Archive for the ‘innovation’ Category

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Personal Robotics

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Wow. First, computers were these gigantic machines that took up all the space in a single room (or more!), made for the government and big corporations. Then prices dropped, technology improved (Moore’s law), and the computer was personalized, and today everybody practically carries one in their pocket.

When I had to first decide what to major in when in college, I did want to major in something to do with robotics. Robotics however, wasn’t exactly a popular or major discipline that was easily available anywhere. Fast forward to today .. we have personalized robots.

Enter the world of Arduino.

Here’s a very basic robot that exhibits basic facial expression, speaks from text, complete with LEDs. This is hilarious. And SOOOOO COOL.

Read more about the Ganzbot here.

Next, we have Arduway, a Segway-like self-balancing robot. It’s like creating a fragile and little life-form from your bare hands.

Read more about the Arduway here.

And alright .. enough of toys. How about a real world application? Here’s a robot that uses GPS and other sensors to steer a 30,000 lbs beast of a machine for a farmer – to harvest soybeans!

Can’t wait for the robotic revolution!

If you are interested in getting started with learning Arduino, here’s a quick link to the books recommended by the official Arduino site.

Getting Started with Arduino (Make: Projects)

Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects

Posted in changing the world, hacks, ideas, innovation, technology | Comments

Google Goggles (Giggles)

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Google just publicly unveiled this Labs project today called Google Goggles. The project is still in its infancy but you can already see some preliminary results that show what a game changer this application will be (see the video).

Excerpt from the announcement:

A New Era of Computing

Mobile devices straddle the intersection of three significant industry trends: computing (or Moore’s Law), connectivity, and the cloud. Simply put:

  • Phones get more powerful and less expensive all the time
  • They’re connected to the Internet more often, from more places; and
  • They tap into computational power that’s available in datacenters around the world

These “Cs” aren’t new: we’ve discussed them in isolation for over 40 years. But today’s smartphones — for the first time — combine all three into a personal, handheld experience. We’ve only begun to appreciate the impact of these converged devices, but we’re pretty sure about one thing: we’ve moved past the PC-only era, into a world where search is forever changed.

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Posted in innovation, mobile, technology | Comments

Roll with uncertainty

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),

“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.

And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.

Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.

In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,

Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.

Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



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Posted in entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, problem-opportunity, quotes, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | Comments

Ex-Google China Chief speaks on mobile internet, cloud computing, ecommerce

Monday, September 7th, 2009

It’s Labor Day, I’m still groggy from just waking up .. but this is a good piece worth sharing here if you’re looking for opportunities, and focused on mobile and cloud computing. Google’s China chief Kai-Fu Lee just left Google (some of us recall this as it was a controversial high profile hire because Lee was poached from Microsoft). Here’s what he is up to next, and his words from an interview with peHUB.

“There is a confluence of several things happening in China, and we’re at an inflection point of mobile Internet, cloud computing and ecommerce. It’s really now or never.

There is an abundance of companies here and VCs have lots of money, but there is a lack of angel funding and experienced entrepreneurs. It’s a compete imbalance. Whatever you might think of Y Combinator or Idealab in the U.S., the China market is different. China needs this type of business-building platform to hire and train people and provide angel funding, which is scarce.

There also is a worldwide economic crisis, which means that there is a bunch of strong talent out there that we want to hire, in order to start a lot of exicting businesses.“

On why it’s “now or never”, he says,

“Ecommerce in China has gone from 7% adoption to 25% adoption. Payment capabilities are just happening. Really, it’s a lot like the late 90s in the U.S. Remember how quickly Amazon and eBay and even Google search took off? You have to imagine the current Chinese Internet as news and games and blogging, but a big shift is inevitable. The average Chinese Internet user is just 25, compared to 42 in the U.S. That means they are getting older, getting more money, getting married, having kids… A rising ecommerce will lift all boats.

In terms of mobile, there are 650 million cell phones in China and mobile Internet usage is growing like crazy. It’s not just knowledge workers, but it’s also growing rapidly for groups like migrant workers and people making just a few dollars a day. They view it as the only way to access information, and with usage and volume a lot of things will grow.

There also is 3G, which is the one thing the Chinese government is going after and developing this year. In China, when the government wants to do something it happens.

