January 2011
6 posts
3 tags
Link: Idea to Market in 5 Months →
The Glif, a small tripod attachment for the iPhone 4, provides a great case study of how rapid prototyping and web-based services are going to change manufacturing. This write-up from one of the Glif’s creators shows how quickly they were able to conceive, design, fund, and ship it. Very interesting prospects for lowering the barriers to innovation.
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Link: Stuxnet and Iran's nuclear program →
A wrap-up from Wired on the brilliantly elusive and deadly Stuxnet computer worm that has crippled up to one-fifth of the uranium enrichment centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz plant. In particular see the link to a report in today’s New York Times that is coming out with more evidence of state intelligence agency involvement than I had previously seen.
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Link: James Fallows on cyberwar →
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Link: A Light in India →
David Bornstein of the New York Times reports on rice husk biomass power for the extremely poor villages of Bihar in India. This sort of innovation at the low end of the market, where low price and high reliability are more important than fancy features or the latest technology, is really worthwhile.
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Raging against the machine
The roaring furnaces of England during the Industrial Revolution, churning away in grimy Dickensian factories, could not be further removed from the quiet, pristine offices of a 21st-century Finnish software company. But despite their separation in time and technique, both settings were built with a common purpose: to take work out of the hands of artisans and use machines to make it simpler,...
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Link: When Innovation, Too, Is Made in China →
From the New York Times. Will be interesting to see how China’s capacity for huge quantity in fields like patents and scientific research (which is growing quickly) translates into quality and revenue.