For some in Silicon Valley, Asia remains an alluring black box. A promising world with pockets of hyper growth, obscured by a tangled web of unfamiliar languages, customs, regulations and native ecosystems. Although the walls are coming down fast, the road to Asia's markets remains an intimidating one for many.
Enter Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups (a recently launched $30M super angel fund) and Geeks On A Plane, a program that takes tech entrepreneurs and investors to emerging markets. In its own small way, Geeks On A Plane is attempting to bridge that gap between the Valley and the rest of the world. Earlier this year, roughly 55 "Geeks" traveled to several key hot spots in Asia, including Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul and Beijing, to connect with the region's top entrepreneurs, to mingle with Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, and to sample local tech conferences like Shanghai World Expo and CHINICT.
During the journey, Ben Henretig, founder of Micro-Documentaries, followed the group and made four short videos on the trip's highlights. Jump ahead for our video interview with McClure and the official debut of episode one, Shanghai.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Future Mars Colonists Could Learn To Terraform By Studying Darwin's Methods
Ascension Island Charles Darwin's artificial forest captures moisture from clouds that drift over the volcanic peaks on Ascension Island. Google Earth
The father of evolution apparently played God with a tropical ecosystem 160 years ago, and the results could inform future experiments to terraform Mars, botanists say.
The BBC recounts how Charles Darwin helped build an artificial forest on Ascension Island, one of his subjects of study from his trips on the HMS Beagle. Today, the island is home to species of plants that would not naturally co-exist. Darwin and his friends put them there, and nearly two centuries later, their grand experiment is living proof that we can transform natural environments.
Originally used as an outpost to keep an eye on Napoleon in exile, Ascension Island, between South America and Africa, was a busy Atlantic waystation in Darwin's day. It had meager fresh water supplies, however, so Darwin and his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker, set out to change things.
The BBC interviews Darwin biographer David Catling, a professor at the University of Washington-Seattle, who says he believes Darwin decided to build a lush "Little England" on the volcanic island after visiting it in 1836.
Darwin's friend Hooker explored Ascension a few years later, and in 1847, Darwin convinced Hooker to get his father -- director of the Kew Gardens -- to send trees, hoping they would capture rain, prevent erosion and reduce evaporation.
Beginning in 1850 and continuing each year, ships brought an assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina, the BBC says. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had taken hold.
Today, Ascension is home to a cloud forest that would have taken millions of years to evolve naturally, according to Dave Wilkinson, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
It's proof that humans can build a fully functioning ecosystem simply through trial and error, he said. As the BBC reports, the same principle could be used in future Mars colonies: "Rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it find its own way."
Intelligent design, indeed.
The father of evolution apparently played God with a tropical ecosystem 160 years ago, and the results could inform future experiments to terraform Mars, botanists say.
The BBC recounts how Charles Darwin helped build an artificial forest on Ascension Island, one of his subjects of study from his trips on the HMS Beagle. Today, the island is home to species of plants that would not naturally co-exist. Darwin and his friends put them there, and nearly two centuries later, their grand experiment is living proof that we can transform natural environments.
Originally used as an outpost to keep an eye on Napoleon in exile, Ascension Island, between South America and Africa, was a busy Atlantic waystation in Darwin's day. It had meager fresh water supplies, however, so Darwin and his botanist friend, Joseph Hooker, set out to change things.
The BBC interviews Darwin biographer David Catling, a professor at the University of Washington-Seattle, who says he believes Darwin decided to build a lush "Little England" on the volcanic island after visiting it in 1836.
Darwin's friend Hooker explored Ascension a few years later, and in 1847, Darwin convinced Hooker to get his father -- director of the Kew Gardens -- to send trees, hoping they would capture rain, prevent erosion and reduce evaporation.
Beginning in 1850 and continuing each year, ships brought an assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina, the BBC says. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had taken hold.
Today, Ascension is home to a cloud forest that would have taken millions of years to evolve naturally, according to Dave Wilkinson, an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK.
It's proof that humans can build a fully functioning ecosystem simply through trial and error, he said. As the BBC reports, the same principle could be used in future Mars colonies: "Rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it find its own way."
Intelligent design, indeed.
