If one is to believe that a country’s long-term prosperity and growth is tied to the strength of its innovation and science, the US is in increasing trouble. I fear that we will not begin to take things seriously until we are fairly down the declining path. Marc Faber presented two interesting tables from Robert Herbold (former COO, Microsoft).

                            BS/BA Degrees  BS Engineering   % Degrees
                                    (000’s)         (000’s)          Engineering
        US                    1,253.0                59.5                   5%
        China                  567.9              219.6                  39%
        S. Korea              209.7                56.5                  27%
        Taiwan              117.4                 26.6                  23%
        Japan                 542.3              104.5                   19%

All four Asian countries have a 4-8x the relative number of students going into engineering and China & Japan have 4x and 2x the annual number of BS degrees in absolute terms compared to the US. Another set of figures is around Ph.D’s.

Students Receiving Ph.D’s in Physical Science or Engineering
                                              1987            2001      Growth
     US Citizens getting degree   4,700          4,400       (6.4%)
     Asian Citizens getting          5,600        24,900       345%

We need to sound the alarm, in my opinion, and start to get our kids excited and interested in science even before middle school while also more prominently promoting scientific role models. We also need to get them engaged in science through the likes of Junior Achievement, BizWorld, the Lego First Robotics Leagues and local museums (like the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry). Funny thinking from an Econ/History major making a living in finance…

It is too late for me to get a full post out, though I have several topics on the burner. That said, I would be interested in hearing from you (either in the comments section below or email: [email protected]) about a) topics that would be of interest to you and b) ideas/suggestions about how to make this blog more interactive or engaging. This blog will only be as useful and successful as it is relevant. Love to hear your voices…

Here is another supporting fact about our how flat our world truly has become. I use Blogbeat (thanks to Brad Feld’s suggestion) to analyze site traffic. Here is the "City Cloud", listing where visitors to my site came from since last night at Midnight until 8am today (the bigger the letter, the more traffic from that city). Pretty wild:

            Ajax Alameda BeijingBrussel
Budapest
Chicago  Geneva Hangzhou Jinan Los Angeles
Madison
  Nanjing
   Obando
Perth
  Praha
Raleigh
    Riyadh
  Shanghai
      Sherman Oaks
   Sunnyvale
  Tallinn
  Ultimo
Wilmette

Scott Burkett and I have been blogging back and forth about the importance of giving back, the power of small groups and the need for philanthropy. His most recent post, Philanthropic Entrepreneurship: Up Close talks about an entrepreneur in Atlanta, Tom Flaim, and his brother who started a not-for-profit company, First Wate Systems, to provide a variety of solar-powered water purification systems for the developing world and domestic emergency management. I am a firm believer of letting a thousand flowers bloom. I think that the ills of our society are best addressed by small groups targetting very specific issues (clearly with public policy support). This means any and all of us doing whatever little we can. Scott has a great Margaret Meade quote:  "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

I live in Winnetka, an affluent suburb of Chicago. Diversity entails having brown and blonde haired children and poverty consists of kids not getting the latest PSP game. Like all parents, I love my kids and seek to give them every advantage possible. This plays out in suburb and city after city in the US. Unwittingly, despite our best intentions, we are infecting our kids with affluenza. Wikipedia defines this as:
"The American middle class [and wealthy] is often criticized for never being
satisfied. People are constantly wanting new things and are never
satisfied with what they have. Affluenza ties into the criticisms that
there is a superabundance of popular culture and such."

Schwab’s website has an article that goes as far as to say: "Part of the problem is that many parents are oblivious to the messages
they unwittingly send their kids: that desires are simply there to be
gratified; that status and luxury are birthrights."

Is there an antidote? It grows more challenging each day to impress on our kids (and ourselves) about the effects of affluenza. We each deal with it in our own way. My wife and I are trying to get our kids exposed to other communities and to social causes early on, but it is not easy.