For cloud computing: China has never really developed a software market, and what’s happening is like what’s happening in the U.S. – moving from packaged software to online or the cloud. In that process new businesses and models are starting to happen. If you look at the success of the Amazon platform or Google apps in the U.S., it will also be true in China because there are millions or people who want easy ways to build websites.

There is incredible opportunity right now.“

Via peHUB.

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Posted in business, cloud computing, entrepreneurship, innovation, mobile, problem-opportunity, regular reads, startup | Comments

Shai’s Divide and Conquer!

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Shai Agassi is a real genius—one of my rock stars that I’m just dying to meet. I’ve already got to meet the other big name in electric cars, Elon Musk from Tesla.

He has said before that he’s good at break big problems into smaller problems, solving the pieces, then aggregating the results. I’m not familiar with his work at SAP, but clearly he’s proved this with his divide-and-conquer approach to problem solving here. Computer scientists make some of the best problem solvers out there.

In this TED talk, Shai talks about a shift in thinking: viewing the electric car’s battery a discrete unit that’s interchangeable, vs. today’s mentality where the car is one with the fuel tank (who would buy a car without a fuel tank, or vice versa?)

I’ve previously blogged about unbundling production from delivery before with examples of Amazon.com and it’s IT infrastructure, mobile phones as a poverty buster, and this is kind of like that, but with other concepts tied in – e.g. subsidized pricing (e.g. like how cell phones are subsidized by carriers).

The analogy Elon Musk uses (I can’t find where he said this, but I swear I remember him saying this), is like air travel today. I can fly to Europe from California for $500. But that’s because I’m not the first person to ever fly on that plane, nor will I be the last; the same air plane gets reused over and over for many flights. The point here is that the owner of the plane doesn’t have to recoup the cost of the plane with a single flight, it is done over a period of time. The higher the utilization rate, the faster they recoup the investment.

That’s why Elon’s SpaceX goal of building a reusable rocket is so revolutionary (most people don’t realize this) and is an important step for man-kind. Imagine being able to fly to the moon or other planets in our solar system for the price of a flight ticket?

Back to Better Place. In Shai’s talk, he shows how battery for electric cars follow a Moore’s law-like curve; battery prices will drop as its technology increases. By unbundling the ownership of the car and the battery, you can increase the utilization rate per battery which result in people owning these cars having access to the latest and most efficient battery at that time (vs. someone stuck with the same battery for the lifespan of the car). Small but important point.

Shai’s a very cool guy who is literally, changing the world. I’m a big fan.

Check out his TED talk if you haven’t already!

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Posted in changing the world, cleantech, entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, passion, people i like, startup, technology | Comments

Health care technology, the stimulus and opportunity

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree), Cisco’s CTO and until recently, one of the top candidates for America’s CTO position was recently interviewed on Technology Review. I recently watched her interview on Web 2.0 expo and could certainly tell that this is someone who is a real visionary, certainly someone to pay attention to. Some clips from her interview from MIT’s interview below.

TR: But how does more broadband installation boost the economy, beyond creating one-off construction jobs?

PW: There are many areas we can look at, such as modernizing health care with health-presence solutions–like a doctor from a remote area interacting with a patient who might not otherwise have access–and making the energy grid more efficient with smart-grid technologies. Collaboration, virtual networking, and visual communications will be the e-businesses of the next decade, and this will drive productivity. To do all of that, we need to have broadband connectivity nationwide.

Given my interest in using technology to help people (health care an obvious application), I thought this point was interesting. On a related note, there’s a new stimulus bill that mandates MDs to now electronic-ize all patient data, and most doctors don’t know how to navigate these techie waters.

To a techie, it’s quite amazing to see how health care is so .. for lack of a better word, backwards. Systems that don’t talk to each other creating separate data silos (in Web 2.0, data overlayed with other data creates even more richer data), programs written in MS-DOS (seriously?), and they still use the fax to transmit data (have you heard of this thing called the Internet?)

One of the ways entrepreneurs look for opportunities is to ask themselves, “What industry has not seen any innovation breakthroughs in a long time?” Paypal came about because the financial industry have remained stagnant for a long time prior to that. Health care is another area. And now with the stimulus/mandate in America .. it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing some creative software startups tackling this problem.