Blogosphere Trends + A Challenge
This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a great tool that gathers and organizes the world?s best blog posts) ? Darren
Hi-dee-hoo, fellow bloggers! Thanks for joining me for another edition of the weekly blogosphere trends, provided by Regator.com (click any trend to see posts about it). Darren's post "The Key to Successful Blogging: Do Something!" from earlier this week resonated with a lot of you (and with me), so it seemed like the perfect week to look back at some of the important topics we've discussed in this column and issue a challenge: Kick procrastination in the butt by putting at least two of these techniques to work THIS week on your own blog. Then share a link to your post in the comments.This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.
Blogosphere Trends + A Challenge
Hi-dee-hoo, fellow bloggers! Thanks for joining me for another edition of the weekly blogosphere trends, provided by Regator.com (click any trend to see posts about it). Darren's post "The Key to Successful Blogging: Do Something!" from earlier this week resonated with a lot of you (and with me), so it seemed like the perfect week to look back at some of the important topics we've discussed in this column and issue a challenge: Kick procrastination in the butt by putting at least two of these techniques to work THIS week on your own blog. Then share a link to your post in the comments.This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.
Blogosphere Trends + A Challenge
Bloggers versus Copywriters: 8 Reasons why Bloggers do it Better
A Guest Post by Glenn Murray from Divine Write.
It?s true. Bloggers do it better. The good ones do anyway.
See for yourself: Choose a handful of your favorite blogs and a handful of static websites, and compare the writing.
(TIP: Try to choose sites that look professionally designed, as they?re more likely to have professionally written [...]This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.
Bloggers versus Copywriters: 8 Reasons why Bloggers do it Better
It?s true. Bloggers do it better. The good ones do anyway.
See for yourself: Choose a handful of your favorite blogs and a handful of static websites, and compare the writing.
(TIP: Try to choose sites that look professionally designed, as they?re more likely to have professionally written [...]This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.
Bloggers versus Copywriters: 8 Reasons why Bloggers do it Better
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
When Drones Go Rogue In Friendly Skies, How Do We Bring Them Home?
Wing Ejected A shrunken F/A-18 target drone equipped with a new, advanced fly-by-wire system was able to return home safely after losing up to 80% of one wing.
Rockwell CollinsAn advanced fly-by-wire system capable of landing grossly damaged unmanned aircraft-demonstrated on video saving a plane missing 80 percent of one wing-is key to solving one of unmanned flight's biggest problems
Word spread last week that a rogue MQ-8B Fire Scout copter drone entered restricted airspace just 40 miles shy of Washington D.C. after losing contact with its operators. The revelation occurred smack in the middle of AVUSI 2010, the world's largest UAV tradeshow. And it served as a poignant reminder that all the game-changing technology on display here at the Denver Convention Center still has some innovating to do, especially when flight crews lose control of their unmanned craft.
But to lose control of a flying robot over a warzone is one thing; things get much more complicated in crowded domestic skies. One remarkable system, capable of bringing a plane missing most of one wing safely home, aims to make losing control a more palatable proposition.
Speaking generally about the issue of bringing UAVs into compliance with FAA rules, Lockheed Martin's Bob Ruszkowski, a Skunk Works systems engineer, said, "I think we need to rise to the challenge rather than ask for forgiveness." Then he posed a rhetorical question to underscore his point: "How many of those UAVs [in the convention center] do you see with a collision beacon? Or nav lights?"
Very few, in fact, but there were signs of such advancements.
The most dramatic evidence of technology that might clear the way for UAVs entering national air space was on display at the Rockwell Collins booth. Suspended from the rafters was a sub-scale model F/A-18 missing the better part of its right wing, which had been ditched as the plane ripped above Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground as part of a DARPA-sponsored technology demonstration this summer. But the model didn't crash.
It's sounds improbable, until you see the video:
The plane is up and away, there goes the wing, and then? nothing that your gut grasp of Newton's laws would lead you to expect: The craft shudders briefly, stabilizes, and then comes in for an astonishing, albeit a bit rough, landing. "We're not defying physics," insists Dave Vos, Rockwell Collins' senior director of control technologies and UAVs. "As long as it's physically possible to put the airplane in some configuration, attitude, velocity and orientation to recover some degree of control, we can do it."
