[Video] Stanford: How the Mob is Killing Innovation in Russia
July 29, 2010
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[Video] China is Next Silicon Valley, Stanford Professor believes
July 29, 2010
Is China really the next frontier?
Is China really the next Silicon Valley? As much as I respect Steve Blank opinions, I don’t think so.
As Blank pointed it out in his magistral lecture yesterday about “The Past, Present, and Future of Silicon Valley” at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford, the problem for all the other Silicon Valley wannabes is first and foremost, the lack of a risk taking culture. “Silicon Valley was done by cowboys, not accountants. And even the investors were cowboys,” Blank adds.
But, in fairness, the lack of risk-taking doesn’t really apply to China, where “capitalism has gone wild.”
But there’s more than just a strong – but controlled – capitalism spirit, an “obscene pile of money,” a successful “manufacturing engine,” and the ability to educate the masses to spur innovation, Silicon Valley-style.
The missing ingredient? I believe Freedom – political, spiritual… – is as important to create this sense of purpose, compassion and community which could nicely be summarized by this Silicon Valley belief that “the sky is the limit.” Not the case in China today.
Leave a Comment » | economy, news, startups | Tagged: AlwaysOn, sas10 | Permalink
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[Video] SecondMarket: An Alternative to Raising Venture Capital Money, Going IPO
July 28, 2010
Leave a Comment » | news, startups, stocks and investing | Tagged: sas10, secondmarket, silbert | Permalink
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[Video] SecondMarket To Launch IPO Lock-Up Shares Marketplace
July 27, 2010
SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert wants to completely disrupt the financial industry.
Wall Street should be wary of this financial startup that is trying to bring the financial industry upside-down.
New York City-based SecondMarket’s 14,000 participants manage over $1 trillion in investable assets and include global financial institutions, hedge funds, private equity firms, corporations (Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga…) and high net worth individuals.
At the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford today, SecondMarket CEO and Founder Barry Silbert unveiled his company’s plan to launch a marketplace to buy and sell IPO Lock-Up Shares.
“When a company goes public you have 6 months of a lock up [when you can't sell your shares],” Silbert said. Adding that banks hated his idea because they control those shareholders for 6 months and “they extract every last penny out of these transactions.”
Silbert also told the audience of entrepreneurs and investors how he finds new market ideas.
“If they [the banks] puke all over the table, we know that is the market that we want to get into because they’re making so much money off of the spread and the opacity that we know we can completely disintermediate that market.”
It’s getting personal!
Leave a Comment » | news, startups | Tagged: AlwaysOn, Facebook, LinkedIn, sas10, secondmarket, silbert, Zynga | Permalink
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Face2Face: Less Precise Better For Your Social Experience!
July 22, 2010
There aren’t many times when you come across an application that boasts about location or proximity and you end up liking it. The concept to say the least and Face2Face is one for now. The application was launched by Proximate Global. The app, isn’t really about pinpointing your location to the entire circle of friends but more about making your connections aware about your location.
It is most definitely not another social network requiring you to sign up and send those senseless emails to friends requesting them to join in, but a simple application for your smartphones. I am talking about the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, J2ME and the BlackBerry devices. I stated that the application is a bit unique and the reasons are:
F2F basis itself on location awareness, bringing Proximity based social network into the arena which is quite well dominated by the likes of FourSquare, Gowalla and Yelp, but the folks have ensured that they keep user privacy in mind and not expose the exact latitude and longitude of where you are. Do you recall Google Latitude and how shameless it marked your location on the map? In my opinion it shred your privacy to pieces, making you appear as a thumb tack on a map for all your friends to know where you are. The idea was interesting initially, but it evaporated much sooner. F2F takes a more simplistic approach:
- Download the app
- Sign-in with your existing social networks: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter
- The app utilizes proximity awareness to let you know which one of your friends or friends of friends is near your vicinity and notifies you both
- Lets you send IM using its interface
It is a more intelligent use of location awareness and users are more comfortable given that their exact position is not compromised and aren’t run into by someone they don’t expect or want to meet.
