Innovation Watch Newsletter - Issue 10.

14 - July 2, 2011

ISSN: 1712-9834

Selected news items from postings to Innovation Watch in the last two weeks... Dutch scientists develop test tube hamburger from stem cells... pigs could grow human organs for transplant... flying robots proposed to monitor electric utility infrastructure... Nevada passes a law to allow self-driving cars... India loses its outsourcing advantage as salaries rise... company offers a bounty to crowdsource challenges to patents held by litigator Lodsys... anti-virus pioneer says the Internet will soon become a war zone... do-it-yourself biology is raising concerns... Israel builds a new Silicon Valley... Brazilians buy Miami condos at bargain prices... chocolate maker Mars predicts a global cocoa shortage by 2020... using iron fertilization to engineer climate will lead to major changes in deep-sea ecosystems... hundreds of millions of people are moving to cities in Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America... Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos builds a 10,000year clock... More great resources ... Stephen Bungay's new book, The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps Between Plans, Actions and Results... a link to the Collaborative Consumption website... the audio clip of a Science Friday interview with Daniel H. Wilson, author or Robopocalypse... a post by Kyle Munkkitrick on the AI Singularity debate... David Forrest Innovation Watch

David Forrest advises organizations on emerging trends, and helps to develop strategies for a radically different future

SCIENCE

Top Stories: Coming Soon, the Test-Tube Burger: Lab-Grown Meat 'Needed to Feed the World' (Daily Mail) - The first 'test-tube' hamburger is only a year away, scientists claim. They believe the product, beef mince grown from stem cells, could pave the way for eating meat without animals being slaughtered. The Dutch scientists predict that over the next few decades the world's population will increase so quickly that there will not be enough livestock to feed everyone. New Study Reveals Pigs Could Grow Human Organs (Medical Xpress) - At the annual European Society of Human Genetics conference, a group of researchers presented their newly discovered technique that may soon enable pigs to grow human organs for transplant. Using mice and rats the researchers injected rat's stem cells into mice which had been genetically altered so they were unable to produce their own organs. The mice instead grew rat organs.

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TECHNOLOGY
Top Stories: Strong Grid: Are Radical Robotics the Secret Ingredient? (Forbes) - Delivering low-cost, high-reliability robotics to the electric utility industry is the principal focus of new research projects launched at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an industry organization based in Palo Alto, CA. EPRI is developing flying robots to perform aerial assessments of infrastructure assets over wide scales, which could improve asset management, reduce restoration times and enhance recovery efforts. Google Gets Driverless Car Law Passed in Nevada (PhysOrg) The Nevada state legislature has just passed has just passed a bill, Assembly Bill No. 511, that does two things. First, the law allows the Nevada Department of Transportation to create rules and regulations regarding the use of self-driving cars, so that they can be used legally on the road. The second part of the law requires the Nevada state Department of Transportation to designate areas in which these vehicles can be tested. The cars in question use a wide array of sensor, GPS technology and a little but of help from an artificial intelligence program to function. Google already has a fleet of these vehicles active in the state of California.

BUSINESS
Top Stories: Is Outsourcing Outdated in India? (Asian Correspondent) American companies started looking at India as a destination

because of its cost-effectiveness and large English-speaking population. The cost effectiveness is eroding as Indian employees are demanding better wages. Growing at 10% per annum, some of the Indian salaries are comparable to the global standards. There might be a state of equilibrium where getting a job done might cost the same in India and the US. That is at least few years away. Until then the hunt for the next cost-effective destination is on. China, the Philippines and Vietnam are the immediate choices people are raving about. Can Indians talk of their jobs being stolen by Vietnamese? Scoop: Bounty Set for Invalidating Lodsys Patents (CNET) Lodsys, a group that's targeted companies big and small for infringing on its patents, is now in the crosshairs of a company offering to pay a bounty for research that seeks to invalidate those patents. Article One Partners, a business that crowdsources intellectual property (IP) research, has launched three new studies into patents held by Lodsys. Each offers a reward to the party that finds prior art, or examples of pre-existing technologies or other IP that could be used as evidence to invalidate one or more of Lodsys' patents.

SOCIETY
Top Stories: Anti-Virus Pioneer Evgeny Kaspersky: 'I Fear the Net Will Soon Become a War Zone' (Spiegel) Evgeny Kaspersky is one of Russia's top Internet virus hunters and IT entrepreneurs. In a SPIEGEL interview, he discusses a raft of recent hacker attacks on multinationals, the "total professionals" behind the Stuxnet virus and his fear of both personal and widespread cyber violence. Should Synthetic Biology Be Policed? (Forbes) - What scares many people about the emerging field of synthetic biology is the lack of official safeguards. The Do-It-Yourself movement is taking off, with blogs and user groups of grad students and high school students publicly sharing information about how to home-brew microbes. The International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) draws hundreds of experiments made from basic biology toolkits from undergraduates all over the world.

