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Comment Re:One year (Score 1) 103

by waderoush (#47188103) Attached to: Sparse's Story Illustrates the Potholes Faced By Hardware Start-Ups
Author of TFA here. Actually the guys behind Sparse are bootstrapping the company with their own money and "sweat equity" and one modest SBA loan. I don't think Colin Owen was whining at all. In addition to telling the story of a scrappy company with a cool product, I wanted to frame Owen's experiences in a way that might help tamp down some of the recent hype around hardware startups. They are still *a lot* harder to build than software startups.

Submission + - If Tesla Made Bike Lights, They'd Look Like This; The Story of Sparse (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: Hardware is Silicon Valley’s new religion. Bits and atoms aren’t so different after all, the creed goes; just as the cost and complexity of starting a software company has drastically declined over the last decade, it’s now becoming much cheaper and easier to start companies that make physical things. But talk to almost any real hardware company, and you’ll discover that the promised land is still some distance away. Sparse, a San Francisco product design startup, learned that the hard way. The company raised $66,000 on Kickstarter for its uber-cool theft-proof bicycle lights, but it took more than a year to deliver the first units to backers, thanks to a string of unforeseen manufacturing and supply-chain snafus. ‘We had all the t’s crossed and all the i’s dotted and still there was a big daily surprise,’ says industrial designer Colin Owen, Sparse’s co-founder and CEO. Today Sparse is shipping and profitable, with a vision to ‘change the face of mobility’ for urban cyclists, but its story illustrates just how high the bar still is for aspiring hardware entrepreneurs. Says Owen: ‘I wish there was more of a handbook for these things, but the biggest hiccups were very localized and unpredictable.’

Submission + - The Next Big Startup Hub Is: Sacramento? (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: Don’t laugh. As the cost of housing spirals out of control on the San Francisco peninsula, neighboring metro regions like Sacramento are beginning to look more attractive to startup founders who prefer a Northern California lifestyle but haven’t worked in the Silicon Valley gold mines long enough to become 1-percenters. Today Xconomy presents Part 1 of a two-part look at innovation in the Sacramento-Davis corridor and efforts to make the region more welcoming to high-tech entrepreneurs. In Sacramento’s favor, there’s a talented workforce fueled by a top-20 university (UC Davis), space for expansion, proximity to the ski mountains at Tahoe, and a far lower cost of living — the average house in Sacramento is selling for $237,000, compared to $909,000 in San Francisco. The downsides include a shortage of local investment dollars and a lower density of startups, meaning there’s less opportunity for serendipitous collaboration. But locals say recent efforts to boost the local high-tech economy are working. ‘I really feel like we are in a renaissance area,’ says Eric Ullrich, co-founder of Hacker Lab, a Midtown Sacramento co-working space.

Submission + - Five Places Where the Silicon Valley Bubble Could Pop (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: If Silicon Valley is in a bubble — which it is – how will it finally burst? Where is the bubble’s membrane being stretched so thin that it’s in danger of tearing open and letting the real world rush in? This commentary from Xconomy picks five real places around the San Francisco Bay Area embodying tensions, imbalances, injustices, or dangers that could escalate into a show-stopping crisis for the technology economy. One is Bank of America’s former headquarters in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District; another is an elementary school in Oakland that happens to sit on the Hayward Fault. ‘If we can identify the fractures that threaten to destroy the innovation machine, we might be able to patch them up and keep the system going for a while longer — and maybe even point it in a smarter direction,’ the piece argues.

Submission + - Minerva CEO Details His High-Tech Plan to Disrupt Universities (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: In April 2012, former Snapfish CEO Ben Nelson provoked both praise and skepticism by announcing that he’d raised $25 million from venture firm Benchmark to start the Minerva Project, a new kind of university where students will live together but all class seminars will take place over a Google Hangouts-style video conferencing system. Two years later, there are answers – or the beginnings of answers – to many of the questions observers have raised about the project, on everything from the way the seminars will be organized to how much tuition the San Francisco-based university will charge and how it's gaining accreditation. And in an interview published today, Nelson share more details about how Minerva plans to use technology to improve teaching quality. ‘If a student wants football and Greek life and not doing any work for class, they have every single Ivy League university to choose from,’ Nelson says. ‘That is not what we provide. Similarly, there are faculty who want to do research and get in front of a lecture hall and regurgitate the same lecture they’ve been giving for 20 years. We have a different model,’ based on extensive faculty review of video recordings of the seminars, to make sure students are picking up key concepts. Last month Minerva admitted 45 students to its founding class, and in September it expects to welcome 19 of them to its Nob Hill residence hall.

