In Search of Stupidity is not a traditional business book; rather, it's a high-level analysis of marketing mistakes made by some of the biggest and most well-known high-tech companies over the last 20 years. [Ben Rothke, slashdot.org, Nov 22, 06] Full review

Fearless manufacturing prediction for 2007. 8. The United States and China will sign an historic trade agreement that promises to “level the playing field” for U.S. manufacturers. As a result of this agreement, absolutely nothing will change. [David Blanchard, Industry Week, Dec 20]

What Is a Start-Up Worth?  Andrew Metrick's Reality Check Model assumes its revenues will grow at a rate faster than 75% of similar companies after they went public. In his research, Professor Metrick found that the median start-up does so for five years after going public. Again, to give start-ups the benefit of the doubt, he assumes they can outpace their industry for seven years. [Mark Hulbert, New York Times, Dec 31]

Paul Allen Smethers and Alastair France's new book Five Myths of Consumer Behavior: Create Technology Products Consumers Will Love. It's been required reading at the office and for good reason. It's a superb book! Something every marketing student and product designer or engineer should pick up. [Corante Innovation Hub, Dec 18]

Lighting a candle. An anonymous reader writes "Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who was fired [as chief economist] by the World Bank blasted drug patents in an editorial in the British Medical Journal titled 'Scrooge and intellectual property rights.' 'Knowledge is like a candle, when one candle lights another it does not diminish its light.' In medicine, patents cost lives. The US patent for turmeric didn't stimulate research, and restricted access by the Indian poor who actually discovered it hundreds of years ago. 'These rights were intended to reduce access to generic medicines and they succeeded.' Billions of people, who live on $2-3 a day, could no longer afford the drugs they needed. Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research. A few scientists beat the human genome project and patented breast cancer genes; so now the cost of testing women for breast cancer is 'enormous.'" [slashdot.org, Dec 25] Like the workings of government: where you stand depends on where you sit. A few years ago at the AEA annual meeting, Larry Summers, no stranger to controversy, speaking after Stieglitz on a panel  opened with "I disagree with everything Joe said."

Import penetration, as it is called, worried economists and policymakers when it first became noticeable 20 years ago. .. As imports gained ground, ... the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up. ... said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, “In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability.” [Louis Uchitelle, New York Times, Dec 24] So, SBIR is about fostering innovation?  Then let the money go to situations where new products and processes have a future beyond filling the federal library with knowledge.

Washington need not worry about China's economic boom, much less respond with protectionism. Although China controls more of the world's exports than ever before, its high-return high-tech industries are dominated by foreign companies. And Chinese firms will not displace them any time soon: Beijing's one-party politics have bred a timid business culture that prevents domestic firms from developing key technologies and keeps them dependent on the West. [George J. Gilboy, Foreign Affairs, J/A 2004]

What's Coming. No shortage of futurists at year-end. Some guesses from Business 2.0's Chris Taylor:  India and China race to the moon (to gain what?), a $100 PC, Wireless USB, you-pay Ad-free news, thin-film silicon solar panels, Big-city Wi-Fi.

Academic Nurture The idea that the United States dominates cutting edge science and technology is challenged by the decline in the U.S. share of patents and the growth of corporate spending on research and development (R&D) in emerging countries like China and India. ...  Lower R&D cost in emerging economies was not the main reason; market factors, collaboration with university scientists, and quality of R&D personnel were all at least as important as cost  ... these results suggest that, for developed economies to maintain an advantage for cutting-edge corporate research, the keys are maintaining excellence and accessibility of research universities [Jerry and Marie Thursby, Science, Dec 8]

I’d recommend this book highly to anyone interested in the economics of information technology, or in understanding the future of industries being transformed by IT. [ARUN SUNDARARAJAN reviewing Digital Phoenix: Why the Information Economy Collapsed and How It Will Rise Again. By Bruce Abramson, Journal of Economic Literature, Sep 06].

Researchers, Michael Grätzel,  in Switzerland have demonstrated more-efficient water-splitting solar cells based on a cheap, abundant, and long-lasting material: rust. ... by including small amounts of silicon and cobalt, they can grow nanostructured thin films of iron oxide that convert sunlight into the electrons needed to form hydrogen from water. And the iron oxide films do this more efficiently than ever before with this material. [MIT Tech Review, Dec 12]

In response to the blurb on Bossel's hydrogen economy paper, one reader said: One must read the whole Proceedings Vol 94, No. 10  before jumping on Bossel's European view of jumbo jets at Frankfurt as the only issue. His physics appear sound but his overall view of energy carrier policy is highly suspect. Solar and wind economies fail too, but for different economical and political reasons. Nuclear electricity may fail also because of wrongly placed environmental safety concerns.  A mix of electric and gaseous carriers is a good bet even with R&D in energy at rock bottom now. All that CO2 can be sequestered underground and off peak production of H2 for use in urban areas is very feasible. Don't forget the enormous cost of building electric transmission to all those rural cars!  The last paper treats law making issues and suggests it would be stupid to make laws now on a H2 economy. It would be like making internet laws in 1950!

Net Energy Minus. “More energy is needed to isolate hydrogen from natural compounds than can ever be recovered from its use,” Bossel explains to PhysOrg.com. “Therefore, making the new chemical energy carrier form natural gas would not make sense, as it would increase the gas consumption and the emission of CO₂. Instead, the dwindling fossil fuel reserves must be replaced by energy from renewable sources.”  [Lisa Zyga, physorg.com, Dec 11] Hydrogen is only a political asset that lets politicians evade real action on an inconvenient problem.  Ulf Bossel published his Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? in Proceedings of the IEEE. Vol. 94, No. 10, October 2006

Shockley had been given a very vague mission to find a solid replacement for vacuum tubes. Starting in the 1940s Shockley and a band of stalwarts worked on the problem. But they failed repeatedly and spectacularly. So they switched gears and said, 'What are the reasons for our colossal ignorance?' One of Shockley's employees, a guy named John Bardeen, designed a series of incredibly brilliant experiments to diagnose their failures. But one of the experiments was itself capable of amplification, just like the vacuum tubes they were trying to duplicate.  Shockley was simultaneously delighted with his group's achievement and frustrated at not having discovered that first device himself. He went, for lack of a better term, transistor-wacky. He withdrew from the group, and in a flurry of activity in 1948, he came up with the junction transistor, which is the origin of everything we see today. So the initial transistor invention was something they stumbled on while they were trying to diagnose their earlier failures to invent a transistor. [Thomas Lee interview, Wall Street Journal, Dec 12]

Proud and Ready Graduates. Bigfoot Networks led a graduating class from the Austin (TX)  Technology Incubator and raised $4M in VC money. The other grads:  BuildForge Inc., which makes tools that help software developers create and test products and was acquired by IBM Corp. in May; Connectione LLC, a mobile solutions provider that helps companies make wireless decisions, reduce wireless costs and save wireless management time; Coupon Logix, which sells software that helps manufacturers and grocery retailers manage coupon promotions; FactoryDNA Inc., which sells software for manufacturing operations; Inventes Inc., which provides information technology service management and governance solutions; LabNow Inc., which is developing a diagnostics system to help monitor the treatment of HIV/AIDS patients in Africa; Solid State Displays Inc., which is developing low-cost, high-performance flat panel display technology; SozoTek Inc., a digital imaging company developing image enhancement technologies. [Austin American-Statesman, Dec 11]

Two big technology industry research firms said growth rates in IT spending would slow in 2007.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University believe they have achieved a breakthrough in the reconstruction of three-dimensional models from two-dimensional images (pictured). Their system analyses photographs of outdoor scenes, identifies “sky” and “ground” regions, and looks for visual cues that distinguish horizontal surfaces from vertical ones. It then reconstructs the scene by cutting and folding the original image, taking into account the constraints that apply in the real world: skies are blue, horizons are horizontal and most objects sit on the ground. “In our world things don't just float,” says Martial Hebert, who co-developed the software with his colleagues Alexei Efros and Derek Hoiem. [The Economist, Nov 30]

Now some analysts and money managers are hoping the imminent Democratic takeover of Congress will also be bullish for alternative energy stocks by improving prospects for favorable legislation for the industry. One likely initiative, known as a national renewable portfolio standard, would require utilities to derive 10% of their electricity output from renewable sources by 2020. Currently, less than 3% of electricity is generated from such sources. [Norm Alster, New York Times, Dec 10] Except that there is a Bush/Cheney barrier called a veto for at least two years and possible Senate filibusters by the crowd that for the last twelve years denigrated such tactics. Again, where they stand depends on where they sit.

If you want additional proof that we’re in a bubble, here it is: young people are trying to get into the venture capital business again. ... here’s my advice to all the Biffs, Sebastians, Brooks, and Tiffanys who want to be kingmakers: Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. It should be your last job, not your first.  [blog.guykawasaki.com]

Pause before partnering  Most small businesses pine for the opportunity to team up with a large business they think can help them grow. But not so fast. While so-called strategic partnerships can be a boon to small firms, they can also be rife with legal disputes and disappointing results, according to the Kauffman Foundation, a resource center for entrepreneurs. Kauffman just posted a package of articles by legal experts and entrepreneurs and tools to help small businesses thinking about forming partnerships on its Web site, eVenturing.org. The articles offer advice on selecting the right business partners, evaluating the results of a partnership, setting up legal boundaries and rights and co-marketing. There's also a worksheet to help small businesses recruit prospective partners. [Kelly Spors, Wall Street Journal, Dec 7]

Although it is still the world's biggest market for capital, America's lead is shrinking fast in almost every area. In some it has been overtaken. The most spectacular collapse has come in the market for IPOs of shares, where the New York exchanges, miles ahead a few years ago, now trail behind London and Hong Kong.  [The Economist, Nov 25]

Finding Hidden Tumors. Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital are using whole-body MRI to illuminate a tricky disease - neurofibromatosis ... MRI provides detailed anatomical images that crisply map out the location and size of each tumor. [Katherine Bourzac, MIT Tech Review, Nov 14] Great stuff, but like most new technology, who will pay for its general use?

What Do The Bios Treasure?  With about 300 medical products on the market and nearly 400 more in late-stage tests, Northern California biotechnology companies are on the cusp of a commercial explosion, according to a report by the industry group BayBio. But competition from other states and countries where it is cheaper to operate, with fewer government regulations, could woo many local companies elsewhere, according to several experts  [Steve Johnson, San Jose Mercury News, Dec 6]  Sure, Kentucky or Chile might seem easier and cheaper for business, but with whom will the bios rap, where will they find venture capital, and how will they replace a lost valuable tech worker quickly?  For high tech innovators, cheaper is not the prime location criterion.

The study, Here or There? A Study of Factors in Multinational R&D Location, is now available from the National Academies Press ... four factors seem to be most important: output market potential, quality of the R&D personnel, university collaboration, and intellectual property protection.  For those who obsess on taxes and the unfairness of paying for all that government, including SBIR pork consider a move to Wyoming. That’s because Wyoming ranks No. 1 in the latest State Business Tax Climate rankings produced by the Tax Foundation. [National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship, Oct 23]

For innovative readers.  Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox  By Charles D. Ellis; Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business WinBy William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre; Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future By Patricia B. Seybold; The Entrepreneurial Imperative: How America's Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World (and Change Your Life) By Carl J. Schramm  [The Economist, Nov 18]

Scientists combine two molecules that occur naturally in blood to engineer molecular complex that uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. [press release Imperial College (London) Dec 1]

Stuff Happens. a radar precise enough to track a baseball hurtling through space at 15,000 miles an hour. But the vessel carrying the radar has sprung leaks and blown out electrical circuits.  [Jonathan Karp, Wall Street Journal. Nov 28]

Everyone's For Innovation, and apple pie. A consortium of high-techers (including Doerr, Chambers, and Levinson) organized by the Congressional Dems called for doubling funding for the NSF and for broadband Internet access over five years, producing 100,000 scientists, engineers and mathematicians over four years and permanently extending and expanding the research and development tax credit. The plan had no price tag, but Bush's similar American Competitiveness Initiative would cost $136 billion over 10 years. [Jim Puzzanghera, LA Times, Nov 26] Of course, no one will have to pay anything just as no one has to pay for Iraq.

For the first time since the height of the dot-com bubble, Intel Corp.'s venture-capital arm will reach $1 billion in investments this year. [Jonathan Schieber, Wall Street Journal. Nov 28]

Consumer products using extremely small particles of silver to kill germs will need Environmental Protection Agency approval, part of the government's first move to regulate the burgeoning nanotechnology industry. ...  Silver is among the most common type of nanomaterials marketed to consumers, of which more than 200 now exist, according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, [AP, Nov 23]

"People are trying to make solar cells that are more efficient," Shapiro told The Lewiston Tribune. "But it's so much cheaper to use fossil fuels, despite all the obvious advantages of solar cell technology."  So far, Shapiro's team has created a compound called a "quantum dot" that is made of elements that include copper, indium and selenium. Shapiro said that the quantum dots would be embedded between layers of a solar cell and would absorb energy that is otherwise wasted due to overheating. [Information from: Lewiston Tribune, http://www.lmtribune.com ] The local politicians cheer the need to keep the research dollars flowing, but not one mentioned the second law of thermodynamics about extracting useful work from low quality heat.

The nanotube thermal rectifier is the first experimental proof that such a device works. ... Alex Zettl and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have shown that it is possible to make a thermal rectifier, a device that directs the flow of heat, with nanotubes. If made practical, .... [Pachi Patel-Predd, MIT Tech Review, Nov 22] Now what is needed is a market agile small business that can convert the new knowledge into useful products. A perfect nursery role for an  SBIR, but only for a market-driven company that could and would exploit the technical success.

Cry Poverty.  The funding outlook for biological sciences in the United States is bleak .. Why Aren't There More Scientists Advocating for Funding? ... Science and our country need us. [Science, Nov 17]  Two science-crats write an appeal for bio-scientists to beg more loudly.  If you believe that more of a good thing is always better, you can understand why the USG cannot balance its budgets even in peacetime.  Every science- or other- crat has three direct defenders in Congress (except those few in DC) who want to be re-elected and have no qualms about helping the locals who elect them.

Science Fiction. MIT Tech Review is embarking on an experiment of including an essay, memoir, or short fiction about emerging technology.

Global Competition. The new home of 2,000 Chinese entrepreneurs and an army of low-wage workers, 25,000 strong, is growing rapidly in front of the walls of this small city of 180,000. One in five of the workers is undocumented and, officially at least, isn't even here. Meanwhile Prato's citizens look on and curse their new neighbors as sewing machines rattle through the night. ... Luigi is a Chinese businessman from Wenzhou. He calls himself Luigi because it's easier for Italians to remember. Practically every pizza maker in Italy is named Luigi, he says. .. Prato Italy  was once the center of the Italian textile industry. [By Fiona Ehlers, translated from the German by Christopher Sultan] Although America also has a lot of invited illegal immigrants, it has become harder for those who can't walk or swim across the Mexican border to get here, thanks to Bin Laden's spur to US INS.

Buy Now, Pay Later. The U.S. has stimulated export-led growth around the world while continuing to attract the largest share of foreign direct investment, according to a new Council on Competitiveness report, Competitiveness Index: Where America Stands. The total stock of foreign direct investment in the U.S. is now $1.6 trillion, about twice that of the next largest recipient and more than six times as much as China. Between 1986 and 2004, the U.S. received more annual flows of foreign direct investment than any other country in the world. However, this expansion has been funded primarily through rapidly increasing foreign debt, coupled with high consumption and a return to federal budget deficits, the report cautions. Such imbalances should raise warning flags for the future of American competitiveness and global economic stability, which the study discusses in depth. ... The Council on Competitiveness is a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy action group focusing on U.S. competitiveness and economic leadership. Competitiveness Index: Where America Stands is available for purchase at http://www.compete.org. [SSTI, Nov 20]

The latest surge in Google's market value put its founders Page and Brin in even richer territory - now worth just south of $16B each for as long as the stock trades north of $500 a share - at 64 times earnings. 

