Tag: Startup

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-09-02/tech/wireless.electricity_1_electricity-low-power-wireless?_s=PM:TECH

Electronics such as phones and laptops may start shedding their power cords within a year.

That’s the prediction of Eric Giler, CEO of WiTricity, a company that’s able to power light bulbs using wireless electricity that travels several feet from a power socket.

WiTricity’s version of wireless electricity — which converts power into a magnetic field and sends it sailing through the air at a particular frequency — still needs to be refined a bit, he said, but should be commercially available soon.
Giler, whose company is a spinoff of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research group, says wireless electricity has the potential to cut the need for power cords and throw-away batteries.

“Five years from now, this will seem completely normal,” he said.

“The biggest effect of wireless power is attacking that huge energy wasting that goes on where people buy disposable batteries,” he said. Watch Giler demonstrate the idea

It also will make electric cars more attractive to consumers, he said, because they will be able to power up their vehicles simply by driving into a garage that’s fitted with a wireless power mat.

Electric cars are “absolutely gorgeous,” he added, “but does anyone really want to plug them in?”

Ideas about wireless electricity have been floating around the world of technology for more than a century. Nikola Tesla started toying with the ability to send electricity through the air in the 1890s. Since then, though, making wireless electricity technology safe and cheap enough to put on the market has been an arduous task for researchers.

Engineers have developed several ways to convert electricity into something that’s safe to send through the air without a wire. Some of their technologies are available on commercial scales, but they have some limits.

Low-level power

One set of researchers is able to send power over long distances but in very small amounts.

For example, in 2003, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, company called Powercast used radio waves to light a low-power LED bulb that was 1.5 miles from its power source, said Harry Ostaffe, spokesman for the company.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/132/brilliant.html?page=0,1

The dominant player in this technology for the moment seems to be Michigan-based Fulton Innovation, which unveiled its first set of wirelessly charged consumer products at the Consumer Electronics Show early this year. Come April, Fulton’s new pad-based eCoupled system will be available to police, fire-and-rescue, and contractor fleets — an initial market of as many as 700,000 vehicles annually. The system is being integrated into a truck console designed and produced by Leggett & Platt, a $4.3 billion commercial shelving giant; it allows users to charge anything from a compatible rechargeable flashlight to a PDA. The tools and other devices now in the pipeline at companies such as Bosch, Energizer, and others will look just like their conventional ancestors. Companies such as Philips Electronics, Olympus, and Logitech will create a standard for products, from flashlights to drills to cell phones to TV remotes, by the end of this year.
TECH 2: Radio-frequency Harvesting
Availability: April
>> THE INDUCTION SYSTEMS are only the beginning. Some of the most visually arresting examples of wireless electricity are based on what’s known as radio frequency, or RF. While less efficient, they work across distances of up to 85 feet. In these systems, electricity is transformed into radio waves, which are transmitted across a room, then received by so-called power harvesters and translated back into low-voltage direct current. Imagine smoke detectors or clocks that never need their batteries replaced. Sound trivial? Consider: Last November, to save on labor costs, General Motors canceled the regularly scheduled battery replacement in the 562 wall clocks at its Milford Proving Ground headquarters. This technology is already being used by the Department of Defense. This year, it will be available to consumers in the form of a few small appliances and wireless sensors; down the road, it will appear in wireless boxes into which you can toss any and all of your electronics for recharging.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5goAZgzPOITC0wCEoDPVxMwMgpfJQD9HARJ3G0

