Researchers use inkjet acumen to create wireless explosive sensor from paper

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

Meet Krishna Naishadham and Xiaojuan (Judy) Song. They’re researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and those little devices they’re holding may one day save you from an explosive device. This petite prototype is actually a paper-like wireless sensor that was printed using basic inkjet technology, developed by professor Manos Tentzeris. Its integrated lightweight antenna allows the sensor to link up with communication devices, while its functionalized carbon nanotubes enable it to pick up on even the slightest traces of ammonia — an ingredient common to most IEDs. According to Tentzeris, the trick to such inkjet printing lies in the development of “inks” that can be deposited at relatively low temperatures. These inks, laced with silver nanoparticles, can then be uniformly distributed across paper-based components using a process called sonication. The result is a low-cost component that can adhere to just about any surface. The wireless sensor, meanwhile, requires comparatively low amounts of power, and could allow users to detect bombs from a safe distance. Naishadham says his team’s device is geared toward military officials, humanitarian workers or any other bomb sniffers in hazardous situations, though there’s no word yet on when it could enter the market. To find out more, careen past the break for the full PR.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/31/researchers-use-inkjet-acumen-to-create-wireless-explosive-senso/

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Kai-Fu Lee On Why China Isn’t Ready For The Next Mark Zuckerberg

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

DLNG2218

InnovationWorks founder and former GooglerKai-Fu Lee took the stage at TC Disrupt Beijing today with Sarah Lacy to talk about the startup ecosystem in China.

InnovationWorks is a Chinese incubator focusing on early stage internet companies in China – interest in startups is exploding, and InnovationWorks saw 7,000 resumes in response to open applications for its first batch, “There’s nothing that matches the Chinese entrepreneurs desire for success,” he said.

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Lee sees the future of InnovationWorks, which started out as sort of a Chinese IdeaLab, as a combination Andreesen Horowitz/Y Combinator. The incubator is moving increasingly towards VC, with a new fund totaling almost $200 million dollars. Lee wants to put a Chinese spin on Andreesen’s strategy of completing everything in house, ”We take advantage of a high valuation and low cost of building. Disadvantage is that we don’t have ten years to wait. “

Lee said that InnovationWorks currently looks for three characteristics in its Chinese startup founders in addition to the prerequisites of being hardworking, tec, a) doing their homework b) previous experience — real skillset and value add in spaces c) the characteristics of being a leader

On the “previous experience” point, Lacy brought up that Lee’s belief that China isn’t ready for an entrepreneur with a disruptive, “lightbulb on top of head” type idea — a Zukerberg, Andreeseen or even a Jerry Yang or Steve Chen.

“Chinese society is not as supportive of failures,” Lee explained, and because of that “in the current state it is very difficult to find that 20 year old dropout with the novel idea.”

Lee did not preclude the idea of a Chinese Mark Zuckerberg (a.k.a. a young kid that changes the world) but implied that Tencent founder Pony Ma was an exception and instead Innovation Works was banking on people like Renren’s Jack Shiu, Vincent Tang and Jeff Ma, “all experienced people.”

“We think our hit rate is very high,” he said “and we need to spend that time with people who will increase that hit rate.”

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Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/kai-fu-lee-on-why-china-isnt-ready-for-the-next-mark-zuckerberg/

The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

7 Habits cover

Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher.

There was a girl at a party, Ona, who then started telling me how she met her current boyfriend. She just simply told him she liked him. I was insanely jealous right then of this guy. Here was this beautiful, hysterically funny girl who told a guy she liked him and now he was having regular sex with her.

That doesn’t happen, right? It never happened to me. I sat there nodding, not being able to say anything but thinking, what if she said, “I like you” to me right then. I would’ve been happy. Instead, I got depressed and went to sit on the stairs.

There was another girl there. She was crying.I tried to comfort her by telling her I was an artist. I then asked her why she was crying. Apparently the party was actually her birthday party! I had no idea. I didn’t even know who she was. And she was crying because her boyfriend didn’t show up.

Within a week we were living together. Ultimately it didn’t work out and I did my usual passive thing,which was to move to another city (in this case, NYC), to get out of the relationship.

In Stephen Covey’s Book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” his first habit is “Be Proactive.” I haven’t read the book. I saw the list on Wikipedia. I will not buy the book because at this moment it’s the #1 book on Amazon under Motivation on the Kindle and I am #2. How can he be #1 after 22 years?