However, the global poverty numbers are staggering. While there are various estimates, one puts the number of people living on $2/day or less at 2.6 billion. That is roughly 9 times the population of the US. Other statistics:

Number of children in the world

2.2 billion

Number in poverty

1 billion (every second child)

Shelter, safe water and health

For the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:

• 640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)
• 400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)
• 270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)

Children out of education worldwide

121 million

Survival for children Worldwide,

• 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)
• 1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

Health of children Worldwide,

• 2.2 million children die each year because they are not immunized
• 15 million children orphaned due to HIV/AIDS (similar to the total children population in Germany or United Kingdom)

Makes one think and wonder…

My wife just bought a book for our kids by Steve Young (the motivational guy, not the quarterback) titled "Great Failures of the Extremely Successful". It is a mixture of inspirational quotes, short snippets and essays from famous people who have overcome adversity. For entrepreneurs dealing with the day to day challenges and setbacks of building the next Microsoft, it is a good read.

Some of the quotes I liked:
"You don’t drown by falling in the water;
  You drown by staying there." — Edwin Louis Cole

"What is easily achieved or acquired seems not to be long lasting while what is more difficult to achieve is more worthwhile and enduring" — John Wooden, UCLA basketball coach w/10 NCAA titles

Snippet:
For those looking for funding, just remember…
"So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’  And they said,’No.’  So, we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’"
— Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and HP interested in his and Steve Wozniak’s personal computer

…and the classic
Failed in business in 1831
Defeated for legislature in 1832
Second business failure in 1833
Suffered nervous breakdown in 1836
Defeated for Speaker in 1838
Defeated for Elector in 1840
Defeated for Congress in 1843
Defeated for Congress in 1848
Defeated for Senate in 1855
Defeated for Vice President in 1856
Defeated for Senate in 1858
Elected President of the US in 1860

Eric Schmidt spoke tonight to a packed crowd at the Economic Club. He talked about how Google views the world and what they hope to do in the coming years. Overall, it was a fairly interesting speech. Key points included:
— We live in a world of continuous distraction and multi-tasking. Just look at kids doing IM, watching video, talking to friends while doing homework. It will only get worse.
— People’s attention is the most important asset for marketers (similar in theme of the AttentionTrust initiative).
— The key to getting people’s attention is targetted advertising instead of untargetted. He asked how many people read the paper this morning or watched TV. Could they recall any ads they saw?
— Society is trying to block untargetted ads with Tivo, spam filters, Do Not call lists and such.
— Social communities will become more and more core to interactions and marketing on the web.
— An example of a social paradox: people lonely in the city.
— Group dynamics, such as predictive markets (future blog), are fascinating
— Study after study shows that groups collectively predicting/assessing dramatically outperform individual experts. How to tap? Some hedge funds trying to find ways to mine opinion from chat rooms about stocks. The trick is guaranteeing no gaming…one person, one vote.
— He said that all decisions at Google are made consensually through groups. New ideas are broken out into three person teams.
— Predators, Phishers and other such elements are greatest threat and will always be there.
— Google is working on auto-translation products. This will allow content, trapped within a language such as Japanese, to be freed for consumption world wide by all.
— Not only is the world opening up as never before, but data is unbounded as well, with handhelds having access to all content in the world. Google mobile core to this.
— Furthermore, handhelds will truly be digital assistants. They will know location & preferences in order to deliver what you want, when you want and now where you want.
— We are at the early stages here. Over 1 billion people are online, but 5 billion are not (of course 2.6 billion people get by on less than $2/day).

He took a few questions, including ones about their China interaction. How can they "do no evil" while also complying with censorship in China? He said that they want to be a part of every country’s engagement of the internet. They have to respect (though not agree with) the laws of each country.

In short, Google’s goal is to help people organize and find all information in the world, whether online or offline. Feel the fear…

It seems like everyone is suddenly a B2C, Web 2.0 service driven predominantly by user generated content.  The first wave of B2C plays have hit, delivering strong initial financial success to investors and management.  The blood is in the water and now, as is usually the case in the venture business, everyone is jumping in with both feet. You are seeing several of the pioneers like YooTube (video) and Digg (news) and some later entrants like Tagworld (community) going exponential in their growth. There is also a very long tail of new entrants coming in, taking advantage of the low cost of entry. While the revolution is early, the models are maturing quickly and the fields are getting crowded, making it increasingly difficult to break out from the crowd. Furthermore, there are a handful of logical acquirors (IAC, Yahoo, Google, etc) and once they have either bought or built their own, they will not necessarily be looking for high priced future acquisitions. This is similar to the Web 1.0 phenomenon. By 1998, enough success stories had generated enough copy cats that the chance for success dropped dramatically.

