Yesterday, the Mass Technology Leadership Council — which represents a wide range of Massachusetts industries, including energy, robotics, software, life sciences and healthcare — held its annual meeting at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge. The event featured a keynote on the Council's vision for 2012, a comparative research report from the Mass Technology Collaborative, a state of the US economy from The Parthenon Group's Chief Economist Roger Brinner, and a fireside chat, featuring a colorful and candid interview with Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell by Fast Company founder Bill Taylor.

One of the themes to come out of the MassTLC annual meeting was the idea that, in order to drive innovation in the Boston area, we should encourage risk taking in the funding of new companies. While not all new companies will survive infancy, the odds are in our favor that one of the wild business ideas of today will not only survive, but thrive in a spectacular fashion. After all, it's no secret that Facebook began here, but was unable to put down roots. Today, Facebook is a dominating worldwide presence, but at the beginning, it needed nurturing and support. Making seed funding available to early stage companies is paramount to the Boston region accelerating as a hub of innovation.

Today Apple revealed the third generation iPad with its Retina screen, bringing the most powerful mobile visual display to market with a whopping 326 ppi in its 9.7 inch space. Print resolutions typically range from 300 - 1800 dpi, which means that Apple has effectively brought mobile computing into that same realm, a significant step to say the least. There's no doubt that the e-reader experience on the iPad will be greatly enhanced, be it for books, magazines, or even PDF documents. And with a starting price point of $499 for its bare bones model, it's conceivable that the other tablet competition and dedicated e-reading devices like the Kindle and Nook could soon be in for a bumpy ride.

I don't think there's any question that the creative class jobs that drive our innovation economy — designers, engineers, scientists, architects, entrepreneurs, writers, etc. — are all positions that require constant learning and evolution. In a larger sense, our economy, the companies that survive and thrive, the types of jobs in demand, and the skill sets required to successfully compete for these positions, are changing at a rate faster than we ever could imagine.

The Fast Company article, "This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers of the New (and Chaotic) Frontier of Business", has an interesting take on this phenomenon, framing the current economic environment as a system caught in the throes of creative destruction, brought on by rapid technological innovation and radical business model changes. A related article, "The Four Year Career", examines the imminent demise of the long duration job and the well defined career path.

In the new digital world, we are the sum of our trackable behavior. The web sites we read, the items we share, the products we buy, are all elements that contribute to our digital personas. Online marketers desperately want to collect our behavioral data so they can analyze our history, better target their offers, and maybe even predict our next moves. But the question remains, do we want them to have access? Do we trust their intentions? And, more importantly, if we don't, can we stop them from peering over our shoulders as we navigate our digital lives?

At Involution Studios Boston, we've been lucky enough to design crazy, brain-bending, exciting software that changes the way humans work and play. Since 2004, we've been creating software for some of the biggest and best companies, not to mention over 100 different start-ups in various industries. Our alumni have worked for companies like Apple, Facebook, Adobe and IDEO. And we're fortunate to work on important, complex problems in practice areas like healthcare, security, information technology, and engineering.

Here’s what we’re reading online, this week at Involution, on design, tech, and the digital life, in our links round up.

The Internet of Things Will Rise in Boston
With the advent of the mobile revolution, we're now living connected lives, where our day-to-day activities are closely tied to the digital products and services that we carry with us everywhere on our smart phones. The future vision of smart devices networked via an Internet of Things takes this connectedness one step further, to a place where not only our phones, but our cars, our homes, the appliances within them, and any number of other objects can communicate with each other and us. This connected vision may be closer to reality than we realize.

The Mass Technology Leadership Council held its annual Big Data Summit yesterday at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, MA. The sold out event was attended by a broad cross-section of the Boston tech community with engineers, designers, venture capitalists and business managers all coming together to discuss the future of Big Data in the Bay State. Massachusetts is well positioned to take advantage of the coming boom in big data according to a recent MassTLC white paper that reviews both the current lay of the land and future opportunities.

For Immediate Release

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (U.S.) - February 15, 2012 - Involution Studios Creative Director Juhan Sonin will conduct an applied UX methods workshop and expert session at the HIMSS12, healthcare and technology conference next week. The hands-on, interactive workshop will focus on real-world scenarios in measuring the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of the user experience with Electronic Health Records. Sonin will cover usability research methods across the software design spectrum that can be adapted to any organization's EHR development, customization, or implementation process. In addition, Sonin will be participating in a forum where industry experts interact with HIMSS12 attendees on a one-to-one basis.

For Immediate Release
LONDON, England - February 8, 2012 - Marketing innovation software leader, Affinnova Inc., launched Concept Studio, a Web-based application for collaboratively developing new product concepts and designs, at the Online Research Methods conference in London. The software facilitates product innovation by allowing marketing teams to assemble numerous variations on a potential concept. By enabling the exploration of a wide spectrum of ideas, Concept Studio can help users discover genuine breakthroughs that might have otherwise been overlooked. Early adopters of the Concept Studio software include dietary service Nutrisystem, which used the software to help identify product messaging across key demographics.

Last week, the IxDA's Interaction12 conference in Dublin, Ireland brought together the professional interaction design community from around the globe for four days of inspiring talks and workshops.