Could IBM Have Bought Microsoft?

Not likely. Microsoft did try to buy Google, "at any price." And Google did try to buy Facebook. But the Blockchain is not just the next Google or Facebook, it is an entirely new platform, it is the next Internet. There is no buying the Internet.

It would be hard, perhaps impossible, for a company like Google to also be big on the Blockchain. It is an Internet company. 

Brave is a web browser that competes with Google’s Chrome. Instead of running targeted ads, Brave uses blockchain technology to pay websites when people spend time there. BitClave lets people perform searches online, and get rewarded for seeing ads. Another project, Presearch, is also using blockchain to try to compete with Google’s search engine

A Small Sales Tax Makes Sense

It makes sense for the giant tech companies to pay something like a 3% tax to local jurisdictions globally, why only Europe? It goes beyond purchases. If data is the new oil, the people sitting on the oil wells, those billions of people, ought to have a say.

YouTube's Long Road To Monetization

YouTube was always going to make money, just like Amazon was always going to make money. But it has perhaps needed Google's deep pockets to make it happen. Google has been patient. A wildly popular app since its very inception is still ahead of the curve. The Internet is still not fast enough for video. But YouTube chugs along.

Facebook Is Facing A Backlash

And that is putting it mildly. Facebook sure is facing a major backlash. The global darling app is seen using nefarious means. This is kind of like when Microsoft came under the gun in the late 1990s with monopoly accusations. The beating created space for other tech companies that became big. Facebook might have hit its high point. It is hard for one company to ride multiple technology waves. Although I have thought Facebook might also have some interesting VR applications in mind.

Here is Zuck's latest missive. He is on the defensive.

Employees have begun to worry that the company won’t be able to achieve its biggest goals if users decide that Facebook isn’t trustworthy enough to hold their data. At the meeting on Tuesday, the mood was especially grim. One employee told a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter that the only time he’d felt as uncomfortable at work, or as responsible for the world’s problems, was the day Donald Trump won the presidency.

Towards A Global Government

India has rolled out the biometric ID to almost its entire population. On top of that it has added a layer that works like Jack Ma's Alipay, only Alipay is in the private sector, the Indian version is in the public sector. Voting from the phone should become possible and private. Facial recognition technology minus possible abuse can be harnessed for safety and security. Digital makes business and vehicle registration easy. Solar energy is dropping in price at a dramatic pace and is set to blow open the number one constraint for the Global South's desire for prosperity: energy. When Musk puts over 4,000 satellites into orbit in a few years, you are looking at gigabit internet from every point to every other point on earth. Taking good care of earth will become possible. Much progress seems to be technology driven. But it is the human being that has to be placed at the center of the progress.

A world government has been long overdue. But it will soon become possible, and soon enough become inevitable. The first step might be to create a bicameral legislature in New York. In the lower house each member country has a voting weight in proportion to its population. In the upper house it is in proportion to its GDP. Each member country pays 1% of its GDP in tax. That makes the world government's budget. The President of the World is required to garner a majority in both chambers, limited to two five year terms. Eventually when at least half of humanity has biometric IDs and can vote from mobile phones, the President of the World can be directly elected. Local, state, federal, global -- these would be the four layers of government everywhere on earth, except where the country might be too small, or too homogenous for a federal setup.

The world government is not the UN. It is a new thing, just like the UN was not the League Of Nations. There will be a President Of The World. There will be a global parliament. There will be a World Court. There will be the three branches. All global institutions will be subsumed by the world government.

This century is not the American, or the Chinese, or the Indian, or the Asian, or the African century. This is the global century. All world will become one country. The basic needs of all human beings will be met. Primarily because the Age Of Abundance is right around the corner, much of it technology driven.

Multinational corporations are already global, finance has long been global, but there is not the robust political framework. That robust political framework will also be good for the MNCs, also for global finance.

Nokia: 10 Years Ago

Forbes cover 10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/EBlHpdRDsl

— Mikko Hypponen (@mikko) November 12, 2017

Asteroid Belt And Earth On The Way To Mars

Spending a year in weightless space is a nightmare for the human body. But the push for Mars might have benefits closer to home. And robotic travel will harvest the asteroid belt. A few hundred years ago spices were scarce and literally gold. The asteroid belt could turn gold into a commodity.

Elon Musk’s New Plan: Travel from New Delhi to Tokyo in 30 Minutes https://t.co/KG8GeNq1vE

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) November 7, 2017

Delhi to Tokyo in 30 minutes, says Elon Musk. That translates to anywhere to anywhere on earth in 30 minutes. That is more alluring for human tourism (and commerce) than zooming vertically to the boundaries of from where all you see is pitch black before you come back.

Blue Origin's Breakthrough Means SpaceX Finally Has a Competitor https://t.co/tNLtYbkBd7 via @Futurism

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) November 7, 2017

But if you move information well enough, fast enough, in large enough quantities, securely enough, and from every point to every other point on earth, human beings perhaps can get by on less travel in the first place. The vision of 4,000 satellites carrying the bulk of internet traffic is sound. And it beats going to Mars. Such a spacenet would be indispensable for the Internet Of Things with its hundreds of billions of sensors, its top use being to keep the earthly ecosystem at its optimum best. Human safety and security would be a whole new paradigm.

SpaceX to kick off 4,425-strong satellite constellation launch in 2019 https://t.co/2PSHUqRViu

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) November 7, 2017

SpaceX aims to bring super-fast satellite internet to Earth in 2019 https://t.co/SGLDBLidzE via @MailOnline

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) November 7, 2017

Elon Musk Wants to Begin Launching SpaceX's 4,000 Internet Satellites in 2019 https://t.co/LyxpW9IOoF via @FortuneMagazine

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) November 7, 2017

Movie Making Trends

Movies are about to enter a whole different realm, mostly for the good. Some of the trends are:

(1) A Screen In Nearly Every Hand

The smartphone will get there before the broadband will, but the connectivity will get there fast enough. It is a legitimate expectation that people should be able to watch new releases on their own screens. You could charge 10 million people $10 each in a theater, or you could charge a billion people one cent each. Or that cent could be an ad they opt to watch. The numbers work. Micro-payments will become much more of an option.

