Geek Gestalt

Over the last 13 years, Chris Shipley has been the primary gatekeeper of the twice-a-year Demo conferences, evaluating more than 20,000 applications from companies wishing to present in front of a roomful of reporters, venture capitalists, and analysts.

Now, with DemoFall 2009 beginning Tuesday morning, Shipley is marking the last of 24 Demos she has overseen as she prepares the formal hand-off of the show to VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall.

VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall, who is taking over the organizational leadership of Demo after this week's show.

(Credit: VentureBeat)

For each Demo, Shipley and her team have selected a few dozen companies, giving each a chance to make a name for themselves during a 6-minute presentation in a tiny show floor booth by unveiling something never seen before--or perhaps a great new take on an existing product or service. All told, over the 24 shows, she has given the opportunity to more than 1,500 firms.

Some of them are now household names, and some have long since faded into little more than memories.

As a parting gift to the many Demo alumni, Shipley recently announced the show's Lifetime Achievement Awards, honors that went to some of its most successful presenters. Among the winners were Palm co-founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, Six Apart founders Mena and Ben Trott, Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, WebEx CEO Subrah Iyar, and others.

Given that list and the fact that Marshall is waiting in the wings to usher in the next generation of Demo--to begin next spring--now seems to be a good time to follow in the footsteps of my colleague Josh Lowensohn, who a week ago took a "Where are they now" look at 10 alumni--five good and five not so good--of the TechCrunch50 shows, examining some of the stars and flops of Demo's past.

The good

TiVo

One of Demo's older success stories, it's still hard to believe that TiVo, the first successful service for digital-video recording, is already 12 years old (it was founded in 1997, though service didn't debut until 1999). From its humble beginnings on the Demo stage, the company has gone on to become the standard-bearer in the world of DVRs, even as others have tried to ride its coattails.

Today, TiVo has just more than 3 million subscribers and is boosting its presence among cable users. During the last quarter, cable provider RCN became the first to ever use both TiVo's hardware and software offerings. The company offers three main DVR models, two of which have high-definition capabilities.

Over time, TiVo has become synonymous with DVR technology and, to some extent, has been one of the major thorns in the side of commercial advertisers, who have had to battle against viewers' preference for skipping through commercials.

Palm

Although Palm as a company has had its share of ups and downs, it has to be considered one of the most important players in the history of handheld computing. Today, it is trying to make one of its biggest comebacks ever with its Pre smartphone, one of the few devices that has the potential to take a bite out of the iPhone's market share.

With its original Palm Pilot, Palm essentially created the market for personal digital assistants. And while the company lost some of its edge when Microsoft decided to get into the business with its Pocket PC technology, there is little doubt that the PDA market, and the subsequent smartphone market, owe a great deal of debt to Palm. The original Palm OS was used by millions of people around the world.

Founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, who were recently awarded Demo Lifetime Achievement honors, left Palm to form Handspring, which produced its own line of PDAs using Palm OS. Eventually, Handspring was sold back to Palm, giving the latter a chance to regain its dominance with the Treo.

Salesforce.com

Marc Benioff brought his fledgling company, Salesforce.com, to the Demo stage in 2000. Unknown at the time, the company has since become a household name in customer relationship management, or CRM, services.

Today, Salesforce.com has more than 63,000 corporate customers, and in its most recent quarter, it earned $21 million on record revenues of $316 million.

Six Apart

After debuting at Demo in 2004, Six Apart became a leading provider blogging tools. Its Vox, Movable Type, and TypePad services are used by many of the most popular bloggers in the world, including HuffingtonPost.com, Boing Boing, and Talking Points Memo.

Founded in 2001 by Ben and Mena Trott, the company got its first significant round of funding, a $10 million B round from August Capital, and soon after, purchased Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal.

Blinkx

Launched at Demo 2007, Blinkx has become the world's-largest video search engine. It has more than 500 media partnerships and currently indexes more than 35 million hours of video content.

The Bad

Ugobe Ugobe, which presented at Demo in 2006, looked poised to become a leader in personal robotics. Furby inventor Caleb Chung was one of its founders. And ts Pleo animatronic dinosaur, both friendly and programmable, was the kind of toy that seemed certain to provide enthusiasts and children alike with hours of robot fun.

Pleo, from Ugobe. It looked likely to be a big hit but fell victim to the recession.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

But the company probably came along at the wrong time. Ugobe found itself in the position of trying to sell a product that cost too much, just as the global recession was kicking in.

While Pleo got positive reviews and had a wide range of fans, it simply couldn't gain a foothold in the market. Ultimately, Ugobe filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, and today, Pleo is sold, albeit with little marketing, by a company called Innvo Labs.

Filmloop

Launched at DemoFall in 2005, FilmLoop was intended to be an online service that presented a tray of moving images that slide from right to left across a user's screen, showing each picture and then advancing to the next.

The goal was to create a community in which users could invite anyone they wanted to join, and even add photos, to, their loop. There was no limit to the number of people that could be added to a loop, meaning that an entire community could participate.

The company also hoped to become a photo newswire of sorts, and it had relationships with hundreds of professional photographers.

But things didn't go as planned for the company. By early 2007, it had burned through millions of dollars of venture capital and had laid off most of its staff. In large part, that was because there were other companies providing similar services, and FilmLoop's service simply never picked up a critical mass of users.

Peerflix

Also launched at DemoFall in 2005, PeerFlix aimed to be something of an open-source Netflix.

The idea was that users would send each other their own DVDs, and would search for and figure out where to send their DVDs through PeerFlix's servers. The company hoped to take advantage of the collective library of movies of its users, and it thought that members would trust each other enough to send off their own personal property to strangers.

