Technology – Page 33 – artdiamondblog.com

Entrepreneur Sam Wyly Hard to Classify

Source of book image: http://www.charlesandsamwyly.com/images/1000-dollars-and-an-idea.jpg

I sometimes divide entrepreneurs into two broad types: free agent entrepreneurs and innovative entrepreneurs. Free agent entrepreneurs are the self-employed. Innovative entrepreneurs are the agents of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction.
Then there are entrepreneurs like Sam Wyly who don’t fit very well in either category.
He built or improved businesses in ways that made the world better, but usually did not involve breakthrough innovations.
Like many of the entrepeneurs considered in Amar Bhidé’s main books, Wyly grew businesses that served consumers, enriched investors and created jobs. Some of his most important start-ups, especially early-on, involved computer services. And his efforts to compete with the government-backed AT&T monopoly, were heroic.
I read the 2008 version of his autobiography a few months ago, and found that it contained a few stories and observations that are worth pondering. In the next few weeks I will briefly quote a few of these.

The 2008 Wyly autobiography is:
Wyly, Sam. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire. New York: Newmarket Press, 2008.

I have not read the 2011 version of Wyly’s autobiography:
Wyly, Sam. Beyond Tallulah: How Sam Wyly Became America’s Boldest Big-Time Entrepreneur. New York: Melcher Media, 2011.

The dominant examples in Bhidé’s two main books are entrepreneurs like Wyly. The two main Bhidé books are:
Bhidé, Amar. The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Bhidé, Amar. The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Entrepreneurs Will Mine Asteroids to “Help Ensure Humanity’s Prosperity”

“Space mining has captivated Hollywood. Director James Cameron is a backer of the new venture.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) A new company backed by two Google Inc. billionaires, film director James Cameron and other space exploration proponents is aiming high in the hunt for natural resources–with mining asteroids the possible target.

The venture, called Planetary Resources Inc., revealed little in a press release this week except to say that it would “overlay two critical sectors–space exploration and natural resources–to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP” and “help ensure humanity’s prosperity.” The company is formally unveiling its plans at an event . . . in Seattle.
. . .
[The] . . . event is being hosted by Peter H. Diamandis and Eric Anderson, known for their efforts to develop commercial space exploration, and two former NASA officials.
Mr. Diamandis, a driving force behind the Ansari X-Prize competition to spur non-governmental space flight, has long discussed his goal to become an asteroid miner. He contends that such work by space pioneers would lead to a “land rush” by companies to develop lower-cost technology to travel to and extract resources from asteroids.

For the full story, see:
AMIR EFRATI. “A Quixotic Quest to Mine Asteroids.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 21, 2012,): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed word added.)
(Note: the online “updated” version of the article is dated April 23, 2012.)

Innovation Took “Three Years Working through the Bureaucratic Snags”

“FULL FLEDGED; The production prototype of the Terrafugia Transition, with its wings folded and road-ready.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 13) THE promise of an airplane parked in every driveway, for decades a fantasy of suburban commuters and a staple of men’s magazines, resurfaced this month in Manhattan. On display at the New York auto show was the Terrafugia Transition, an airplane with folding wings and a drive system that enabled it to be used on the road.
. . .
But there can be many delays along the road from concept to certification. For instance, government officials and the designers have had to determine which regulations — aircraft or automotive — take precedence when the vehicle in question is both.
. . .
In 2010, the $94,000 Maverick, a rudimentary buggy that takes to the air under a powered parachute, earned certification as a light-sport aircraft. Troy Townsend, design manager and chief test pilot for the company, based in Dunnellon, Fla., said he spent spent nearly all of his time over the course of three years working through the bureaucratic snags.
“There was a lot of red tape,” Mr. Townsend said. “The certification process went all the way to Oklahoma and Washington, D.C.”

For the full story, see:
CHRISTINE NEGRONI. “Before Flying Car Can Take Off, There’s a Checklist.” The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., April 29, 2012): 13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 27, 2012.)

