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

August / September 2010 Volume 8 Number 4

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What Did Mickey’s Inventor and the Boss Know?

“Imagine Walt Disney at the age of 19,” says Dan Pallotta, an innovation expert on his blog. “His uncle asks him what he plans to do with his life, and he pulls out a drawing of a mouse and says, ‘I think this has a lot of potential.’ Or Bruce Springsteen. He once told the story of how his father hated his guitar. Late one night, Springsteen came home to find his father waiting up for him in the kitchen. His father asked him what he thought he was doing with himself. ‘And the worst part about it,’ Springsteen says, "was I never knew how to explain it to him.’ How does he tell his father, ‘I'm going to be Bruce Springsteen?’”
Someone once said to Pallotta the thing that stood out most in conversations with entrepreneurs was the willingness of great entrepreneurs to be vulnerable. “It's not the first association you'd make with an entrepreneur,” he says. “Words like ‘driven,’ ‘ambitious’ and ‘persistent’ usually come to mind. But the moment he said it I knew he'd hit the nail on the head. Vulnerability. It is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know. There's a misfit in each of us, and it's the most delicate, precious thing that we have. Sadly, most people make it their life's mission to hide it, to cover it over in the same clothes, the same work, the same "regurgitations," as Thomas Merton wrote, as everyone else.
“I used to visit the merry-go-round in Griffith Park in Los Angeles where Disney once took his daughters, asking himself, ‘Is this all there is? There has to be a better place to take my children.’ And the rest is history. The great entrepreneur—the entrepreneur who really changes things—is the one who, in 2010, goes to Disneyland and asks the same question: ‘Is this all there is?’ And the new world she or he will create as a result of that audacious inquiry is one that cannot possibly be conceived by people busy trying to fit into the world as it is.”

BUT WILL THE BEDSIDE MANNER IMPROVE?
As physician-guided robots routinely operate on patients at most major hospitals, the next generation robot could eliminate a surprising element from the scenario—the doctor. Feasibility studies have demonstrated that a robot—without any human assistance—can locate a man-made lesion in simulated human organs, guide a device to the lesion and take multiple samples during a single session. The researchers believe that as the technology is further developed, autonomous robots could some day perform other simple surgical tasks.
“Earlier this year we demonstrated that a robot directed by artificial intelligence can on its own locate simulated calcifications and cysts in simulated breast tissue with high repeatability and accuracy,” says Kaicheng Liang, a former student of Stephen Smith, director of the Duke University Ultrasound Transducer Group. The Duke team combined a souped-up version of an existing robot arm with an ultrasound system. The ultrasound serves as the robot’s “eyes” by collecting data from its scan and locating its target. The robot is “controlled” not by a physician, but by an artificial intelligence program that takes the real-time 3-D information, processes it and gives the robot specific commands to perform.

Perhaps a Blessing in Disguise
The internet will run out of internet addresses in about 1 year's time, say the folks at the American Registry for Internet Numbers. The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the web, thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the web. But what to do, what to do? No good answers yet.

ALL YOU NEED IS A FINGERPRINT
A grocery store in the southwest German town of Ruelzheim has piloted a novel technology cutting out time otherwise wasted scrabbling for coins or cards. In checking out, a customer places his or her finger on a scanner, which compares the shopper’s fingerprint with one stored in the store’s database with account details. And, voila! Customer gets charged and goes on his or her way. The store’s manager figures the system won’t be abused. The chance of two people having the same fingerprint is about 1 in 220 million.

Can the Scientist and the Engineer Ever Be Friends?
All fields of science seem to experience tension between those who want to generate basic knowledge [scientists] and those who want to apply this knowledge [engineers], especially as the fields develop. The field of chemistry evolved from being dominated by research chemists to eventually include industrial chemists and chemical engineers. Physics expanded from those investigating the fundamental nature of matter to material scientists and engineers who created the electronics industry. This evolution is natural. After all, you must discover and understand the basic rules of a system before you can apply this knowledge. Basic knowledge in biology has been slow to develop because of its complexity, but we are starting to get to a point where the engineering sciences can make a real impact on our progress.…Unfortunately, funding issues have created real tension between the two groups. The scientists control most of it and seem to begrudge engineers the money necessary to contribute to biology. There will always be tension between different groups competing for the same limited resources. But rejecting engineering proposals because they “lack a hypothesis” reflects an unfortunate prejudice that only basic science projects deserve support. Basic science is not inherently superior to engineering or vice versa. We need both to advance as a field and to create the practical applications that will justify public funding of biology.
—H. Steven Wiley, Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Get Rid of Those Red Flags
There is a tendency in business plans to rely on well-established cliches that all to often disguise the reality, shall we say, and are invariably red flags for investors. Morton Zwilling, CEO of Startup Professionals, has collected a number of them. Several follow, with Zwilling’s comments.
“Our product is truly disruptive technology.”
If your product really represents a paradigm shift, you probably haven’t figured out yet what problem it solves. At best we can count on it taking many years to catch on, just like other disruptive technologies before you. No investor wants to wait that long for his return, or fund the years of waiting.
“All we have to do is get 1 percent of the market.”
This red flag is the flip side of “the market will be $50 billion.” There are two problems with this assertion. First, no investor is interested in a company that is only looking to get 1 percent of a market. Second, that first 1 percent is the toughest of any market, so you look naïve implying it's easy to get.
“We don’t believe there are any competitors.”
This is a terrible statement because there are only two logical conclusions. A first conclusion is that there must not be a market. Or worse yet, the entrepreneur is so arrogant that he hasn’t even used Google to figure out he has competition just down the street.

INVENTORS HAVE THEIR OWN MONTH
August, we suppose, is the optimum to invent something since it is officially National Inventors Month. Created by the United Inventors Association, the Academy of Applied Science and Inventor’s Digest magazine, it’s been around since 1998. "We want to recognize those talented, brave individuals who dare to be blatantly creative, and therefore different, and whose accomplishments affect every facet of our lives," says Joanne Hayes-Rines, editor of Inventors' Digest. So go forth and invent.

FLASHY AWARD
Lockheed Martin, in addition to being the country’s largest defense contractor, is also a maker of flash drives, which you probably didn’t know. Its drive called “Ironclad” was cited recently for innovation by the TechAmerica Foundation, naming it the best of new products in the cyber security and authentication award category. Lockheed says Ironclad makes it possible to securely fit the entire desktop in a pocket.

HOW BIG CAN A RIG GET?
Those oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico you keep hearing about are plenty big, but the world’s largest—which is actually a natural gas platform—is located off the Norwegian Coast in the North Sea and called, unsurprisingly, the Troll platform. At 656,000 tons, it is said to be the heaviest man-made mobile object ever. It stands 369 meters tall and was constructed of 245,000 metric tons of concrete and 100,000 tons of steel, which is approximately 15 Eiffel towers. Shell Oil owns it.