WOW: “The speed of light is too slow.” They noted that firms located further away from the market center were being shut out because the speed of light could not carry their orders to market fast enough…Whether it’s the 7-millisecond delay between Chicago and New York, or the 35-millisecond delay between the Big Apple and San Francisco, increasingly, if you are not co-located near where you execute, you’re just not fast enough to grab the brass ring.
A few weeks ago, The Tabb Group hosted a focus group on connectivity in which we brought in some of the best and brightest industry connectivity specialists. What they said surprised me. They basically said that “The speed of light is too slow.” They noted that firms located further away from the market center were being shut out because the speed of light could not carry their orders to market fast enough.
That amazed me. Now, anyone sitting far away from a noisy event knows that there is certainly a gap between the speed of sound and the speed of light. But who, besides Einstein, ever thought that the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) would be too slow?
But as our markets increasingly become more electronic, time matters. Whether it’s the 7-millisecond delay between Chicago and New York, or the 35-millisecond delay between the Big Apple and San Francisco, increasingly, if you are not co-located near where you execute, you’re just not fast enough to grab the brass ring.
While you might think, “Who cares?”, it’s impacting the market in very real ways. Hedge funds are saying that market opportunities they were able to take advantage of last year are no longer accessible.
In the health care sector, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, as its compliance deadlines phase in, is requiring health care providers to turn to higher-tech operations to store and protect patient data and conduct electronic transactions.
Canyonlands Community Health Care, which operates a group of rural clinics in northern Arizona, was keeping records on paper two years ago. With a compliance deadline at its doorstep, it invested $500,000 in a computer network that stores patient records and other data. “That’s a big chunk of change for a nonprofit to commit to,” said Garrett Martin, information technology director of Canyonlands, who was brought in to install the system.
When the system is fully up and running this summer, doctors and nurses will be able to access medical records, e-mail and billing through hand-held computers and a secure, wireless network. “We’ve already realized efficiency, from the time a patient makes an appointment to the time we get them out the door,” Mr. Martin said. Concrete results are the big sell for small businesses.
Frank Muehleman, general manager for small and medium business at Dell, said: “They’re the most discriminating and discerning group when it comes to where and how to spend their money. Small businesses do not buy technology hoping there’ll be some payback in the future. They want immediate payback.”
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2005-01-26 10:52:072005-01-26 10:52:07Smaller clinics can play on the NHII, too
Here’s another example of what makes this place so dynamic. Stanford scientist, KJ Cho, developed a great nanotechnology method, but didn’t know how to make a business out of it. He meets a veteran like Bill Miller, who helps him throw a business plan together — and within 18 months, the new company, Nanostellar, has gotten $3 million in venture backing and already cranked out a prototype for a new catalytic converter that aims to undercut prices of existing models, and help save the environment too. Worst case, it may end up one of the nine of ten start-ups that eventually fail — but hey, better the idea is given a chance to fly than to let it die in the labs.
Posted by Matt Marshall on January 19, 2005 08:07 AM
Dr. William Miller (Chairman, Founder)
Dr. Miller is a Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management and Computer Science Emeritus and he was Vice President and Provost of Stanford University. He is currently serve as Chairman of the Board at Borland Software Corporation. He is also President and CEO Emeritus of SRI International. He has served on the board of directors of several major companies such as National Science Foundation, Wells Fargo Bank, Women.com Networks, and Varian Associates. Dr. Miller also played a role in the founding of the first Mayfield Fund as a special limited partner and advisor to the general partners. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from Purdue University.
When Stanford University scientist KJ Cho developed a method to study the qualities of materials at the level of about 30,000 atoms, he had no idea it could help clean up the environment.
Semiconductor companies such as Texas Instruments and Intel used his modeling software to select materials that would let them build chips smaller and smaller. Specifically, Cho’s method was crucial to letting those companies select the right “high-K dielectric” material needed to insulate the semiconductor’s data from its power lines, helping keep electrons from going where they shouldn’t.
But that niche wasn’t big enough to build a business out of, so Cho searched for a better way to put his method to use.
In a brainstorming session in 2003, he and two others — Michael Pak, an engineer who had recently run a DSL company, and Bill Miller, a physicist and former provost of Stanford University — stumbled onto a good idea.
Cho’s method could help find low-cost materials to replace the highly expensive platinum and palladium coatings on catalytic converters.
Catalytic converters facilitate chemical reactions that convert automotive exhaust pollutants such as carbon monoxide into normal atmospheric gases such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water.
By introducing cheaper nanomaterials of similar or even superior emission-reducing qualities to platinum, they could reduce the cost of a catalytic converter by 30 percent — the devices average $100 to $300 even for cheaper cars — and help the environment.
In November 2003, Menlo Park’s Nanostellar was born — with Cho’s collaborator, Jonathan Woo, joining in as a founder, and Deepak Srivastava, a NASA scientist, as a scientific adviser.
The trick was to take Cho’s modeling technique and find an efficient way of manufacturing the desired materials.