The technology, called Damage Tolerance Control, consists of a palm-sized box stuffed with sensors and advanced algorithms that taps into a plane's existing avionics. It exploits the fact that flight control systems are exponentially more capable to counteract in-flight damage than a human pilot. With all due respect to Sully, a craft's electronics can move its flaps in configurations you could never imagine in the 2 milliseconds available to compensate. Rather than diagnosing the problem, Damage Tolerance Control reacts instantaneously and automatically when it senses a dramatic change in trajectory, adjusting an aileron, say, and cheating the nose to the left to remove drag from the intact wing to keep the craft from whipping into a death spiral. "If you step off your front porch and your leg buckles, you don't have time to diagnose it," Vos says. "You catch yourself and worry about your knee later."
The system will be tested in a UAV currently flying missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vos won't say which one, but according to a spokesperson for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., it's not the Predator or Reaper. If the system works as advertised, the improved survivability of mid-air damage would be a boon to the military, which under new budgetary restrictions can't afford to waste resources.
But on the civilian side, improving the reliability of UAVs with a system that automatically lands the craft if something goes wrong is a significant step toward proving that unmanned planes could one day coexist with manned ones. "Once people start believing it's possible, it's going to happen really fast," says Vos.
Stay tuned this week for an in-depth photo report from AVUSI, the drone trade show
Rockwell CollinsAn advanced fly-by-wire system capable of landing grossly damaged unmanned aircraft-demonstrated on video saving a plane missing 80 percent of one wing-is key to solving one of unmanned flight's biggest problems
Word spread last week that a rogue MQ-8B Fire Scout copter drone entered restricted airspace just 40 miles shy of Washington D.C. after losing contact with its operators. The revelation occurred smack in the middle of AVUSI 2010, the world's largest UAV tradeshow. And it served as a poignant reminder that all the game-changing technology on display here at the Denver Convention Center still has some innovating to do, especially when flight crews lose control of their unmanned craft.
But to lose control of a flying robot over a warzone is one thing; things get much more complicated in crowded domestic skies. One remarkable system, capable of bringing a plane missing most of one wing safely home, aims to make losing control a more palatable proposition.
Speaking generally about the issue of bringing UAVs into compliance with FAA rules, Lockheed Martin's Bob Ruszkowski, a Skunk Works systems engineer, said, "I think we need to rise to the challenge rather than ask for forgiveness." Then he posed a rhetorical question to underscore his point: "How many of those UAVs [in the convention center] do you see with a collision beacon? Or nav lights?"
Very few, in fact, but there were signs of such advancements.
The most dramatic evidence of technology that might clear the way for UAVs entering national air space was on display at the Rockwell Collins booth. Suspended from the rafters was a sub-scale model F/A-18 missing the better part of its right wing, which had been ditched as the plane ripped above Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground as part of a DARPA-sponsored technology demonstration this summer. But the model didn't crash.
It's sounds improbable, until you see the video:
The plane is up and away, there goes the wing, and then? nothing that your gut grasp of Newton's laws would lead you to expect: The craft shudders briefly, stabilizes, and then comes in for an astonishing, albeit a bit rough, landing. "We're not defying physics," insists Dave Vos, Rockwell Collins' senior director of control technologies and UAVs. "As long as it's physically possible to put the airplane in some configuration, attitude, velocity and orientation to recover some degree of control, we can do it."
The technology, called Damage Tolerance Control, consists of a palm-sized box stuffed with sensors and advanced algorithms that taps into a plane's existing avionics. It exploits the fact that flight control systems are exponentially more capable to counteract in-flight damage than a human pilot. With all due respect to Sully, a craft's electronics can move its flaps in configurations you could never imagine in the 2 milliseconds available to compensate. Rather than diagnosing the problem, Damage Tolerance Control reacts instantaneously and automatically when it senses a dramatic change in trajectory, adjusting an aileron, say, and cheating the nose to the left to remove drag from the intact wing to keep the craft from whipping into a death spiral. "If you step off your front porch and your leg buckles, you don't have time to diagnose it," Vos says. "You catch yourself and worry about your knee later."
The system will be tested in a UAV currently flying missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vos won't say which one, but according to a spokesperson for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., it's not the Predator or Reaper. If the system works as advertised, the improved survivability of mid-air damage would be a boon to the military, which under new budgetary restrictions can't afford to waste resources.
But on the civilian side, improving the reliability of UAVs with a system that automatically lands the craft if something goes wrong is a significant step toward proving that unmanned planes could one day coexist with manned ones. "Once people start believing it's possible, it's going to happen really fast," says Vos.
Stay tuned this week for an in-depth photo report from AVUSI, the drone trade show
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