Tag: innovation

2025 innovation Areas

  1. Personalized medicine
  2. Distributed energy
  3. Pervasive computing
  4. Nanomaterials
  5. Biomarkers for health
  6. Biofuels
  7. Advanced manufacturing
  8. Universal water
  9. Carbon management
  10. Engineered agriculture
  11. Security and tracking
  12. Advanced transportation

i like universal water and distributed power. without those, the rest is pretty meaningless.

Itemized Electricity

Imagine a little device that sits between the appliance’s plug and the wall socket, measures the power use, and reports that data over the AC network to a collector. Each device would be coded, you’d map the codes to appliances (TV, refrigerator, toaster, computer), and you’d wind up with a fully itemized accounting of where all the power goes. No guessing about the payback period for a new and more efficient refrigerator, you’d just know. A few years down the road, if your new Energy Star fridge starts to leak, you’ll be alerted to the fact and know to check the seals. In this scenario the network effects would get really interesting. When contemplating the purchase of that new fridge, for example, you could go beyond the rated performance to the actual performance as measured by other users of that model. And maybe even adjust for factors like the number of kids in the house who are likely to stand in front of the open fridge door pondering their options.

if you got a bill by device, that would reduce consumption pretty quickly

Old parts, but a new whole

China’s forte seems to be recombining old technologies for new uses

Huawei has not invented many original products. But it has made some original tweaks. It split its mobile-phone base-stations into 2, lighter parts, which could be installed separately and more cheaply. But an in-house magazine dismisses the modification as “merely an improvement in engineering processes”.

Both schools of thought look in the wrong place for signs of technological creativity. The state may aspire to match America’s supercomputers. But such breakthroughs, which push the limits of scientific and engineering knowledge, are beyond Chinese firms. Their future lies instead in “trolling” through existing technologies and components, and combining them in new ways.

Moon X Prize

A morning brainstorm featuring Google’s Larry Page and Virgin’s Richard Branson had already turned up scores of possible new X Prize targets, from early cancer detection to ultracheap solar energy. During a break for lunch, Page dropped one more on X Prize chief Peter Diamandis: He and Google cofounder Sergey Brin had been “kicking around” the idea of sending low-cost robotic landers to the moon. Diamandis, who has been launching extraterrestrial enterprises since he was an MIT undergrad in the 1980s, grabbed his laptop and disappeared, returning half an hour later with a freshly minted PowerPoint deck. Page looked it over, then said, “Talk to Sergey.” That evening, as the guests sipped cocktails in the shadow of the little white spaceplane, Diamandis cornered the Google technology chief and pitched. Brin loved it. “Some endeavors are too speculative, even for venture capital. If they’re really worth doing, you try to find some other way.”

this is why i love this place. not just puny crap like the guys in sunnyvale.