Sign of 'things' to come

Can iRobot's success be the harbinger of 'things' to come.

Will be intersting to see how the pioneers in this space (Lego Mindstorm, Friendly Robotics and the mighty soft with its Robotics Studio) advance the robotization of the home and office.

Don't miss Helen Greiner's interview to Knowledge@Wharton.

AUM trends: Patents

NYT reports an interesting trend:
Patent activity among financial services firms began to soar in the late 1990’s, prompted by the boom in new technology and by the fact that banks were spending enormous sums to upgrade their in-house systems. A federal court decision in 1998 that software and business methods could be patented also fed the rush to seek patents.

The result was a virtual stampede among top financial services firms to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. In 1997, there were 927 patent applications for various methods of processing financial and management data. Last year, there were 6,226.

Machinima. Coming to an iPod near you

When i read of Machinima in the BusinessWeek i was thrilled.
The name, the concept and everything - with its own set of Blogs and Academy - is so kewl.

I always had a feeling that the Gaming generation is onto something very interesting - one with the potential to become far bigger than we can imagine now.

Seeing Machinima described as a sort of Gamer's Blog gives me visions. What they actually said was this:

"Since it emerged in the late 1990s, machinima has been the playground of mainly hard-core gamers who cobble together characters and sequences from favorite games, adding voice-overs laced with references that only fellow gamers can grasp. But with more user-friendly software tools on the market, novices can create their own narratives. That will democratize the movie business, machinima enthusiasts say. Anyone with a computer and off-the-shelf game software can now make and distribute animated movies over the Internet. "This is to the movies what blogs are to the written media," says Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, a New York nonprofit."
- BusinessWeek

Where to look for the Next cool language

Ever heard of a finance company that had its own programming language.

Morgan Stanley seems to have had its own language A+ developed inhouse for high performance analytics work. Originally developed as an replacement for the Array Processing Language (APL) on Unix platforms, A+ seems to have had become the central language for building Morgan Stanley's analytics applications and real-time trading systems in the early '90s.

Find the language developer Arthur Whitney here and his new/ next language K here.

World of War Craft

When i heard of Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, i remembered skimming through Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community in the late '90s.

Its surprising how quickly (or slowly?) have we reached the world of MySpace, YouTube and SecondLife (and WordPress, ,WikiPedia, World of Warcraft) from where we were when The Virtual Community was first published.

While SecondLife reached almost 800,000 at the end of Sept 2006, WoW currently has 7mn subscribers.

Castronova's interview to BW is here.

See Wikipedia profiles of Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale and Blizzard's World of Wardcraft.

The WorldOfWarcraft Flickr stream is here.


PS:
The wow in this wowstreet, doesn't have any relation to the other WoW btw.

Get a new life in SecondLife

2006 SEPT 28 - The Economist declares:
A Californian firm has built a virtual online world like no other. Its population is growing and its economy is thriving. Now politicians and advertisers are visiting.

The SecondLife Flickr stream is here.

And don't miss Mitch Kapor's talk on SecondLife, as told by 3PointD btw.

The Inspiring Mr Musk

See Elon Musk's profile on Wiki.

Not content with founding PayPal, eMusk launched SpaceX - a space exploration venture that tries to dramatically reduce the cost of mass launches in future.

He is also backing Tesla Motors, an electric car company with noble ambitions.

Auto industry going through a major revamp?

First it was Tesla Motors with some high profile backing from Google and PayPal founders.

And, now Venturi of France announces a couple of models (Astrolab & Eclectic) ready for rollout in 2008.