Submission + - One Laptop Per Child Project Has Achieved Its Goals, CEO Says (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: A blog post at OLPC News last week went viral with the claim that the nine-year-old One Laptop Per Child project, the effort founded by MIT Media Lab Founder to distribute inexpensive laptops to millions of children in poor nations, is dead. Media outlets quickly controverted the assertion, but the response from the OLPC Association itself was brief, saying that its mission is ‘far from over’ and citing ongoing projects to distribute laptops in Central America. In a more lengthy Q&A this week, OLPC chairman and CEO Rodrigo Arboleda says the organization has achieved many of its goals, including demonstrating the value of the ‘Constructionist’ 1:1 learning philosophy originally espoused by Negroponte. With 2.5 million laptops distributed so far, the OLPC vision is ‘on track to being fully realized,’ Arboleda says. He sees ‘commercial greed’ and a ‘status-quo mentality’ within ministries of education and teachers’ unions as the main hurdles holding back faster progress.

Submission + - Enough Whining. San Francisco is the new Renaissance Florence. (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: Despite legitimate concerns over sky-high rents, Ellis Act evictions, Google Bus traffic, and the like, the San Francisco Bay Area is perhaps the most prosperous, comfortable, enlightened, stimulating, and generative place to live in Western history. For satisfying parallels, you'd have to look to a place like Florence and a time like the Renaissance, argues an Xconomy essay entitled From Cosimo to Cosmos: The Medici Effect in Culture and Technology. Today's coder-kings are working to reinvent economic structures in much the same way Renaissance painters, poets, architects, and scientists were trying to extend the framework they'd inherited from classical Greece and Rome. And in the role of the Medici family, long Florence's most powerful rulers and art patrons, we have people like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Seth MacFarlane. Wait, what — Seth MacFarlane? Yes, the reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos starring Neil deGrasse Tyson (itself a tribute to the rise of science) wouldn't have happened without the involvement of a California media mogul. It's true that Silicon Valley can feel like Dante's Inferno if you're stuck in traffic on 101, or working 70-hour weeks as a code monkey at a doomed startup. But 'It would be unthinking, and ungrateful, to overlook the surplus we’re reaping from the tech boom,' the essay argues.

Submission + - Actually, It's Google That's Eating the World (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: An Xconomy column today suggests that Google is getting too big. When the company was younger, most of its acquisitions related to its core businesses of search, advertising, network infrastructure, and communications. More recently, it’s been colonizing areas with a less obvious connection to search, such as travel, social networking, productivity, logistics, energy, robotics, and — with the acquisition this week of Nest Labs — home sensor networks and automation. A Google acquisition can obviously mean a big payoff for startup founders and their investors, but as the company grows by accretion it may actually be slowing innovation in Silicon Valley (since teams inside the Googleplex, with its endless fountain of AdWords revenue, can stop worrying about making money or meeting market needs). And by infiltrating so many corners of consumers’ lives — and collecting personal and behavioral data as it goes — it’s becoming an all-encompassing presence, and making itself ever more attractive as a target for marketers, data thieves, and government snoops. ‘Any sufficiently advanced search, communications, and sensing infrastructure is indistinguishable from Big Brother,’ the column argues.

Submission + - One-Armed UBR-1 Points the Way to Cheaper Robots (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: One of the problems that kept PR2, a two-armed humanoid robot developed by Menlo Park, CA-based Willow Garage, from succeeding commercially was its $400,000 price tag. But as it turned out, only a handful of the 40 or so universities that own PR2s ever developed applications that use both arms. That’s one of the reasons why UBR-1, a mobile manipulator robot from Willow Garage spinoff Unbounded Robotics, has only one arm. And that, along with many other engineering decisions and technology improvements, will allow the startup to sell its robot for just $35,000 (it's designed for materials-handling tasks in places like warehouses, elder care facilities, and supermarkets). ‘With robots, feature creep is so much more present than in some other fields,’ says Unbounded co-founder and CEO Melonee Wise. ‘There is always this desire to make a Swiss Army knife. But you have to make compromises, and those compromises directly impact the capabilities as well as the cost of the robot.’ One roboticist told Unbounded: ‘Your robot is so inexpensive that if I needed to have a second arm, I’d just buy a second robot.’

Submission + - Anki Is Not a Toy Company. It Has iRobot, Others In Its Sights (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: Anki gained instant fame as the robot-car company that launched at Apple’s WWDC in June. Its iPhone-controlled racing game hit Apple stores in October, and the company is hoping it will be a holiday hit. But while Anki Drive offers offers a novel physical/virtual entertainment experience for kids and their gadget-loving parents, being a toy company ‘is not our vision,’ says co-founder and CEO Boris Sofman in this combined company profile and product review from Xconomy. Anki Drive is planned as the first in a series of new consumer-robotics products that are intensively AI-driven, as compared to the mechanically sophisticated but relatively instinctual or behavioral robots exemplified by iRobot’s Roomba (which is probably the most successful consumer robot to date). The common characteristics of Anki’s coming products, in Sofman’s mind: ‘Relatively simple and elegant hardware; incredibly complicated software; and Web and wireless connectivity to be able to continually expand the experience over time.’

