Archive for category: Neat Tech & News

If you’ve ever had to hire, manage, motivate, or work with Real Programmers, you MUST listen to Paul Graham talk about “Great Hackers”. In his presentation, he uses the term Hackers to mean Programmers instead of what we typically think of Hackers people who break into computers. So just know that going in and you will love this presentation.

I’ve been in the tech industry since I was a young teen and have dealt with Hackers all my life. This presentation is, by far, the best I’ve ever heard. I had the great pleasure and honor to spend a little bit of time with Paul Graham. He’s a cool guy and I would definitely suggest you listen to this. If you’re really intersted, buy the book!

My good buddy and patent attorney Leighton Chong wrote a good article on “An Alternative Business Model for Hawaii Tech Company Success” that I think any entrepreneur should take a serious look at. Leighton’s point is that instead of building out a traditional Silicon Valley (SV) tech company, Hawaii can be just as successful by licensing intellectual property (IP) instead.

The SV model requires many millions in venture capital, which is very difficult to come by in Hawaii. The IP model only needs about $500k in angel funds, which is not too hard in Hawaii if you have a good plan. Instead of building out a huge company with lots of overhead, staff, executives, and headaches, develop what he calls the “Three P’s” :

(i) Protecting their intellectual property rights; (ii) Proving that the technology works (building a functioning prototype, or contracting tests and studies to validate it); and (iii) Productizing their inventions (researching unique niches of demand in the markets and designing optimal products that people will buy).

And once you’ve done that, find a company that is wiling to buy your Intellectual Property via a licensing agreement. A successful IP company provides almost as good a return as a successful SV company except it can do it with far less capital. Throw in our state’s Act 215 tax incentive to develop and R&D company, and it becomes quite attractive.

I’ve been personally following this path myself for the past few years with my email privacy company, Titan Key Software. We just received a patent in March of 2005. I’ll keep you all posted on any major good news that comes our way.

Meanwhile, give Leighton’s article a good read and post some of your comments here. I’m going to see if I can talk Leighton into doing a podcast interview.

From the Advertiser:

An association of local business interests yesterday received some federal government assistance to help develop a 300,000-square-foot life-sciences research center in Kaka’ako.

Honolulu-based Biotech Research Center LLC was awarded $11 million worth of tax credits to help attract financing for the estimated $150 million project.

It’s very cool to see a continued momentum in Hawaii Biotech and it looks like Kaka’ako is shaping up to be the epicenter. First you had Tissue Genesis locating in the Gold Bond Building (and in fact they moved into the killer office space that my other company CyberCom, Inc, had leased) and then the Medical School and now this.

I would be very interested in knowing more about what unique advantages Hawaii can bring to the Biotech industry. Why does it make business sense for a BioTech company to do business here? The better we can answer this question, the tighter a point we can focus our resources on.

Finally, there’s research that’s bringing out what gamers like me already know: Video games are not only way better than watching TV, but have many health benefits. I caught this cool article in GMSV with some things to think about:

“The people who play games are into technology, can handle more information, can synthesize more complex data, solve operational design problems, lead change and bring organizations through change,” says Chip Luman

hiring managers? maybe you want to find out if they play video games because:

research on managerial behavior that indicated gamers were better risk-takers, showed particular confidence in their abilities, placed a high value on relationships and employee input and thought in terms of “winning”‘ when pursuing objectives.

So now, you can quote this post when you need to justify to your family as to why it’s 3am and you’re still firing away. 🙂

I caught this story in CNET about a new generation of TVs that might be hitting stores in 2 years or so.

Called “Nano-emissive Display”, these new generation TVs are markedly improved over the old stuff. CNET says:

Among favorable attributes of Motorola’s new displays: They’re bright enough to be seen in daylight, they respond as quickly as CRTs, their colors are almost as good as CRTs and they can be viewed from a wide range of angles. And they’re “much less expensive” to build than current displays because fewer steps are required in the manufacturing process, Ilderem said.

They use a new technology called “Carbon Nanotubes” which are tubes built from Carbon that apparently have the ability to pipe electricity. These tubes are connected to the coated class of a TV and then turn themselves on an off to create the picture.

I’ve still got an old Tube TV because I like the picture quality. Now if this thing is for real, I’ll gladly wait for a few more years to get something better, bigger, and cheaper.