Before I start making myself appear like someone managing the promotion of Face2Face, I would like to state that the concept of proximity based social networking isn’t new. Rather Aka-Aki introduced something similar last year and even won a Webby for a similar application. However, they required users to join in and it was more of a social network itself, with Face2Face, the guys at PGI have made an intelligent move to leverage existing social networks instead.
2 Comments | startups | Tagged: App, location, Social Network, startups | Permalink
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[Video] SF AppShow: How PlayFirst Build iPad Game Sans Device
April 28, 2010At the SF App Showcase last night, San Francisco-based game publisher PlayFirst showed its first native game ($4.99) for Apple’s iPad, Diner Dash: Grilling Green.
“We [PlayFirst] are considered a leader in making games for women. And the way we do that is we create really emotionally engaging games. What that means is that we’re out there just making simple match 3 puzzle games or these sort mind numbing time waster game,” explains Chris Williams, the director for mobile and console at PlayFirst.
Diner Dash has been downloaded over 500 million times (over 5-years) on PCs and Macs, and 5 million downloads for the iPhone/iPod touch version for which users spend on average 20-25 minutes per session.
iPad game required extensive custom design
For the iPad, the 100+ employee startup started from scratch and had to do a lot of extra work to customise the game for the new Apple device, like full multi-touch support, gestures and both orientation support.
“It’s a very different device… the larger screen, the assets need to be higher resolution, multi-touch… It was quite complex. It took a bunch of people, certainly more people that we have making our iPhone games. A solid 6-weeks to make this game,” adds Williams.
But unlike for other platforms, PlayFirst’s biggest challenge in developing the game for the iPad, was the lack of device!
“We spent 46 days working with cardboard cut-outs and the [iPad] simulator, hoping that it was going to play well on the device… That being said, Apple has a great simulator and we were able to replicate the experience. We were able to simulate the multi-touch and gestures and all those things. Now that we released it, we played it on the device and we’re very pleased with the result.”
3 Comments | Interviews, news, software, startups | Tagged: Apple, ipad, playfirst | Permalink
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[Video] Visible Energy EnergyUFO Lets Consumers Monitor, Control Electricity Use From iPad
April 27, 2010
Visible Energy UFOEnergy iPad application remotely monitors and controls appliances over Wi-Fi or the Web
New and innovative home energy management applications for the iPad, turns the Apple tablet into a versatile home control device!
Control4 and Visible Energy are the first startups to release an iPad application that lets you monitor and control your the electricity usage in your home, right from the Apple tablet.
I’ve met this week with Visible Energy CEO and founder, Marco Graziano, for a test drive of the EnergyUFO iPad application that left me impressed in how simple it was to remotely control – over the Web or Wi-Fi – the company’s smart powerstrip, the EnergyUFO Power Center.
“With EnergyUFO you can monitor in real-time the electricity usage of all your smart Wi-Fi powerstrips, remotely switch on or off and an appliance connected to one of the smart electrical outlet or schedule its daily use. With this granular view of electricity usage, users can finally see how their power is being used, which will help them reduce their power consumption, and thus save money,” explains Graziano.
The Palo Atlo, Calif.-startup expects to ship its Wi-Fi smart powerstrips in the second half of this year. The powerstrips will come with either one smart outlet (Visible Energy Monostrip) or four (EnergyUFO Power Center).
Pricing starts at about $99, versus several thousands of dollars or more for the Control4 solution that requires a professional installation.
“Unlike Control4, we’re targeting the mass market, no professional installation required. Our vision is that, the more people use our smart powerstrip technology, the more they will conserve energy, save money, and save our planet.”
7 Comments | hardware, Interviews, news, software, startups, web 2.0, wireless | Tagged: control4, graziano, visiblenergy | Permalink
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Videos: Best Of Ignite At Where 2.0
March 29, 2010
Ignite is a fun and high-energy evening of “speed presentations”. At Where 2.0, the theme was geolocalisation
The sixth annual Where 2.0 Conference kicked off this morning in downtown San Jose, Calif., with tutorials (on mapping, geolocalisation…) and the infamous “Ignite” presentations.
