October 2011 Archives

We'll all be selling tickets to Theme Park Europe if we don't start building the new companies of the future, Lawrence Johns of Amadeus Capital Partners told the Silicon South-West Viva Entrepreneurs! meeting in Bath last Friday.

Orange was a phenomenon. Eight years after launch it was sold for £30 billion.

Could robots evolve autonomously? The HyperNEAT project at Cornell University has put neural-net-based brains inside robotic bodies and programmed the brains to take sensory inputs from the body and use them to figure out how to control the robotic body. Some brains taught themselves how to do it, others didn't.

Ping-Pong could provide the model for making commercial quantum computers.

Using MEMS to shrink airborne guidance systems is opening up significant opportunities.

What's the fastest growing US industry? Software? ICs? Consumer Electronics? No, it's iron ore mining. Thanks to Daily Finance for this one - the top ten growth industries in the US for 2011.

'"Electronic brain" is damaging to sales and exports, says Elliott's computer manager.'

This was the headline, 51 years ago, on a story in Electronics Weekly's edition of November 2^nd 1960.

"Why am I selling my best image sensors to Apple?" asks Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony and others, notably Samsung, must be wondering why, for so long, they supplied Apple with the wherewithal to thrash them in end product markets.

The industry has seen plenty of cock-ups. Of all the big-time balls-ups who blew it worst?

Ulrich Schumachger and Hermann Hauser had the same idea when they ran Infineon and Acorn respectively - dinner.

Staying in Palo Alto this week, I was lured, as one is, to the Apple store.

There was once a journalist who wanted to be an inventor.

Bob Widlar was the best circuit designer in the industry's history, Bob Dobkin, who founded Linear Technology with Widlar and Bob Swanson 30 years ago last month, told me earlier in the week.

A Canadian company has printed a car. Urbee, the world's first printed car, was built on a 3D printer.

Thanks to ZDNet for this one - the ten worst high-tech executive decisions of all time

450mm is the most divisive issue ever to hit the semiconductor industry. For many years there was a stand-off between the device manufacturers and the equipment manufacturers about whether it was necessary.

'Radio has no valves or transistors'

This was the headline in a story 50 years ago in Electronics Weekly's edition of April 12^th 1961.

'The Brats are bugging me about generating more cash-flow to pay down the huge debt they've loaded onto the company,' moans Ed referring to the 20-something-year-old super-sharpies who monitor his company's performance for its private equity owners.

2011 has been a historic year for heroes. Who are the most heroic? 

Brilliant people can be a pain. In his book 'High Sta@kes No Prisoners', Charles Ferguson, founder and president of Vermeer Technologies, tells how he hired a super-star techie in the start-up days.

It's entertaining to watch your betters struggling to understand something which they can't quite grasp, and so it was at the Plastic Electronics session in the Semicon Europa conference earlier this week.

There was once a brewer's son who went into the Navy and became a lieutenant.

An exquisite torture is sitting through presentations about ubiquitous connectivity when you're beating your brains out trying to get a link.

Blood vessels made using a 3D printer by the Fraunhofer Institute are being shown at this week's Biotechnica Fair in Hanover.

Carbon, in the form of graphene, may be the answer, but how do you make it in a suitable form for fabricating devices in it.

'RF treats tumours'

50 years ago this was the headline in a story in the May 3^rd 1961 edition of Electronics Weekly.

'Margin, margin, margin,' Ed confides to his diary, 'profitability is the key to securing an IPO valuation of $5 billion which I need to trigger my $25 million bonus. After the time I've spent dealing with our private equity owners I'll have earned it.'

There's a phrase going around that the times we live in practise 'socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor'.

In 1917 the wireless operators and cryptographers of  'Room 40' intercepted and decoded a telegram.

HP intends to have an alternative technology to flash on the market in eighteen months, an alternative to DRAM in three to four years followed by replacement for SRAM, Stan Williams, Senior Fellow at HP, told the IEF2011 meeting in Seville this week.

There was once a company whose value, measured by market cap, grew 2,300% between 1995 and 2000.

Leading edge capacity will never again be a commodity. Recent trends are making manufacturing more valuable and scarce, according to Future Horizons whose IEF 2011 conference in Seville started this morning.

"The present is at risk," is the telling phrase of Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee, as "world-class companies crumble away."

Thanks to economicshelp.org for this one - the ten most indebted nations measured by debt as a proportion of GDP:

NFC won't become the payment method of choice in the USA, according to the COO of Square, Keith Rabois, adding that the technology "makes for good cocktail chatter."

'Furnaces order from ATL'

was a headline, 50 years ago, in Electronics Weekly's edition of February 8^th 1961.

'SG&A expenses are looking toppy,' Ed writes in his diary, 'so many of the admin people are time-servers, now is the time to shake them up.'

We'll all be selling tickets to Theme Park Europe if we don't start building the new companies of the future, Lawrence Johns of Amadeus Capital Partners told the Silicon South-West Viva Entrepreneurs! meeting in Bath last Friday.