Furthermore, many of these models rely on giving away the service for free to drive rapid adoption while leveraging ad models for revenue. Recessions and slowing economic conditions have a chilling effect on the advertising world. Remember when Yahoo’s revenue dropped 40% in one year from $1.1B to 0.7B in 2001? Additionally, click fraud threatens the engine at the heart of much of this, Google’s and other ad networks’ CPC offerings.

The trick is in going where the puck will be, not where it is today. Enterprise applications are out of vogue. The sales cycles are long and firms can’t fall back on the simple ad-based models driving the B2C world. That said, there are numerous opportunities for proven technologies from the B2C side to migrate over to the B2B world. These include everything from search to social networking to blogging to predictive markets. Corporations don’t like being guinea pigs, so the fact that millions, if not tens of millions of users, have pounded away at technology, helps to reduce the “technology risk” associated with it. Clearly, these technologies will not simply transfer over as corporations are much more demanding and careful in controlling the experience with their customers and employees. Blogs and Wiki’s are two classic examples. They are concerned about rogue participants flaming their products and services or disseminating false/erroneous information.

That said, I predict that we will see a resurgence of B2B services and offerings in the coming year. We are already seeing it with several of our own Web Service infrastructure companies. After years in the wilderness, they are starting to close deals at an increasingly rapid pace.

So, get ahead of the curve. Help corporations adapt the new, promising B2C technologies to their more rigorous business needs. You have a broad array of open-source, web-service and Web 2.0 technologies to mash together in your efforts. There are many areas you can target ranging from customer intimacy & intelligence to location based services to mobile workforce applications to database analysis opportunities. The key is to get out ahead of the pack before it becomes obvious that the worm has turned.

Want to get way, way, way ahead of the pack? Later this week…Quantum Physics. Follow the white rabbit, Neo.

It seems like everyone is suddenly a B2C, Web 2.0 service driven predominantly by user generated content.  The first wave of B2C plays have hit, delivering strong initial financial success to investors and management.  The blood is in the water and now, as is usually the case in the venture business, everyone is jumping in with both feet. You are seeing several of the pioneers like YooTube (video) and Digg (news) and some later entrants like Tagworld (community) going exponential in their growth. There is also a very long tail of new entrants coming in, taking advantage of the low cost of entry. While the revolution is early, the models are maturing quickly and the fields are getting crowded, making it increasingly difficult to break out from the crowd. Furthermore, there are a handful of logical acquirors (IAC, Yahoo, Google, etc) and once they have either bought or built their own, they will not necessarily be looking for high priced future acquisitions. This is similar to the Web 1.0 phenomenon. By 1998, enough success stories had generated enough copy cats that the chance for success dropped dramatically.

Furthermore, many of these models rely on giving away the service for free to drive rapid adoption while leveraging ad models for revenue. Recessions and slowing economic conditions have a chilling effect on the advertising world. Remember when Yahoo’s revenue dropped 40% in one year from $1.1B to 0.7B in 2001? Additionally, click fraud threatens the engine at the heart of much of this, Google’s and other ad networks’ CPC offerings.

The trick is in going where the puck will be, not where it is today. Enterprise applications are out of vogue. The sales cycles are long and firms can’t fall back on the simple ad-based models driving the B2C world. That said, there are numerous opportunities for proven technologies from the B2C side to migrate over to the B2B world. These include everything from search to social networking to blogging to predictive markets. Corporations don’t like being guinea pigs, so the fact that millions, if not tens of millions of users, have pounded away at technology, helps to reduce the “technology risk” associated with it. Clearly, these technologies will not simply transfer over as corporations are much more demanding and careful in controlling the experience with their customers and employees. Blogs and Wiki’s are two classic examples. They are concerned about rogue participants flaming their products and services or disseminating false/erroneous information.

That said, I predict that we will see a resurgence of B2B services and offerings in the coming year. We are already seeing it with several of our own Web Service infrastructure companies. After years in the wilderness, they are starting to close deals at an increasingly rapid pace.

