Innovation

There are two very disturbing bills making their way through Congress: Protect IP Act (PIPA – S.968 ) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA – H.R.3261 ). These bills are coated in rhetoric that I find disgusting since at their core they are online censorship bills. It’s incredible to me that Congress would take seriously anything that censors the Internet and the American public but in the last few weeks PIPA and SOPA have burst forth with incredibly momentum, largely being underwritten by large media companies and their lobbyists. ...

As 2011 kicks off, I think we are in for a ton of innovative software and Internet stuff this year. Yeah, some of it will be “just like everything else but different.” However, of the areas we invest heavily in – human computer interaction – has an incredible amount of activity going on. I’ll be at CES in Las Vegas this week so I expect to have a dose of nerd-eye-candy (e.g. the latest TV sets) along with a bunch of cool / amazing / clever / intriguing new HCI things. ...

Last night I printed, signed, scanned, and emailed two signature pages. As is my custom of not keeping anything around, I tore up and tossed the sig pages and then deleted the files. This morning I woke up to an email saying “We didn’t get your signature pages. Can you please send them.” I just went through the same print, sign, scan, and email process again. This is so profoundly stupid. I sent a note yesterday afternoon in reply to the email thread asking if I was all set to go that said “I’m all set to go.” A bunch of lawyers were on the email thread (mine and the company’s.) We are wiring the money today. Now they have some pretty scanned sig pages also. ...

Like most of the blogosphere, I’ve been trying to use Flipboard since its extraordinarily well executed (or well hyped – I can’t tell yet) announcement. But, like almost everyone I know, I can’t get it to authenticate Twitter or Facebook. Two days ago I entered in my email address to reserve my place in line. Today, at 9:55 AM AKDT I got an email titled “Your Flipboard is Ready to Customize” that said: ...

Tonight’s book is The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani. Actually, it’s the book I read the last two nights as it was too much to get down in one night. I’ve been promising Vinnie that I’d read his book ever since he sent me the galleys a few months ago. I tossed the PDF up on my Kindle which, when I got around to it, was unreadable because of the tiny font and the way the Kindle scaled the PDF to fit the page. I promptly went on to another book and never read it. ...

I’m in Washington DC again – this time to talk about innovation. I’ve been here three times in the past year – the first time was to hear Bilski at the Supreme Court in November and then I was back in March to talk about and promote the Startup Visa . Yesterday, Thomas Friedman article wrote another great OpEd about the topic titled A Gift for Grads: Start-Ups . As with many Friedman OpEd’s, rather than just railing against the situation, he suggests several specific things that can be done – in this case by the current administrationb. His premise is that to solve the unemployment issue, especially among recent college graduates, we need three things: more start-ups, more start-ups, and more start-ups. And to do this, Friedman talked to Robert Litan (vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation) and Curtis Carlson, (CEO of SRI International) and came up with the following. ...

When I was on vacation last week, I read John Bogle’s book Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life . In addition to be a superb book, it had a bunch of tasty little nuggets in it. One of my favorites was “the three i’s – innovator, imitator, and idiot” that was attributed to Warren Buffett. I thought of this nugget this morning when reading Fred Wilson’s post When Government Funds Business . In it, he concludes “When government funds business, it messes everything up.” One of his examples is the delicious irony that Citi – which just got more government money – is running traditional print ads in the NY Times. ...

I’m heading out to Seattle for a board meeting and a few other things. Tonight, I’m going to be doing an event called Beers and Boulder with Brad. I’m going to talk about entrepreneurial communities, the critical importance of entrepreneurship and innovation today, TechStars , what we’ve done in Boulder to drive entrepreneurship that can apply to other cities such as Seattle, and why we are expanding TechStars to Boston . I’m then going to stick around until they kick us out answering any and all questions and talking with whoever wants to hang out. ...

Fred Wilson has a magnificent post up this morning from Berlin titled Bits Of Destruction . In it, he nails a critical point about innovation. “This downturn will be marked in history as the time where many of the business models built in the industrial era finally collapsed as a result of being undermined by the information age. Its creative destruction at work. It’s painful and many jobs will be lost permanently. But let’s also remember that its inevitable and we can’t fight it. Technology and information forces are unstoppable and they will reshape the world as we know it regardless of whether or not we want them to.” ...