 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
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 |
>>
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
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.
>>

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.
>>
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/
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.
>>

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
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.
>>

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.
>>
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.
>>
| top |
| E+EQUITY
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 Sports
Inc. has secured a $2 million round of funding for an online high
school sports broadcast network.
To help connect consumers with information about
electronics they own, OwnerIQ Inc. has
raised a $6 million Series B round of funding.
|
top |
| E+Help
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.
|
top |
| E+Resources
To customers in which country outside the U.S.
did you make the most sales in the last three years?
|
RESPONSE
|
|
|
1
|
|
Canada
|
32
|
|
2
|
|
Mexico
|
13
|
|
3
|
|
British Isles (including Ireland)
|
12
|
|
4
|
|
Continental Europe
|
8
|
|
5
|
|
Latin America (except Mexico) /Caribbean
|
5
|
|
6
|
|
Asia
|
14
|
|
7
|
|
Australia, New Zealand
|
3
|
|
8
|
|
Other/Unclassified
|
8
|
|
9
|
|
DK/Refuse
|
4
|
|
Total %
|
|
|
99
|
Thirty-two (32) percent of small manufacturers
send the largest share of their exports to Canada.
>>
|
top |
 |
|
 |
|
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
|
|
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
|
|
| top |
|
|
top |
E+Capital
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/
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.
>>
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.
>>
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.
>>
|
top |
E+Notes
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.
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.
|
top |
 |
Many of the articles you read in E+Action are submitted by readers. That is appreciated and welcomed. If you see a news item that you believe would be of interest to the readers of E+Action (currently over 1000), please send to timothys@csufresno.edu. If you are developing your own work, such as the book reviews that Lee Ayers submits, we would welcome those as well. And thanks to all of you for your positive comments about E+Action. Feel free to share with others by having them subscribe by going to www.lylescenter.com |
 |
|
|  |