He's one of the fathers of the new economic growth theory, and he's been on the short list for a Nobel price in economics. He's founded companies, including online teaching firm Aplia.
Now, Professor Paul Romer of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business is leaving the campus to pursue a new, somewhat startling private endeavor. Using Western know-how and bureaucracies, he wants to build modern metropolises in one of the most challenging areas of the world: Africa.
"I am embarking on a whole new direction in my career," Romer said during a recent meeting in Menlo Park, Calif., with Swedish, Finnish, and Pakistani journalists. "I am going to put my whole career on the line with this new idea."
Paul Romer
(Credit: Stanford University)
The idea is to create city-states along the coast of Africa that can become economic hubs for the region and at the same time be insulated from the continent's notorious corruption and political chaos. In a sense, it's what the British did with Hong Kong in the 19th century when China was relatively unstable.
Romer envisions a Nordic country, perhaps, emerging as a champion for his concept. The European host could accelerate economic growth by taking charge of police forces, jails, and courts. Local government would take care of the rest.
A modern form of colonialism? To many, it might seem like it, but the colonizer would be a "disinterested trustee government" that would preside over a form of what Romer calls "delegated democracy."
"The British raised tens of millions of people out of poverty" in the colonial era, Romer said. "Hong Kong is the most successful development program in economic history."
Romer said he would not trust the United States to serve as a steward in Africa, and he even doesn't think even the European Union is up for the task.
A cynic, however, could also point out that Nordic countries have been, historically, relatively homogeneous and isolated and have not had to deal with conflicting ethnic and religious interests like Britain, the U.S., and several African nations. Thus, what makes Scandinavia successful makes it unsuited for an African voyage, he asserts. But Romer prefers to focus on the Nordic countries and their history of conflict mediation and peacekeeping operations, working closely with the U.N.
He has discussed his idea, which might strike some as radical, in small circles for some time, and now he'd like to influence the wider debate on development issues, such as the effectiveness of development aid.
He does not believe in the philosophy of many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that national governments are best avoided altogether in favor of directly reaching needy Africans. Good governance requires more discipline and a guarantee that the party in power does not abuse its power.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--The 2008 Presidential election will determine whether wireless networks will be open or closed, former Federal Communications Chairman Reed Hundt said during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference taking place here at Stanford this week.
The FCC is gearing up for the January auction of the spectrum--the 1GHz and below part of the spectrum--currently dedicated to UHF TV. It's valuable spectrum, Hundt noted. It goes through walls and building. A nationwide network on the spectrum should cost about one-tenth of the cost it would require to build a network for the 2.4GHz spectrum.
"This is the last auction," he said.
In a recent decision, the agency ruled that a valuable portion of the spectrum will be auctioned off with the requirement that it be left open. That is, companies that own the spectrum would have to let anyone with any kind of wireless device to access content on the spectrum. Carriers could not wall off elements from their own customers.
Entertainment services like V Cast from Verizon would not be permitted, according to Hundt.
Still, even though the spectrum will be auctioned off this coming January, some of the regulations regarding open access will terminate in January 2009, right after the election. Thus, he stated that whether or not open access rules are enforced or remain could be determined by who becomes president.
Hundt is not an impartial observer. He is one of the figures behind Frontier Wireless, a company that plans to buy much of the spectrum to be auctioned off. Unlike traditional carriers, however, Frontier will not sell content or service packages to consumers. Instead, it will sell it wholesale to others. Hundt further added that the company is asking the FCC to regulate it so that it can't move into the retail market.
Although Frontier says it is dedicated to helping preserve freedom for the average American, it's backed by several former Netscape execs, venture firm Kleiner Perkins, and other captains of industry.
Analog TV, by the way, won't disappear until February 2009. That wasn't because of the election cycle. The FCC picked it so that it would come between the Super Bowl and the NCAA championship, Hundt said.
The battle over spectrum is akin to the antitrust battle over railroads at the end of the 19th Century. In 1860, 10 percent of the government's property was effectively given to railroads. Twenty years later, railroads were some of the most powerful and profitable businesses in the country.