By BEN DOBBIN (AP) – 2 days ago
CORNING, N.Y. — An ultra-strong glass that has been looking for a purpose since its invention in 1962 is poised to become a multibillion-dollar bonanza for Corning Inc.
The 159-year-old glass pioneer is ramping up production of what it calls Gorilla glass, expecting it to be the hot new face of touch-screen tablets and high-end TVs.
Gorilla showed early promise in the ’60s, but failed to find a commercial use, so it’s been biding its time in a hilltop research lab for almost a half-century. It picked up its first customer in 2008 and has quickly become a $170 million a year business as a protective layer over the screens of 40 million-plus cell phones and other mobile devices.
Now, the latest trend in TVs could catapult it to a billion-dollar business: Frameless flat-screens that could be mistaken for chic glass artwork on a living-room wall.
Because Gorilla is very hard to break, dent or scratch, Corning is betting it will be the glass of choice as TV-set manufacturers dispense with protective rims or bezels for their sets, in search of an elegant look.
Gorilla is two to three times stronger than chemically strengthened versions of ordinary soda-lime glass, even when just half as thick, company scientists say. Its strength also means Gorilla can be thinner than a dime, saving on weight and shipping costs.
Corning is in talks with Asian manufacturers to bring Gorilla to the TV market in early 2011 and expects to land its first deal this fall. With production going full-tilt in Harrodsburg, Ky., it is converting part of a second factory in Shizuoka, Japan, to fill a potential burst of orders by year-end.
“That’ll tell you something about our confidence in this,” said Corning President Peter Volanakis.
Investors are taking notice. In June, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York raised Corning’s projected share price, predicting Gorilla would be its second biggest business by 2015.
“There’s a wide range of views on how successful this product will be,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Carter Shoop. “But I think it’s safe to say that, in aggregate, people are becoming much more bullish. It’s a tremendous opportunity. We’ll have to see how consumers react.”
DisplaySearch market analyst Paul Gagnon said alternatives “obviously scratch easier, they’re thicker and heavier, but they’re also cheaper.” He estimates that a sheet of Gorilla would add $30 to $60 to the cost of a set.
It remains to be seen “whether this becomes a hit trend that propagates to other models and sizes or remains in the confines of a premium step-up series of products,” Gagnon said.
“This is a fashion trend, not a functional trend, and that’s what makes (the growth rate) very hard to predict,” said Volanakis. “But because the market is so large in terms of number of TVs — and the amount of glass per TV is so large — that’s what can move the needle pretty quickly.”
Based in western New York, Corning is the world’s largest maker of glass for liquid-crystal-display computers and TVs. High-margin LCD glass generated the bulk of Corning’s $5.4 billion in 2009 sales.
By ramping up volume production quickly in a budding market, Corning is pursuing a well-worn strategy designed to keep rivals from gaining ground. Its patience is also well practiced. Executives know too well the gulf between inspiration and application is sometimes decades-wide.
Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor.
Then in 1964, Corning devised an ingenious method called “fusion draw” to make super-thin, unvaryingly flat glass. It pumped hot glass into a suspended trough and allowed it to overflow and run down either side. The glass flows then meet under the trough and fuse seamlessly into a smooth, hanging sheet of glass.
To make Chemcor, Corning ran the sheets through a “tempering” process that set up internal stresses in the material. The same principle is behind the toughness of Pyrex glass, but Chemcor was tempered in a chemical bath, not by heat treatment.
Corning thought Chemcor sheets created this way would be the material of choice in car windshields, but British rival Pilkington Bros. intervened with a far cheaper mass-production approach. And another Chemcor adaptation in photochromic sunglasses also fizzled in the retail market.
Fusion draw finally proved its commercial value when Japanese electronics companies, looking for slim sheets free of alkalis that contaminate liquid crystals, turned to Corning’s soda-lime LCD glass in the 1980s. Corning rapidly turned into the world’s biggest supplier of LCD glass for laptops and that business blossomed around 2003 when LCD technology migrated to TVs.
In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla. “Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business,” said researcher Ron Stewart.
With relatively low startup costs, Gorilla should generate its first profit this year. And now that production is back on, designers are again exploring using it in unexpected places, like refrigerator doors, car sunroofs and touch-screen hotel advertising.
Among the 100-plus devices with Gorilla are Motorola Inc.’s Droid smart phone and LG Electronics’ X300 notebook. Whether Apple Inc. uses the glass in its iPod is a much-discussed mystery since “not all our customers allow us to say,” said Jim Steiner, general manager of Corning’s specialty materials division.
Since the Civil War, Corning has turned out a glittering array of innovations from railroad signals to Pyrex and auto-pollution filters to optical fiber. Allotting 10 percent of revenue to research keeps promising projects brewing at its Sullivan Park research hub on Corning’s hilly outskirts.
Optical fiber is another example of an invention that took a long time to come into its own. In 1934, chemist Frank Hyde came up with a practical method of making fused silica — an exceptionally pure glass — in bulk, yet it wasn’t put to use as optical fiber until the 1970s. Once there, it helped create the Internet revolution.
In his office lobby, Steiner showed off a 400-foot-long spool of flexible, 16-inch-wide glass that’s as thin as a sheet of paper.
“Kind of like Chemcor was back in the ’60s,” he said. “We’re not sure what we’re going to do with it, but it’s cool isn’t it?”