(2) Reduced Production Costs

A small crew dabbling in the art form could do all the camera work on a smartphone and all the editing on a computer today. That opens up the floodgates of production. Every language, every culture can have its own movie industry. Every such industry has a ready global audience among the scattered peoples, all connected. Let a thousand flowers bloom. That also creates a spectrum of success. A movie making 100 K can meet someone's definition of robust business. A movie making 10 K can. What if you could earn a living making 10 minute long movies? Does that beat serving tables?

(3) Really Big

The small can do brisk business. But the big can get really big. A global super hit movie could make outsize money.

(4) Computer Graphics And Animation

For what you can show on the screen, the imagination is now the limit. You don't have to actually build a physical set. Which means it is possible to have small high tech studios. Right now the costs are high. But they will go down. Spices used to be gold. Now they are commodity. The liberation of the background should give added focus to the human element. Movies have to be thought of as therapy sessions for society at large.

(5) The Script

Some things never change. It boils down to the story, not the technology. Ultimately it is about telling a good story. That ancient art has currency.

Technological Advances And The Social, Political Sphere

Often when we talk about technological advances we assume the political and social frameworks will remain stagnant for decades on end. That is flawed thinking. The era of Big Data will be one, the era of Internet Of Things will be one where data gathering also for the social sciences will be as abundant as has been for the physical sciences. That changes things. The Age Of Abundance that will be heralded by astronomical increases in productivity that would fundamentally challenge basic ideas of ownership and distribution will be a new paradigm beyond capitalism and socialism. It is the steepness of the curve of imminent technological advances and its inevitability that gives humanity much hope. The millennial reign is imminent.

Recent centuries of progress in human knowledge have endowed humanity with much gains of insight on the first four dimensions from magnitudes extremely small to extremely large. That puts humanity in a tremendous position to appreciate the huge leap that the fourth dimension is from the third. If subsequent leaps are even larger and larger and God is the tenth, the final dimension, does your physics now take you face to face with God?

Some very smart minds have sounded alarms on Artificial Intelligence. Lucifer, aka Satan, is magnitudes smarter than the smartest AI you could ever create. Because your AI will be limited to the first four dimensions whereas Lucifer is a being from a beyond dimension. Those who fear AI should be aware of Lucifer even more easily. Evidence of Lucifer "getting" you in all around. You call it global warming. Lucifer promised global warming in the Koran more than a millennium ago. The human hubris that kicked in post "enlightenment" and post industrial revolution and post space exploration took big chunks of humanity away from God and right into Satan's lap. Those who say there is no God, there is no hell, there is no devil make it sound like this is original, independent thinking on their part. Not so. You are in Satan's grip. It is bondage. You made the choice to walk away from God. That is not a good record. Love God with all your heart, mind and soul and keep loving God if you stand any chances to positively harvest the imminent advances in technology. God is infinitely smarter and more powerful than Lucifer.

God is everywhere. Pray anywhere.

The Basic Template Of Entrepreneurship

Steven Spielberg, rightly thought of as one of the most creative movie directors, once said, it makes sense to keep the same team and churn out movie after movie, like they produce cars at factories.

What has happened with technology and innovation in just the past 20 years has been amazing, but all that is nothing compared to what is about to happen. And it makes sense to firm up the basic template of entrepreneurship. So we can focus on the more important stuff, like the technology and the innovation.

Curiously that template is waist deep in politics and public policy. The very idea of who owns the company is about to fundamentally alter. The inevitable Universal Basic Income (UBI) will be a huge boost to the innovators. Without that true large scale wealth creation is simply out of reach. The UBI is the oxygen mask that takes you to the top of Everest.

The idea of the corporate culture should be on the cutting edges of social science fiction and egalitarian thinking. Treating people right does not take away from competition or innovation. The second coming of Steve Jobs was primarily that he had learned to treat people better, like he himself admitted. But it goes beyond smiles and handshakes. It is about making fundamental leaps on race and gender.

Grassroots Organizing: The Stealth Hero

How Hillary Clinton Is Going to Win Today 

Clinton has made a strategic choice to invest significantly in organizing. Finding, onboarding, training, deploying and managing this talent puts any organization under extreme stress, and the Clinton campaign has mastered it flawlessly. The Clinton campaign has deliberately and painstakingly built a grassroots juggernaut that is executing exactly the way it should in these closing days.

Finally, the “Obama Coalition” is quickly evolving into the Clinton coalition. Clinton’s pathway is built on the same foundation of women, young people, African Americans and Latinos but with even stronger support and turnout by those critical groups of voters. I know this coalition well—I ran these programs for President Obama in 2012, and what the Clinton campaign has done to engage these groups is nothing short of breathtaking.

Clinton may very well win women of every age group, ethnicity and educational level—unprecedented in modern campaigns.

When I ran Clinton’s primary in California against Bernie Sanders, I vividly remember the public polling shrinking by the minute as we neared Election Day. However, I knew that if we kept our eye on the prize and deployed the grassroots machine that we developed to turn out our supporters, we would win and we would win big. That’s what we did. Much like then, this campaign is doing everything it needs to in its final days. In the postscript of this election cycle, I hope the analysts and pundits recognize this campaign for what it truly is—a historic achievement of grassroots mobilization in a time of unparalleled political polarization.

Hillary Is Winning, Do Not Fear

NBC's Final Battleground Map Shows Clinton With a Significant Lead 

In our final battleground map of the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton holds a substantial lead over Donald Trump with one day before Election Day. Clinton has 274 electoral votes in her column -- which is unchanged from last week, and which also is more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, is at 170 electoral votes, down from 180 last week. And we have 94 electoral votes in the Tossup column.

Too Dangerous For Twitter, Too Dangerous For Nuclear

Barack Obama's frantic final campaign 

"Apparently his campaign has taken away his Twitter," Obama scoffed, issuing an attack line on Donald Trump that would barely have made sense during his first stop there eight years earlier. "They had so little confidence in his self-control they said we're just going to take away your Twitter. If somebody can't handle a Twitter account, they can't handle the nuclear codes."

On most days last week Obama woke up at the White House with his schedule virtually cleared. Leaving around midday and returning late in the evening, he spent his downtime tossing a baseball around the Rose Garden with aides and tweaking his stump speech in the Oval Office.

In seemingly every spare moment, he's dialed African-American radio hosts across the swing states, chatting loosely backstage at his rallies and aboard Air Force One about his favorite hip-hop artists (Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper) 

A loss, however, has become a nightmare scenario. Obama's vision of the US is so at odds with Donald Trump's he told a crowd of 16,000 college students in Chapel Hill the "fate of the world is teetering."

