- Improving Content ID (YouTube) — finally they’re adding some human intervention to lower the number of false positives.
- OECD’s Internet Economy Outlook (OECD) — lots of stats, from growth of streaming media to crime and EHRs. This caught my eye: In 2010, on average, 35% of all businesses with ten or more persons employed used the Internet for purchasing, and only 18% for selling goods and services.
- Half Of What You Know Is False — The field of scientometrics – the science of measuring and analyzing science – took off in 1947 when mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. He stacked them in order and he noticed that the height of the stacks fit an exponential curve. Price started to analyze all sorts of other kinds of scientific data and concluded in 1960 that scientific knowledge had been growing steadily at a rate of 4.7 percent annually since the 17th century. The upshot was that scientific data was doubling every 15 years.
- Catalyst Grants — Macmillan’s Digital Science incubator.
"incubator" entries
$20,000 and a trip to Shenzhen
An incubator that leads to an accelerator that leads to China's high-volume manufacturers.
Manufacturing is rapidly becoming more accessible to people whose expertise lies elsewhere. The change is most apparent at the small scale, where it’s become easy to order prototypes made on high-quality 3D printers and electronics in small batches from domestic factories. High-volume Chinese manufacturing has been tougher to get into.
A new incubator launching today, and led by our former O’Reilly colleague Brady Forrest, is aimed at lowering the barriers to getting physical goods manufactured fast and in high volumes. Highway1 will prepare nascent hardware companies to enter the accelerator pipeline of the Sino-Irish supply-chain giant PCH International. It offers portfolio companies up to $20,000 and a hardware crash-course that includes a trip to the factories of Shenzhen. Forrest says his curriculum will eventually be made public (minus the China junket, of course).
The successful companies that progress to PCH’s accelerator will have PCH as both an investor and supply-chain manager, essentially drawing from the same network that supplies some of Silicon Valley’s bestsellers.
Forrest put it to me this way: “There is no Amazon Web Services for hardware, but we’re the closest thing to it.”
Have an idea for a health care startup?
DreamIt, UPenn, and IBC offer you an unfair advantage.
I sit down now and then with Roy Rosin at the East coast hub of health care business networking, the Gryphon Cafe in Wayne, PA. (I’m saying that only slightly tongue in cheek.) Roy was the long-time Chief Innovation Officer at Intuit and now holds that role with the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Our conversations tend to be wide ranging, but this morning he let me know that he’s been working on a partnership between Penn Medicine and Independence Blue Cross to fund a health care incubator with DreamIt Ventures in Philadelphia.
If you are working on a health-related startup this is worth your time because it’s being funded by the largest provider and payer in the region. This will give your startup access to both sides of the payer/provider equation in a meaningful way (the aforementioned “unfair advantage”). The application deadline is coming up fast on February 8. Details can be found here.
Four short links: 5 October 2012
Robocopyright, OECD Numbers, Half Of Which Are Probably Wrong, Science Incubator
Four short links: 4 October 2011
Singaporean Incubator, Oracle NoSQL, Should Facebook have a Browser?, and GitHub has Competition
- jfdi.asia — Singaporean version of TechStars, with 100-day program (“the bootcamp”) Jan-Apr 2012. Startups from anywhere in the world can apply, and will want to because Singapore is the gateway to Asia. They’ll also have mentors from around the world.
- Oracle NoSQLdb — Oracle want to sell you a distributed key-value store. It’s called “Oracle NoSQL” (as opposed to PostgreSQL, which is SQL No-Oracle). (via Edd Dumbill)
- Facebook Browser — interesting thoughts about why the browser might be a good play for Facebook. I’m not so sure: browsers don’t lend themselves to small teams, and search advertising doesn’t feel like a good fit with Facebook’s existing work. Still, making me grumpy again to see browsers become weapons again.
- Bitbucket — a competitor to Github, from the folks behind the widely-respected Jira and Confluence tools. I’m a little puzzled, to be honest: Github doesn’t seem to have weak spots (the way, for example, that Sourceforge did).