Interesting Snippets

G.E. announced a partnership with Quirky, a New York-based start-up that is a kind of social network for inventors, helping turn vague ideas into marketable items, manufacturing them, and distributing them through stores like Best Buy and Target. G.E. is licensing hundreds of its patents to the company’s community and working directly to help identify particularly promising consumer uses of these patents.

The third map plots innovations, measured as patents per capita. Now, the United States takes first place, followed by Japan, Switzerland, Finland, and Israel. Sweden, Germany, Canada, Denmark, and Hong Kong round out the top ten. Turning to the BRICs, India is 26th, Russia 34th, and Brazil 41st. (Reliable data for China were not available).

From a low point of 51 375 EU-27 patent applications filed with the European Patent Office (EPO) in 2002, there was a steady increase during four years. Having peaked at 57 424 applications in 2006, the number of EU-27 patent applications to the EPO fell for four consecutive years, although latest estimates show that patent applications (54 415) in 2010 remained higher than at the start of the decade. ….
Among the EU Member States, Germany had by far the highest number of patent applications to the EPO, some 21 724 in 2010 (39.9 % of the EU-27 total). In relative terms, Sweden reported the highest number of patent applications per million inhabitants (306.7), followed by Germany (265.6), Denmark (241.7) and Finland (217.7).

It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better…. Because when you’re working to make things 10 percent better, you inevitably focus on the existing tools and assumptions… But when you aim for a 10x gain, you lean instead on bravery and creativity

In 1986, the BBC gave birth to the Domesday Project… that saw one million Brits crowdsource a cultural snapshot of UK life, including text, photography and video, then ship the resulting database on Laser Discs to schools and libraries as an interactive guide to the country. Over 100,000 square kilometres of British soil was documented, along with just under 150,000 pages of written text and more than 20,000 digitised colour photographs…. For a time it was possible for the information stored online to be updated but today the archive serves as a memorial for a project that took 21st century online ambition and tried to make it work 20 years too soon.

I feel like there are all these opportunities in the world to use technology to make people’s lives better. At Google we’re attacking maybe 0.1 percent of that space. And all the tech companies combined are only at like 1 percent. That means there’s 99 percent virgin territory. Investors always worry, “Oh, you guys are going to spend too much money on these crazy things.” But those are now the things they’re most excited about—YouTube, Chrome, Android. If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.

Astro Teller, who oversees Google X, the company’s blue-sky skunkworks division, illustrates Page’s proclivities with a parable. Teller imagines wheeling a Dr. Who time machine into Page’s office. He plugs it in and—it works! But instead of being bowled over, Page asks why it needs a plug. Wouldn’t it be better if it didn’t use power at all? “It’s not because he’s not excited about time machines or he’s ungrateful that we built it,” Teller says. “It’s just core to who he is. There’s always more to do, and his focus is on where the next 10X will come from.

Teams of scientists from across the continent are vying for a funding bonanza that could see two of them receive up to (euro) 1 billion ($1.33 billion) over 10 years … Just four have made it to the final round.
They include a plan to develop digital guardian angels that would keep people safe from harm; a massive data-crunching machine to simulate social, economic and technological change on our planet; an effort to craft the most accurate computer model of the human brain to date; and a team working to find better ways to produce and employ graphene — an ultra-thin material that could revolutionize manufacturing of everything from airplanes to computer chips.
The two winners will be announced by the European Union’s executive branch in Brussels on Jan. 28.

Some unknown genius discovered that if you hooked two Sears or Monkey Ward telephone sets to the top wire on a barbed-wire fence, you could talk between the telephones as easily as between two “town” telephones connected by slick wire through an operator’s switchboard. A rural telephone system that had no operators, no bills—and no long-distance charges—was born

[Tel Aviv Israel] :World’s number 2 startup ecosystem and serious contender to Silicon Valley
- In 2009, 63 Israeli companies were listed on the tech-orientated NASDAQ – more than from Europe, Japan, Korea, India, and China combined
- Almost every major tech company today has some kind of subsidiary in Israel: Intel, Microsoft, Google and Cisco etc.
- 39% of Israeli high-tech employees work in the R&D departments of multinational companies

Back in 1997, the White House also put forth five principles that described how governments should approach Internet policy. The first and most important was that “the private sector should lead.” This has been borne out by time. …
But if we examine the e-Intensity Index leaders, a more complex—and interesting—story emerges…. Many of the most advanced digital economies—South Korea, Sweden, and Japan, for example… have developed coherent, long-term strategies for going digital.

The private sector in those countries created the products, but their governments took leadership positions: they foresaw the importance of the Internet, they believed that they could encourage its evolution, and they developed policies to help their countries get more than their fair share of the growth and social benefits the Internet brings. Both the private and the public sector have led.

Executives and investors might finance three types of innovations with their capital. I’ll call the first type “empowering” innovations. These transform complicated and costly products available to a few into simpler, cheaper products available to the many … (EG: Ford Model T, Sony transistor radio)… Empowering innovations create jobs, because they require more and more people who can build, distribute, sell and service these products. …

The second type are “sustaining” innovations. These replace old products with new models. … They keep our economy vibrant — and, in dollars, they account for the most innovation. But they have a neutral effect on economic activity…

The third type are “efficiency” innovations. These reduce the cost of making and distributing existing products and services. Examples are minimills in steel and Geico in online insurance underwriting. Taken together in an industry, such innovations almost always reduce the net number of jobs, because they streamline processes. But they also preserve many of the remaining jobs — because without them entire companies and industries would disappear in competition against companies abroad that have innovated more efficiently.

Why does it take agencies months to work out a single campaign, when it seems Silicon Valley can kickstart an entirely new company in the same amount of time? In the same time frame, gaming companies pull together thousands of iterations of Call Of Duty and Farmville. Sitcoms can turn out dozens of scripts. And so forth…. Top-down assembly line processing is a remnant from the rusty industrial age, and no longer works in the fluid, spreadable hoodoo environments of the information era. Most agencies take a waterfall approach — you’ve got strategy then production then design then technology