SAIC’s plans to move its corporate headquarters from San Diego, where the company was founded in 1969, to McLean, VA, may rank as one of the defense contractor’s worst-kept secrets. Today the company also known as Science Applications International Corp. made it official. In a statement issued by the company, new CEO Walt Havenstein says, “This move will formally relocate the corporate executive leadership team closer to our federal government customers enabling us to better respond quickly and efficiently to their critical needs, while maintaining a significant presence in San Diego.”

SAIC spokeswoman Laura Luke tells me by email that the relocation only affects corporate functions, and that roughly 20 corporate positions are being considered for relocation to McLean. These moves would take place by next summer, and operational units directly supporting customers in San Diego will not be affected, Luke says.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine hailed the move, calling SAIC a “technology and defense powerhouse” and disclosing that the company plans to invest $25 million and add 1,200 new jobs in the Northern Virginia area over the next three years. About 17,500 of SAIC’s estimated 45,000-employee workforce already works in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area.

SAIC ranks among a handful of Fortune 500 companies in San Diego. The company had annual revenues of $10.1 billion for its fiscal year that ended Jan. 31.

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Last night, Google hosted a series of technology talks at its Fremont office in Seattle. The goal was to give the tech community a look at the core technologies and problems Google is working on in the Northwest—the first time Google Seattle has spoken publicly in detail about a number of projects it’s pursuing. Between its Seattle and Kirkland, WA, offices, Google has more than 500 employees here, making it one of the three largest outposts for the Internet giant outside of its Mountain View, CA, headquarters (the other two are in New York and Zurich, Switzerland).

Brian Bershad, Google’s Seattle site director, said the company has gone through a period of six or seven months of slowed growth (along with everyone else). But it has emerged from that and is hiring again. “We’re back in the mode where we’re looking for extremely strong talent,” Bershad said.

Three tech talks followed. I heard nothing earth-shattering, but Google provided an in-depth and unusually transparent look at how its local engineers are pushing the state of the art in the company’s key products. Some of this was clearly aimed at building relationships with the local technology talent pool. Here’s a brief recap:

—Stephen Adams, a staff software engineer, discussed his project on Web browser security. Like any browser, Google Chrome, which has 30 million users, needs periodic updates (software patches) to stay secure from viruses and other bugs. The problem is these patches are huge and take a lot of time and bandwidth to download. Adams figured out a clever way to reduce the size of a patch from 1 megabyte down to about 79 kilobytes (better than a factor of 10). Adams said he’s been going to Mountain View headquarters to work with the Chrome team on building the product, code-named “Courgette.”

—Peeyush Ranjan, engineering director for search, gave an overview of how his team is improving Google’s core search engine technology. One area they’ve been pushing is the freshness of search results—how to find and rapidly rank the importance of new Web pages as they come online. Another area is improving Google’s Hot Trends feature, which tells you the top rising queries in the search stream (terms like Hurricane Katrina or Apple iPhone). He also mentioned some future work in real-time search and push-based Web, but didn’t elaborate. Ranjan did say Google has a special team in Kirkland dedicated to pushing the state of the art in Web search.

—Chee Chew, engineering director for client and applications tools, talked about advances in desktop software and Web apps. He touched on Gmail tools—viewing attachments without having to download PowerPoint or PDF reader, and uploading groups of photos with one drag and click. Chew also showed a demo for a project on how to make it so adding video to the Web is as simple as adding an image.

Afterward, there were questions from the audience on how Google can make money on some of these products, and why it chose to go open-source for Chrome. “Let’s agree that Google is an Internet focused company” Chew said. “Our Internet apps are richer, faster, more robust. That helps our business model.” Bershad added that there are millions of paying Google Apps customers. Kirkland site director Scott Silver added that not every Google product has to make money.

As for the open source question, Bershad said, “Much of what we do, we want to see other companies pick up.” The best way to drive engineers to build valuable applications on top of existing platforms like Google’s, he said, is to “show them what you’re doing.”

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[Updated and corrected, August 11---see below]
Anyone who has spent much time in universities knows that openness, teamwork, and collaboration are widely taught, but not always widely practiced. And when it comes to implementing entirely new models of education, well, let’s just say that institutional barriers, turf wars, bureaucracy, and tradition all too often derail significant change.

Better to start from scratch.

That, anyway, was the watchword of an experiment begun 12 years ago in Wellesley, MA, when the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering was created. Built on 70 acres purchased from Babson College next door, Olin was founded specifically to pioneer a new model of engineering education. It has no academic departments, and no tenure. The curriculum is designed to be retired after seven years. Students focus on real-world projects crafted around a commitment to design, functionality, and usability far more than an understanding of science. And, oh yeah, everyone who’s admitted in gets a full ride on tuition, or at least they did (more on that later). [The last sentence originally said Olin intended to offer students free tuition and room. Olin officials say that while free tuition was planned in perpetuity, the school only intended to offer room for the first class, which it did.]

Olin graduated its first class just four years ago, so the experiment is still an experiment-but one with encouraging early results and exciting long-term possibilities. I went out to Wellesley recently to learn more about Olin first hand from director of business development Ron Guerriero, VP for development J. Thomas Krimmel, and rising junior and entrepreneur Evan Morikawa. Not everything has gone as planned, according to this crew. But the upstart college has already produced a crop of Fulbright scholars and is finding ready jobs for its graduates at Microsoft, Google, Akamai, and a host of other leading companies. It even has a plan for introducing its model to more traditional schools.

