Category Archives Innovation

Google is developing plans to use a network of huge balloons to provide internet to the two-thirds of the world currently without web access. Project Loon balloons float in the stratosphere, twice as high as airplanes and the weather. They are carried around the Earth by winds and they can be steered by rising or descending to an altitude with…

  The link of the first URL is active again:  http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html Background British physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented the web at CERN in 1989. The project, which Berners-Lee named "World Wide Web", was originally conceived and developed to meet the demand for information sharing between physicists in universities and institutes around the world. On April 30, 1993, the European Organisation for…

Telepresence has taken many forms over the years, Education, Health, Emergency services have all experimented with various iterations and combinations of form-factors and bandwidth. I have been involved in many promising, yet ultimately doomed trials and implementations. The team at Double Robotics appear to have something genuinely innovative, well designed and most importantly, practical. Combining the mobile utility of a…

Some more wonderful musings by Kevin Kelly on specialisation and the growth of long-tail niches. These trends do have profound impacts for markets, education and most notably, Government policy; in fact the impact is and will be felt in all walks of life.  I hope to write more about this later. Evolution moves from the general to the specific. The first…

The bandwidth-sync correlation that's worth thinking about Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head. Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes. On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time--like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and…

Local Government first to 2.0. In Australia, Government 2.0 is being pursued at a national level. However, in the US, some big cities have moved first. Here is an article about New York City’s initiatives and here is another about Boston’s moves [HT: Darren Challis] Early days yet but very interesting. [Core Economics]

Not a plant to be seen, the desert ground is too dry.  But the air contains water, and research scientists have found a way of obtaining drinking water from air humidity. The system is based completely on renewable energy and is therefore autonomous. Cracks permeate the dried-out desert ground, the landscape bears testimony to the lack of water. But even…

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