October 2012
1 post
…it is exactly at the edge that the need to get better faster has the most urgency. Incumbents at the core - which is the place where most of the resources, especially people and money, are concentrated, and where old ways of thinking and acting still hold sway - have many fewer incentives to figure out the world, or to discover new ways of doing things, or to find new information. ...
December 2011
5 posts
4 tags
Cyber War - The Next Threat To National Security And What To Do About It, by Richard Clarke. Clear, concise, and, as the events of 2011 unfolded, increasingly prescient.
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New cyber security R&D plan adds designed-in security to the list of existing research themes of trustworthy spaces, moving targets, and cyber economic incentives.
Like crazy football moms who bring the drinks and snacks, do chain duty, act as spotters for the coach and scout the competition, venture capitalists are crazy fans on the sideline who hopefully contribute a lot more than money. But at the end of the day, we don’t run the companies. We are active board members who provide guidance and add value through our networks, but the team has to walk...
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Breaking through pictures under glass
This rant on the future of interaction was excellent. Lamented the sense that most “future visions” being touted in concept videos today are neither very futuristic nor visionary. Instead, they just expand on the current ‘pictures under glass’ metaphor for interaction.
Senseq offers a new technology to bring tactile feel front and center, and by doing so breaks...
November 2011
21 posts
2 tags
A ‘Cambrian Explosion’ needs more than just sheer numbers - it needs tremendous diversity and variety. While there are certainly signs of diversification, the more remarkable aspect of today’s environment seems to have more to do with how many startups there are and not how many different startups there are.
From The Cambrian Explosion of Startups:
The sheer number of new...
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Tuned into a cyber security discussion today with Richard Clarke who shared insights into what he calls the CHEW (Crime Hacktivisim Espionage and War) of cyber security. The talk was hosted by Veracode where Mr. Clarke is a recent addition to their Board. Some highlights below:
Increasingly offensive nature of cyberwar
20-30 nations have created offensive cyberwar units
U.S. Cyber Command and...
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Someone needs to declare war on latency. Latency of all kinds, not just network delays but app switching, page rendering, UI element activation, etc. Both Fire and iPad2 have 1GHz dual-core processors and ample RAM. They should be able to achieve a much higher level of responsiveness. I had high hopes for Silk and thought a browser with optimized server-side elements could lead to a lightening...
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Why Start-Ups Fail
futuresagency:
Click image to display full graph. (via Jonathan MacDonald)
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Creating Competitive Advantage Through Data ::...
The fanciest tools and biggest datasets don’t mean much without smart people and a data-driven culture. Wise reminder from @infoarbitrage
informationarbitrage:
As usual, the Defrag Conference has brought together a disparate group of amazing people to discuss innovation, technology, community - and data. I was flattered to ask to deliver a keynote this year, and the topic I chose was near...
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“The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.
Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes...
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“It is about discerning meaning and information from millions—billions—of data...”
– Janet Napolitano, DHS Secretary
“Though it is called the ‘Defense’ Department, if called on to defend the U.S....”
– General Ken Minihan, Managing Director, Paladin Capital Group and former Director of the NSA.
“I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the...”
– Steve Jobs
October 2011
2 posts
Codify looks pretty cool
Been thinking of teaching tools lately and how mobile can be used to improve learning. Codify looks really cool and could be an important step to making development more engaging, tactile and intuitive. And, in the process, open it up to a much larger audience.
Despite advances in languages, IDEs and other tools, coding a mobile app is tough. It requires a good deal of specialized coding...
July 2010
3 posts
Mobile Data: For Carriers, It's What's On The...
MIT TechReview on CDR mining
I’ve often argued that the data inside the carriers’ networks could become as valuable as the data they carry over their networks. To date, carriers have been less aggressive/creative about analyzing and making this data available, mostly, and appropriately, due to privacy concerns. Meanwhile, 3rd parties like Sense Networks, and to a certain extent startups like...
Designing for the Real Life Social Network
“The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.”
Excellent talk by Paul Adams of the UX team at Google about designing for relationships. You can just see the next wave of social networking sites incorporating these multi-identity, multi-group and multi-relationship...
Booz-Allen’s S-1 and an imaginary ATS IPO
Booz-Allen is going public, and since they are in some sense an ATS writ large (very large), their S-1 (BoozAllen-S1) is instructive as a template for an imaginary ATS IPO (I know, I know – ATS is an “important part” of Telcordia…).
In July 2008, BAH was acquired for roughly $2.2 billion by Carlyle who shed the commercial and international businesses and retained the government...
June 2010
8 posts
Foursquare raises $20 million led by Andreessen...
Foursquare finally closes on a funding round after considerable flirting with the likes of Yahoo! and Facebook. Ben Horowitz explains the reasoning here. Foursquare is adding 15,000 users every day and is growing at a faster clip than Twitter did at this stage. I’ve written about the commercial potential of foursquare to add value not only to its users but also to merchants, venue owners and...