"Anybody who is upset about a 'Saturday Night Live' skit, you don't want in charge of nuclear weapons," Obama taunted in Miami on Thursday, only to pierce the anger with yet another exasperated "C'mon man!"

Post Poll

Deep divisions within the Republican Party that Trump has helped stoke are revealed in a question on what the GOP should do if Trump fails to win the presidency.

Among Republicans and independents who lean that way, the largest share, 37 percent, say the party should start from scratch, rename itself, and reinvent what it stands for

Health 2.0

The technology industry has entered the field of medicine and aims to eliminate disease itself. It may well succeed because of a convergence of exponentially advancing technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, sensors, and genomic sequencing. We’re going to see more medical advances in the next decade than happened in the past century.

Abundance, Round The Corner

In the 1800s, aluminum was more valuable than silver and gold because it was rarer. So when Napoleon III entertained the King of Siam, the king and his guests were honored by being given aluminum utensils, while the rest of the dinner party ate with gold. 

But aluminum is not really rare.

In fact, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3% of the weight of our planet. But it wasn’t until chemists Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult discovered how to use electrolysis to cheaply separate aluminum from surrounding materials that the element became suddenly abundant.

The problems keeping us from achieving a world where everyone’s basic needs are met may seem like resource problems — when in reality, many are accessibility problems. 

Think about all the things that computers and the internet made abundant that were previously far less accessible because of cost or availability … 

Less than two decades ago, when someone reached a certain level of economic stability, they could spend somewhere around $10K on stereos, cameras, entertainment systems, etc — today, we have all that equipment in the palm of our hand.

When put to the right use, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence,robotics, digital manufacturing, nano-materials and digital biology make it possible for us to drastically raise the standard of living for every person on the planet.

Elon Musk: To Mars Or Not To Mars

I say no Mars. It is basic. I don't mean to spoil the fun and sound like I were saying the emperor is naked. But the human skeleton is not designed for Mars gravity. Or for the months of space travel. It would simply give up.

But reusable rockets are a great concept. The financials are in the robotic mining of the asteroid belt and, more immediately, in the network of 4,000 satellites that would carry a big chunk of the load of internet traffic. The need for bandwidth is going to grow exponentially. Both would be tremendous money makers. And robots don't have skeleton issues. Good thing.

The earth is the only home. And Elon Musk should really double down on solar. Create a Musk Law whereby costs are halved every two, or three or four years. Dirty needs to be driven out of business.

Electric vehicles go hand in hand with that.

And what's up with the hyperloop? Again, I have human body questions. All that acceleration and deceleration, how would the human body react to that? But if the hyperloop be possible then you will see an Amazon size forest in America before 2050. Good thing. People would congregate in the big cities of the world.

Mars is for the Curiosity rover. Robotic exploration is the best way.

The Microsoft Mojo

Microsoft looks to reinvent the desktop PC

Is the Microsoft mojo back?

FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array

The ability to do deep learning more quickly – using that AI supercomputer in the cloud – has broad implications. It could vastly speed up advances in automatic translation, accelerate medical breakthroughs and create automated productivity tools that better anticipate our needs and solve our workday problems.

Fingerprint Scanning Is Its Own Revolution

Microsoft Surface Phone Rumored To Feature Unique Fingerprint Scan

This has implications for taking voting rights to everyone, about letting people vote for an entire week from anywhere, instead of on just one day at one physical location (the voting rates could cross 90% as it should), this will take credit history building to the masses in the Global South, and thus a massive long overdue democratization of credit, this will make fingerprint scan as much a feature of phones as cameras, this has implications for global immigration, and security and policing, and education and health. This has positive implications for cyber security. This is good stuff.

Tim Cook Like Steve Ballmer?

Steve Ballmer faced a lot of criticism as CEO and he would get confused because he was bringing in a lot of revenue. A company is supposed to make money, right?

But he was not innovating. All the new products were coming from elsewhere. He did manage to buy Skype though.

Tim Cook has been toying with the dimensions of the various Apple products, and he has been bringing in a lot of money.

Is that a warning sign?

http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/25/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ballmer/

Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer | VentureBeat | Business | by Steve Blank

DealSpotr: Social, And Sharing, And Ecommerce And Deals

DealSpotr is a flash sale site. Carlista Macy reached out to me. Next thing I know, I signed up.

I am in the market for a Chromebook right now. And I was surprised to see a deal for $200 at the site on the very first page. It did not feel like I had entered too many details. The smarts of ecommerce sites these days!

On Facebook and Twitter you are sharing links to articles you read. On DealSpotr you are sharing deals from wherever you might find them on the web. DealSpotr is for the shopping kind. I am not a big shopper myself, but ecommerce is a perennial fascination. It ties into the monetization strategy of many tech startups. And the social aspect of the sharing thing intrigues me.

Should a deal you spotted ends up taking off, you get rewarded.

This is like when people would collect coupons, from a newspaper cutting here, a newspaper cutting there, only this is, of course, digital. But the coupon collecting of the good old days did not have the ease of sharing, and you were not rewarded simply for collecting coupons.

But then if you have an even modest social media presence, perhaps an active Twitter account, a blog with a decent readership, you could really up your engagement level with the site.

The site reminds me of Epinions.com which came out around the year 2,000. You wrote product reviews and you earned money if a lot of people read your reviews. This site is also a money maker for active participants.

You could earn a $20 Amazon gift card during your first visit at the site by doing the basics at this social couponing site.

The newsfeed format means you get deals as per the interests you have listed. And you can upvote deals. If one of the deals you thus upvoted becomes "hot," you get rewarded.

This site is much more focused than Pinterest, for the specific niche of deals and coupons and shopping.

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10 Breakthrough Technologies

Immune Engineering
Precise Gene Editing in Plants
Conversational Interfaces

“I hope to someday have grandchildren who are mystified at how, back in 2016, if you were to say ‘Hi’ to your microwave oven, it would rudely sit there and ignore you.”

Reusable Rockets

spaceflight could become a hundred times cheaper..... the future of spaceflight will be far more interesting than the Apollo-era hangover of the past 40 years.

Robots That Teach Each Other

an average experiment generates 100 gigabytes of information ..... Researchers are already working on autoimmune disorders, like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and lupus. Infectious disease is also in the sights of T-cell engineers.

