E+Trends 

Earlier this summer we wrote about Now Play It, a UK-based site that uses artist-led video instruction to teach music fans to play their favourite pop and rock songs. Now, focusing on a different niche, a similar site based in New York targets professional classical and jazz musicians with a wide range of expert-taught lessons.

Mucony offers video music lessons taught by some of the world’s finest classical and jazz artists. All the major instruments are represented, along with lessons in voice, history and theory, and teaching faculty hail from such prestigious institutions as the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera orchestras. A lesson for pianists on Schumann’s Canaval opus 9, for example, spans 30 minutes, while baritones can learn about pronouncing vowels through a 27-minute lesson; pricing for each is USD 5. In the next few weeks Mucony plans to relaunch with a new format that adds a raft of community features as well, the site says. Included among them will be job listings, master classes, live performances, a forum, downloadable music for sale and lessons for beginners.

Making top-level instruction more widely accessible can only please musicians, and the upcoming addition of community elements promises to complete the picture. One to replicate in the other arts as well, or any place practitioners can benefit from the guidance of experts. www.mucony.com | >>

Country, the city version: Farms in the sky gain new interest

What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact. The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. >> | Slideshow

The most walkable cities in America

Guess which Central Valley City is ranked 19th best. Walk Score ranks 2,508 neighborhoods in the largest 40 U.S. cities to help you find a walkable place to live. >>

Students design ‘urban oasis’ for homeless

Sacramento’s aging Marshall Hotel, now home to more than 100 of the city’s poorest residents, may soon be converted to a boutique inn. If so, its tenants will need to be relocated and MBA students at the University of California, Davis, have come up with a solar- and wind-powered idea.

The students’ detailed plan for the “urban oasis” has won the 17th annual Bank of America Low-Income Housing Challenge and will be incorporated into a proposal that Mercy Housing expects to deliver to the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency in August. “We tried to really focus on the people who will be living in this new building, and on what we could do to help them turn around their lives and become a part of the community,” says Amy Barr, leader of the UC Davis MBA student team.  >>

The changing face of innovation

Today’s innovation is not your father’s—or your grandfather’s—innovation. The way that new products, services, and technologies emerge has changed, and innovation policies need to change in response to this transformed innovation ecosystem. A new study sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation analyzes forty years of data from R&D Magazine, which has annually ranked its top 100 innovations since 1976. This historical perspective yields some interesting insights. One major finding is that the role of Federal investments in supporting innovations has grown rapidly.

Also, collaboration is more important. In the 1970s, a large portion (80%) of innovations came from large corporations acting alone. Today, a similar portion of innovations—roughly 2/3—results from inter-organizational partnerships and collaborations. American firms and government agencies are quite effective in building partnerships, and this collaborative mindset is something of a competitive advantage for the US. The author contends Federal innovation policies need to respond to these trends with more funding and better collaboration across government agencies. Both of these moves will ensure that Federal support for R&D has greater impact as well as greater efficiency. >>Report 

Source: National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship | http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/  

More MBAs derailed by the mommy track

A surprising number of highly educated MBAs are dropping out of the labor force, according to a new study done at the University of California, Berkeley. Associate Professor Catherine Wolfram, a member of Berkeley’s Haas Economic Analysis and Policy Group, found MBAs are more likely than MDs and JDs to be stay-at-home mothers. Ms. Wolfram studied surveys taken of nearly 1,000 Harvard undergraduate alumni and found that 15 years after graduation, business school graduates are more likely than doctors and lawyers to leave the workforce. The common factors: being married, being female, becoming a mother. In her study, “Opt-Out Patterns Across Careers: Labor Force Participation Rates Among Highly Educated Mothers,” Ms. Wolfram conjectures that the business world is less female-friendly than fields of medicine and law. “Within a field, we find that women who are in family-friendly environments are more likely to stay working,” says Ms. Wolfram, who co-authored the study with Jane Leber Herr, of UC Berkeley’s Department of Economics. >> 

Sweeping panoramas, courtesy of a robot

A new, inexpensive robotic device from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University attaches snugly to almost any standard digital camera, tilting and panning it to fashion highly detailed panoramic vistas—whether of the Grand Canyon, a rain forest or a backyard Easter egg hunt. The robot is called GigaPan, named “giga” for the billion or more pixels it can marshal for a typical panorama. It creates the huge, high-resolution vista by extending its robotic finger and repeatedly clicking the camera shutter, taking tens, hundreds or even thousands of overlapping images, each at a slightly different angle, that are then stitched together by software to create one gigapixel shot. >> | gigapan

Textbooks, free and illegal, online

Faced with soaring prices for textbooks, cash-strapped students have discovered a tempting, effective, but illicit alternative—pirated electronic books, available for free over the Internet.