Bilski is a non-loss for ATS
The Bilski ruling (08-964) came out yesterday in what was a busy morning for the Supreme Court. In addition to Bilksi, they also ruled to strengthen gun rights and that parts of Sarbanes-Oaxely are unconstitutional.
Bilski was meant to address the issue of business method, or software, patents such as those typified by Amazon’s one-click and others. The patent under issue in Bilski was a...
More lessons from SRI
Another good piece on SRI and their success commercializing DoD/DARPA funded technology (see earlier post).
They are a few lessons ATS can take away from SRI’s approach to commercializing their government-funded technology. Most notably, is that they actually have a process to identify, vet and launch compelling commercial businesses. A few other things are worth noting:
1) They...
Palantir - Organizing unstructured data into a...
Palantir gets the Techcrunch treatment. They’re developing data collection and deep analysis tools to help the government ward off cyber threats, track epidemics and identify fraud — all through “human-driven synergies between humans and computers”…. Worth a read.
Siri, or how to commercialize government work
Fascinating look at the making of Siri, the contextually-aware personalized assistant acquired by Apple a few months ago, with several good takeaways for how ATS can successfully commercialize our government developed technologies. Siri was created at SRI as part of DARPA-funded research into machine learning and AI. SRI took a deliberate approach to evaluating the commercial potential for...
“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else”
– Bill Joy
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man...”
– Theodore Roosevelt
Give’em a fricken innovation bonus…
I came across this today and found it timely given that the AIP structure was released today. So how do you motivate creative, conceptual thinkers? The answer is, differently than you would those whose jobs are more physical and/or algorithmic. According to Dan Pink, the science says that knowledge workers, i.e., those in ATS, want Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. If you’re familiar with the...
May 2010
14 posts
Computer algorithm recognizes sarcasm
The paper is here sarcasmAmazonICWSM10.
The team at Hebrew University first scanned through 66,000 product reviews at Amazon and developed a classifier to group patterns of text into different sarcastic classes. They then seeded their machine-learning algorithm with subset of these samples. Apparently, the algorithm is in on the joke 77% of the time.
This is similar to what I’m hoping to do...
Build. Measure. Learn.
Build. Measure. Learn.
The faster you execute through that cycle, the better. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i65PaoTlVKg&w=560&h=315] Quick hit from Eric Ries on the lean startup. Succinct summary of what Lean is and is not. I’m a fan of this approach and of continually testing to challenge/confirm assumptions. Stop the faith-based initiatives and start doing stuff people...
Foursquare and Starbucks partner to offer rewards...
Told you so. Today Foursquare and Starbucks are offering $1 off a Frappucino. Merchants are becoming increasingly comfortable with this type of model and obviously Foursquare wants to see these types of offers grow.
One of the interesting questions I’ve been looking into is, can automatically integrating foursquare status into credit card transactions add value to consumers and...
iPhone effect on VZW and ATT
Better Disagreements
This post from Paul Graham, Y Combinator founder, is fantastic. I came across it two years ago and it’s stuck with me ever since. Imagine how better things would be if people learned to disagree better.
The thesis is that, online, there’s bound to be more disagreement than agreement because there’s not much to add when you agree with someone. So, if that’s the case, we...
Socializing credit card transactions
Lots of new startups have been getting attention in the credit card and social networking space. Blippy and Swipely being the most prominent. Swipely raised $7.5m and Blippy raised $11m. Both allow users to share their credit card purchases with their social network.
I don’t know how it’ll all shake out, but what is clear is that there is real demand and willingness to socialize...
Does the world make sense, or do we make sense of...
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
This cute and quirky introductory look into the semantic web addresses some of the issues around structuring data, ontologies and reasoning. Features some prominent figures in information science, web, new media and startups, including Clay Shirky who asks the titular question, John Hebeler from BBN, Chris Dixon from Hunch, David Weinberger, a few googlers and...
Peter Lee, TCTO & DARPA's new attitudes
If this is indeed the new attitude at DARPA, color me impressed. Peter Lee was computer science chair at CMU and now runs the Transformational Convergence Technology Office (TCTO) at DARPA. This video gives an excellent sense of the new thinking and attitudes taking hold at DARPA in the wake of Dugan’s appointment and of the vision of the new TCTO.
The mission of the TCTO is to...
Siftables are very cool
A very cool take on using technology, communications and physical devices to develop new ways to engage with information and explore spatial relationships.
This came out of MIT with NSF funding. Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi then formed Sifteo to commercialize it, rasing $1m in A round funding from True Ventures. Today, they announced a $9m B round led by True and Foundry Group.
With this...
InterDigital’s 3rd bucket
IDCC makes their money on patents. In 1Q10 they reported $116M in total revenue, of which $113M came from patent licenses. That’s 97.5% of revenue from licensing. In 2009, they spent $64M on R&D and were issued 187 patents. They have roughly 1200 patents in total.
And they’ve been doing well recently, signing new licensing agreements (including an iPad agreement), shedding poor...
