Starbucks says it has begun implementing an LED lighting conversion program in all of its company-owned stores in the U.S. and Canada, and has already completed installation in more than 1,000 U.S. locations.

The retail giant expects to expand the program to international markets in March 2010, aiming to complete installation in more than 8,000 company-owned stores around the world by the end of 2010.

Once that’s all done, Starbucks projects a 7 percent per-store reduction in energy use. This is a very exciting move by a major corporate entity, and I like the statement it makes about responsible energy consumption. I also like the technology implications here – solid state lighting is viable and can be esthetically formed to meet the needs of all kinds of design environments.

 Solid state lighting seems to be finally moving into the mainstream. I’ve recently come across Oree who is developing next-generation planar LED illumination with the first flat, thin, highly efficient light source. It’s cool because it lets lighting companies do some very creative design while still reducing energy consumption.

Oree’s is the kind of technology that could drive widespread adoption of LEDs in growing markets such as general lighting, decoration and LCD panels. I like it.

Uncategorized cleantech, green technology, innovation, LED Lighting, technology

Gizmodo is running an excellent series this week called “This Cyborg Life.”

The series is described as being about “what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.”

Here’s are some of my favorite stories from the series:

• If 1950s Men Redesigned the Human Form, We’d Be Horrors
• Gadget Singularity: Let’s Ditch Our Buttons and Screens Forever
• This Flight Helmet Collection Will Kill Your Childhood Dreams
• Nature’s Most Wicked-Looking Robot, the Bacteriophage
• Tales of Human Upgrades: Magnetic Fingertips
• Me and My Exoskeleton: The Trick to Super Strength
• The Six Million Dollar Man’s Cyborg Surgery, Adjusted for Today’s Dollar
• Digital Tattoo Interface Turns Your Skin Into A Display
• I Wear My Suncontacts at Night
• Tales of Human Upgrades: Jerry Jalava’s USB Finger
• Audeo Captures Electrical Signals From The Brain To Create Sound

All these are very cool and worth taking the time to read, in my opinion.

The entire series is posted on Gizmodo at “This Cyborg Life.”

Uncategorized innovation, nanotechnology, neuroscience, singularity, technology

Yes, well I don’t know about changing everything, but a few days ago, Glenn Fleishman wrote about 3D TV, HTML5, video over Wi-Fi, superfast USB, and mobile augmented reality as being key breakthrough technologies emerging over the next few years. While there are certainly many such lists to be made, I think Glenn’s done a nice job detailing this particular set of five technologies for us.

He rightly dubs USB as one of the “least-sexy technologies” built into present-day computers and mobile devices, but speeding it up by an order of magnitude is a game changer. And in fact, USB 3.0 (a.k.a. SuperSpeed) should deliver more than 3.2 gbps of actual throughput. The results will introduce major changes in device connectivity, computer backup (coupled with coming advances in flash drives), and video (replacing HDMI?).

By 2012, two new WiFi protocols–802.11ac and 802.11ad–are expected to handle over-the-air data transmission at 1 gbps or faster. Glenn does a nice job of pointing out that the high speed transfers will work well “moving data across short distances between devices in the same room.” He quotes Allen Huotari, the technical leader at Cisco as saying “home networks won’t result from “any one single technology in the home, but rather a pairing of technologies or a trio of technologies–wired and/or wireless–for the backbone and the wireless on the edges.” With one foot firmly in the G.hn camp, Rainier concurs.

Then we come to 3D TV. Could the makers of the old red and blue cardboard eyeglasses ever have envisioned the coming active-shutter approach to 3D simulations? What Hollywood has historically called “depth enhanced movies” are now moving more toward the promise of real 3DTV, an immersive, true-to-life experience that’s nothing like anything we’ve seen before.

Augmented Reality?

My favorite part of Glenn’s article is his discussion of “augmented reality.” First of all, the phrase itself, with or without quotation marks, pulls us immediately into the philosophical domain. I personally think that until we can artificially stimulate our cranial neurons to have choreographed experiences, reality is still reality.

Technologies like heads-up displays, etc. are terrific tools for enhancing safety, efficiency, etc., but they are still tools (is a compass – once an exceedingly innovative high-tech device, “augmented reality?”)

Glenn’s final breakthrough, HTML5, sounds a little dull until you consider it might may do away with the need for audio, video, and interactive plug-ins, and will let designers create Websites that work essentially the same on every browser–whether on a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device. Yeah, actually, that would be kind of awesome.

Read Glenn’s article in its entirety here.

Uncategorized broadband, G.hn, home networking, innovation, technology, tv, WiFi

At the Web 2.0 Summit  General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt  gave the first public viewing of GE’s new pocket-size Vscan  “ultra-smart ultrasound.”

About the size of a smart phone, theVscan houses powerful ultrasound technology that can potentially redefine the way doctors examine patients. By giving doctors a view into the body from the palm of a hand, GE says Vscan could one day become “as indispensable as the traditional physician’s stethoscope in patient exams.”

The company’s website says GE’s drive is to miniaturize technologies in order to make them more mobile, and GE has committed to developing 100 new innovations as part of its new $6 billion “healthymagination“  committment to developing 100 new medical innovations.