High Tech. Wanted: Technicians willing to climb to the top of 250-foot towers and spend 12 hours there. Resistance to vertigo required. Interest in alternative power sources a plus. ... The need for technicians increases at a rate of about eight jobs per 100 megawatts of installed power generation capacity. [The Oregonian, Nov 21] Many years ago I ascended 250 foot towers from which I quickly floated back to earth in Army parachute training.

genuine mainstream public ownership [of hydrogen powered cars] is years and possibly decades away. ... At present the only commercially viable way to manufacture hydrogen is to extract it from natural gas, a process that itself emits large amounts of CO2. [Andrew Frankel on the BMW Hydrogen 7, The Times, Nov 21]

Women in Silicon Valley have a problem. They are MIA in the board rooms and executive suites. ... According to a recent study, among the top 103 public companies here, women make up 6.5%of board directors and 8.8% of company leadership teams. [Michelle Quinn, San Jose Mercury News, Nov 21]

In 2000, Indian companies made 50 acquisitions worth a total of $957m, according to Dealogic. So far this year, they have made 146 acquisitions worth a total of $20.2 billion. Chinese companies bought 27 foreign firms in 2000 worth a total of $1.8 billion. So far this year they have bought 85 companies worth $15.5 billion.  [Paul Kedrosky, Infectious Greed, Nov 20]

Discover's 25 Greatest Science Books  From here. The top ten are: 1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie]; 3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687); 4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632); 5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543); 6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.); 7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543); 8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916);9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976); 10. One Two Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow (1947) ... As much as I like Darwin, I think Netwon should probably should have ranked higher. Discuss at your leisure. [Stranger Fruit blog, Nov 20]

Bahrain as the science and technology hub of the region, is the dream of the Bahraini government which is putting up $1B for a two million square meter campus will host small, medium and large companies in these and other emerging industries. The campus would be staffed by university type researchers recruited from somewhere to live in a land that lives on oil and has tribal warfare as the basis for power.  Which Nobel laureate would come first? [story from SSTI, Nov 20]

The US really is a country of contradictions: on the one hand, it has the greatest number of Nobel Prize winning scientists and represents all that is cutting-edge and exciting in scientific endeavour and achievement.  On the other hand, this most powerful and advanced nation on earth represents the most backward and medieval ideologies that would not look out of place in an isolated goat-herding community somewhere in Borat’s Kazakhstan. The statistics are amusing and familiar: the number of Americans that have seen UFOs and believe they were put on earth by aliens is legendary. [New Scientist blog, Nov 20] We love contradictions; the certified winning candidate in the Sarasota FL Congressional district said there was no evidence of voting machine malfunction when 17000 voters were recorded as voting for no Congressional candidate at all, a non-voting rate six times the rate in the neighboring counties. His rationalization: they were protesting the negative campaign attacks although he offered no supporting data.

Experts say they "can't get much more" out of lithium-ion technology. As people use devices more and longer, new products will be needed. The future may be fuel cells. ... Sony introduced the lithium-ion battery in the early 1990s. .. Energy levels improve about 5 to 10% each year, said Jason Howard, energy technologies manager for Motorola's mobile phone business. ...  While 5 to 10 percent gains sound impressive, the speed of microprocessors and the storage capacity of disk drives in electronic devices doubles every 18 months to two years. [Mike Hughlett, Chicago Tribune, Nov 17]

Plastic Light. Sandia National Laboratory projects that if half of all lighting is solid-state by 2025--that is, made up of OLEDs and their technological cousin, LEDs made from inorganic semiconducting materials--it will cut worldwide power use by 120 gigawatts. That would save $100 billion a year and reduce the carbon dioxide emitted by electrical plants by 350 megatons a year. And plastic light advanced again into the competitive range as Stephen Forrest at the University of Michigan, increases the light output of the thin, flexible OLEDs by 70%. [Neil Savage, MIT Tech Review, Nov 20]

The Semiconductor Industry Association expects global chip sales to expand 9.4% because consumers keep buying more things that use chips.

Dangers of high tech. Two armed thugs tried to rob of line of people waiting to buy the new Playstation 3 gaming console early Friday and shot one who refused to give up the money, authorities said.   The two confronted a "bunch of people who were in line" outside a Wal-Mart store [in Connecticut] shortly after 3 a.m. Surely some of those folks had camera cell phones for recording the events.

After more than 15 great years, [Michael Miller is] leaving PC Magazine and Ziff Davis. I am going to work for Ziff Brothers Investments, LLC, a private firm run by the Ziff family.  While the Ziff family used to own Ziff Davis, neither the family nor ZBI has been affiliated with Ziff Davis for the past 10 years.  But after a short break, I expect to be continuing to blog here in a couple of weeks [Miller's Forward Thinking blog]

Charles River Ventures new QuickStart program provides loans of up to $250K which convert to equity on a Series A financing. George Zachary explains in a New York Times interview “We think there are going to be a ton of companies that get started with a quarter-million to build consumer services on the Internet,” said George Zachary, a partner at Charles River, which has offices in Waltham, Mass., and Silicon Valley. “In an environment where a fewer number of deals are generating the majority of the gain, we think it is important to see as broad a selection of companies as possible.” Angel Investors, and some VCs, have been doing this for a long time. [Corante Innovation Hub, Nov 7]

Andrew Leigh writes "On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore by Brian Bagnall is fodder for anyone interested in the buried history of the personal computer. Whether you owned a Commodore computer or want to hear a new angle on the early stages of computer development, you'll find this book easy to pick up and almost impossible to put down. Bagnall has gone to a massive amount of effort in telling this tale, researching and interviewing the real personalities involved. It takes readers on an important and often emotional ride that will many times leave you shaking your head at how painfully it all went wrong." [slashdot.org, Nov 15]  

schnippy writes "Esquire is running an interesting article on the work on adaptive optics and directed energy being done at the U.S. Air Force's Starfire Optical Observatory. This facility was the subject of a New York Times article earlier this year which suspected the facility was conducting anti-satellite weapons research under the cover of astronomy." [slashdot.org, Nov 15]

Immigrants have fueled the US entrepreneurial economy, starting one in four venture-backed companies since 1990 and two in five in high technology, according to a study being released today by the National Venture Capital Association trade group. [Robert Weisman, Boston Globe, Nov 15]

Haruki Soma writes, "Unearthed: An A to Z guide to security — from antivirus to zero-day. The writer includes the latest on the UK's newly updated Computer Misuse Act. She also pokes around rootkits, IM, and spyware, pens an ode to Gary McKinnon (aka the NASA hacker, in the 'E is for Extradition' entry), probes Google-induced Spear Phishing, and takes a look back at the Love Bug and Jaschan's Sasser." Security pros won't find much new here, but the rest of us might learn a thing or two. [slashdot.org, Nov 15]

I’m writing to you on my laptop on a flight across Canada, courtesy of something I’ve never encountered before: full-blown, three-prong, U.S.-style power outlets on every seat back. Not some wacky jack that requires a $70 adapter - we’re talking regular three-prong outlets. Not in first class; in coach. Free, by the way. Why is it, I wonder, that Air Canada is the pioneer here? [David Pogue, NY Times blog, Nov 9]

Three-fourths of global corporate spending aimed at innovation comes from a handful of industries: health, high-tech and automotive, according to consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton ... Spending on innovation rose 6% last year among the 1,000 companies that spend most on research and development, ... The payback: Money doesn't buy effective innovation ... 94 companies outperformed peers while spending less than peers on R&D. [Scott Thurm, Wall Street Journal, Nov 13]

Most economists believe that, even at a slower growth rate, capital spending will still be relatively strong in 2007. [Timothy Aeppel, Wall Street Journal, Nov 13] Unlike the market for traded securities, a consensus could be right. In trading, if every pundit agrees, the opposite is sure to happen.

Time's Euro version named Linus Torvalds to join worthies like Thatcher and Gorbachov as a hero of the past 60 years because at age at age 21 he changed the world. ... Today, 15 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones around the world, and Torvalds has achieved fame as the godfather of the open-source movement. No SBIRs.

Forbes 2006 list of the best 200 small companies included ATMI, Ceradyne, and ViaSat.

Intel confirmed Friday that it will more than triple its initial investment in Vietnam to $1 billion, dramatically expanding the size of a chip assembly and testing plant that it is building in the country's southern business hub. [San Jose Mercury News, Nov 11] What a difference three decades make. During my two years there in the war, business was essentially zero; investment, mostly French and Chinese, had been wiped out; surface traffic was nil. Now Vietnam is peddling shrimp and catfish well below the costs for American aqua-farmers to much activation of the national protectionist gene. Present job preservation always trumps future economic gain or cheaper consumer prices - concentrated loss and diffused gain.

It's moral, it's economic and it's life and death. Biotechnology is here to stay, even if humanity, as we know it, isn't. .. we can't stop ourselves. So we try to simplify the oncoming technologies, treating them like issues we already know. On the right, that means equating ESC research with abortion. ... The left treats ESC research like health care.  [William Saletan, Slate, Nov 12]

Biotech a Tougher Sell.  Biotechnology companies spent an average of eight years and $1.2 B to get a new treatment to the market, about 24% more than it cost makers of traditional drugs to develop a medicine,  ... partly because it cost more for them to raise capital, according to the report from researchers at Tufts University. ...  Study author Joseph DiMasi  [Bloomberg News, Nov 10]

MIT researchers are developing low-cost manufacturing methods based on the rapid reproduction of viruses, says MIT professor Angela Belcher who has engineered viruses to assemble battery components that can store three times as much energy as traditional materials by packing highly ordered materials into a very small space.  [Kevin Bullis, MIT Tech Review, Sep 28]

More than 8,600 press releases have been issued over the years with "breakthrough" in the headline, a majority of them by computer and electronics companies,' Lee Gomes writes in the Wall Street Journal. He examines whether hyperbole and hype has robbed the term of much of its meaning, focusing on a recently announced 'breakthrough' by Intel involving optical computing. From the article: 'Having been inside Intel's laser labs, I need no persuading that the company is doing important work here, and an Intel spokesman says the development is indeed a "breakthrough" because it shows how real-world optical products can be made with silicon. I wonder, though, how many more breakthroughs we will be reading about before optical computing becomes ubiquitous.'" [slashdot.org, Sep 27]

For Her Business.  SBA Office of Women's Business Ownership .... List of local centers .... National Association of Women Business Owners .... To find your local centers: .... Count Me In .... Make Mine a Million ..... Ladies Who Launch .... Find a local incubator: .... Angel Capital Education Foundation .... Golden Seeds ...  Center for Women's Business Research .... Wells Fargo Women's Business Center   [Joanna Ossinger, Wall Street Journal, Sep 25]

Doerr says the overall green-energy market is "probably the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century." Since 2001, KPCB has committed $200M to at least nine energy startups. ... To Doerr, alternative energy is an investment theme on the scale of the Internet. Of course, such markets are given to volatile cycles of hype, disillusionment, and rebound.  [Business Week, Oct 2]

Nanotechnology, the science of creating functional systems on the scale of molecules or smaller, could enable engineers to combine the functions of memory chips and disk drives on a device the size of a dime. Besides the instant boot up, systems that are in development today could enable desktop computers to hold 10 terabytes of data (10,000 gigabytes) or more, and future systems may be able to store data for as long as 100 years while eliminating the worry that the storage media will become obsolete, according to ComputerWorld.  Some of these systems could be available today if the economics were right. Others will probably take another decade or so.  [Dan Mitchell, New York Times, Sep 23]

Copper Out, Glass In, Maybe. Kate Green [MIT Tech Review, Sep 25] reports the coming demise of copper in airplanes because its hundred miles of insulated copper wire is a big liability: it's heavy, it's susceptible to electromagnetic interference, and when not properly maintained, it can cause system failures and fires.  Now researchers at Texas A&M developed a novel optical switch that enables much of that copper to be replaced by FO lines. But economics may be a big barrier to ever seeing it in Boeing planes since the 787 design is already cast with  a more cost-effective optical communication network onboard.

While it’s nothing like 2000, strong earnings have allowed companies to take bigger risks on unproven technologies. Corporate venture investing rose to $1.05 billion in the first half of this year, up from $680 million in the same period last year, according to the National Venture Capital Association. [Miguel Helft, New York Times, Sep 22]

I need to focus on the short-term rather than on the future. Battening down the hatches to ride out the economic storm is so tempting in poor economic conditions. Yet it increases the odds for failure. When your business strategy shrinks to "how am I going to live day to day?" it might be time to consider closing up shop. If cash is a problem and you can no longer secure bank loans, consider bringing in another equity partner to strengthen your cash position. However, a far more viable strategy is to reduce your selling prices to ensure a steady flow of customers and a continuing turnover of your inventory.  Although you will be making less profit on each sale, you will be protecting your market share.   When bad economic times loom, don't give up the ship. Instead, craft a strategy to come sailing through the downturn as an even stronger company.  [Arizona Business Gazette, Sep 21]

The 2006 WSJ Silver Medal for Technology Innovation went to HelioVolt (Austin TX) for the fastest and most effective way to manufacture CIS (Copper Indium Selenide), the most reliable and best-performing thin film [photovoltaic] material. One SBIR (Phase I so far from MDA) perhaps created by Ron Gale. VP for Business Development and formerly Chief Technical Officer for Kopin.Other SBIR companies among the winners and runners-up: Xencor (Pasadena CA), Invitrogen San Doego CA), CardioMag Imaging (Schenectady NY), Sunpower (Athens OH),  Fiberstars (Solon OH), A123 Systems (Boston MA), Eikos (Raynham MA), Advanced Diamond Tech (Champaign IL), Coverity (Menlo Park CA). About half the small company winners had a little SBIR help. Companies with a lot of SBIR may well not compete well because they have lost sight of innovation and fallen for the lure of government money.

"US Patent and Trademark Office made a new record for the number of software patents awarded in a single year. The agency has issued 893 new patents yesterday. Pushing the total to 30,232 in this year [slashdot.org, Sep 20]

InnoCentive® says it is an exciting web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe. We provide a powerful online forum enabling major companies to reward scientific innovation through financial incentives. Other Business Week highlighted sites for "crowdsourced crowds" : IBM's InnovationJam , Cambrian House.

innovation isn't free, that innovation actually is quite expensive and quite risky. ... You have to connect your innovation initiatives and your innovation investments to your broader business strategy, and look at those areas where you are going to get, or think you can get, a competitive advantage  [Nicholas Carr, Wall Street Journal interview, Sep 11] Innovation is only free when a lifestyle company does government R&D (especially with SBIR money) with no intention of investing anything itself. But then after the contract, there's no future.

Getting Solar to Commerce. Prashant Kamat (University of Notre Dame) uses the carbon nanotube. ... so that the tubes stuck up from the surface like hairs. The tubes then eased the passage of the liberated electrons from the cell to the electrode that collected them. Using this technique doubled the efficiency of Dr Kamat's cell from 5% to 10% at ultraviolet wavelengths and he reckons it would create similar increases in efficiency in both plastic and dye-based cells. Such a boost would take novel solar cells closer to becoming a commercial reality.  [The Economist, Sep 16] The article discusses two other new techniques as well.

If Universal Display is right, lightbulbs in the future won't come in boxes. They will be incorporated into the wallpaper. .. The company so far has made transparent light sources and prototypes of transparent displays. .. 22% of the US electricity consumed goes toward lighting [CNET news.com, Sep 5]

Drew a Blank?  A handful of journals that publish only negative results are gaining traction, and new ones are on the drawing boards. ... Example: In the 1990s, publication bias gave the impression of a link between oral contraceptives and cervical cancer. In fact, a 2000 analysis concluded, studies finding no link were seldom published, with the result that a survey of the literature led to "a spurious statistical connection."  [Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, Sep 15]  Journal editors can expect what happens when a new government R&D program starts - an avalanche from the national intellectual attic.

Angels Still Rising. “If it's just an idea, it's worth £10,000; if it has a credible management team in place, it might be worth £100,000. On the other hand, if it has sold something for real money to real customers, it could be worth £500,000.” says David Beer who runs a British network of angels. ...On this side,  Sohl estimates that only 10% of new ideas get enough money to set up. However, in 2000 the proportion shot up to 25%, before falling back to the teens during the bear market. He frets that since 2004 the approval rate has steadily risen from 18% to 23%. It is still rising.  [The Economist, Sep 16]

The Economist also notes that Governments everywhere are desperate to help entrepreneurs start the companies that will create new jobs and new wealth. Unfortunately, government aren't very good at direct investment in private business. Programs like SBIR wind up paying off political interest groups rather than applying cold economic calculus.

The People's People Need Advice.  The scientific community thinks Congress committed intellectual suicide by ditching OTA (which came up with too many politically inconvenient answers). Now, a decade later, AAAS testifies that too few members have backgrounds or experience in science and technological fields to adequately evaluate the issues. [AAAS News, Aug 3] It's a touchy situation for science to deal with Congress critters who have a direct line to God and don't need true science. Many others who don't want to hear scientific opinions about climate, or pollution, or GM foods, or contraception or .... can find a political angle in anything the science community says. 

Stroll through any corporate innovation conference and one thing becomes abundantly clear: It's a good time to be an innovation guru. ... Four Sources For Trends And Ideas: Logic + Emotion
darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/ ; Jim Carroll jimcarroll.com/weblog ;  Ted Blog
tedblog.typepad.com ; Innovation Tools innovationtools.com/weblog/innovation-weblog.asp   [IN, Business Week, Sep 25]

Peer Review by Blog.  Want feedback? Publish anything the least controversial and stand back for the wave of bloggers.  Even the prestigious journal Nature is joining the game.  For some volunteering authors, Nature will seek open on-line peer review. Details. Life style companies whose employees live by peer-reviewed science publication should take note.  Innovative companies should find it merely curious. 

