eTextbooks - Who's working on what

Interesting recap of eTextbook players and directions in the Sri Lankan Sunday Times. Much more going on in this area than meets the eye.

Industries experiencing disruptive change

Locating disruptive change is a big deal when investing for growth; it's become a catch-phrase for investors and a holy grail of sorts for the shrewd. From my perspective, I see a number of industries undergoing disruptive change and with the spread of technology, there will be others, too.

Some to watch right now:

• Learning - What it means to get an education, how it happens, availability to learning resources, and cost are all factors ramping up disruptive change in the learning industry. MOOCs (massively open on-line courses) are gaining traction (Coursera, Khan Academy, and Udacity). Helping students connect to colleges, learning resources, experiences, and each other is another area to watch (Chegg, AfterCollege, Zinch, Facebook, etc). Publishers and distribution networks (No Starch Press, Packt Publishers, O'Reilly, Amazon, Apple, etc) are experiencing and injecting change, too.
• Ticketing and Entertainment - the high cost tickets and events is another area ripe for change; new players such as Brown Paper Tickets are taking a fresh approach, which will inject change in this marketplace.
• Nanotechnology and Materials - There are so many emerging possibilities that it's hard to appreciate them all. The implications to the medical field (diagnostics, treatments, prostheses, augmentation) and industrial fields (electronics, batteries, sensors, solenoids, monitoring devices, 3D printing) are staggering, not to mention what will happen as small amounts of intelligence get added, too; enabling devices to report, confer, and decide.
• Food production, distribution, and nutrition - Initiatives to buy and eat locally (farm to fork), to take control of preparation, to use fresh and simple ingredients, etc are all introducing positive changes. New styles of farming (smaller scale, organic, specialized, and strategic) are making a difference, too. Some examples: Farm Fresh to You, Polyface Farms, Full Circle, Jacobs / Del Cabo, local farmer's markets, etc.
• Software Development and Computing - How it happens and the tools to make it efficient, productive, inherently secure, and sustainable continues to evolve. The Agile Manifesto started a revolution that's still in progress, as it requires dedicating significant resources (an organization must maintain a continuous integration / delivery process, implying significant computing and staff resources, although I suspect virtual machines and cloud computing are lowering cost barriers, too). The tooling now available to software developers is amazing (Eclipse and other IDEs, build management, defect tracking and database systems, testing frameworks, native language presentation and translation technologies, and multi-platform support). Where I think growth is needed is seamless support for multiple displays (web, mobile, and tablet) and efficient and affordable team management tools.

Netflix rates ISPs for their streaming speeds

Netflix now provides on-line info about how well ISPs perform with streaming media - organized by country, check it out.

Java 7 vulnerability

Here's the U.S. DHS advisory concerning the Java 7 security issue, along with the steps to take to address it. Interestingly, this basic information has been missing from most of the media reporting I've seen.

On-line privacy - what's left of it

Here's an interesting article on how determine which sites you visit are harvesting your Facebook info and, if that concerns you, some things you can do about it.

TANMS - research with serious potential

Check out this short UCLA Engineering article highlighting research into TANMS technology - pretty amazing stuff!

I'll take some crackers with my gluon soup, please!

We live in amazing times! If you think that's an overly optimistic statement, then check out this fun list of recent discoveries.

Amazing stuff: The quantum frontier

Congrats to the team at the CERN LHC on observing a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson postulate. What a breakthrough, once this discovery is validated and proves to be repeatable. Quantum fireworks on July 4th, WOW!

OLEDs - make way for LCDs!

A really interesting article about how Quantum Dot technology stands to revolutionize LCD capabilities, likely at the expense of OLEDs, which as discussed earlier probably won't scale economically anyway. So this is good news!

Fascinating Digital Media Ecoscapes

I recently saw the display advertising map from Luma Partners and was dumbfounded by what I already knew was a complex environment.

Here's a link to the complete set, which is even more mind boggling.

And you thought a display advertising budget was your biggest headache!