The only other attempt I've come across is StartupSearch, and it just doesn't measure up to TechCrunch's CrunchBase. If you go to the VCs pages, they have great overviews of their investments (i.e. total amount, participants). Check it out.
Showing posts with label tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tech. Show all posts
Saturday, February 16, 2008
CrunchBase... Great Directory of the Startup World
It's been a few months since I last visited CrunchBase, but it's turning out to be a very comprehensive directory of tech startups and their investors. I don't know when they changed their homepage, but I like it and how they position themselves.
The only other attempt I've come across is StartupSearch, and it just doesn't measure up to TechCrunch's CrunchBase. If you go to the VCs pages, they have great overviews of their investments (i.e. total amount, participants). Check it out.
The only other attempt I've come across is StartupSearch, and it just doesn't measure up to TechCrunch's CrunchBase. If you go to the VCs pages, they have great overviews of their investments (i.e. total amount, participants). Check it out.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Qbox Facebook App Launches!
Qbox is a cool startup that I advise. It's a social music play that allows users to access and play free music through their player/application. You can either download it for your desktop, embed a player on your blog (e.g. Xanga, Blogger:), or as they just launched several hours ago on your Facebook profile. What's cool is that typically a video from YouTube or another social network plays in the embedded player, so your blog or site becomes more active and lively.
Here are some screenshots from my Facebook profile:
I didn't post this before, but VentureBeat referred to them in a longer piece on online music sites, "38 free/cheap music sites — Welcome to the fray, Qbox!"
Here are some screenshots from my Facebook profile:
I didn't post this before, but VentureBeat referred to them in a longer piece on online music sites, "38 free/cheap music sites — Welcome to the fray, Qbox!"
Monday, February 11, 2008
Our Nation's Innovation Dilemma
I came across John Kao's new blog, "Innovation Nation," at The Huffington Post.
His first post, The Innovation "Frame", is a good start to what I believe is an important topic and discussion to push into the national spotlight. An excerpt:
We've had the Iraq "frame," and now the recession and change "frames." But what about the Innovation "frame?" Are we just not getting the importance of innovation? Vannevar Bush, presidential science advisor, said it best in 1947, "A nation that loses its science and technology will lose control of its destiny." More recently the National Academy of Science referred to the problem as a "gathering storm." And in my own recent book, Innovation Nation, I state that America is losing its innovation edge with profound implications for our security and prosperity as a nation.
Is anybody listening out there in leader-land?
History will show America's current innovation melt-down to have been an egregious self-inflicted wound. I would need ten times this space just to recite a list of dismal facts about how poorly our national innovation system is performing. Some headlines: our young scientists are abandoning their careers with increasing frequency, talent is increasingly not coming to our storied shores, our public education and R & D are showing significant erosion, we're strapped for cash, other countries are leading us in a growing number of scientific fields, and nobody seems to care.
I blogged about a related topic back in 2003 ("It's Not The Deficit Stupid!... Tech is the Primary Driver of Economic Growth"). An excerpt:
Nelson and others within the same camp believe technical advance or growth in technology account for 50%-70%+ of long-term economic growth. Seeing how the U.S. has become the world's foremost economic power, it's difficult to deny some of the truth and theories developed from Nelson and others. Whole new industries were created by developments that sprouted from U.S. R&D labs throughout the 20th century. From Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to AT&T's Bell Labs to DARPA, inventions such as laser printing (1971), Ethernet, the graphical user interface, the Internet (1969), and cellular communications (1947) were given birth to in these halls.
One of the people most responsible was Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under FDR. His report to President Roosevelt, "Science The Endless Frontier" (July 1945), help set forth and secure U.S. investment into scientific research as one of its core policies. Heavy investment by the government into various military and non-military labs were initiated.
One danger that is recently occurring is the decrease in funding for basic research. Basic research allows scientists to research for the sake of researching. To seek out their curiosities and find the truths of the universe. This is more of a non-linear approach that allows for a wide-range of possibilities, and many inventions that have changed our lives have come from basic research (e.g. x-rays, superconductivity, laser... what would you do without CDs or DVDs?). Over the past decade, corporations under pressure to perform have cut back or closed down their basic research efforts and only focused on applied research that seeks out a specific solution or product that can eventually generate revenue for the company.