From the get-go, the idea seemed problematic, in part because it required a critical mass of users in order to maintain an attractive collection of films. By early 2008, PeerFlix died. According to my colleague Rafe Needleman, who liked the service at first, "instead of getting more reliable as its user base grew, the service got less and less reliable, most likely as users stopped participating in it."

WebDiet

It sounded like a good idea when it was announced at DemoFall in 2008: WebDiet, a service designed to help people find healthy restaurant food, regardless of where they are.

The idea was that people would enter--either via a Web interface or through an iPhone app--dietary criteria and then see healthy food options arrived at by combining those criteria with location-based data. WebDiet even planned on partnering with restaurant chains with online menus so that users had a wide range of choices right from the get-go.

But good idea or not, a year later, and WebDiet is still in private beta, not a good sign this late in the game. It's certainly possible that it will still launch publicly and make an impact on people's eating habits, but at this point, it seems like the odds are against it.

Ham-It

Announced at Demo 09 last spring, Ham-It was touted as a "mobile-centric single-stop shop to globally connect and match consumers with local providers of day-to-day consumer services with capability to collaborate and schedule."

At the time, I wasn't sure what that meant, and I'm still not. And it looks like potential customers never understood either, as the company appears to have all but disappeared.

The DemoFall 2009 roster

Starting Tuesday, these companies will be taking their 6-minute turns on stage at this year's DemoFall. Stay tuned for full coverage of the show.

80legs
Anaplan
Answers
Armorize Technologies
Article One Partners
Burt
CallSpark
Cazoodle
Cortera
Digitrad Communications
DotSyntax
Emo Labs
Enthusem.com
ePulze
Faculte
Freeddom Tecnologia e Servicos
Fuze Box
Glam Media
Gogrok Technology
Hand Eye Technologies
Hashwork
Hevva
Hewlett-Packard
Indigo
Intelius
Kryon Systems
LeapFile
Liaise
Lunchster
Micello
MicroAssist
MoLo Rewards
MyOwnRealEstate.com
MyVocal Holdings
NativeTung
Piryx
Point of Wealth Systems
Rseven Mobile
RumbaFish Technologies
Scientific Media
Symform
Third Iris
TotalTrainer
Traackr
TravelTrac
TuneWiki
Tungle Corp
Twirl TV
VicMan Software
Waze
Webroot
Weels Corp
WhoDoYouKnowAt
YiqYaq
Zorap
Zuora

In addition, these 14 companies are part of Demo's AlphaPitch program, in which presenters get 90 seconds to make their case:

Cardagin Networks
Diditz
Dubzer
Enroute Systems
Gelato Dating
Infochimps
Keen Systems
Melior Technologies
Nubli
Pinyadda
Ringful
Sarithi LocalMart
ShareGrove
TrafficTalk

The administration's cloud computing initiative is getting started immediately, at least in small measure, on the brand-new Apps.gov Web site.

(Credit: Apps.gov)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a far-reaching and long-term cloud computing policy intended to cut costs on infrastructure and reduce the environmental impact of government computing systems.

Speaking at NASA's Ames Research Center here, federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled the administration's first formal efforts to roll out a broad system designed to leverage existing infrastructure and in the process, slash federal spending on information technology, especially expensive data centers.

According to Kundra, the federal government today has an IT budget of $76 billion, of which more than $19 billion is spent on infrastructure alone. And within that system, he said, the government "has been building data center after data center," resulting in an environment in which the Department of Homeland Security alone, for example, has 23 data centers.

Obama administration CIO Vivek Kundra on Tuesday unveiled the government's new cloud computing initiative.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

All told, this has resulted in a doubling of federal energy consumption from 2000 to 2006. "We cannot continue on this trajectory," Kundra said.

That's why the administration is now committed to a policy of reducing infrastructure spending and instead, relying on existing systems, at least as much as is possible, given security considerations, Kundra said.

As an example of what's possible with cloud computing, Kundra pointed to a revamping of the General Services Administration's USA.gov site. Using a traditional approach to add scalability and flexibility, he said, it would have taken six months and cost the government $2.5 million a year. But by turning to a cloud computing approach, the upgrade took just a day and cost only $800,000 a year.

But while some of the benefits of the administration's cloud computing initiative are on display today--mainly at the brand new Apps.gov Web site--Kundra's presentation was short on specifics and vague about how long it may take the government to transition fully to its new paradigm.

Indeed, Kundra hinted that it could take as much as a decade to complete the cloud computing "journey."

Three-part initiative
While repeatedly referencing the realities that many government efforts must make allowances in their IT needs for security, Kundra argued strongly that in many other cases, there is little reason that federal agencies cannot turn to online resources for quick, easy, and cheap provisioning of applications.

As a result, the first major element of the initiative is the brand new Apps.gov site, a clearinghouse for business, social media, and productivity applications, as well as cloud IT services. To be sure, the site isn't fully functional yet. In fact, a brief survey of it resulted in a series of error messages. But it's evident that the administration hopes that for many agencies, the site will eventually be a one-stop shop for the kinds of services that to date have required extensive IT spending, and Kundra said he believes that some at the Department of Energy has already been using the site for some of its needs.

The second element of the effort, Kundra said, will be budgeting. For fiscal year 2010, the administration will be pushing cloud computing pilot projects, reflecting the effort's priority and hopes that many lightweight workflows can be moved into the cloud. For fiscal 2011, it will be issuing guidance to agencies throughout government.

Finally, the initiative will include policy planning and architecture that will be made up of centralized certifications, target architecture and security, privacy, and procurement concerns. Kundra said every effort will be made to ensure that data is protected and secure, and that whatever changes are made are "pragmatic and responsible."

Clearly, though, the administration has seen benefits in the way private industry uses cloud computing, and intends to mirror those benefits. Ultimately, he added, the idea is to make it simple for agencies to procure the applications they need. "Why should the government pay for and build infrastructure that may be available for free," Kundra said.

