PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD The tech industry is in the middle of a blossoming of product and tech introductions. I'm not sure exactly why, but I suspect it has something to do with the economic downturn, the emergence of SAAS (software as a service) and long simmering technologies finally making it to the mainstream.
While at first glance you would not think an economic downturn is good for product development, at second glance you'll find lots of reasons for new products and companies to appear during bleak economic times. First the lackluster economy scares established companies into realizing they have to get real, innovative new products out the door if they are going to survive. The upside to layoffs is that executives and engineers who always thought about going out on their own find themselves forced to go out on their own.
SAAS means that instead of sinking all your money into building an IT infrastructure upon which you can create new products and services, you can get right to the creation of those services. The ability for developers to tap directly into the Amazon elastic cloud or a competitor means IT startups can be accomplished faster, cheaper and able to scale out more quickly.
New battery technologies, new open software models, new RFID and geolocation services are all examples of new technologies long in development but now becoming easy and cheap to incorporate into new products.
Here are five new smart tech technologies that caught my eye this week.
1. Use your data center to heat your building. This is a joint project between IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (by the way, IBM sponsors this site but does not oversee content). Waste heat from data centers is now on the tech industry's radar for elimination. Among the many approaches is water cooling. The IBM project takes the water-cooled concept the furthest by using "micro-capillaries" to more efficiently cool electronic components in the data center and also capture the excess heat to be used in a building's heating system. Reuters covered the story.
2. Microsoft Hohm. No, this is not a home version of Windows 7. This is an offering from Microsoft for consumers to manage their energy consumption. I'm a real fan of these types of products as you can't start managing a process until you can measure your usage.
3. Are your forms in order? Much of business still runs by form. Forms to apply for a job, forms for warranty, forms for everything. Finally a company has combined SAAS with easy forms development, deployment and management. Perfect Forms recently introduced a new version in its cloud forms system.
4. Social networking in the enterprise. All your co-workers want to know when they are going to have the same social networking tools they use outside the company in their personal lives. But can social networks and the need for security and compliance ever find a happy pairing? Take a look at Socialtext, which combines blogs, wikis and even a private company (Twitter) to get your company in the social net world.
5. You light up my ... door handle. Recently I wrote about a smart pill bottle that can track and remind folks of their medicine usage. It was only one example of digital technology being applied to previously dumb items. What could be dumber than a door handle? So, apply a little tech and the handle lights up when you are within 10 feet. I could use one of these.
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