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Sure would be nice to have a space elevator. I'm having my doubts that this group of 5 full time and 4 part time people are going to have much to contribute. There is a lot of talk on their website about plans and research and 'groups', but very little substance. It seems their first priority was to develop a line of clothing and an online store. The "Finance" portion of their group consists of investment club opportunities which they generously offer to the public. I couldn't find any mention of other members of their "Group" apart from the sub-companies consisting of the same 9 employees. So far it looks like they have received some money from NASA and $100K from local development agencies in New Jersey where they have announced the building of their first factory. The money from NASA is a little misleading, however. It seems that another company, High Lift Systems, got its start when LiftPort's President, Michael J. Laine, ran into Brad Edwards on a space forum. Edwards is a physicist who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratories for 11 years and had raised $570K from NASA to study the feasibility of a space elevator. Laine originally wasn't interested - "I thought it was ridiculous,' says Laine" - but quickly changed his mind. Edwards is also the only scientist or researcher connected to LiftGroup on their website. Unfortunately for LiftGroup, but probably not for Edwards, after about a year he gave Laine the boot and went off to do research at Eureka Scientific under a NASA grant. Currently he has received $2.5M from the US government to fund his own lab. His take on Laine? He says that Laine "spins his wheels" and "if Michael Laine is standing there with something, Boeing and the Air Force won't even notice him."

LiftPort Group seems to be a lot of talk and a website. Search results for Laine are few and all related to LiftPort, yet supposedly he has been a leading proponent of the space elevator for years. Content about LiftGroup on other websites consists almost entirely of Liftgroup press releases, with no information other than that provided by LPG. LiftPort Group claims that LiftPort Carbon is a leading force in the industry and its product, Liftite(TM) carbon nanotubes, will "revolutionize the way the world thinks about materials". There is no third party reference to this not originating from LiftPort that I could find. As a matter of fact, I can not find ANY reference from ANY acknowledged authority in the field confirming any of LiftPorts claims. While other companies are mentioned in news stories about product releases, cooperative ventures, and funding awards, LiftGroup is mentioned in quotes from its own press releases. Maybe I'm missing a huge body of information somewhere, if not, the only question left seems to be...is Michael Laine a kook or a crook? I guess time will tell.

billy - who disavows all knowledge of THIS particular mission

E-mails are not like letters. Letters have a physical component. E-mails have a physical component only if they are downloaded to a disk, which the deceased did not do for whatever reason. If he had downloaded the e-mails, the family would have the rights to that physical property. He did not.

To further blow away your "e-mail = mail" misconception, read about your employer's ability to snoop through your e-mail. Opening somebody else's mail is a crime, but e-mail lacks this protection.

Let us not forget the other parties involved, either... Everybody who sent him e-mail, or received e-mail from him, also has a right to privacy. This right will be violated if Yahoo gives the family access to those e-mails.

In December, Inc. Magazine also selected Burt Rutan as Entrepreneur of the Year. The article is a very good read, and gives a lot of details about Rutan's management style.

A snippet:

As a manager, Rutan has proven intuitively adept at inspiring loyalty and extraordinary work. He doesn't worry so much about the formal background of the engineers he hires. He looks for people who share his passion for aircraft design and gives those who have it free rein. Instead of the specialists sought by aerospace companies, he encourages his staffers to remain generalists who can design anything from a fuselage to a door handle and then go into the shop and build it. Chief engineer Matthew Gionta recalls starting off at the company right out of graduate school in 1994 and being handed the project-leader slot on an ultra-high-tech unmanned aircraft. "What I had to learn on the job made my formal education pale in comparison, but I had to learn it because no one else was going to do it for me," Gionta says. "The stress took years off my life, but when you get that kind of responsibility, it's hard not to feel ownership."

Rutan is loath to codify his approach to managing. "I don't like rules," he says. "Things are so easy to change if you don't write them down." But one way or another, he has communicated a few simple principles to employees. One is that when it comes to safety issues -- and in aircraft design, almost everything is a safety issue -- everyone should be quick to raise questions. Rutan makes sure that when people at Scaled point out their own mistakes, they're applauded rather than reprimanded. And instead of extensively analyzing a design before building it, a notion that's axiomatic in the aerospace industry, Rutan pushes his people to get a first version built quickly, test it, and fix it. Says Gionta: "Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding."

And here's the link: http://www.inc.com/magazine/19980601/939.html

Plog

What's the matter, having problems with google?