Here are some highlights:

—About 300 total students, all undergraduates
—Three degree programs: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and a broad Engineering degree
— 9-1 student-teacher ratio
— 91 percent of students graduate (40-60 percent appears to be the norm for U.S. colleges, according to the statistics I found)
—42 percent of this year’s graduating class, and 54 percent of the incoming class, are women (the highest in the country for an undergrad engineering program, according to Olin) [An earlier version of this point said that 47 percent of the incoming freshman class were women. Women will be about 47 percent of the entire student population this fall. ]
—17 percent of the study body are alumni of FIRST Robotics, Dean Kamen’s popular student robotics competition

The overriding concept behind Olin is that to compete successfully in today’s global economy, American engineering students need strong technical skills coupled to a better understanding of business and entrepreneurial thinking and broad cultural experiences offered by the arts and humanities. The engineering coursework is geared at providing loads of experience in creating real-world products—with product teams, timelines, and all the rest.

The college was founded by the Franklin W. Olin Foundation, named for the early-20th-century ammunition magnate, in 1997. After purchasing land from Babson College and creating Olin College, the foundation then dissolved itself.

The first employee—Rick Miller, the only president the school has had—was hired in 1999. Initial faculty came the next year, from places like MIT, Harvard, and Vanderbilt, and the core of the first class arrived in the fall of 2001, roughly 30 of them. They are known as “the partners,” …Next Page »

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Engineering may be a numbers-driven profession, but it’s the context surrounding the numbers that makes all the difference. NASA learned that the hard way in September 1999. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory programmed thrusters on the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was designed to take up a permanent orbit around the Red Planet, to expect data in metric units. But as the craft approached Mars, engineers from contractor Lockheed Martin sent final navigation instructions in English units, causing the thrusters to fire with 4.45 times too much force. The $327 million craft went off course and burned up in the Martian atmosphere.

If the raw thruster-firing data supplied by Lockheed had been inherently tied to a unit of measurement—pounds of force in this case, as opposed to the newtons that the software expected—then flight controllers, or the software itself, might have detected the confusion before it was too late. But ten years ago, the concept of metadata, or associating numbers or other data in their raw form with external data about that data, was still fairly new. Only in the era of the semantic Web have a few people started to think about ways to indelibly couple numerical data to contextual data, thus providing every individual number with a kind of credential or pedigree.

Allen Razdow is one of those people. The creator of Mathcad, a software package widely used by engineers to display equations and perform calculations, Razdow has started a new company called True Engineering Technology to promote the idea that numbers in digital documents should be “live” and “connected”—that is, they should be illuminated by adding a bit of semantic information, in much the same way that text snippets are associated with URLs in hyperlinks.

True Engineering, based in Cambridge, MA, came out of stealth mode today, debuting a Web-based system that can turn a plain number into what Razdow calls a “truenumber.” Just like a hyperlink with an embedded URL, a truenumber includes an ID pointing to a record stored elsewhere, along with tags pertaining to properties of the number such as units. But unlike a hyperlink, a truenumber can do more than just send you off to another document. The metadata contained in a truenumber can also be grabbed and used by local applications—browsers, spreadsheets, e-mail clients, or presentation software, for example—to make the raw number more informative.

Here’s an actual truenumber, representing the approximate driving range of the Nissan EV-11 electric car: 150 mi. To get a sense of how a truenumber works, hover over the quantity, then click on it (then come back here).

The original goal of the project, says Razdow, was “to create a technology for numbers that allowed engineers, as they type numbers into things, to get some assistance formatting them and getting the units right, doing unit conversion, and making sure the number is correct and traceable back to the original number, whatever format it was in.” He says he sees the rise of markup languages like HTML and the semantic Web as the restoration, in a sense, of human language to a computing universe long ruled by graphical interfaces. “But it struck me that there was no special treatment for numbers,” Razdow says. “We have formatted text for headings and tables and everything else, but numbers are still just strings of characters. I began to think about what it would take to create a technology of numbers that would be sufficiently semantic that it wouldn’t be just digits, but would show what this number is, and where it came from, and how we can describe it.”

All of which sounds like it will appeal to the thousands of professionals who use programs like Mathcad—and would certainly have helped the engineers on the Mars Climate Orbiter mission avert their fiasco.

But Razdow believes truenumbers will quickly develop another use. “I think the bigger reason people will use it is for a kind of visibility,” he says. “What we’ve heard from [beta] customers is that a lot of numbers that are critical to their projects are just ‘hanging in the air’—all of the engineers are thinking about them but they don’t live anywhere, they just get …Next Page »

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It may be one of the great untold success stories of the Seattle technology scene. For the past decade, R.W. Beck, an engineering and business consulting firm, has been quietly making a name for itself in key technical areas like energy and water management.

Now the Seattle-based firm with 550 employees is becoming part of the closely guarded empire of SAIC (NYSE: SAI), the government contractor also known as Science Applications International Corporation. The companies did not disclose financial terms under the agreement they announced two weeks ago. But Xconomy has learned from a source familiar with the deal that the price was $155 million.

