Morgan Stanley recently published data on key economy and internet trends. The presentation is available online at various locations, including SlideShare below:
‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world with digital information and lets users use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
It offers some interesting ideas for potential new applications.
I attended the Carleton University engineering poster session on Mar 20th. 89 engineering students displayed the results of 36 4th year projects (http://www.sce.carleton.ca/courses/sysc-4907/webforms/posterLocations.php).
The projects ranged from the abstract to the commercially viable, and from simple to complex. The one thing that stood out in general was the high quality of the students. The projects I found most interesting were the ones which struck me as being commercially viable with further development – examples from the poster session included:
Poster sessions like this can be a great way to help advance commercialization of university work and link local investors/entrepreneurs to ideas and talent.
With all the talk of government stimulus and spending it is disappointing to see the government not using programs that have already been approved and rolled-out.
Last year, the Ontario Government’s Next Generation of Jobs Fund was rolled out by McGuinty with much fanfare and promises of how his government would be fast tracking the program to “Git’r Done”. The Next Generation of Jobs Fund is a five-year, $1.15 billion fund intended to create new highly skilled jobs.
“We’re stepping up because Ontario is not going to let others steal our future out from under us - we will produce the next wave of clean technologies that create jobs and clean up the environment,” said Premier McGuinty.
“We’re sending the message to companies around the world that if you’ve got a project that will grow your business and create jobs, we’ll make it happen in Ontario,” said Minister of Economic Development and Trade Sandra Pupatello.
“This fund is about building on our strengths to ensure Ontario can compete and win in the global economy - and create a better standard of living for Ontario families,” said Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson.
There was also much noise made about how:
Companies are guaranteed a decision within 45 days of submitting a complete proposal.
So, since being announced a year ago…. nothing has happened.
Furthermore, last summer – Nortel, IBM and Carleton University submitted a proposal to establish and collaborate on a project called “Coral CEA”. The group’s proposal was to setup an organization to focus on development of communications enabled applications with the objective of spinning-off companies and jobs. In-spite of being under bankruptcy protection Nortel remained committed to the proposal because of it’s strategic value.
This was a proposal from two of Canada’s top innovators and Ottawa’s leading University… and nothing has happened.
In fact, worse then nothing has happened – good ideas have been submitted and no action has been taken.
It appears that the only jobs that the NGoJF is creating are jobs for government organ grinders whose purpose is to turn our “Creative Class” into dancing monkeys for the bureaucracy -
If McGuinty is serious about his commitment to innovation and the NGoJF – he needs to roll up his sleeves and take direct personal action in his government. Right now McGuinty and his government fall into the category of “Big Hat, No Cattle”.
UPDATE: The Strategic Opportunity Program (part of NGoJF) has been very quietly shut-down …
Sun has developed Sun Small Programable Object Technology (SPOT). It’s an experimental platform to inspire developers to build the next great toy, sensor, communication device — who knows — using Sun technology. The Sun SPOT devices make include a flexible hardware platform as well as the software and tools to make it easy to innovate, experiment, and prototype whatever a developer can imagine.
The Sun SPOT Device is a small, wireless, battery powered experimental platform. It is programmed almost entirely in Java to allow regular programmers to create projects that used to require specialized embedded system development skills. The hardware platform includes a range of built-in sensors as well as the ability to easily interface to external devices.
This little platform is full of potential for “Creative Class” people to base a microbusiness on.
A small computer in a wall-plug, running Linux.
Marvell is selling this “development platform”, targeted at the following applications:
For those of the “Creative Class” looking for new microbusiness ideas, it might be something worth looking at.
It is interesting to note that the computing and the networking industry is now starting to compete openly in each other’s backyard.
HP started going after networking aggressively in 2005, and it’s Procurve business unit has been growing faster then the overall networking market and has been slowly taking away Cisco market share. Further, on Feb 18, 2009, HP announced the formation of a business unit to consolidate it’s telecommunications and media products. The new unit will be called HP Communications and Media Solutions (CMS).
Cisco has stated its intention to aggressively go after virtualizing the entire datacenter (including computing and networking) and is expected to announce a virtualization-enabled blade system this spring. According to the trade press – the new blade system is code-named “California”. There is also rumors of friction between IBM and Cisco as Cisco’s actions put serious strain Cisco-IBM channel partnerships.
This will change the landscape for many virtualization and utility computing oriented startups. This war is expected to result in a price war for networking equipment and blade systems. This will also result in significant industry consolidation.
