Outside Innovation

Innovative New Glasses

On a recent vacation to visit my brother in Santa Fe, I had a chance to try out these new glasses from TruFocals. I can't wait to get my own pair. Both my brother and his wife have these glasses. They told me that the quality of vision is SO much better than you get with bifocals or with progressive glasses because you are always looking through the entire lenses--not through a smaller section. You change the focus by moving a small lever. I thought it would be a pain, but my sister-in-law said that it became second nature in a few hours. In fact, she finds herself trying to change the focus on her regular dark glasses all the time and finds it quite annoying that she can't adjust them.

Here's a short video that explains how these innovative glasses work.

The inventor behind this company is Stephen Kurtin. I met Steve years ago when he was the founder of a word processing company--Lexitron--His Videotype word processor was unique. To scroll the screen, you reached up to roll a wheel on the side of the screen that mimicked a typewriter platen -- an attempt to make a computer system mimick a typewriter. The TruFocals glasses may be the best of Steve's many inventions. He explains the goal of his invention this way:

"These glasses mimic the normal operation of a youthful human eye. And
in that normal youthful eye, there is a interior lense, sometimes called the
natural lens which changes shape under the control of your mind under the
silliary muscles. When you're youthful this happens completely automatically.
As you age, the lens sort of hardens and you can no longer, with your mind,
control that lens. The TruFocals restore that capability. The actually change
shape just as the lens in the youthful human eye did when you were
younger."

John Markoff explains the crux of Steve's invention in his article entitled "Making Eyeglasses That Let Wearers Change Focus on the Fly" in the New York Times: 

"The idea of a fluid lens whose focal plane can be mechanically adjusted goes back at least to an 1866 patent awarded D. A. Woodward, a Baltimore inventor. Since then there have been a variety of attempts to commercialize the technology, but none have met all the criteria for success. The lens must be thin, light, durable and easily adjustable. Several years ago Dr. Kurtin had his epiphany. A magnetically attached removable front lens would make for a compact and durable system."

 I was also impressed by the TruFocals Web site. In particular, check out the Flash demo that gives you a sense of what happens when you change the focus of your glasses.

Wikipedia Evolves Its Policies

Wikipedia has a new "flagged revisions" editing policy for certain submissions. I think it makes sense. Under the new policy, your edits to Wikipedia will not be published until they have been approved. The approval is not by a subject matter expert, per se, but by an "experienced volunteer." That's a person who has been editing on Wikipedia for some time and who has not been blocked. The presumption is that these experienced volunteers understand the Wikipedia ethos best. There is no guarantee about how long the approval may take.

What I like about this approach is that it WILL deter the needless vandalism that is so annoying and will therefore improve the quality of Wikipedia articles. Waiting to have one's edits approved is no different than waiting to have a comment on a blog post approved. It's something most of us have gotten used to.

This approval process is designed to reduce the amount of vandalism and misinformation that has been appearing, particularly on the articles about famous people (e.g., Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Britney Spears, etc.). In fact, according to the article, Wikipedia Changes Editing Policy in PC World, this edit approval policy will now apply to all articles about living people.

It Takes an ARU Student to Change a Village!

 Great story by Matt Clark in the Christian Science Monitor on July 5, 2009 about "my" African Rural University for Women (ARU) in Uganda with wonderful photos by Mary Knox Merrill. 

Here, Charlotte Mbaine, who just completed her third year at the University, is being thanked by one of the women in the Village where she did her "senior project"-- spending one month helping villagers articulate their Visions and begin to achieve them by discovering and using their own resources and talents. Check out the full story and video African Academy Empowers Youths.

Photo: Mary Knox Merrill, Christian Science Monitor

I'll be heading back to Uganda for a visit with these recent grads in early November. These young women went to ARU to become rural Community Transformation Specialists, rather than to head to Kampala to work in business. They are raising the economic productivity of each village they work with. We are seeking funding to provide them with paid internships, laptops, Internet access, cell phone minutes, and solar energy starter kits. They come to each village with knowledge of local agricultural techniques, brick-making, sanitation, road-building, and visionary leadership. They inspire the villagers to articulate their own visions, to pool their talents and resources and to achieve their visions. Read more about this innovative program for customer-led innovation.

Expect a Sea Change in Application and Information Architectures

Intersecting waves of technology are converging: Cloud computing, massive parallel processing, distributed file systems like Hadoop, dynamic provisioning to the cloud, embedded computing, open mobile platforms and APIs, and semantic publishing, to cite just a few. Patty’s Pioneers (technology architects) have been talking recently about how these phenomena will profoundly change the way we do business, use computers and address problems. We already have the ability to send huge volumes of information to the compute cloud to perform long-running, compute-intensive pattern detection. Google works that way. The genome project and many other scientific endeavors are enabled by this capability. You can solve BIG problems. You can offload bursty, compute-intensive applications. You can enable new capabilities like high-frequency trading.

Information, data types, and file formats are changing too. Scientific and technical data isn’t always organized in relational databases or spreadsheets. There are huge flat files, analog files, arrays, sequences, 3D models, and a myriad of data types and patterns that most business IT was never designed to address. We are sensing and detecting real-time changes in everything from weather to ocean pH. We perform chemical analyses, create molecular models, and find interrelationships among everything. We have massive amounts of genetic sequence data, with genome browsers, model organism databases, molecule- or process-specific databases.

Information that we want to share and have customers find and use is increasingly being tagged to accelerate semantic processing. Many of Patty’s Visionaries (customer-centric e-business leaders) have already embarked on large semantic tagging projects. They are convinced that, in their fields of endeavor, important concepts need to pop out of the sea of words and data so that these concepts can be linked to the appropriate behaviors and services. A company name came be linked to news, financial data, personnel information, products, patents, geography, partners, and customers. A chemical formula or a gene sequence can be linked, viewed, and acted upon with a staggering array of tools.

This next generation of distributed computing and pattern matching will unleash a new economy – with new opportunities for value creation.

As I contemplate the tremendous and revolutionary changes that will hit all of our businesses as a result of the new ways in which we can now detect patterns and process information, I am grateful for the magic of the human brain. Our intuition and emotions combine with our sense-making and pattern matching to make magical leaps across disciplines.

This next generation of computing architectures is upon us. It’s time to take the plunge. Say goodbye to Microsoft Word, say hello to N-dimensional arrays and patterns. Say goodbye to PDAs and laptops. Say hello to holograms you can gesture through.

MIT's Smart Mobility Project Featured at TEDx Boston

I enjoyed Ryan Chin's presentation about the MIT Smart Cities' mobility on demand project.  It's a compelling vision with some great green engineering (intelligent wheels, folding electric cars and one-way vehicle-sharing). An important next step: creation of the software required to manage the dynamic pricing required to incentivize people to return cars, scooters, and bikes to the locations with the most demand.  Here's a link to my report on the innovative work being done by this team under the visionary leadership of Prof. William J. Mitchell at MIT. Here's the great conceptual map that CollectiveNext created during Ryan's talk.

Image: Franco Vairani