They moved quickly. By April 2004, the group already was experimenting with products in their lab. By June, they had attracted $3 million, with venture capital firm 3i as lead investor. And by December, Nanostellar delivered its first two prototypes to automobile manufacturers for testing.
Pak, who is chief executive, said one automaker is planning to use Nanostellar’s material for its converters as early as the fourth quarter of this year.
Meantime, the company has 20 full-time employees and is operating off a $1.5 million bridge loan. Cho and his colleagues plan to raise a bigger round of venture capital shortly, but declined to talk about the details.
“Pollution is a huge problem,” Pak said, “and government regulations are getting stricter every year. . . . This is a great application to demonstrate the power of nanotechnology.”
They aim to produce the nanomaterials for half the cost of platinum, which generally makes up about 65 percent of the total cost of a catalytic converter.
After solving the platinum-replacement challenge, Nanostellar plans to move to step two: finding even lower-cost materials that will help improve on platinum’s emissions-reducing qualities by reducing the amount of nitrous oxides still not tackled by catalytic converters.
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2005-01-25 10:51:392005-01-25 10:51:39CN Board Member Bill Miller founds NanoStellar
Rumor has it they’re adding an API — but only for advertisers. The goal would be finer-grained campaign scheduling and optimization, but not for publishers to shop which ads they’d like to run. Already, some of the commentary has focused on publishers’ wishes to replace the mapping function that assigns ads to pages — sometimes, the last thing you want to see on a tech news site is yet more ads for microprocessors. Perhaps, as one publisher put it, you’d be better off with 5% of a lobster-and-caviar referral sale at Amazon during the holidays :)
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2005-01-21 11:49:472005-01-21 11:49:47Breaking (open) news: Google to be more advertiser-driven?
LONDON – A motor scooter in Manchester, an apartment in Amsterdam, a poster in Paris. All are available via Craigslist, an online bulletin board that presents a new challenge to the established players in the estimated $100 billion global market for classified advertising.
Craigslist was started 10 years ago by Craig Newmark, an Internet pioneer in San Francisco, as a way of keeping friends up to date on events in the Bay Area. It spread through the United States before going international in 2003, with sites in London and Toronto. The expansion accelerated in late 2004 with a flurry of sites, including ones for Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Sydney. About a dozen other international start-ups are planned in the next few months.
On Wall Street, “now” means now!
Event Driven ArchitecturesWOW: “The speed of light is too slow.” They noted that firms located further away from the market center were being shut out because the speed of light could not carry their orders to market fast enough…Whether it’s the 7-millisecond delay between Chicago and New York, or the 35-millisecond delay between the Big Apple and San Francisco, increasingly, if you are not co-located near where you execute, you’re just not fast enough to grab the brass ring.
Light Speed and The Buttonwood Tree
A few weeks ago, The Tabb Group hosted a focus group on connectivity in which we brought in some of the best and brightest industry connectivity specialists. What they said surprised me. They basically said that “The speed of light is too slow.” They noted that firms located further away from the market center were being shut out because the speed of light could not carry their orders to market fast enough.
That amazed me. Now, anyone sitting far away from a noisy event knows that there is certainly a gap between the speed of sound and the speed of light. But who, besides Einstein, ever thought that the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) would be too slow?
But as our markets increasingly become more electronic, time matters. Whether it’s the 7-millisecond delay between Chicago and New York, or the 35-millisecond delay between the Big Apple and San Francisco, increasingly, if you are not co-located near where you execute, you’re just not fast enough to grab the brass ring.
While you might think, “Who cares?”, it’s impacting the market in very real ways. Hedge funds are saying that market opportunities they were able to take advantage of last year are no longer accessible.
Read more
Smaller clinics can play on the NHII, too
Health CareIn the health care sector, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, as its compliance deadlines phase in, is requiring health care providers to turn to higher-tech operations to store and protect patient data and conduct electronic transactions.
Canyonlands Community Health Care, which operates a group of rural clinics in northern Arizona, was keeping records on paper two years ago. With a compliance deadline at its doorstep, it invested $500,000 in a computer network that stores patient records and other data. “That’s a big chunk of change for a nonprofit to commit to,” said Garrett Martin, information technology director of Canyonlands, who was brought in to install the system.
When the system is fully up and running this summer, doctors and nurses will be able to access medical records, e-mail and billing through hand-held computers and a secure, wireless network. “We’ve already realized efficiency, from the time a patient makes an appointment to the time we get them out the door,” Mr. Martin said. Concrete results are the big sell for small businesses.
Frank Muehleman, general manager for small and medium business at Dell, said: “They’re the most discriminating and discerning group when it comes to where and how to spend their money. Small businesses do not buy technology hoping there’ll be some payback in the future. They want immediate payback.”
(from High Tech Isn’t Just for the Big Guys)
CN Board Member Bill Miller founds NanoStellar
InnovationHere’s another example of what makes this place so dynamic. Stanford scientist, KJ Cho, developed a great nanotechnology method, but didn’t know how to make a business out of it. He meets a veteran like Bill Miller, who helps him throw a business plan together — and within 18 months, the new company, Nanostellar, has gotten $3 million in venture backing and already cranked out a prototype for a new catalytic converter that aims to undercut prices of existing models, and help save the environment too. Worst case, it may end up one of the nine of ten start-ups that eventually fail — but hey, better the idea is given a chance to fly than to let it die in the labs.