One inspiration, he explained, are advances the government has already seen in the streamlining of student aid application forms. The so-called FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form is "more complicated" than the federal 1040 tax form, Kundra said. But in a joint effort between the IRS and the Department of Education, it has become possible with one click of a mouse button for IRS data to populate the FAFSA form, Kundra said, eliminating more than 70 questions and 20 screens.

That, then, should be the kind of thing that the government seeks to do across the board, ultimately delivering large savings to taxpayers and significantly reducing the environmental impact of government IT systems.

Vint Cerf, the 'father of the Internet,' is one of the many thought leaders that students at Singularity University get a chance to learn from.

(Credit: Singularity University)

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Sitting in a classroom, listening to students explain their approach to an assignment to develop an initiative to impact the lives of a billion people over ten years, one could be forgiven for taking it all with a grain of salt.

After all, student projects like this are usually peppered with holes, naive assumptions, and unrealistic goals.

But here at Singularity University, things are a little different. This group project, which aims to flip the car sharing movement on its head and bring affordable transportation to the masses, started less than two weeks ago but has already won a prize and attracted venture capital interest.

That's because Singularity University is no run-of-the-mill academic institution, and its students are not the usual breed of dreamers with good intentions. Founded by leading futurist and "The Singularity is Near" author Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, the nine-week course examines exponentially growing technologies like biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing. As well, the 40 students in the program are focusing on future studies and forecasting, and finance and entrepreneurship.

Those chosen for the program are truly the cream of the crop. After all, they have regular access to superstar teachers like George Smoot, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics; Dan Kammen, co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore; Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist; and Stephanie Langhoff, NASA Ames' chief scientist. And speakers include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe.

According to program director Ismail, this summer's inaugural Singularity University class of 40 students was chosen from among more than 1,200 applicants from around the world. Ismail said there were three main criteria for selection: students who already had top-level academic rigor and who are already at the top of their respective fields; those who have demonstrated leadership and entrepreneurial skills; and those who have demonstrated interest in global issues.

The result? A class of doctors, advisers to prime ministers, CEOs and successful start-up founders, just to name a few.

Singularity University students get regular access to technology superstars like PayPal co-founder and hedge fund manager, Peter Thiel.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

So when I showed up Wednesday to observe the program in action and first sat in on the car-sharing group project demonstration, I realized this was something I should take seriously.

The 40 students are split into four teams, which get three weeks to come up with a project that, as stated above, could impact a billion people over the next 10 years. The presentation I saw was by a group that was calling itself Gettaround, and which has set as its goal the creation of a new car-sharing program that would incentivize car owners to rent out their vehicles to members, while also making it easier for people to find cars to use for short drives in many more places than are served today by companies like ZipCar or CityCarShare. Ultimately, the idea is to spread the program to developing countries around the world, ideally helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the process.

At the heart of Gettaround's proposal was an iPhone application designed to make it possible for members to locate available cars and, then, when physically approaching them, to start the engines via a low-priced kit installed in the vehicles.

The app was awarded the "best money-making iPhone app" prize at a recent iPhoneDevCamp event in Sunnyvale, Calif., and on the strength of that, the team members said that they've already identified interested venture capitalists and are most likely going to pursue the project as a real business upon completion of Singularity University.

Students speak
After the presentation, I got a chance to speak with some of the program's students about their experiences at Singularity University over the last eight weeks.

This is an amazingly diverse group. Among the 40 students, half are from other countries, and 35 percent are women. The average age is 31.

I first talked to Sarah Sclarsic, 25, of Boston. She's a former medical school student who had previously designed her own emerging technologies major at Harvard University and who has a deep interest in health care and public health.

Sclarsic said the Singularity University course has been hectic, "but for me, that's good."

Among the most valuable aspects of the program, she said, is that students are shown, from the beginning, how the various fields being taught here relate to each other or, at least, can cross over in real-world practice.

She pointed out how she had never before thought about how someone working in quantum computing might have their research converge with health care, or how fields like computational biology, quantum computing, and protein folding intersect.

The results of such convergence down the line? That doctors may be able to design new therapies meant for specific patients, a "huge ability we've never had before."

But this isn't the distant future, she pointed out. The main focus of Singularity University is to teach the students how the various disciplines being taught will converge in the near future, and to help them see how to turn these developing technologies into real-world businesses.

For V.J. Anma, an entrepreneur from Seattle (via India), deciding to come to Singularity University, where tuition is $25,000 (though many students get at least some scholarship help), was based on his conclusion that his career building high-tech start-ups would be enhanced through introductions to his fellow high-powered students and the industry leaders and venture capitalists they'd meet. He was also drawn to the idea of discovering how the various technologies being taught all relate to each other.

"It has definitely lived up to my expectation of being able to learn new ideas and connect with people," Anma said.

One phrase he used to describe the intensity of the program, especially the early weeks, was that it was "like drinking from a fire hose."

Oddly, that was the exact same phrase used by another student, Paul Lem, a doctor and biosciences company CEO from Ottawa, Canada. Lem said Singularity University offers its students so many world-class mentors and "so many amazing opportunities" that, yes, "it's like drinking from a fire hose."

Lem, too, lauded the program's focus on teaching the students to "think about where all these exponential technologies (are) going, and to see where they're all going to intersect."

A huge fan of hockey star Wayne Gretsky, Lem said that one invaluable piece of the program is that it helps students visualize the near future and to "skate to where the puck is going to be." In other words, they will--hopefully--be able to determine where the various fields of technology being taught are heading and be among the first to get there to capitalize on the convergence.

"I'm not sure how it's all going to shake out," Lem said, "but mix enough of this stuff together, and really cool stuff is going to happen. Seeds are being planted in the ground, and they're going to germinate and sprout this cool rain forest of incredible things."