It certainly feels like we are entering a serious renaissance in the portability of medical instrumentation. In just the past year, I’ve met with numerous companies whose sole purpose is to use technology to do in the field what once could only be done in the laboratory. From infectious-disease detection to blood-flow monitoring, the cost-reduced portability of such devices could not come at a better time as our debate continues to rage around how to get our arms around skyrocketing medical expenses.

Uncategorized innovation, medical devices, medicine, portable, technology

Internet Evolution site editor Nicole Ferraro shares a compelling story from the floor of the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Nicole reports that Morgan Stanley‘s managing director, Mary Meeker says that over the next few years the mobile Web will be “bigger than most people think.” In fact, she’s calling it “the next major computing cycle,” and says mobile-related technology shifts will change all the dynamics between incumbents and attackers, and will create a wide range of winners and losers.

Meeker presented 68 slides, starting with an economy update / dashboard. Included were positive leading indicators like rebounding global stock markets, narrowing credit spreads, reduced market volatility, and rising earnings estimates.

The technology sector (as has been previously noted in this blog), Meeker says, is leading the charge back to financial health as the largest sector measured by S&P 500 market capitalization (19%). She also showed how global technology revenue estimates mimic the 2002 recovery that followed the tech nadir of 2001.

Now granted, when Meeker turns to domestic GDP and consumption, she is only able to call the trends “less bad,” and she does say that low capacity utilization in manufacturing, horribly low home sales, rising consumer credit and mortgage defaults, and high unemployment all imply economic weakness.

But unemployment peaks are typically key for economic turnarounds, Meeker says, and global GDP growth forecasts, led by China and India, are positive for 2010. Advertising spending, too, should grow in 2010, and consumer confidence seems to have bottomed out in February and has been heading up all year.

Then Meeker turned to the promise of the mobile Internet. And Meeker is bullish like crazy about mobile Internet! Driven, she says, by unprecedented next-generation-platform-induced changes in communication and commerce, mobile-related share shifts will “create/destroy material shareholder wealth.” YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are well noted. And not shockingly, the poster child for the uptake of mobile devices on IP-based networks is iPhone/iTouch usage (“fastest hardware user growth in consumer history” ).

The next big thing in computing follows a logical evolution, Meeker illustrates by slide 32. Increasing levels of integration will provide an incredible opportunity in semiconductors, hardware, software, and services as the rate of mobile Internet adoption makes desktop Internet adoption look so last-century. This statement I particularly loved: “Mobile devices will evolve as remote controls for ever expanding types of real-time cloud-based services…empowering consumers in unprecedented and transformative ways.”

Quoting from Mathew Honan in Wired magazine’s January issue, Meeker shares this: “Millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are, but also plugs into the Internet.” Heavy mobile data users will triple to more than 1 billion by the end of 2013 (AT&T alone has had a 50x increase in mobile data traffic in the past 3 years).

These are exciting times for technology makers, marketers, and users. My passion for, and faith in technology has kept me bullish throughout the downturn, and I can hardly contain my enthusiasm for what’s coming as we turn this innovation economy skyward once again.

The full set of slides from Meeker’s presentation are available here, and are worth going through in their entirety.

Uncategorized consumer, economy, innovation, marketing, mobile, network equipment, semiconductors, social media, technology, telecom

While global information technology spending will have its worst year on record in 2009, research behemoth Gartner is predicting a return to growth for the industry in 2010. For what it’s worth, so am I.

“While the growth rate has slowed over last year, it’s remarkable amid this uncertain economic environment that it is up at all. Core technology spending intent supports our conviction that the bottom has been reached. Everyone is looking for visibility, especially into technology spending. The fog is starting to lift.”

Actually, that quote is from a Gartner press release issued in November of 2001. Just a little reminder that cycles do happen.

Gartner is predicting 2010 IT spending to total $3.3 trillion, a 3.3 percent increase from 2009.

Among the topics Gartner predicts will drive recovery in tech are business intelligence, virtualization and social media. Duh. Also cited is what Gartner calls Operational Technology (OT) — devices, sensors, and software used to control or monitor physical assets and processes in real-time to maintain system integrity. The result of OT will be an increasingly unified view of all the information covering business process and control systems.

It’s all good news and a good direction for the industry, of course. We’ve seen growth all throughout 2009 which continues to convince me that the innovation economy is plugging along with a quietly confident knowledge that only those who continue to invest in R&D and marketing will reap the benefits when the market as a whole returns.

Uncategorized business intelligence, economy, gartner, innovation, social media, technology, Technology Public Relations, virtualization

New York Times technology writer Steve Lohr makes a good case for a recovering economy, led by increasingly good financial performance in the technology sector.

Lohr gathers optimistic chief executive quotes from Google, Intel, I.B.M., Dell, Cisco, plus a supporting cast of economists and analysts. The pervasive spread of computing across industries and society, they tell us, means the long-term growth trend in the tech sector is as much a mirror of the economy as an engine of economic growth.

Just as there was some serious psychology behind the economic collapse, rising confidence at the executive level will translate into investment in growth, including hiring. Lohr says that phase has just begun and that the steady march of digital technology is pushing a renewed and broadbased demand for information technology.

Oh, and by the way, check out the image associated with Lohr’s article – a dollar bill made from a circuit board. Another interesting statement relative to my blog post from yesterday about images of technology…

Read Steve Lohr’s entire column here.

Uncategorized consumer, economy, innovation, technology