Blueseed Startups

When startup Blueseed floated the idea to create a seaborne startup community in international waters off the coast of northern California, we were intrigued. We weren’t the only ones. A new report released by the company says it has 133 tech startups on board to move their operations offshore when the ship launches next year.

The idea here is to create a startup-only environment in international waters--a place that requires no visa to visit or work--that will draw the best technology minds and ideas from around the world. Daily ferries will move people between Blueseed’s floating base and venture-capital-rich Silicon Valley, just a dozen miles away. That means Blueseed could accept daily commuters, but that startups are also able to permanently set up shop in the floating city, housing employees there as well.

The startup-centric culture seems to be a big draw, and upstart technology ventures are lining up to shell out the roughly $1,600 per month it costs for a single occupancy living space (this includes workspace as well). More well-endowed residents can get a top-tier single occupancy cabin for twice that. Blueseed’s floating startup city is slated for launch by third quarter of 2013.

Only You Can Control It!

"The last of the human freedoms:

to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

- Viktor Frankl

Sunday Silliness - Mediocrity :o)

Fashion Police Not Needed

Approximately a year after introducing a textile recycling program in New York City, supporters have pronounced it a grand success.

Last May, the city formed a partnership with Housing Works, a group that helps homeless people who are H.I.V.-positive, to pick up donated clothing at apartment buildings in one of the first large-scale consumer textile recycling programs in the country. The goal is to capture most of the 200,000 tons of apparel  and other textiles that New Yorkers throw away each year but that could be reused instead and there-by reduce the city’s garbage disposal costs.

At a City Council hearing on Friday, Department of Sanitation officials reported that over 50 tons of textiles were donated in the first six months of the program. That amount is expected to rise to more than 300 tons for the second half of the first year.

While about 130 buildings are now taking part, the Department of Sanitation is still processing requests and more than 1,000 inquiries. Donations are tax-deductible, and the program, called Re-fashioNYC, is paying for itself through sales of donated items.

Almost every clothing item, including shoes and accessories like handbags and belts, can be recycled. The Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association, a trade group, emphasizes that materials like stained or ripped clothing, buttons and zippers can be processed and reborn as wiping cloths, carpet padding and other products.

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Do You Collaborate?

How do you develop a team to work to common goals?

1) Listen to the right voices. Some leaders look at how to squeeze a new role into the team. The best ones turn the old logic on its head and start with the capabilities that will drive the strategy forward to decide the roles that should on the top team. 

2) Reset the rules of the game. Executives are rational people and act according to written and unwritten expectations. The best make it clear that members of the top team have a shared accountability for the enterprise, not just their own areas. They reinforce this by ensuring that bonus payments reflect overall company performance, not just silo performance.

3) Stop being the "Decider in Chief." Executives often move quickly up the corporate ladder because they get things done. They make decisions and get them implemented. Then they get promoted and stick with the model that got them there — and they get overwhelmed.

4) Be prepared to declare "amnesty for the past." When a company is facing a need to fundamentally change the direction of the company or how it operates, previous approaches may have made sense until now, but it's time to move forward given the need to change (e.g., to increase performance, integrate an acquired company, divest a company). 

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Future Jet

BOX WING JET, LOCKHEED MARTIN

Target Date: 2025

Passenger jets consume a lot of fuel. A Boeing 747 burns five gallons of it every nautical mile, and as the price of that fuel rises, so do fares. Lockheed Martin engineers developed their Box Wing concept to find new ways to reduce fuel burn without abandoning the basic shape of current aircraft. Adapting the lightweight materials found in the F-22 and F-35 fighter jets, they designed a looped-wing configuration that would increase the lift-to-drag ratio by 16 percent, making it possible to fly farther using less fuel while still fitting into airport gates.

They also ditched conventional turbofan engines in favor of two ultrahigh-bypass turbofan engines. Like all turbofans, they generate thrust by pulling air through a fan on the front of the engine and by burning a fuel-air mixture in the engine’s core. With fans 40 percent wider than those used now, the Box Wing’s engines bypass the core at several times the rate of current engines. At subsonic speeds, this arrangement improves efficiency by 22 percent. Add to that the fuel-saving boost of the box-wing configuration, and the plane is 50 percent more efficient than the average airliner. The additional wing lift also lets pilots make steeper descents over populated areas while running the engines at lower power. Those changes could reduce noise by 35 decibels and shorten approaches by up to 50 percent.—Andrew Rosenblum

Feel The Power

Tidal power is one of the renewable energy sources that you hear the least about even though its potential for generating electricity is vast.

The Maine Tidal Energy Project started construction of the bottom support frame for Ocean Renewable Power Company's TidGen turbine generator system in March. The project's first phase will see five of those generators deployed in the Gulf of Maine with a capacity of 900 kW. That phase should be online by October.

The complete project will reach a capacity of 4 MW and already has 20-year power purchase agreements with Bangor Hydro, CMP and Maine Public Service.

The TidGen system consists of slowly rotating foils that power a permanent magnet generator at its center. It is gearless and made from composite materials that won't corrode underwater.

A Boy's Dream Come True!

Arturo Valdenegro, 12-year-old Tucson resident, made paper aviators everywhere look minuscule by comparison last week. In the skies over the Sonora desert in Arizona, the Pima Air & Space Museum launched the biggest paper airplane ever constructed-a paper airplane based on Valdenegro’s design--into the sky, accelerating it to speeds topping 100 miles per hour before it came crashing down (as paper airplanes do).

The plane, aptly named Arturo’s Desert Eagle, weighed 800 pounds and stretched 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan. The museum constructed it out of falcon board, a kind of corrugated cardboard, as part of its Giant Paper Airplane Project, the goal of which is to generate interest in aviation and engineering among young people.

Arturo designed and folded his plane for the competition, winning top honors in a fly-off sponsored by the Pima museum. But for last week’s flight, his design was adopted and constructed by Art Thompson, one of the designers of the B-2 stealth bomber.

The idea was initially to tow Arturo’s Desert Eagle up to roughly 5,000 feet and let it fly, but the pilot of the Sikorsky S58T helicopter that was doing the towing decided that the wind conditions wouldn’t allow it. The tether was cut at about 2,700 feet, which was still plenty high to allow the giant paper plane to glide for about ten seconds, hitting speeds of 100 miles per hour before tail stress brought it crashing to the ground. For his part, Valdenegro told the museum that he’s now convinced that a career in engineering is the right move for him when he gets older. 

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Currents

This NASA animation--titled “Perpetual Ocean”, was compiled from data produced by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Earth, Phase II (ECCO2 for short), the animation is a high-res model of global ocean and sea ice movements from June 2005 through December 2007. And it’s strangely therapeutic to watch.

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Sunday Silliness - Maturity :o)