I recently enjoyed listening to Guy Kawasaki in person at the Cleveland TechSync, which is trying to foster regional economic growth and tech innovation. His talk was good, he is a good speaker and has a wealth of experience (as he put it – ” I know too much”!).
I love the efforts going on in this region – helping young and upcoming entrepreneurs with resources that would make it condusive to start a company in this region. But as Guy highlighted in the talk, the main focus should be on education and specifically engineering which will drive innovation. Everything else will follow.
Case in point: Ford vs Toyota, the latter has great products and very little in “employee discounts”. This month it overtook Ford as the No.2 in terms of sales volumes. If you look around there are several such examples – iPod, BMW, Sony, etc that stand true to this test. Great products “that have depth – Guy” will shine and emerge victors (as look as they do not really really mess up other aspects of the business).
I think the sure way to improve the region is to invest in school and university. Start from ground up..teach kids math and science and let them think freely. Honestly I have taught some freshmen classes, the students are totally ill equipped when it comes to simple mathematic. Not their fault really, in a culture where geeks are projected as freaks or looser (ridiculous)
Once they are nurtured, their quest for knowledge will drive them to find ways to acquire it – be it college or real life. The next best thing is to make the local universities worth aspiring for and not having to loose these smart kids to the Yales and Harvards.
Easier said than done, however it begins with leadership and the aspiration to challenge the status quo, which I think is present in North East Ohio. So what are we waiting for?
I was surfing and found this interesting presentation - How to finish your damn PhD.
Funny yet very true.
Every web application that comes out these days has a “Beta” next to it. This does make people more tolerant to errors or bugs they come across the site. However, with Google keeping many of it apps in “perpetual beta”, the term has some how been eroded of its value.
Just to point out, Google News, some time back quietly droped the “beta” meaning the application was stable and relatively bug free. However here is a screen shot of “Mini Me” with the Kraft business news. 
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So it it out of Beta?
I was browsing the blogsphere and came across http://www.BlueDot.us. It is a social bookmarking site with a lot of AJAX and the ability to have links, representative thumbnails from the bookmarked page and ofcourse – tagging.
When I hit the site, it was a bit slow, but that is understandable given that they really were not ready for the kind of attention (they mentioned on their blog.) Good luck to them, hope they find what they are looking to achieve with the site.
Reminds me of 1999-2000, the entrepreneurial sprit never fails.
There are a lot of unsolved problem in the world. From as profound as “Where did we come from?” to as trivial as “Where did I come keep leave my keys?”.
One very interesting problem, that I had mentioned in one of my previous posts was the lack of online geographic data on places outside the US and Europe. So can the mass participation of people on the web help tackle this problem?
Today when I got home, Sabah showed me a cool site, Wikimapia – a play on wikipedia and maps. It turns out is a mashup using google maps and the concept of open participation of a Wiki.
I marked all the places I know of pretty quickly (talk about being territorial) and was able to find them because of information put up by other users. Soon I hope every inch of the globe is covered with relevant tags.
One up to human processing power .
I have been following Riya – a photo sharing and searching web app for quite some time. It is interesting to see that someone is trying facial recognition at this scale. Facial recognition is a really hard problem to solve. In a nut shell think of a complex graph formed by common facial features like – distance between eyes, width of the nose etc to form a faceprint. Then these nodal points are compared to a reference set of images in a database.
Easier said than done of course!
When one talks about photo sharing sites, Flickr cannot be left out of the conversation. I was thinking about how fundamentally the two approaches differ. What it boils down to is – the former using computing power and the later using the social computing power of the web to make images searchable.
So I wonder which is more accurate and what kind of results would one produce versus another?
One thing is for sure; computers can recognize but not interpret.
I have been fascinated with robotic since I was a child. But it was never easy to build a robot – a very expensive hobby to say the least. But with Lego’s mindstom I saw hope and I am waiting for Mindstorms NXT to be released.
I am more into software, as that gives you options and some possibility of “AI” to a robot. That being said I was pleasantly surprised by Microsoft’s announcement today about their Robotics Studio.
I know there will be challenges putting the two together, but I for sure want to get back into building robots. Once a technology crosses a certain threshold, things become “obvious” that were previously novel and abstruse. Aren’t we living it on the Internet?
Vikas is a good friend and co-entrepreneur who engages uncertainty like me (don’t wish to wed it!) . He wanted to know the capacity of CDMA and what made it better. While I am not a expert on what is best for the mobile MAC (Medium Access Protocol) enviroment, CDMA does take advantage of many phenomenon that occur in wireless cellular networks -
- Relax Bandwidth Capacity - Unlike TDMA, there is no hard limit on the bandwidth. One can trade off the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) to accomodate addtional users.
- Voice Activity Dection – Since humans talk only 35% time of time, it does cause enable to increase the the capacity by almost 5-6 folds in CDMA. However it does not hold true if you are downloading rich media. Design so much depends on the Traffic pattern, no wonder my Advisor keeps asking me – “What traffic pattern are you assuming?”
There are a several other aspects and a small post would not do justice to it. The best place to start is at the source paper : Overview of Cellular CDMA that appeard in the IEE transactions on Vehicular technology in May 1991.
How well one can solve a problem really depends how well one can abstract the noise and distill to the core of the issue. While this is true in every aspect of problem solving it is particularly true in Software Development. All the rage about AJAX – it is RPC, it is Web 2.0 and every other term coined to make it sellable.
Basically it is an excellent example of abstraction. It enables the decoupling of UI from programming logic. So now the user who interacts with a web application does not have to depend on what is on the server and what is on the client.
If I may speculate, this abstraction may finally refine the web to its true potential of a socio-technical, distributive-collaborative application platform.
Microsoft is always taking a beating for not being original and not being innovators. They copied the UI from Xerox, they were the last to get on to SAAS etc. However Google and to some extent Yahoo! are perceived to be very inventive and creative.
I personally think that none of them come up with original ideas, they just have the resources to perfect them over time. Microsoft with their OS has made it, one of the easiest to use. Google with their search have vastly improved it, since its inception.
So are they not innovators? Innovation to me is doing something very well, iterative, consistent, incremental improvements based on feedback from end users. Google is not original with its “new” calendaring services, or the just announced social bookmarking and vertical search. But rest assured they will improve it and refine it over time to make it such that it is a cut above the rest. So is true with Toyota and Honda – how many iteration have we seen of the Camry and Accord? Pure incremental refinement till they almost seem disruptive inventions.
Keen observation, good analysis and the ablity to translate them to actionable things are great tools that lead to innovation.
