UPFRONT News, Notes, Bits and Bytes From Here, There, Everywhere

June / July 2010 Volume 8 Number 3

Print this Article

E-mail this Article

Space Apple

You never know what will get the media to jump on a story—but you can make a pretty good guess. Scary or sexy stuff are easy sells. But cute, harmless, a bit fluffy and sort of fuzzy works too, even with science stories and especially if reading them makes the reader feel smarter. Hence word that the Royal Society has provided UK astronaut Piers Sellers with a signed piece of a tree to carry into orbit on the shuttle Atlantis’s last scheduled flight has gotten enthusiastic response. The reason is that the signature is Isaac Newton’s and the splinter, as vouchsafed by the Royal Society, is off the very tree under which Newton sat when a falling apple inspired his second law of motion. That’s the one about force, mass and the inverse square of distance. If the clippings on the space station are ever gathered, most of them will be on such as this—lessons for children from space, astronauts wrestling with balky instruments, spiders building webs in microgravity, problems with the toilet, and such. Not much to show for its purported megabillion-dollar purpose: the expansion of human science and society to a grand new level.
—Charlie Petit in Knight Science Journalism Tracker

SEED-STAGE INVESTING IS UP

The National Association of Seed and Venture Funds  and the Temple University Fox School of Business announced today that the percentage of venture and angel funds focused on investing in seed-stage companies has increased 40 percent from 2009 based on the second annual survey to its members. Sixty-nine percent of the funds in the annual NASVF survey have $20 million or less under management and 85 percent focus on knowledge-based ventures such as technology, software, web 2.0, science based, communications and media.  Other positive results from the survey were the following:
• 51 percent of the funds plan to invest more money in companies over last year
• 40 percent increase in the number of funds able to raise new money in less than a year
• 10 percent increase in the capital raising climate over last year

Who Was It That Said “Plastics”?

Student researchers at Northeastern University have designed an apparatus to convert plastic waste into clean energy without releasing harmful emissions. The team developed a waste combustor, which breaks down non-biodegradable plastics to create an alternative source of fuel. Self-sustainability is the key to the design. Plastic waste is first processed in an upper tank through pyrolysis, which converts solid plastic into gas. Next, the gas flows to a lower tank, where it is burned with oxidants to generate heat and steam. The heat sustains the combustor while the steam can be used to generate electric power.
“The prototype can be scaled up to drive a large power plant, which could connect to a plastic recycling center for a constant flow of fuel,” said David Laskowski, a researcher. He says calculations show that the technology has the potential of replacing up to 462 million gallons of petroleum, if all recycled plastics were to be processed.

Do a Little Solitary Thinking and Never Mind the Brainstorming

To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What pacesetters of the future really require is some time alone. Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies. They found that a hybrid process—in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers—resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.The researchers say the absolute best idea in a hybrid process topped the No. 1 suggestion in a traditional model.

INCUBATORS ARE, WELL, INCUBATING LIKE CRAZY

Business incubators—programs designed to help launch entrepreneurial ventures—are expanding nationwide amid increased demand for the resources, services and counseling the programs typically provide for little or no cost. New incubator programs have been forming in the U.S. at an annual rate of 8 to 10 percent for the past five years, and today there are approximately 1,200, estimates Tracy Kitts, vice president of the National Business Incubation Association. The programs are commonly funded by economic-development groups, government entities and academic institutions, and more than half support startups in a mix of industries. Most incubators offer startups commercial space to grow their ventures for below-market lease rates, plus free counseling, administrative support and services in areas such as human resources, information technology and marketing.

IF YOU’RE LIKE MOST FOLKS, YOUR PASSWORD IS HARDLY A PASSWORD AT ALL

Here's a statistic that can mean your virtual survival. If your online password has 3 characters, it will take a computer hacker 0.86 seconds to crack.  However, if your password has 10 characters, it will take almost 2 million years. Since you probably have an easy-to-remember password (nearly 1 out of 100 people use “123456”), you may want to create a new one. But don’t use common words or patterns and come up with a fairly long password—8 to 10 characters work best. Even if you avoid common terms, some hackers could still attempt to “brute force” their way into your account.
This means telling a computer to try every permutation that it can think of until it busts in. So sticking to lower-case letters is a bad idea: mix ‘em up. John Pozadzides, CEO of software company iFusion Labs, says  “adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an eight-character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.”

WHAT MAKES A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR?

