By: Mark Wilson
Via: Co.DESIGN

Our oceans are every bit as turbulent as “Starry Night.”



We imagine the ocean as having high tides and low tides, water that comes in and out in waves. Beyond that, how does water actually move around the world? What’s that flow look like?

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio assembled this remarkable animation of the surface currents of our oceans. It’s called Perpetual Ocean, and the full work is 20 minutes of HD video, assembled from a huge amount of satellite, on location, and computational data generated by ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase 2). ECCO2 itself exists to better understand our oceans and their role in the changing global climate.



What you’re looking at is the surface current flow (not anything deeper) of oceans around the world, recorded from 2006 to 2007. The white lines are the currents, and the darker blue colors of the water represent bathymetry (the fancy word for misnomer “ocean topography”).

The image is wondrous, isn’t it? I had no conception of how many massive whirlpools sit off the world’s coasts. It’s hard to imagine how difficult sea travel must have been to early explorers, trapped in currents without motors, relying only on wind, guts, and the stars to take them somewhere they’ve never seen before. Heck, it seems scary to undertake now.



And all this pontification is ignoring just how unthinkingly beautiful the visualization looks. NASA has rendered a picture of the ocean that’s as gorgeous as the ocean itself.

I find myself replaying the video embedded here, again and again, while Googling the locations of deeper currents to make sense of the surface repercussions I’m looking at. But the static references I discover–arrows pointing around continents–just aren’t the same. I’ve been spoiled by the complexity of this work. I don’t want to see nature simplified or snap-shotted. I just want to see it. I can notice the trends for myself.

By: John Cook
Via: Geek Wire

Walmart is trying to roll onto Amazon's turf

One of the most fascinating rivalries going on in tech right now isn’t between Apple and Microsoft. Or Google and Facebook. It’s actually the battle for online retail dollars between Walmart and Amazon.com, a fight for the hearts and minds of the world’s shoppers.

Through its Walmart Labs unit, the giant Arkansas retailer is investing heavily in e-commerce as it plays a game of catch-up to Amazon.

Walmart is still the bigger of the two companies, with a market value of $207 billion to Amazon’s $89 billion. And because of that you might think it would have the upper hand at the negotiation table, right?

But as Reuters reports today, Walmart has lost out on two big possible acquisition deals to Amazon.com in the past few years. The most recent one occurred this week when Walmart passed on an opportunity to buy warehouse robot maker Kiva Systems, which Amazon gobbled up for $775 million.

A Kiva robot in action

Citing a source familiar with the situation, Reuters reported that Walmart passed because “it did not see an attractive return on the investment.”

In the same report, Reuters noted that Walmart went after Quidsi — operator of Diapers.com and other e-commerce sites — but lost out to Amazon.com which purchased the company for more than $500 million in 2010.

Certainly, Walmart is behind in e-commerce. And one way that it can get into the game is through acquisitions, gobbling up either tech talent (which it has already done), big niche players (like a Quidsi) or pure technology plays (Kiva). Walmart has been making a number of buys in recent months, but they’ve typically been smaller upstarts like Small Society, One Riot, Kosmix and Grabble.

Given that, all I have to say is watch this space. With two well known and well capitalized giants going at one another, I anticipate plenty of fireworks in the coming months.

The rivalry between the two companies has come and gone over the years. Back in 1998, Walmart sued Amazon for stealing trade secrets. At the time, Walmart issued this statement:


That was just three years after Amazon.com launched, and it showed the disdain (or fear) for the young upstart. It also occurred just before the dot-com implosion, a period that nearly killed Amazon. Walmart could have used the time to plant its flag in e-commerce. But it didn’t, and now 10 years later the fight appears to be back on in a big way.

The question now is whether Amazon.com is just too big to kill off.

By: Mark Green
Via: The Lane Report

State program matches federal grants received by Kentucky firms

FRANKFORT, Ky. (March 19, 2012) – Governor Steve Beshear today announced 17 high-tech Kentucky companies will share $6.2 million in state funds as part of a program to support and attract technology-based small businesses.

Through the state’s competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Matching Funds program, Kentucky matches all or part of federal SBIR-STTR awards received by Kentucky-based companies or those willing to relocate operations to Kentucky.

“These 17 companies are developing some of the nation’s most promising new technologies, as recognized by experts on both the federal and state levels,” said Gov. Beshear. “From finding cancer treatments, to combating Alzheimer’s disease, to helping develop long-lasting batteries for electric vehicles, Kentucky is proud to help support these innovators and entrepreneurs who are helping create high-tech businesses and high-paying jobs throughout the Commonwealth.”