The references I gave talk more about the general GUI concept as popularized by the Mac, but we can talk about icons specifically. First, what do we mean my icon? For this post, when I refer to an icon, I'm talking about a graphical representation of an object (file, text, etc) that can be maneuvered and manipulated using the mouse. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Xerox used icons to represent "actions" rather than "objects" (kinda like a toolbar). Unfortunately, I can't find the reference right now.

This source claims that " the Apple work extended PARC's considerably, adding windows that can be overlapped, manipulable icons and..." This source quotes an unnamed Lisa developer: "[the Xerox Star] didn't use icons at all..."

Now that's not to say the Xerox didn't come up with, and develop, the idea on their own - I'm just supplying evidence to counter the convential wisdom that Apple got all of their GUI ideas from PARC. I believe that Raskin, Tessler, and a lot of the PARC/Apple GUI people knew each other before the formation of PARC and Apple, and it was likely that they were all working off concepts they had researched in the 60's and early 70's. (of course that doesn't mean Apple didn't think they were stealing ideas - supposedly Mac programmers spent lots of time working on overlapping/self-repairing windows because they thought they saw that at PARC, but it turns out they didn't:)

But you have to look at the context of the trip: the GUI was new to Jobs, but not to Raskin. Raskin convinced Jobs to go on the trip, not to "discover" the GUI, but because Jobs kept trying to kill the Mac project, and Raskin wanted him to see an implementation of a GUI so he could see for himself that it wasn't a waste of time.

You also have to look at the context of the interview: Jobs was cementing his status as "Father of the Macintosh." Raskin had a few comments on the interview (Search for "Raskin" and then scroll up a little bit), and later Cringley acknowledged Raskin's contributions.

Go read Michael S. Malone's Infinite Loop:How Apple, The World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane . It goes into great detail about the origins of the Mac.

_ALL_ Economics is based on "frankly don't have a clue on how to address it", except for the little bit that actually understands that the economy is a dynamic system with a _huge_ number of bodies and variables, and thus you must consider it using probablistic and statistical methods.

Of course, elements of the automotive UI were patented, the most famous be the intermittent wipers patent. Many aspects of early telephone and telegraph dials were patented.

Behold the power of google ... This article describes a specific study about restaurants in central Ohio, but has a quick blurb about businesses overall:

"(H.G. Parsa, the report's author) reviewed other published studies that also suggest failure rates of restaurants to be closer to 60 percent or less after three years to five years."

This is compared to the oft-cited conventional wisdom of a 90% failure rate in restaurants, and 70-80% for other businesses. An early-90s Inc. article says failure rates are inflated because researchers didn't account for changes in ownership -- in other words, just because a business comes under new management doesn't mean that the business has failed:

"after eight years, 54% of start-ups still survive in some form: 28% have the original owners, and another 26% survive with new owners"

Now, that Inc. article may be a little dated post-boom, but the basic concept still holds: *you* may have a great product or idea, and a business you launch has perhaps an even-money chance of surviving ... but you probably don't have the skills to make your product/idea stick in the marketplace.

(I'm wondering what Alan Cox will come up with after he finishes his MBA.)

This article
states that 4 out of 5 new businesses fail is a myth. Take it for what its worth, another opinion.

If you're into this sort of thing (and have a little time to spare), here is some more data for you survey-chart-whatever nerds.

What are "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" running?

Inc.com publishes the company list including website for free, so with the help of Perl, I got the HTTP headers for these 500 companies. 44 sites appeared to be down, and didn't respond. For the 456 others, get the data in various formats and enjoy.

Of course, if you do make fancy graphs with it, please give us the link.

(and you should probably give credit to Inc.com for making the original company listing available for free)

If you're into this sort of thing (and have a little time to spare), here is some more data for you survey-chart-whatever nerds.

What are "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" running?

Inc.com publishes the company list including website for free, so with the help of Perl, I got the HTTP headers for these 500 companies. 44 sites appeared to be down, and didn't respond. For the 456 others, get the data in various formats and enjoy.

Of course, if you do make fancy graphs with it, please give us the link.

(and you should probably give credit to Inc.com for making the original company listing available for free)

If you're into this sort of thing (and have a little time to spare), here is some more data for you survey-chart-whatever nerds.

What are "the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, from Inc magazine" running?

Inc.com publishes the company list including website for free, so with the help of Perl, I got the HTTP headers for these 500 companies. 44 sites appeared to be down, and didn't respond. For the 456 others, get the data in various formats and enjoy.

Of course, if you do make fancy graphs with it, please give us the link.

(and you should probably give credit to Inc.com for making the original company listing available for free)

here

which shows how small-startups can get the money intros into the patent area. (It showed up on the same page as the first link, at the bottom. The wrong link was at the top. Search for "small company seed patent"). That's a direct counter example of "Small businesses can neither afford to claim patents nor defend them". Small businesses CAN afford to claim patents, and there are funds out there to help people do just that.