Mark Suster is an entrepreneur who joined a venture capital firm after selling his company. Close observation has led him to conclude that successful entrepreneurs share a number of characteristics, including the following:
•  Tenacity—The most important attribute of an entrepreneur is never being willing to give up.
 • Street Smarts—Getting out and understanding customers is far more important than book smarts or computer research.
• Ability to Pivot—You need to be sure you have a great product/market fit and that it is a big enough market to make money.  The best entrepreneurs fine tune their product and their business model until they find this groove.
• Resiliency—Being an entrepreneur is sexy—for those who haven’t done it.  In reality it’s gritty, tough work where you will be filled with self doubt.  Entrepreneurs are survivors.
• Inspiration—You need to lead teams and convince others to move mountains when by all means they shouldn’t believe they can.
• Willingness to Accept Risk—Entrepreneurs are people who are willing to start a business on a leap of faith.  If you aren’t willing to take a shot by going full time on your startup it tells investors you aren’t confident enough in the idea or in yourself.
•  Attention to Detail – If you’re going to lead an early stage business you need to be on top of all your details.  
•  Decisiveness / Gets Things Done – Entrepreneurs don’t “noodle,” they “do.”  This is what separates entrepreneurs from big company executives, consultants and investors.  Everybody else has the luxury of “analysis” and Monday-morning quarterbacking. 

A Quicker Way to Mars?

There's a growing chorus of calls to send astronauts to Mars rather than the moon, but critics point out that such trips would be long and gruelling, taking about six months to reach the planet. But now, researchers are testing a powerful new ion engine that could one day shorten the journey to just 39 days. Traditional rockets burn chemical fuel to produce thrust. Most of that fuel is used up in the initial push off the Earth's surface, so the rockets tend to coast most of the time they're in space. Ion engines, on the other hand, accelerate electrically charged atoms, or ions, through an electric field, thereby pushing the spacecraft in the opposite direction. They provide much less thrust at a given moment than do chemical rockets, which means they can't break free of the Earth's gravity on their own.
But once in space, they can give a continuous push for years, like a steady breeze at the back of a sailboat, accelerating gradually until they're moving faster than chemical rockets. Several space missions have already used ion engines, including NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is en route to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres. But a new engine will have much more "oomph" than previous ones. That's because it uses a radio frequency generator, similar to transmitters used to broadcast radio shows, to heat the charged particles, or plasma. The engine is being developed by the Ad Astra Rocket Company.

So Why Waste All That, um, Energy?

Don’t be too surprised ifone day you see a computing center spring up next to a cow pasture.  That’s because  all those cow pies could be transformed into enough energy to run that data center. If  the average cow deposits enough waste daily to power a 100-watt light bulb, think of what 10,000 cows can do: fuel the equivalent of a one-megawatt data center, according to folks at HP, which is enough to run a small computing center for, say, a bank. There is equipment to turn manure into methane that can be used as a natural gas or diesel replacement. HP hasn’t yet decided to build its own manure-burning system, but is thinking about it.
Wait! There’s more: Airplanes powered by coal—at first blush it sounds about as attractive as the toddler chainsaw. But Accelergy in Houston says it has come up with a way to convert the ubiquitous rock into an economical, clear, and arguably clean form of jet fuel.
The company will initially try to sell fuel to the U.S. military—the Air Force has already begun initial testing—and has also started to field inquiries from China and some commercial aircraft and engine manufacturers. Biomass can also be substituted for coal, or at least part of it, in the recipe, depending on the desired characteristics of the final fuel.

And if you like that bit of news, you’ll love this one: You may be seeing more data centers built in places where cows outnumber people, mainly because the, um, leavings of cows could be converted into energy to power those data centers. The average cow produces enough waste per day to power a 100-watt bulb. It follows, then, that 10,000 cows have enough in them to fuel a one-megawatt data center, equivalent to a small computing center used by a bank, say folks at HP, which has an interest in such things. HP hasn’t constructed its own manure-burning system, which results in a large quantity of methane gas, but is thinking about it.

Imitation May Be Better Than Innovation

Books these days regularly cheer innovation. You rarely go to a conference without hearing how important it is. Copying others has a bit of a stigma. Yet despite all of that talk, successful imitation rather than innovation may be a better way to make money. Even better, borrowing from others and combining that with your own creativity, can build strong competitive advantages. So says Oded Shenkar, a business professor at Ohio State University, in a new provocative book called Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation To Gain a Strategic Edge, published by Harvard Business Press.