I haven't read John Mao's book ("Innovation Nation") yet, but I assume it includes my concerns and others that I haven't blogged about. For me, there are three primary areas of concern with our nation's innovation engine:
1. Decreases in overall scientific research dollars, especially in basic research.
2. Changes in the education system that are degrading our culture of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity (future blog post).
3. Continued blockade and movement of immigrants into the U.S. fabric hence depleting our innovation engine of a primary "fuel" source (increase H-1Bs!).
While I believe research dollars are the primary driver, our nation's culture of innovation and entrepreneurship is still unique and unmatched so we need to continue to lead in all these areas through sound public policy, investment and education. The next president has to take a strong lead on this and change the course of our rapidly weakening strongholds, or our nation's ideals, economy and future generations will suffer.
His first post, The Innovation "Frame", is a good start to what I believe is an important topic and discussion to push into the national spotlight. An excerpt:
We've had the Iraq "frame," and now the recession and change "frames." But what about the Innovation "frame?" Are we just not getting the importance of innovation? Vannevar Bush, presidential science advisor, said it best in 1947, "A nation that loses its science and technology will lose control of its destiny." More recently the National Academy of Science referred to the problem as a "gathering storm." And in my own recent book, Innovation Nation, I state that America is losing its innovation edge with profound implications for our security and prosperity as a nation.
Is anybody listening out there in leader-land?
History will show America's current innovation melt-down to have been an egregious self-inflicted wound. I would need ten times this space just to recite a list of dismal facts about how poorly our national innovation system is performing. Some headlines: our young scientists are abandoning their careers with increasing frequency, talent is increasingly not coming to our storied shores, our public education and R & D are showing significant erosion, we're strapped for cash, other countries are leading us in a growing number of scientific fields, and nobody seems to care.
I blogged about a related topic back in 2003 ("It's Not The Deficit Stupid!... Tech is the Primary Driver of Economic Growth"). An excerpt:
Nelson and others within the same camp believe technical advance or growth in technology account for 50%-70%+ of long-term economic growth. Seeing how the U.S. has become the world's foremost economic power, it's difficult to deny some of the truth and theories developed from Nelson and others. Whole new industries were created by developments that sprouted from U.S. R&D labs throughout the 20th century. From Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to AT&T's Bell Labs to DARPA, inventions such as laser printing (1971), Ethernet, the graphical user interface, the Internet (1969), and cellular communications (1947) were given birth to in these halls.
One of the people most responsible was Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under FDR. His report to President Roosevelt, "Science The Endless Frontier" (July 1945), help set forth and secure U.S. investment into scientific research as one of its core policies. Heavy investment by the government into various military and non-military labs were initiated.
One danger that is recently occurring is the decrease in funding for basic research. Basic research allows scientists to research for the sake of researching. To seek out their curiosities and find the truths of the universe. This is more of a non-linear approach that allows for a wide-range of possibilities, and many inventions that have changed our lives have come from basic research (e.g. x-rays, superconductivity, laser... what would you do without CDs or DVDs?). Over the past decade, corporations under pressure to perform have cut back or closed down their basic research efforts and only focused on applied research that seeks out a specific solution or product that can eventually generate revenue for the company.
I haven't read John Mao's book ("Innovation Nation") yet, but I assume it includes my concerns and others that I haven't blogged about. For me, there are three primary areas of concern with our nation's innovation engine:
1. Decreases in overall scientific research dollars, especially in basic research.
2. Changes in the education system that are degrading our culture of innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity (future blog post).
3. Continued blockade and movement of immigrants into the U.S. fabric hence depleting our innovation engine of a primary "fuel" source (increase H-1Bs!).
While I believe research dollars are the primary driver, our nation's culture of innovation and entrepreneurship is still unique and unmatched so we need to continue to lead in all these areas through sound public policy, investment and education. The next president has to take a strong lead on this and change the course of our rapidly weakening strongholds, or our nation's ideals, economy and future generations will suffer.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Slide at $550 Million?... Am I Missing Something?
