OverMatter

Dream Mergers

A list of dream M&A activity

Clocky

"Clocky, An MIT Media Lab Research Project: Clocky is, quite simply, for people who have trouble waking up. When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky's shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day." (MIT Media Laboratoy)

Orphan Works

""Orphan Works" probably comprise the majority of the record of 20th century culture. These works are still presumably under copyright (only works published before 1923 are conclusively in the public domain), but the copyright owner cannot be found. The default response of archivists, libraries, film restorers, artists, scholars, educators, publishers, and others is to drop copyrighted work unless it is clearly in the public domain. As a result, orphan works are not used in new creative efforts or made available to the public due to uncertainty over their copyright status, even when there is no longer anyone claiming copyright ownership, or the owner no longer has any objection to such use." (Duke Law, Center for the Study of the Public Domain)

Political Networking

"The lesson is as old as the Post Office: the framework we create for communication is a framework for politics." (technologyreview.com)

Civilization going the way of the Betamax...?

"Ever since the Betamax ruling in 1984, inventors have been free to create new copying technologies as long as they are capable of substantial noninfringing (legal) uses. But by the end of this year, all that could change. In MGM v. Grokster, Hollywood and the recording industry are asking for the power to sue out of existence any technology that appears to be a threat, even if it passes the Betamax test. That puts at risk any copying technology that Betamax currently protects as well as any new technologies Hollywood doesn't like.

To raise awareness about what's at stake in the Grokster case, EFF is profiling one Betamax-protected gadget every weekday until the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on March 29. Some of these examples are in fun, some more serious, but all represent general-purpose technologies that can be used for both infringing and noninfringing purposes. Check them out and pass the word"

(Electronic Frontier Foundation: Defending Freedom in a Digital World: Countdown to Grokster)

Floozed

"A good tale from the dot-com days. Silicon Valley loves disaster movies.

Case in point: Pando Networks is working on a way to deliver large files easily over the Internet, but the best part about the company is that the CEO, Robert Levitan, started iVillage and Flooz.

Remember Flooz? They sold dollars that could be exchanged for gifts. Whoopi Goldberg stumped for them. Flooz survived the implosion of 2000. Then in 2001, one of its biggest customers, Cisco Systems, wanted to renegotiate a multimillion-dollar contract. Flooz survived that.

Then the company noticed that gift-buying didn't slow down after the Mother's Day/Father's Day/graduation season. The FBI informed Levitan that the Russian mobsters were buying Flooz credit as a way to launder stolen credit card purchases. Flooz survived that, too. Then the large credit card companies decided to withhold payments, in part, says Levitan, because Flooz was able to garner a higher percentage of each transaction than they were.

The company was forced to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. It had 325,000 creditors, the largest number of creditors ever. The court allowed it to notify creditors via e-mail, a first. Levitan expected to face a hostile audience of several angry consumers at the first court hearing.

"No one showed up," he said. The company called it quits on Sept. 10. On his first day of unemployment in years, Levitan decided to go to his Manhattan gym, where he saw the disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold.

Whatever the merits of Pando, the story sets them apart from the pack."

(How to pitch your company | CNET News.com)

Life on the Scales

"Simple mathematical relationships underpin much of biology and ecology...

In the July 2004 Ecology, Brown, West, and their colleagues proposed that their equation can shed light not just on individual animals' life processes but on every biological scale, from subcellular molecules to global ecosystems. In recent months, the investigators have applied their equation to a host of phenomena, from the mutation rate in cellular DNA to Earth's carbon cycle.

Carlos Martinez del Rio, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, hails the team's work as a major step forward. "I think they have provided us with a unified theory for ecology," he says...

"We've found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these rates and times are remarkably similar," says Gillooly.

A single equation predicts so much, the researchers contend, because metabolism sets the pace for myriad biological processes. An animal with a high metabolic rate processes energy quickly, so it can pump its heart quickly, grow quickly, and reach maturity quickly.

Unfortunately, that animal also ages and dies quickly, since the biochemical reactions involved in metabolism produce harmful by-products called free radicals, which gradually degrade cells.

"Metabolic rate is, in our view, the fundamental biological rate," Gillooly says. There is a universal biological clock, he says, "but it ticks in units of energy, not units of time..."

The researchers have also discovered that the number of trees of a given mass in a forest follows the same scaling law governing the number of branches of a given size on an individual tree. "The forest as a whole behaves as if it is a very large tree," West says.

(Science News Online, Feb. 12, 2005)

Contactlink Keeps You Connected

(Disclaimer: blatant commercial for an associated venture!)

From http://www.contactlink.com:

Contactlink Keeps You Connected

Stay reachable and connected on your own terms.

Be found and reachable by the people you want (long lost friends, former classmates, old business associates, etc.) without making your current contact information public.

Be found in any search engine by the search terms that you want to be found by.

When people find you in search engines, they reach your Contactlink Door web page - where they need to identify themselves so you can decide whether or not they then actually reach you.

From http://www.contactlink.com/help.html:

Once you have set up your account, you will have your very own Contactlink Address (contactlink.com/door/example) that points to your Contactlink Door.

You can use this address in many different ways.

1. Instead of an email address. Instead of exposing your email address to spammers on your blog, personal website, or corporate bio page, use your Contactlink Address instead. That way you can stay reachable without having to make any contact information public - and you always get to see who it is before deciding whether or not to respond...

2. In addition to an email address. Putting your Contactlink Web Address in your email signature line makes a whole bunch of sense - especially from a work or school email address that you may lose someday - since it gives people an alternate way of still reaching you.

When someone clicks on your Contactlink Web Address:

If they are not already connected with you... they can request to connect (and if you accept, you automatically get updated as their shared contact information changes).

If they are already connected with you... they see the latest version of the info you chose to share with them. This may seem somewhat trivial until you realize that with that one web address in your email signature you can present different views (Contactlink Cards) of your information with the people you correspond with - so you can automagically share just what you want with just who you want.

There are many other features, benefits, and uses of Contactlink, so why not just go check them out for yourself?

If you don't already have a Contactlink Account, click here to get started!

How to Start a Startup

Yet another excellent essay by Paul Graham (founder of Viaweb, which was later bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Stores). Also, check out his new A Unified Theory of VC Suckage essay and the Summer Founders Program! (His previously mentioned book, Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, is also excellent).

Microsoft Firefox Default?

"Interesting bit: when you just enter “http” into the Firefox address bar and press enter, it will take you to the Microsoft homepage. This might sound like fodder for conspiracy theories, but what actually happens? The answer is simple: if you do not use a full URL, Firefox will start its default search function. And searching Google for “http” has Microsoft.com as first result (Google heavily weighs in link text into their ranking calculation, and many people use “http://www.microsoft.com” as link text). And of course, entering “about:mozilla” into Firefox is fodder for yet another conspiracy theory..." (Google Blogoscoped)