That amounts to 1.5 percent of SAIC’s $10.1 billion in annual revenue, and it seems unlikely SAIC will interpret R.W. Beck’s price tag as a “material event” requiring disclosure. Still, at $155 million, the deal represents one of the biggest acquisitions—if not the biggest—of a Seattle-area firm since Bellevue, WA-based SnapIn Software was bought by Nuance for $180 million last summer.

Even though SAIC’s core business is contract research and engineering, R.W. Beck’s focus on energy and water infrastructure represents a somewhat unusual foray into civil engineering for the San Diego conglomerate, which generates most of its revenue from defense and intelligence contracts. (A more characteristic deal for SAIC was last week’s acquisition of Atlan, a cybersecurity product testing firm based in McLean, VA, that specializes in validating cryptographic modules, including software and hardware components, to meet federal standards.)

If nothing else, though, SAIC has been extraordinarily adept at catching the big waves in government contracting—and right now, energy is huge. One of the biggest clues to SAIC’s plans for R.W. Beck was a contract that my colleague Bruce Bigelow noted in February, which basically pre-qualifies SAIC to compete for energy conservation contracts throughout the federal government.

Another noteworthy energy-related deal that SAIC landed was a $14.9 million contract to develop economical methods for making JP-8 grade jet fuel from algae. It turns out the Pentagon is interested in developing alternative sources for all that jet fuel that U.S. military aircraft use.

When I reached R.W. Beck president and CEO Russ Stepp last week, he said the deal with SAIC is expected to close on August 1. He had no comment on its size, but did speak freely about what the deal means to both sides.

First of all, the acquisition does not mean R.W. Beck employees will be relocating en masse to San Diego, nor will there be downsizing of the firm’s business operations, Stepp says. Most employees …Next Page »

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A wise man once told me, “Engineers don’t lie.” So when I wanted to find out the real story behind Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, I went to Harry Shum. Shum is Microsoft’s vice president of search product development. He runs the engineering team responsible for Bing, among other duties. He was formerly the managing director of Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, and he’s a Microsoft distinguished engineer. A few weeks ago, he granted a rare in-depth interview about all things Bing. He also spoke publicly about the search effort at this week’s Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, WA.

What’s most striking about Bing is how well it has been received so far—especially compared to other recent high-profile Microsoft products (Windows Vista comes to mind). Bing, which was launched in full last month along with a serious marketing effort, has received mostly positive reviews, and has spurred a modest but significant increase in Microsoft’s market share in Web search—8.4 percent in June, up from 8 percent in May, according to comScore.

So a lot has already been written about it, of course. But I wanted to hear from Bing’s head of engineering about the deeper process of building the software, the technology behind it, and the culture of the search group within Microsoft—and, crucially, how its approach is different from other product groups in the company, in terms of the mindset of its engineers. There may be some important lessons in product innovation here.

Shum began with some historical context. Microsoft has been working on its search product for about six years, he said, while Google has been on the case for more than twice as long. Back in the 1990s, top Microsoft researchers like Eric Horvitz and Nathan Myhrvold talked about building a search engine and crawling the whole Web (only tens of millions of pages back then) with just a few dozen machines. But in terms of product development, Microsoft freely admits it came to search late and remains a heavy underdog in the battle for market share. “The competition is here, and we recognize and respect that,” says Shum, who took over the search team in the fall of 2007.

Indeed, Bing is a new opportunity in a long line of Microsoft search engines—MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. “We really believe Bing represents a dramatic improvement in search,” Shum says. “It goes beyond a search engine. We claim Bing is a decision engine. It’s a tool to help users make everyday decisions.”

Whether you’re trying to buy a pair of shoes for a particular occasion, or looking up the local weather to decide how to dress, or tracking a package online, Bing tries to figure out your …Next Page »

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While the Mariners are still in contention for the American League West lead, I thought it might be useful to make some analogies between baseball teams and startup companies. This came out of a recent chat I had with Matt Hulett, the chief executive of Seattle-based Mpire, makers of the Widgetbucks ad network and AdXpose software for marketers and publishers. Hulett, an Xconomist, also has previous experience at Expedia, RealNetworks, and Atom Entertainment.

Lately, he has been coaching his young son’s T-Ball team. Besides it being lots of fun, there happen to be some important parallels between running a sports team and running a startup, he says. (I know a number of other executives and investors around town who coach sports as well, and I’d like to hear their thoughts on this too.)

Here are a few points of advice from Hulett, to get started:

—Clarify roles and responsibilities. Kids in the field like to play all positions at once, unless they’re told exactly what to do. A third baseman might run over to first base during the course of a play, for instance. The same goes for startups. “The natural thing at a small company is everyone does everything,” Hulett says. For example, the chief technology officer might be the main development engineer as well as the head manager. “But as a company gets bigger, it’s hard to give that power out.” This, he says, is ultimately fixable by clarifying everyone’s role.

—Do lots of drills. As we talked, Hulett stood up and demonstrated a five-step drill to help his kids learn to throw the ball (don’t forget to follow through). They do it repeatedly to master the skill. “A lot of companies pivot too much, so they never get really good at anything. They don’t have the muscle memory in their company,” Hulett says. The startup equivalent to these drills might be focusing on one particular product area, or having employees work diligently to improve specific skill sets.