Precise Gene Editing in Plants

CRISPR offers an easy, exact way to alter genes to create traits such as disease resistance and drought tolerance.

a lab in China has used it to create a fungus--resistant wheat; several groups in China are using the technique on rice in efforts to boost yields; and a group in the U.K. has used it to tweak a gene in barley that helps govern seed germination, which could aid efforts to produce drought-resistant varieties. ..... The gene-editing technique could be critical in helping scientists keep up with the constantly evolving microbes that attack crops ...... “It takes millions of dollars and many years of work to go through the regulatory process,” Kamoun says. “But the pathogens don’t sit and wait for you; they keep evolving and changing.” ....... Big and small companies alike are jumping in. ..... The big question is whether CRISPR crops will be governed by the same regulations as GMOs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has already said some examples of gene-edited corn, potatoes, and soybeans (edited using a different method, known as TALENs) don’t fall under existing regulations. But both the United States and the more restrictive European Union are now conducting reviews of today’s regulations. And Chinese authorities have not said whether they will allow the crops to be planted.

Conversational Interfaces

Powerful speech technology from China’s leading Internet company makes it much easier to use a smartphone.

A growing number of China’s 691 million smartphone users now regularly dispense with swipes, taps, and tiny keyboards when looking things up on the country’s most popular search engine, Baidu. China is an ideal place for voice interfaces to take off, because Chinese characters were hardly designed with tiny touch screens in mind. But people everywhere should benefit as Baidu advances speech technology and makes voice interfaces more practical and useful. That could make it easier for anyone to communicate with the machines around us. ...... “The best technology is often invisible, and as speech recognition becomes more reliable, I hope it will disappear into the background.” ...... they offer a glimpse of a graceful future in which there’s less need to learn a new interface for every new device. ...... There are thousands of Chinese characters, and although a system called Pinyin allows them to be generated phonetically from Latin ones, many people (especially those over 50) do not know the system. It’s also common in China to use messaging apps such as WeChat to do all sorts of tasks, such as paying restaurant tabs. And yet in many of China’s poorer regions, where there is perhaps more opportunity for the Internet to have big social and economic effects, literacy levels are still low. ....... Robots or home appliances, for example, could be easier to deal with if you could simply talk to them. ...... a powerful new speech recognition engine called Deep Speech 2. It consists of a very large, or “deep,” neural network that learns to associate sounds with words and phrases as it is fed millions of examples of transcribed speech. Deep Speech 2 can recognize spoken words with stunning accuracy. In fact, the researchers found that it can sometimes transcribe snippets of Mandarin speech more accurately than a person. ....... Baidu’s progress is all the more impressive because Mandarin is phonetically complex and uses tones that transform the meaning of a word. Deep Speech 2 is also striking because few of the researchers in the California lab where the technology was developed speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other variant of Chinese.

The engine essentially works as a universal speech system, learning English just as well when fed enough examples.

Reusable Rockets

Rockets typically are destroyed on their maiden voyage. But now they can make an upright landing and be refueled for another trip, setting the stage for a new era in spaceflight.

If this can be done regularly and rockets can be refueled over and over, spaceflight could become a hundred times cheaper.

Robots That Teach Each Other

What if robots could figure out more things on their own and share that knowledge among themselves?


DNA App Store

An online store for information about your genes will make it cheap and easy to learn more about your health risks and predispositions.


SolarCity’s Gigafactory

A $750 million solar facility in Buffalo will produce a gigawatt of high-efficiency solar panels per year and make the technology far more attractive to homeowners.

efficiencies in the lab are even higher: researchers have made exotic solar-cell materials with efficiencies of up to 40 percent.

Slack

A service built for the era of mobile phones and short text messages is changing the workplace.

Slack gives you a centralized place to communicate with your colleagues through instant messages and in chat rooms, which can reduce the time you have to spend on e-mail. Whether you’re on a mobile device or a desktop computer, you can upload files, get and manipulate information stored in spreadsheets or other business applications, and easily search through past conversations. But many of the core features have been around since the 1990s. And there have been other “Facebook for the office” software packages that resemble Slack and have failed to generate anything close to the same level of enthusiasm. ...... more and more people now get work done on mobile devices, in collaboration with people who aren’t always in the same office at the same time. ....... Slack funnels messages into streams that everyone who works together can see. That “allows you to ‘overhear’ what is going on in an organization, which research has shown can lead to business impact,” he says. “It’s a kind of ambient awareness that you just don’t get from e-mail.” ...... Slack messages tend to be short and casual, much more like the mobile text messages that people are increasingly favoring over e-mail in their personal life

Tesla Autopilot

The electric-vehicle maker sent its cars a software update that suddenly made autonomous driving a reality.

give drivers something similar to what airline pilots employ in flight ..... The car could manage its speed, steer within and even change lanes, and park itself. ..... Everyone wanted to know what it felt like, the strange surrender of allowing a car to take control. The only moments that seemed like magic were when the car parked itself or changed lanes, mostly because watching a steering wheel turn all on its own was unnatural and ghostly. ...... the thing that quickly becomes strange is driving a car without Autopilot. “You’ll feel like the car is not doing its job,” he said. ...... my car accelerated and slowed more smoothly than it ever could have with me in charge.

Power from the Air

Internet devices powered by Wi-Fi and other telecommunications signals will make small computers and sensors more pervasive.

energy harvested from nearby TV, radio, cell-phone, or Wi-Fi signals ..... Transferring power wirelessly is not a new trick. But getting a device without a conventional power source to communicate is harder, because generating radio signals is very power-intensive and the airwaves harvested from radio, TV, and other telecommunication technologies hold little energy. ..... weak radio signals can indeed provide all an Internet gadget needs ...... tiny passive Wi-Fi devices could be extremely cheap to make, perhaps less than a dollar. In tomorrow’s smart home, security cameras, temperature sensors, and smoke alarms should never need to have their batteries changed.

Tech News (2)

Free money! What’s not to like?

An earlier incarnation, called the negative income tax, was pitched by the conservative economist Milton Friedman in the early 1960s as a way to curtail the growing government antipoverty programs of that era. ...... among many tech elites and their boosters, the idea of a basic income seems to have morphed from an antipoverty strategy into a radical new way of seeing work and leisure. ....... the economy is becoming increasingly dominated by machines and software.