Source of table: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Myhrvold Left Work with Hawking for the Excitement of Entrepreneurship

(p. 139) Microsoft was represented ¡n the discussion by its senior vice president for advanced technology, a thirty-five-year-old Nathan Myhrvold. After finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton at age twenty-three, Myhrvold had worked for a year as a postdoctoral fellow with the physicist Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, tackling theories of (p. 140) gravitation and curved space-time, before taking a three-month leave of absence to help some friends in the Bay Area with a software project. He became caught up in the excitement of personal computer software and entrepreneurship and never went back. In Berkeley, he co-founded a company called Dynamical Systems to develop operating system for personal computers, which struggled for two years until Microsoft bought it in 1986. At Microsoft, he persuaded Bill Gates to let him establish a corporate research center, Microsoft Research, with Myhrvold himself in charge.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Benefits of Driverless Cars Justify Changing Liability Laws

“The car is driven by a computer that steers, starts and stops itself. A 360 degrees laser scanner on top of the car, a GPS system and other sensors monitor the surrounding traffic.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p A13) Expect innovations that change the nature of driving more than anything since the end of the hand-crank engine–so long as the legal and regulatory systems don’t strangle new digital technologies before they can roll off the assembly line.
. . .
Mr. Ford outlined a future of what the auto industry calls “semiautonomous driving technology,” meaning increasingly self-driving cars. Over the next few years, cars will automatically be able to maintain safe distances, using networks of sensors, V-to-V (vehicle-to-vehicle) communications and real-time tracking of driving conditions fed into each car’s navigation system.
This will limit the human error that accounts for 90% of accidents. Radar-based cruise control will stop cars from hitting each other, with cars by 2025 driving themselves in tight formations Mr. Ford describes as “platoons,” cutting congestion as the space between cars is reduced safely.
. . .
Over the next decade, cars could finally become true automobiles. Our laws will have to be updated for a new relationship between people and cars, but the benefits will be significant: fewer traffic accidents and fewer gridlocked roads–and, perhaps best of all, young people will be in self-driving cars, not teenager-driven cars.

For the full commentary, see:
L. GORDON CROVITZ. “INFORMATION AGE; The Car of the Future Will Drive You; A truly auto-mobile is coming if liability laws don’t stop it.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 5, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Quantum Computers May Revolutionize Nanotechnology and Drug Design

“Scott Aaronson.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. D5) When people hear that I work on quantum computing — one of the most radical proposals for the future of computation — their first question is usually, “So when can I expect a working quantum computer on my desk?” Often they bring up breathless news reports about commercial quantum computers right around the corner. After I explain the strained relationship between those reports and reality, they ask: “Then when? In 10 years? Twenty?”

Unfortunately, this is sort of like asking Charles Babbage, who drew up the first blueprints for a general-purpose computer in the 1830s, whether his contraption would be hitting store shelves by the 1840s or the 1850s. Could Babbage have foreseen the specific technologies — the vacuum tube and transistor — that would make his vision a reality more than a century later? Today’s quantum computing researchers are in a similar bind. They have a compelling blueprint for a new type of computer, one that could, in seconds, solve certain problems that would probably take eons for today’s fastest supercomputers. But some of the required construction materials don’t yet exist.
. . .
While code-breaking understandably grabs the headlines, it’s the more humdrum application of quantum computers — simulating quantum physics and chemistry — that has the potential to revolutionize fields from nanotechnology to drug design.
. . .
Like fusion power, practical quantum computers are a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century may or may not bring — depending on the jagged course not only of science and technology, but of politics and economics.

For the full commentary, see:
SCOTT AARONSON. “ESSAY; Quantum Computing Promises New Insights, Not Just Supermachines.” The New York Times (Tues., December 6, 2011): D5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated December 5, 2011.)

The Intensity of Entrepreneur Jobs

(p. 114) As Jobs was criticizing the Pixar managers for failing to hit a delivery date on a project, Smith interrupted and said, “Steve, but you haven’t delivered your board on time”–meaning, a board for the NeXT computer.
It was the sort of remark Jobs normally might have put up with, but it seemed Smith had crossed a line by joking about Jobs’s [sic] computer. “He went completely nonlinear,” Smith recalled. “He went crazy on me and started insulting my accent.”
Jobs had homed in on a sensitive spot. Smith’s native southwestern accent, which he had mostly suppressed since his days as an academic in New York City, sometimes reemerged in moments of stress. Jobs mocked it.
“So I went nonlinear, too, which I had never done before or since,” Smith remembered. “We’re screaming at each other, and our faces are about three inches apart.”
There was an unspoken understanding around Jobs that the whiteboard in his office was part of his personal space–no one else was to write on it. As the confrontation went on, Smith defiantly marched past him and started writing on the whiteboard. “You can’t do that,” Jobs interjected. When Smith continued writing, Jobs stormed out of the room.
To outward appearances, the conflict blew over, but the men’s relationship would never be the same.