So, get ahead of the curve. Help corporations adapt the new, promising B2C technologies to their more rigorous business needs. You have a broad array of open-source, web-service and Web 2.0 technologies to mash together in your efforts. There are many areas you can target ranging from customer intimacy & intelligence to location based services to mobile workforce applications to database analysis opportunities. The key is to get out ahead of the pack before it becomes obvious that the worm has turned.

Want to get way, way, way ahead of the pack? Later this week…Quantum Physics. Follow the white rabbit, Neo.

I have had a number of discussions with people this year about when venture will take off in Latin America. Venture capital is clearly going global. We have added affiliates from our own network not only in India and China as many are doing, but also in Russia and Eastern Europe. We are in discussions with several firms in Latin America about expansion down there. With the boom in commodities, there will be increasing economic activity and resources flowing south of the border. There are pockets of activity in energy and telecom specifically in Latin America. The following article describes Intel’s recent expansion. Much like the railroads opened up economic activity across all regions of the United States, the internet is doing so across the globe whether it be chip design in China or game development in Estonia. Our business has definitely scaled well beyond it cottage industry roots and will become more international in nature. This will increasingly reward the firms with the largest global networks and put pressure on smaller regional players. It is the next phase in the institutionalization of the business.

venture market summary

By VentureWire Staff Reporters
Continuing its trip around the world in search of venture deals to seed nascent technology markets, Intel Capital, the venture arm of the world’s largest chip company, has launched a new $50 million fund for investments in Brazil.
The burgeoning economy was one of the determining factors in the decision to launch the latest fund, according to Dave Thomas, managing director for Intel Capital Latin America. There were "significant improvements in the investment arena in the last 18 to 24 months," he said.
Foremost among them "is the strength of the public capital markets," he said. Investments in Brazil can look to the Nuevo Mercado as a viable place for a public offering, and changes in the ways that venture investments are taxed also make the investment climate much more favorable, Thomas said.
For National Venture Capital Association President Mark Heesen, it’s surprising that more investors don’t make the trip south. "The venture market in Latin America is still not a particularly great market," he said. "I continue to kind of be surprised by that when you look at the growing middle class in Central and South America and you look at the stability of the governments."
Intel’s launch of its Brazilian venture capital fund comes a little over three months after it announced a $250 million venture fund for India and four months after the announcement of a $50 million fund for investments in the Middle East. Though Intel has invested in Brazil since 1999, the new fund represents its strongest commitment there to date. Intel Capital has invested more than $35 million in 13 companies in the country since it began committing capital there.

Corporate America has a love/hate relationship with the freedoms created by the various Web 2.0 technologies like blogs.  At the Blog-On conference last Fall, I noticed the audience broke into three sections. You had the corporate communications and PR teams, the technology providers (blog services, business intelligence/analytics, etc) and the revolutionaries. The corporations expressed an interest in embracing and using these new technologies to better understand and communicate with their customers and employees. They also asked for help on how to leverage these without losing complete control over their brands. The technology providers, excited by the notion of big revenue, offered up a variety of services and solutions to help Corporate America. However, in the end, it was the Revolutionaries that had the final say. They frequently commented that these new technologies gave the average Joe (or Jane) voice and Corporate America could not silence them. They could embrace this future and put their brand out willingly to be dissected and discussed by the masses or have it dragged out involuntarily. This was not the answer Corporate America wanted to hear and is why it is very slowly adopting these solutions.The most recent test of this is Microsoft. Microsoft has encouraged its employees to publicly embrace blogging. They believe, rightly, that it gives Microsoft voice in many corners of the net as well as providing a more authentic presence out there. The most popular is Robert Scoble while a recent "insider" in the spotlight is Mini-Microsoft who blogs anonymously and has recently been commenting and revealing the considerable disatisfaction with Microsoft’s internal operations and politics. It will be interesting to see how commited Microsoft is to this open approach going forward. Will corporate PR try to reign things in? I am a firm believer that open always wins and I give Microsoft credit, so far, for their efforts. Time will tell. Either way, this will provide a great learning environment for the rest of Corporate America.

Red Herring Article: Postings on company blog reveal low morale over Vista delay.
Postings on a Microsoft blog by company staffers over the past week reveal dismay, anger, and demands for high-level resignations in the wake of the company’s delays of consumer releases of its Windows Vista operating system and Office desktop productivity suite.