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100801/10481810436.shtml

Vivek Wadhwa has an interesting post at TechCrunch, pointing out that much of the world beyond the US, Europe and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are effectively a patent free zone. Even if many of these places do have patent laws, very few companies find it worth the trouble to file for patents in those places — and, technically, that means that anyone producing products in those areas can legally copy from the patents filed elsewhere.
Take the iPhone as an example: it has over 1000 patents; yet Apple does not apply for patent protection in countries like Peru, Ghana, or Ecuador, or, for that matter, in most of the developing world. So entrepreneurs could use these patent filings to gain information to make an iPhone-like device that solves the unique problems of these countries. Apple has so far received 3287 U.S.-issued patents and has 1767 applications pending: a total of 5054 (for all of its products). Yet it has filed for only about 300 patents in China and has been issued 19. In India, it has filed only 38 patent applications and has received four patents. In Mexico it has filed for 109 and received 59 patents. So even India, China, and Mexico are wide-open fields.
Of course, if you were to make an iPhone in Peru or Ghana, you wouldn’t be able to export it to the US, as then it would again be considered infringing. So, the market size for a “legal” knockoff iPhone might be pretty limited. On top of that, there’s a pretty good reason why companies like Apple don’t bother filing for patents in these places: the economy and the local infrastructure really aren’t advanced enough to make a difference. So, even if these are “patent free zones,” the lack of other institutions to make innovation and economic growth important mean that this really doesn’t matter very much.

Still, it does raise some questions about if there are “opportunities” within those patent free zones. Certainly, it would not be a historical anomaly to see part of the patent free zone step up and use that fact to help it industrialize. As we’ve seen in the past, countries like Switzerland and the Netherlands used the fact that they were patent free zones for parts of the 19th century to speed up their industrialization process. But, of course, as we saw with both of those, once their industries got big enough, foreign competitors started to freak out and put tremendous pressure on those countries to put in place patent laws.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123345784962836599.html

Finding a job in this economy — even keeping one — is tough. Tired of the uncertainty, some twentysomethings are going from job hunting to job creating by starting their own businesses.

Generation Y entrepreneurs have a few advantages here: They’re seen as tech-savvy, enthusiastic risk takers with fresh perspectives. But they also tend to lack money, credit histories and managerial experience.

Some pointers if you’re under 30 and starting a business:

Ask for advice. You may know your “great idea” inside and out, but you might not know as much about writing a business plan, incorporating a company, or managing employees. Reach out to more established business owners by tapping your college-alumni network or finding a support group such as Score, a group of about 11,000 volunteer business executives who counsel entrepreneurs in person or online at Score.org.

“I think the first challenge that I had was wondering where to start,” says Joel Erb, who started a Web design company at age 15 and has since expanded it to offer new-media marketing and communications services. Mr. Erb, now 25, taught himself computer coding but learned how to incorporate, finance and expand his company, named INM United, from his mentors.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2008/sb20080111_262142.htm

Entrepreneurship holds increasing appeal for retirees. But they need to address four unique challenges to improve their chances for success

Ric Cox retired at 55, but he didn’t stop working. Instead, he launched ChicagoCondosOnline.com, a database that sells condo information to realtors and listings services. A first-time entrepreneur, he hoped to channel the same creative energy he brought to his 32-year publishing career into his new venture.

About 20% of the entire over-50 workforce in the U.S. is self-employed, and one-third of those workers made the transition to self-employment after turning 50, according to a 2007 RAND Corp. study commissioned by AARP. Switching to entrepreneurship is one way retirees stay active, says Deborah Russell, the AARP’s director of workforce issues. But she says people must know what they’re getting into: “For those who have not done this before, they may have a false expectation that working for yourself also means less stress and less demand, and it may be in fact the exact opposite.”