The companies and research initiatives receiving the awards include the following:

3H Company LLC, of Lexington, was awarded $232,212 to support the development of technology to capture and store carbon dioxide underground that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. The company’s novel absorbent also helps reduce energy loss during the coal capture process. www.3hcompany.com

Advanced Genomic Technologies LLC, of Louisville, was awarded $500,000 to help develop laboratory animal models that can be used to pattern sporadic Alzheimer’s disease in humans. www.advancedgenomictechnology.com

AllTranz Inc., of Lexington, was awarded $150,000 to develop innovative pharmaceutical products delivered via unique dermal solutions to treat a variety of neurological disorders. www.alltranz.com

Amelgo LLC, of Covington, was awarded $100,000 to support the development of effective non-antibiotic dry-off agents for the dairy industry to help reduce the number and severity of disease outbreaks in cows.

AMT nano LLC, of Lexington, was awarded $90,000 to assist in developing multi-functional micro robots, using a common manufacturing platform, for use in medical devices and aerospace and defense applications, as well as other micro-electrical mechanical system projects. www.amtnano.com

ATI Inc., of Lexington, was awarded $98,748 to help develop aluminum alloy weld wire that could be used in products ranging from armored military vehicles to commercial lightweight bikes. The company specializes in aluminum alloys and products for aerospace and defense applications.

Bexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., of Covington, was awarded $500,000 to support further development of BXQ-350 for glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), one of the most common and aggressive brain cancers in humans. BXQ-350 has shown to be effective against GBM in preclinical trials, as well as against pancreatic cancer and neuroblastomas. www.bexionpharma.com

customKYnetics Inc., of Versailles, was awarded $494,458 to help develop an electrical stimulation device for use by individuals undergoing orthopedic rehabilitation and those with neuromotor disorders due to spinal cord injury or stroke. www.customkynetics.com

Invenio Therapeutics Inc., of Lexington, was awarded $434,480 to facilitate the development of a therapy for patients who have acute myeloid leukemia that offers higher potency, lower toxicity and fewer side effects than current treatments.

NaugaNeedles LLC, of Louisville, was awarded $500,000 to support the development of high-aspect-ratio atomic force microscopy probes that could advance and accelerate the pace of research and discovery in areas including nanomanipulation, biophysical probing, nanomechanics, nanoelectronics and metrology. www.nauganeedles.com

nGimat, of Lexington, won two awards totaling $750,754 to help develop advanced energy storage nanomaterials for use in advanced lithium-ion automotive batteries for electric vehicles, as well as in energy storage components for the emerging electrical smart-grid. www.ngimat.com

Orthopeutics LP, of Lexington, was awarded $359,400 to develop and commercialize nonsurgical solutions for common orthopedic problems via injection to treat degenerative disc disease and repair damaged tendons and ligaments. www.orthopeutics.com

ParaTechs Corporation, of Lexington, was awarded $459,478 to further develop and commercialize a non-surgical assisted-reproductive technology for mice used in biotechnology discovery and development. www.paratechs.com

Regenerex, of Louisville, was awarded $500,000 for further development of a well-defined bone marrow cell processing procedure to help induce patient tolerance following kidney transplantation. www.regenerex.com

Tier1 Performance Solutions Inc., of Covington, was awarded $396,000 to assist in the development of human factors analysis software that will support a variety of NASA design projects such as space vehicles, mission control centers and flight deck systems. www.tier1performance.com

Transposagen Biopharmaceuticals Inc., of Lexington, was awarded $500,000 to help develop a method to create mutations in the genome of laboratory rats that can produce models that mimic human diseases in studies to develop new therapies. www.transposagenbio.com

W-Z BioTech LLC, of Lexington, was awarded $150,000 to support the development of a minimally invasive double lumen cannula apparatus (a non-surgical medical device) to manage heart failure in congenital heart defect patients.

The Cabinet for Economic Development manages the Kentucky SBIR-STTR Matching Funds program, which is administered under contract by the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (KSTC).

Applications for each round of the program are accepted by KSTC on a regular basis. A link to the online guidelines and application form for the Kentucky program are posted at www.ThinkKentucky.com/dci/SBIR.

Information on Kentucky’s economic development efforts and programs is available at www.ThinkKentucky.com. Fans of the Cabinet for Economic Development can also join the discussion on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/ThinkKentucky or follow on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/ThinkKentucky.