“We think it’s a significant problem,” said William Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy at Cengage Learning Inc., a reference book publisher in Farmington Hills, Mich. Sampson said that in any given month, 200 to 300 of the company’s titles are posted illegally as free Internet downloads. Distributing books for free without permission violates copyright laws and deprives publishers of revenue.

It’s not just textbooks that are being downloaded improperly. Ed McCoyd, director of digital policy at the Association of American Publishers in New York, said a survey in May located about 1,100 titles available illegally online, including novels and books on current events. But textbook piracy is particularly seductive, McCoyd said, because students are often hard-pressed to pay for academic books that can cost more than $100, three times the price of most other books.  >>  

High-tech windshields could aid aged eyes

When Coke bottle glasses just won’t cut it for safe driving, a futuristic windshield might do the trick. General Motors Corp. researchers are working on a windshield that combines lasers, infrared sensors and a camera to take what’s happening on the road and enhance it, so aging drivers with vision problems are able to see a little more clearly. Although it’s only in the research stage now, the technology soon will be more useful than ever. The 65-and-older population in the United States will nearly double in about 20 years, meaning more people will be struggling to see the road like they used to. >>  

Ahh, remember your first cell phone?

Teenage boys and teenage girls acquire cell phones differently, according to a recent study by MultiMedia Intelligence, a market research firm. The likelihood that teenagers will have cell phones increases with age for both boys and girls. But girls tend to acquire cell phones at a steady pace as they become older, whereas boys tend to acquire them in two leaps: at age 13 and at age 16. Last year, the number of boys with cell phone subscriptions jumped from 668,000 to about one million at age 13, and rose from 1.2 million to 1.5 million at age 16. Of all teenagers, 17-year-old girls are the most likely to have cell phones; 91 percent of them had cell phones last year, compared with 78 percent of 17-year-old boys. Over all, 57 percent of teenagers have cell phones by age 13. >>   

Hanger Network racks up $10M more

Hanger Network In-Home Media Inc., which distributes ads, coupons and promotional materials on biodegradable coat hangers, has racked up another $10 million from venture investors.

Wazoo plans more online sports broadcasts with $2M

Wazoo Sports Inc. has secured a $2 million round of funding for an online high school sports broadcast network.

OwnerIQ rises to $6M Series B

To help connect consumers with information about electronics they own, OwnerIQ Inc. has raised a $6 million Series B round of funding.

The Fresno Scrapers 

Create | Explore | Innovate 
We invite you to roll up your sleeves and get to work at the inaugural meeting of the Fresno Scrapers. Named for a famous Fresno area innovation, the Scrapers is an informal innovation club where Fresno’s creative thinkers can come together to brainstorm new ideas and present new projects. Our focus is action over talk. Every session will be about active, embodied thought exercises. Come ready to draw, model and prototype! 

First meeting:
Thursday, August 7 | 11:45-1:15
Claude Laval WET Incubator
2911 E. Barstow Ave. (Barstow and Chestnut) 

The topic for August is mobile technology and the disruption it brings to social and business processes. Band of Neighbors will demonstrate its own Fresno-based disruptive technology, which allows neighbors to instantly message each other about signs of trouble.

How does the system work? What assumptions about community and security are implied by the system? Does it work??? Join us, to play with the system, wrestle with the challenges, and offer your insights. 

Sign up for the Band of Neighbors demo.
This is limited to twenty, so act fast! 

Fresno Scrapers is a joint project of the Institute for Public Anthropology and the Central Valley Business Incubator.

International Trade

To customers in which country outside the U.S. did you make the most sales in the last three years?

Thirty-two (32) percent of small manufacturers send the largest share of their exports to Canada.  >>

