Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Chris Olsen says when he looks around the Midwest, he sees the raw ingredients "for what could potentially be a great economic driver for tech."


From USATODAY

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Chris Olsen believes the next great tech firm could emerge right here from the heartland.

Sure, Silicon Valley is home to most huge tech household names (Apple, Facebook, Twitter, eBay and so many more), with New York (Tumblr) and Boston (Trip Advisor) creeping up, but as he sees it, why not Ohio or Michigan?

Hundreds of brilliant engineers are churned out yearly from top Midwestern schools like Ohio State University and University of Michigan. Graduates shouldn't have to leave for California to get funding for their dreams, he says.

So Olsen is literally putting investors' money where his mouth is, with a $250 million fund to bankroll tech start-ups from the Midwest.

"Silicon Valley is great," he says. "But everyone forgets that 40 years ago it was just apple fields and orchards. When we look around the Midwest, we see a lot of the raw ingredients for what could potentially be a great economic driver for tech, which over time will create great industries."


I like to note my example of an Midwest investment opportunity right here on the 'Midwestern Riviera'. Door County Global Interactive is building two interwoven lifestyles brands for the DC enthusiast..
Thanks, Perry

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Want money? Investor legend John Doerr names his top 3 verticals.. Check out the last sentence...

Want money? Investor legend John Doerr names his top 3 verticals

Want money? Investor legend John Doerr names his top 3 verticals 

From Venture Beat September 11, 2013 10:29 AM
 

SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the biggest names in venture capital says, “The largest new opportunities in technologies are in … ,” you listen.
John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins fame took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about his top three picks for verticals ripe for innovation.
They are, in order, healthcare, education, and revolutionary hardware....
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In response to that trend, KPCB has created an initiative called Low-Power Everywhere. This includes research and investment in companies that promote battery efficiency, display energy efficiency, and all kinds of initiatives for greener devices and better use of energy resources.
“The game changer would be to … triple the energy density in batteries. We’ve got a venture working on that.” With lighter, more powerful batteries, Doerr said, “My dream is that we could make electric vehicles as cheap or cheaper than internal combustion.”

Please link to full article here  http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/11/want-money-investor-legend-john-doerr-names-his-top-3-verticals/

 




How David Beats Goliath When underdogs break the rules. Great story from 09 about Uncubed thought and the guy that just bought the Kings.

How David Beats Goliath


When underdogs break the rules

by May 11, 2009 

A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?
A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?

 When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion.
Link to full article in the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Interesting article from Gladwell about what I like to call Uncubed Thought. (Outside the box - well that needed reinvention too.)
Thanks, Perry

U.S. scientists achieve 'turning point' in fusion energy quest

U.S. scientists achieve 'turning point' in fusion energy quest

Wed Feb 12, 2014 1:00pm EST

By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - U.S. scientists announced on Wednesday an important milestone in the costly, decades-old quest to develop fusion energy, which, if harnessed successfully, promises a nearly inexhaustible energy source for future generations.
For the first time, experiments have produced more energy from fusion reactions than the amount of energy put into the fusion fuel, scientists at the federally funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said.
The researchers, led by physicist Omar Hurricane, described the achievement as important but said much more work is needed before fusion can become a viable energy source. They noted that did not produce self-heating nuclear fusion, known as ignition, that would be needed for any fusion power plant.
Researchers have faced daunting scientific and engineering challenges in trying to develop nuclear fusion - the process that powers stars including our sun - for use by humankind.
"Really for the first time anywhere, we've gotten more energy out of this fuel than was put into the fuel. And that's quite unique. And that's kind of a major turning point, in a lot of our minds," Hurricane told reporters.
"I think a lot of people are jazzed."
Link to full article http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/12/science-fusion-idUSL2N0LF16020140212

Let's keep an open mind because there has to be a better way in almost aspect of life..
Think Uncubed..