By: Nilofer Merchant
Via: Harvard Business Review

Imagine that you wanted a new home theater system. But instead of spending hours in Best Buy or on Amazon comparing configurations and assembling the parts you needed, you could signal what you wanted and a company would create it for you. You might simply Pinterest the elements you liked, including information about your space or noise limitations (“One-bedroom apartment on busy street in New York,” or “suburban space that needs stuff protected from little kids”), and then have a retailer give you a personalized, optimal configuration.

Right now, social is largely seen as a way to amplify messages (“Like” us on Facebook!) or to create conversations around customer service (“We’re so sorry you’re having a problem,” the persistent tweet from @ComcastCares). These two key functions — Marketing and Service — are regularly discussed as shaped by social era dynamics.

But the social era can — and will — be more than that. It will help us decide what we make, how much we make, and how we finance that production. While social media doesn’t shift Porter’s model, the social era surely does.

Big Isn’t Enough

This is the third part of a series on what it takes to win in the social era: being fast, fluid, and flexible. (Part one is here; part two is here.)

Let’s think about the way that changes our modes of production. Size once gave organizations purchasing power. Being big used to enable high barriers-to-entry, keeping out potential competitors. Big had the dollars to buy the mass-market access to consumers back when mass media was the only way to reach an audience. But when the capital requirements to enter markets have declined, the marginal cost of reaching consumers is effectively zero, and one-off production is not hard to do… being big offers a much smaller advantage than it used to. Being big ain’t enough, anymore.

Most existing big organizations — the 800-pound gorillas — subscribe to Michael Porter’s value chain framework. As I mentioned in the first part of this series, this model optimizes for efficient delivery of a known thing. Organizationally it means Z follows Y, which follows X. It carries with it one fundamental assumption: that customers are tangential to the process.

There is no question that Porter’s work has helped shape (some would say, “invent”) modern-day strategy. I’ve used his ideas for over 20 years of running companies big and small, and I consider myself a fan of his thinking. But, to put it bluntly, Porter’s value chain is antiquated in the light of the social era. It was created at a time when being big and having scale was in itself a key aspect to competitive advantage and profitability.

Generic vs. Distinct

People buy two categories of things: The distinct, and the generic. The distinct items are the things that have a limited quantity, that are artisanal in nature, and that are worth paying a premium for. The generic items are, well, the things you might find on Amazon.

When companies like Best Buy or Target are simply aisles of what you can find online, then it’s easy enough to become a storefront for Amazon. Everything that is undifferentiated is going to be delivered in ever more efficient, low-cost ways. Porter’s value chain is well suited for this mass-market, cost-driven approach, where customers remain at the end of the value chain.

But for organizations wanting to thrive in the social era, being distinct is key to both profitability and winning. While there has always been a market for bespoke, differentiated items, until very recently that market served a tiny fraction of the uber-rich. But today, both macroeconomic forces, and technological advances mean that customized products aren’t just for the one percent. Instead, customized products and experiences can be for everybody, at least some of the time.

How will the smartest, nimblest companies move away from less-profitable generics and into more-profitable distinct goods and services? By using the rules of the social era.

Social Becomes Central to What We Build

During Fashion Week in September 2011, Burberry did a direct campaign with an everyday consumer (not just the editors and fashionistas) to showcase their new line in what they called a #tweetwalk, letting users tweet about what they liked (or didn’t). It created an immediate signal between the company and its broad users.

It was an interesting first step.

Every brand already has the ability to get direct feedback from consumers on what they like; the friction cost of doing this is effectively zero through a social media conversation. But Burberry stopped short of doing what makes the most sense to their bottom line. Imagine if they’d actually created a video of a runway walk that enabled click to order. They could produce only what was ordered, and thus reverse their supply chain to produce only what is already sold. They could even allow customers to request products in particular colors at premium prices. Social gives companies more control to operationally adjust their offers and create zealots by better collecting and amplifying even weak signals.

This puts the customer at the center of the company much more than any lip service about being “customer centric.” Today, we see brands asking consumers to “like” them on Facebook as a way of getting permission to push them information. The brand is still the central part of that communication. Imagine what that dynamic becomes when using the power of pull. Ask yourself, what would it look like to put customers at the center?

Many of you already know of Kickstarter as the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Several other platforms exist to allow community to fund expansion. When no one funds you, you know there’s no market for your idea. This changes more than the economic source. When a community invests in an idea, it also co-owns its success. In other words, it’s not just socially funded; it’s socially meaningful.