E+Knowledge
 

The Return of History and the End of Dreams Robert Kagan  Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. Nation-states remain as strong as ever, as do the old, explosive forces of ambitious nationalism. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict. Communism is dead, but a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics. Finally, radical Islamists are waging a violent struggle against the modern secular cultures and powers that, in their view, have dominated, penetrated, and polluted their Islamic world. The grand expectation that after the Cold War the world would enter an era of international geopolitical convergence has proven wrong. For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them. >>but from amazon		The Post-American World Fareed Zakaria  When a book proclaims that it is not about the decline of America but the rise of everyone else, readers might expect another diatribe about our dismal post-9/11 world. They are in for a pleasant surprise as Newsweek editor and popular pundit Zakaria (The Future of Freedom) delivers a stimulating, largely optimistic forecast of where the 21st century is heading. We are living in a peaceful era, he maintains; world violence peaked around 1990 and has plummeted to a record low. Burgeoning prosperity has spread to the developing world, raising standards of living in Brazil, India, China and Indonesia. Twenty years ago China discarded Soviet economics but not its politics, leading to a wildly effective, top-down, scorched-earth boom. Its political antithesis, India, also prospers while remaining a chaotic, inefficient democracy, as Indian elected officials are (generally) loathe to use the brutally efficient tactics that are the staple of Chinese governance. Paradoxically, India’s greatest asset is its relative stability in the region; its officials take an unruly population for granted, while dissent produces paranoia in Chinese leaders. Zakaria predicts that despite its record of recent blunders at home and abroad, America will stay strong, buoyed by a stellar educational system and the influx of young immigrants, who give the U.S. a more youthful demographic than Europe and much of Asia whose workers support an increasing population of unproductive elderly. A lucid, thought-provoking appraisal of world affairs, this book will engage readers on both sides of the political spectrum.   >>buy from amazon

Private equity and employment

Policymakers around the world are concerned about the impact of private equity buy-out firms. Their fear is that these firms swoop in, strip a company of its assets, and move on. A new study sponsored by the Census Bureau offers some support for these fears. The researchers examined private equity buyouts that occurred in the US between 1980 and 2005. They find that targeted firms have lower employment growth (when compared to control firms) in the immediate aftermath of a buy-out. The target firms also exhibit higher levels of job destruction and establishment closings after the buy-out. These lower job creation numbers most likely occur as a result of the shedding of unprofitable units by the company’s new private equity owners. These effects are limited to retail, services, and financial services firms. Manufacturing firm performance did not differ greatly. Buyouts also had some positive outcomes as target firms were much more likely to create jobs through the opening of new greenfield facilities. These companies are also more likely to be involved in new acquisitions after the initial buy-out transaction.  >>Paper 

Source: National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship | http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/  

CALPERS sees investment loss

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System—the nation’s largest pension fund—says it had an overall investment loss of 2.4 percent in its fiscal year ended June 30. The loss is reflective of the worldwide economic slowdown and lagging global equity markets, CalPERS says. CalPERS ended the fiscal year with its market value of assets totaling $239.2 billion. “It was difficult for any investor to make positive returns in stocks this past year, but we realized gains in other areas, ending the year in good financial shape,” says Anne Stausboll, CalPERS interim chief investment officer. “Private equity returns led the way in gains. Fixed income and our new inflation-linked asset class were also in positive territory.” On a five year basis, CalPERS returns are 11.4 percent—well above the 7.75 percent return objectives to finance liabilities, it says. >> 

Venture financing drops for youngest companies as older ones suck up more cash

In an ominous sign for Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial machine, venture capital firms are cutting back on their investments in companies at their earliest stage of development and being forced to provide extra financing for later-stage companies that can’t leave the nest and go public. Overall, venture capital investment remained flat at about $7.4 billion in the second quarter, according to a report released Saturday by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers. But the amount of money invested in companies seeking their first round of venture investment fell 12 percent to $1.6 billion, down from $1.8 billion in the first quarter. Also, first-round financings fell to just 21 percent of all venture funding—the lowest percentage since the fourth quarter 2004. Mark Heesen, president of the N.V.C.A., suggested that the drop reflected caution by funders who are worried about their inability to cash out of their investments through initial public offerings of stock.  >>  

Venture capital funding rises 3% from a year ago

Wall Street is in its deepest slump in years, but megabuck investors like pension funds and university endowments are putting more money into venture capital funds than they were a year ago, according to an industry report released Monday.

Seventy-one VC funds raised $9.1 billion nationwide in the second quarter of 2008, a 3 percent increase over the $8.8 million raised in the second quarter of 2007, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association.

The robust quarter continues a trajectory since the tech crash early this decade. In 2007, VCs in the United States raised $36.7 billion, 3 1/2 times the $10.6 billion raised in 2003.

The fundraising success offers a stark contrast to the dire conditions for the industry’s coveted initial public offerings of stock, or IPOs. In the second quarter, there were no IPOs of venture-backed companies, typically the largest payoff for VCs and entrepreneurs.  >>

Patent gridlock suppresses innovation

The Founders might have used quill pens, but they would roll their eyes at how, in this supposedly technology-minded era, we’re undermining their intention to encourage innovation. The U.S. is stumbling in the transition from their Industrial Age to our Information Age, despite the charge in the Constitution that Congress “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

For the third year in a row, Congress has just given up on passing a law reforming how patents are awarded and litigated. This despite growing evidence that for most industries, today’s patent system causes more harm than good. Litigation costs, driven by uncertainty about who owns what rights, are now so huge that they outweigh the profits earned from patents.

