As [Steve Jobs] told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”

Jobs sometimes says this even more bluntly: Nike CEO Mark Parker likes to recount the advice Jobs gave him shortly after Parker’s promotion to the top spot: “You make some of the best products in the world — but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.” (…)

Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance.

{ San Francisco Chronicle | Continue reading }

photo { Leilani Wertens }

The longest-lived of camera films has just ended its 75-year history. The only laboratory that still processed Kodachrome, the first commercially available colour slide film, stopped doing so at the end of last year. Kodak progressively withdrew the film from sale between 2002 and 2009, though many photographers loved it enough to buy large stocks to keep in their freezers. Amateurs cannot develop Kodachrome, which requires a large number of carefully controlled treatments, so, with the end of laboratory processing, the film is finished.

Kodachrome is made up of layers of black and white film, each of which responds differently to coloured light, and a series of filters. Only during processing are the appropriate dyes added to each layer to produce a colour transparency. Compared to other colour films, at least up until 1990 when Fuji introduced the garish Velvia, Kodachrome had unique advantages: its colours were rich and naturalistic, its blacks did not have the greyish cast of so many colour films, it had remarkable contrast, its greys were subtle, and the lack of colour couplers between its layers (which tend to diffuse light) gave the film extraordinary sharpness.

{ London Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Arnaud Pyvka }

Every Monday afternoon at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., more than a dozen of Google’s top executives gather in the company’s boardroom. The weekly meeting, known as Execute, was launched last summer with a specific mission: to get the near-sovereign leaders of Google’s far-flung product groups into a single room and harmonize their disparate initiatives. Google co-founder Sergey Brin runs the meeting, along with new Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and soon-to-be-former CEO Eric Schmidt. The unstated goal is to save the search giant from the ossification that can paralyze large corporations. It won’t be easy, because Google is a tech conglomerate, an assemblage of parts that sometimes work at cross-purposes. Among the most important barons at the meeting: Andy Rubin, who oversees the Android operating system for mobile phones; Salar Kamangar, who runs the video-sharing site YouTube; and Vic Gundotra, who heads up Google’s secret project to combat the social network Facebook. “We needed to get these different product leaders together to find time to talk through all the integration points,” says Page during a telephone interview with Bloomberg Businessweek minutes before a late-January Execute session. “Every time we increase the size of the company, we need to keep things going to make sure we keep our speed, pace, and passion.”

The new weekly ritual—like the surprise announcement on Jan. 20 that Page will take over from Schmidt in April—marks a significant shift in strategy at the world’s most famous Internet company. Welcome to Google 3.0. In the 1.0 era, which ran from 1996 to 2001, Page and Brin incubated the company at Stanford University and in a Menlo Park (Calif.) garage. In 2001 they ushered in the triumphant 2.0 era by hiring Schmidt, a tech industry grown-up who’d been CEO of Novell. Now comes the third phase, led by Page and dedicated to rooting out bureaucracy and rediscovering the nimble moves of youth.

Although Google recently reported that fourth-quarter profits jumped 29 percent over the previous year, its stock rose only 13.7 percent over the past 12 months, disappointing investors and lagging the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Google is being outpaced by rivals such as Facebook in social networking. In 2010, Facebook served up more display ads than either Google or Yahoo!—and was visited by more U.S. Internet users. And Apple is setting the pace in mobile computing, with beloved products that use a proprietary operating system that can be closed off to Google’s services if the company so chooses.

On top of all that, there are antitrust inquiries in Washington and Europe, the defection of some top Google executives for opportunities elsewhere, and perhaps the most serious rap against the company: that its loosely organized structure is growing unwieldy and counterproductive.

{ Business Week | Continue reading }

The food scientist Beverly Tepper is director of the Sensory Evaluation Laboratory at Rutgers University. Her research combines nutritional science and psychology with the genetics of taste perception in order to better understand the links between flavor, diet, and health. We talked about some of the innovations she thinks will reshape our food in the coming years, where food scientists have gone wrong in the past, and what she thinks of molecular gastronomy.

(…)

To give you a specific example, the food industry often uses a technique called encapsulation to protect a flavor that they’ve placed in a food product. That means you coat it in some kind of material that allows the flavor compound to stay fresh and separate within the food product until you release it by eating it. The next generation of encapsulation uses nanotechnology, which will open up an entirely different dimension in the kinds of technologies that can be placed in foods and food packaging. For example, there are things that you can place on the inside of a food package that act as a sensor to tell you if the food is spoiled or release molecules into the package that fight bacteria.