As always, Ignite Where 2010 was a fun and high-energy evening of “speed presentations” where attendees where given five minutes on stage to pitch their project using a slides (20 maximum) that rotates automatically after 15 seconds!
Follows are my favourite presentations and the associated videos:
- App Store is For Suckers by Jonathan Stark (Jonathan Stark Consulting)
Submitting (pun intended) to the App Store is for suckers. The cheapest, easiest, fastest way for developers to get in on the mobile gold rush is to build killer web apps. Web apps can now – today – access location data, utilize client-side SQL databases, and even run offline. Web apps run on more than 100 mobile handsets with zero modification. We’ve moved on. Don’t get suckered. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | news, startups | Tagged: o'reilly, opengeo, praized, Ushahidi, where20, zoomatlas | Permalink
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Personalized Medicine Conference Recap
February 6, 2010Genetics and pharmacogenomics took center stage at the Personalized Medicine World Conference in Mountain View, CA.
A larger part of the discussion was centered around how we will collect, handle, standardize, store and process all the information on each of us for healthcare.
Attendees were an interesting mix of angel investors, academics, representatives from governmental agencies, institutional investors, pharma, information technologists, bioethicists, hospitals, patients and consultants. Currently, the field of personalized medicine is a mix of all these players, looking for the next healthcare technology play.
Large IT companies that wouldn’t normally be thought of as healthcare attended, IBM and Dell both gave talks. A major focus for the IT companies were EHR‘s or Electronic Health Records. As the types of data multiplies, a way to handle digitized X-rays, test results, prescriptions and clinician notes will need to be found and integrated. For a savvy technologist who can understand what kinds of information clinicians/doctors need at a glance, there is a definite business opportunity.
One point of note, Dr. Amos from NIST stated governmental agencies have a vested interest in making sure biological test results have standards- so your results from one lab will be able to be interpreted by any doctor down the line. Coming up with these standards will likely be a long process involving both government, healthcare workers and industry.
Contributed by Chia Hwu, follow me on Twitter @chiah.
Leave a Comment » | life-science, startups | Tagged: healthcare, Personalized Medicine | Permalink
Posted by Chia Hwu
Tesla Motors To Take Over NUMMI?
August 27, 2009
Tesla CEO recently said he would love to take over NUMMI
A few months ago, I remember Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk warming at the idea of taking over NUMMI, the sole auto assembly plant on the West Coast.
Musk comments did make a lot of people laugh. Back in April, when the prolific entrepreneur spoke at a Churchill Club event, GM and Toyota were still committed to keep the 20-year old joint-venture running and Tesla was still waiting for government loans to help it jumpstart its future sedan “model S” vehicle project.
But after a tumultuous 4-months that saw GM file for bankruptcy, sever its partnership at NUMMI, Tesla raising nearly a $1 billion from both the government and private investors and finally, Toyota announcing today it will not keep operating alone the Fremont, Calif., car plant, Musk’s “pipe dream” of taking over NUMMI could very well happen!
“Maybe at some point there’ll be an opportunity to acquire NUMMI. That’d be great. I’ll take that in a second. But that isn’t available right now,” added Musk.
A golden opportunity for Tesla indeed, that is required – by receiving the government loans – to find a 20+ year old plant to produce its upcoming all-electric “S” vehicle. And NUMMI just celebrated it’s 20 years anniversary… this year!
“But we can’t afford it right now, unless they give it to us. Which maybe they will,” said Musk 4 months ago!
And “they” (including the state, local and even perhaps the federal governments) might indeed make it so attractive that Tesla could actually find it hard not to move to NUMMI. Wait and see!
Follows the video excerpt where Tesla CEO Elon Musk eluded at the idea of taking over NUMMI:
1 Comment | Alternative Energy, Clean Tech, startups | Tagged: churchill club, elon, musk, nummi, tesla | Permalink
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