So Kara Swisher broke the news on Slide's $50 million investment from Fidelity and T. Rowe Price for 9%, which values the company at $550 million.
More from Kara, "Slip-Sliding Into a Fortune"
From VentureBeat, "Widget-maker Slide raises $50 million at $550 million valuation"
As Matt Marshall from VentureBeat states, I don't know Slide's revenues, but I never heard it being significant or wildly successful enough to earn such a valuation.
So maybe we are already into bubble territory. Are we really getting crazy stupid? Or is it because these large institutional investors desperately need to put their money to work? I didn't even know that T. Rowe Price had a private equity arm since it's known as a mutual fund. Because of the sub-prime crisis, various private equity deals have been dropped over the past several months, so maybe they are throwing money at earlier stage deals they wouldn't have touched a year ago? And what's $25 million to a multi-billion dollar fund? It would be interesting to learn more about how this deal came down and listen to the negotiations on Slide's valuation.
More from Kara, "Slip-Sliding Into a Fortune"
From VentureBeat, "Widget-maker Slide raises $50 million at $550 million valuation"
As Matt Marshall from VentureBeat states, I don't know Slide's revenues, but I never heard it being significant or wildly successful enough to earn such a valuation.
So maybe we are already into bubble territory. Are we really getting crazy stupid? Or is it because these large institutional investors desperately need to put their money to work? I didn't even know that T. Rowe Price had a private equity arm since it's known as a mutual fund. Because of the sub-prime crisis, various private equity deals have been dropped over the past several months, so maybe they are throwing money at earlier stage deals they wouldn't have touched a year ago? And what's $25 million to a multi-billion dollar fund? It would be interesting to learn more about how this deal came down and listen to the negotiations on Slide's valuation.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Bill Joy's Apocalyptic Vision, Determinism, and Commonality with Stephen Hawking
Bill Joy's apocalyptic vision of our future and is in line with the the world's greatest mind and one of the greatest intellects of the modern era, Stephen Hawking. Horribly bleak are such worlds without God.
While attending the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, one interesting moment was during the "Is Technology Making Us Safter?" session with George Gilder, Bill Joy, and Jaron Lanier yesterday, when a man pretending to be Ray Kurzweil kept posting on the chat board "Bill Joy: What technologies would you end?"
Paul Saffo, the moderator, kept ignoring the question after realizing it was probably not the real Ray Kurzweil, but others on the chat board soon kept posting for "Ray." The audience soon joined in shouts and chats to ask "Ray's" question. Eventually a man in the audience was picked to ask a question and he asked "Ray's" question to the delight and cheers of the audience. Bill Joy went on to give a brief answer and cited aspects of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, which I don't remember in detail but you can find more here.
It was interesting since I didn't know Bill Joy, who has been called the "Edison of the Internet" and designed Berkeley UNIX, Java, and Solaris among many things, had this apocalytic view of man's future and was in essence a determinist. I went home and Googled him and found his Wired article from 2000, "Why the future doesn't need us.", which I surprisingly missed.
From Joy's Wired essay: "I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals."
As I read his article and other references, I found Joy's view of the future to be very similar to Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and our modern day Einstein (his assistant once told of a time when he was dictating volumes of notes and on the 46th page he recognized that there was an error 20 pages before and corrected it). While Hawking's raw brain power is greater than Joy's, the only difference I have read is that Joy goes into detail about the hows of this apocalyptic vision and presents a different solution than Hawking. Joy wants to end certain areas of scientific research, such subgroups within as robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, while Hawking hopes science will take us to the point where we can escape the earth:
"My only fear is this. The terror that stalks my mind is that we have arrived on the scene because of evolution. Because of naturalistic selection, and natural selection assumes natural rejection, which means we have arrived here because of our aggression. And my hope is that somehow we can keep from eating each other up for another 100 years. At that point science would have devised a scheme to take all of us into different planets of the universe and no one atrocity would destroy all of us at the same time."
Ravi Zacharias, a Christian apologist, commented on Hawking’s lecture, "Hawking was unavoidably caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, if there is no God he could feel the hold of determinism from which evolutionary theory could not escape—out of flux, nothing but flux. What followed from that deduction was even more troubling. For on the other hand, if evolution held true, he could not further ignore the aggression and violence through which man has evolved. Therefore, Hawking offered mankind’s only hope—that the savior of technology would come riding on the wings of science to rescue us from the clasping teeth of determinism."
