Paul Allen – Keynote Speaker, Tech Visionary, Soar.com & Ancestry Founder
Nokia will ship by the end of this year a number of new phones that offer rich multimedia capabilities. One of their phones has a 4 GB hard drive that will store 3,000 songs.
This is significant partly because in 2004 Nokia owned more than 30% of the global market for mobile phones, almost twice as high as the number two player Motorola.
Toshiba is using nanoparticles to some how charge lithium-ion batteries 60 times faster than today. This will be commercialized beginning next year. This is one of the first commercialized nanotech announcements I have seen; but in the coming years we will see of thousands of nanotechnology ideas getting to market. I think by 2020 much of our material world will be influenced by nanotechnology: housing, energy, clothing, transportation, communication, agriculature, medicine and manufacturing.
Nanosys withdrew it\’s highly anticipated IPO. Maybe there won\’t be a nanotech bubble anytime soon. Darn. I like bubbles. One friend told me he took a bath during the last bubble.
Steve Jurvetson has an interview on Always-On where he stated that the 18 investments they have made in nanotechnology have all come from universities or government-funded research. The cost of doing nanotech research is enormous. So I suppose if I want to get involved in nanotechnology, I should look in my own backyard first, at BYU. A patent attorney of mine just told me about a BYU professor involved in nanotechnology.
Implementing tried and true internet marketing and development strategies for our portfolio companies continues to generate traffic, revenue and market presence. It\’s rewarding when search engine, affiliate, and email marketing strategies work over and over again. But it\’s also a bit predictable and just ever-so-slightly boring to keep doing the same things (howbeit successfully) again and again. I\’ve felt for some time that I need to gear up for the next big wave, the next new technology that can challenge my imagination and creativity.