A Future Without Jobs? Two Views of the Changing Work Force

A problem I have with the idea of a universal basic income — as opposed to, say, wage subsidies or wage insurance to top up the earnings of people who lose their job and must settle for a new job at a lower wage — is that it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all. ...... They see a future in which a small group of highly skilled tech workers reign supreme, while the rest of the job world resembles the piecemeal, transitional work we see coming out of tech today (Uber drivers, Etsy shopkeepers, people who scrape by on other people’s platforms). ...... techies have a philosophical bent toward big ideas, and U.B.I. is very big. ..... Norwegians work 20 percent fewer hours per year than Americans; Germans 25 percent fewer. They have taken much more of their wealth in the form of leisure rather than money. ......

And, by the way, I’ve read about robots that can program. So maybe the programmers aren’t safe either.

...... It will be O.K., under this policy, to choose a life of learning instead of a low-paying bad job. ..... a universal basic income functions properly only in a world with little or no paid work because the odds of anybody taking a job when his or her needs are already being met are going to be fairly low. ...... If the idea of robots taking over sounds like science fiction, the idea of the American government agreeing to tax capitalists enough to hand out checks to support the entire working class is in an entirely new category of fantasy. ...... One of the reasons some libertarians and conservatives like U.B.I. is that it is a very simple, efficient and universal form of welfare — everyone gets a monthly check, even the rich, and the government isn’t going to tell you what to spend it on. Its very universality breaks through political opposition. .....

Andy Stern, the former head of the S.E.I.U., will soon publish a book calling for a basic income

. ...... The techies, as usual, are either way ahead of everyone, or they’re living in some other universe. .....

tools and techniques we have developed in recent times — from gene sequencing to electron microscopes to computers that can analyze data at enormous speeds — are about to open up vast new frontiers of possibility.

Covering Donald Trump, and Witnessing the Danger Up Close

and the mood shifted, as well, turning tense and electric...... One young woman, a Trump supporter, was shoved against the metal barricades and began to cry. A group of older women left early, shortly after a man holding a “K.K.K. 4 Trump” sign was hustled out nearby.

How WeChat Is Extending China’s School Days Well into the Night

A Bitcoin-Style Currency for Central Banks



10 Breakthrough Technologies:2016

Reinventing Marketing in the Digital Era

Business Models, Information Technology, and the Company of the Future

The Nature of the Firm—75+ Years Later

Pentagon Hackers Are Waging America’s First Cyberwar

Immune Engineering

Tech News (1)

Archinaut, a 3D Printing Robot to Make Big Structures in Space

Why Prospecting Asteroids for Precious Resources Is Now Possible [Video]

Most of the raw materials we value on Earth exist in much larger quantities in space. ..... “The first trillionaire in the world is going to be the person who first mines asteroids.”

Drones Have Reached a Tipping Point—Here’s What Happens Next

Over the past few years, drones have moved from the "government phase" to the "consumer phase" into the "commercial phase." ........ Drones are demonetizing rapidly. Ten years ago, drones were million-dollar military/industrial things. Today they are on the shelves of Walmart. ...... "They started at $1,500 and now they're at $500 and they're soon going to $50, with even better technology onboard. The price decline in the industry is staggering." ..... "You will basically see supercomputer performance in toy level devices, just as we're already seeing with smartphones." ..... The next big breakthrough in drone research will be "sense-and-avoid." ....Right now, drones are either manually piloted or GPS piloted, but as we integrate them into our urban fabric, they'll need true autonomy...... "Drones will need to have eyes. Sensors like radar, LiDAR, stereo vision, sonar, and they'll need to use this to autonomously avoid obstacles and fly. It's environmental awareness and it is necessary to safely navigate worlds they've never explored." ...... The way we're going to digitize the planet is by putting sensors out there on drones ..... Satellites are going to be complementary, covering big areas but at lower resolution. ..... "Today the FCC doesn't have to regulate or give you a license for Wi-Fi because it's low power and self-de-conflicting — it's not a threat to anyone," says Anderson......"In the future, as drones become small enough, with low kinetic energy, and smart enough, I believe the FAA will regulate them like Wi-Fi. We want the FAA to create kind of an 'open spectrum' sandbox to allow for huge amounts of innovation."

Eye on the Cure: Can Algae Genes Restore Vision in First Optogenetics Human Trial?

Given the power of optogenetics to fine-tune brain circuits, rumors of its potential use in humans as therapy have floated around since its inception...... In one previous study, after optogenetics treatment, previously blind mice could swim out of a chamber in which the escape route was brightly lit. On average, they escaped as fast as mice with normal vision.

This Remarkable Robot Hand Is Worthy of Luke Skywalker

most Star Wars tech is beyond us...... Artificial bones were 3D printed from a laser scan of a real skeleton hand; ligaments were fashioned from ultra-strong, lightweight strings; and laser-cut rubber sheets act as soft tissue for stability, flexibility, and torque. All this is controlled by an array of servos and cables. ...... Some of the hardest tasks to automate in factories require human-level dexterity (e.g., handling circuit boards to tightly packing boxes). ...... Xu says we're making progress printing bone structures with biocompatible materials, making biodegradable ligaments, growing muscles in petri dishes, and learning to regenerate peripheral nerves.

Space and Technology: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life

there are an estimated 100 billion billion Earth-like planets in our universe. ...... we're finding evidence of liquid water all over the solar system, and the one thing we know about life on Earth is the need for water. ..... in our own solar system, organic compound-glazed comets drift everywhere ..... we should be inside a life-spawning factory of a universe. ..... our universe has 500 billion billion stars like our own, and orbiting those suns are another 100 billion billion Earth-like planets. That is 100 habitable planets for every grain of sand on Earth. That’s trillions of opportunities for some other planet to grow life. ...... there would be one million planets with life in the Milky Way Galaxy alone ..... if even just a handful of alien civilizations have advanced beyond our current level of technological progress, humanity should be waking up to a universe like the world of Star Trek.