In modern-day America, communications carriers have experienced a boon through regulations. A significant portion of their market value, Hundt asserted, derived from how government rules help them grow and protect their markets.
Meanwhile, the average American is not enjoying a robust economic life these days, he said.
"Average wages are lower on an inflation adjusted basis than they were in 2001," he said. During the same time, "47 percent of income gain has gone to the top 1 percent in the country," he added.
Traditional carriers have heavily criticized and fought open access regulations.
(This is the second post in a series written "live" from Hot Chips 19 at Stanford University.)
Vernor Vinge is best known as a science-fiction writer, but he's also a computer scientist; he retired from his professorship at San Diego State University five years ago. (I mentioned his participation in a panel at Siggraph earlier this month here.)
Vinge's talk was titled "Digital Gaia," a reference to the Gaia Hypothesis. (I see Vinge used the same title for a January, 2000 essay in Wired, here.) Vinge described several scenarios for the future of the integrated-circuit industry, building on some ... Read more
I'm blogging today from Hot Chips 19, the annual chip technology conference hosted by Stanford University. I'm planning to summarize each session as it happens.
Before the sessions began, there were some announcements--expected attendance, for example, is about 600 people.
Famed computer architect John Mashey spoke on behalf of the Computer History Museum, giving an update on museum exhibits and inviting Hot Chips attendees to visit while they're in town. The museum will have one of the two working copies of Charles Babbage... Read more
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Another line of start-ups made their case at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit here on Thursday. A mix of more established and fairly new companies with services that are in beta--some that have already had one or two rounds of funding but are now seeking investors' attention again.
Here is a chunk of the start-ups:
Technology enablers
• Flock is a Web browser that lets you add tools and applications to share media and interact online. We have mentioned it before and the last version of the social browser is now up for beta before its official launch later this summer.
• Nextrials is in the Life Science space and has a software solution for clinical research. The company started in 1999 and the CEO James Rogers says their software is already used on 850 sites. Their product manages inventory, patient randomization and brings data together to lower costs and bring products to the market faster. Nextrials is focused on the middle market of biopharmaceutical and medical devices companies.
• Genius.com provides sales companies with a platform to track clients browsing on a company Web site. The company found that many sales representatives send tons of e-mails but there wasn't a way to track them. So they created "Genius e-mail," allowing them to follow customers' page-by-page visits to see "who's hot and who's not," said the CEO David Thompson.
• EffectiveUI is a company using rich Internet applications to provide interface solutions for clients like Adobe Systems, eBay and Discovery Channel. Its eBay platform, which is now in beta, is intended to give eBay customers tools to search and compare companies and products. It has a function that sorts pictures of a product one after another like it's done by hand. But users are accustomed to having the buttons where they've always been so it's a challenge. One admirable thing EffectiveUI did with Discovery Channel is an interactive platform for a cancer collage, where survivors of cancer tell their stories.
• Infopia is a platform where companies can manage transactions, inventory and customers. It feeds Web sites with information and keeps track of orders and market output. CEO Bjorn Espenes says the company has 350 customers and is partnering with companies like eBay and Salesforce.
Web services and collaboration
• Mindtouch provides a wiki platform for online media and brands. It pitched its Nexus--a white-label version publishing platform that can be implemented and customized in a company's own style.
• Box.net offers Web-based online file storage and sharing. This was one of the more straight-forward and clear presentations of the day, but what they're doing is not unique. They have been online for a while and claim to have more than 1 million users who share 700,000 files per day. What is new is a plug-in on Facebook to help share files with friends.
• Leads360 is targeted to the mortgage industry to streamline leads and turn them into customers. CEO Jeff Solomon says they have 10,000 subscribers and 500 clients using their software to get return on their investment on their leads.
• LongJump is offering companies an online platform for secure solutions of their catalog of applications and sharing information with colleagues and partners. They have a drag-and-drop interface where each application can be customized by the users.