While starting a business is a challenge at any age, a first-timer starting a business later in life will encounter different obstacles than younger entrepreneurs, particularly when it comes to funding the business, securing health insurance, managing personal finance, and succession planning. Younger people can spend years trying to make a company profitable and can return to salary jobs if they don’t succeed, but people over 50 may not have the flexibility to deal with such a loss, says Julie Zissimopoulos, an economist at RAND and co-author of the study. Experts say older entrepreneurs need to plan carefully to align their ventures with their life goals.

Cox, who turned to the nonprofit Counselors to America’s Small Business (commonly known as SCORE) for guidance before launching his business, seemed like the ideal retiree-turned-entrepreneur: He was healthy, single, without children, and had a comfortable nest egg. Even with all those factors to his advantage, he says he still underestimated what it would take—in money and time—to launch a business.

“I think there’s kind of a rule of thumb that it’s going to cost you two to three times as much, at least, than you expect it to, so you have to have enough capital or access to it,” says Cox, who put about a quarter of his savings into his business. The time frame to recoup his investment also exceeded his expectations. Now 63 and in the eighth year of his business, Cox anticipates his first profits this year.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123466563957289181.html

It’s a scary time to own a business, and the knee-jerk reaction may be to just keep chugging along and wait out the financial storm. But that’s a risky decision.

This recession is expected to be longer, deeper and deadlier for businesses than any this nation has seen in decades.

The savviest entrepreneurs right now aren’t hunkering down. They’re rethinking their business models and hunting for new strategies based on the assumption that consumer spending won’t be rebounding to prerecession levels and that the types of products and services people want will be much different from before.

For a business owner, this can mean finding new sales channels, trying new marketing tactics and promotions, forming strategic partnerships and introducing new products that appeal to frugal shoppers.

“Unfortunately, bad news has this huge ability to paralyze people,” says Victor Cheng, a San Francisco business consultant. “I think it is very important for a small-business owner to be fast and nimble” right now. He suggests businesses do a hard evaluation of all segments of their businesses and focus in only on the ones that seem to be faring well in this economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/fashion/04roles.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1

THE office joker. The mother hen. The king. The rebel. The gossip. The peacekeeper. The dude.

Anyone who has ever been part of a workplace culture can probably recognize at least one of those characters in the cubicle next door.

But workplace roles and the dynamics among colleagues can go much deeper than those somewhat superficial stereotypes, especially in a nation where many people spend as much time with colleagues as they do with their families, where the office so often mirrors the family.

A boss is not just a boss, in the view of some psychologists who study workplace roles; he can be a stand-in for a disapproving and distant father. An unpredictable, easily angered manager can be a thinly veiled rejecting mother. Colleagues competing for the boss’s attention — or merit raises and bonuses — are siblings in rivalry.

The employees of a company acquired by another in a hostile merger? They can experience seething resentment toward what they feel is an unwelcome stepparent, according to psychologists working with companies to manage emotional fallout during a merger.

There is, too, the workplace spouse, a co-worker of the opposite sex who shares a kind of closeness achieved only through the intense experience of long weeks at the same office.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14startup.html?_r+1&emc=eta1

SAN FRANCISCO — Alex Andon, 24, a graduate of Duke University in biology, was laid off from a biotech company last May. For months he sought new work. Then, frustrated with the hunt, he turned to jellyfish.

In an apartment he shares here with six roommates, Mr. Andon started a business in September building jellyfish aquariums, capitalizing on new technology that helps the fragile creatures survive in captivity. He has sold three tanks, one for $25,000 to a restaurant, and is starting a Web site to sell desktop versions for $350.

“I keep getting stung,” he said. And his crowded home office is filled with beakers and test tubes of jellyfish food. “But it beats looking for work. I hate looking for work.”

Plenty of other laid-off workers across the country, burned out by a merciless job market, are building business plans instead of sending out résumés. For these people, recession has become the mother of invention.

Economists say that when the economy takes a dive, it is common for people to turn to their inner entrepreneur to try to make their own work. But they say that it takes months for that mentality to sink in, and that this is about the time in the economic cycle when it really starts to happen — when the formerly employed realize that traditional job searches are not working, and that they are running out of time and money.