It’s true that defining intellectual property is hard at a time when new technologies upset the traditional ways of protecting rights, as debates over digital piracy make clear. But in the case of patents, poorly defined property rights for inventions are leading even the biggest companies to take desperate measures, including banding together to protect themselves against claims of increasingly broad and vague patents.

Companies as diverse as Verizon, Google, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard recently formed the Allied Security Trust to buy patents they may want to use some day and that otherwise could end up in the hands of “patent trolls.” These firms buy up old patents not to produce anything, but instead to work the system to extract settlements. A similar group formed against trolls to protect the Linux open-source operating system. A Google executive explained that helping to buy up and license patents is the “legal equivalent of taking a long, deep, relaxing breath.” Companies can rest easier, and legitimate inventors get paid for their work.

These corporate trusts seem like odd ways to protect products, but the memory is still fresh of the BlackBerry device almost being forced to shut down. Parent company Research in Motion paid more than $600 million in 2006 to settle a case. But in this and many other cases, companies can’t be sure whether or not they are complying with patent law. For example, by one estimate there are more than 4,000 patents that must be reviewed and potentially licensed by firms selling products or services online. The legal abuses arising from uncertainty are legion. More than 100 companies are being sued for alleged patent infringement by using text messaging internationally.

The proposed law in Congress would have reduced potential damages to the value of the technology, not the full value of the completed product. Another uncertainty would have been reduced by moving to the first-inventor-to-file system, instead of our more ambiguous first-to-invent standard. The larger problems would have remained, including the trend of awarding vague patents, coupled with a still-primitive system for notifying others of the existence of patents.

Yet the fault line over patent reform signals the deeper problems. Many pharmaceutical companies lobbied against the proposals, fearful of reduced value in their key intellectual property. In contrast, most technology firms supported the reforms, worried more about uncertainty in the law than about the value of their patents.

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, “Patent Failure,” found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they think the system will protect.

These are shocking findings, but they point to the solution. New drugs require great specificity to earn a patent, whereas patents are often granted to broad, thus vague, innovations in software, communications and other technologies. Ironically, the aggregate value of these technology patents is then wiped out through litigation costs.

Our patent system for most innovations has become patently absurd. It’s a disincentive at a time when we expect software and other technology companies to be the growth engine of the economy. Imagine how much more productive our information-driven economy would be if the patent system lived up to the intention of the Founders, by encouraging progress instead of suppressing it.

July 14, 2008; Page A15. Write to informationage@wsj.com. See all of today’s editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

Making a Fortune—the Bilimoria Way

Entrepreneurs are often great with ideas and not so great with the detail. According to Karan, the key to running a successful business is to be able to delegate, and the real secret to success is to employ people better than you and to trust and respect them. He knows his own strengths lie in production, sales, marketing, and finance, but concedes his directors “are way better than me.” The best piece of management advice he received was when he got his first job at Ernst and Young, and his father told him, “Whenever you are given a task, the first thing is to do it. The second thing is to do that little bit extra. Be innovative, be creative and go the extra mile.” He encourages innovation and creativity in his team too. He has an open office culture which fosters interaction, the sharing of ideas and an enthusiasm for taking responsibility and turning vision into actuality. The proof is in the pudding and Cobra boasts a low staff turnover, with some of his former employees returning to the company professing to miss the energy and the stimulating buzz. This is further illustrated by his company having the prestigious “Investors in People” certification, and it has also been ranked by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best small companies to work for in the UK from 2004 to 2007.

Karan stresses the importance of the company’s values and beliefs. In particular, with a large proportion of its employees and customers coming from an Asian background, Karan highlights and recognizes the importance of what he calls “Asian Values” such as hard work, education and family values. Cobra has very few rules, and that trust is rewarded by absolute professionalism from its team. The team is ethnically diverse, with staff from over 20 countries. This diverse and open culture at Cobra ensures that, in a fast-moving environment, all departments are able to work together to fully achieve the company’s goals. The company aims to work in a fully integrated manner, not in individual or departmental silos.

Karan’s advice to would-be entrepreneurs is, “Have a vision. It’s important to be passionate about what you do: it will never be easy and you will need focus, determination and guts.” He continues, “Be different, be better, and change the marketplace forever.” Or, in the words of Winston Churchill, “Never give in, never give in, never give in.”

Making a Fortune—Learning from the Asian Phenomenon. Pages: 43-44. Dr. Spinder Dhaliwal. Copyright 2008.