#MARKETS: "Jobs' Secret Formula at Apple Revealed"

Steve Jobs' death ends an era at Apple, but his legacy in innovation is overshadowed by his execution of solid business practices in a market filled with casualties. In particular, Apple's margins on its top-selling products lead the industry, but analysts question whether Jobs' vision and high-margin execution strategies can be maintained without him.



Steve Jobs’ genius may prove irreplaceable at Apple, according to IHS iSuppli, which recently polled the opinions of its analysts, asking the question: "Can Apple Stay on Top Without Jobs?"
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#ALGORITHMS: "Primer: BPM`s Role in Business Agility"

Purported to be the most important advancement in business management since the Industrial Revolution, business process management aims to turn enterprises into lean, agile, profit-making machines that simultaneously maximize customer satisfaction, product quality, delivery speed and time to market.


Business process management improves business agility by treating the processes of business as an enterprise asset in the design of lean, efficient organizations and information technology. By taking a holistic approach, rather than concentrating on specific aspects of the business process-like workflow, BPM applied to improve business agility has consolidated and optimized the best-of-the-best business and IT practices.
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#MATERIALS: "Erasable E-Paper Saves Trees, Cuts Costs"

Electronic paper that runs through thermal printers but can be electrically erased and rewritten aims to make tree paper obsolete. The paper makes use of flexible plastic that retains printed text without batteries or moving parts.


With all the movement to green technology, the day was bound to come when ordinary sheets of paper were replaced with electronic versions that run through printers but can be erased electrically and rewritten over and over. Made of a durable plastic, e-paper uses a similar technology to reflective e-readers, but in a more flexible form factor that does not require a battery and which can be instantly erased.



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#ALGORITHMS: "Cities Awarded $50 Million to Get Smart"

IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge offers budget-constrained cities relief with free software and consulting services aimed at simultaneously improving a city's economic outlook and its citizen-service delivery. These goals are to be achieved by making each city's operations more efficient with smarter management, planning and forecasting.


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#HEALTH: "Smart ePetri Dish Monitors 24/7"

Biological research may never be the same if California Institute of Technology succeeds in transforming the way cell cultures are monitored by using a cell phone camera as the platform for a "smart" Petri dish.


Today, the venerable Petri dish for culturing living cells is still in wide use even though it has not changed substantially since it was invented in the 19th century by Julius Richard Petri. Now Caltech wants to bring the Petri dish into the 21st century. By disassembling a smartphone and using its camera and display to monitor and illuminate, Caltech's "smart" Petri dish can monitor cell culture activity 24/7.



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#WIRELESS: "Smart Navigation Mates Cars to Signage"

Crowd-sourced consumer GPS navigation units are feeding a new array of smart transportation services, such as smart signage that recommends detour routes with specific times-to-destination.


Dashboard-mounted GPS units are almost as common as iPods, and now this network of location sensors is crowd-sourcing its resources by feeding into smart transportation systems that improve traffic management and planning.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Social Analytics Tracks Baseball Sentiments"

The Annenberg Social Sentiment Index--powered by IBM Social Analytics--is measuring fans' feelings from analytics that scan millions of baseball World Series tweets.


Retargeting analytics from pure business decision-support to tracking social sentiments in the more fun aspects of life--such as the ongoing baseball World Series--is the goal of a new social sentiment index created by the University of Southern California. The USC Annenberg Innovation Lab will present its baseball analytics project at the 2011 IBM Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum (this week in Las Vegas).
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#ALGORITHMS: "Android Beats Apple With Location-Based Security"

Location-based services usually mean trying to sell something to nearby consumers, but Virginia Tech has invented location-based security for Android-based smartphones or tablets. With a capability that Apple's iOS can't match, the approach allows secure information to be viewed when in a designated vicinity but automatically zeros it out when the user leaves the premises.

Virginia Tech has modified Google's Android operating system to provide a location-based service that maintains privacy by automatically wiping sensitive information from smartphones and tablets.
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#SECURITY: "Privacy and Trust On Trial in 2012"

Georgia Tech predicts that Internet privacy and trust will erode in 2012 due to a new era of sophisticated cyber-threats including search poisoning, peer-to-peer botnets, and rampant mobile-device breeches.



As cyber-threats become more sophisticated in 2012, users will become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation by malicious websites, stealth botnets, and wholesale commercial-use of stolen data caches, wresting away user confidence in the Internet.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Smart Systems to Top $1 Trillion"

Smart systems that combine microprocessor control, connectivity and a high-level operating system will grow from a $1 trillion market today to $2 trillion by 2015.



Microsoft Embedded argues that all the connected devices today are providing unprecedented opportunities for fine-grain realtime business analytics.

Smart systems are proliferating in nearly all fields. And their use covers quite a broad range, including smart household appliances, smartphone navigation apps, smart security apps that identify suspicious activity, and supercomputers that use artificial intelligence to give expert medical or legal advice.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Smart Systems Standardized by Feds"

Standardizing smart systems is a newly announced goal of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal agency that has standardized everything from the yardstick to the atomic clock.