—Figure out when to bring in fresh talent off the bench. “There is an art to when you bring in the relief pitcher,” Hulett says. He would know—he was brought in as a new CEO in 2006, when Mpire made the switch from an eBay seller-tool business to an ad network. To me, this point sounds like it’s about being able to adapt to the market, and your competition, as much as knowing your own team.

T-Ball analogies aside, Hulett also pointed out a broader and more difficult challenge that startups face: management bias. That means that the management team’s inherent way of thinking, based on the industry and roles they have come from, may not always match the market their startup is going after. “Engineering-oriented companies make engineering-based decisions, and are not necessarily customer focused,” he says. An example of this might be Microsoft. As a company gets bigger, Hulett says, there is often a divide between its customers and the people who make the products.

So which big companies have done a particularly good job of staying customer focused? Hulett points to Nordstrom and Southwest Airlines, to name a couple. “Most businesses are customer facing, but most businesses don’t do the best job organizing around the customer,” he says.

One last piece of advice: customers will never tell you what to build, Hulett says, but they’ll give you insight into what problem to solve. As a startup, you should jump on that. “As you get bigger, though, it’s easier to take your eye off the ball.”

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This is the time of year when I look for hot young prospects for my fantasy baseball team. Maybe that’s why it seemed natural to think of Matt O’Donnell, the dean of the University of Washington’s College of Engineering, as being like a baseball general manager. Part of his job is to recruit and develop talented young stars across information technology, biotech, and cleantech, in hopes that a few will blossom into the next Evan Longoria of their field. (For those who don’t follow sports, Longoria is a star third baseman for the Tampa Bay Rays.)

O’Donnell, who was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in February, joined the UW in 2006 from the University of Michigan. He’s a physicist by training who found his niche in sophisticated medical imaging technologies, including ultrasound, optoacoustics, and using catheters with tiny cameras to look inside coronary arteries. So bioengineering is his comfort zone, but as Dean, he oversees 10 different engineering departments, including computer science and materials science.

When I stopped by O’Donnnell’s office last week, I put him on the spot, asking him to name five young talents to watch for the future in IT, biotech, and cleantech. Here’s who he picked:

Suzie Pun

Pun got her doctorate in chemical engineering from Caltech in 2000, and has already gotten some national attention for UW with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2006. She was recently granted tenure as a bioengineering professor, O’Donnell says. Pun’s latest research interest, in collaboration with UW’s Patrick Stayton, is in using polymer materials to improve the delivery of biotech drugs into cells, a project that won more than $7 million in support from the state’s Life Sciences Discovery Fund.

This polymer chemistry work holds the potential to solve some of biology’s big problems—how to deliver gene therapy and RNA interference molecules efficiently throughout the body, make them last long enough to work, and get them precisely to the right targets not just on the surface of cells, but inside them where they can be more effective, O’Donnell says. “She’s young, she’s bright, she’s energetic,” O’Donnell says.

Xiaohu Gao

“He’s a brewer,” O’Donnell says. This doesn’t mean Gao plays for the major league team in Milwaukee. It means …Next Page »

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At a luncheon that followed the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit on Friday, I sat with Bob Dynes, the former President of the University of California system, who began talking about the formation of CalIT2 (Cal-IT-squared) almost a decade ago.

These days, the research center also known as the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology is playing an increasingly central role in multi-disciplinary advances that span academic departments, campuses, and even industries. The prevalence of CalIT2’s influence was evident throughout presentations made at the summit, which was organized for venture investors as a showcase of San Diego’s innovative capabilities. Sony Electronics, for example, used an algorithm developed at CalIT2’s machine perception lab as the basis for the “shutter smile” technology in the company’s latest generation of consumer digital cameras.

“Who would ever have guessed that CalIT2 would look the way it does today!” exclaimed Dynes, who spent 22 years at Bell Labs before arriving at UC San Diego as a physics professor in 1991. Dynes became UCSD’s chancellor in 1996, and told me he began working to create the institute—and to recruit founding director (and Xconomist) Larry Smarr—in 1999.

CalIT2 is one of four institutes for science and innovation that California Gov. Gray Davis officially launched in 2002 by signing legislation that provided $308 million in lease-revenue bonds. Since then, CalIT2 has come to embody Smarr’s ambitious vision for tackling daunting, large-scale problems.

“What we’ve succeeded in is this idea of institutional innovation,” Smarr said in an interview. By using the power of high-speed networks and high-performance computing, Smarr said CalIT2 can take on seemingly intractable problems in everything from molecular biology to atmospheric science by assembling multidisciplinary teams of the best minds, whether or not they are on UC campuses. He calls it a “persistent framework for collaboration.”

New buildings for CalIT2 were built at …Next Page »

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New ideas for alternative energy and cleantech were in the air on Tuesday at the University of Washington, which hosted a regional meeting of the National Academy of Engineering and a public symposium on energy topics. We’ve taken a keen interest in this subject lately at Xconomy as we prepare for our own Northwest cleantech event next week, and wanted to hear from a couple of our very own Xconomists—Ed Lazowska of UW computer science and engineering (who co-organized the meeting), and Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and the former president of MIT.

