Tag Archive for 'Driving Forces'

Ecomagination $10 Billion Eco-R&D Push

GE has a whole lot faith in its ecomagination initiative. So much faith, in fact, that the company is pumping $10 billion into the project’s R&D over the next 5 years–effectively doubling its investment from the past 5 years.

The reason is simple: ecomagination is a cash cow, generating $70 billion in revenue since its inception in 2005. GE believes it will generate $25 billion in 2010, up from $18 billion in 2009. Over the next 5 years, GE hopes that ecomagination revenue will grow at twice the rate of the company’s total revenue.

Ecomagination encompasses a broad set of projects. So far, ecomagination has spawned everything from low-energy digital mammography machines and aircraft engines to gas turbines and nuclear plants. There’s plenty more on the way, including a massive battery plant in New York, a $2 billion wind project in Oregon, and a series of high-end energy-efficient front-load washers and dryers set to be manufactured in Kentucky. And we can’t forget GE’s ambitious plan into integrate appliances (i.e. hot water heaters, microwaves, and oven ranges) with smart grid technology.

Megatrends in Global Health Care

Powerful trends are at work — all around the world — forcing changes in how health care will be conceived and delivered in the decades ahead. The editors of Harvard Business Review have compiled a list of 12 megatrends that will dramatically change how we must think about the issue and some of the largely unrecognised consequences.

Megatrend 1: Innovation and demand soar in emerging economies
Megatrend 2: Personalised medicine and technological advances
Megatrend 3: Aging populations overwhelm the system
Megatrend 4: Rising costs
Megatrend 5: Global pandemics
Megatrend 6: Environmental challenges
Megatrend 7: Evidence-based medicine
Megatrend 8: Non-MDs providing care
Megatrend 9: Payers’ influence over treatment decisions
Megatrend 10: The growing role of philanthropy
Megatrend 11: Prevention is the next big business opportunity
Megatrend 12: Medical tourism

News Browsing by Network Analysis

Intuitively, we all know that big news topics relate to other big news topics–when you read about Google, you’re likely also reading about Microsoft. This new tool from Slate makes those connections a bit more concrete.

News Dots automatically scans all of the articles from major publications, and then tags them using Calais, an automated tagging engine created by Thompson Reuters. When two stories share a tag, it records the results:

The hope, of course, is that as the tool develops, “social networks” will develop in clusters, the same way that Facebook friends tend to cluster around college acquaintance.

The interface is currently hideous. But you wonder if something like this isn’t the future of news browsing. Can you imagine what happens when tagging technology gets truly semantic–when stories can be linked not just with keywords, but ideas? [Source: Flowing Data]

iPad is here!

Even though the Apple iPad won’t be available for another 60 or 90 days (depending on the model), Apple already has its official iPad website up and running.

In addition to showing off some of the applications, features and design and technical specifications, the website also features an eight-minute video with Apple’s design and development team discussing the device and showing it off. If you love Johnny Ive and well-produced promo videos, you’ll want to check it out!

You can watch the video over at Apple.com here. Please also find a NYTimes article on how “The iPad: A Media Machine That Opens Up a New Front” here.

The Real-Time Web is Here!

googleWe knew it was inevitable, and now it’s here: Google has just launched real-time search integrated into search results pages.

Basically it means that Google will display information from news sites, blogs and platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, as soon as it is published. It works on mobile too, at least for now only @ iPhone and Android [Source].

Here’s a video demo from Google on real-time search:

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Searching Social Media

seearch-sociallAlready wrote about the real-time web at this post. Now Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s search service are preparing real-time searches of Twitter and Facebook posts. Targeted ads could follow.

Naver (The popular Korean search engine) already incorporated this functionality a long time ago. Naver displays its search results in various categories, such as results found on blogs.

Nonetheless, in a bid to stay relevant in the face of these shifts, Google and Microsoft said on 21 October that they will incorporate information culled from social media sites into search pages. Microsoft said its Bing search engine will let users search for Twitter posts known as tweets and, later, for status updates posted to Facebook pages. The same day, Google said it too will include Twitter updates in search results and that it will begin offering a social search tool that delivers information posted by a searcher’s friends on social sites [Source]. We live in again in exciting times: Real-Time web. =)

The New Masters of Wall Street

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A brash new generation of traders is making a fortune by remaking financial markets. An outgrowth of Chicago’s derivatives markets, they go by wonky names like Global Electronic Trading Co., Tradebot and Infinium. Personnel include mathematicians, engineers and gamers. They bet their own capital on sophisticated software algorithms that spit out thousands of orders a second. Big Wall Street brokerages and hedge funds pursue similar strategies.

E.g. from the get-go the strategy was to trade fast, furiously and electronically. Getco’s first point of attack was futures, which went electronic early. Tierney and Schuler programmed their computers, and the people manning them, to offer quotes and execute trades more quickly than rivals. Then, when the market moves, to do it again. By posting bids and offers for the same securities simultaneously, they are able to scoop up a spread of a tenth or a hundredth of a penny per share thousands of times a day while limiting the capital at risk. What Getco gives up by capping its risk it makes up for in volume. The company currently trades an estimated 1.5 billion shares a day with 220 employees and offices in Chicago, New York, London and Singapore.

[Source]

Age of collaboration

collaborative_technologyOne-to-one concepts are looking increasingly dated. Smart companies are now striving to enable many-to-many technology, tools and services.

Smart companies are looking at ways to enable many-to-many relationships between employees. This comes under the umbrella of collaborative technology, tools and services that are designed to be shared by groups of people. Those people may be employees within the organisation but also employees of suppliers and even clients. For an overview of collaborative technology forms click here.

Elevating Social Media

elevating_social_mediaWhen most company bosses think about Facebook, Twitter and all those other oh-so-fashionable darlings of the social world, it is usually about how they stop their employees wasting their valuable time on those sites.

Yet a small but growing number of chief executives are coming to realise that social networks offer significant opportunities for marketing and selling their products, for engaging with their customers at a deep level and for using them to guide new product development. Read more.

The Next Energy Innovators

EnergyInnovationBusinessWeek and GreenBiz.com have assembled a list of 25 intriguing energy startups, including young companies that tap geothermal heat, turn waste into biodiesel, and more. Read here.

An overview of the 25 most promising US based energy tech companies can be found here. Furthermore, this week’s edition of The Economist features also an article on energy: “The future of the energy industry“.