To Ismail, this inaugural Singularity University program has been a revelation about what's possible when you bring together so many talented students with the kinds of world class instructors that are possible in Silicon Valley.

He said he thinks the program has been going "phenomenally well" and said that he's been blown away by some of the ingenuity on display.

For example, he recalled that during a discussion on entrepreneurship, one student registered a domain name, threw up some Google AdWords against it, and started generating real revenues. All during a single lecture.

Ismail didn't use the drinking from a fire hose image, but he did say that he's been amazed at seeing the breadth of what's "coming down the pike" in the various fields being taught in the program and that, "I've been surprised by how mentally drained I am at the end of each day."

He also said that, so far, there are five companies likely to be started by groups of students in the program, including the Gettaround team, and that some of the program's founders are already interested in putting money into some of the projects.

The number of such companies emerging from the program should only increase in future years, as Singularity University will expand from 40 students to 120 next year. But despite a larger class, there's still no way that everyone who wants to take part will be able to attend. And with that in mind, Ismail said, the program is considering how it can share its content with the world at large. One possibility is the Ted conference model, in which lectures and discussions may well be posted online for all to see, free of charge.

For now, though, it's all private, and to the students who managed to get in, an extremely valuable experience. They seem acutely aware that they have been granted access to what could be one of the most exclusive technology clubs in the world, and one that will almost certainly bear important fruit in their careers.

"Creativity is about mixing and matching different building blocks together to build something new and powerful," Lem said. "I've never before been in a place where there are so many building blocks that you can move around."

Correction: This post was updated at 5:40 p.m. PDT with the correct spelling of Salim Ismail's name.

The garage where David Packard and William Hewlett started their new company in 1938 as recent Stanford University engineering graduates.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Sometimes, when things are huge, it's easy to forget that they come from the most humble of backgrounds.

Such is the case with Hewlett-Packard, one of the biggest technology companies in the world. It has a massive headquarters in this central Silicon Valley town, but like the stuff of legends, it got its start 71 years ago in a tiny garage in the middle of an otherwise nondescript residential neighborhood here.

Today, that garage, and the house it sits behind, belong to HP. In front of the house is a plaque declaring the location the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" and noting that it was recently added to the National Registry of Historic Places.

But back in 1938, the garage--significantly renovated in 2005--was the affordable rental workshop secured by William Hewlett and David Packard, two Stanford University engineering graduates who, after going back east for stints at MIT and General Electric, respectively, came back to Palo Alto to start a business.

According to HP archivist Anna Mancini, "the boys," as their landlady called Hewlett and Packard, rented the space there because in addition to living there--Packard lived with his wife in the lower floor of the house, and Hewlett lived the bachelor life in a spartan shed out back--they were allowed to set up shop in the garage.

The HP Garage is not open to the public as it is located in the middle of a quiet residential neighborhood that would be unable to handle the traffic that would come from hosting such an attractive tourist destination.

The two set out to start their company with a business plan that was famous, Mancini said, for having everything in it "but a product." At the urging of their former Stanford adviser, Fred Terman, however, the two decided to build audio oscillators.

Already an established product, Hewlett and Packard found a way to improve upon what the competition was selling by adding a small light bulb to the equation, an innovation of Hewlett's that compensated for fluctuations in the current, and which allowed their oscillators to hold frequencies longer and test more frequencies than the competition's offerings.

Beginning to send out letters soliciting customers, the two entrepreneurs soon began to see results. "'We started getting (back) these letters and some of them had checks in them,'" Mancini quoted them as having said about their first sales.

In the early going, they charged $54.40 for the oscillators, but soon found they were losing money on the devices. Deciding to raise the price to $71.50--competitors were charging as much as $500, but Hewlett and Packard had low overhead since they were making the oscillators themselves--they quickly became profitable.

At first, they used nothing but parts from the hardware store. "They tried to contract out the sheet metal," Mancini said, explaining that their business was too small to support such an endeavor, "and the guy was like, 'no.'"

Still, the nascent Hewlett-Packard was making about 200 oscillators a year, and before long, they had outgrown the garage. In all, Mancini said, they were there for just 18 months. By the spring of 1940, they'd moved on to a larger space in Palo Alto.

Though HP is now best known for its computers and printers, the company actually continued making the original oscillators until the 1960s, Mancini said. And today, those devices fetch upwards of $300 on eBay. And she should know, because she's been buying them for HP's archives for quite some time.

Photos: Inside the HP Garage

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"I drove the price up," she said, "because I was buying a lot and people figured it out."

In 2000, HP bought the house--and the garage--in order to convert them to somewhat of a museum piece. And while the interior of the garage now looks much like it's thought Hewlett and Packard had it when they worked there, it's in fact entirely a re-creation.

To be sure, the garage itself is authentic. But everything inside it was placed there by Mancini in a bid to make it seem like the space where the young Hewlett and Packard created the company that became HP.

And she's done a good job. While it obviously undercuts the authenticity, the re-creations feel right. Everything in the garage is from the right era, and the space is practically littered with original oscillators.

These days, some might argue that the garage's claim to the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" honor neglects the fact that there were several technology companies in the area prior to the founding of HP. But Mancini said that the title likely has more to do with the fact that HP ended up becoming so key to the development of the region as a technology powerhouse. She explained that there have been a long history of spin-offs from HP, and that the company's technology was considered key to the American World War II effort.

After the war, she continued, HP cherry-picked many of the best minds from the military and began to build a technology powerhouse in earnest. And today, as everyone knows, it is one of the leaders in the industry, and, in Palo Alto, an anchor that ties the small city irrevocably to Silicon Valley.

But there was a time, back in 1938, when it all began in a 12-foot by 18-foot garage. And a couple of legends were just two guys trying to get a start-up off the ground.

On June 21, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--If you're in the planning stages of sending people back to the moon, as NASA is, you'd better know as much as possible about it.

