Friday, June 27, 2008

Statistics on Opium Use


(Please click the picture to enlarge)

Here are some interesting statistics on the use of Opium across the world. I think this image is a poor representation of the graph on top of it though. Also, the only country to use more than it did a century ago is America.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Flogos - Floating Advertising & Messaging


Yet another entrepreneur from the Research Triangle Park, North Carolina area is receiving global recognition. Brian Glover - a dentist and part-time inventor developed Flogos - a machine that allows creation of four foot, cloud-like floating logos, designs, ads, etc.

The construction of a Flogo is non-toxic and sudsy that bursts like bubbles when they come in contact with harder surfaces.

See an article here on the pervasive use of Flogos. You can see details on the company with a demo here.

This is yet another example of innovation leaping boundaries to fulfill needs in different industries as I previously discussed here.

The Lemelson-MIT Award - Dr. Joseph DeSimone

I was happy to discover today that a local (to Research Triangle Park, North Carolina where I live) Dr. Joseph DeSimone - an entrepreneur and with academic appointments at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, won The Lemelson-MIT Award.

To see details on Dr. DiSimone's background and reasons for receiving this prestigious award, click here.

Dr. DeSimone is the founder of Liquidia Technologies. He calls his venture "uniquely American" and further states:

"In Europe, a scientist gets one chance. If it doesn't work out, you're done. In America, we get second, third and fourth chances."

This is the heart of an innovation eco-system, to fail repeatedly to create breakthroughs.

Dubai - Rotating Tower


Everytime I am in Dubai, it looks like a different city due to its continuous growth. Over time large cities tend to take on an aura... yet, this may be the first time in the history of mega-cities that the view of the skyline of a city will continue to morph, not due to its growth but due to "dynamic architecture".

See here the video of the world's first 80 story rotating tower to be built by Florentine architect Dr. David Fisher in Dubai. You can see Dr. Fisher's dynamic architecture details here. Dubai also plans to become an exporter of the pre-fabricated rotating towers to the rest of the world.

See more videoes on YouTube.com of Dubai's "dynamic architecture" here.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Memory of the Future - Self Commoditization

With this blog I plan to begin a series of articles brought to realization through actual application and further refined through evolution in my life. The blog is intended to be abstract. The hope is to disrupt the basic brain patterns for evaluating information and causing the deeper cognitive layers to emerge that have been hidden away due to the mediocrity that must pervade our lives.

Ladies and gentlemen, any merit based, tremendously successful individual or company, can be considered to have understood the concept of good to great as Jim Collins discusses in "Good to Great".

Now, what comes after the "greatness" for an individual or a company that is mostly focused on revenue generation? It can be a goal of larger delta between existing and future gross profits, create or capture the next breakthrough, sometimes short term outcomes i.e. quarter to quarter, etc.

To begin to look beyond greatness that all of us feel entitled to yet few conceive and achieve, let each one of us turn around through our individual history, step back and look through our successes - pick up one that we feel great about (and let us say if ego allows) that we can brag about. Now if a certain level of humility combined with confidence pervades, we ought to instantly come up with one or two things we wish we could have done to turn our great success into excellence.

“This” future memory… the specific realization that every great triumph has a delta to a new level is what I have come to call “Memory of the Future” (MOT-F) or the comprehension that in our conquests we leave so much more to be realized, or made conscious – yet, always after the fact. For individuals and organizations who give in and close the curtain to the window of excellence, it is called concensus building or 80 for 20. While for the ones who dare to peek it is called a fantastic learning (whether failure or success) that causes cognitive dissonance, the disruption that leads to cladogenesis in innovation, etc.

Today, our focus should be to grasp these fissures that keep us from our MOT-F… fill them and achieve the next level that exists far beyond greatness. Why should we strive? Simply because if we do not then there will be someone faster than us and more knowledgeable than us some where in the world will capture the breakthroughs… World Flatteners cannot afford such risks… We must preempt commoditization.

I declare “self commoditization” a practice we must adopt and development of ourselves into the next generation product that is the need of the World as our “Memory of The Future”. I call upon the merit based knowledge workers to adopt the same.

I must credit the ignition of the above thought to Mr. Steven Levin and Dr. Adam Malofsky who are my business partners in our venture – Acara Global. I plan to discuss Acara in detail in the near future.

In the next few blogs I will share some ideas on how Memory of The Future can be applied to business innovation.