In his opening remarks, Vest noted that the National Academy of Engineering will soon release a report called “America’s Energy Future.” “We hope it will become a bible for policymakers to understand what the technological and economic facts are about most of the major technologies that may play a role in the next 10 to 20 years in the distribution, generation, and transportation of electrical energy,” Vest said. “It will not be a policy document, but it will be a basis of facts which we hope those in Congress and the administration will utilize.”

Here are a few highlights from three of the ensuing energy talks:

—Rob Pratt, a staff scientist and program manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, spoke about “smart grid” technologies and how minute-by-minute communications and monitoring of energy use could lead to huge overall savings in cost and carbon emissions.

In California, for example, an estimated 1 percent decrease in electricity demand would lead to a 10 percent decrease in energy bills, because electricity generation is most expensive during times of peak demand (e.g., hot summer days). That could translate into some $50 billion in savings for the U.S., if people had enough information about power usage to adjust their consumption levels.

Pratt presented the results of a trial of 112 homes on the Olympic Peninsula, in which letting customers explicitly control their energy usage and savings (and guaranteeing they would not pay more than normal) led to a 15 percent decrease in peak load demand over the course of a year. “You need a simple, intuitive interface,” Pratt said. “Do you need standards for [smart grid] communication? Ours were simple—you need to understand cost, quantity, and time.”

As for his outlook, Pratt said, “I predict this country will embark on an energy efficiency program that will make anything else we’ve done look like child’s play.” He noted that the cleanest power plants are the ones that produce energy for intermediate demand levels—not the peak, not the lowest. And he sees a big opportunity in electric vehicles, provided people manage the timing of charging them up. Giving consumers and utilities minute-by-minute data to track usage levels will be crucial. “The smart grid can help sort this out,” he said. “If we buy the smart grid, this is free. This is like software.”

—Tim Rahmes, biofuels program manager at Boeing (he’s based in Everett, WA), spoke about his team’s recent efforts to test biofuels for aviation. Boeing’s customers in the airline and defense industries are concerned with carbon emissions, fuel availability, and fuel costs, he said. The most important thing about Boeing’s biofuel effort is that it must be sustainable, and not compete with …Next Page »

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Redmond, WA-based Microvision, a mobile imaging and display company, announced it has been awarded a $750,000 contract to begin developing a high-definition, see-through eyewear display. The name of the customer was not disclosed. The wearable display is designed to be full-color and transparent to the surroundings.

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Why can’t big companies invent? How should inventors handle their intellectual property? And what are countries around the world doing on these fronts? I recently stopped by Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA, to get the scoop from Patrick Ennis, IV’s global head of technology. Ennis was a venture capitalist with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle for 10 years before taking his current post in early 2008. (Between jobs, he took some time off and, among other things, chopped wood full-time for a week.)

Back in October, Xconomy reported that Ennis is heading up Intellectual Ventures’ expansion in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Singapore. The invention company, which is led by founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, currently has some $5 billion under management, 450-plus employees, and 160 university partnerships around the world. I wanted to get a deeper sense of Ennis’s philosophies on invention and intellectual property on a global scale.

Ennis organized his thoughts loosely around a talk he gave last month at the Ready To Commercialize 2008 conference, run by the Office of Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas (which happened to be IV’s 100th university partner). In Austin, he spoke on game-changing approaches to commercializing inventions. The conversation we had over lunch in Bellevue was free-flowing and touched on everything from anatomy and antibiotics to Sumerian culture and the Renaissance.

I was particularly intrigued by Ennis’s take on the current state of global competition and its historical context. “It’s a complicated world,” he said. “Leonardo da Vinci could do what he did because the world was not as complicated. Leonardo could not be a Renaissance person today—there’s too much to know.”

A few more highlights from Ennis, in his own words:

—On doing business at Intellectual Ventures: “We want to create a market for invention. We want to reward inventors, perfect the process of invention, and make invention respectable…We don’t ask for exclusive deal sourcing agreements, we like to earn our business a deal at a time, the old-fashioned way. All organizations, if they succeed, have to fight the hubris thing. You see that with all big companies. IBM had it, Microsoft had it, and Google, quicker than any other startup, got it. It’s amazing how the hubris seeped into Google real quick. And the backlash is coming—you see it in the EU and, to a certain extent, in the States.”

“We’re a collection of individuals, and business is always done personally, one on one, whether you work for a 10-person company, or 450, or 4,000,” Ennis says. “That’s when companies lose their way, …Next Page »

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Chandigarh, Sunday, December 7—I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improved four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city that the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dental school graduate, to a young engineer who works with Tata. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S. to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarh is considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India’s bread basket. However, most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S..

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarh, and I had the chance to meet with the director of the college, Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example, he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Philips Labs from Delhi. Philips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India; they support all Philips divisions, including the medical division in Andover, MA. For instance, they recently launched a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India, as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston University has a world-renowned public health department that has projects in India; I need to connect them to Philips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, which has been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cell phone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cell phone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cell phone retail distributors. Usha has been struggling to differentiate itself on grounds other than price. To illustrate how powerful this can be, the CEO told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but had stumbled onto a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most India villages and is unreliable when it is.

I asked him if he had considered differentiating on the cell phone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers. I will discuss this further with him when I return to Delhi.

