Category: Globalization

Barnes and Noble Maker Faire

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date November 5, 2015

This weekend Barnes and Noble is sponsoring nationwide an in-store Maker Faire. The greater Milwaukee area will see Mayfair, Greenfield, and Bayshore stores participating. The Maker Faire event actually starts on Friday. If your children are in school then prep them for all the events on Saturday and Sunday. There is a Raspberry Pi event on Saturday at 2:00pm.
Invite your children to meet their local leaders of the Maker movement. These are local people like your neighbors changing the way we learn, design, create and build the future. “Makers” are DIYers with a tech twist.

Get ready for a tech-educational expo, your children will see products like 3D printers, drones, robots and programming. YMMV. Barnes and Noble will provide the materials. Let your children dream up and create their own product. The only limit is their imagination.

Tags change, community, culture, Design, Education, Innovation, Internet of Things, Maker, trends

BMW Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Innovation Network Technology

Introducing the AWS IoT cloud

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date October 11, 2015

The emerging IoT developer community received a much anticipated jolt of news when Amazon finally announced new enterprise services dedicated to the AWS IoT cloud launch at their 2015 re:Invent conference.
This new AWS IoT cloud service will permit web based interfaces to manage IoT events from various devices: sensors, wearables, drones, and of course mobile tools and apps around an established AWS ecosystem.

The AWS IoT cloud emerges as Amazon’s long term platform following the SalesForce Thunder platform announced last month. Both vendors look to establish key IoT cloud solutions in the corporate enterprise space. They join Cisco’s IoT, Microsoft’s Azure IoT, Oracle’s Movintracks along side GE’s energy launch of Current IoT. The race is now on to process millions of data events from light bulbs to dishwashers and cars over the MQTT protocol and process those messages in their respective clouds.

Amazon is leveraging 11 services around their IoT Cloud strategy to include existing AWS services: Kinesis, Redshift, S3, SNS, SQS, ML, DynamoDB and Lambda. A key investment to this strategy was the recent acquisition of 2lemetry, a IoT enterprise company tuned for transforming raw data from IoT devices onto their ThingFabric platform.

Tags amazon, analytics, AWS, AWS IoT Cloud, business, change, cisco, cloud computing, GE Current, Globalization, Innovation, IoT, kinesis, knowledge, lambda, microsoft, MQTT, Network, oracle, raspberry pi, re:Invent, redshift, tipping point, trends

Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest read: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date October 9, 2015

Tim Wu’s second book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is wonderful examination how American information empires were established and stifled innovation at the same time. This is my second book by Wu following his brilliant Who Controls the Internet.
Wu identifies long business cycles surrounding the birth of information systems. While they begin open over time they were consolidated and driven by the market to become closed.

We displays how they become open again following amazing innovations force a business change in order to survive in the new marketplace.

The Master Switch opens with the birth of the Bell AT&T telephone monopoly. This is a facinating story when held against the garage startups of Apple and Google.

There is an amazing look at how countries and cultures also view information empires differently. The case for Wu is the capitalist, independent market approach to radio vs the UK’s BBC dominated by the royal family.

The Master Switch reveals how four key markets actually hold government infrastructure: telecommunications, banking, energy and transportation. These four and their capitalist owners for generations established control over any citizen’s attempt at challenging their monopolies. The lesson Wu establishes is corporate control by closed technologies. Yet one cannot help but understand they magically protected the country from the devastating affects of revolution leading up to and more importantly the horrific aftermath of World War I that forever removed Paris as the hub for film entertainment.

Design Education Globalization Innovation OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest read: The Internet as Material Empowering the Next Phase of Connected Hardware Innovation

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date September 26, 2015

Ayah Bdeir wrote The Internet as Material Empowering the Next Phase of Connected Hardware Innovation as a way to introduce the iPad generation to digital legos. This is a resource that should be in every elementary school across America.
Lego turned the cement block into a toy that we have all played with growing up. Ayah is doing the same for the circuit board.

littleBits Electronics has launched a revolution in the open hardware movement that somehow remains in a ‘quite’ mode.

Her idea needs a bigger platform like for example the Gates Foundation to be catapulted across a national audience.

littleBits has a product solution for children that is the next step to the Raspberry Pi’s breadboard. Microsoft has really embraced Raspberry Pi and breadboards for their IoT projects.

Tags Ayah Bdeir, littleBits, The Internet as Material

Education Globalization Reading Vietnam War

Latest read: Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date September 22, 2015

The Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War by Ted Morgan is a simply stunning read. This book proves to be a perfect follow up to the CIA’s Archimedes Patti revealing Why Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross and Bernard Fall’s excellent Hell In A Very Small Place: The Siege Of Dien Bien Phu.

This review below includes a series of powerful quotes from the 700+ pages that should turn your stomach as French leaders permitted men to die just to save face for their failing empire. It is truly stunning across this book to see a morally bankrupt France fight to re-colonize Indochina.

Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War Morgan set the post-World War II stage inside Indochina for any reader to learn how France was able to maintain a rule over Indochina during the occupation by the Japanese Imperial coup in Vietnam. Valley of Death reveals how the CIA approached Ho Chi Minh before D-Day to rescue downed US Air Force pilots from Japanese troops throughout Indochina. Ho urgently cooperated and was rewarded with munitions and a US Army Deer Team sent by the CIA to Ho Chi Minh. Their mission? To train and lead Viet Minh troops against the Japanese. This includes raids on Japanese positions in northern Vietnam after both atomic bombs were dropped.

Again Valley of Death clearly reveals US and Viet Minh relations were bonded against Japanese control of Indochina during World War II.

Tags colonialism, Dien Bien Phu, Education, french union, indochina, rene cogny, ted morgan, US Army Deer Team, Valley of Death, Vietnam War