But it makes me think—unfortunately he’s dead on. In fact, Being Proactive might be the only effective habit. I read the other six and they all seemed to be corollaries of the first one.

When I started my first company, Reset, I showed my brother-in-law the Internet so he could start learning design for it. And then I hired Reset from my perch at HBO to do HBO’s website. I was insanely proactive in getting the company off of the ground. When I wanted to sell the company I didn’t wait for buyers. I proactively went after everyone who was buying companies in the space. And screw you, Razorfish, for ignoring me.
When I was trading for hedge funds I sent out about 20 emails every weekend to new potential investors. Altogether I probably sent out over 1000 emails. Most of them ignored me. Over the course of a year about 14 allocated money for me to trade.
When I started Stockpickr, I spec-ed out the site, mocked up a few pages, and showed the CEO of thestreet.com what I was working on. I had spent less than $1000 on it at that point. He wanted to be involved and eventually it grew into a good business. If I had just said to him, “let’s do a social media business in Finance”, it would not have worked. I would’ve become a consultant rather than an entrepreneur. You have to do things to succeed. Nobody is just going to give you money. This is why being as proactive as possible is important.
Ona was proactive in meeting her boyfriend. He was never going to ask her out. So she told him she liked him and they started going out. She was proactive.
Before I met my wife Claudia, I was sending out probably 50 messages a day on dating services. That’s the sheer quantity I had to do in order to meet someone I liked and it worked. And I screwed it up so badly, as I’ve written before. She wrote to me that she was from Buenos Aires and I said, “oh, I’ve always wanted to go to Brazil.” And she wrote back, “uhh, Buenos Aires is in Argentina!” Ugh, what an idiot I am! I can’t believe she agreed to go on a date with me after that. But if I hadn’t been sending out 50 messages a day I never would’ve met her. To top it off, I really was hoping Buenos Aires was in Brazil. I would save at least four hours on any plane rides. Oh well.

(Claudia looking very suspicious, minutes after we were married).

Here’s the proactive plan:

LIST AND DO:

Proactively list what you want (a spouse, a new job, a new business, a new opportunity.

List what the next step is (sign up for dating services, take a yoga class, look at classifieds, spec out your business, decide how you will build your product, contact the people who will build it and get a price from them, ask people if you can work for them.) Make sure the next step is very doable. So doable that you can (and will) do it today.

CUT LOSSES:

Quickly determine what doesn’t work. For instance, when I set up Stockpickr.com I set up 10 other websites at the same time. None of them got any traction and I stuck with the one that did.

GET A JOB:

If you want a new job, proactively go out and get another one. Preferably freelance : think about what you do best, and then do it for three paying customers. Contact 30 customers and ask what simple services you can do for them that they would be willing to pay for. Three of them will respond and now you can quit your job.

If you want to raise money: Contact 100 VCs or angels and share with them your business. If they all say “no” then build up for six months, send them all notes on your progress every month, and go out and raise money again six months later. If you have no progress then start a new business. It didn’t work.

Another example: when a book publisher once rejected me, I wrote back to her saying that I fit perfectly with her list, describing how I could publicize the book with the different branches of her own company. I would make all changes she wanted, I would work with a co-author, etc and wouldn’t you know it—she published my book that she had rejected. It was an easy book to write (my co-author did a lot of the writing) and I got an advance and made money. It never would’ve happened if I hadn’t researched her and proactively chased her down.

GET PUBLICITY:

If you want publicity, write your own publicity. Write a guest post for a popular blog (like I am doing here). If you want to go on TV, contact the producers of shows and give them ten ideas of what you can talk about and why they should pick you to talk about them. Example: I have no credentials in politics but I wrote a post about a year or so ago for the Huffington Post on who the possible third-party candidates could be. Next thing I was on five radio shows talking about it. Suddenly I was a political expert.

HEALTH

If you want health, proactively get it. You know when you are putting bad stuff in your body, when you’re not sleeping enough, when you’re not exercising enough, when you’re letting short-term pleasures get in the way of longer-term gratification . Proactively make sure that when you’re 80 you’re not stooped over and suffering.