That's one of the reasons NASA launched, in late 2007, the Lunar Science Institute (LSI), an organization with an annual budget of $10 million for the study and research of the moon, as well as the role of supporting and inspiring new generations of lunar scientists.

According to Greg Schmidt, LSI's deputy director, it is a "virtual" institute with a staff of just eight or nine people at any given moment. LSI is focused on collecting and sharing Web data and communications, chiefly among the scientists doing research on behalf of the institute, and who work in teams around and outside the country that are competitively selected.

This robot, called K-10, is part of the Lunar Science Institute, and NASA's, efforts to research the conditions that lunar rovers will encounter on the moon. Here, it traverses the Arizona desert.

(Credit: NASA)

While lunar science has been around for more than 40 years as a formal discipline, LSI is focusing on a different set of problems than the researchers were in the 1960s. Yet, the institute also benefits from the work done decades ago. "We have a tremendous amount of data that we can pull together to answer the questions our scientists have," Schmidt said.

LSI is built around studying three main areas. The first is looking at the lunar science of the moon itself: the hard rock geology or the moon; lunar minerology and researching the moon as a planetary object, Schmidt explained. The second is studying the science on the moon, science that involves human exploration. And the last is science from the moon, which Schmidt said means thinking of the moon as an observational platform.

To Schmidt, that is one of the most exciting scientific areas imaginable. And part of that involves a proposal from one of LSI's principle investigators, University of Colorado astrophysicist Jack Burns, who is interested in putting a radio telescope on the far side of the moon.

"The far side of the moon is the quietest radio area in the inner solar system, and would make a perfect place for such a telescope, a very long wave telescope," Schmidt said. "We can peer further into the universe's history than with anything else if we had such a telescope. And I'm very confident that there's at least one Nobel Prize in this work. Totally confident."

He acknowledged that it will be years before any such telescope is put in place. After all, it will take a huge amount of research into the most efficient and cost-effective methods of undertaking such a project.

"I just can't wait until we do that," he said. "But, man, what an interesting question for humanity to be able to answer something like that."

Encouraging the next generation
One problem facing the lunar science community, Schmidt argued, is that the scientists who have been prominent in the field are aging. And that means that in order to keep the field fresh and growing, new blood has to be brought in.

With that in mind, another part of LSI's mission is to help find and encourage young people to join the field. LSI hosts an annual lunar science conference, timed to the anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon, and it happens that this summer's edition of the conference will go on just as we reach the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's pioneering July 1969 trip to the moon.

Lunar science takes off at NASA

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Last year, he said, one of the best parts of the conference was seeing the innovative ideas that current lunar science graduate students are coming up with and nurturing those students and their ideas.

And while LSI is primarily a NASA organization, it couldn't achieve its goals without partnerships with research teams in many other countries. Among them are teams that are deeply involved with lunar research in India, China, and Japan, as well as England, where there are 14 different different academic and industry members, Schmidt said.

"We're getting the best lunar science from the UK as part of the Lunar Science Institute," he added. "And they have an equal seat at the table as our principal investigators."

At next month's LSI conference, meanwhile, the researchers will finally get a chance to see the first data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), which NASA plans to launch next week.

"Both of those together are just incredibly exciting, so...we're hoping to get the first mission results from LRO," he said. "We won't see a lot yet, but there is a lot of data that is going to be collected, in multiple wavelengths with LRO...What we're expecting to see in July are the first images from the LRO camera. And so, that I think is exciting in itself. These are going to be the highest-resolution images that have been taken since the Apollo era."

Schmidt explained that one of the most exciting elements of this project is that the lunar researchers have a chance, for the first, time, to compare high-res images taken today by the LRO to the images taken more than 40 years ago by the Lunar Orbiter, and which have recently been reconstructed at NASA.

"Our idea is taking those (older images) and comparing those to the LRO pictures that are going to be taken and seeing what we find that has changed," Schmidt said. "And we expect to find quite a lot. The moon, it's not a static body. I like to think about it as our cosmic companion for 4 billion years. And so, it is what we think of as a witness plate for what has happened in the Earth's neighborhood. It records not just the early bombardment that happened in the Earth's system, but also the bombardment that's happening now."

With its $10 million annual budget, LSI is giving grants to teams throughout the United States and in other countries that are doing the next rounds of lunar research. And to Schmidt, that is crucial as the world stands ready for the next stage of lunar exploration. Within years, it is expected that we'll be visiting the moon again, and now is the time, he clearly believes, to encourage the kind of research that will best prepare us for those visits.

"I can still remember when Apollo 11 landed, and I can still feel those emotions," he said. "We want to bring (the moon) within our sphere and what (LSI is) about is bringing it within our scientific sphere...It's just really important for us to do this right now, and to bring in a new generation to do it."

On June 21, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

PALM DESERT, Calif.--How does one measure the effects of economic meltdown?

At Demo 09 here, there are two ways, one that's obvious, yet hard to see, and another that is both obvious and visceral.

While Demo for years has featured about 65 to 70 companies, this time around there's just 39. Everybody knows that, but it's hard to actually see it. The main ballroom where Demo presentations are held is packed, with every seat at every table full. But that's an illusion: the wall at the back of the room has been pulled in dramatically from a year ago when Demo 08 had several hundred more attendees.

And no wonder. The companies that present here pay well into five figures to do so, and most bring a group of people. The registration fee for non-presenting attendees is $3,000.

In the past, Demo has received hundreds of applicants for its coveted on-stage spots. While have complained that the show's format is pay-to-play, there's no doubt been an overabundance of companies willing to pony up for the chance at the exposure the show generally nets presenters.

This year, however, word is that Demo Director Chris Shipley and her team simply didn't have enough applicants that fit its criteria to fill out the normal-sized roster. Incidentally, Shipley recently announced she was handing off her leadership responsibilities to VentureBeat CEO and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall after this year's DemoFall.