Young Innovator Prize. TR35 winner Stephanie Lacour has pioneered the development of semiconductor devices that can stretch and still retain their electronic properties. Stretchable electrodes based on the technology could be especially valuable in creating safer neural implants. [David Rotman, MIT Tech Review, Sep 13]

An anonymous reader writes, "Travelpost has a new guide to Wi-Fi in 141 U.S. airports. The chart includes pricing information and multiple service provider info for many of the airports — something you rarely see. A good, comprehensive resource for travelers who are constantly online."  [slashdot.org, Sep 13]

[Rob] Walker's newest DVD film, ``The Microprocessor Chronicles,'' a documentary on the history of microprocessor innovations. ... The video is the second in Walker's Silicon Genesis series. His first, ``The Fairchild Chronicles,'' captured the story of Fairchild Semiconductor, the seminal chip company of Silicon Valley started by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1957. The third will focus on pioneers in analog chips, which take signals such as sound and format them into computerese. ... ``The Microprocessor Chronicles'' goes on sale today at www.thesilicongenesiscollection.com for $49.95  [Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Sep 12]

says SRI International CEO Curtis Carlson, "you can invent by yourself, but you can't innovate that way."  ..  Over the past 20 years, Carlson has searched SRI and countless corporations for the best practices of innovation. Now he has, with William Wilmot, director of the Collaboration Institute, laid all that learning down in a book, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. [Unmesh Kher, Time, Sep 11]

Japanese inventor and GaN breakthrough artist, Shuji Nakamura today received Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize for his breakthroughs, which led to blue and then white LEDs and blue laser diodes.  [Compound Semi News, Sep 8]

A New Sunshine Competitor.  Applied Materials is going to adapt its skill in semiconductor wafer machines to solar panel making machines in Germany.  [Austin Statesman American, Sep 5]

A consortium of technology companies, including I.B.M. and Cisco Systems, announced plans  for a vast wireless network that would provide free Internet access to big portions of Silicon Valley and the surrounding region as early as next year.  [NY Times, Sep 6]

Need good staff?  Intel may ax at least 10,000 this week.

Social Side Effects.  imjustatomato writes "A 1998 study showed that the Internet causes declines in social relationships and isolation, similarly to how television causes social disengagement and bad moods. This is the 'Internet Paradox' because while the internet is heavily used for communication, it makes people lonelier. However, a more recent study shows that now the internet has a positive effect on social and psychological well-being. This is even more so for those who have more social support and are extroverted in nature. Interestingly, frequent Internet use is associated with a decline in local knowledge and interest in living in the local area."  [slashdot.org, Sep 1]

Samsung Electronics showed off the promise of future mobile technology with data sent wirelessly at blazing speeds to a moving minibus. ... The current prototype technology allows data transfers of 100 megabits per second, about 30 times typical broadband Internet speeds, and works while moving at up to 120 kph (75 mph).  sales barrier: data receiver is the size of a compact refrigerator.  [AP re-published in MIT Tech Review, Sep 1]

you can't really conceive of anything like Moore's Law for electrochemical energy storage. Moore's Law was based on being able to perform similar functions [for computing] using either fewer electrons or, more recently, fewer photons. But energy is constrained by chemistry and the periodic table. Expecting Moore's Law from battery chemistry is like expecting steel next year to weigh half as much and be twice as strong. -- Yet Ming Chiang  [MIT Tech Review interview, Sep 1]

Bong, Pong! Atari, the New York maker of video games including ``Enter the Matrix,'' said it may be delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Market after failing to maintain a minimum share price of $1. [San Jose Mercury News, Sep 2]

An anonymous reader writes "Ross Anderson, author of 'Security Engineering', notifies in a message to comp.risks that he just got permission from Wiley to let anyone download the full content of his book for free. This is one of the best books on computer security and it is used as textbook in many University courses (I teach two of them)."  [slashdot.org, Sep 1]

The panel, dubbed the Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Economic Advisory Committee, will be composed of academia and private industry representatives and will convene this fall to identify new ways to assess regional innovation activity and the impact of innovation policies. An interim report is due in early 2007.  ... In June 2006, the National Science Foundation (NSF) held a two-day workshop of academics and government officials to share the latest methods in innovation data collection and analysis. The results will be shared in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Technology Transfer. [SSTI, Aug 14]  Measuring innovation, a fascinating subject although highly susceptible to politics when it comes time to make policy, is what SBIR needs a cathartic dose of if it is ever to prove its value beyond mere pork.

Transformation advocates have grown dextrous in the use of bold terms. They call the whole enterprise “network-centric warfare” and speak of “information superiority” and “shared awareness.” They refer to “systems of systems” and “linked platforms of sensors, shooters and commanders in seamless webs,” and talk of the increased speed and greater lethality with which military operations will now operate. But whatever the language, network-centric warfare reflects principles that have governed force-on-force warfare for centuries: Rapid, effective command and control that allows you to get inside an enemy’s “decision loop” has been the goal of the great captains of history for centuries; precision-guided weapons are just the latest and most effective effort to hit enemy forces as accurately as possible. ... Yet Clausewitz wrote the epitaph of “perfect information dominance” some time back: fog and friction.  [Michael Mazarr, Extremism, Terror, and the Future of Conflict, 2006] 

The 20 smartest companies to start now:  Khosla and Kaul are looking for an engineering team to build a lithium-ion battery with five times the life of anything found in cell phones, PDAs, or cameras. $2 million for a 10- to 15-person team to show proof of concept ...  An engineering team to design implantable wireless devices capable of 24/7 patient and data monitoring for conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.  $10 million over three years for a functioning prototype, software to manage wireless data, and early-stage trials ... A device that can identify new types of hospital-borne infections in just a few hours. $10 million for patent-protected research   [CNN Money, Aug 31]

Need a High-Tech Infusion?  Inc. Magazine, July 2006 Consider partnering with a university.  ... In 2004, 462 new businesses were launched based on academic research, a 24 percent increase from the previous year

The 5 best airports for business travelers.  if you have to be stuck in purgatory on your next business trip, these are the airports where you'll want to be: Minneapolis-St. Paul International  Charlotte Douglas International   Denver International San Francisco International    Dallas-Fort Worth International   [Business 2.0, Sep 06]

So Good It's Bad. Silicon Valley ranks last in an annual ranking of 12 U.S. technology hubs because of the region's notoriously high housing costs, traffic congestion, unemployment rate and other quality-of-life problems. .. Nevertheless, the valley remained dominant in one key metric: It attracts nearly $8B per year in venture funding, four times more than its closest domestic rivals. [Rachel Konrad, AP, Sep 2]

the immediacy of web publishing makes some people lazy. They type faster than they think; or they believe that a reaction is the same thing as an argument.  -- Malcolm Gladwell

Toyota spends an average of $22.7 million per day on R&D ...  Microsoft will spend more than $6 billion in 2006 ... Microsoft's Ballmer:"You've got to be optimistic about your ability to change the world. You've got to make big, bold bets."  [Jill Jusko, Industry Week, Sep 1]  OK, so you haven't got a billion for R&D. When, however, you ask the government for SBIR  money, it is to supplement your own R&D for your future products, or are you just doing busy work to keep the paychecks flowing?   Fortunately for most SBIR winners, the government never asks that question. You don't have to work in a lab to love these science books, says physicist Seitz of his five favorites: De Re Metallica, By Georgius Agricola 1556; Promethean Ambitions, By William R. Newman, 2005;  Bedrock, Edited by Lauren E. Savoy, Eldridge M. Moores and Judith E. Moores, Trinity University, 2006; Longitude, By Dava Sobel Walker, 1995;  Cosmos, By Alexander von Humboldt, 1845.  [Wall Street Journal, Jul 31]

If you equate education with intelligence, then the smartest city in the United States is Seattle - 52.7 percent of its residents age 25 or older have completed a bachelor's degree or higher. .. Seattle's also been ranked as the most literate city in the United States by Central Connecticut State University, beating out Minneapolis, Washington and Atlanta ... Companies headquartered there and in surrounding towns, including Microsoft, Amazon, Cray, Washington Mutual and Costco, all use heavy doses of information technology. Even another of the area's biggest employers, old-line Boeing, is also a glutton for technological solutions. ... Seattle also has more than its share of residents with advanced degrees: 20.5 percent. Only Washington, D.C., has more  [Les Christie, CNNMoney.com, Aug 31]

5. Every programmer shall have a fast internet connection. Good programmers never write what they can steal. And the internet is the best conduit for stolen material ever invented. I'm all for books, but it's hard to imagine getting any work done without fast, responsive internet searches at my fingertips. - The Programmer's Bill of Rights. [Coding Horror,Aug 24]

William C. Norris built computers that helped address some of the world's toughest scientific problems. He also used his company to take on social problems, an idea that inspired admirers but irritated Wall Street.  Mr. Norris founded Control Data Corp., whose massive machines in the 1960s were more powerful than those of mighty International Business Machines Corp. He also pioneered computer services in areas such as education decades before the Internet made that commonplace. The company employed 60,000 by 1984, and helped turn the Minneapolis/St. Paul area into a technology hub. [Don Clark and Stephen Miller, Wall Street Journal, Aug 26]

Oxford and Cambridge played practically no role in the Industrial Revolution. Degrees, certificates, qualifications, all the apparatus of academic trade unionism, were still of little consequence, except in medicine where they formed barriers to progress.  -- Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern 1815-1830, 1991.

BoredStiff writes "The Weekend Edition of NPR ran a story on Edward Tufte — the outspoken critic of PowerPoint presentations — he has been described by The New York Times as "The Leonardo da Vinci of Data." Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. Tufte's most recent book is filled with hundreds of illustrations that demonstrate one concept: good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death."  [slashdot.org. Aug 21]

when a colleague told Thomas Edison that he'd again failed to find a filament that would not burn out, Edison replied, "I didn't fail. I just found something else that didn't work." And sometimes the ultimate market for a great idea isn't the one you first imagined. Carlson and Wilmot note that when one SRI engineer developed a technique for printing metals on paper -- thinking it could revolutionize the greeting-card business -- the idea was scrapped after the realization that the potential market was small, and there were already cheaper alternatives. But further research showed that a better application for the technology was printing cheap antennas for Radio Frequency Identification Device tags. In the pursuit of innovation, there doesn't always have to be a Eureka moment.  [Business Week reviewing Carlson and Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want, Sep 4]

The specifics of his Change Function are simple enough: A technology will be successful if the pain associated with adopting it is less than the pain associated with the status quo. "Pain" looms large in the world of "The Change Function," as does "crisis." Successful technologies, the book says, tend to exploit crisis in one form or another. ... As you work through the book, you start to realize "The Change Function" is less an argument for a particular formula involving pain and crisis than it is a platform for Mr. Coburn to launch his instructive analyses of technological success and failure.  [Lee Gomes reviewing Coburn's The Change Function, Wall Street Journal, Aug 9]

Please note that I am reporting this with the utmost skepticism - but a small Irish technology firm has announced that it has accidentally discovered a method of "generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields", and has sent out an open invitation to scientists to come forward and test the equipment concerned. If it turns out to be true, then a huge number of our problems as a race have vanished overnight. Personally, I think it's about as likely as me becoming world leader by universal decree, but there you go.  Aug 21, 2006 by Armchair Anarchist

2929 CEO Wagner said Silicon Valley startups and Hollywood movies have one big thing in common: big money chasing big risk. But here's the difference: In Silicon Valley, "the riskiest money gets paid first," said Wagner. In Hollywood "the riskiest money gets paid last … after distribution costs, advertising, promotion, etc." That's why once-burned investors get out of movies and why even successful directors have a hard time raising money for their next film. [Rich Karlgaard, Digital Rules, Jul 31]

Green Energy Money. Using today's production methods, it would take 85% of the U.S. corn acreage to produce enough to replace just 10% of gas demand, according to Alexander E. Farrell at UC Berkeley .... Ion America Corp [the secretive Silicon Valley (Moffett Field) start-up apparently developing a fuel cell to produce hydrogen and electricity to power cars and trucks, has raised $103 million in its latest equity financing, its fourth round.[Matt Marshall, siliconbeat.com, Aug 4] is preparing a launch later this year of fuel cells that supply electricity to buildings. And in February, Kleiner announced that it has earmarked at least $100M of its new $600M fund for green investments. ...Wall Street is champing at the bit to provide capital. Last year, $17 billion poured into clean-energy projects in the U.S. -- 89% more than in 2004, estimates researcher New Energy Finance Ltd. Worldwide, the $49B collected in 2005 was up 62% from 2004. [Business Week, Aug 14]

Technology stocks under pressure.   ... a growing sense among investors that the days of heady profit growth for many of these companies are over. And the new environment for profits is turning out to be even more subdued than many investors had anticipated.  [Gerg Zuckerman, WSJ, Aug 6]

posts so red-hot I wouldn't recommend touching the screen while you read them.  Science Is Not a Path to Riches" "They're not getting out based on a rational assessment of career possibilities, they're getting out because they don't like the first class or two that they take. By the time they find out about the lousy career possibilities, they're too far in to change majors.. "Alchemy Without the Shame"  "Some of the most dramatic revolutions were born within systems of thought that today seem hopelessly backwards. I wonder how twenty-ninth cenutry historians will look back at our own revolutions today. Who will be cast aside as the new alchemists?"  [ScienceBlogs, Aug 4]

Oil Bugs. Scientists in Europe have sequenced the genome for an oil-eating bacterium, a move that could pave the way for faster and more efficient ways to clean up oil spills. [Duncan Graham Rowe, MIT Tech Review, Jul 31]

Slippage in the Heart. Wall Street reacted fast and furiously Thursday on news that Medtronic  failed to meet analysts' expectations for first-quarter earnings. The drop in shares was the biggest daily decline in 22 years.  Medtronic said that sales of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) fell 6%, to $675M, including a 13% drop in the US.  [Janet Moore, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Aug 3]

Where's the Next Apple? venture capitalists are grappling with an era of diminished returns ... says Paul J. Ferri, who founded Matrix Partners in 1982. "I know what we have distributed to our investors over the last six years, and it's damn little." ... Cumulative returns for the past six years remain negative ... "We're in a position where almost one in two venture-backed companies will fail...It's hard to see how the industry gets around that basic math," says John Denniston, a Kleiner partner [Rebecca Buckman, Walll Street Journal, Aug 3]

The two designers from Yahoo stood ready to test a new user interface at the Sunnyvale company's headquarters Monday afternoon.  ``Gentlemen, start your licking,'' commanded North Pitney, a graduate student at the California College of the Arts.  Vigorously applying pink tongues to heart-shaped lollipops, Lance Nishihira and Bill Scott complied. Sensors transmitted each sloppy stroke to a laptop that was controlling the movements of several robotic toys.  [Elise Ackerman, San Jose Mercury News, Aug 2]

there is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong.  -- H.L. Mencken.

The strength of our economy rests on two pedestals: the growth of tech-centric, hard-driving start-up firms -- e.g., Microsoft, Genentech, Hewlett-Packard -- shepherded from birth to IPO by U.S. venture capitalists, and U.S. supremacy in corporate finance, with Wall Street as the epicenter of global financial activity. [But] The power supply of venture capital activity, the initial public offering of a company's stock, is shifting offshore, principally to London. Inexorably, the critical mass of corporate finance activity will follow. [Joseph Bartlett, Washington Post, Aug 1] So, should the government step in to be an alternative finance vehicle for high-tech start-ups?  With whom to pick the beneficiaries and on what criteria? SBIR has already demonstrated that it is no solution as it avoids any economic evaluation of what happens when the money is given to the federal mission agencies to distribute. 

Clustered in certain U.S. cities, there is a group of innovative people -- about 38 million of them, by [Richard] Florida's latest calculation -- that generate far more than their proportionate share of wealth. ... Florida offers a Creativity Index that ranks U.S. cities based on how well they foster technology, tolerance, and talent, "the three Ts." ... His next book, due in 2007, continues to connect the dots between people and places. "Where you choose to live is the most important decision of your life," he says. "This book will explain why."  [Ali McConnon, Business Week, Aug 7]

Skilled Jobs Growing. While the U.S. manufacturing sector has contracted sharply since the early 1980s, employment in high-skill manufacturing occupations has risen by an impressive 37%. ... virtually all of the nation’s industries have shared in this trend. ... in all parts of the country, even those experiencing severe employment losses. [Deitz and Orr, NY Fed, Feb06]

IBM Remembers. it's the 50th anniversary of hard-disk storage ...  weighed a full ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. ... The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. [Steve Levy, Newsweek, Aug 7] It's also the 20th anniversary of another of IBM's great breakthroughs - the PC.  Unfortunately, IBM fumbled that one when it assumed another effective monopoly and took the gadget under its ordinary management scheme. The competitors gladly zoomed by.

Intel launched Core 2 Duo, a line of computer chips that boast up to 40% more processing power while using 40% less electricity. [it] squeezes two computing brains onto a single microprocessor.  [Nichole Wong, San Jose Mercury News, Jul 28]

Now that everybody's got one  the computer industry is feeling its age. .. markets are maturing and that slower growth may be here to stay ... market-research firm IDC predicts that information-technology spending by the world's largest companies is likely to increase just 5% a year between 2005 and 2009   Intel, Dell, Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, H-P re-tooling their strategies  ...  Even in the hot Web-search market, the easy growth may be over  [Tam, Guth, and Lawton, Wall Street Journal, Jul 27]

Lower costs of doing business, and lower costs for customers to find sellers and vice versa, mean that the minimum efficient scale for many enterprisers is quite small. .... while big enterprises will always be with us, we're going to see a much more vibrant small-business (and even micro-business) sector over the next decade or so. [Reynolds's piece reviewing Anderson's The Long Tail] Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard (Digital Rules) sees Reynolds saying that they will account for most of the gross domestic product growth over the next decade.  Well, if that is true, why do the businesses need a government handout program heavily for companies who do mostly government work? 

