If you've got a good idea to improve global health, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is ready to pony up serious money to see it through to completion.
The foundation announced Wednesday that it has chosen 104 scientists from 22 nations across five continents to receive $100,000 each. This is the first round in what will become a regular practice as the foundation seeks to develop what it calls transformational ideas that will help revolutionize health care.
Andrew Serazin
(Credit: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)"We have a few examples of ideas which will turn conventional wisdom on its head and seek an alternative approach to a long-standing problem," said Andrew Serazin, program officer at the Gates Foundation. "The transformational part of that is something which is a little bit of an unconventional approach that can lead to having a long-term health impact."
Given the strength of the ideas sent in, Serazin said, the foundation handed out grants to about twice as many people as it originally planned in this round.
"It's hard to say what the future numbers will be though each round," he said, adding that it will depends upon the quality of the submissions. More than 4,000 proposals were sent in.
"One great thing about the program is the opportunity for really anyone with an idea to apply for funding," he added. "We're very open to as broad a set of ideas as possible...whether it be from a Nobel laureate or a grad student--we want to hear from them."
Among the winners, my personal favorite concerned one Hiroyuki Matsuoka from Jichi Medical University in Japan. He believes it may be possible to turn mosquitoes that normally transmit disease into "flying syringes," so that when they bite humans, they instead deliver vaccines.
You can find the full list of the funded projects at www.gcgh.org/explorations/
Three Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who have been barred by a court order from discussing subway card vulnerabilities are now free to say what they want.
The University of Michigan released its annual ACSI scores for the PC industry, and Apple took top honors for the fifth straight year.
Plus, it isn't your usual Nokia jingle, but a campaign to promote condom use in India sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is off to a strong start.
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Today's stories:
U.S. mobile-phone sales take a hit
Android security team appeals to bug hunters
Georgia cuts access to Russian sites, TV news
Overheating iPod Nanos? Japan investigates
Apple extends MobileMe accounts--again
Palm leaks Treo Pro photos and videos
Mary Jo Foley's a smart cookie. Reading through a retrospective piece by former Microsoft coder Joel Spolsky, she was quick to spot this intriguing paragraph:
"Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. But often, you can't."Spolsky was riffing on what it was like to work for Microsoft in the early 1990s, when Bill Gates was as hands-on a technologist as you might expect from the most successful tech entrepreneur of our times.
He recalled that Gates often was more familiar with the details of Microsoft's software projects than the people he appointed to take care of this stuff for him.
He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.
Spolsky offers an insightful period retrospective, but I'm not sure his one-size-fits-all prescription really works. Gates may have "understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables" as Spolsky writes, but his technology chops didn't prevent Microsoft from committing severe errors. Let's not forget that Microsoft was late to recognize the implications of the Internet when Gates was still running the show as its CEO. He was also at the helm when the Microsoft got sued by the government for engaging in anticompetitive behavior.
But Spolsky offers fodder for a great bar room discussion. Unfortunately, there's no clean way to prove things one way or the other. For fun, I compiled a back-of-the-envelope list of four former software CEOs who used to command the attention of the technology industry. While tech CEOs often combine both technology and business smarts, I'm assigning them into one of two camps based on what I saw when they were running the show. First, the business types:
Jim Manzi: Lotus:
Jim Manzi came out of the world of business consulting. If he was more of a technologist, maybe he would have pushed Lotus to adopt its applications to the then-nascent Windows platform. Manzi recognized the import of the work Ray Ozzie was doing with Notes. Unfortunately for Lotus, the growth of its groupware products wasn't enough to compensate for the freefall in its applications business. The company was doomed, only to be rescued when Lou Gerstner's IBM appeared with an out-of-the-blue (temporarily) hostile buyout offer. Might Lotus have fared better under its more tech-savvy founder, Mitch Kapor? That's like asking whether Willie Mays would have broken Babe Ruth's record if the Giants never moved away from the Polo Grounds. We'll never know.
Mark Cuban: Broadcast.com
I first met Cuban when he was a computer retailer. I don't remember him as a visionary technologist but he was an exceptionally sharp businessman. He was one of the first computer dealers to recognize how to romance business buyers of PCs. That may seem entirely obvious in 2008, but systems integration was a black art when MicroSolutions got going in the early 1980s. In my book, Cuban's sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo stands out as the most brilliant deal of dotcom-dom. But did he create any game-changing technology that since justified Yahoo's $5 billion purchase price? No matter. He did well--very well--for himself and his company.
Now, the technologists.
Philippe Kahn of Borland
Remember Borland and the "Barbarians?" Philippe Kahn was a geek extraordinaire. And for a while, Borland stood toe-to-toe with Microsoft. Kahn was one of the first software entrepreneurs to embrace object-oriented programming. But that didn't prevent Borland from suffering costly product development delays. If Kahn had more business savvy, perhaps he wouldn't have OK'd the ill-considered acquisition of Ashton-Tate. The company never recovered from those self-inflicted wounds.