A $1 million award to the Institute for Systems Research will team University of Maryland at College Park researchers with scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in a three-year program to create standards, testing methods and measurement tools to consistently rank the performance of smart systems.
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#ENERGY: "Artificial Leaf Turns Water Into Fuel"

As free as a water lily floating on a lake, solar-panels coated with a new catalytic material can harvest hydrogen fuel from ordinary water with no wires attached.



Many energy researchers have proposed using solar cells to generate electricity for electrolysis that splits water into its component parts--hydrogen and oxygen--which can then be used to power fuel cells. However, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has combined all those functions into a single free-standing unit, which generates fuel whenever it is submerged in water illuminated by the sun.
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#TABLET: "Enterprises Get Ruggedized Secure Tablet"

Tablets used in the enterprise require strong security and other features that many consumer models simply do not offer. One manufacturer is trying to address the enterprise market with the introduction of a bullet-proof professional's tablet.



Touted as the world's first enterprise tablet, the Motorola ET1 is the first of a family of touch screen, ruggedized computers that will be sold to companies wishing to modernize their workforce without compromising on durability, configurability and branding.
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#3D: "Perfecting 3-D Microchips"

YOU’VE HEARD THE HYPE: The foundation of semiconductor fabrication will be transformed over the next few years as multistory structures rise up from dice that today are planar. After almost a decade of major semiconductor engineering efforts worldwide aimed at making the structures manufacturable, three-dimensional ICs are poised for commercialization starting next year—several years behind schedule.


Chip makers have spent the past several years perfecting the through-silicon vias that will interconnect 3-D ICs. Now that TSVs have been honed for 2-D tasks, such as transferring data from the front side of a planar chip to bumps on the flip side, the stage is set for 3-D ICs using stacked dice.
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#MATERIALS: "Make Waves, Not Electricity, to Save Power"

Today the crystalline structures in microchips conduct electricity that wastes power by generating heat from friction as the electrons burrow through semiconductors to perform computations. Charge-density waves, on the other hand, burn less power by encoding data on modulations in the semiconductor's crystalline lattice.


Researchers at the University of California at Riverside have received a $1.5 million grant to encode data as charge-density waves instead of electrical current, thereby cutting the power requirements for digital electronic devices.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Free Business Intelligence From SaaS"

A popular platform-as-a-service (PaaS) business intelligence provider now offers a free software-as-a-service (SaaS) version for personal use. Called Cloud Personal, the SaaS lets individual users access MicroStrategy's business analytics suite before committing their company to its PaaS.


Business intelligence helps make sense of the glut of information streaming into enterprises, providing visualizations that help executives pinpoint relevant trends. MicroStrategy's platform as a service (PaaS) provides these services to its enterprise customers, but a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) version called Cloud Personal gives individual users free access to the company's business analytics.
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#WIRELESS: "Enterprise tablet ready for business"

Touchscreen tablets for the enterprise were unveiled by Motorola Solutions Inc., maker of push-to-talk radios and ruggedized wireless terminals for enterprises as diverse as first responders, warehouse managers and point-of-sale clerks.


The new Enterprise Tablet (ET1) joins a family of wireless terminals that allow fire-fighters to see around corners, buyers to visualize their entire supply chain, and salesmen to assess their inventory, display product features, and make sales by scanning barcodes and credit cards.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Cloud Security Hardened with Hardware"

There's a new sheriff guaranteeing security to cloud users with a footprint so small that malware has no place to hide from it. Called the Strongly Isolated Computing Environment by its IBM and North Carolina State inventors, SICE uses the hardware on x86 multi-core processors to isolate secure cloud resources.






Professor Peng Ning, of the computer science department of the engineering school at North Carolina State University wrote 300 lines of code as all that needs to be trusted in order to ensure security.

Cloud security has special needs, especially public clouds where your data may be stored and processed on the same servers as your competitors. However, by repurposing the System Management Mode (SMM) hardware on x86 multi-core processors, IBM and North Carolina State University claim that secure isolated partitions can be easily managed, results that will be presented at this month's ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (Oct. 17-21, 2011, Chicago, Ill.)
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#MEDICAL: "iPhone Microscope Diagnoses Disease"

Researchers recently demonstrated how easy it could be to remotely diagnose disease anywhere in the world by merely snapping a close-up lens onto your iPhone and photographing a sample of blood.






Pollen (left) and plant stems (middle, right) are shown from an expensive microscope (top) and with an inexpensive add-on lens for an iPhone (bottom). (Source: University of California, Davis)

Medical and scientific measurements of all types are done with optical microscopes, which snap photos of blood samples that are then evaluated by screening technicians who refer suspect images to full-fledged doctors.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Autism Traits Prove Valuable for Software Testing"

Smarter software-debugging services are being performed by savants where the intense focus and superlative technical abilities of high-functioning autism shine.



Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that preserves linguistic skills and sometime features exceptional cognitive development, turns out to be a boon to tedious, time-consuming software-debugging tasks, according to Aspiritech NFP.
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