(The Other Washington) Technology Center gave 11 companies $952K to help commercialize their technology. 3TIER provides tools to analyze renewable energy resources like wind, water and solar power. The company is collaborating with the University of Washington's Civil and Environmental Engineering department to develop forecast techniques for stream flows used in hydropower, which generates 76% of the state's electricity.   EnerG2 develops carbon-based material for high-performance capacitors used in energy storage, which could improve the way alternative fuel vehicles capture energy. The company is partnering with the University of Washington's Materials Science and Engineering Department.  [Seattle Times, Jul 26]  The other "winners" were: Cadwell Laboratories, Calypso Medical Technologies (1 Phase 1 SBIR),  Hummingbird Scientific(2 Phase 2s),  Infometrix (1 Phase 2) , Insitu, (5 Phase 1s) Kronos Air Technologies (2 Phase 2s), MicroGREEN Polymers, SpringStar USA, and VentriPoint.

Is there a shortage of engineers in the U.S.? One answer: The engineer shortage is a myth perpetuated by the proponents of outsourcing as a convenient excuse to send tech jobs overseas. With all the manufacturing closures of the last decade there is a glut of experienced engineers. The problem is the lack of opportunity and downward pressure on wages form outsourcing, and therefore many are now either underemployed or have made mid life career changes out of mfg. The lack of college students pursuing engineering paths is also indicative of the lack of good job availability when they graduate. I can cite several anecdotes of recent engineering grads who have given up finding career oriented mfg jobs and are installing satellite dishes or fixing copiers for a living. Another answer: we (that is the we that make up society) are getting what we ask for. We want lower priced goods so we shop at Walmart and Home Depot. We want immediate answers and solutions at no added cost so Dell has a low wage earner in India answer our questions, 24 hours per day and 7 days per week.  [Industry Week forum]

Transparent transistor> transparent IC> car windshield displays. Step one happened as Oregon State University electronics engineer John Wager has already produced the first one  [PC Mag, Aug 06] First, science fiction predicts the applications; then the real word takes over with people actually investing money in new apps when the fiction becomes true science.

Let's Have More Threats. An anonymous reader writes "The Denver Channel 7 News reports that federal air marshals are operating under a quota for reporting a minimum number of suspicious travelers which is resulting in innocent people being placed on a secret government watch list. From the article: 'These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR.'"  [slashdot.org, Jul 25]  In the security world, more threat means more business and more budget. It was often observed that the mission of the Defense Intelligence Agency was to report a threat large enough to justify a large DOD budget.

Rents are rising. Of nearly 5M square feet of lab space built in the Kendall Square biotech hub, only 5% is available for [direct] lease ... Two years ago, the overall lab vacancy rate in Kendall Square was 26%. [Jeffrey Krasner, Boston Globe, Jul 24]

"Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have isolated a single-crystal film of semiconductor from the substrate on which it is built. Then they transferred this very thin film -- 200 nanometers thick -- on plastic. Both sides of the film can host active components and several layers can be stacked, opening the way to very powerful 3-D flexible computer chips. Besides computer chips, this technique could be used for solar cells, smart cards, RFID tags or active-matrix flat panel displays."  [slashdot.org, Jul 24]

Justice Grinds Slowly. A company that provides cellular phone billing services reached an $87M settlement of a patent infringement case  .. Freedom Wireless Inc., a small, private (Phoenix AZ) firm sued in 2000 over its 1994 patents that allows customers making prepaid calls to avoid dialing identification codes or calling toll-free numbers. [Mark Jewell, AP, Jul22]   Freedom did not need SBIR to develop its technology.

Where Are the Inventors? small-time inventors remain a potent force -- consistently accounting for about 15% of all U.S. patents in recent years What is changing: their ZIP Codes .. Adam B. Jaffe, the dean of arts and sciences at Brandeis University, studied patents to find out how often inventions in the same metropolitan area cite one another. The answer: up to 25% in some cases. ... the apparent leader in percent increases in numbers - Bloomfield Hills, Mich.  "The automotive industry stinks but the brains are still here."  Still, the clear champ is the Silicon Valley with seven of the top ten cities that total many times the third city Austin TX. [Reed Albergotti, Wall Street Journal, Jul 22]

Teamwork v. Innovation.  Emphasizing teamwork may be popular in workplaces across America, but a new study says companies that focus more on individual achievement produce more innovative ideas. [Ellen Wulfhorst, Reuters, Jul 20] Teamwork is sine qua non for drill teams, but it does suppress individuality and new ways of doing things. After all, Some of the most innovative people can be people who don't get along very well in social situations and may be people you don't want to spend a lot of time with. said Barry Staw, the study's co-author at Berkeley.

"The Globe and Mail reports that a Calgary biotech firm has developed a process to turn genetically modified safflower oil into human insulin in commercial quantities. The process reduces capital costs by 70% and product cost by 40%. "SemBioSys says it can make more than one kilogram of human insulin per acre of safflower production. That amount could treat 2,500 diabetic patients for one year and, in turn, meet the world's total projected insulin demand in 2010 with less than 16,000 acres of safflower production.""  [slashdot.org, Jul 20]

analyst has eight cabinets filled just with prospectuses for almost every biotech company's initial public offering since 1992. ... Now he is closing shop -- frustrated with the lack of demand for quality independent research and with companies that retaliate against outspoken analysts. ... Wall Street promotes the new new thing, coming up with ever-more imaginative ways to value the profitless entities. Mr. Sturza's files reveal some of the most ridiculous; he singles out a report touting a company's low price-to-employee ratio. ... He tracked executives who moved from one failed company to the next -- "serial destroyers" of wealth, he says. ... "Nobody has to worry that I'm not around anymore," he says. "Just get the prospectus."  [Jesse Eisinger,Wall Street Journal, Jul 18]

Modine Manufacturing has introduced a hydrogen-powered fuel cell as part of a heating and cooling system for heavy-duty diesel trucks. The fuel cell allows truckers to heat and cool their vehicle cabs while the vehicles are parked, .. DOE estimates that a billion gallons of diesel fuel are consumed a year while trucks idle their engines - a leading cause of air pollution, [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Jul 18]

Perhaps the best description I’ve ever seen of how wise people act comes from the amazing folks at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future. ... to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.”  Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of “confirmation bias.”  [Bob Sutton, Work Matters blog, Jul 17]

According to DuBois, customers—that is, device makers—are looking for one-stop shopping for a broad range of state-of-the-art technologies. These demands also bring concerns over IP protection as well as cost considerations. ... Since a [$3B] chip facility needs to produce some 10 thousand wafers a week to be profitable, manufacturers must have enough customers with preexisting orders that can support a "rocket" ramp-up, [eWeek, Jul 14]

Technology managers on the market as Intel cuts 1000 managerial jobs. [Aug 06]

Although only a small percentage of smaller companies hold patents currently in use by their businesses, more than 40% say they have introduced at least one new -- or significantly improved -- product, service, process, or design in the past year. Richard Breeden, Wall Street Journal, Jul 11]

A wave of capacity is set to flood the semiconductor market next year, and it's likely to swamp the same companies that are currently thriving. [Chris Kraeuter, Forbes.com, Jul 10]

Resolving Net Neutrality.  Fortunately, there's a middle ground: We must acknowledge that public networks for everyone can exist alongside premium, private ones, and that these two types of networks can live by different rules. The Center for Democracy & Technology (www.cdt.org), a think tank on tech issues, argues for an approach that preserves the open nature of today's Internet while creating space for premium networks.  [Stephen Wildstrom, Business Week, Jul 17]

Responsible Nanotechnology.  First, that we take effective precautions to forestall a new arms race. Second, that we do what is necessary to prevent a monopoly on the technology by one nation, one bloc of nations, or one multinational corporation. Third, that we seek appropriate ways to share the tremendous benefits of the technology as widely as possible; we should not allow a ‘nano-divide’. Fourth, that we recognize the possibilities for both positive and negative impacts on the environment from molecular manufacturing, and that we adopt sensible global regulations on its use. And fifth, that we understand and take precautions to avert the risk of severe economic disruption, social chaos, and consequent human suffering. [worldchanging.com interview with Center for Responsible Nanotechnology]

St. George is a boomtown; The growth leads the nation; more than two times the national average. [Salt Lake Tribune, Jun 29] Another booming Southwest city where the new homes climb up the nearby mountain slopes. Only one SBIR company - Scientific Toolworks which is partly in Vermont.  ringed by black lava flows, crimson sandstone bluffs and faraway pine-clad mountains. Nearly 70,000 people now call it home (or a second home), more than a few of them Californians attracted by its lung-clearing, mind-relaxing wide-open spaces. [Ken van Vechten, LA Times Travel, Jun 25]

Mountain Top Wealth.  The city with the highest percentage of millionaires?  Los Alamos NM - home of atom bomb scientists with fewer than average opportunities to throw it away. Second, a retirement haven - Naples FL. Fifth, Silicon Valley's San Jose/Sunnyvale. [Business Week, Jul 17]

"To Google" an Official Verb. Webster, Oxford, and Merriam-Webster are recognizing ``google'' as a transitive verb  Their newest additions also include: adware, biodiesel, codec, digicam, google (as a verb), geocaching, hacktivism, mash-up, rewriteable, ringtone, spyware, and texting.  [slashdot.com and San Jose Mercury News, Jul 7]  To the reactionary conservatives: a living language is whatever the natives speak. What matters most in language (including SBIR proposals) is clear and concise.

Power from Waste Electrons. UCLA computer scientist Barham Jalali reports a way to generate several milliwatts of power by collecting stray electrons in a silicon chip that would otherwise have to use more power to get rid of the electrons. [Neil Savage, MIT Tech Review, Jul 6]

Walt Mossberg [Wall Street Journal, Jul 6] says that GreenBorder has developed a product that isolates your browser from the rest of the computer, without impairing your Web browsing.

These visa workers were supposed to supplement the American workforce on a temporary basis, not replace Americans, but that is what has happened, and will accellerate once the cap is raised. ... Nothing but the visa cap stands between the American worker and a life of poverty. Yo brother, says a response This is all about corporations getting cheap labor at any cost! [Betsy, Industry Week forum, Jul 5]

Move The Goalposts Innovation requires flexibility in meeting goals, since early predictions are often little more than educated guesses. Intuit’s Scott Cook even suggests that teams developing new products ignore forecasts in the early days. “For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome,” he says.  [Business Week, Jul 10]

crystalline silicon won't disappear any time soon as the key technology in photovoltaics. By far, it's still the dominant type of solar cell, and its production costs are declining steadily, at a rate of seven to ten percent per year, [Kevin Bullis, MIT Tech Review, Jun 5]

They're Working on the Laser.  They've experimented with a high-power laser in a 747 carcass on the ground, but this isn't a plane that can fly. They've got to put a laser in an actual aircraft that flies. That's currently in development in Wichita, Kan. -- Boeing put out a press release that they put a surrogate laser in the plane, but it turns out that it is very difficult to develop a high-power laser that can actually shoot something down. I don't expect to live long enough to see it work if ever it will. They've been having lots of troubles  [Phillip Coyle interview, Wall Street Journal, Jul 3]

Most [American manufacturers] have enjoyed roaring success of late. Net profits have risen by nearly 9% a year since the recession in 2001 and productivity has been growing even more rapidly than is usual during economic expansions (see chart). The country's various widget-makers, moreover, show no sign of losing their innovative edge. [The Economist, Jul 1]

Nobody really knows if Silicon Valley could be re-created elsewhere, but there are no shortages of locales boasting potential. [ten cities that] have the potential to hone the right combination of ingredients for the next tech epicenter:  Austin, Denver/Boulder, Sacramento, Salt Lake, Raleigh, Portland (OR), Milwaukee, Richmond, Phoenix, Houston.  [eWeek, Jun 28]

tales of America's IT demise now seem more greatly exaggerated. IT execs are raking in more than ever, smaller tech markets are blooming across the country, and the field boasts growth despite a slowing market.  Most promising of all is that the students who have returned to top technology programs are, judging by their summer jobs and internships, doing more impressive and innovative work than ever.  [Deborah Rothnerg, eWeek, Jun 22]

Don't worry about finding a company that can whip up a prototype of your idea. There are dozens to choose from. Your bigger concern should be finding one that does quality work without draining the piggy bank.  [Kelly Spors, Wall Street Journal, Jun 27]

Ninety percent of the country has blazingly fast, 3-megabits-per-second broadband at home, and similarly high-speed wireless connections on the road. The telecom market is fiercely competitive, and broadband service costs the consumer less than $20 a month. [The future is in South Korea, Business 2.0]

much of the hoopla over creativity is a crock. Why? Because we are already up to our eyeballs in it. Make no mistake: Innovation matters. Nothing is more essential for long-term economic growth. But to get more innovation we may want less, not more, creativity. ... HUMANS GENERATE far more suggestions than we could ever possibly pursue.  ...  What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them.[Robin Hansen, Business Week, Jul 3]  

Patent Farming. A rocket scientist, a mathematician, a brain surgeon, and a lawyer walk into a room. It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but at Intellectual Ventures it's something more serious—a business model. ... As the experts spoke, Intellectual Ventures' patent lawyers, many of them with doctorates in science themselves, monitored the highly technical interchange, taking notes, recording the conversation from two microphones hanging from the ceiling, and snapping pictures of whiteboard drawings. ... [Myhrvold's] ambitious goal is to own the next generation of transformative technology in some of the world's fastest-growing industries. [Michael Orey, Business Week, Jul 3]

A Journal of Awful Chemistry. Chemical rections don't always turn out, spawning unanticipated products or fizzling altogether. Although these flops rarely end up in papers, they can be instructive for other researchers attempting to duplicate a synthesis. That's the rationale behind the Chemistry Unpublished Papers Forum ... lets chemists report reactions that unexpectedly faltered or that released surprising products. ... visitors can post their lab woes or join discussions of more than a dozen troublesome reactions, such as copper nanoparticles' failure as catalysts. In the "Fake Chemistry" section, users can identify papers that they think show suspiciously high yields. www.chemunpub.it   [Science Net Watch, Jun 16]

Betting the Company on a new product for a shrinking market is what Richard Aboulafia says Airbus did with the jumbo 380. You may have noticed in domestic US travel more direct flights in smaller planes, like the Embraer 170 (a Brazilian plane). The biggest beneficiary was Boeing when Airbus helped drive Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas out of the market.  One barrier to Airbus's business judgment - government as a shareholder.  A moral: don't let government own part of your company because politicians want to protect present interests (especially voters and contributors).

5 ways to start a company (without quitting your day job)  Use Your Salary as Funding; Turn Common Complaints Into a Business Plan; Make Your Boss a Beta Tester; Take Advantage of Your Company's Reputation; Convert Your Employer Into a Business Partner. [Business2.0, May 06]

LEDs Attack. The Lightship Group got FAA approval for its new A-170 lightship, an enormous blimp that doesn't just say Goodyear or Coca-Cola on the side, but instead flashes their newest commercials, NFL football highlights, movie trailers, or whatever else a company wants to put on its 70-by-30-foot LED screen. [AP, Jun 19]

Where Next Tech Heaven?  eWEEK says:  Seattle, (population 570K, Amazon, RealNetworks, AT&T Wireless, T-Mobile); Atlanta (419K, Cingular, EarthLink, Internet Security Systems); Boston (570K, Akamai Technologies, EMC Corp., CMGI venture capital); Washington (550K, Sprint Nextel, AOL, Computer Sciences Corporation, the government); Dallas (1210K,Aspen Communications, CompUSA, Electronic Data Systems, Kinkos); Philadelphia (1470K, Unisys, SAP America, Verizon); Chicago (2860K,  Accenture, US Robotics, Telephone and Data Systems); Orlando (205K, Lockheed Martin, Symantec, Electronic Arts); LA (3840K, DirecTV, Belkin, Univision, Memorex); Charlotte (650K, SPX Corporation, Time Warner Cable, Bank of America). said entrpreneur Paul Graham, you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. .., because they're the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move. What could local governments do? Help create a climate for nerds, don't bother trying to pick winners with public capital. 