GLOBAL POLITICS
Top Stories: Israeli innovators build new 'Silicon Valley' (PhysOrg) - With a concentration of start-ups just behind that of Silicon Valley and an impressive pool of engineers, Israel is becoming the new standard for high-tech, with a unique business model.

From Microsoft to Intel through Google, IBM and Philips, almost all the giants of the Internet and technology have set up important research and development centres in Israel, spawning products and systems used worldwide. Brazilians Buy Miami Condos at Bargain Prices as Real Gains 45% (Businessweek) - As many as half of the downtown Miami condos that have been sold to foreigners for more than $500,000 since January were purchased by Brazilians, said Craig Studnicky, president of International Sales Group LLC, an Aventura, Florida, property-marketing firm. Buyers from Brazil also accounted for about half of sales of more than $1 million in Miami Beach. Demand from Brazilians is "growing geometrically," he said. "Next year, it's clearly going to be the dominating force." The Brazilian real's 45 percent increase against the dollar from the end of 2008 through yesterday is the best performance among 25 emergingmarket currencies tracked by Bloomberg.

ENVIRONMENT
Top Stories: Cocoa Shortage by 2020 Unless Industry Acts Now, Warns Mars (Food Navigator) - Confectionery giant Mars predicts a major cocoa shortage by 2020 and reveals harmonization of global cocoa certification programmes to ensure meaningful income hikes for farmers is one of its sustainable cocoa project goals. The chocolate company warns that "unless more is done to promote sustainability," the industry as a whole can expect a shortfall of more than one million tonnes of cocoa in just nine years. Iron Fertilisation Would 'Significantly' Change Deep-Sea Ecosystems (PhysOrg) - Adding iron to the oceans in an effort to curb growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere would lead to 'significant changes' in deepsea ecosystems, the latest study suggests. The study, led by UK researchers, found a big difference in the types and numbers of species living on the sea floor under a naturally iron-rich region of the Southern Ocean compared with a region free of iron. The findings bring us a step closer to understanding the unintended consequences of this type of climate 'fix.'

THE FUTURE
Top Stories: World's Peasants are Moving to the Cities in Greater Numbers (The Record) - It is the little-noticed force behind the revolutions in the Arab world, the new protests in China and the economic booms in India, Turkey and South America: The

largest population shift in human history, currently at its peak, is probably the most significant, and misunderstood, global event of our time. In Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, hundreds of millions of people are rapidly moving from rural areas, where they practiced peasant agriculture, to cities -- a shift that makes itself felt in the rough-and-tumble transitional neighbourhoods where rural migrants first land, both in their own countries and in other nations where they make up the largest group of immigrants. Amazon.com Founder to Make 10,000 Year Clock (PhysOrg) Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon.com has embarked on an interesting and unique project that, if all goes well, will last the test of time, a whole lot of time. He is looking to create a clock that is able to run for 10,000 years. If, at first, this sounds like a bit of a strange project you have to understand why Mr. Bezos wants to make a giant clock that will keep time long after his great-great-grandchildren are dead and gone and Amazon.com is less than a faint memory in the collective of the web.

Just in from the publisher...

The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps Between Plans, Actions and Results
by Stephen Bungay
Read more...

A Web Resource... Collaborative Consumption - Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before. There are thousands of examples of Collaborative Consumption across sectors from peer-to-peer travel, to social lending to co-working to service networking.

Multimedia... Daniel H. Wilson: Author of 'Robopocalypse' on the Future of Robotics (Science Friday) -- MP3 -- In the summer science fiction book, Robopocalypse, civilization's technology develops a mind of its own and sets out to destroy humanity. Author Daniel H. Wilson, who has a Ph.D. in robotics, talks about why technology can be frightening, and how to avert the robot apocalypse. (17m 44s) [Science Friday]

The Blogosphere... The AI Singularity is Dead; Long Live the Cybernetic Singularity (Discover) - Kyle Munkkitrick "The nerd echo chamber is reverberating this week with the furious debate over Charlie Stross' doubts about the possibility of an artificial 'humanlevel intelligence' explosion -- also known as the Singularity. As currently defined, the Singularity will be an event in the future in which artificial intelligence reaches human level intelligence. At that point, the AI (i.e. AI n) will reflexively begin to improve itself and build AI's more intelligent than itself (i.e. AI n+1) which will result in an exponential explosion of intelligence towards near deity levels of super-intelligent AI. After reading over the debates,

I've come to a conclusion that both sides miss a critical element of the Singularity discussion: the human beings. Putting people back into the picture allows for a vision of the Singularity that simultaneously addresses several philosophical quandaries. To get there, however, we must first re-trace the steps of the current debate."

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