Intriguing innovative ideas from the annual NY Times “Year in Ideas”:

• wearable air bags (prevent injuries for elderly; also potential for motorcyclists)
• biomechanical energy harvester (strap it on your knee; converts your kinetic energy to power your cellphone or for other uses )
• Brickley engine (novel design dramatically reduces friction, increases fuel efficiency)
• cloth car (body made from a polyurethane-coated Lycra fabric; strong, durable, waterproof–inexpensive and energy efficient plus the car can change shape in response to driving conditions)

www.NY Times Year in Ideas.com

For some fun summertime reading check out IDC’s white paper on the “Digital Universe” (http://www.emc.com/digital_universe). This vendor-sponsored study boldly estimates and forecasts what IDC calls “The Digital Universe” — essentially the total quantity of digital information created, captured and replicated worldwide. It is measured in exabytes (one exabyte= 1 billion gigabytes) and is forecast to grow rapidly, reaching 1,800 exabytes by 2011.The study notes that

The tools are in place–from Web 2.0 technologies and terabyte drives to unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web–to tame the digital universe and turn information growth into economic growth.

illumin8 is a good example of a tool designed exactly for this purpose: converting masses of raw content into business value. This is a critical task for those of us in the information industry and it’s not an easy one. As IDC notes: “searching for meaning in the content of unstructured data….is the rocket science of the digital universe”. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.