Job growth in the nation's information technology industry has been relatively weak, according to a new report. From March 2004, about two months before the industry began to recover, to February 2006, the high-tech sector has added about 88,600 jobs — fewer than one-quarter of the roughly 400,000 jobs lost during the three previous years, the report said. [AP, Jun 19]

50 By Sea.  On the 50th anniversary of container shipping, you could read Marc Levinson's  history of the innovation: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

"University of California professor Shuji Nakamura, the japanese inventor of the bright green, white and blue GaN LEDs and a blue laser, has been awarded the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize. While blue LEDs are considered cool and thus needful things by most nerds, Nakamura adapted his blue LEDs to make a blue laser in the mid 90s. The next generatorage formats, HD-DVD and BluRay, are of course both based on blue laser. Also, his white LEDS need far less energy than normal incandescent lamps and can thus provide plenty of opportunity for energy-saving in the industrialized world. But probably the most significant future application for Shuji Nakamura's invention comes in the form of sterilizing drinking water, since the the water purification process can be made cheaper and more efficient with the use of ultraviolet LEDs. This can improve the lives and health people in developing countries." [slashdot.org, Jun 16]

Last year human beings produced more transistors (and at a lower cost), than they did grains of rice. [Business Week IN, Jun 06]

New England recipients for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of The Year 2006 Award, .. included seven technology companies. Recipients included: James D. Foy, president and chief executive of Aspect Software Kuznetsov, DataPower Technology Inc.; Valentin Gapontsev, chief executive of IPG Photonics Corp.; Jeffrey Glass, chief executive of m-Qube Inc.; Greg Schmergel, president and chief executive of Nantero Inc.; Christoph Westphal, vice chairman and chief executive of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals.  Since none got any SBIR, is SBIR really needed for entrepreneurs? Or does it mean that government is the wrong vehicle for growing entrepreneurs? Oh sure, every comnpany getting a Phase 2 sees itself as entrepreneurial, and most of them look for all the government money they can get.

The valley is still not in the mode of ramping up for initial public offerings like it did during the go-go days of the late 1990s. But a new model is taking hold: Small companies develop technology and then sell themselves to larger companies. In recent months, Google and Yahoo have acquired several startups with so-called Web 2.0 technology [Dan Fost, SF Chornicle, Jun 15]

Good news for some entrepreneurs:  The story doesn't say Gates is leaving Microsoft, but that he'll be spending more time at his non-profit foundation. We think this may be more significant that it sounds. Looks like he's exiting the strategy portion of the business. You know the lore: Once a company's founder leaves, so does the fiery passion that pushes it along. This could leave Microsoft adrift, good for all the little guys down here in Silicon Valley. [siliconbeat.com, Jun 16]

Over the last decade the number of nonprofits has grown by 68 percent and now includes some 837,000 organizations, according to a recent report by the National Council of Nonprofit Associations. Based on IRS data, the council estimated that these groups had combined assets of $1.76 trillion in 2003 -- which would make the "nonprofit economy the sixth largest in the world, larger than the economies of Brazil, Russia, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea."  So if you have any thoughts on how technolgy can make those assets go further, join in the discussion that Lamb is leading on Social Edge, a program backed by former eBay president Jeff Skoll.  [The (SF) Tech Chronicles, Jun 15] A future in coal? Just extrapolate (all the politicians do it): May was a record month for coal shipped from Wyoming's Southern Powder River Basin, says Union Pacific RR. But every ton of coal burned completely yields nearly four tons of carbon dioxide.

Less than a quarter of the US technology jobs lost earlier this decade have been recovered in the past two years, according to a labor union's study.Technology workers lost 395,600 jobs in the three years ended in March 2004, according to the report released yesterday by the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  [Bloomberg News, Jun 15]

Goldman Sachs upgraded a handful of semiconductor stocks, saying that while prices and fundamentals are likely to be choppy for a while, it believes long-term investors can now overweight selected stocks.[WSJ, Jun 15]

Think Niagara for Technology. With both Internet services and power costs soaring, big technology companies are scouring the nation to secure enough of the cheap electricity that is vital to their growth. ... many companies have recently turned to eastern Washington. Prices there are among the lowest in the nation. [Kevin Delaney and Rebecca Smith, WSJ, Jun 13]

Let the Water Flow. Lawrence Livermore NL reports a breakthrough in desalination that boosts the flow rate 10,000 times with sheets of carbon atoms rolled so tightly that only seven water molecules. The chemical engineers recoil at the revolutionary idea that smaller pathways mean faster flow, says LLNL chemical engineer Jason Holt whose findings appeared in the 19 May issue of Science. [story MIT Tech Review, Jun 12]

The company still has 3,000 bloggers left, but Microsoft has apparently figured out how to keep them safely within the rules, blogging about the wonders of product renaming and coming features instead of anything that might challenge the party line. There's a lesson here for those starry-eyed adolescents who think the power of the blog is going to triumph over the power of the boardroom."  [SJasperson, slashdot.org, Jun 12]

Look to the Roof.  the CIO informed her CEO that in order to support more analytics and trading activity - the computational heart of their business - they needed to build a bigger computing grid. For which they needed more space (which isn't cheap in midtown Manhattan), and more power -... The more power we bring in, the more cooling we need. The more cooling we need, the more power again. But the thing that's really holding us back is even with more budget for space, power and cooling, we need backup power in the event of an outage, and the generator necessary to provide backup power of this magnitude is the size of a locomotive, and the only place we could possibly put that is on the roof, and look, we DON'T HAVE ANY MORE ROOM!"  [Jonathan Schwartz's blog, Jun 10 http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan ]   Schwartz is one of the few Fortune 500 chief executives that's blogging. And as part of his commitment to transparency, and his belief in the power of word-of-mouth, he says Sun will host product reviews written by users on its online store  [Maura Welch, Boston Globe, Jun 12]

Sounds Good. BACK in 1964 an editorial in Wireless World lamented the apparent uselessness of a new technology called “light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation”. The article agreed heartily with Sir Robert Cockburn, a noted physicist, who had recently suggested that the applications of lasers, as a newly coined acronym for the devices dubbed them, were “somewhat limited”.  Now comes the saser, by a Ukranian and and Englishman, the sonic equivalent of lasers with no such doubt on applications. [The Economist, Jun 10 http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_SDPPJRN  ]

Intel in crisis.  The aging computer chip maker has spent billions of dollars on ill-fated forays in both computing and communications and allowed a once-weak competitor to catch up. Its predicament is so serious that it is cutting $1 billion in costs and may sell unprofitable parts of its business. [San Jose Mercury News, Jun 11] Market saturation for tip-top processors and no clear competitive advantage in the also products. Can or should they clone Andy Grove?

Getting from Innovation to an Airplane - Details Matter.  Boeing's vital 787 jet program has suffered a setback in development of the pioneering manufacturing process used to build the carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic air-frame. Boeing recently had to scrap one of the large barrel-shaped fuselage sections of the new airplane made in its East Marginal Way research center after discovering defects had formed inside the carbon-plastic skin. [Dominic Gates, Seattle Times, Jun 9 ]

A Costly Gift  Iphtashu Fitz writes "What's the easiest way to hack into the computer systems of a credit union? It turns out that all you need to do is copy a virus/trojan onto USB drives and scatter them around the front door of the credit union. This was how a recent security audit was performed at a credit union where the employees had actually been tipped off to the audit. Security experts collected 20 old USB thumb drives and filled them with images and other data along with a trojan that would collect sensitive information and e-mail it back to them. Early one morning they planted the thumb drives around the entrances to the credit union as well as other public places where the employees were known to congregate. In very little time 15 of the 20 USB drives were plugged into company computer systems and started e-mailing usernames, passwords, etc. back to the auditors."  [slashdot.org, Jun 9] 

Maybe a new R&D investor.  A group of pension fund leaders and investors accused Exxon Mobil of fighting efforts to limit global warming and failing to invest in alternative energy.  Board member Michael Boskin, a Stanford professor, said the company has declined to invest in current alternative energy but supports research into new technologies. [Houston Chronicle, Jun 8]  Exxon has huge money but its recently retired CEO Lee Raymond consistently said it is an oil company, just an oil company. Michael Boskin is a noted conservative economist and Bush 41's chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

IBM wants lots of technical employees for its coming $6B investment - In India. As US companies move their operations a out of the US, the opportunities for SBIR type companies shrink. A perfect opening for the SBIR advocates to shout that the US must have more SBIR, even though the advocates can produce no hard evidence that the billions spent so far have been anything more than a jobs program. So, practice up on shrieking "fair share".

Recent economic research on the spillover effects of R&D spending suggests that one of the important factors that can help increase the number of new firm births in the future will be the amount that is spent on research and development, according to Ken McCarthy (Center for Innovative Entrepreneurship) What we're seeing is an economy that is constantly reinventing itself. It's an economy where it is vital to continue developing new products, new innovations, and, from that, new companies and industries. As soon as a new company is formed and gets out there in the real world, it comes under competitive pressure. These days that pressure can come from anywhere -- it can come from other companies in the U.S., but it can also just as easily come from companies abroad. [Reuters, Jun 4]

"if I had listened to my customers, I would have given them a faster horse.” -- Henry Ford

Of 1,091 Canadian inventions surveyed in 2003 by Thomas Astebro, of the University of Toronto, only 75 reached the market. Six of these earned returns above 1,400%, but 45 lost money. A rational manager will balk at such odds. But the entrepreneur answers to his own dreams and demons. [The Economist, Mar 11]

4. Can the organization survive the inevitable culture change from a technical excellence culture to a “making the numbers” culture?  One of many questions asked by Fred Patterson of companies thinking they can convert an SBIR technical success into a stream of profits.  Fred, The Commercialization Funding Coach, wangled space in MDA's Tech Applications quarterly http://www.mda.mil/mdalink/pdf/spring_06.pdf  to show how hard it is to translate prototypes into profits.  You can also read Fred's  Prepare to Fund Your Technology Development http://www.abdmag.com/Articles/article-0106-010.htm in Austin Business District

Features, Love our Features. The attractively simple thesis of The Change Function is that most technology ventures fail because technologists manage them. Technologists think their business is the creation of cool technologies loaded with wonderful new features. [Jason Pontin, MIT Tech Review, reviewing Pip Coburn's new book, M/J06]  http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16816&ch=infotech

Creativity Pays. ... The innovators achieved median profit margin growth of 3.4% a year since 1995, compared with 0.4% for the median Standard & Poor Global 1200 company. [Business Week, Apr 24]  The world's most innovative? Apple, Google, 3M.

NFIB National Small Business Poll on Innovation  The National Small Business Poll is a series of regularly published business survey reports based on data collected from national samples of small business employers. Findings within the most recent poll indicate that 10 percent of all small businesses purposefully innovate or invent with the intention of selling or leasing the results of their efforts.  http://www.nfib.com/object/IO_28171.html  [SSTI, Jun 1]

Pacific Competition.  Confronted by rising Asian competition and its dependence on foreign oil, Japan is embarking on a visionary plan to become a world innovation leader, Iwao Matsuda, Japan's minister of state for science and technology policy, said during a visit to AAAS.  In an animated and engaging lecture, Matsuda described initiatives that, if successful, would have global impact: gas-free automobiles, technology for monitoring Earth's environment, and medical technology for the detection of microscopic cancers. [Science, May 26]

you only I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They're the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.  Wannabe places all over the country and globe would like to reject Paul Graham's ideas http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html on how to create the chain reaction to their own Silicon Valley.

Big new efficiencies needed. At today's price ethanol is equivalent (given its low energy content) to gasoline costing $4.50. That's before taking taxes and subsidies into account.

Fast rise in a small game. SUNY Albany College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering was ranked the best school in the United States for micro and nanotechnology by Small Times, a trade publication. The ranking is considered a big step in the growth of the school, which was started in 2004 and has just 125 graduate students and 35 faculty members. [Larry Rulison, Albany Times-Union, May 29] Way back, when I was an engineering student in NY, the state had no state university at all.

Make that tree grow to the sky. Intel shareholders want higher, higher, higher. They want the PC world to change back to an incessant drive for faster performance chips in a world where PC users don't need more speed. Failing that, I suppose, the want Intel to work the same magic in an entirely different field where Intel has no particular competitive advantage. For advice, they can look north to Redmond where Microsoft can't make the trees grow to the sky either. When everyone has a PC that already does more than they can handle, few will replace it every two years. One questioner at the company's annual meeting went so far as to suggest that Intel take a page from HP whose results and stock price have improved dramatically since it brought in Mark Hurd to succeed Carly Fiorina as chief executive. [Wall Street Journal, May 18] HP may have gotten the present boost by eating its seed corn. Unfortunately for all those demanding shareholders who want the American dream of instant gratification, not only cannot Intel management change the world, neither can their federal politicians heading into a storm of financial insufficiency. Get real, folks. Intel profits will be stale and your taxes will rise.

Anonymous Cow writes "This week, the editors of TechEBlog have compiled a list of the 'Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future,' from solar powered LEDs to memory LCD screens, it's all there." Urinal gaming stations! How did no one implement this sooner? [slashdot.org, May 27]

Technology stocks have been especially hard hit, with the Dow Jones World Technology Index off 6% for the month [Wall Street Journal, May 30]

Making More Stuff  Gross new orders of metal-cutting and metal-forming machine tools for U.S. consumption up 22.2% for the quarter. [Industry Week, May 17]

Building a Successful Career in Scientific Research: A Guide for Ph.D. Students and Postdocs  In 2000, Phil Dee began sharing his career experiences with fellow scientists in his regular and highly acclaimed Science 's Next Wave column. Now, his invaluable and entertaining advice is available in this compact, warts-and-all guide to getting your science Ph.D. and subsequent postdoctoral employment as a researcher. Copies of the book can be ordered online via the publisher, Cambridge University Press, Which is great for starting a career of begging government for grants in a world where government will no longer be able to fund the ever expanding pile of PhD holders in their favorite hobby.  The braver grads can look into innovative small companies where pay is thin but opportunity great for big payoff from business success of innovations. SBIR was supposed to be a vehicle for supporting such opportunities instead of paying small actors to emulate big science.

Unwelcome Innovations.  Princeton University President Emeritus Harold T. Shapiro, an economist and expert in bioethics .. reminded scientists that advances sometimes cause deep cultural uneasiness and urged constructive public dialogue.
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/0427shapiro.shtml  William Tyndale introduced an innovation; he used the new printing press to print the Bible in English for which he was burned at the stake by the vested religious interests.  http://www.williamtyndale.com/

A tiny biosciences company is developing a promising drug to fight diarrhea, a scourge among babies in the developing world, but it has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies because it grows the experimental drug in rice genetically engineered with a human gene. 

Opinions Galore. Every day, more than 70,000 new blogs are born on the Internet. While the vast majority are used as online diaries, an increasing number of businesses see them as tools to reach customers. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/3860769.html

Powered by Waves. ubiquitous sensors could also mean "ubiquitous dead batteries," says Josh Smith, a researcher at Intel Research ... Intel's sensor devices use off-the-shelf components: an antenna to send and receive data and collect energy from a reader, and a sensor-containing microcontroller -- a tiny computer that requires only a couple hundred microwatts of power to collect and process data. The antenna harvests this power directly from the radio waves emitted by an RFID reader. [Kate Green, MIT Tech Review, May 15]

Microsoft is nervous because the Google guys have bigger things in mind than search. And they have the same bug that got Bill Gates and Paul Allen started back in 1975: Enchanted by the power and potential of computer systems, they want to make it easier and cheaper for everyone to use them. [Brier Dudley, Seattle Times, May 15 ]

Buffett on private equity firms: "They invariably auction the business and are looking for strategic buyers," he said, adding that "a strategic buyer is just someone who pays too much." [Brier Dudley's blog,

industrial funding for U.S. academic research is on the skids - the first-ever 3-year slide for a funding source since NSF began compiling such data in the 1950s. [Science, May 5] Why? Academia wants to keep more of the intellectual property. Universities want other people to pay for their research while the university and the professors reap a financial benefit from the results. They should remember the basic rule of investing that whoever takes the financial risks gets the rewards.  Why else would they pay professors (or SBIR companies) to do their hobbies? Now if the professor were to contribute financially by taking only a nominal salary .... SBIR offers the company a better deal: the performers get full pay and the commercial rights while the government gets only a limited right to use it for government purposes.

When IBM Corp.'s new Blue Gene supercomputers are up and running later this year at Rensselaer Technology Park, researchers throughout the Capital Region will have a powerful new tool to use. "Magical research will flow from this," predicted Tim Lance, president and chairman of the New York State Education and Research Network, ... [RPI] announced creation of the $100M Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations. ... the most powerful university supercomputing center on the planet, RPI officials said. [Eric Anderson, Albany Times-Union, May 12 ] The $100M will come from a third each from IBM, the state, and RPI. In the mid-1950s as a sophomore features writer for the student newspaper, I wrote a piece on the new thing in an obscure building - a computer.

German software giant SAP is expected to announce soon a $100 million venture capital fund to promote its NetWeaver software, according to industry sources.  SAP is creating the NetWeaver Fund to finance start-up companies that will create products that use NetWeaver software. NetWeaver is used to develop corporate Web applications. [Therese Poletti and Matt Marshall, San Jose Mercury News, May 13]

Fluorine Good .. and Bad. Teflon and Freon became household names because they do their jobs very well. But fluorine is just too active for safe life outside its container. The impact has been most acute in automotive applications, where refrigerants often leak out. Indeed, by 2010, such leakage will contribute more than 4 percent of the total climate change impact from motor vehicles. Add in the extra fuel consumption to run the AC, and AC's share rises to 7 percent. [Peter Fairly, "Automotive AC Makers Are Sweating;, MIT Tech Review, May 8] Europe and California are banning R-134 refrigerant and looking to CO2 as a replacement. CO2 is at least in long supply and harmless to people (but not to the climate).