Tool Makers Cannot Predict Creative Ways Tools Will Be Used

(p. 89) Jobs had no use for small-minded naysayers. His experience had taught him that if you offered a better computer, well priced and accessible, there was no limit to what human ingenuity could achieve with it. No one, after all, had thought of electronic spread-sheets when he and Wozniak rolled out the Apple II, in 1977, but within two years, a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc–created in an attic by a first-year Harvard MBA student and a programmer friend–was one of the strongest drivers of Apple Il sales. The PIC was not a consumer product like the Apple II, but the principle was the same. “People are inherently creative,” Jobs remarked to an interviewer a few years later. “They will use tools in ways the tool makers never thought possible.”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Internet Companies Respect the Value of Your Time

“Arvind Jain, a Google engineer, pointed out the loading speed of individual elements of a website on a test application used to check efficiency, at Google offices in Mountain View, Calif.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Wait a second.

No, that’s too long.
Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days, even 400 milliseconds — literally the blink of an eye — is too long, as Google engineers have discovered. That barely perceptible delay causes people to search less.
“Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,” said Arvind Jain, a Google engineer who is the company’s resident speed maestro. “Every millisecond matters.”
Google and other tech companies are on a new quest for speed, challenging the likes of Mr. Jain to make fast go faster. The reason is that data-hungry smartphones and tablets are creating frustrating digital traffic jams, as people download maps, video clips of sports highlights, news updates or recommendations for nearby restaurants. The competition to be the quickest is fierce.
People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second).
“Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” said Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft.
. . .
(p. A3) The need for speed itself seems to be accelerating. In the early 1960s, the two professors at Dartmouth College who invented the BASIC programming language, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, set up a network in which many students could tap into a single, large computer from keyboard terminals.
“We found,” they observed, “that any response time that averages more than 10 seconds destroys the illusion of having one’s own computer.”
In 2009, a study by Forrester Research found that online shoppers expected pages to load in two seconds or fewer — and at three seconds, a large share abandon the site. Only three years earlier a similar Forrester study found the average expectations for page load times were four seconds or fewer.
The two-second rule is still often cited as a standard for Web commerce sites. Yet experts in human-computer interaction say that rule is outdated. “The old two-second guideline has long been surpassed on the racetrack of Web expectations,” said Eric Horvitz, a scientist at Microsoft’s research labs.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait.” The New York Times (Thurs., March 1, 2012): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated February 29, 2012.)

Source of graph: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Web Sites Expose Petty Corruption

“Swati Ramanathan, a founder of the site I Paid a Bribe, in India.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.

The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.
The expense of obtaining a driver’s license after having passed the test in Karachi, Pakistan? 3,000 rupees.
Such is the price of what Swati Ramanathan calls “retail corruption,” the sort of nickel-and-dime bribery, as opposed to large-scale graft, that infects everyday life in so many parts of the world.
Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.
About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.
“I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter,” someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. “The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ ” — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.
Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own.

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE STROM. “Web Sites Shine Light on Petty Bribery Worldwide.” The New York Times (Weds., March 7, 2012): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date March 6, 2012.)

“Antony Ragui started an I Paid a Bribe site in Kenya.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Storytelling Trumps Technology in Making Good Movies

(p. 28) The calamity of Tubby the Tuba forced them to confront an unpleasant fact–namely, that they were in the wrong place for making good movies. Money was nor enough, they could now see. Technical genius was not enough (though Tubby had grave technical problems, too). Splendid equipment would not be enough. For them to make worthwhile films someday–not just the R&D exercises (p. 29) they showed at SIGGRAPH meetings–there also had to be people on board who understood film storytelling. Schure, although blessed with great foresight, could not be their Walt Disney.