Living organisms are composed of cells. Often, Biology studies life building on (molecular) chemistry of cells and their multi-cellular (or even inter organelle) collective interactions. On the other hand, Condensed Matter Physics has made great progresses in highlighting the role of similar collective effects in matter, probably far beyond any other scientific discipline studying complexity. As an example, already Einstein concluded that superconductivity has quantum mechanical origins, showing the failure of the initial reductionism approach. Since a few years, it has been widely accepted that it is not possible explaining and predicting superconductivity with chemistry. Today, we know that superconductivity is well captured by the universal, symmetry-based Ginzburg-Landau theory. It’s a matter of universality classes (i.e. categories) describing collecting behaviors that manifest under certain conditions: for example superconductivity is from symmetry breaking of the global U(1) gauge symmetry in the field theory.

The point is, do we need a new physics (and mathematics) of evolving living systems as well, which is capable of reflecting allowable dynamical symmetries? What is sure it that the laws governing dynamics far from equilibrium (which typical of life) are still unknown: I wouldn’t be so surprised in learning that these laws (and the related mathematics) are behind brain functioning as well. Nature has jumped ahead of us: once we discover these laws, then we can probably make use of them to make a breakthrough in our technologies.

Much have been said about smart grids and maybe the idea of controlling the house energy at distance might seem futuristic to a lot of people. But, as a matter of fact, it is closer to reality than you would imagine. A good example is the Cisco Home Energy Management solution. It comprises the Cisco home energy controller (HEC) for consumers and the Energy Management Software which hosts services for utilities. It gives to utility companies the right tools to enhance customer satisfaction and effectively implement demand management, load shedding, and pricing programs for residential deployments.

This system includes a support touchscreen display, common networking and security protocols and energy management applications. It enables consumers to save energy and money with demand-response, managing energy budget based on peak pricing and time of use, and thus be more aware about their energy use.

Furthermore, the Cisco Home Energy Management isn’t alone in the energy saving market. Other examples include Google Power Meter and Microsoft Hohm.

There are, indeed, plenty of products already in the market to manage energy consumption in the home. Why aren’t they much more popular? Clearly the cost is a factor, but also the lack of standardization plays a role. There is a need for having appliances producers to provide information on energy utilization in a standardized form. Is it that most of them are reluctant to provide this information?

Imagine if when buying a new fridge I get the information on how much energy “money” I will and up spending in using it! That would make me think twice about the selection of a model. It is amazing how far energy consumption is from our habits.

Just think: you go visit a friend and if you need to make a call from his phone you ask permission and you might even offer to pay the price (it was very common in the past when calls where individually metered) but you never think about asking permission for recharging your cell phone using his sockets. The fact is that electricity in the day by day usage is felt as “free” which of course is completely wrong.

Having a monitoring device would raise awareness, may be some producers prefer we are not fully aware!

The competition in the Search Engine area is intense aiming at satisfying every user with relevant results. How can one detect the satisfaction of the user on a given query result? Some techniques are discussable, and there is also some very interesting new ones such as movement tracking.

Heatmap of recorded cursor positions (Photo: University of Washington, and MSR Redmond)

Tracking the user by observing his mouse movements and hesitation can show the relevance of results in Web search engines. Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research just showed that tracking cursor moviment and hovers instead of monitoring clicking or gazing may provide a better understanding of user satisfaction. The researchers tracked Bing users, and evaluated the relevance of the mouse movements since it is closely related to the users gaze, and it can provide indication whether a user may abandon the search. Moreover, they could differentiate a page abandonment, and its possible reasons. For example, the user was dissatisfied with the search results, or that he has found the answer directly on the first result page.

In mobile Web searching, this technique, obviously, cannot be used to track users movements. However, other attributes could be used to increase the likely-hood of user satisfaction, such as position. As an example, if you are in Venice-Italy, searching for something related to tourism, it would be nice to receive suggestions about what to do in this place, instead of receiving stuff about Venice Beach, California.

What all this is telling me is that the more able we are to connect data about a user behavior and context, the more likely we are to meet his expectation. This, of course, bring the concept of ecosystem to the forefront. Understanding the user ecosystem (that is broader than his context since it also includes other actors that may interact among them, hence changing the user context) is key to create value.

Are bills and coins going to disappear any time soon? Will we be using digital money?

Hey, we already have credit cards and we use them most of the time. Personally, anytime I go to the US I take with me 100 $ in cash ’cause you never know but most of the time when I fly back home I still have those 100$ in my wallet. I pay most of my expenses through credit card.

However, even though it is so easy to pay with credit card I cannot accept any payment from another guy through a credit card. Never thought about it actually till I saw Square, a new start up founded by the creator of Twitter.

Now I can, and you can too. Just go on the AppStore and download Square for your iPhone and get the special card reader (a tiny square that plugs in into your iPhone earphone port) and you are all set. You can ask for a free delivery in 48 hours of the card, provided you have a US security number, directly from the Square website.