{ Good | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

My Lux Capital partner Larry Bock and I wrote the following Trend Spotting piece highlighting the Top 9 Rise & Falls We See in the Year Ahead:

1. The Rise of Celebrity Science

Nations, cultures, economies all get what they celebrate. Celebrate celebrities and we’ll have another generation of over-consumptive, over-indebted, overweight, underemployed citizenry. But celebrate scientists: thinkers, doers, achievers, explorers, inventors, creators and we stand a shot at restoring the very human capital that led to the rise of what made our nation great. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So I founded the largest-ever celebration of science, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, to inspire and galvanize a force of young scientists keen to invent, explore, discover and create. 1 million participants is a good start, just 299 million to go.

2. The Rise of the IPO

Nearly a decade has passed without a blockbuster set of IPOs. Hints abound that the resurgence of an IPO market is upon us. The rise of secondary markets swapping shares of Facebook and other social-networking darlings prove there is pent-up demand and that capital is ready, willing, and able to once again fund high-flying companies that didn’t exist a few years ago and are the essential companies of tomorrow. Groupon, despite having 500 competitors and being founded only two years ago may be the fastest company in history to get to a billion dollars in revenue.

3. The Rise of the Tablet

The iPad was just the start. Samsung’s Galaxy and a slate of other touch tablets will continue seizing netbook and laptop share. When we get over the buzzword and just start calling the “cloud” the “Internet” again, people will also see that the prophecies of George Gilder and Sun’s Scott McNeely—that the network is the computer—were correct all along.

4. The Rise of Nuclear & EVs

My partners at Lux Capital always tell entrepreneurs to shave with Occam’s Razor: find the simplest solution. In energy it’s nuclear power, and the electrification of everything, including cars. Watch for just-out-of-stealth startups like Kurion that are solving the problem of nuclear waste, and other breakthrough companies that will soon emerge from stealth with high-power energy conversion for electric vehicles and industrial motors. Just like the PC business in the 1980s, picking brands will be tough, but betting on the digital guts inside may make fortunes.

5. The Rise of Surprise

The most exciting things always come from unexpected upside surprises. Watch for not-widely followed areas of science and technology. Metamaterials, graphene, battery breakthroughs, solid-state lighting, augmented reality, computational photography, better energy storage and regenerative medicine are all hot areas that Lux and other VCs are on the hunt for.

6. The Fall of Super-Angels

When barriers to competition are low, expect lots of it. Hundreds of companies are getting funded by so called super angels or micro-VCs, but valuations are in the nosebleed sections. As momentum in sectors like social-networking slows (or gets saturated), some angels’ staying power could wilt as follow-on financing face tougher terms from larger VCs.

7. The Fall of Personal Privacy (& The Rise of Good Behavior?)

Regardless of what privacy advocates say: between diplomacy hackers like WikiLeaks , industrial hackers like the Stuxnet virus, geo-tagging, real-time data, status updates, tweets, check-ins, and phone cams in the hands of everyone-the facts is this: personal privacy has irreparably changed. Tech guru Kevin Kelly made a provocative statement: nobody really knows what any technology will be good for: the real question is what happens when everyone has one? Now compare modern technology as an unblinking eye with Southern gun culture. Some believe Southern gentility arose from a gun culture, where politeness was a survival tactic. If people assume they’re being watched all the time, what affect might it have on ethics and behavior?

8. The Rise of Robotics

From UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), and military drones to autonomous systems in hospitals, factories, and shipping centers: expect robots to do the mundane, the menacing, and the miraculous.

9. The Rise of Risk

The world is more connected, less predictable and more volatile than ever before. Models widely taught in universities that assumed linear cause-and-effect, or even bell-shaped distributions in markets, are proving to contribute to more risky systems and bad decision-making. As John Maynard Keynes said, it’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. Low probability, high consequence events, so-called Black Swans, are on the rise with greater frequency and less predictability. Whether it’s financial crises, weather systems, or geopolitical instability-the best way to deal with risk is to know more things can happen than will and you should expect the unexpected.

{ Josh Wolfe Newsletter, Jan. 14, 2011 }

The Web hasn’t been designed to do anything. And so it doesn’t do anything, much less anything smart, creative, or suggesting awareness.