PROACTIVELY EXTEND YOUR RUNWAY

Of course one way to make more money is to spend less. Cut out the biggest expenses in your life. Even rent or mortgage. It’s no crime or shame to move someplace else. I’ve done it repeatedly when I’ve needed to. That’s how you live happier and longer.

PROACTIVELY ELIMINATE THE CRAPPY PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE

If someone is making you angry, how do you be proactive? That’s easy. Ignore them! Don’t try to fight them. You’ll never win. Do you think you are going to win an argument against a someone who hates you? Of course not. Ignore them until they stop hating you. Now that entire problem is gone.

HOW TO START TODAY!

So today, write down the five things you want and what the absolute very next step is to getting those things (if you want to start a business, for instance, write down some ideas for businesses and how you can realistically start them within the next month).

I did beat out Covey for about 15 seconds. (Click here if you want to a promotion on my book).

NO EXCUSES

You can come up with a lot of reasons for not proactively beginning something. Excuses are easy and I get it. But how about take a ten-day diet from excuses. You can get back to your “I cants” 10 days from now. If I said, “I can’t start Stockpickr, I’m running a fund of hedge funds,” then I never would’ve started it and sold it nine months later. If I said, “I can’t self-publish – nobody will buy it” then I never would’ve had for 15 seconds the #1 best-selling Motivational book on Amazon’s kindle store, beating out Stephen Covey’s crappy little book.

After I was dating Sue for two years (the girl whose birthday party it was at the beginning of this post), I went shopping for an engagement ring. My friend, Peter, went down to the main store in Pittsburgh with me. There was an emerald ring that looked nice and it was $700. I was shaking. That was a lot of money to me at the time.

There were so many pretty girls walking around the store and I fell in love with all of them. It was an honest and sincere love I felt for every woman walking around. I wanted to marry them all. Right then.

Later that night I came home and told Sue I wasn’t ready to get married yet. A year later we were broken up. Probably the most effective habit: Don’t be proactive about the things you don’t want to do.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/29/the-most-effective-habit-for-entrepreneurs/

The Entire $1.65B Acquisition Of YouTube Took A Week, Was Negotiated At Denny’s

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

Screen Shot 2011-10-31 at 1.13.18 PM

In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijingtoday, YouTube co-founder Steven Chenreminisced about selling his company to Google. “Was there any way you could not have sold?” Sarah Lacy asked? Hindsight is 20/20 Chen replied.

Chen revealed that the entire $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition was completed in one week’s time. Chen met with executives from both Google and Yahoo, including Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, at a Denny’s in Palo Alto, “We didn’t want to meet at offices, so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’”

Chen said he ordered the Mozzarella sticks.

The deal was set to be announced at the closing of markets on Monday, so Chen and company were up until the last-minute completing paperwork at Wilson Sosini’s offices. In a historic moment for TechCrunch, our own Mike Arrington ended up breaking that news.

Chen said that his meeting with then Google CEO Eric Schmidt was instrumental in the decision to go with Google. Schmidt basically promised the founders unlimited resources in return for an “infinite amount of happy users” and an “infinite amount” of good content; “Here are all the resources that Google has around the world, and you can pick and choose”

“For twelve months, whatever we wanted to do, we were allowed to do,” Chen said “It was tremendous courage from Eric, allowing this group of 20 year-olds to run the company.”

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/the-entire-1-65b-acquisition-of-youtube-took-a-week-was-negotiated-at-dennys/

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: If I Were Starting A Company Now, I Would Have Stayed In Boston

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

zuck

Yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School in a candid interview with Y Combinator Partner Jessica Livingston. You can watch the full interview here, and it starts around the 43 minute mark, and lasts for roughly 40 minutes. If you have some time to spare, it’s well worth a look.

Zuck revealed a number of fascinating things about entrepreneurship, founding Facebook, and product development, but one of the more interesting (and surprising points) came at the end of the interview when Livingston asked him what he would do different if he could go back in time. Zuck replied: If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.

He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. “There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term,” he explains. “You don’t have to move out here to do this.”

“There’s this culture in the Valley of starting a company before they know what they want to do. You decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you are passionate about yet…you need to do stuff you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.”