The Near Future of VR and AR: What You Need to Know

try to predict the future when AI, robotics, VR, synthetic biology, and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining… You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. ..... VR will ultimately impact everything from real estate to retail and healthcare and education. Business meetings, conferences and concerts will soon all be held in virtual environments. ...... Over the past two years, well over $5 billion has been invested in AR and VR by all of the major technology companies, from Google to Microsoft and Samsung to HTC....... we're now reaching a crossover point where hardware technology will let us scan rooms and the people in it, and convert those scans into 3D objects at a very low cost ..... "There will be a magical turning point where the pixel size in our displays will get so small that you can't see them." ...... "When we've developed displays with between 4K and 8K resolutions (roughly), there will be a moment when we can't tell the difference between reality and virtual/augmented reality (at least with our eyes)." ...... we'll be able to animate you at a distance, talking to somebody else with a perfect representation of your facial movements. Think of a film like Avatar and how they transferred the actors onto those characters in the movie. You're going to be able to do that live, in a meeting, where you're going to be that character and it's going to move and express itself emotionally like you do. ..... Why go to conferences, school, or travel for business if you can have richer, deeper experiences from the comfort of your living room? ...... "If you can buy your kid a $600 virtual reality headset, and they can study five times as fast as anybody else, and they don't have to be in a particular neighborhood or near a school to do it, they are just going to adopt these things. They are that much better." ...... In success, your Magic Leap headset will allow you to view a virtual TV anywhere, on any wall, or a mobile phone screen on the palm of your hand, or the air in front of you, then there is no need to carry around clunky glass devices in your pockets or hang TVs on your walls.

Why Big Tech Companies Are Open-Sourcing Their AI Systems

Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been making remarkable progress developing artificial intelligence systems. Recently they have released much of their work to the public for free use, exploration, adaptation and perhaps improvement. ..... “deep learning” — an approach that organizes layers of neural networks hierarchically to analyze very large data sets not just in search of simple statistics but also seeking to identify rich and interesting abstract patterns. ......

even experts do not understand when or how AI might become powerful enough to cause harm, damage or injury.

....... AI systems involve large — often very very large — amounts of code, so much that it stretches the ability of any single individual to understand in both breadth and depth. Scrutiny, troubleshooting and bug-fixing are especially important in AI, where we are not designing tools to do a specific job (e.g., build a car), but to learn, adapt and make decisions in our stead. The stakes are larger both for the positive and potentially negative outcomes. ........ Over the long run, Google and Facebook are not really in the business of selling ads, and Amazon is not in the business of selling merchandise. No, these technology companies are powered by your eyeballs (and data). Their currency is users. Google, for example, gives away email and search for free to draw users to its products; it needs to innovate quickly, producing more and better products to ensure you stay with the company. ...... AI is central because it, by design, learns and adapts, and even makes decisions. AI is more than a product: it is a product generator. In the near future, AI will not be relegated to serving up images or consumer products, but will be used to identify and capitalize on new opportunities by innovating new products.

Will the End of Moore’s Law Halt Computing’s Exponential Rise?

Since 1991, the semiconductor industry has regularly produced a technology roadmap to coordinate their efforts and spot problems early. ...... Because the chief outcome of Moore’s Law is more powerful computers at lower cost, Kurzweil tracked computational speed per $1,000 over time. This measure accounts for all the “levels of ‘cleverness’” baked into every chip—such as different industrial processes, materials, and designs—and allows us to compare other computing technologies from history. The result is surprising........ Moore’s Law is the fifth computing paradigm. The first four include computers using electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, and discrete transistor computing elements. ...... “When Moore’s Law reaches the end of its S-curve, now expected before 2020, the exponential growth will continue with

three-dimensional molecular computing

, which will constitute the sixth paradigm.” –Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near .......... Artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, virtual reality, unraveling the human genome—these are a few world-shaking advances computing enables. ...... As a society, if we just believed that single trajectory of Moore’s, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout.

Don’t Be Alarmed: AI Won’t Leave Half the World Unemployed

we can pretty much automate the job of an airline pilot today. Indeed, most of the time, a computer is flying your plane. But society is likely to continue to demand the reassurance of having a pilot on board even if they are just reading their iPad most of the time. ....... We also need to consider all the new jobs that technology will create. For example, we don’t employ many printers setting type any more. But we do employ many more people in the digital equivalent, making web pages. ..... the Oxford report gives a 98% chance of umpiring or refereeing to be automated. But we are likely to have just as many if not more umpires and referees in the future, even if they use technologies to do their job better. ..... In the US, the average working week has declined from around 60 hours to just 33. Other developed countries are even lower. Germans only work 26 hours per week. .......... Society would break down well before we get to 50% unemployment.

Where Artificial Intelligence Is Now and What’s Just Around the Corner

AIs will begin to sense and use all five senses. ...... We'll see revolutions in how we manage climate change, redesign and democratize education, make scientific discoveries, leverage energy resources, and develop solutions to difficult problems. ......... AI is being used to match clinical trials with patients, drive robotic surgeons, read radiological findings and analyze genomic sequences. ..... Ultimately, during the AI revolution taking place in the next three years, AIs will be integrated into everything around us, combining sensors and networks and making all systems "smart." ..... AIs will push forward the ideas of transparency, of seamless interaction with devices and information, making everything personalized and easy to use. We'll be able to harness that sensor data and put it into an actionable form, at the moment when we need to make a decision.

In the Future, Ownerless Companies Will Live on the Blockchain

poised to transform global commerce ..... Blockchain has been called “the most disruptive thing I’ve seen in my career” ........ Fundamentally, banks, auditing firms, legal services, and security systems are designed to authenticate the transactions that ripple across our planet. .......

Like the internet democratized the exchange of information, transforming entire industries in the process, the blockchain promises to democratize the exchange of value, a concept with staggering possibilities.

...... “in the same way that we don’t refer to the internet as ‘PayPal’, we should be clear that ‘Bitcoin’ does not mean blockchain. PayPal is just one service built on top of internet protocols—Bitcoin is similarly built on top of the blockchain.” ....... “while Bitcoin itself may not stand the test of time, we can be sure that the blockchain is not going anywhere.” ........... Technologically binding smart contracts would bypass the need for sprawling financial back offices and expensive legal systems requiring lawyers, judges, auditors, and insurance professionals. Imagine a scenario in which a land title could check an online registry and automatically send itself to a new owner, eliminating a need for expensive title insurance to verify the legitimacy of the transaction. ....... One might design an account that automatically donates to relief efforts in the case of any or certain natural disasters, thereby removing the need (or even the option) of a case-by-case donation decision. ...... Imagine that a portion of FEMA’s funds were programmed to check a Hurricane’s status, and in the case of a Category 5 storm that makes landfall—it could allocate money to the correct local offices. ...... At a basic level, corporations themselves are fueled by contracts. We may live to see a new era of business and commerce built upon a more automated legal framework. Legal scholars and computer scientists have pointed out that an ecosystem of self-enforcing contracts would give rise to what are called

distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs)

. ....... Imagine in the future —summoning a taxi that not only has no driver, but that belongs to a computer network, not to a human being. ...... a world where a network-owned drone service might power its units from network-owned charging stations. Supply chains built on top of such a system might further reduce the costs of delivering goods anywhere in the world. ....... The blockchain may then deliver the software smarts to eat away at parts of the economy we hadn’t considered ..... human society after the proliferation of the blockchain will be as unfamiliar to us as anything we’ve experienced.