"In Switzerland, two teams are vying to be the first to circle the globe in a solar powered vehicle--one team in a boat, the other in an airplane. The boat, a two person trimaran, is the brainchild of PlanetSolar, who hopes to circumnavigate the world In 80 days. Solar Impulse is fielding the single-pilot plane, which will be capable of taking off under its own power and flying all night. Both groups hope to bring greater attention to solar power, which they believe is more appropriate for alternative transportation than for automobiles." [slashdot.org, May 13]

The Indus Entrepreneurs' annual meeting, a hyper-networking event that has grown into a gathering of the global tech elite, ... The 13th annual TiEcon, whose theme was ``disruption and convergence,'' drew nearly 4,000 conventiongoers and numerous heavyweight speakers. In addition to Dean and Schwarzenegger, the keynote speaking lineup included Doerr and Shashi Tharoor, United Nations under-secretary-general. ...  ``It's like Woodstock for techies,'' said Bobby Sharma, co-founder of start-up Realchase.com, an apartment finder search engine.  [John Boudreau, San Jose Mercury News, May 13 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/14571689.htm ]

It Feels Like 1998 All Over Again. Signs of a new bubble in Silicon Valley ... San Francisco's South of Market district, a barren wasteland after the dot-com bust, is once again bustling with startups, bars, and restaurants. ...  The lure of instant wealth drove the development of industries from disk-drive manufacturing to computer gaming. "Silicon Valley needs champagne bubbles all the time to be percolating up for the whole system to work," says James F. Fulton Jr., an attorney at Cooley Godward. [Business Week, May 22 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_21/b3985051.htm ]  some Valley folk detect hints of the good old bubble days in two imminent IPOs. Vonage, an internet-based phone company, last week predicted it could raise $493m, nearly double what it predicted in February when it filed to go public. ... Riverbed Technology, a computer-networking company, is initially hoping to raise nearly $75m. Both firms are loss-making.   [The Economist, May 11]  Will SBIR also drive innovation into economic froth? Not as long as SBIR allows present federal agents to spread the fuel to "scientific and technical merit" projects with no effective criteria for return on investment.

Fire Needs Fuel.  an economic rebound has sent corporate profits to an 11th consecutive quarter of double-digit gains, the longest streak since at least the 1950s ... Unlike the great 1990s bull market, which was sustained by a wave of new technology, this one has the feel of an old-fashioned economic boom, the type investors saw in the 1950s and 1960s. [ES Browning, Wall Street Journal, May 14]

The Tantalizing Tech Sector These companies are looking to commercialize exciting technology. But remember -- the risks ... Five for the Money presents some companies marketing or using exciting technologies:   A former defense contractor, Maxwell Technologies has reinvented itself with ultracapacitors, devices capable of recharging quickly and producing short but powerful bursts of energy. Evergreen Solar is a strong-performing stock in the increasingly crowded solar-energy sector.  Genomic Health markets a test for determining breast-cancer patients' chance of recurrence, a factor that can help physicians determine if a patient should undergo chemotherapy to beat the disease or if a treatment with fewer side effects will suffice.  Pharmaceutical-enhancement outfit Depomed sells versions of existing medications that expand to about the size of a nickel after they are swallowed. [Alex Halperin, Business Week, May 8]

Michael Dell joined the push for getting governments to think more about digital access.  He talked about how the IT is everywhere and the PC market has tripled in the past 10 years, how proliferation was causing technology to move faster, and how IT has become a primary driver of economic growth.  He sited a study that said that 27% of the GDP growth in the big industrial economies between 1995 and 2003 was caused by IT investment. [Michael Miller, Forward Thinking blog, May 4, http://blog.pcmag.com/blogs/miller/default.aspx ]

Yes, we'll have no bananas.  While diseases stalk, monoculture efficiency bites back.  Virtually all bananas traded internationally are of a single variety, the Cavendish, the genetic roots of which lie in India.  [techblog, Houston Chronicle blog, May 14] Other big cash crops - corn - also have a perilous dependency on one or few strains.

Will the Boomers Sell Out the Stock Market? Michael Milken says no.  hugely optimistic, mainly because he thinks that many boomers will live far longer than is expected today .. average life expectancy could eventually reach 120 years. ... working for longer will become easier thanks to technological innovation, such as using the internet from home. That will increase wealth, fuelling demand for assets. ... Daffy and against common sense? But Milken's greatest achievements, from creating the high-yield debt market to beating cancer, have been the result of his refusal to accept conventional wisdom. [The Economist, May 11]

Release a product before it's ready to market: When you have spent so much time and money creating your new widget, it's bound to be perfect. There's no need to miss the current selling season just for the sake of extensive field testing; the widget worked just fine in the lab. Unlike your competitors' problem-plagued new products, you are confident this new design is flawless, so it's time to start generating sales and realizing profits. Even if a few minor issues do develop, most customers won't complain. For those who do, you'll resolve the complaints through warranty repairs. One of the sure-fire ways to set your business on rocky road to failure [Arizona Business Gazette, May 11 http://www.azcentral.com/abgnews/articles/0511abg-clark0511.html ]

"The rich get richer, the shareholder is valued more than the employee, jobs are eliminated in the name of bottom-line efficiency (remember when they called firing people 'right-sizing'?) and the gulf between the rich and the working class grows wider every year. You see this libertarian ethos everywhere, but nowhere more clearly than in the technology sector, where the number of union jobs can be counted on one hand. Tech is the Wild West as far as the job market goes and the robber barons on top of the pile aim to keep it that way. They'll offshore your job to save a few bucks or lay you off at the first sign of a slump, but they're the first to scream, 'You're stifling innovation!' at any attempt to control the industry or provide job security for the people who do the actual work."  [Tony Long, Wired News, May 11 http://www.wired.com/news/columns/theluddite/0,70858-0.html ]

Albuquerque has suddenly turned business-friendly--attracting new enterprises and creating highly skilled and well-paid manufacturing jobs. Says Forbes (May 22) which ranks it the best business friendly city, having resurrected itself from  Little of the (DOD) weapons technology filtered out into commercial use to create jobs. Crime rates were rising faster than personal incomes; thousands of people were hightailing it out of Albuquerque. In the 1970s Bill Gates and Paul Allen lived there and hatched their software company. Of the top 10, the northernmost is Indianapolis. Big factor: ABQ ranked best in cost of doing business.

Sun Down. ... McNealy's accomplishments, when he was riding high, included prescient visions of Internet computing backed up with hardy systems that Wall Street banks and dot-coms craved. His mistake was sticking with Sun's proprietary Solaris operating system and Sparc microprocessors long after customers started shifting to free Linux software on inexpensive chips from Intel  and Advanced Micro Devices . He derided (and obsessed over) rival Microsoft when the real threat was a cheap clone of Sun itself. [Daniel Lyons, Forbes, May 22]

Data Centers Go Solar, says Donna Fuscaldo [Wall Street Journal, May 11] as the cost of electricity rises with the price of oil. One interesting effect is rising demand for lower power chips. In an effort to address that issue, the nation's computer companies are developing energy-efficient products. Those products are coming in the form of low-powered semiconductors, more-efficient servers and better power supplies. In some cases companies are teaming up, a rarity in the highly competitive technology market. 

Tech industry growth is strong in Utah. Fueled by venture capital: The state ranked first in the west with a 8.5 percent increase in companies established in '04  [Salt Lake Tribune, May 11 http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_3808258 ] Looking for a majoritarian family-friendly place with an air of moral certainty?

"Intel is not going to redesign the Pentium tomorrow because of it,"  said Steve Ohr, an analyst at Gartner about British engineer John Wood'z , clocking innovation that sends electrical signals around square loop structures while most of the electrical power is recycled. [Don Clark, Wall Street Journal, May 8]

Two years ago, executives at Subrogation Partners LLC of Connecticut outsourced some paperwork-processing tasks to India. That is hardly unusual. But Subrogation's size is: It has about 90 employees [Erin White, Wall Street Journal, May 8]

The [Washington DC] region has the largest science and engineering workforce in the country, with more than 100,000 employees more than the second-leading city. [Washington Post, May 7]

According to one calculation, 3,000 of the technology firms created in Silicon Valley since the 1980s—more than 30% of the total—were founded by entrepreneurs with Indian or Chinese roots. [The Economist, May 4]

An anonymous reader writes in to tell us about "A funny article about gadgets from the 70's & 80's compared to gadgets of today. Amazing that you can fit 25,000 5 1/4 diskettes on one 8GB compact flash, and phones weighed 11.5 pounds! " [slashdot.org, May 7]

Hydrogen Reality Check.   Fuel cells won't significantly dent fuel consumption for 50 years -- we need to look elsewhere. ... On the other hand, advanced internal combustion engines, which will likely be ready for the marketplace much sooner, and will require less retooling and so can spread through the fleet faster, could have a significant impact in about 20 years. Meanwhile, advanced, clean diesel engines and hybrids could both reach significant levels in about 30 years.  [MIT Tech Review, May 5] While politicians blather and ignore economic realities,  people will keep driving unless and until the fuel cost skyrockets far above the micro electionyear crisis of $3/gal. Europeans survive nicely on $6/gal.

Stages of usability Usability is a measure of how easy software user interfaces are to use. To chart how mature your tech company is as far as usability is concerned, Jakob Nielsen has created stages -- sort of like the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of grief. Stage 1: The tech guys are in charge. Their philosophy is ''A good user is a dead user." Stage 2: The design guys take charge and ''use their gut." Stage 3: Someone in marketing starts a skunkworks usability project and is widely derided by the tech and design guys. Stage 4 is where most companies never get: a fully funded usability testing budget to make sure people can use their products effectively. [Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox  www.useit.com/alertbox/ ]

"50 years ago U.S. Patent No. 3,167,440 was granted to Noah McVicker and Joseph McVicker for a "plastic modeling composition", (which was originally intended to be a wallpaper cleaner) now called Play-Doh. Little did they know that they had created the substance of childhood memories as well as many a childhood meal, unfortunately. Play-Doh persists as one of the most well known and popular children's "toys". As you attempt to clean your children's Play-Doh out of the carpet, the car, and the bathtub; take a look back with us at how it all got started."  [tanagra writes,  slashdot.org, May 4]

Tech Entrepreneurs. Ant writes "Thieves are using laptops/notebooks to steal the most expensive luxury cars. Many of these cars have completely keyless ignitions and door locks, meaning it can all be done wirelessly. Thieves often follow a car until it gets left in a quiet area, and they can steal it in about 20 minutes..."  [slashdot.org, May 4]

Profit or Perish. many universities start to treat their professors more like employees of a business. ... universities are increasingly demanding accountability, and refusing to coddle scholars who don't pull their weight in the competition to secure grant money  [Bernard Wysocki Jr., Wall Street Journal, May 4 ]  Should the federal agencies do the same for serial SBIR winners?

Beware the Journal. Virtually every major scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings that are later discredited. ... peer review does not eliminate mediocre and inferior papers and has never passed the very test for which it is used. Studies have found that journals publish findings based on sloppy statistics. If peer review were a drug, it would never be marketed, say critics, including journal editors.  [Lawrence Altman, New York Times, May 2  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/health/02docs.html?8dpc ]

Petroski's Maxims.  Systems that require error-free performance are doomed to failure. ... Devices can be made foolproof, but not damn-fool-proof. (An old Army maxim: give a GI an anvil and he will find a way to break it') ...  Computer simulations and other methods of predicting whether components will fail are themselves vulnerable to failure. ... Today's successful design is tomorrow's failure   [New York Times, May 2 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/science/02prof.html?8dpc ]

The Web as as a Public Utility. The plan to create a wireless Internet network covering all of Silicon Valley just took an important step on the path from dream to reality. Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network, the coalition of business, non-profit and government leaders driving the project, unveiled a request for proposals Friday - [San Jose Mercury News, May 1]  The downside of public utilities: a lot less incentive for innovation. But it would break the present telco monopolies that suppress innovation in land line use.

Productivity - a crucial yardstick of efficiency among competing economies - also catapults Milwaukee into the nation's top tiers. Milwaukee comes in No. 9, the highest-ranking Midwestern city in the sampling, outstripping No. 53 Madison. ...  But Milwaukee plunged to No. 309 when measured in terms of the percentage change in the growth increase in personal income from 2003 to 2004 [John Schmid, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Apr 30  http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=419710 ]

About 500,000 patients in Central Texas have opted into the Indigent Care Collaboration's I-Care database of medical records, which is one of only a handful of such systems nationwide. Of those given a chance to opt in, coordinators said, few have declined. They add about 125,000 patients to the database each year. [Austin Statesman-American, May 1]

"Million Dollar Networking: The Sure Way to Find, Grow and Keep Your Business," by Andrea Nierenberg, Capital Books, $19.95. For all the introverts who say, "I don't have the gift of gab," Nierenberg begs to differ. You need to start this book by reading Chapter 6, "The Introvert's Networking Advantage," first to see how introverts can adapt their style to turn their innate strengths to networking advantages.  [Jim Pawlak, Chicago Tribune, May 1 http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0605010120may01,1,6429106.story?coll=chi-business-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true ]

bright ideas on display Wednesday afternoon at the sixth annual Stanford Cool Products Expo, a one-day show where 37 exhibitors showed off new and future gadgets to about 1,200 attendees ... a better steam iron, or a child's bicycle that won't tip over, or a way to keep screws and nails at hand without holding them between your lips [San Jose Mercury News, Apr 27]  Although incrementalism is good for sales, it is not good for national innovation advances in a competitive world where America depends on selling high tech goods to balance its imports of luxuries and cheap goods.  Unfortunately, the purveyors of SBIR money are incrementalists at heart who want to see useable results in the next couple of years. Someone has to seed disruptive innovation and as interest rates rise, so does the discount rate for private investment.

The World Congress on Information Technology, opens today with a golf tournament. Upscale Austin is booked up for the week with 2,100 expense account delegates from 81 countries, plus a similar number of other visitors travelers. [statesman.com, Apr 29]

Preparing for a Variable Future. Exxon pursues only projects that will turn a profit even in the leanest years  ... will not be seduced into making expensive investments on the assumption that the oil price will remain high  ... oilfields take so long to develop, and are in production for such a long time, [CEO Tillerson] says, that the oil price of the day, whether high or low, “is almost entirely irrelevant” to investment decisions  [The Economist, Apr 27  http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6850162 ] Unlike technology innovators, Exxon has little fear that its one product will become obsolete in the lifetime of its capital investments.

Physics in America is at a crossroads and in crisis, just as humanity stands on the verge of great discoveries about the nature of matter and the universe, An NAS panel says the US needs the International Linear Collider, a junior supercollider, in the US for a cool $500M.[New York Times, Apr 30  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/us/30physics.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ]  Otherwise the Europeans and the Japanese will get all the good physicists who almost all work for a government funded salary to do what they love.

"In his blog, Jonathan Schwartz argues that Scott McNealy is single-handedly responsible for making network computing a reality. His timeline is something like that in 1992, the industry was focused on 'Chicago' (Windows 95), while McNealy bravely went his own way-- 'the network is the computer.' He goes on to claim that 'There is no single individual who has created more jobs around the world than [Scott McNealy]. [...] I'm not talking hundreds or thousands of jobs, I'm talking millions.' I have trouble following his argument: client/server computing and distributed computing were already widely available and widely used in the early 1990s. The defining applications of the emerging Internet were, not Java, but Apache, Netscape, and Perl. Sun's biggest response to Chicago was to attempt to establish Java as the predominant desktop application delivery platform, something they have not succeeded at so far. So, what do you think: is Schwartz right in giving credit to McNealy for creating 'millions' of jobs? Or has Sun been a company on the decline since the mid-1990s, only temporarily buoyed by the Internet bubble?" [Posted by CowboyNeal April 29, http://slashdot.org/ ]

"the bandwidth glut is over." ... At long last, the pipes are starting to fill up. ... Prices across the Atlantic have hovered around $3,400 a month for 155 megabits (million bits) per second of capacity over the past year, instead of the annual 30% or 40% price drops seen in previous years .. Two years ago, wholesale customers typically bought connections that could handle 2.5 gigabits of data a second; now the standard order is four times as large -- 10 gigabits  [Mark Heinzl and Shawn Young, Wall Street Journal, Apr 27]

Technorati, a site that keeps numbers on the blogosphere, reports that as of this month the number of Web logs the site tracks is 35.3 million, and doubling every six months. Technorati claims each day brings 75,000 new blogs. We know something's happening here but I'm not sure we know what it is. [Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal, Apr 21]

It was the book that led to a publishing empire. Now 68, McGovern went from reading about computers to creating the first trade journal for tech types. Computerworld, started in 1967, fast became the industry's bible. And today, McGovern is chairman of Boston-based International Data Group (IDG), a global conglomerate of information technology publications, conferences, and market research. He can also lay claim to creating the first joint venture between a U.S. company and China, the first venture capital fund in China, and the ubiquitous Dummies series of instruction books. Along the way, he amassed a $2 billion fortune   [Catherine Arnst, Business Week, May 1]

Memory chip licenser Rambus shares dropped 17% [Apr 20] after a drop in earnings and rumors about losing its patent-infringement case.