Still, just because there are fewer companies presenting here this time around, doesn't necessarily mean the quality of those taking the stage was any lower than in previous go-rounds. In fact, it's always hard to accurately judge that quality until months later, since Demo is all about showcasing companies and products that are just getting off the ground. So, since it takes time build a business, the results are often not known for months.

Spotting likely success stories
To be sure, you can tell right away that some of the companies that present here are going to do well, or are going to fail. Sometimes their presentations just wow the audience, and sometimes you can feel the discomfort in the room. This is my sixth Demo and I'd have to say that the percentage of companies in those two categories this week feels about the same as it has in the past.

Indeed, my colleague Rafe Needleman and I nominated seven products as the best of Demo, and just one worst of. With just 39 companies on hand, that's a pretty healthy percentage.

Last week, I wrote a story asking the question, do we still need Demo and conferences like it when the economy is falling apart and when companies have more choices than ever to promote themselves and their products. My conclusion? We do, but only some of them. As Eric Faurot, whose TechWeb company puts on the Web 2.0 conferences, put it, "In the event business, the stronger events, the really healthy events that have a real purpose to them, will emerge stronger, and weaker events will just die. They just won't survive."

After the last company finished its presentation here, I asked Christine Herron, a principal at San Francisco-based First Round Capital, what she thought of the event, especially given the smaller size.

Herron said that size really doesn't matter that much at Demo. What matters is companies' relative health and their funding situation.

"This year, there's a lot of companies who have made it here without a big check, so that's more interesting," Herron said. "If you're a venture capitalist coming to Demo looking for undiscovered investment (opportunities)...I'd like to see companies without a big check."

The lessons of Demo
She's talking of companies that can handle the five-figure presenter's fee, as well as Demo's criteria, without having taken significant investment from a VC. Herron seemed to be suggesting that this is a sign that even in this toxic economy, there are still a number of companies that have been able to get to the stage where they are qualified to present at Demo--including paying the fee--with very low costs. And that could well be a sign that companies, albeit a limited number of them, are seeing ways to weather the recession (or depression, if it gets that bad) by more quickly and efficiently getting products and services to market than has been the case in recent years.

If so, this is good news. It seems to me that this is the only model that is going to succeed in coming years. A panel here on Monday about venture capital in the post-downturn era pointed out the obvious reality that VC investment is down significantly. Eric Tilenius of Tilenius Investments said, for example, that his firm's investments are down 67 percent and that of those that are getting money, most are companies that have already gotten at least one round of funding. The number of new companies getting VC money, he said, "has dropped precipitously."

What does this all mean? Clearly, that the salad days are over. We all thought that after the dot-com bust, only companies with viable business models could get funded. In reality, I think we saw that the lessons learned in the tech industry really had more to do with the levels of funding VCs were willing to put into companies. In the 2003 to 2007 years, as the stock market rebounded and Google millionaires started impacting real estate values throughout the Bay Area, companies could still get funded. They just weren't getting $50 million just because they had a badly-spelled URL like in the pre-2000 days.

Now, companies are still going to be getting funded, but seemingly only if they really do have a solid business model, and likely only if they've already convinced previous investors to get involved. Venture capital is only going to flow to companies that have demonstrated they know how to get to profitability without spending a fortune and without needing to be propped up because they don't have any revenue.

In that regard, then, Demo looks like it could well be an interesting barometer of the state of the (technology) economy. Some companies will succeed. Many will fail. And those trying to make it are going to need to keep their eyes seriously on the prize, even as the grim reaper circles around.

"There's a suspension of disbelief that goes into start-ups," said Herron. "You have to have a certain suspension of disbelief if you're going to quit your job, anger your spouse, and work 14-hour days. You have to have a certain Pollyanna vision."

Timothy Leary became a fan of the personal computer, and used them until his death in 1996. This is the famous psychedelic researcher's Macintosh LC III.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

OAKLAND, Calif.--The phrase is probably about as familiar to anyone who lived through the '60s as any other: "Turn on, tune in, and drop out."

That, of course, was Timothy Leary's exhortation to the world to embrace counterculture, and more specifically, to embrace the many benefits he saw of LSD, or acid.

Leary, as you probably know, was famous for his decades of experimental research into and promotion of the effects of hallucinogens, and over the years became as well known as many of the celebrity artists, writers, thinkers, and performers he hung out with.

Photos: Tuning in to the Timothy Leary archives

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Less well known, however, is that Leary, who died in 1996 of prostate cancer, became a serious techie in his later years. He put up a very early Web site, co-produced a late-'80s video game for Electronic Arts, worked on a series of the latest and greatest computers, and, it is said, updated his era-defining catchphrase for the digital age to reflect a newfound belief that computers were the LSD of the '90s: "Turn on, boot up, and jack in."

Today, addiction to technology is probably even more prevalent than devotion to drugs was in the '60s, and most people probably can't even imagine what the physical archives of someone like Leary would look like. After all, isn't everything digitized and online these days?

On Thursday, however, I had the chance to spend some time with a small piece of Leary's 400-carton-large archives--which is housed in a storage facility here--and I was in danger of getting seriously sucked in. In box after box, I found a true treasure trove of letters, photographs, posters and yes, computer equipment and discs.

My visit was in advance of an event on Sunday in San Francisco to celebrate Leary's life, bring together some of his friends and family, and show off some of the contents of the archives.

Several months ago, Bruce Damer, who, among many other things, runs the DigiBarn Computer Museum, told me he was helping Leary's estate try to sell the archives, and that, if possible, I might end up with a chance to go through the countercultural bounty.

Time slipped away, though, and only a couple of weeks ago, Damer alerted me to the fact that this Leary celebration was happening. And, it turned out, I could go and spend some time with the archives before the event.