Posted by Matt Marshall on January 19, 2005 08:07 AM
(from SiliconBeat: Silicon Valley’s engine chugs on)
Nanostellar, Enabling Innovation
Dr. William Miller (Chairman, Founder)
Dr. Miller is a Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management and Computer Science Emeritus and he was Vice President and Provost of Stanford University. He is currently serve as Chairman of the Board at Borland Software Corporation. He is also President and CEO Emeritus of SRI International. He has served on the board of directors of several major companies such as National Science Foundation, Wells Fargo Bank, Women.com Networks, and Varian Associates. Dr. Miller also played a role in the founding of the first Mayfield Fund as a special limited partner and advisor to the general partners. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from Purdue University.
MercuryNews.com | 01/19/2005 | Cleaning up cars at atomic level
CATALYTIC CONVERTERS ARE MADE BETTER, CHEAPER
By Matt Marshall, Mercury News
When Stanford University scientist KJ Cho developed a method to study the qualities of materials at the level of about 30,000 atoms, he had no idea it could help clean up the environment.
Semiconductor companies such as Texas Instruments and Intel used his modeling software to select materials that would let them build chips smaller and smaller. Specifically, Cho’s method was crucial to letting those companies select the right “high-K dielectric” material needed to insulate the semiconductor’s data from its power lines, helping keep electrons from going where they shouldn’t.
But that niche wasn’t big enough to build a business out of, so Cho searched for a better way to put his method to use.
In a brainstorming session in 2003, he and two others — Michael Pak, an engineer who had recently run a DSL company, and Bill Miller, a physicist and former provost of Stanford University — stumbled onto a good idea.
Cho’s method could help find low-cost materials to replace the highly expensive platinum and palladium coatings on catalytic converters.
Catalytic converters facilitate chemical reactions that convert automotive exhaust pollutants such as carbon monoxide into normal atmospheric gases such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water.
By introducing cheaper nanomaterials of similar or even superior emission-reducing qualities to platinum, they could reduce the cost of a catalytic converter by 30 percent — the devices average $100 to $300 even for cheaper cars — and help the environment.
In November 2003, Menlo Park’s Nanostellar was born — with Cho’s collaborator, Jonathan Woo, joining in as a founder, and Deepak Srivastava, a NASA scientist, as a scientific adviser.
The trick was to take Cho’s modeling technique and find an efficient way of manufacturing the desired materials.
They moved quickly. By April 2004, the group already was experimenting with products in their lab. By June, they had attracted $3 million, with venture capital firm 3i as lead investor. And by December, Nanostellar delivered its first two prototypes to automobile manufacturers for testing.
Pak, who is chief executive, said one automaker is planning to use Nanostellar’s material for its converters as early as the fourth quarter of this year.
Meantime, the company has 20 full-time employees and is operating off a $1.5 million bridge loan. Cho and his colleagues plan to raise a bigger round of venture capital shortly, but declined to talk about the details.
“Pollution is a huge problem,” Pak said, “and government regulations are getting stricter every year. . . . This is a great application to demonstrate the power of nanotechnology.”
They aim to produce the nanomaterials for half the cost of platinum, which generally makes up about 65 percent of the total cost of a catalytic converter.
After solving the platinum-replacement challenge, Nanostellar plans to move to step two: finding even lower-cost materials that will help improve on platinum’s emissions-reducing qualities by reducing the amount of nitrous oxides still not tackled by catalytic converters.
Breaking (open) news: Google to be more advertiser-driven?
CommerceRumor has it they’re adding an API — but only for advertisers. The goal would be finer-grained campaign scheduling and optimization, but not for publishers to shop which ads they’d like to run. Already, some of the commentary has focused on publishers’ wishes to replace the mapping function that assigns ads to pages — sometimes, the last thing you want to see on a tech news site is yet more ads for microprocessors. Perhaps, as one publisher put it, you’d be better off with 5% of a lobster-and-caviar referral sale at Amazon during the holidays :)
Lots of additional details in the extended entry…
Read more
Craigslist-in-a-Box anyone?
CommerceNow, what would it take to build an open-source clone of Craigslist one could run locally?
Craigslist Circles the Globe With Online Classifieds, One City at a Time
By ERIC PFANNER, International Herald Tribune
Published: January 17, 2005
LONDON – A motor scooter in Manchester, an apartment in Amsterdam, a poster in Paris. All are available via Craigslist, an online bulletin board that presents a new challenge to the established players in the estimated $100 billion global market for classified advertising.
Craigslist was started 10 years ago by Craig Newmark, an Internet pioneer in San Francisco, as a way of keeping friends up to date on events in the Bay Area. It spread through the United States before going international in 2003, with sites in London and Toronto. The expansion accelerated in late 2004 with a flurry of sites, including ones for Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Sydney. About a dozen other international start-ups are planned in the next few months.