China’s Curious Dream of Floating Nuclear Plants on the Ocean

a floating, ship-based nuclear power plant. ...... The plants would be situated between 8 and 12 miles from the coast at a depth of at least 100 meters. Power cables would run to switchyard facilities situated on land......Being placed so far from land would help protect the plants against earthquakes and tsunami waves, which are relatively small so far out...... the country will build at least 100 new nuclear power reactors in the coming ten years. ..... the country will use nuclear power to help reduce its current heavy reliance on coal, and in doing so, dramatically lower emissions of CO2 and air pollutants, which have reached health-threatening levels in many areas.

China will invest more than a trillion dollars in nuclear energy over the coming years.

In time, it’s hoping to recuperate some of that by becoming a leading global exporter of nuclear technology. ...... ocean-based reactors would be more susceptible to terrorist attacks. ..... The US Navy has logged more than 5,400 reactor years and traveled more than 130 million miles. They have sailed all the seven seas, including some of the most hostile environments, without any publicized accidents.

Goodyear’s Awesome New Spherical Tire Design For Autonomous Cars

Car bodies of the future might be completely 3D printed. They may be completely autonomous — and now, they might have multi-directional spherical tires. .... Reinventing the wheel ..... Why bother attaching them to the car at all, when you can simply keep them in place with magnets? ..... the way a magnetic levitation train works. .... These trains use electrically charged magnets to lift train cars anywhere from a fraction of an inch to a few inches above the tracks. Once the train car is hovering above the tracks, electricity supplied through coils in the tracks creates magnetic fields that move the train. Since these trains float frictionlessly above the tracks, they can reach speeds of over 300 mph. ..... Inspired by brain coral and natural sponges, the 3D printed tire treads are designed to stiffen in dry conditions and soften when wet, like a sponge, to provide powerful control in all kinds of weather. ...... “What I'd really like to see is a provision for the wheels to be hollow and with some type of access hatch. That way you could fill one wheel with dirty laundry, some water and detergent, and by the time you arrive at your destination, boom, clean clothes! You could also insert peeled avocados, limes and some type of pestle in another wheel to create a delicious guacamole as you drive. The third wheel could be used for smoothies.”

Big Tech Companies Need To Pay Individuals Globally

Over the long run, Google and Facebook are not really in the business of selling ads, and Amazon is not in the business of selling merchandise. No, these technology companies are powered by your eyeballs (and data). Their currency is users. Google, for example, gives away email and search for free to draw users to its products; it needs to innovate quickly, producing more and better products to ensure you stay with the company.

It only makes sense. When a foreign company goes and drills for oil in Saudi Arabia, it pays the country. When Google drills you for data, should Google not pay? Data is the new oil. Tech companies are about to build super rich profiles on individuals. That is fine as long as privacy is respected. And they pay. Google's money might show up in your Gmail account. You should be able to conduct local commerce wherever you are.

This is not really that different from AdSense/AdWords. Google pays you when you display Google ads on your blog.

Just like with ISPs, governments can make companies owning the big pipes allow many small companies to become the last mile provider, similarly, many of these big tech companies are busy building many big pipes of all sorts. At some point it might make market sense to allow for competition in the final mile.

Also true for finance. If the big banks can just make sure your bank deposits are safe, do they also have to be the people providing the basic services? Can not small startups who don't own buildings simply plug in and start offering services?

Google owns Blogger, but Wordpress beats Google's Blogger in blogging platform innovation. Wordpress does the last mile really well.

Like Mao said (at least for a short period of time, very short), Let a thousand flowers bloom.

This is a policy challenge. It is for governments to make sure free competition is kept to the max. Sometimes that requires liberating the last mile to small players who might be more nimble, with their ears close to the ground.

I read somewhere Google is giving 25% ownership to the Sri Lankan government for taking its Project Loon insanity to the ground in that country for use of the airwaves. That sounded close to perfect to me, and might be even more meaningful to many of the African countries. Oil holes in the sky.

FlipKart: Owned 80% By Investors

I learned today that FlipKart is owned 80% by investors. That is a sad state of affairs. Investors should have the discipline to not own 35-40% of a tech startup, otherwise you are killing the hen that lays the golden egg. It is racism to think Indian tech startup founders can get by with little ownership because, well, they are Indian and they are in India.

I wish FlipKart all the best, but I can't see how a tech startup that is so weak at its foundation can be a trailblazer. It has been set to fall, if not now then later. The ownership structure is bull.

Rahul Yadav is another story that caught my attention months ago. The Indian media made it look like the guy sent out one wrong, arrogant email and that is why. That is missing the point. He had all the inklings of a tech startup founder. But the ownership structure there also was all messed up. And I gather Housing.com has bombed since. The hen got killed.

The Real Rahul Yadav Story
Rahul Yadav Has A Bright Future

I hope there will be a second coming of Rahul Yadav just like there was a second coming of Steve Jobs.

If FlipKart is owned 80% by investors, I am not sure it is the Indian Alibaba.

Saudi Arabia: SuperPower?

A tech startup founder is not a CEO. A tech startup founder has to be in a commanding position. Because you have to make drastic moves as you grow. And you need power to be able to make those moves. And the power comes from equity ownership. I don't know what the FlipKart investors are thinking.

A company owned 80% by investors, when it goes for its next round of funding, the investors will make the call. The founder CEO will not be at the negotiating table. That should never happen. An irrelevant founder CEO is not a founder CEO but an employee.



Tech Startup Equity Distribution
Zuck, Free Basics, India
Zuck, Free Basics, India (2)
Dorsey Ouster Was DNA Damage At Twitter

There is venture capital. And then there is vulture capital.

Top Angel Investment Returns In History

25K Becomes $110 Million In 5 Years

What are the greatest historical angel investment returns?