Twenty years ago one would have expected something like the Web to have liberated the creative spirits inside tremendous numbers of people who had not previously had such an outlet. Instead, Lanier argues, the Web has caused the evolution of creativity to stagnate.

Where, Lanier asks, are the radically new musical genres since the 1990s? Technological change seems to be accelerating, and yet the development of novel forms of musical expression appears to have not merely slowed, but stalled altogether. We’re listening to non-radical variations on themes that existed two decades ago, Lanier argues. (…)

More generally, he challenges readers to point to the new generation of people living off their creativity on the Web. (…)

Contrary to the prevailing idea that consumers on the Web should not be obligated to pay individual human content-creators for their work, Lanier is adamant that music and human-created information should not be free. Creativity that goes unpaid leads to a novelty- and diversity-impoverished intellectual world dominated by material that takes minimal effort to produce—think LOLcats.

{ Seed | Continue reading }

For centuries people living in the Middle East have dreamed of turning the sandy desert into land fit for growing crops with fresh water on tap.

Now that holy grail is a step closer after scientists employed by the ruler of Abu Dhabi claim to have generated a series of downpours.

Fifty rainstorms were created last year in the state’s eastern Al Ain region using technology designed to control the weather.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

There are now roughly 2 billion Internet users worldwide. Five billion earthlings have cell phones. That scale of connectivity offers staggering power: In a few seconds, we can summon almost any fact, purchase a replacement hubcap or locate a cabin mate from those halcyon days at Camp Tewonga. We can call, email, text or chat online with our colleagues, friends and family just about anywhere.

Yet, along with the power has come the feeling that digital devices have invaded our every waking moment. We’ve had to pass laws to get people off their cell phones while driving. Backlit iPads slither into our beds for midnight Words With Friends trysts. Sitcoms poke fun at breakfast tables where siblings text each other to ask that the butter be passed. (According to a Nielsen study, the average 13- to 17-year-old now deals with 3,339 texts a month.)

We even buy new technology to cure new problems created by new technology: There’s an iPhone app that uses the device’s built-in camera to show the ground in front of a user as a backdrop on the keypad. “Have you ever tried calling someone while walking with your phone only to run into something because you can’t see where you’re going?” goes the sales pitch. (…)

A growing number of researchers here and elsewhere are exploring the social and psychological consequences of virtual experience and digital incursion. Researchers observe the blurring boundaries between real and virtual life, challenge the vaunted claims of multitasking, and ponder whether people need to establish technology-free zones.

{ Stanford magazine | Continue reading }

{ My primary interest in visiting your Web site is to examine every page on the site before I finally find your hours of operation and phone number in illegible type in a graphical footer. | neversaidaboutrestaurantwebsites.tumblr.com | more }

Evolutionary biologists suggest there is a correlation between the size of the cerebral neocortex and the number of social relationships a primate species can have. Humans have the largest neocortex and the widest social circle — about 150, according to the scientist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar’s number — 150 — also happens to mirror the average number of friends people have on Facebook. Because of airplanes and telephones and now social media, human beings touch the lives of vastly more people than did our ancestors, who might have encountered only 150 people in their lifetime. Now the possibility of connection is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson says, “We’re in uncharted territory.”

{ TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg | Continue reading | A map of the world, as drawn by Facebook }

{ DigiBarn | more }

Turbulence, a film by Prof. Nitzan Ben Shaul of Tel Aviv University, uses complicated video coding procedures that allow the viewer to change the course of a movie in mid-plot. In theory, that means each new theater audience can see its very own version of a film. Turbulence recently won a prize at the Berkeley Video and Film Festival for its technological innovation.

{ AFTAU | Continue reading }

Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them, and keep playing them.