• Forterra Systems supplies a virtual world applied to business applications. They want companies to start doing business in a virtual 3D environment with avatars while conducting real tasks like training, collaboration and real-time meetings. Pity though that the sound didn't work during the presentation, so we couldn't see the demo.
• Collarity wants to help companies monetize products online. Its tool is intended to help users to find good stuff. Many sales are lost because visitors can't easily find the products. Through search on what customers are looking for, Collarity generates recommendations such as "customers who liked this also liked this." This is also done by others, such as Cleverset and Aggregate Knowledge.
Mobile and wireless
• Nuvoiz is a Japanese-American company enabling voice over IP with a soft phone through Wi-Fi for small and medium-size businesses. Nuvoiz claims to be "the Skype for the enterprises".
• Azaire Networks is providing a broadband mobility infrastructure. Still it has not reached the U.S. market yet even though it is an American company. It mainly has customers in Europe using the 3G technology. CEO Bill Howe wants to "free my phone" and get more U.S. carriers than T-Mobile to support Wi-Fi.
• Digislide is an Australian company developing video projecting technologies. The device the company demonstrated projected a video from a laptop, but was big and boxy. Its latest project is Digismart Miniature Projection, which is expected to be launched in early 2008, where a projector as small as a finger can be integrated in to a cell phone or a laptop. You can also chose between different resolutions and you get an hour viewing time from a cell phone. Among the competitors are Nokia, Samsung and Light Blue Optics.
• GoWare provides what it calls DoMo--a do more platform, first launched at DEMO in February, with an open API allowing users to create a personalized homepage on your PC that is formatted to be used on your cell phone. The company also showed off plug-ins for World of Warcraft in which users can take their characters to their phone. GoWare is partnering with 4Info for personal ads put into the content.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Crazy parents, pay attention. You'll probably be forking money over to Jason Ma in the near future.
Ma, CEO and founder of VC firm Congruent Partners, is behind Vanteus, an education center that helps high-achieving students boost their SAT scores. Companies like Kaplan and the Princeton Review concentrate on a wide swath of students, Ma said.
Vanteus' courses and education modules are geared at kids who want to raise their score from 1800 or 2100 closer to the 2400 maximum. (There are now three modules on the SAT, so an 1800 is equivalent to 1200 in the old system and 2400 is a formerly perfect 1600.)
Students in a testimonial page for the company say they boosted their scores by 160 to 490 points on practice tests. A couple of students scored a perfect 2400 on the actual test. Would they have improved without the course or some other course? Perhaps, but the results seem pretty good.
Right now, Vanteus has centers in Cupertino, Fremont and Pleasanton, Calif. (There are cities where a score of 1500 and an admission letter from Middlebury would plunge an entire family into a deep well of depression.) Ma wants to go nationwide next.
Education--as we've written about--is becoming a big focal point for the Valley. Azure Capital jump-started the growing and several education companies at a recent ThinkEquity Partners event made pitches for venture funds.
I ran into Ma, whom I've interviewed before, near the snack table at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit taking place this week. He's going to probably make a pile with this new venture.
In the interests of disclosure, I'm a big believer in the SAT. My scores helped me get into Cornell (and since then, it's been a long, slow ride down the intellectual achievement curve.) Today, my scores wouldn't get me into Hampshire College.
Yossi Vardi, the guy who helped bring instant messaging to the world, is now trying to speed up video downloads.
Vardi is an investor in Haifa-based SpeedBit, which sells an application for speeding up downloads of games, videos and music. He claimed that by using the application, the download of a movie decreases from more than an hour to 22 minutes.
Downloading movies, of course, will get worse as high definition spreads. Some of these download services have received their share of customer complaints.
"It's the fastest growing application ever," he said, during a hallway conversation at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit taking place this week. "We're growing faster than Skype."
I haven't had time to verify that, but they do have a lot of downloads. They released their first product in 1999, and now claim that 142 million people have downloaded SpeedBit Download Accelerator Plus.
Sales of videos on iTunes have helped business, he added.