And, it seems, the photographs I took on Thursday would be among the first of the archives to be publicly seen.

Damer promised me that Leary had been a "true-blue nerd," and that, of course, was catnip to my internal geek culture radar. I was eager to see the physical evidence of the impact the LSD era had had on the development of the modern era of technology, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so.

Man of mystery
It turns out that it may be a little harder to trace that evolution through Leary than one might think.

I got in touch with John Markoff, The New York Times reporter who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, to ask him about Leary's role in that shaping.

Surprisingly, Markoff told me that while he had met Leary--at the West Coast Computer Faire--and knew that he had dived deep into technology in the '80s and '90s, he didn't have any real sense of how much Leary's LSD experimentation had affected the Silicon Valley world. Indeed, Leary hadn't arrived in the Bay Area until the '70s, and by then the culture of engineering, drugs, and anti-war sentiment was well established here.

Yet, Markoff said, there is little doubt that psychedelic culture had played a significant role in the development of the modern Silicon Valley, whether or not Leary had anything to do with it.

"I've seen social theorists argue that creativity happens around the edge of chaos," Markoff said. "I have no direct proof of that, but it seems that many early people in a variety of places like the Stanford Research Institute and the Stanford AI Lab and Xerox PARC were deeply immersed in (psychedelic culture and the anti-war movement), besides being engineers."

Even more prominent in tying the psychedelic culture to the emergence of modern Silicon Valley was the experimentation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

"Steve talked about it, and so has Bill Gates," Markoff said of experimentation with LSD. Jobs said it was "one of the two or three most important experiences of his life, and as a result of those kinds of experiences, he (feels) set apart from some of the more buttoned down corporate America (types) that he deals with."

Ultimately, then, the question of whether Leary himself directly helped birth the modern Silicon Valley with his research and experimentation is besides the point: if it wasn't him, then it was others who were following a similar path.

There's value in archiving
Back at the storage facility, I met Denis Berry, a trustee of the Timothy Archives, and she spent the day with me, taking me through some of the thousands of items tucked away in those cartons, pulling out little gems and helping me find others that I'd heard of.

My impression was that to Berry, the archives meant two very different things. On the one hand, she sees them as a friend and fan of Leary's, someone who can recognize the immense cultural value of the incredible number of artifacts contained in the 400 boxes. On the other, as a trustee tasked with selling the archives, I could see that she was a bit wearied by them.

She explained that after negotiating to sell the archives to a buyer who Damer had sourced up, she had engaged an appraiser to determine their value.

After spending several months going through the boxes, the appraiser declared that the entire collection was worth in excess of $1 million.

To Leary's family--he had made it clear he wanted the archives sold so his family could reap a bit of a windfall--this seemed like very good news.

But after two years of negotiations, Berry said, the buyer pulled out.

"So we're regrouping and looking for a home for the collection," she said.

The value of these boxes is immense, Berry said, when considering what they contain and what they mean to people interested in the history of the 1960s.

"Really, the history of the psychedelic movement is in here," Berry said. "So while it's Tim's archives, it's really much more than that."

Ideally, she told me, Leary's family hopes to find a buyer who will, once taking ownership, donate the the archives to an institution like the Library of Congress.

Times being what they are, however, it may be difficult to find a buyer willing to part with seven figures for something they won't even take possession of. But Berry thinks that the message contained in Leary's life of work is still very current.

She recalled how she had been talking with someone about Leary's work, and had said that, "Kids really related to what he said."

The friend responded, "Of course. He talked about drugs."

But, Berry said, it was really about much more than that. "He talked about fresh ideas and thinking for yourself."

A counterculture treasure trove
Going through the boxes was something I wish every student of the counterculture could do. I didn't see everything, of course, and even missed out on some of the best stuff, like correspondence between Leary and, say, William S. Burroughs.

But I did find letters to Allen Ginsberg, Leary's old Mac, a badge for entry into a John F. Kennedy for president event, and much more.

Berry said she was worried that some reel-to-reel tapes in the collection would soon deteriorate and that she wasn't sure how to digitize them. I told her surely there was a way and that perhaps someone reading this article would know how to achieve such a thing.

Then, upon discovering a box full of Leary's old 5.25-inch floppy disks, I said I had the same worry about those, and that it would be good to find someone who could back up that data before it disappeared forever.

The archives are mainly from the '60s, '80s, and '90s. During the '70s, of course, Leary spent several years in prison for a series of offenses, and before that, he spent a fair amount of time in Europe trying to elude capture.

That's why, despite Leary's being better than almost anybody I've heard of at holding onto the documents and artifacts of every day life, Berry said, there isn't much in the archives from the '70s.

"It's hard to carry boxes with you when you're on the run from country to country," she said. "He was meticulous (though) and I think he did understand the importance of what was going on."

Co-founded by noted futurist Ray Kurzweil and X Prize CEO and chairman Peter Diamandis, Singularity University will begin offering a 10-week interdisciplinary course in exponentially growing technologies this summer.

(Credit: Singularity University)

Starting this summer, some of the world's leading thinkers in exponentially growing technologies will be gathering annually at NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of Silicon Valley, for 10 weeks of discussions on how to change the future. And you could join them.

The gatherings will be part of what is known as Singularity University, a brand-new academic institution co-founded by inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, X Prize chairman and CEO Peter Diamandis, and former Yahoo Brickhouse head Salim Ismail, and anyone can apply.

Singularity University is less a traditional university and more an institution that will feature intensive 10-week, 10-day, or 3-day programs examining a set of 10 technologies and disciplines, such as future studies and forecasting; biotechnology and bioinformatics; nanotechnology; AI, robotics, and cognitive computing; and finance and entrepreneurship.

