Parviz mentions that the LED for example is made of aluminum gallium arsenide, a toxic material that should first have to be encapsulated in a biocompatible polymer.

Last but not least: seeing the LED-light switching on and off is one thing, but seeing something comprehensible in dense resolution to the eye is something else.“The true promise of this research is not just the actual system we end up making, whether it’s a display, a biosensor, or both. We already see a future in which the humble contact lens becomes a real platform, like the iPhone is today, with lots of developers contributing their ideas and inventions.”

Contact lenses have always been about improving natural sight, so whatever information they may bring to our eyes in the coming future… may the view be clear.

Via: justgetthere.us