Systems software technology and business
Talking to possible investors, smart people with a lot of business experience, is a reminder of how critical patents are to innovative small business. Every new idea attracts imitators and worse, and small companies, by definition, do not have the market inertia that allows giants to sell bottled tap water at premium prices.
This Washinton Post article on a SCADA failure at a US nuclear power plant was noted in Slashdot, but not much elsewhere.
Specifically, experts worry that vulnerabilities were introduced into the systems that regulate the electrical grid as power companies transferred control of generation and distribution equipment from internal networks to supervisory control and data acquisition, [...]
I’m on my way to Linz, Austria to participate in a panel at an event called Cleantech Venture Forum. We’ve spent a lot of the last two years looking at ways to save power in data centers and mini-data centers (which may be a term nobody else uses). If we look at the history of [...]
Mr. Myhrvold: All of this fear is from people who have guilty knowledge of their own actions. There are lots of major tech companies that grew from zero to gigantically successful in a very short period of time without investing in their own inventions. They got there by using other people’s inventions.
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No kidding.
I’m surprised that John McCain’s proposal to make health insurance benefits taxable has not received more notice. For a startup, cash is expensive and hard to find and it is a tremendous handicap for US startups that we have to pay a huge amount for insurance for employees. But under current US tax law, the [...]
“I was pulled aside in a room … and you have to wait your turn to finally be released,” Labbé said. “An hour, an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it is after. Once I was caught in Miami like that for six hours.
“It’s always the same questions, about if I’ve lost my passport, [...]