Where are the world's most innovative companies and what do they do?
Patents ... quality vs. quantitity
The Economist discusses a possible successor to what has become an everyday necessity.
"AMONG the many new gadgets unveiled at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was a pair of smartphones able to exchange data using light. These phones, as yet only prototypes from Casio, a Japanese firm, transmit digital signals by varying the intensity of the light given off from their screens. The flickering is so slight that it is imperceptible to the human eye, but the camera on another phone can detect it at a distance of up to ten metres. In an age of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, flashing lights might seem like going back to sending messages with an Aldis lamp. In fact, they are the beginning of a fast and cheap wireless-communication system that some have labelled Li-Fi."
http://www.economist.com/node/21543470
The Economist wisely points out that:
"Merely counting pennies is no way to measure national prowess. Research spending is an input, not an output."
However, they do not propose an alternative metric.
It is also interesting to hear that:
"One reason why spending in Asia has risen is that American firms nearly doubled their R&D investments there in the decade to 2008, to $7.5 billion. GE recently announced a $500m expansion of its R&D facilities in China."
The Economist tracks the fall of Kodak from an industrial giant to a company on the verge of bankruptcy.
Another Economist article on how 3D printing could potentially revolutionize manufacturing. No longer would we need manufacturing plants to make small numbers of products. Could be a huge boon to innovators and small scale entrepreneurs. Potentially bad for freight companies like FedEx and UPS.http://www.economist.com/node/18114221?story_id=18114221&fsrc=rss
This graph from The Economist demonstrates how the once seemingly invincible Nokia has been knocked off its mobile phone perch by Steve Jobs' iPhone. What is perhaps most surprising is how this has ocured without much of a loss in actual market share.
Whole article here:
Gulliver, The Economist's business travel blog, presents The Kindle Conundrum: another downside to e-books...
"It is the Kindle conundrum that really drives me dilly. My Kindle poses no greater danger to the flight while switched on than does the phone that I may have forgotten to switch off. Nor does reading it put me at any greater risk of failing to heed a "brace" command than would the reading of a gripping book. Yet the book is allowed while the Kindle is banned because it is an electronic device. And little will likely be done to solve the Kindle conundrum because the people affected are disempowered when it comes to making the rules, while the rulemakers have little incentive to make them less annoying. For no good reason, it seems as though the ban will persist for years."
- sezflom