"Everyone keeps calling for the death of small-caps, but we haven't seen it as yet," said Sasha Kostadinov, a portfolio manager and research analyst at Shaker Investments. "Capital doesn't seem to be a constraint for small companies, even though interest rates have gone up."  Small companies are expected to report strong earnings this season, and that is helping their shares, he added. [Wall Street Journal, Apr 20]  The predictions apply only to public companies, not to private life-style and government-R&D-for-pay companies.

Yochai Benkler’s book, The Weath of Networks, is out. This is — by far — the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this. [Larry Lessig, Apr 15 http://lessig.org/blog/ ]  Disclaimer: I have not read it.

Faith in Technology.  British drivers believe their nav-sat system instead of their eyes  submitted by coulsono via ; THERE is a lucrative new sport in the Wiltshire village of Luckington: fishing stranded motorists out of a ford at £25 a time. Since a road closure, dozens of drivers have blithely followed directions from their satellite navigation systems, not realising that the recommended route goes through the ford.  Your hot new technology could suffer a similar fate when you blankly assume how it will be used.

Imagine Your Story. The dearth of well-rounded scientific characters in the arts and popular culture provided one inspiration for LabLit. Jennifer Rohn, a London-based microbiology Ph.D., edits the Web magazine and writes some of the content. The title refers to realistic fiction about scientists at work and to Rohn's hope to shed light on "a largely unknown or obscure world … the culture of science." To illuminate that world, Rohn posts everything from reviews of science-themed plays and novels to a profile of an ex--Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician whose company offers advice to screenwriters. In one "Lab Rats" feature, a postdoc writes up his anecdotal evidence that "My specialty is neuroscience" isn't such a bad a pickup line. The LabLit List tallies movies, books, plays, and TV shows that pass the reality test. It's longer than you might expect and includes works by writers such as Tom Stoppard and Barbara Kingsolver. www.lablit.com  [Science NetWatch, Mar 10] For drama about scientists, see the work of chemist Carl Djerassi, such as "Calculus" and "Oxygen" http://www.djerassi.com/ . 

Intel Retrenchment. Companies don't grow to the sky. Even before Intel's warning, analysts were ratcheting down their first-quarter estimates for the company. After the warning, they pared them down more. [Justin Lahart, Wall Street Journal, Apr 19] Intel's main problem is the growing competitiveness of rival AMD and declining demand for ever higher performance PC CPUs. The downside for outside innovators is less Intel investment in their new stuff.

6+6 =>2 + diesel.  The catalysts work by rearranging the carbon atoms, transforming six-carbon atom hydrocarbons, for example, into two- and ten-carbon atom hydrocarbons. The ten-carbon version can power diesel engines. The first catalyst removes hydrogen atoms, which allows the second catalyst to rearrange the carbon atoms. Then the first catalyst restores the hydrogen, to form fuel.    [Kevin Bullis, MIT Tech Review, Apr 19  http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/wtr_16713,296,p1.html ] Two chemistry profs found a catalyst to convert hexane-like hydrocarbon to diesel fuel in an affordability improvement on a German WW II process. The semi-mysterious catalysis works all kinds of miracles rearranging organics.

Tech Hiring Recovers.  For the first time since the downturn in computer spending sapped thousands of high-tech jobs five years ago, companies have begun adding workers again. Industry trade group AeA says high-tech companies in the United States added 61,000 more jobs than they cut last year. It's the first annual growth since 2000, the peak of the tech boom.  ... Texas holds the nation's second-highest concentration of tech jobs behind California. [Austin American-Statesman, Apr 19]

survival of the richest  I've derived a simple mathematical model to show that loss aversion is really the outcome of a survival instinct. This notion of loss aversion, being more aggressive when you're losing and more conservative when you're winning, is a very, very smart thing to do when you're being hunted on the plains of the African savannah. However, it's not a smart thing to do when you're on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Says MIT's Andrew Lo http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/wtr_16714,295,p1.html

Buffett Doesn't Like Research Companies.  Nevertheless, there is a downside to research. Often, innovative companies are required to do research simply to maintain their competitive position. And if the research dries up, the company suffers. [Richard Gibbons, "Dreadful Stocks to Avoid, http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06041707.htm?source=eptyholnk303100&logvisit=y&npu=y&bounce=y&bounce2=y , Apr 17 (originally published on Oct. 7, 2005)]  Fortunately, lots of VCs do like such companies in their infancy when ROI might be huge. VCs and Buffet invest for different strategies.

Q: How do you go about getting your product in front of large companies? I would like to license my product to pharmaceutical and dog-food companies.   A: Brace yourself for a long, wearisome journey. There are hundreds of thousands of small-product innovators like yourself, but only a lucky few create products that ever get picked up by large companies. And even when they do, most don't make much money. Only about 3% to 6% of patented products by independent inventors ever reach the market,  [Small Talk, Wall Street Journal, Apr 18]

Dig the Dirt. Valleywag, http://valleywag.com/ [Nick Douglas's] online "tech gossip rag," specializes in rumor, innuendo and biting commentary on the latest technology trends and the people behind them.   Gossip does draw eyeballs: Lacking a gossip rag for years, tech insiders flocked to the site early on, but traffic has plunged. Valleywag averages about 16,000 pages viewed a day. In contrast, Gawker gets 318,000 page views, Defamer 260,000 and Wonkette 89,000. Denton's gadget blog, Gizmodo, gets 395,000.  [Chris Gaither, LA Times, Apr 16]

Valleywag does point to a John Markoff  piece[NY Times Apr 14] about government iconoclast TJ Rodgers's solar call business basking in the sun of government subsidy for solar energy The culture that got built is what I call a grant culture. They're all pitching to the U.S. government, looking for funding, said TJ.

it's true that China is striving to catch up in science, hiring Western professors and pressing its researchers to publish in international journals. But there is no straight-line connection between scientific progress and economic advance. What matters is how companies deploy technology. Americans are good at that. [Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, Apr 17] SBIR was originally supposed to exploit that deployment advantage by helping small high tech companies over the deployable threshold.   But the federal agencies scuppered that idea by using SBIR only for their own technology interests.

Eastern Attraction?  Singapore's siren song is growing increasingly more irresistible for scientists, especially stem cell researchers who feel stifled by the U.S. government's restrictions on their field.  Two prominent California scientists are the latest to defect to the Asian city-state ... which wants to become the ''Boston of the east'' -- along with its promise to limit government meddling. ... All have been lured by lucrative pay, state-of-the art labs and -- the clincher -- nearly unlimited government support. [AP, Apr 13]

University of North Carolina researchers found a new material for proton-exchange fuel cell membrane that they say can "dramatically outperform" .. [nearly three times as well] ... the [Nafion]now used.  ... DeSimone says that a clearer idea of potential cost savings from their new material should be available within six months. And he expects that fuel cells using the membrane could be in production within two to three years.  [Kevin Bullis, MIT Tech Review, Apr 5 http://www.technologyreview.com/BizTech/wtr_16665,296,p1.html Which should be good news for the government which has put something approaching $50M into SBIR projects groping for a sufficiently efficient  PEM fuel cell. As a measure of potential demand, East Japan Railway will do a test run of the world's first fuel-cell-powered train, and EJR runs a lot of trains.

MIT Tech Review is still looking for the young [under 35] innovators creating technology that will change the future. The new deadline is April 24.  http://www.technologyreview.com/TR35/

Grab-and-run laptop thefts are on the rise in San Francisco and police say the crooks are stalking Internet cafes. [Tech Web Today, Apr 12]

"We are seeing the hottest technology employment market in the Seattle market in years," Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg said in an email. "Competition for technology workers has increased dramatically over the past six months, with many candidates reporting multiple offers. Large employers such as Microsoft and Google (which is growing its Seattle presence) are now competing aggressively with small startups for tech talent."  [Kristi Heim, Seattle Times, Apr 11]

Here are a few links to the Mercury News' package of stories about the largest 150 Silicon Valley companies. They are doing well, growing both their revenues and profits (free registration), but at the same time they are not necessarily creating more jobs. In fact, job creation is weaker, even if the jobs that do exist are more attractive, because they are high-end and pay really well (free registration). If you click on this link, you will see a whole menu of stories within the package, including our story about the decline in the number of Silicon Valley IPOs, our colleague Mike Langberg's piece on the flaws and unaccountability of legislation that let Silicon Valley companies repatriate billions of dollars of profits last year, and more. See the list of the valley's top dogs here (scroll down). [siliconbeat.com, Apr 11]

Here's an intriguing study about the differences that emerge between CEOs and venture capitalists on company boards. It is a reminder to entrepreneurs to take the selection of their board members more seriously. [siliconbeat.com, Apr 10]

in a fall 2005 survey of government employees, the SBA was considered the worst federal government agency to work at.  [SBIR Insider Newsletter 04-03-06 ]

"EETimes is reporting that ARM Holdings have developed an asynchronous processor based on the ARM9 core. The ARM996HS is thought to be the world's first commercial clockless processor. ARM announced they were developing the processor back in October 2004, along with an unnamed lead customer, which it appears could be Philips. The processor is especially suitable for automotive, medical and deeply embedded control applications. Although reduced power consumption, due to the lack of clock circuitry, is one benefit the clockless design also produces a low electromagnetic signature because of the diffuse nature of digital transitions within the chip. Because clockless processors consume zero dynamic power when there is no activity, they can significantly extend battery life compared with clocked equivalents."  [slashdot.org, Apr 8] Yet another asynchronous scheme. SBIR supported an interesting new version, NULL Convention LogicTM,  in the early 1990s at Theseus (now Theseus Logic, Orlando FL) when it was being born in Minnesota. Some VC money and several years later, the idea says it has six "partners" http://www.theseus.com/partners.htm , and the founders, a Honeywell mathematician and a marketeer, no longer appear on the Executive Team. Theseus and NULL were the kind of innovation that SBIR should be actively rooting around to find - a different idea with a need for short term seed money as a bridge to serious adopters and investors.  Who planted the seed money? Who else? BMDO, with a proviso that by the second half of Phase 2, they had to find third party financing.

Smaller companies are also beginning to share their technology with outside programmers to leverage their competitive positions. ... The new economics of software development poses a fresh challenge to the dominant players in the industry. [John Markoff, NY Times, Apr 5]

More Credit for R&D. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which issues the G.D.P. reports each quarter, is on the case. So are two prominent economists at the Federal Reserve. They all seem to be finding that the current methods for calculating G.D.P. undercount the dollar returns from research and development. [Louis Uchitelle, NY Times, Apr 9 ]

Acs, et al. found that changes in entrepreneurship rates have a positive impact on changes in economic growth, regardless of time (1980s or 1990s). Changes in R&D expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product, however, were found to have a positive impact on changes in economic growth only during the 1990s, not the entire period. which merely demonstrates that those investments, alone, are not sufficient to sustain growth. The presence or addition of tech-based entrepreneurship would appear to be a critical ingredient to transforming knowledge investments into economic growth. [SSTI Weekly Digest, Apr 3] Alert, government SBIR managers, at least the few who care about technology economics: spending will do no economic good (beyond a jobs program) unless the company is entrepreneurial. Which means companies for whom the SBIR is merely a supplement to a market-driven idea.  Growth & Entrepreneurship: An Empirical Assessment is available for purchase ($5) at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=893068

Nanotech, Y'All. A new report by the Southern Growth Policies Board (Southern) reveals the South, while performing about 20 percent of all nanotechnology research activity in the U.S., would benefit greatly through a formalized regional nanotechnology network.  Connecting the Dots: Creating a Southern Nanotechnology Network maps the South's assets in nanotechnology and provides recommendations for establishing the South as a leader in the emerging industry. [SSTI Weekly Digest, Apr 3] I don't quite see how a region can establish itself as an innovation leader when it refuses to tax itself for good schools and promotes religious views of "science". Such a world makes a poor seedbed for intellectual curiosity without which the best and brightest will not come.  A look at the ranking of states in Industrial R&D intensity http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/040306t.htm  gives a clue: the Dixie states live in the bottom half, ranking from 22d to 49th.

A doctor and former programmer has written a good article on common geek health problems. From the article: 'If I were to go and try to run a few miles this weekend, I would not be able to easily do so. [...] However, if you take one of the these college basketball athletes, any of them would be able to run miles without even breathing heavy. However, if you made them sit down and try to learn Java for 12 hours a day, most of them would be asleep at their desk before lunch. The typical geek trains their brain to be heavily focused while multitasking day after day. Is it surprising that this same brain does not do well when forced to isolate down to one task' [slashdot.org, Apr 5]

small companies are able to respond like gazelles to changes in the demands of the marketplace, while their giant competitors plod along like elephants. [The Company Doctor www.saclark.com. reprinted Arizona Business Gazette, Apr 5] One of the premises for SBIR was the market agility of small business in adapting to innovation. Nice idea, but irrelevant, because the federal agencies ignored that advantage in deciding whom to fund. Instead, the money goes mostly to plodding companies who serve the agency's immediate interests. 

Who Reads Such Stuff?  Our marketing department has done extensive research over the last 3 quarters and discovered that our audience is strangely disproportionately skewed towards males. Like, 98.3% males to be precise. To correct this oversight, we have decided to subtly tweak Slashdot's design and content [slashdot.org, Mar 31] Warning: the government has many female SBIR reviewers.

Profitable Manufacturing Isn't Easy. Photronics is shutting down its eight-year-old Austin photomask plant as CEO Michael Luttati said the Austin factory fell short of his goals for profitability and market leadership  [Austin American-Statesman, Apr 1]

If you can believe its numbers, Clean Edge, an alternative energy research group, is showing that an additional $110+ billion market will be created in alternative energies (fuel cells, biofuels, wind power and solar) over the next eight years. That's more than $13.5 billion each year. Where else in the global economy are you going to see such creation? Where else are venture capital firms going to find companies to invest in that can target a $1 billion market? Beats us. That's why Doerr & Co. are beating the drum.  [siliconbeat.com, Mar 30]

Peters and Immelt see previous gains from six sigma disciplines and going lean as great but no longer enough to distinguish one company from another. Only innovation in products, processes and business models offer competitive advantage in Peter's view of the world, one with 3 billion new capitalists.  [John Torinus, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Apr 1] Can and will the USG see the same necessity and foster innovation in SBIR?  Unlikely, on its 20-year track record of self-servicing.

Engineering Ourselves Out of a Job?  Mark Schweitzer and Saeed Zaman argue that productivity has a downside - less labor per unit of output.  But they waffle that It turns out to be largely a coin toss whether high-productivity-growth manufacturers added or lost employment in the 1990s; the same holds true for low-productivity growth manufacturers. to partly explain a decline in the fraction of manufactured goods that come from domestic plants.      http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/com2006/0101.pdf   Whatever the reasons, innovation in productivity has to generate new industries as fast as it eliminates manufacturing labor in existing industries. Sadly, using SBIR to muddle on government projects is contributing nothing to the growth of new industries.  

How do you build the next Yahoo or Google?  Perhaps the best way is to get admitted to the graduate program at Stanford University's department of computer science, or be invited to join the department's faculty.  [Mike Langberg, San Jose Mercury News, Mar 22] Although that sounds like the rich get richer, states that want to become another Silicon Valley should realize that it takes a lot more than a few million dollar pseudo-VC fund subject to annual carping and cutting by the legislature. The SV experience says that to form an industry center takes a world-class technical and business university, large R&D centered firms, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a well-educated labor pool. Few places in the US qualify on even a majority of the counts and politics cannot make it happen with speeches and pork-barrel "investments".

The author William Gibson once said "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." [Richard Watson, Fast Company]

Amazing Innovation. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised “an amazing wave of innovation,” rolling out at least a dozen new products this year, ... But the new apps boast so many tiny buttons and mind-boggling connections among myriad programs that eyes were glazing over at a New York event where Microsoft gave a sneak peek to 500 tech buyers. [Daniel Lyon, Forbes, Apr 10]

I agree with David Cowan's post that the best way to pitch your business is a simple 10 or so page powerpoint.  Check his post out to get some great tips on what to include in the powerpoint.  It's not meant to be an exhaustive plan - just enough to get our attention and get us excited and establish your credibility.  [Raj Kapoor, Mayfield Fund, http://vcinme.typepad.com/, ]

Most of the more than 500 attendees -- up from 325 at the previous [Cleantech Venture Network] conference -- crammed in to hear John Doerr, the well-known venture capitalist at Silicon Valley's Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, give a rousing talk about the urgent need for more energy efficiency. ``We will suffocate, and overrun, and pollute and poison our planet to death,'' he said of the rampant growth in population of major cities -- with eight cities the size of Manhattan being built every year, mainly in China, he noted. [San Jose Mercury News, Mar 25]

Last week, more than 200 biotech employees and executives from 36 states, including Minnesota, descended on Capitol Hill to urge Congress to ... let VC funded bio companies into SBIR.  Don Gerhardt, president and CEO of the industry organization Medical Alley/MNBio, said that the ban  throws out almost all biological and pharmacological development, and a whole bunch of device development. This could be extremely damaging to Minnesota.  [Janet Moore, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mar 26]  Which is why the issue is still alive.  If state alliances are for it, Senators pay attention, and generic business politics has less influence.  Since the issue is suitable for political compromise,  it is likely ultimately to let in VCs under somewhat restricted conditions.