Vardi, along with Yair Goldfinger and others, were behind Mirabilis, which created the instant-messaging client ICQ. AOL bought the company in 1998 for around $287 million. It also helped Israel get into the Internet business.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Baynote wants to eliminate the power of the blowhard on the Internet.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has come up with software that allows shopping sites or media outlets to better determine what their customers want by how people interact with their site.
If customers click on the specifications on a road bike offered on a sports site more than the specs of competing bikes, that extra bit of attention is an indication that the bike in question might be a bigger seller, Baynote says. The next time a customer comes to that site, that bike might be highlighted above other models, thereby increasing the odds that the bike will sell.
Tapping into this "invisible wisdom of crowds" through behavior is a far better indication of customer behavior than what people are saying in online reviews, focus groups, customer comments or comments from self-appointed influences on the Web, Jack Jia, Baynote CEO, said during a meeting at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit taking place here this week at the university.
"There are three kinds of people that post comments--people with too much time on their hands, people who are too opinionated, and people with a secret agenda," he said. "Human behavior will tell you what (the general audience) wants."
Web site optimization is a crowded field, but Jia argues that the company's emphasis on unarticulated desires gives it an edge.
The company began selling its software about a year ago. Customers include Glam.com, eBay and Motorola.
One early customer, US Appliance, initially thought the software was buggy. Out of the large number of washers the online site sold, one of the most popular, according to Baynote's tracking data, was a red one. Weeks later, sales data indicated that it was one of the most popular models, he said. Red washers have also become a staple of the Best Buy Sunday insert since then, he added.
With media companies, the software is used for ad placement. "We know which ads are best suited for what spot," Jia said.
How customers react changes from Web site to Web site and product to product. Color might be a telling characteristic in appliances, but meaningless in sporting equipment. The company, however, does not emphasize clicks. Whether or not a person clicks on an item is a function of Web design rather than customer preference, he said. Instead, it examines about 12 different data points, which are determined by past consumer behavior on the site.
What are some of the common mistakes people make when designing Web sites? Sometimes sites are overloaded with content, which makes it difficult to find something, Jia said.
An inordinate amount of time is also often spent on user interface design. "They spend a lot of time on that rather than what people want," he said. "It can be pretty, but it can still be a pig."
Electronic records hold the potential to improve medical care by flagging problems such as drugs that shouldn't be combined, but a study by Stanford and Harvard medical school researchers has concluded that so far they haven't improved the quality of outpatient health care.
The researchers studied a database of 1.8 billion doctor visits in 2003 and 2004 and examined performance on 17 indicators of quality. The results were mediocre, according to Stanford.
"In essence, we found little difference in the quality of care being provided by physicians with electronic health record systems, compared to those without these systems," Dr. Randall Stafford, a Stanford associate professor of medicine and senior author of the research, said in a statement. The research is scheduled for publication Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The issue isn't necessarily that electronic records don't help make better decisions. For one thing, many systems just transferred previously paper records into electronic form without adding extra abilities such as checking for negative drug interactions. For another, doctors often don't necessarily take advice from an electronic system.
Electronic records didn't make a difference in 14 areas, such as avoiding drugs that could be inappropriate for older patients and prescribing appropriate antibiotics. In two areas, doctors with electronic records systems did better than otherwise, and in one, they did worse, Stanford said.
Update:This posting has been changed to correct the results in the three tests where doctors with the electronic records system did better or worse than those without.
The U.S. Army will spend $105 million over five years on a new supercomputing research center based at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. Stanford University will lead development of the research center, with the help of engineers and scientists from NASA, Morgan State University, New Mexico State University and the University of Texas.
The goal of the new center is to test, via computer simulation, various new military applications and hardware, such as wireless communications on the battlefield, advance warning systems for biological warfare, and lighter materials for army vehicles. The research could also prove beneficial to supercomputing research itself.
"Using the most advanced high-performance computing resources, a research center of this magnitude has great potential for innovating technology," Charbel Farhat, Stanford mechanical engineering professor, said in a statement.
The grant from the U.S. Army, which began its supercomputing research center program in 1989, includes an optional renewal for another five years and $105 million of funding after 2012.
- prev
- 1
- next
