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The movies are filled with great trucking teams — from Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed in “Smokey and the Bandit” to Kris Kristofferson and an army of drivers in “Convoy.” Now transport finance can add Navistar International and GE Capital to the list of road warriors. In a new alliance, Warrenville, Illinois-based Navistar — a global manufacturer of commercial trucks, buses, and diesel engines — has chosen GE Capital as the preferred retail financing partner for trucks and school buses for its U.S. dealers. Navistar will now be able to free up critical capital to invest in what they do best — making and selling trucks and buses. GE Capital, in turn, will do what it does best — provide financing in an industry it understands, leveraging nearly 40-years of experience in the transportation financing space. In the audio clip below, GE Capital’s Dan Henson explains the deal.

Our story yesterday turned the spotlight on GE’s R&D and the way in which sustained technology investments, even in an economic downturn, translate into new products with huge potential. As described in GE’s just-released online Annual Report, new product introductions are one side of the equation. The other is how technologies and solutions get deployed in the field by customers such as AEP, one of the largest investor-owned utilities. As Tom Jones, Research Program Manager for AEP, says in the video below about their smart grid project: “GE really understands the customer. We understand the utility system — what it takes to supply customers. The two come together to make a really good team.” Adds Ray Hayes, Advanced Testing Manager for AEP: “This is a great time for the American utility industry. There’s so much opportunity to look into new technologies. To be able to be part of the birth of the next generation of that grid, it’s very exciting.”

Making GE an “industrial company first” and pushing our competitive advantage in technology — they’re key themes at GE in 2010 and ones that take center stage in a new letter to shareholders in this year’s Annual Report. “In 2010, we will spend about 5 percent of our industrial revenue on R&D,” writes GE’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt in the note. “We have filed 20,000 patents this decade. We have nearly 40,000 engineers and scientists around the world. We have developed more than 150 core technologies that create leadership across our company. We share technologies and innovation across multiple platforms to create technological scale. We benchmark each of these against our competition and lead in many.” One of the most recent examples of that technology push can be seen in the handheld Vscan ultrasound. As GE Healthcare’s Al Lojewski explains in the video below, which is part of GE’s online Annual Report: “We really hope that this is going to truly change the way that all physicians worldwide interact with their patients.”

As we recently reported, 10 of GE’s solar-powered water purification units were shipped to earthquake-stricken Haiti to help with the country’s desperate needs for clean water. Now, seven of the Sunspring units are up and running — with each able to provide safe water for up to 10,000 people per day. Our Sunspring partner, Innovative Water Technologies, was hard at work this week completing installations that bring the total of available clean water in the Port au Prince area to over 40,000 gallons per day. The video below was created and produced by Mark Tchelistcheff of openfilms.net and documents the installation at the SOS Children’s Village orphanage in Santo, Haiti.

Doctors from around the world have been turning their attention to the latest breakthroughs in healthcare IT this week at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in Atlanta, Georgia. Featuring one of the year’s biggest tech expos, the conference is a chance for the society’s more than 20,000 members to see how healthcare is rapidly transforming thanks to an array of new computerized technologies designed to put more information in doctors’ hands.