Now, let’s go back to that imagined home entertainment system. What if you — and everyone else shopping for a similar system — could signal your desired systems and have Best Buy choose one of hundreds each week to showcase (or perhaps choose the most popular per region). You would then have a reason to check out that configuration in a retail store — to see it and feel it — and then order it so they could come set it up at your place. See how that changes the retail experience from generic long aisles of commodity items to customized and community experiences? That is what social allows.

A Cycle of Profitability

When companies figure out how to shape their design, production, and manufacturing cycle from rigid planning and production systems to unique customer-driven experiences, they’ll design a way to respond in smaller bursts of more profitable cycles.

By allowing customers to directly fund an expansion, companies will know exactly what to build, and what is extraneous. By allowing signals to direct production, there’s an opportunity to learn immediately what the market responds to. Organizations can be in a constant conversation to learn what is working and what is not, and adapt on the fly. These nimble organizations consistently try new things, adapt to what works and thus improve the bottom line. What is interesting about this approach is that no company has to get it “right” the first time, as much as know how to learn and discover what works for growth.

The 800-pound gorilla dominated at a time when companies needed and used more capital, when the value chain could be profit maximized through vertical integration. To run this kind of organization, leaders had to be focus on being big enough to enable scale — because that’s where the profits once were. Once an organization got big, it took a lot to displace it. But the social era demands something more of our organizations. Something that is qualitatively different. The social era rewards the gazelles — the ones that are fast, fluid, and flexible.

by Adam Davidson

via NPR Planet Money


Every week, Robert Stout of Kings County Jerky slices meat by hand. Photo by Adam Lerner/adamlerner.net

One day Chris Woehrle decided to finally leave his corporate job and pursue his dream: to become an artisanal food craftsman. And so, every day at home, he’d basically pickle stuff.

“I had a refrigerator full of plastic food buckets that were full of pickles and kimchee and sauerkraut and harissa and salsa and ketchup and mustard and, you know, any kind of craft food you could make,” Woehrle says.

Woehrle lives in Brooklyn, where shops are filled with handcrafted, grass-fed, organically raised whatever. Too much of it, in fact. Every time Woehrle had a good idea, he found eight other companies were already making precisely the same kind of mustard or pickled radish.

“You don’t want to play a marketing game where it’s just like, let’s out-market the other pickle people,” Woehrle says.

Eventually, though, he and his partner found a hole in the market: all-natural beef jerky. Kings County Jerky was born. Two guys, a small warehouse in Brooklyn and 25 pounds of beef a day.

The Kings County approach is a model for how manufacturers in many sectors can do better. Ignore low-priced commodity products. Focus instead on customizing high-quality goods for a select audience willing to pay a premium.

It works even on something as simple as a spring.


Photo: Dan Kedmey/NPR Juan Delgado (left) and Steve Kempf of Brooklyn’s Lee Spring company stand with a 50-year-old coiling machine, still in use today.

“Springs are critical to the day-to-day functioning of everybody’s lives,” says Steve Kempf, CEO of Lee Spring in Brooklyn.

My eyeglasses have springs. Our audio recorders have springs. And each of those springs has to solve a slightly different problem.

“You take this wrench here for example,” he said, picking up a wrench from his desk. “It’s got a very unique L-shaped spring design. And so the product designer wants to come up with an elegant design, and he also has a very specific force he wants when you let go of this wrench so that it opens in your hands and feels comfortable.”

Think of this as an artisanal craft wrench. And a craft wrench needs a craft spring. This is good business, by the way. Companies will pay more for a spring that precisely meets their needs than they will for some off-the-rack spring.

The springs at Lee Spring are gorgeous displays of ingenuity and skill. Making them requires knowledge and artistry. It’s a true craft. Craft jobs typically pay more, so the workers at Lee Spring tend to do better than workers who don’t have all those spring skills.

Even big manufacturers — like Toyota, General Electric, Dow Chemical — are focusing more of their business on custom-making products for customers willing to pay more. It’s one of the best alternatives to competing with China and other low-wage countries, which have perfected the commodity business of turning out lots and lots of identical products as cheaply as possible.

Forget that model. In America, we can focus on craft. That’s where the money is, and that’s where the hope lies for American manufacturing.

By Christine Negroni

via NYTimes


The old Town Hall in Stamford, Conn. has been renovated and will become a home for aspiring entrepreneurs.