Tom Siebel (of Siebel Systems) has identified health care as one of the worlds largest looming problems, and will present an opportunity for not just good but GREAT companies to capitalize on.

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Posted in healthcare technology, innovation | Comments

Tom Siebel on problems to focus on – if you’d like to change the world

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Tom Siebel (from fame of Siebel Systems) identifies the next opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to change the world. Using surfing as an anology, these are the waves in the horizon—you have to paddle hard and fast now before it reaches you. The IT wave has already floated us far. And although IT will still play a large role in solving these problems, these are the broader world problems that need to be solved (technology is just the conduit for the solution).

The big problems are .. *drumroll*:

  • food
  • water
  • healthcare
  • energy

Counterintuitively for most technologists, these are all “lower in the stack” type problems. Why? Because more people are living longer/child mortality rates improving (thanks to advances in health care), hence an aging population – with inadequate health care infrastructure, especially in China.

Here are some notes from the Mark Logic CEO’s blog (that I mostly cut-and-pasted here, thanks to Dave Kellogg for actually transcribing):

  • He (Tom Siebel) did a long riff contrasting the period from 1980 to 2000 with what he anticipates in the period from 2010 to 2030.
  • The 1980 to 2000 period was a paradise of government policies, efficient capital markets, and a free flow of capital to information technology that ultimately created a $1T information technology industry.
  • IT growth was 17% CAGR from 1980 to 2000. From 2000 it grows, he says, with GDP at a rate more like 3%. “The party here is over.”
  • “It’s done. Tell me the next step that’s a replacement technology. Right now it’s all bells and whistles.”
  • The big picture from 2010 to 2030, he says, is (1) increased government regulation, (2) exponential population growth, (3) aging population, (4) increased demand for healthcare (of which 85% of an individual’s lifetime consumption is spent in the last year of life), and (5) energy scarcity.
  • It took from 8000 BC to 1750 AD to grow the world population to 1B. In 2008, it’s 6.5B. In 2028 it will be 9B. (Says the guy next to me: “and they’re all going to need to buy things — how is this bad?”)
  • These trends make for the following opportunities: (1) food, (2) water, (3) energy, and (4) healthcare.
  • Per-capita energy population is increasing exponential. So if you combine exponential population growth with exponential per-capita energy consumption, you end up with energy demand that is — pardon the expression — exponential squared.
  • He then discussed the concept of peak oil, an idea that I’d heard of but that I hadn’t known was postulated in the 1950s by an engineer at Shell. By 2020/2030, says Siebel, this gets to be a real problem.
  • He then said we have two choices: drill / drill / drill or invent / invent / invent.
  • He then discussed two initiatives he’s working on: (1) an Energy-Free Home Challenge that is soon to be formally announced, and (2) a new company called C3 that he was involved in founding.
  • The Energy-Free Home Challenge is a contest with $20M in prizes paid for by the Siebel Foundation (2007 annual report here). The goal is to find a way to build houses that consume net zero energy at the end of a year, built with no more expense than traditional construction methods.
  • C3 (which I think is related to the acronym carbon-conscious consumer) is a new company, run by Siebel veteran Pat House, that will make enterprise software to help companies manage their carbon footprint. The company started by calling together a panel of 29 experts during the summer of 2008. “Deliberations were concluded 12/08.” C3 was founded last month, in 1/09. Operations will begin in 2/09. The product spec will be completed by summer 09. And — if I heard correctly — they will have demonstrable product one quarter later in fall 09. (And one heck of a development team if they can actually build a product in a quarter.)
  • C3’s goal is to help companies “monitor, mitigate, and monetize” their carbon footprint. I tried for about 15 minutes to find a website for the firm and failed. If you find one, let me know via a comment and I’ll link it here.
  • Almost to the point of comedy Siebel strained to not position C3 as an information technology company, despite the fact that it will sell enterprise software. “C3 is an energy tech company.” “IT is incidental to C3.” “C3 will not have an IT rate of growth.” (How quickly they turn.)

Check the entire podcast for the entire story with stats.

Tom Siebel – Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT Marketplace

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Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, innovation, problem-opportunity, stanford, things to ponder about, trends | Comments

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