Jeff Bezos also invested $250,000 in the first angel round in Google and that at today's prices his shares would be worth $1.6 billion. ...... In the hottest angel investment country in the World, the US, last year had some 227,000 angels and pumped $23 billion into start-ups, up 3% from 2004 ..... In 1996 there were only about ten angel groups in the U.S.; today there are more than 200. ....... the 1878 Paris Exhibition, a few highly prominent chaps by the name of J.P.Morgan and Spencer Trask decided to back a crazy idea called “electricity” that was being pitched by none other than Thomas Edison. ....... Back in 1994, there was a guy in the US selling books from his garage via the internet. 12 angels later and Amazon.com was born, 2005 sales were over $5 billion! ......... The second most famous angel investment in recent years (number one to come shortly) was probably the $100,000 check that Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim made out to Google after watching Larry Page and Sergey Brin demonstrate their search-engine software. The check was uncashable at first, as a legal entity, Google didn’t exist yet, but once the company’s incorporation papers were completed and filed, the money enabled Page and Brin to move out of their dorm rooms and into the marketplace. ............ even the likes of Apple, Kinko’s and Starbucks all got their starts with the help of angel investors, as did current rising stars such as Digg, LinkedIn, and Simply Hired. ........ Larry and Sergey .. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department’s loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network. ....... Larry and Sergey continued working to perfect their technology through the first half of 1998. Following a path that would become a key tenet of the Google way, they bought a terabyte of disks at bargain prices and built their own computer housings in Larry’s dorm room, which became Google’s first data center. Meanwhile Sergey set up a business office, and the two began calling on potential partners who might want to license a search technology better than any then available. Despite the dotcom fever of the day, they had little interest in building a company of their own around the technology they had developed........ One portal CEO told them, “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.” ......

Unable to interest the major portal players of the day, Larry and Sergey decided to make a go of it on their own. All they needed was a little cash to move out of the dorm — and to pay off the credit cards they had maxed out buying a terabyte of memory. So they wrote up a business plan, put their Ph.D. plans on hold, and went looking for an angel investor. Their first visit was with a friend of a faculty member.

.......... Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, was used to taking the long view. One look at their demo and he knew Google had potential — a lot of potential. But though his interest had been piqued, he was pressed for time. As Sergey tells it, “We met him very early one morning on the porch of a Stanford faculty member’s home in Palo Alto. We gave him a quick demo. He had to run off somewhere, so he said, ‘Instead of us discussing all the details, why don’t I just write you a check?’ It was made out to Google Inc. and was for $100,000.” ......... Since there was no legal entity known as “Google Inc.,” there was no way to deposit the check. It sat in Larry’s desk drawer for a couple of weeks while he and Sergey scrambled to set up a corporation and locate other funders among family, friends, and acquaintances. Ultimately they brought in a total initial investment of almost $1 million. ......... That December, PC Magazine named Google one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world. ......... Google’s appearance on Time magazine’s Top Ten Best Cybertech list for 1999.

Angel Investors: How The Rich Invest

There are currently between 5-7.2 million people in the United States who are accepted as accredited investors. This group of people, which represents as little as 1% of the U.S. population, is made up of wealthy individuals that make $200,000 or more in base salary every year, or maintain a net worth of over $1,000,000. ........ there are currently 756,000 angel investors in the U.S. who have made an angel investment or participated in a friends and family round of financing. ...... the New York Angels require every member to invest at least $50,000 during a 12-month period. ...... during the past 17 years, startups were accountable for creating 65% of the net new jobs. ...... Angel investing is becoming the new venture capital. 50,000 companies were started by seed capital last year while venture capital firms financed only 600.

The origins of angel investing

Since the late 1980s, a growing pool of individuals with moderate wealth have been adding early stage investments to their portfolio. Regardless of whether they are the orthodontist, the real estate flipper, or the middle manager at Boeing or Microsoft, the number of these private investors with truly moderate wealth have been investing in the local economy for over three decades and we are seeing a shift in who is allocating capital from the venture capitalists to the individual investors at the early stage. Many micro VCs or investment partnerships are being built as well as steady growth within the existing network of angel groups. These individuals who used to be lovingly referred to as "Aunt Agatha" and "The rich Uncle" have transcended those nametags and are now providing enough capital for startups to truly get off the ground. ....... during the time-span 1979 to 1995, Fortune 500 companies lost more than four million jobs, yet 24 million jobs were created in the entrepreneurial economy. During that time new business creation rose 200 percent (in comparison with a 17 percent population growth). That is an incredible rise in the affect entrepreneurs have on our economy and it hasn't slowed down since that time frame. .......

in 1874 Alexander Graham Bell used angel money to found Bell Telephone. In 1903 Henry Ford used a $40k investment from five angel investors to launch Ford Motors. In 1977 Apple accepted $91k from a single angel investor to grow. Heck even the Golden Gate Bridge was financed by the angel investor A. P. Giannini after the architect spent 19 years searching for funding.

....... That angel investor who put $91k into Apple received a return of 1,692x their investment (yes $154m). Thomas Alberg received a 260x return on his Amazon.com investment turning $100k into $260m. ....... You can see why investing in 29 losers at $100k makes sense if the 30th investment returns more than 30x.

Angel Investing 101 from David Teten

Tech Power Couple

The Power Couple of the New York Tech Scene

The two entrepreneurs, who celebrated their second wedding anniversary in October and are expecting their first child in May, have a uniquely modern marriage. In addition to their cozy home life and shared passion for active sports, Ms. Crowley is a client of her husband’s, using Foursquare’s location-tracking technology to market her company. ...... The Crowleys also cut a dash in New York’s tech-social scene, where the most influential people in the room are more likely to be wearing performance fleece than designer suits. ..... Geek mystique gets the Crowleys invited to A-list parties, including the recent James Bond premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater, where they posted an Instagram photo of themselves in black tie. Gossip-column sightings have also placed the Crowleys at events alongside new-media luminaries like Arianna Huffington, the Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer and the Hollywood star (and tech gadfly) Ashton Kutcher. ..... “We talk a lot online,” Mr. Crowley said of the couple’s daily interactions. “The pillow talk, so to speak, is more over instant messenger.” ..... “And how we’ve coexisted is, he does this really sweet thing,” she said, “which is, he’ll ask me, ‘Do you want my advice, or do you want me to just listen?’ Because, if I say, ‘I’d love your advice,’ then I’ve asked for it, and I can’t argue.” .... when their baby comes. .... Her husband added, “I can’t imagine it’s any harder than start-up stuff.”