This application really makes me wonder if the time of hard currency is over. Mobile payment using mobile phone has been available in Japan and Korea for several years now and it is widely used. In Italy we are starting and I feel it will catch up. Applications like this makes it possible to anyone of us to become a merchant!

The display market is flooded today by LCD, with a limited share of Plasma and an even more limited share of OLED. The dimension of the pixel in plasma screens limits their application to very large display and the production cost (and limited life span) of OLED limits their use in some top of the line cell phones.

NED, Nano Emissive Display are ready, in the labs, but are still years away and probably they will have their time as 4k screens will come to be an object of desire with an affordable price, probably in the second part of this decade.

The Quantum Dot display engineered by Samsung

Now Samsung has shown that the Quantum Dot technology can be transformed into real display, as reported in a recent paper in Nature Photonics, summarized by Technology Review.

Quantum Dot displays promise to be brighter than current LCD (therefore better to see in a lighted environment) and to consume 1/10 of the energy.

Presently their life time is estimated around 10,000 hours (a bit too short, however remember that the first plasma screens had a lifetime of 5,000 hours) and their consumption is about the same of today’s LCD.

One interesting aspect is that they can be created on plastic film, therefore can be bendable. Imagine using them as labels on tomato cans! Quite away in time but we have seen how fast technology can progress.

The real challenge, as experience shows, is the huge volume of LCD production that is leading to continuous, even though linear, innovation. They keep getting better and it is difficult for any underdog technology to take their place.

The Mobile World Congress is the industry’s biggest annual gathering. The 2011 version points out that the biggest trend, according to Cellan-Jones (technology correspondent from BBC News), is probably local search adverts, where, for example, you look for someplace to eat and the nearest restaurants pop up (as I already talked about in one of my recent posts).

And who is dominating this area? Google of course, which is taking its massive share of search on the web to this new mobile platform. The Google Maps is the main navigation tool on most smartphones.

Then there is advertising within mobile applications, many of which are free and so need ad revenue to be viable. According to the BBC report, apps are now a $15bn business, with $2bn from advertising. Thus, advertising is a very convenient way for developers to make money.”

Mr Kruse (from Smaato Mobile Ads) claims that consumers are more likely to recognize a brand which pops up in a mobile app than on a website. Adverts within games are also becoming more and more common, often to promote other game titles.

“The main challenge for marketers,” says Marco Veremis (CEO of Upstream), is how you advertise in a way that doesn’t look like advertising.”

The final statement of the report is that we should expect plenty more marketing messages on our mobile, but if the advertisers succeed, maybe we won’t realize that they want us to buy something.

Font: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12509571

In dark and light blue, there are, respectively, the Brazilian states affected and partially affected by the blackout. In red, there is the Luiz Gonzaga substation.

In the night between last Thursday and Friday a blackout took place over 8 states in the north-east of Brazil, according to  BBC and G1 (the news site of the biggest television station in Brazil). Edison Lobão, Brazilian Minister of Mines and Energy, said it was probably caused by a fault originated in the Luiz Gonzaga substation (located in the city of Jatobá, state of Pernambuco). Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff took some decisions to handle the situation. It was announced that Rousseff wants greater accuracy in maintaining the network by the energy agencies, and better supervision of the power grid by ANEEL – National Agency of Electrical Energy in Brazil. Some of these affected states include cities hosting the 2014 Football World Cup matches, but according to Edison Lobão there is no reason to be concerned, because the system is “good although it has some faults”, like every big system.

If energy in Brazil were managed through a smart grid, the impact of blackouts would be much less. One of the advantages of moving to a smart grid is to survive different kinds of localized network failures, such as those which happened in Brazil last week. With sensors and smart meters, it is possible to identify problems when they occur and take the right decision to solve or minimize their impact. Redirecting energy from/to alternative routes could be a solution to this problem and it can be possible in the new grid.

Blackouts are more common than most people imagine. In 2003 there was a memorable one in Italy, affecting all the country except the islands of Sardinia and Capri. It lasted for about 12 hours, also affecting part of Switzerland near Geneva for 3 hours. Also in 2003, the second biggest blackout in history left about 55 million people in darkness in the north-east of U.S. and south-east of Canada. But the record is the 1999 Brazilian Blackout, which is estimated to have affected between 75 to 97 million people.

Changing to a new network architecture requires a large investment. Nowadays, Brazil has about 63 million consumer units and just changing the measurement devices to smart meters represents a spending of 7.5 to 19 billion dollars. However, even though the smart metering isn’t enough to transform the network into a smart grid, it may be a first step since it should increase the consumer ability to better manage the electricity bill and her electrical devices from remote, thus helping in decreasing the load on the network.

Think about it. Nature is building its “products” from a tiny seed that grows over time to become a oak or a pea, a fly or a whale.

We work differently. We start big (even a tiny bolt is bigger than a seed or a spermatozoa) and then we assemble parts to form even bigger objects. Nanotech is working in a much similar way to Nature but with Nanotech we can only build nanothings. We are still missing the capacity to start small and grow.