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This time last week, Nathan Myhrvold was sitting down with Bill Gates. Gates had just returned from the Olympics, where he had watched some high-profile ping-pong matches—a very hot ticket in China. The two former Microsoft colleagues were catching up, and their discussion turned to racquet sports, and the various technical differences between them.

“Bill was telling me that badminton is also insanely popular there,” says Myhrvold. “So then I asked him to compare, ‘OK, you’ve got three implementations of what’s fundamentally the same game—tennis, badminton, and ping-pong. How do they differ?’ So we started discussing the parameters of it.” They made a list of important factors: serve speed, number of shots per rally, average rally time, size of the court, and so forth. “A naïve guy like me watching these expert ping-pong guys,” Myhrvold goes on, “there’s this blur of the white ball, but man the rally’s lasting forever! Versus tennis, I’ve watched a few times, the guy goes ka-whap with his blinding serve, and that’s it. If you can break his serve, you’re there. Bill says badminton is kind of in the middle.”

And why is that? “I bet you could figure that out,” Myhrvold says. “I bet it’s part physics, and part rules. With badminton, you can’t do anything like those serves, because the thing, the shuttlecock, resists going fast. Probably there’s a Reynolds number effect that’s the same thing in ping pong—although it goes fast, the coverage of the table is such that it’d be like tennis if either the ball was really slow or you could run really fast, because you can actually move your paddle—I’ve only played it a couple times in my life—but it’s only this far that you’re moving it. So it’s probably something like the ratio of the ball speed to lining up on it, and then, if that’s true, you’d expect that doubles might be different because each player has a more limited field, so you’ve cut their angle down, so something can come cross-wise in ways you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. But that’s just a guess…It’d be fun to see if someone has looked into this. You’d like to get some stats, like from the Olympics.”

Welcome to Myhrvold’s world. Given the rules of any game, you can figure out the underlying mechanisms and make predictions—and then start testing them with different scenarios and real-world data. It’s the way Myhrvold has always been—intensely curious and analytical—from his years working on quantum cosmology with Stephen Hawking through his time as Microsoft CTO and founder of Microsoft Research. And it’s no different at his current home, Intellectual Ventures, the private company he co-founded in 2000, which has been described by some as an “invention factory.” Its goal is to create a new marketplace for inventions—both by developing its own patents and buying up those of others around the world. Intellectual Ventures is tight-lipped about its funding, but it is rumored to have raised—or be in the process of raising—several billion dollars from big companies and investors.

I had a chance to visit with Myhrvold (he’s an Xconomist) last week at the Intellectual Ventures laboratory, a recent addition to the company located in an unmarked industrial building in Bellevue, WA. First, I got a tour of the lab from Geoff Deane, VP of engineering (see photo; he’s on the right talking with Myhrvold), who was tapped to run the facility five months ago. It is a giant work in progress—17,000 square feet—that started up 14 months ago, and has about 30 people working there so far.

The most striking thing about the lab is how much equipment is scattered throughout. And how many different types of scientific instruments there are. To explain the look of the lab, Deane quotes Thomas Edison: “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” He says the approach is to buy old equipment “for pennies” and then restore it, or mix and match parts to make high-quality working instruments: oscilloscopes, spectrometers, lathes, mills, lasers, a water-jet cutter, you name it. These tools of the invention trade are distributed amongst an almost comically wide variety of lab stations: a kitchen lab full of Willy-Wonka-like contraptions (Myhrvold is working on a cooking-science textbook), a full-service machine shop, an electronics shop, a photonics lab, even a mosquito-growing chamber to study malaria interventions. And that’s just what they chose to show me. I half-expected to see Morgan Freeman and the Batmobile hiding behind a screen.

Regarding the role of the lab in Intellectual Ventures’ business, Deane makes an analogy that he admits is simplified, but gets the point across. “Imagine a swimming pool that’s infinitely long and wide, but only an inch deep,” says Deane. The idea is to be able to dip a toe into any spot in the pool, he says, and see if the water’s promising there. If it is, they can get the further tools and resources to investigate whether an invention can come of it. But first they have to be able to do basic experiments across a very wide range of technical fields.

Which is a good lead-in to what Intellectual Ventures is all about. I sat down with Myhrvold for a far-ranging interview that began with the topic of theoretical physics—and could easily have stayed there for hours. (With next month’s opening of the Large Hadron Collider, the most eagerly anticipated particle accelerator in history, Myhrvold was full of ideas on what they might or might not discover there. He also thinks there’s been nothing revolutionary in physics since Einstein, is unimpressed by string theory, and notes that, for all the efforts to find top talent around the world, “there’s never been an Einstein from America!”)

But I also found out that the lab isn’t the only new facility brewing at Intellectual Ventures. The company will be rolling out new offices in five Asian countries this fall—part of a new strategy to provide tech transfer services around the world, and also to partner with existing technology licensing organizations at universities and research institutions in those nations.

I didn’t even get a chance to ask about Myhrvold’s almost-legendary “outside” exploits in cooking, photography, or paleontology. But his answers, starting today and concluding tomorrow and covering ideas from inventing a new type of nuclear reactor to stopping hurricanes, give a pretty complete picture of what Intellectual Ventures is really trying to do—and its current progress in supporting what he sees as the most precious of commodities: inventions.