Ray Noorda: Novell
A electronics technicians during World War II, Noorda became an engineer and then businessman. In a way, he reminds me of Gates a lot. When he joined Novell, Noorda made a lot of smart decisions early on--in particular his support of Netware. Unfortunately, he decided to take on Microsoft in a foolish battle that sometimes took on the appearance of a personal challenge. Novell went on an expensive software acquisition spree--topped off by the purchase of WordPerfect. Microsoft couldn't have asked for a bigger gift. Noorda was fighting on so many flanks that NetWare was eventually surpassed by Windows NT.
I could go on, but it's late and I need some shut-eye. I shy away from drawing overarching conclusions on the basis of a very mixed record. But it's safe to say that smart CEOs will figure this stuff out on their own--or at the very least surround themselves with sharp folks who'll make them look good in the end. But read Spolsky's essay anyway.
And then drop a note in the TalkBack forum here with your take on the matter.
It wasn't exactly Minority Report but Bill Gates' technology demonstration at the company's CEO Summit earlier Wednesday may be remembered years from now as a harbinger of the end for the keyboard and mouse era. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But soon enough. (Cue Winston Churchill here about how this is not the end, the beginning of the end, but perhaps, it's the end of the beginning.)
As Gates demoed a 4-foot-by-6-foot prototype called TouchWall, there was little resemblance to Tom Cruise's futuristic data juggling in that 2002 sci-fi performance as he moved 3D screens around with simple hand gestures. Making what is likely his last appearance as master of ceremonies at this annual conclave of corporate heavy hitters, Gates used the show-and-tell session to offer a prediction.
(Credit:
CNET News.com)
In the future, he said, all surfaces will feature "an inexpensive screen display capability and software that sees what you're doing there so that it's completely interactive."
I've been watching Gates give performances like these since 1985 and it's wise to treat his predictions with the appropriate grain of salt. When it comes to Microsoft, the concept of vaporware is not entirely foreign. Still, I found the demo interesting when you consider the topic against the backdrop of what Microsoft is developing in Windows 7. In fact, a couple of months ago, Gates hinted at future support for touch-based gestures and speech recognition in a the post-Vista OS.
"The likelihood is that touch will become mainstream on certain form factors very quickly because we are working hand-in-hand with the hardware companies," he told my colleague Ina Fried.
I'll wait to see how Microsoft's product roadmap evolves before getting too exciting. Planned features for operating systems often don't make the final scratch because of various and sundry. For his part, Gates appears confident this is the future direction of man-machine relations. In a practiced sales pitch for the TouchWall, Gates predicted that home and office walls eventually will become computers. Period.
Of course, that's also going to require a lot of infrared cameras to pick up touch patterns as well as projection technology--and that's all going to cost. (For the foreseeable future, touch sensitive walls remain a toy for the plutocrats. Last Christmas, Nieman Marcus was selling Jeff Han's Interactive Media Wall for $100,000.
On the other side of the equation, these sorts of technologies are moving into the mainstream in fits and starts. Vista includes some support for touch sensitivity and millions of iPhone owners now see gestures as natural. The fact is that we are getting beyond the keyboard and mouse as the end-all and be-all. The mouse is more than 40 years old, while the idea for the QWERTY keyboard dates back to a Civil War era invention by C.L. Sholes. Don't know about you but I'm ready for a change.
Old habits die hard when you've spent the better part of three decades perfecting the art of the "dis." Bill Gates may be on his way out, but he hasn't mellowed when it comes to appreciating the technical capacity of the competition.
So before slipping into the role of full-time philanthropist, Gates had some few less-than-kind words for Google's technical chops as he held court at the company's SharePoint conference.
Google this!
(Credit: Dan Farber)"In terms of Google, not to overstate it, but they really don't understand the special needs of business. Today, their economic model is based on consumer search. They have done an incredible job there and obviously we're investing in challenging them in that space...
"If you've seen...the Google tools that have tried to do productivity type things, they really don't have the richness the responsiveness. You can see that relative [to] the success they have had there. Most of these Google products, to be frank, the day they announce them is their best day and then after that..."
That's a nice sound byte for the press but this was a throwback moment, something we expected from a younger, brasher Gates when he was busy talking himself into an antitrust confrontation with Uncle Sam's trustbusters. Maybe he really does believe Google is that lame. To be fair, Google hasn't yet proved it can supply the needs of enterprise customers.
Matt Asay tells it straight (no chaser): "Google's continual failures in just about everything else" other than in search.
We can quibble whether that's really true. But so far, Google's done better branching into applications development than Microsoft's fared branching out from its core businesses into search. And search is where the serious bucks are being made.
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