Miyamoto’s games are widely considered to be among the greatest. He has been called the father of modern video games. The best known, and most influential, is Super Mario Bros., which débuted a quarter of a century ago and, depending on your point of view, created an industry or resuscitated a comatose one. It spawned dozens of sequels and spinoffs. Miyamoto has designed or overseen the development of many other blockbusters, among them the Legend of Zelda series, Star Fox, and Pikmin. Their success, in both commercial and cultural terms, suggests that he has a peerless feel for the pull, that he is a master of play—of its components and poetics—in the way that Walt Disney, to whom he is often compared, was of sentiment and wonder. (…)

What he hasn’t created is a company in his own name, or a vast fortune to go along with it. He is a salaryman. Miyamoto’s business card says that he is the senior managing director and the general manager of the entertainment-analysis and -development division at Nintendo Company Ltd., the video-game giant. What it does not say is that he is Nintendo’s guiding spirit, its meal ticket, and its playful public face. Miyamoto has said that his main job at Nintendo is ningen kougaku—human engineering. He has been at the company since 1977 and has worked for no other.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

4. Metaflex Future Camouflage
Scientists in Scotland are working on advancing camouflage by creating a material called Metaflex. This material acts as a Harry Potter-esque invisible cloak. The wearer appears invisible because the Metaflex material bends light as it hits its surface. The “invisibility cloaks” are being tested this year and could potentially be used as a defense weapon. (…)

9. Hybrid Insect MEMS
The HI-MEMS is part insect, part machine. First, a micro-mechanical system is placed inside the insect during early stages of metamorphosis. The bugs operate similarly to a remote control car — the goal is to be able to control the bugs movement and location through the implanted microsystem. HI-MEMS will be used for gathering information using its sensors, such as a microphone or a gas detector. Debut date unknown.

10. DREAD Silent Weapon System
The DREAD Silent Weapon System has the ability to shoot off 120,000 rounds per minute. The gun runs fully on electrical energy, not gunpowder, which means no recoil, no sound, and no heat. Debut date unknown.

{ 10 Weapons Of The Future That Are Being Developed Right Now | Continue reading }

FRIEND: so have you decided what you are going to do about the websites?
ZUCK: yea i’m going to fuck them
ZUCK: probably in the year
ZUCK: *ear

In another exchange leaked to Silicon Alley Insider, Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted on any Harvard student:

ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks

According to two knowledgeable sources, there are more unpublished IMs that are just as embarrassing and damaging to Zuckerberg. But, in an interview, Breyer told me, “Based on everything I saw in 2006, and after having a great deal of time with Mark, my confidence in him as C.E.O. of Facebook was in no way shaken.”

{ New Yorker | Continue reading }

Stuxnet is an incredibly advanced, undetectable computer worm that took years to construct and was designed to jump from computer to computer until it found the specific, protected control system that it aimed to destroy: Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Intelligence agencies, computer security companies and the nuclear industry have been trying to analyze the worm since it was discovered in June by a Belarus-based company that was doing business in Iran. And what they’ve all found, says Sean McGurk, the Homeland Security Department’s acting director of national cyber security and communications integration, is a “game changer.”

The construction of the worm was so advanced, it was “like the arrival of an F-35 into a World War I battlefield,” says Ralph Langner, the computer expert who was the first to sound the alarm about Stuxnet. (…)

The target was seemingly impenetrable; for security reasons, it lay several stories underground and was not connected to the World Wide Web. And that meant Stuxnet had to act as sort of a computer cruise missile: As it made its passage through a set of unconnected computers, it had to grow and adapt to security measures and other changes until it reached one that could bring it into the nuclear facility.

When it ultimately found its target, it would have to secretly manipulate it until it was so compromised it ceased normal functions.

And finally, after the job was done, the worm would have to destroy itself without leaving a trace.

Here’s how it worked, according to experts who have examined the worm:
–The nuclear facility in Iran runs an “air gap” security system, meaning it has no connections to the Web, making it secure from outside penetration. Stuxnet was designed and sent into the area around Iran’s Natanz nuclear power plant — just how may never be known — to infect a number of computers on the assumption that someone working in the plant would take work home on a flash drive, acquire the worm and then bring it back to the plant.

{ Fox News | Continue reading | Thanks Cole! }

{ The Parrot AR.Drone was definitely one of the highlights of our day. How can you top a quadricopter that can fight with another using augmented reality, is easy to fly, and only needs an iPhone to control it? | Engadget | more photos + video }

A new program enables a robot to detect whether another robot is susceptible to lies, and to use its gullibility against it by telling lies, researchers claim.

The robot could be capable of deceiving humans in a similar way, according to the scientists, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

Scientists are trying to teach robots to read - so they can understand road signs and shop names to ‘live’ for themselves.

Experts believe developing literate artificial intelligence should be relatively simple because computers are already able to turn scanned books into text.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

photo { Mark King }

A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

{ ScienceMag }

photo { Cyril Lagel }