Xconomy: Before we talk about Intellectual Ventures, can you say a few words about the Seattle area as an innovation cluster?

Nathan Myhrvold: This is a very innovative area. Seven or eight years ago, I wrote for National Geographic Traveler about the city. I wrote that, all of a sudden, Seattle in the 1990s became a center of cultural innovation in almost every way you could imagine. Starbucks Coffee is here, Microsoft is here, strangely Nintendo is here. Even more strangely …Next Page »

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If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a box spring up a stairway or down a narrow hall into your bedroom, then you can imagine how comically awkward and expensive it would be to ship one via UPS or FedEx. Which explains why box springs (otherwise known as mattress foundations) aren’t exactly big sellers on e-commerce websites. But what if there were a way to make a box spring that collapsed to a manageable size for shipping, then unfolded to its full dimensions in the customer’s home? Then the lowly box spring might finally be able to join the Internet revolution.

That was the idea that struck engineers at Leggett & Platt a couple of years ago. While the Carthage, MO-based manufacturer isn’t a household name, almost every mattress sold contains some L&P components; indeed, co-founder J.P. Leggett invented the spiral steel coil bedspring in 1883. Despite the company’s history of bedding innovation, however, the L&P engineers weren’t quite sure how to squeeze a fully upholstered box spring into a box small enough to put on a UPS truck.

Fortunately, Leggett & Platt owned a piece of software called Goldfire Innovator, made by Boston-based Invention Machine. Imagine that you’re a product developer who likes to make notes and draw diagrams on a whiteboard— but that whiteboard is attached to software that understands the intention behind your drawings, labels, and notes; searches the Web and global patent databases for designs that employ similar concepts; automatically serves up references to related literature; and even makes suggestions about how to improve your sketches. That’s roughly what Goldfire Innovator does.

According to Vincent Lyons, vice president of engineering and technology at Leggett & Platt, the company’s mattress designers had Goldfire Innovator at their sides as they pored over the mechanical, ergonomic, and materials-science problems associated with building a collapsible box spring. Because the team could use the software to quickly search internal company databases and external patent literature for related ideas—including concepts already patented by other companies that the engineers would need to work around—”we were able to speed up the development of the product by at least a third,” as Lyons told one podcast interviewer. The result: the Leggett & Plat Semi-Fold Box Spring, a mechanical marvel that hit the market in 2007 and folds up into a rectangular shape with one-quarter the volume of a traditional mattress foundation.

I’m not the type to get excited about mattresses, but I was so curious to see how the Semi-Fold works that when I saw the Leggett & Platt box during a recent visit to Invention Machine’s 38th-floor offices at the Prudential Center I made the staff take the assembly out of the box and unfold it so I could take a couple of pictures. Seeing how elegantly the device opened up and snapped into its solid, unfolded shape made it easier to understand why Goldfire Innovator, after only three years on the market, has found its way into more than 500 of the Forbes Global 2000 manufacturing companies.

“We bring ideas to reality,” says Invention Machine CEO Mark Atkins. (If that sounds like an echo of General Electric’s old tag line, “We bring good things to life,” it might not be a total accident. GE was one of Invention Machine’s earliest customers, and the “o” in the company’s logo is shaped like a light bulb.) The company’s history stretches back to 1992, when it was founded by Valery Tsourikov, an engineer in Belarus. His own big idea was to embody in software the so-called “value analysis” principle at the core of Soviet scientist Genrich Altshuller’s Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (more commonly known by its Russian acronym, TRIZ). Roughly speaking, TRIZ advises engineers to assign a value or importance to each component of a problem, then prioritize their research according to those values. And Goldfire Innovator provides an easy format for doing so.

But Tsourikov also wanted to speed that research by giving engineers a way to search the Internet and other knowledge bases according to various types of physical or conceptual relationships, not just keywords. To a traditional search engine, there isn’t much difference between “a pump moving water” and “moving a water pump,” because, for the most part, they look at individual words or strings of words, with no attention to the concepts they embody. But obviously, the two phrases have completely different meanings—and Tsourikov’s inspiration was to …Next Page »

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How much does it take to jumpstart a serious academic research initiative these days? Apparently the answer is $20 million.

That’s the amount pledged for two different projects announced this week. One is an initiative at MIT to study major psychiatric diseases including bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia, and the other is an agreement between Harvard researchers and German chemical giant BASF to support postdoctoral students studying a range of problems in physics, chemistry, and biology.

At MIT, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research announced that it has received a $20 million gift from MIT alumnus James Poitras and his wife, Patricia, of Narcoossee, FL, to create the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research. The funds will go to support research into the genetic and environmental roots of depression and related illnesses, which are estimated to affect 9.5 percent of the U.S. population, or some 21 million people, every year.

“We decided many years ago, when bipolar disorder first affected our family directly, that our philanthropic efforts would be directed towards this area of brain research,” the Poitrases said in a statement. “We could not have imagined then that this perfect synergy between research at MIT’s McGovern Institute and our own philanthropic goals would develop. We are very hopeful for the future.”

At Harvard, the Office of Technology Development (the university’s licensing wing) and BASF announced an unusual five-year, $20 million initiative designed to “foster a vibrant and dynamic intellectual exchange” between the university and the company. BASF will fund proof-of-concept projects within Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and will have the right to develop market innovations with commercial potential.