Wired has a nifty list of the 10 best accidental discoveries in the recent history of science.   1. Viagra, 2. LSD. 3. X-rays, 4. Penicillin, 5. Artificial sweeteners, 6. Microwave ovens, 7. Brandy, 8. Vulcanized rubber, 9. Silly Putty, 10. Potato chips  [Sciguy.com, Houston Chronicle, Mar 19]

The CFOs expect to spend 8.4% more on tech in the next 12 months, compared with an expectation in the earlier poll that year-ahead spending would rise by 4.6%.  Another reason for the more optimistic spending plans, thinks Mr. Graham, is that warm weather this winter meant that fears of a severe energy crunch were allayed. He also thinks that companies are running out of opportunities to defer spending on technology by eking out more productivity from the tech equipment they already have. [Justin Lahart. Wall Street Journal, Mar 24]

If you still do not know principal from principle,  http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors [Thanks, Jeff Bond] And ground-zero is not a starting point like square-one. 

Corning says its researchers have developed glass that is free of heavy metals, such as arsenic, antimony and barium ... Mr. Bocko declined to discuss the precise solution Corning has engineered to avoid the use of the heavy metals. "The entire periodic table of elements has been tried" as substitutes, [Wall Street Journal, Mar 21]

It's just H₂.  James Sims of NIST and Stanley Hagstrom of IU announced a new high-precision calculation of the energy required to pull apart the two atoms in a hydrogen molecule (H₂). Accurate to 1 part in 100 billion, these are the most accurate energy values ever obtained for a molecule of that size, 100 times better than the best previous calculated value or the best experimental value. ... The final calculations were run on a 147-processor parallel cluster at NIST over the course of a weekend—on a single processor it would have taken close to six months.  [NIST Tech Beat, Mar 16] 

The number of factories in the U.S. shrank last year to 336,000, down 10% from its 1997 peak, part of a steady decline that shows no sign of reversing. Yet it isn't the shuttering of old plants that is the problem. It is the lack of new ones. "The death rate in manufacturing isn't any higher than it has ever been," says Daniel Meckstroth, chief economist at the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI. "What's really changed is that the creation of new factories has dropped so dramatically."  [Timothy Aeppel, Wall Street Journal, Mar 15] One of the economic arguments for SBIR (beyond the naked political pork grab) was a need to feed young innovators to get more American-made goods. But that won't happen unless the federal agencies emphasize new technologies that will have market appeal if they  succeed technically in development.

And as the debt piles up, The first rule of relying on the kindness of strangers is simple: Try not to tick the strangers off. ... Roubini Global Economics economist Brad Setser notes there is a good reason why foreign governments will keep buying U.S. assets for now. If they stop, the dollar would weaken -- which in turn would send their own currencies down as well, since in many cases their currencies are pegged to the dollar. For now, that means, they will keep feeding the hand that bites them.

Far Future Fusion. capital charges alone would contribute 36 cents to the cost of generating each kilowatt hour. This is far outside the competitive price range. .......  This assessment comes from William Parkins, now-deceased, the former Manhattan Project physicist and later chief scientist at the engineering firm Rockwell International. It appears in this week's issue of Science, under a Policy Forum titled Fusion power: Will it ever come?  [SciGuy blog, Houston Chronicle, Mar 14] http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/] Yet another gloomy assessment of why fusion power is a technology of the distant future.

Take My Money, Please.  The market for high-technology start-up businesses is so intense in Silicon Valley that some companies are being showered with millions of dollars from investors -- without even asking for it.  It is a phenomenon called "pre-emptive financing," ... The median valuation of venture-funded start-up businesses -- the amount investors think these companies are worth -- soared to $15.2 million in 2005, from $10 million two years earlier, according to research firm VentureOne [Rebecca Buckman, Wall Street Journal, Mar 20]

"Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, speculates about the future of science based on a talk he have gave a few weeks ago. Kelly sees recursion as the essence of science and chronicles the introduction of different recursive devices in science; projecting forward from this, he makes several interesting predictions about what the near future may hold in store. Some highlights: there will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years; the new century will be the century of Biology; new ways of knowing will emerge, with 'Wikiscience' leading to perpetually refined papers with thousands of authors."   bj8rn writes  [http://slashdot.org/ ,Mar 19]

FBI Pleas. Computer hacking has evolved from a sport for geeks into a moneymaking tool for organized crime -- a trend so disturbing to FBI Director Robert Mueller that he came .. to ask for help from tech security experts.  It was the first time a director of the FBI had addressed the annual RSA Security Conference, a 15-year-old confab. [San Jose Mercury News, Feb 16]

Focusing.  A new solar energy system devised by entrepreneurs in a Silicon Valley garage could cut the cost of solar power in commercial buildings by at least half, ...  [SolFocus] is the latest start-up among dozens that are turning Silicon Valley into a hub of solar technology. Industry followers say there are 20 to 30 solar start-ups in the area.  [San Jose Mercury News, Feb 16] No sign of SBIR support.

Employees don't care about security .... the employees, by carrying the CD[handed out in public transport]into the company and putting it straight into their PC, had by-passed much of their company's security. Chapman said: "Employees have to recognise they are the first and easiest route into a company's network."  [Will Sturgeon, silicon.com, Feb 15  http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,39156503,00.htm  ]

Applied Materials took a big profit hit, but says things are looking rosy in the industry with improving conditions in the cyclical chip-equipment market.  "We are pretty excited," said Michael Splinter, Applied's CEO, "We think we're in the early stages of an upturn here." [Don Clark, Wall Street Journal, Feb 16] A substantial chunk of public SBIR grads rely on strength in the electronics sector.

Recycling Down. Non-U.S. investors made $56.6 billion in net purchases of U.S. securities during December, the smallest amount in seven months and a reminder of America's dependency on foreign capital to finance its trade deficit. [Wall Street Journal, Feb 16] That's good and bad news for tech exporters: dollar will decline but sales prices for company equity will also decline.

Customer Service Has Limits. Four U.S. high-tech companies on Wednesday found themselves branded collaborators with the Chinese government in suppressing dissent in return for access to a booming Internet market.  [Foster Klug, AP, Feb 15]  Politicians, who don't have to make money, love to pontificate, especially when they can suggest treason.

Think Ahead, The Future of Science: A Conversation with Alan Lightman http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060215_alan_lightman.html    the never-ending existential puzzle

Super Stuff, Super Price. The main hurdle the new technology is likely to face is not technical but economic. "The nanomaterials are probably a hundred or a thousand times more expensive, today, than the materials that we use," says Michael Sund, spokesperson at Maxwell Technologies, San Diego, CA, a maker of commercial ultracapacitors. "The markets that we serve are price-enabled. If our product stored a hundred times more energy, but cost a hundred times more, there might not be any market for it."  [MIT Tech Review, Feb 13  http://www.technologyreview.com/NanoTech/wtr_16326,303,p1.html  ] 

Only 6% of American students pursue engineering, while 12% of European students and 40% of Chinese students do. America may churn out 41% of the world's PhDs, but that's down from 59% 30 years ago. And while, from 1991 to 2002, Chinese R&D spending went up 500%, from $14B to $65 B, U.S. spending went up only 140%, from $177B to $245B.  [Clay Risen, The New Republic, Feb 10  http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060206&s=risen021006 ]

The avalanche of blogging about FON, much of it from people now tied to the four-month-old company, highlights the rising influence of blogs in shaping opinions about tech start-ups, particularly in Silicon Valley. ... One popular blog that often writes positively about young tech companies, TechCrunch, www.techcrunch.com  is run by a lawyer and entrepreneur, Michael Arrington, who occasionally serves as an adviser to companies he has written about. [Rebecca Buckman, Wall Street Journal, Feb 9] Getting blogged about won't do you any harm in SBIR-land because the tech reviewers try to keep up in their fields.

As a representative of America's high-tech CEOs, I realize that in order for our industry to remain the world's leader in innovation, we need a world-class talent pool. As part of the American Competitive Initiative, the president announced a $380M initiative that will increase our young people's capacity in math, science and technology. In this, he called for a new program, Math Now, for elementary and middle school students that promotes research-based practices to prepare our young students for a more challenging curriculum.  [LEZLEE WESTINE, CEO of TechNet, San Jose Mercury News, Feb 3] While quantitative education is great, federal involvement is highly questionable. Think globally, act locally.

Everyone knows the U.S. is well down the road to becoming a knowledge economy, one driven by ideas and innovation. What you may not realize is that the government's decades-old system of number collection and crunching captures investments in equipment, buildings, and software, but for the most part misses the growing portion of GDP that is generating the cool, game-changing ideas.  [Michael Mandel, Business Week, Feb 13 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_07/b3971001.htm ]

Another New Broom Sweeping. Wyeth hired a new R&D head who is trying to apply formulae to R&D to correlate today's dollar input to tomorrow's profitable products. Unfortunately that is an exercise that works mostly only in hindsight. Among his controversial changes: a series of quotas for how many compounds must be churned out by company scientists. For some of them, having to hit a hard-and-fast number seemed anathema to the complex and at times serendipitous drug-development process.  One study of the R&D found that Often, drugs with the lowest chance of paying off ended up with the most resources. Why? Scientists continued to plow money and staff into troubled projects in an attempt to rescue them, [Amy Barrett, Business Week, Feb 6] which should come as no surprise to government folks with commitment to reputations and sunk costs.  Is there any winning formula for organizing drug R&D, or military R&D, when it depends so much on inspiration and continuing scientific advances in understanding how the healthy and unhealthy bodies work? And will cross-team coordination work when Projan is the first to concede that this sort of thinking takes some getting used to. "Scientists love working in silos," he says. "We are all prima donnas."

A Prize $5-20M from XPrize Foundation for the first team to decode the DNA of 100 people in weeks.  News reporters should expect to wait 5-10 years for the claim.

The 14 companies that ... Inc. magazine, features in "Small Giants" demonstrate conclusively that a company can resist the temptation to keep getting bigger and bigger - and wind up better for it. .... concluded they might not be able to live with the kind of changes new investors might demand. They liked the company the way it was   [Cecil Johnson, FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM, Jan 20]

Only recently left for dead on the global battlefield, the San Francisco Bay Area's tech sector appears to have returned fully armed for the combat of the future.  A relentless appetite for consumer electronics gear and services, coupled with the merging of software with both biotech and nanotech products, is at the heart of the new optimism. The potential for new venues for hardware, software and online devices and services has sparked new hopes that the region's tech companies can once again be in the vanguard of progress. [George Avalos, Contra Cosat Times, Jan 20 http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=10688 ]

Microsoft and Oracle are humbled, phone calls become free, and product design trumps functionality. There's much to get excited about in 2006, according to five of Silicon Valley's leading venture capitalists -- as long as we don't all die first from a global outbreak of bird flu. ... Kleiner Perkins last month invested in BioCryst Pharmaceuticals of Birmingham, Ala., which is developing low-cost drugs to prevent and treat any future outbreak. ... Ann Winblad made the least popular prediction in saying corporate-software makers Microsoft, Oracle and SAP would lose their dominance of the $100 billion enterprise applications market during the next 36 months. Emerging competitors will use open source software and online software delivery, Winblad believes, to offer low-cost alternatives.  All the paddles on the stage flashed red, except for Jurvetson, and the audience showed almost no green.   [Mike Langberg, San Jose Mercury News, Jan 14 http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/columnists/mike_langberg/13626114.htm ]

where the most jobs are?  San Jose, Las Vegas, and Washington have the most jobs per 1000, says  Fred Wilson's blog, . http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/01/indeed_job_data.html  .

The fund claims on its Web site — www.freeenterpriseactionfund.com — to be the first mutual fund seeking "long-term capital appreciation through investment and advocacy that promote the American system of free enterprise."  It's hard to find anyone in this country who is against free enterprise. The audience for this young fund is composed of followers of Fox News and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. The fund's advocacy stance boils down to opposing many of the things supported by traditional social-investment funds because issues such as global warming or corporate governance distract business from operating in the best interests of shareholders.  The problem with the fund is not the politics but the execution. [Chuck Jaffe, Seattle Times, Jan 22, 06]

The nation’s oldest technological university, Rensselaer Poly, appointed a new position of Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship. Robert Chernow has a history in entrepreneurship consulting and founded two health service companies. http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=1287

Got Tech Cash. Tech companies in the blue-chip Standard & Poor's 500 index are expected to report a 17% year-over-year gain in fourth-quarter operating earnings, on average, based on Wall Street analysts' estimates compiled by Thomson Financial in Boston. [Tom Petruno, LA Times, Jan 14]

From Darwin to Moore, marketing to innovation, theories abound. Geoffrey Moore has yet another business theory, Dealing With Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, favorably reviewed by Cecil Johnson [Boston Globe, Jan 15 http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/01/15/darwinian_notions_of_corporate_innovation/ ].

Dodging Their Own Gold.  Wind power has become the cheapest electricity source in the capital of Texas, the largest U.S. gas-producing state, ... The Austin City Council voted today to hold a drawing in March to determine which municipal utility customers will be allowed to switch to wind power. More customers are expected to request wind power than the utility has available because the pollution-free option, which used to cost extra, will save a typical resident about $16 a year. [Bloomberg, Feb 06]

Time Marches On. The usefulness of wristwatches - once a staple gift at holidays, birthdays and graduations - could be ticking away as young consumers rely more on their arsenal of electronic devices for the correct time. Cellular telephones, MP3 players and iPods all provide the time of day, along with Internet access, cameras, games and an almost endless choice of other bells and whistles.  [DARRYL ENRIQUEZ, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Dec 23] Got a nice new technology to improve watches? Microelectronics makes you obsolete.

when the United States Patent Office issued its annual rankings of who received the most patents in 2005. IBM claimed the top spot for the 13th consecutive year.  As in previous years, American firms were the minority on the top-ten list ... But  Fewer than 10% of patents have economic worth.  [The Economist, Jan 14] When it comes to SBIR, the government pays little attention to patent position because the contract terms give the government the right to use the technology for government purposes anyway.

As the 70s song said, I Thought Happiness was Lubbock Texas in My Rearview Mirror, markets pundit Scott Burns (Dallas Morning News) finds 2005 subpar with stock and bond returns half their historic averages.

When customer service is in Penang where it's midnight: A 2004 study of more than 600 customers by Managing Offshore Call Center magazine found more than 60% had trouble understanding accents of service reps abroad, more than 40% said the reps couldn't understand them either and half said their problem wasn't resolved.  And they can answer only the most basic questions, like "what is your order number"?

carmakers plan to install automatic radar-based blind-spot checkers so motorists can avoid looking over their shoulders while changing lanes. Even geeks find some of these technologies scary, If you are writing a proposal for your super technology that will be used by retail consumers, don't assume linearity in cause and effect. Especially road driving which involves a lot more than the individual car (or truck) and driver, since the drivers' brains are not connected to each other. And in heavy traffic at highway speeds - growing situation in America - reaction times are short and too many drivers seek a one car advantage.

Worldwatch .., estimating the worldwide “ecological footprint” – the amount of resources needed to support each individual – of the average Chinese person at 1.6 hectares, the average Indian at 0.8 hectares. The average US citizen's ecological footprint is estimated at a whopping 9.7 hectares. ... One in every two tonnes of cement poured today will be in China ...  uses one-quarter of all the world’s steel, eats one-third of the world’s rice, and is the world’s largest importer of tropical timber and second largest importer of oil. [Fred Pearce, newscientist.com, Jan 11]

Cold fusion may never die. Nature.com reports on Rusi Taleyarkhan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is once again claiming to have achieved ultrasound-induced fusion in deuterium-enriched acetone. Other experts are sceptical, but Taleyarkhan is keen to have other scientists check his results."  [science.slashdot.org, Jan 12]

the [solar]industry has been growing so fast that it has had trouble, at times, finding enough silicon to make solar panels. California will collect nearly $3B more in electric utility charges to fund a solar subsidy for 3000 more MW of capacity. [Rebecca Smith, Wall Street Journal, Jan 13]According to projections from Sandia National Laboratories, the energy-saving benefits of LED lighting would be impressive: If the technology can be improved so that half of all lighting is solid-state by 2025, it will cut worldwide power use by 120 gigawatts, saving $100 billion a year and reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 350 megatons a year.  [MIT Tech review, Jan 11 http://www.technologyreview.com/NanoTech/wtr_16135,318,p1.html ]

The next big thing is whatever makes the last big thing usable. -- Blake Ross, co-creator of Firefox.

Red Herring Women account for only 7.5 percent of the 225,000 US angel investors (high-net-worth individuals that back entrepreneurs with cash). But women are banding together to form angel groups like Seraph Capital Forum. Nearly half of privately held firms are 50 percent or more women-owned, but less than 9 percent of venture funding went to women-founded companies in 2004. [Maura Welch, Boston Globe, Jan 9]