Zuckerberg also talked about the early days, when he was at Harvard, thinking of the idea for what would become Facebook. I was in denial that we were going to make a company early on. When I was in college, I had a lot of conversations with my friends about the direction the world was going to go to and we cared more about seeing this happen. We built it and we didn’t expect it to be a company, we were just building this because we thought it was awesome, he explained

When Zuck moved out to Silicon Valley in his sophomore summer, he thought that maybe one day he and his team would develop a startup, but didn’t think Facebook was that startup. “It was not like in the movie, there was no drinking. We all just lived in a house, iterated, kept going,” he said candidly. “It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.” But a company is the best vehicle in the world to align a lot of people to achieve a mission, he said.

Livingston asked Zuckerberg about how he pitched Facebook when he first pitched the business to Battery Ventures in Boston in 2004. “I barely remember that but I agree that it happened,” he recalled. “I don’t think I said anything and Eduardo said some things but it was fine because I didn’t want to do that anyway.”

Zuckerberg said that Eduardo early on said that Facebook needed to raise money, and he was skeptical of VCs. “That was one of the reasons that we accepted from Peter Thiel, because he could relate to us on a founder level,” he explained, referring to Thiel co-founding his own companies, including PayPal. Zuck said that in Silicon Valley, everyone was talking about flipping companies and he found that to be unattractive. Another potential investor Zuck really was passionate about was Donald Graham, CEO and chairman of The Washington Post. He explained that he came close to taking money from Graham, but Graham actually encouraged Zuckerberg to take money from Jim Breyer at Accel Partners. Zuck saw this as the “best of both worlds.”

He also gave startup founders advice how to guide on how to handle acquisition offers, and gave interesting insight on how he look at Facebook’s own acquisition offers. We really had one phase of this and the only reason why its’ this big story that everyone knows about us turning down a lot of money is because I messed up the process. It’s one of the biggest management mistakes I made through Facebook’s whole history. I learned a lot about the team at that time, and ended turning over a lot of that same team. I wasn’t in it for the acquisitions, and I wanted people around me who were in it for the long-term, he said.

It’s not clear that you should turn down offers, he explained but you should take it if it means the company can go in the direction you want it to go on. “If you go through some big corporate change, it’s just not going to be the same,” Zuck said.”If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different, if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don’t sell because there’s inevitably going to be some change.”

One of the key parts of operations is a ‘growth team,’ which is a centralized team Facebook set up to help its users stay connected an engaged. For example, Zuck said that through this team, the company found that members need to have at least ten friends to have enough content in the news feed to come back to the site. So Facebook reengineered the whole flow of the site when someone signs in to focus on having people find other people to connect with, so that people can get connected with friends (and meet that minimum) right away. Zuckerberg said that the company has exported this idea to another startups, including Dropbox. “Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.”

When Livingston asked what surprised Zuck most in the history of building Facebook, he replied honestly, “most things were surprising.” “I don’t pretend that I had any idea that I was doing. I always felt like we were so close to dying in the first years, and were afraid that Google was about to build our product and we were going to be screwed, and look how long it took for them to build our product,” he said laughing, referring to Google’s newly launched social product Google+. “You are going to make a ton of mistakes, you don’t get judged by that.”

As for what Facebook’s future is, Zuck shed some light on his vision for the network. “I think the story that we look back will be the apps and things that are built on top of Facebook. The past five years have been about being connecting people and the next five to ten years are about what are all the things that can be built now that these connections are in place.”

And I’ll leave you with one of Zuck’s more memorable quotes from the talk, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk…In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/facebooks-zuckerberg-if-i-were-starting-a-company-now-i-would-have-stayed-in-boston/

Shakr Automatically Creates Video Snippets For News Stories As They Break

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

Screen Shot 2011-10-31 at 5.38.06 PM

You run a news outlet. A big news story has broken, and you need a video now. Even if you’ve got a dedicated video staff, the research, editing, and encoding on the video is going to take at least an hour. By the time you’ve got it all exported and uploaded, it’s anything but breaking news.

Disrupt Beijing Battlefield competitor Shakr (not to be confused with the Disrupt SF 2011 champ and digital discoteca Shaker) aims to lop out all of that manual labor and wasted time. By algorithmically pulling in information, photos, and video snippets from around the web, Shakr automatically creates video clips as the news breaks.

When a news story hits, Shakr begins parsing web articles for details as they’re written. Simultaneously, it’s digging around the web for related images and videos. The news publisher hops into Shakr’s editing tool, confirms the details of the story they wish to highlight and the photos they want to include, then taps the finish button. When the final product comes out of the oven, it’s complete with synthesized voice narration and incredibly snazzy visual transitions.