Submission + - Are Cable Subscribers Subsidizing Internet-Only TV Viewers? (xconomy.com) 1

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: 'Dear Cable TV Subscriber: I don’t think I’ve ever told you how grateful I am,' Xconomy editor Wade Roush writes in a tongue-in-cheek commentary this week. 'I haven’t paid a cent for cable television since 2009. Yet I have on-demand access via the Internet to a growing cornucopia of great shows like Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad, at reasonable à la carte prices. And it’s all because you continue to pay exorbitant and ever-increasing monthly fees for your premium cable bundle (around $80 per month, on average). After all, your money goes straight to the studios and networks that produce and distribute all the expensive first-run programming that I’m perfectly happy to watch later at heavily discounted prices. So in effect, you’re subsidizing my own footloose, freeloading, cord-cutting TV habits. I don’t know how to thank you!'

Submission + - A Teletherapy Startup Removes Barriers to Mental Health Care (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: Is the digital age sending the old therapist’s couch the way of the reference librarian, the CD, and the travel agent? Could be: several recent studies have found that therapy via the Internet is just as effective as face-to-face treatment. But it's taken online therapy startup Breakthrough about four years to convince venture investors and insurance companies that online therapy can remove many of the road blocks to mental health care, including the high cost, the social stigma, and the difficulty of access. So far, Breakthrough has partnered with 100 licensed psychiatrists and psychologists in Texas, California, Virginia, and Maryland; every provider on the site has a profile and a welcome video that allows potential clients to evaluate them before they even talk online. 'Now we have greater research supporting telemedicine, and people are more comfortable digitally,' says co-founder and CEO Mark Goldenson. 'I think the market is ready for it.'

Submission + - How Entrepreneurs Overturned California's Retroactive Tax on Startup Founders (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: Startup founders in California can breathe a little easier today — they won't be getting bills from the state for up to $120 million in back taxes. On Friday California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill prohibiting the state from levying retroactive taxes on founders and other small-business investors who took advantage of a tax break invalidated last year by a state appeals court. California Business Defense, a coalition of entrepreneurs, spent most of 2013 trying to reverse the California Franchise Tax Board's interpretation of the court ruling, under which it planned to hit Californians with new tax bills on the sale of small-business stock going back to 2008 (a story that Slashdot picked up on January 24). Two bills on the matter reached Governor Brown's desk in September, one fully restoring the investment incentive through 2016, the other partially restoring it. Brown signed AB1412, the bill granting full relief. 'For a bunch of political greenhorns operating in an environment where political partisanship is at an all-time high, we did all right,' writes Brian Overstreet, one of the co-founders of California Business Defense. 'But it should never have been this hard.'

Submission + - The Golden Gate Barrage: New Ideas to Counter Sea Level Rise (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: What do Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, LinkedIn, and Intuit have in common? They’re just a few of the tech companies whose campuses alongside San Francisco Bay could be underwater by mid-century as sea levels rise. It’s time for these organizations and other innovators to put some of their fabled brainpower into coming up with new ideas to counter the threat, Xconomy argues today. One idea: the Golden Gate Barrage, a massive system of dams, locks, and pumps located in the shadow of the iconic bridge. Taller than the Three Gorges Dam in China, it would be one of the largest and costliest projects in the history of civil engineering. But at least one Bay Area government official says might turn out to be the simplest way to save hundreds of square miles of land around the bay from inundation.

Submission + - The Smog to Fog Challenge: Settling the High-Speed Rail vs. Hyperloop Debate (xconomy.com)

Submitted by waderoush
waderoush writes: Elon Musk thinks California should kill its $68 billion high-speed rail project and build his $7.5 billion Hyperloop instead. It's a false choice. We should pursue all promising new options for efficient mass transit, and let the chips fall where they may; if it turns out after a few years that Musk's system is truly faster and cheaper, there will still be time to pull the plug on high-speed rail. But why not make things interesting? Today Xconomy proposes a competition in the grand tradition of the Longitude Prize, the Orteig Prize, and the X Prizes: the $10 billion Smog to Fog Challenge. The money, to be donated by big corporations, would go to the first organization that delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route, in 3 hours or less. Such a prize would incentivize both publicly and privately funded innovation in high-speed transit — and show that we haven't lost the will to think big.

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