STAMFORD, Conn. — The old Town Hall here, a Beaux-Arts building on the National Registry of Historic Places, has sat unused for 25 years, a victim of Stamford’s rapid growth in the 20th century. But the Town Hall will join the 21st-century economy, with the announcement this month that it would become an incubator for business start-ups in a 10-year lease agreement with private investors.

The Stamford Innovation Center, as the venture is called, is expected to open by summer, and aspiring entrepreneurs will get work space, mentoring and access to investors.

Acting as a corporate sponsor for the venture will be Sikorsky Aircraft, the helicopter maker and military contractor based in nearby Stratford, Conn. The company, a subsidiary of United Technologies, has leased 2,000 square feet on the building’s second floor, and will coach tenants and may even invest in them, said Chris Van Buiten, the vice president for Sikorsky Innovations, a network of employees focused on finding new technologies.

Sikorsky is priming the pump by issuing five technological challenges to the public that, on the surface, are aviation related. It is seeking proposals on, among other things, ways to apply wireless monitoring to digitized aircraft and to obscure the visibility of airplanes in flight. Successful applicants will have use of the company’s space at the Town Hall for a year.

“In much the same way that Sikorsky does not make the engines or avionics that are installed into our helicopters,” Mr. Van Buiten said, “likewise will some next-generation technology solutions not be produced by us.”

The Stamford Innovation Center is renting most of the old Town Hall from the city. The Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development provided a half-million-dollar loan to turn the building into modern office space.

In 2008 the city began renovating the Town Hall, with the hope of finding a tenant. It spent $16 million enlarging the space and making it handicapped-accessible. Patty Meagher, a founder of the Innovation Center, remembers the time she and the others involved with the project first considered leasing the building as the work was completed in 2010. “Remember the line from that movie, ‘You had me at hello’? That was the initial reaction,” she said when they first saw the limestone facade, iron-railed staircase, terrazzo floors and brilliant murals on the walls of several rooms.

The location was also an asset, she said, in the shadow of Stamford Town Center mall, steps from the city’s library, theater, shopping and dining districts. There are no restrictions on the kinds of ideas that will be considered for the center, so long as the directors believe there is potential for turning them into successful businesses. A few start-ups are already working in the building on projects as varied as a GPS-enabled community news site and the use of cloned immune cells for medicine.

As fledgling businesses develop, tenants will be introduced to venture capitalists, many of whom live or work in the area, Ms. Meagher said. The investors and entrepreneurs, she said, “will be meeting each other, interacting, and that’s how these companies could very well get funded.”

Business incubators are very of-the-moment across the country. In Chandler, Ariz., the City Council financed a biotechnology-themed center, while a center in Portland, Ore., focuses on sustainability. Nearly three-quarters of these enterprises are sponsored by economic development agencies, governments or academic institutions, according to the National Business Incubation Association. The Stamford Innovation Center is among the 25 percent that are private, with aspirations to become profitable businesses based on rents charged to tenants and educational programs offered to the public.

Over the last five years there have been 150 incubation centers opened nationwide, the association said. While no studies cite the recession as motivating that growth, Linda Knopp, the group’s research and policy director, said she believed the economy played a role. “More communities at least start considering the business incubation concept during economic downturns,” she said, “as they’re looking for ways to stimulate economic growth and create jobs.”

Certainly that is the goal in Stamford, with a population of 122,643, which has an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, lower than the state and the nation as a whole, but which has lost jobs in the financial and manufacturing sectors and has had an increase in office vacancies. One quarter of the city’s 13 million feet of business space is unoccupied, said Laure Aubuchon, the director of the Stamford Office of Economic Development.

“We are a victim of our own success, because we keep building space,” Ms. Aubuchon said. But she said the upside is that when the entrepreneurs are ready to start their businesses they will be able to find affordable rents in Stamford.

Sikorsky has set a goal of incubating at least two viable companies a year. Barry Schwimmer, a founder of the Innovation Center who is managing the opening, said Sikorsky was setting an example that he hoped other large companies would follow.

“It is a fairly unique model,” he said, adding that such communication between large, established businesses and small, untested ones was “virtually unheard-of.”

What is developed here will most likely have wider applications, Mr. Van Buiten of Sikorsky said. He offered the example of paint that changes color on a military helicopter, which could also be sold to the automobile industry. “We’d be willing to spend a lot of money,” he said of a product like that. “But think of how that would appeal to teenagers if a car company could offer that kind of paint on a Scion at $1,500.”