Shakr’s videos are built on WebGL. While that limits platform compatibility for the time being, it (at least theoretically) works out to nigh-universal compatibility as more browsers find their WebGL wings.

While Shakr’s primary distribution channel will be through media partners (with ads strapped on as the business model), Shakr will also launch a web video portal of their own (pictured in the gallery below).

We’ll add a video of this segment (complete with a example of one of Shakr’s auto-built videos) to this post shortly. Sadly, we’ve gotta do all of that aforementioned encoding/uploading stuff first. (Update: Added! See above.)

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/31/shakr-automatically-creates-video-snippets-for-news-stories-as-they-break-2/

TouchPal Smartens Up Your Contact List On The Fly

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

cootek

TouchPal is a mobile app that helps you “keep in touch with your contacts,” namely by adding social aspects to your current contact list. Although much of TouchPal’s functionality has been replicated in other systems. However, TouchPal has improved things by merging nearly all of them into one app.

TouchPal adds “availability” flags to your contact list and maintains contact information right inside the app. It also allows you to update your information and the change is propagated out to your friends’ phones. You can also create “status” messages and mark busy people to call them back automatically.

It’s a fairly interesting product in that it offers a great deal of real functionality in a fairly easy-to-use package. The rub? Touchpal will have to convince a critical mass of users to swap out their dialers and contact systems with the TouchPal package.

The app runs on Android and iOS and the team hopes to monetize by becoming the de facto contact management system on many phones.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/31/gulu-makes-on-the-fly-event-planning-look-good/

Huohua: Find Your Social Circle Instantly With Semantic Analysis

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

China-based Huohua (it translates to Spark) uses semantic analysis to find your social circle instantly.

Founded by Carl Wu, Huohua is trying to solve a problem of “where and with whom to have fun” by introducing a smart feature dubbed Instant Circle. Basically, it works like this: open the app to tap a keyword like ”basketball”, “hot pot” or “mountain climbing” to locate people with same interests around you, then live chat with them.

Thanks to the semantic search, the updates published on Huohua such as “get something to drink” and “drink beer” can be considered as the same interest and users can be thus connected. So based on where you are and what are you interested in, Huohua will be generating a location-and-interests-based instant circles just for you.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/31/huohua-find-your-social-circle-instantly-with-semantic-analysis/

Moglue Lets Anyone Make A Children’s Book For Tablets

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Zeeshan Ahmad

The rise of the iPad (and, to a lesser degree, other tablets) has led to myriad new kinds of apps that are flourishing. And, as someone who still enjoys flipping through a good Dr. Seuss book from time to time, there are few trends I enjoy more than the rich, interactive children’s books that are catching on.

These books typically feature music, sound effects, some animation, and other nifty niceties that make books more fun for kids to play with (and can also supplement learning). And there are plenty of people out there who can pen and illustrate a good book, but don’t know much about programming in Objective C. That’s where TC Disrupt finalist Moglue comes in: it lets just about anyone create children’s books, using a simple and straightforward UI.

Obviously your book isn’t going to look amazing if you’re not so good at drawing, but for all of those artists looking to make the jump to the tablet — or anyone who wants to craft a custom story book with family photos for their kids — this seems perfect. Text and images can be dragged and dropped onto the screen, then animated using one of many different effects.

These apps are built using clients available for Mac and Windows, and can be ‘one-click’ published to iOS and Android. The builder is free to use, and Moglue will make money via a rev-share for users who publish their books.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/31/moglue-lets-anyone-make-a-childrens-book-for-tablets/

Blog-bin

A bin for my favorite articles

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Researchers use inkjet acumen to create wireless explosive sensor from paper

Kai-Fu Lee On Why China Isn’t Ready For The Next Mark Zuckerberg

The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs

The Entire $1.65B Acquisition Of YouTube Took A Week, Was Negotiated At Denny’s

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: If I Were Starting A Company Now, I Would Have Stayed In Boston

Shakr Automatically Creates Video Snippets For News Stories As They Break

TouchPal Smartens Up Your Contact List On The Fly

Huohua: Find Your Social Circle Instantly With Semantic Analysis

Moglue Lets Anyone Make A Children’s Book For Tablets