As for the second, he did make over $1.5 million by getting Dolby to license the tech in the first place. That was the point of that link.

The XHTML support in these phones is great! As a bit of an XHTML/CSS advocate myself, however, I think browsing the Web from such space-limited devices could become a chicken and egg situation.

A LOT of pages out there are poorly coded FrontPage (or even MS Publisher) not-even-HTML 3.2-compliant junk. There are a lot of amazingly beautiful XHTML/CSS coded pages out there, and they all display well on the small screens.

How many people will buy these phones, surf to their favorite page, and then discover they can't get anywhere fast? Will devices like smartphones and portable computers, with and 3G's ability to access the Internet at speed, force more Web designers to follow the chosen path and design in a fully backwards, and forwards, compatable way with XHTML and CSS? Or will we have a chicken and egg situation where people are turned off from using the devices because the content and pages available to them are so poor.. just like with WAP.

And therein lies my whole problem with this. Accessibility compliant pages are damn ugly. Almost uniformly.

That's not true at all.

And so what we end up doing is take a visual medium and break it for those with different needs.

Accessible websites don't have to be ugly. What makes you think that they do?

VCs are usually smarter than that; they don't want to get stuck with an illiquid investment when the life of their fund ends. Most venture capital contracts are written with one of several possible liquidity-forcing clauses, like demand registration (forces company to register shares for an IPO) or redemption rights (forces company to buy back VCs' shares at purchase price, often plus an accumulated dividend). Not all shares are created equal.

A good reference and surprisingly representative of what was actually being used at the time (they are significantly more punitive, er... conservative, now) is this term sheet. Free registration required.

• • There was a senator or rep who was a staunch Democrat who, when he retired, tried to start a small business (a hotel I think). His business floundered because of many of the extremely harsh policies that he himself had pushed.
  Yeah, a story like that has to be true. No one every makes come-uppance tales about people of different opinions to show them suffering from their misguided ways.

In this case, the story is true.

The classification of exempt and nonexempt employees are defined by a 1970's era law. This article published in the current issue of Inc Magazine goes into great detail. Overtime compensation lawsuits are the new "cash cow" of employment lawsuits. Join the class action early!

People hate Microsoft

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. etc., etc. You're wrong.

Red Hat is one of the fastest growing companies in America

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Sorry to make you look so incredibly wrong, but you posted first. I just couldn't let that fly. By the way, what planet do you live on, exactly?

Also to close a Inc (incorporated company) is not a trivial task and takes both time and money. Inc though has almost no liability for the founders and officers since it legally separated business and corporate assets!! (so that someone suing the company for your product doesn't end up bankrupting you).

Another form of company which is gaining grounds now-a-days is LLC corporation, its easier and cheaper to setup and dismantle and gives adequate (though not similar level as Inc) protection in temrs of liability.

Inc Magazine - has some interesting articles on starting your business!
California Company - starting a business in california starting point.
LLC - summarizes pros and cons of a LLC.

"NPO - a company before it turns profitable"

In 1949 Bill Phillips created the Phillips Economics Computer also known as a Financephalograph. Which simulated economics conditions using water.
See the following links for more info.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/19950915/2624.html
http://www.nzpca.org.nz/megabyte/2001/02/art02.htm

I skimmed more than 100 listing on Google and only managed to find two Microsoft patent lawsuits here and here. Amazingly both appear to be defensive counter suits!

Before you start to feel too safe, take a look here where they discuss microsoft's "range of software patents that the company can potentially use down the line to attack and try to restrict the development and distribution of open-source software". It mentions at least one known patent Microsoft can use to attack Linux. Bruce Perens, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s open-source and Linux strategist theorizes that "They are going to hold onto these patents until they see what happens with the antitrust case against them. Once that is resolved, they will then use them against the open-source industry."

Secondly, while holding a patent on something theoretically prevents somebody else from patenting the same thing, this doesn't hold true in practice (due to the general ineptness of the patent and trade office). If I remember correctly, there were two nearly identical patents issued for LZW compression, one to IBM and one to a company that would later be bought by Unisys. IBM was nice about it and allowed people to freely use LZW compression, but Unisys was not so nice and that's why we're in the mess we are today with GIF images.

It seems to me that a better strategy would be to create as much prior art as possible. If it doesn't save you the time and effort it takes to patent things it will at least save you the $10k per patent that would kill most people. It would also be a lot more impressive to build actual programs than to stoop to the level of companies like priceline.com and try to extort the patent system.