The founders anticipate that students will come from all over the world, and they hope the program results in the founding of new companies, the evolution of scientific and technological thinking, and the solidifying of professional and personal networks among the highly-accomplished students and faculty.

To Kurzweil, Singularity University is a place to problem-solve and talk about the results of the most recent iterations of the exponentially growing technologies that have shaped modern life. Among them, he said, are vacuum tubes, integrated circuits, chips and microprocessors.

Now, he said, we are on the threshold of an explosion of the newest such technology, including 3D and self-organizing molecular circuits. And to Kurzweil, the ability to bring together the leaders in this wide range of fields is a rare opportunity to jump-start the future. (The program's name is based on the theories Kurzweil popularized in his best-selling book The Singularity is Near.)

For Diamandis, who previously co-founded the International Space University (a space studies program on which Singularity University will be modeled), the idea of building an interdisciplinary academic institution around the concepts of exponentially growing trends seemed natural--and powerful.

So, after bringing together 50 leading thinkers for a founding conference at NASA Ames, Kurzweil, Diamandis, and Ismail got the backing of Ames' director, Pete Worden, and a commitment of space at the center--a highly visual Silicon Valley landmark along highway 101--for the annual summer programs.

In addition to the core 10-week course, which will be open to graduate and post-graduate students, Singularity University will also offer 3-day and 10-day executive programs. The shorter version will be targeted at CEOs and CTOs, while the 10-day program will be aimed at rising-star executives who want to add to their knowledge and networks.

"These programs are there to give executives a look at what's in the lab today," said Diamandis, "and what is likely to hit the marketplace in the next 5 to 10 years."

This summer, Singularity University will kick off with just 30 or so students and will piggyback on the International Space University, which will host 120 students at NASA Ames. But in following years, the new institution is expected to expand to about 120 students, each of whom could be the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin.

"If we do our job correctly," Diamandis said, students "will meet, (discover their) common visions, and start companies together. They'll have a chance to match a nanotech expert from Russia with an AI expert from Silicon Valley and see what magic happens at the boundaries."

A stellar faculty
As evidence of how seriously many people in the fields of focus take Singularity University, it has pulled together what can only be described as a very impressive roster of faculty.

Among them are The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright; George Smoot, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics; Dan Kammen, co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore; Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist; and Stephanie Langhoff, NASA Ames' chief scientist.

Befitting the serious nature of the program, its curriculum is not for the faint of heart. The first phase, said Diamandis, is a series of plenary lectures in which all students take the same coursework and learn together about each of the 10 disciplines.

"It's about learning the vocabulary" of the disciplines, Diamandis said, "the basic principles, so they can communicate better between themselves."

In the second phase, students will take deep dives into one of the 10 tracks, typically not one in which they already specialize, learning together in 10-person classes.

And in the final phase, the entire student body will come together to work on a team project.

"This is where the student body will focus as a group in taking on one of the world's grand challenges," said Diamandis, dealing "with global hunger, pandemics, climate change," or something similar.

And while the program's students can expect to work very hard and be deeply immersed in their studies, the faculty will be equally challenged.

"It caused all of us who were invited to be faculty to pause and think about it," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley-based forecaster who is teaching in the Singularity University program. "We're expected to be there for the full nine weeks, which is a breathtaking commitment of time."

But for Saffo, who is helping to organize the future studies and forecasting track with Kurzweil, being intimately involved with the program at every level is precisely the point.

"The real benefit of teaching is being able to participate," Saffo said. "It would be a waste of time to just show up, give a couple of lectures, and leave."

And while their involvement at any level would bring Singularity University the prestige it needs to recruit talented students and faculty, both Kurzweil and Diamandis said they would be teaching each summer.

For Kurzweil, that means teaching some of the future studies and forecasting classes, and for Diamandis, it means helping to build the curriculum and teaching where he is needed.

The students, meanwhile, will need to pony up some serious money to take part in Singularity University. The base fee for the 10-week program is $25,000, though Diamandis said that there will be a significant number of full and partial scholarships available, funded by private companies, and other contributors.

Ultimately, the results of Singularity University won't be known for some time. But given the people behind it and the likelihood of a steady stream of highly talented students, the odds of it producing the kind of deep thinking and world-changing technology the founders hope for are good.

"I have no doubt that society gets ever more complex, and the consequences of ever-growing technology become ever more difficult to anticipate and respond to," said Saffo. "So having a 10-week program of smart, committed people looking at the challenges from an interdisciplinary point of view can only be a good thing."

With Google Earth 5.0, users can now journey to the planet Mars, where they can see 3D views of the Red Planet and dive deep into its canyons.

(Credit: Google/NASA/USGS)

While you might never become an astronaut and have the chance to ride a Mars Rover on the Red Planet, Google has now rolled out an Earth-bound alternative for the masses.

With Google Earth 5.0, which was unveiled Monday, users can now explore Mars in the same way they've been able to instantly view 3D images of much of our own home planet for several years in previous versions of the software.

The Mars project, which was implemented in conjunction with NASA, is intended both for casual investigation of our planetary next-door neighbor, as well as serious research. NASA and Google hope scientists and other researchers will use the new Google Earth Mars feature to share data about the fourth rock from the sun.

"The mode enables users to fly virtually through enormous canyons and scale huge mountains on Mars that are much larger than any found on Earth," NASA said in a statement. "Users also can explore the Red Planet through the eyes of the Mars rovers and other Mars missions, providing a unique perspective of the entire planet."

The Mars feature of Google Earth 5.0 lets users see the Red Planet from the perspective of rovers like the NASA Mars Pathfinder Rover.

(Credit: NASA/Google/JPL/University of Arizona)

Additionally, the new Mars features allows Google Earth users to view much of the most recent satellite imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, as well as other craft circling the planet. And users are able to add their own generally sharable 3D content to the larger map of Mars.