Some objects, like an airplane, have to be “big enough” to embed all required controls and mechanisms.  We can build an electronic fly, as an example, although some attempts are being made.

Hence, it is with surprise that I just read of the feat accomplished by AeroVironment in developing a humming bird size replica that can fly, hoover, counterbalance the side wind and be precisely directed on a desired path.

The artificial hummingbird

This result stems from a research grant provided by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the one who gave the starting kick to the Internet…) to develop a small bird sized aircraft within a set of tight constraints, like the one just mentioned above.

The artificial hummingbird is slightly bigger than the average hummingbird but smaller than the biggest one. It weights 19 grams and has a wing span of 16 cm.

Just the other day I published a post on the work at the MIT on the creation of a flying screen built up by thousands of tiny flying dots. The kind of control those dots have is minimal, basically the can only hoover in an environment where there is no wind. You would never be able to set up that screen in the open. Too much control is required.

This hummingbird has the control it takes to do that and is even able to carry a camera on board, but, of course, it would too big to be used as a pixel in a flying screen. Still a long way to go to reach that point.

However, it could easily carry a sensor to places where it would be difficult to have one and a fleet (or should I say a flock?) of them can perform amazing task in sensing the environment.

Besides, it is not unconceivable to imagine an ecosystem stemming out of flying sensors providing the possibility to create apps for a real flying platform.

We’ll see.

According to IBM, by 2013, there will be  1.2 billion connected electronic devices (sensor, appliances, meters, transformers, wind turbines, rooftop solar panels and so on), in more than 800 million homes with broadband Internet access. This network is called Internet of Things, IoT. With that, we have an opportunity to make our homes smarter.

Taking into account energy consumption the IoT could unleash several new services to save energy. Imagine our refrigerator being automatically adjusted based on the weather, the lights turning off if we have enough light coming from outside, our washer and dryer determining water temperature and wash/rinse/dry time based on load volume, dirt level and time-of-day energy rates, etc.

Your smart home may looks like this, normal.

In order to have smart services like these and achieve optimum efficiency, which is after all the idea behind a smart grid, it is necessary to link many millions of devices across our entire electrical, and communication infrastructure.  With all devices communicating one another there will be a lot of data traveling back and forth in many directions. It is hard to estimate how much data, but I truly believe that it will be a “huuuuge” amount.  Being able to deal with a massive volume of data that need to be processed cheaply in order to monetize value is a key element for this area, but of course there are other challenges like the design of algorithms to offer smart services, and so on.

Cloud computing has been one of the biggest trends for computing and the web of the past decade. Bringing the management of that massive volume of data to cloud computing style services could be an interesting opportunity for the main players in the game of smarter services for energy consumption, as utility industry, and Telecom Operators. Sure new applications and services (previously unthinkable) will come to light, in all shapes and sizes. But I tend to believe that the Internet of thing and cloud computing are meant to each other.

Any kind of content, text, video, music, images, from a digital point of view is simply a set of bit. Even if it may appear a nonsense, the Divine Comedy and the fast food menu are the same thing in this perspective.

Music was the first content to be transformed into files for a commercial use and now we can enjoy music from devices shaped as a cigarette lighter, and we can bring with us hundreds of songs in few grams package.

That was a true revolution in the music market: the way to produce, to deliver, to listen  and to buy music has radically changed.  The I-tunes model is now a reference model.

Now it is the time of books to face a great change. The ebooks diffusion is rapidly growing thanks to the availability of tablet pc and EBR.

We are at the beginning and it’s not easy to predict how this change will take form but we can surely take a look at the opportunities that the digital content opens to users and to all the stakeholders belonging to the publishing ecosystem.

Some advantages are easy to guess: you can buy on line in a few minutes, and publishers can save money since a significant part of the publishing costs are for printing  and stocking copies.

But there is a more interesting and, for me,more important implication that ebooks open.

Imagine that  you are reading the electronic version of the  last Ken Follet best seller, the Fall of Giants, on your personal Tablet and you are curious to know where are the specific places named in the novel, you can immediately satisfy your curiosity just touching the name of the place and visualize the map and all the other information related to that topic. And you could go more in depth, as much as you wish browsing on the internet .

You can enrich your knowledge in real time only following your inspiration without the physical limits of a physical book.

Can you imagine how this possibility could change our habits in building our personal knowledge?

There’s no more boundaries among the different disciplines in which culture is traditionally codified.

This new perspective requires a great change in the publishers product strategies  that will have to enrich their products with additional contents choosing the business model that they will consider as the most profitable. Users will decide if they prefer to buy the additional contents bundled with the ebook or at a second time.

All these elements are very relevant in all publishing market areas especially in the education one. In my next post I’ll try to clarify, leveraging on the first feedback coming from the Future of Learning trial,  the key elements that digital contents for scholastic use, should have.