It's interesting to see how these two great minds have derived at this hopeless conclusion. In a world without God, it is logical to conclude based on humankind's nature, history, and continuing progress that the ending will be horrible for all of us. But this is not my world nor the world of many in this world.
"We have educated ourselves into imbecility." – Malcolm Muggeridge
Zacharias quoted Muggeridge in his seminar and went on to explain how even the greatest of minds in the world today should not ignore the logical and rational existence of God. He was criticizing determinism and how flawed it is and a more logical explanation is having God govern and control the laws and powers of the universe. This notion may be unsettling for Joy, Hawking, and others, but it is the reality and a future to consider. (more of my random thoughts on this subject from an old post)
[tags: ao2005, alwayson2005, alwayson, billjoy, stephenhawking]
While attending the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, one interesting moment was during the "Is Technology Making Us Safter?" session with George Gilder, Bill Joy, and Jaron Lanier yesterday, when a man pretending to be Ray Kurzweil kept posting on the chat board "Bill Joy: What technologies would you end?"
Paul Saffo, the moderator, kept ignoring the question after realizing it was probably not the real Ray Kurzweil, but others on the chat board soon kept posting for "Ray." The audience soon joined in shouts and chats to ask "Ray's" question. Eventually a man in the audience was picked to ask a question and he asked "Ray's" question to the delight and cheers of the audience. Bill Joy went on to give a brief answer and cited aspects of genetic engineering and nanotechnology, which I don't remember in detail but you can find more here.
It was interesting since I didn't know Bill Joy, who has been called the "Edison of the Internet" and designed Berkeley UNIX, Java, and Solaris among many things, had this apocalytic view of man's future and was in essence a determinist. I went home and Googled him and found his Wired article from 2000, "Why the future doesn't need us.", which I surprisingly missed.
From Joy's Wired essay: "I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals."
As I read his article and other references, I found Joy's view of the future to be very similar to Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and our modern day Einstein (his assistant once told of a time when he was dictating volumes of notes and on the 46th page he recognized that there was an error 20 pages before and corrected it). While Hawking's raw brain power is greater than Joy's, the only difference I have read is that Joy goes into detail about the hows of this apocalyptic vision and presents a different solution than Hawking. Joy wants to end certain areas of scientific research, such subgroups within as robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, while Hawking hopes science will take us to the point where we can escape the earth:
"My only fear is this. The terror that stalks my mind is that we have arrived on the scene because of evolution. Because of naturalistic selection, and natural selection assumes natural rejection, which means we have arrived here because of our aggression. And my hope is that somehow we can keep from eating each other up for another 100 years. At that point science would have devised a scheme to take all of us into different planets of the universe and no one atrocity would destroy all of us at the same time."
Ravi Zacharias, a Christian apologist, commented on Hawking’s lecture, "Hawking was unavoidably caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, if there is no God he could feel the hold of determinism from which evolutionary theory could not escape—out of flux, nothing but flux. What followed from that deduction was even more troubling. For on the other hand, if evolution held true, he could not further ignore the aggression and violence through which man has evolved. Therefore, Hawking offered mankind’s only hope—that the savior of technology would come riding on the wings of science to rescue us from the clasping teeth of determinism."
It's interesting to see how these two great minds have derived at this hopeless conclusion. In a world without God, it is logical to conclude based on humankind's nature, history, and continuing progress that the ending will be horrible for all of us. But this is not my world nor the world of many in this world.
"We have educated ourselves into imbecility." – Malcolm Muggeridge
Zacharias quoted Muggeridge in his seminar and went on to explain how even the greatest of minds in the world today should not ignore the logical and rational existence of God. He was criticizing determinism and how flawed it is and a more logical explanation is having God govern and control the laws and powers of the universe. This notion may be unsettling for Joy, Hawking, and others, but it is the reality and a future to consider. (more of my random thoughts on this subject from an old post)
[tags: ao2005, alwayson2005, alwayson, billjoy, stephenhawking]
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