Specifically, Harvard and BASF said they will initially investigate problems such as building polymer structures that could deliver active-ingredient molecules to specific places, in the human body or elsewhere, and controlling the growth of biofilms, microbial communities that grow on surfaces and cause problems in medical and industrial settings.

“We must be as innovative in funding and translating research as we are in conducting it,” said Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, in a statement. “By establishing the BASF Advanced Research Initiative at Harvard, we can bolster our existing excellence in basic and applied research, and develop new ways to bring research out of the lab.

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The U.S. News & World Report list of the best American colleges came out this weekend, with the print edition hitting newsstands this morning. This year, New England’s top schools are once again atop the list (not quite at the top, because Princeton holds the number one spot, a position it has held outright or shared for eight straight years). Yale, Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth…you know the names. But although the rankings are controversial and the lists contain few (if any) surprises, it’s always interesting to pore through the rankings to see if Harvard is holding Yale at bay or if MIT bests the nation’s great engineering schools—or where Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, Wellesley, ranks.

Just in case you don’t feel like spending $9.95 for the print edition, $14.95 for the premium online edition, or $19.95 for the combo package (yes, U.S. News has gotten as good at milking, I mean marketing, itself as many of the colleges and universities it covers), I’m posting below the Top Ten rankings for three categories the magazine charts. These include: National Universities, Engineering Programs, and Liberal Arts Colleges. I’ve also broken out just the New England schools for the top 50 in each of those categories.

First, though, a few observations. It’s no surprise that the Boston area, especially, is rich in top universities. Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Tufts, and Brandeis are all in the top 35 nationwide. If you look at liberal arts colleges, though, the area blows away the rest of the nation. Massachusetts boasts three of the top five in this category—and six of the first 35. Oh yes, it also plays host to the country’s top-ranked engineering school: MIT.

This is a staggering achievement. As far as I can tell, the only place that rivals Massachusetts is California. The Golden State harbors nine of the first 50 schools in the national rankings, five of the top 35 engineering programs, and four of the best 35 liberal arts colleges. So we’re pretty even, except when you consider that California’s 2006 population was about 36.5 million, compared to 6.4 million in the Bay State.

What it all boils down to is that there’s probably nowhere in the country, and quite possibly the world, that offers a higher concentration of excellent higher education. So, here’s a question: Is the area underachieving or overachieving? I’ve heard countless times in recent months that the Boston area is losing its edge as a high-tech innovation machine, especially compared to the West Coast. But the Greater Boston region is only the 11th largest in the United States. Maybe it has done incredibly well to consistently rank in the country’s top two or three areas for innovation.

Or, given its educational underpinning, coupled to the scientific and engineering expertise in the region, not to mention outstanding venture capital, legal, and management expertise, is the area somehow falling short of its promise?

The general feeling among those I’ve talked to is that we could do better. About a month ago, Xconomy profiled Frank Moss, one of our editorial advisors and director of the MIT Media Lab. In his words:

“I view the Boston area just as basically underperforming relative to its assets. Yes, it performs well in some areas. But to whom much is given, much is expected. If you look at the assets we have available, we should be outstripping every other area in the world…The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, it’s less.”

One other thought related to the U.S. News rankings: when it came to Top Public Universities, the region did not fare so well. The University of Connecticut ranked 24th in the nation. The University of Massachusetts—Amherst was mired in a seven-way tie for 45th. That’s out of 67 schools on the list, putting it near the bottom. Of course, those were the only New England institutions to even make the list. There’s really an unacceptable inconsistency between public and private school performance, given the area’s assets.

Here are the rankings—

National Universities (New England schools in bold)

1. Princeton
2. Harvard (MA)
3. Yale (CT)
4. Stanford
T5-6. University of Pennsylvania
T5-6. Caltech
7. MIT (MA)
8. Duke
T9. Columbia
T9. University of Chicago

Other New England schools in the National University Top 50

11. Dartmouth (NH)
14. Brown (RI)
28. Tufts (MA)
31. Brandeis (MA)
35. Boston College (MA)

Top Engineering Programs

1. MIT (MA)
2. Stanford
3. U.C. Berkeley
4. Caltech
T5-6. Georgia Tech
T5-6. University of Illinois—Urbana-Champagne
T7-8. University of Michigan
T7-8. Cornell
T9-11. Carnegie Mellon
T9-11. Purdue
T9-11. University of Texas

Other New England schools in the Engineering Programs Top 50.

T33-36. Harvard (MA)
T37-42. Yale (CT)
T43-47. Brown (RI)
T48-51. Dartmouth (NH)

Top Liberal Arts Colleges

1. Williams (MA)
2. Amherst (MA)
3. Swathmore
4. Wellesley (MA)
T5-6. Carleton
T5-6. Middlebury (VT)
T7-8. Bowdoin (ME)
T7-8. Pomona
9. Davidson
10. Haverford

Other New England schools in the Liberal Arts Colleges Top 50.

T11-14. Wesleyan (CT)
T17-19. Smith (MA)
T22-23. Colby (ME)
T24-24. Bates (ME)
T27-28. Mount Holyoke (MA)
33. Holy Cross (MA)
T34-35. Trinity (CT)
T44-46. Connecticut College (CT)

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