Saturday, September 13, 2014

Gates And Musk On Energy


Going Corporate, Going Startup

Medium (TV series)
Medium (TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


This Medium post has been a social media viral hit the past few days.

How quitting my corporate job for my startup dream f*cked my life up



Why was this post a big hit?

It is well written. The title is catchy. Many more people do startups these days than was true before the 2008 recession. The title speaks to fears many people have. Most people avoid going into the startup grind because deep down they know it is going to f*ck up things.

The post has great introductory paragraphs. The writer seems to be a classic success story. He got a great education, then landed a great job. He was flying business class.

Then he pinches you the reality. It was not all that great. He was mostly staring at spreadsheets, all night long, all flight long. A lot of people relate to that.

They say that about marriage. People who are out, want in. People who are in, want out. People who are married think singles are having more fun. Singles think married people are having more fun.

A great, catchy title with great first few paragraphs can create a social media hit.

But even after that, the post is pretty good. It gives you a pretty good idea of what a sinkhole a startup can be.

One element though is missing. He is not talking about his idea. You don't create a successful startup just because you quit a great job. It is about your idea, and your execution.

Friday, September 12, 2014

NUI: Natural User Interface

English: The Microsoft Kinect peripheral for t...
English: The Microsoft Kinect peripheral for the Xbox 360. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The NUI will be a bigger departure than the GUI, Graphical User Interface, was. This is a big one. Microsoft has some advantages here. But it will not be any one company thing. This will be a tectonic shift.

Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon
Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year ...... Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft’s Skype unit, the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks, and the 3-D design company Autodesk ....... a startup called Volumental, lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement—something that could help with online shopping. ..... data from a tablet’s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games, where a virtual character viewed on a device’s screen integrates into the real environment. In one demo, a flying robot appeared on-screen and selected a landing spot on top of a box on a cluttered table. As the tablet showing the character was moved, it stayed perched on the tabletop, and even disappeared behind occluding objects. ...... the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop, or take control of some features of Windows. ...... reminiscent of Microsoft’s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console, which introduced gamers to depth sensing and gesture control in 2010. Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCs in 2012, and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013, but Kinect devices are too large to fit inside a laptop or tablet.

Nanostructured Ceramics

Just like biotech has a huge appetite for Big Data, I keep wondering how you plug in software into these nano scale equations. You know how they say for sensory perception the software-only approach is a dead end. You need to innovate at the hardware level. So you design neuro inspired chips. I think nano could see software use in that direction. Smarter hardware? In built smartness?

A Super-Strong and Lightweight New Material
they could make ceramics, metals, and other materials that can recover after being crushed, like a sponge. The materials are very strong and light enough to float through the air like a feather. ..... In conventional materials, strength, weight, and density are correlated. ..... nanoscale trusses made from ceramic materials can be both very light—unsurprising, since they are mostly air—and extremely strong. ..... To make the ceramic nano-trusses, Greer’s lab uses a technique called two-photon interference lithography. It’s akin to a very low-yield 3-D laser printer. ..... Nanostructures have a very high surface area and are lightweight, a combination that could make for a fast-charging battery that stores a lot of energy in a convenient package.