Discovering startups 3: Interview with Roberto Macina, founder of Qurami

Roberto Macina, founder of Qurami

Roberto Macina is the founder of the Qurami, an application that helps you not to waste time during the queue. We asked him some questions for an interview.

1) When and where were you born?

I was born in Rome on May 29th, 1984 and I’ve always lived there.

2) Where did you study?

I studied Computer Engineering at “Rome III” University.

3) How did you get the idea of Qurami?
The idea of Qurami first raised while I was studying. It actually happened during a queue at the University administrative office. Looking at my iPhone I just thought: “there must be an app to avoid the line with a smartphone, without losing my time here”. Well, there wasn’t. And I invented it.

4) How much money did you need for launching Qurami? Was it hard to be financed?

I immediately involved other people to help developing my idea from a technical and commercial point of view. Initially I just used my personal money to start the project. Then we joined the Incubator Luiss-Enlabs and, thanks to the growing network of contacts and the first happy clients, we received some financing. To convince the investors we tried to go beyond our good idea: we created a great team of experts in multiple fields, developed a credible business plan and improved the technical quality of the app.

5) How many people work for Qurami and what kind of contract do they have?

Currently there are 14 people  working for the Qurami project. Contracts range from fixed-term to open-end contracts, plus some consulting services.

6) The headquarter of Qurami is near the mani station of Rome (Termini), why did you choose that place? Wasn't it better to be outside the centre?

Our offices are located in the Luiss-Enlabs incubator, inside Termini railway station in Rome. The location is great, there are a lot of other innovative companies and a continuous series of events on entrepreneurship and technology. We really feel to work in the hearth of a vibrant business environment.

7) What is the business model of Qurami? What's the percentage you get from Apple and other companies?

Our business model is very simple. Qurami is free to download for the users while clients pay an annual fee to use the app. The cost varies with the number of premises.

8) If an italian wanted to create a start up about an application, would you suggest him/her to stay in Italy or to move to Silicon Valley (assuming he/she has the chance to move)?

We have created our company in Italy and from here we are expanding to several markets. It’s possible to do good business in our country, but it’s vital to always have an open approach and think globally.

Discovering startups 2: Hyperwords

Hyperwords is a plug-in that lets people right-click for interactive searches. The company's advisory board include geniuses like Douglas Engelbart, Vint Cerf, Ted Nelson.

I asked Frode Hegland (founding director of Hyperwords company) few questions.


1) When was Hyperwords created? and by whom?

By me, Frode Hegland. In the early 2000's.


2) How many people work at Hyperwords?

Two full time, two part time and two development teams, one full time team in Russia and one part time in Germany.


3) I see a Techcrunch article about you in 2005 and i see that you were in Le Web 2009: why didn't you go to Le Web earlier?

We realized quite quickly that people were not interested in the idea of concept, but only in a very smooth and effective user experience so we've been working hard to improve the system since then more than promoting it.


4) In your site you say: "The Hyperword project is based on the work of Doug Engelbart", what does he think about it?

Doug is very happy with the progress of Hyperwords as a step in the evolution of what he calls "symbol manipulation".


5) What is the business model for Hyperwords?

Client installs (Firefox, Chrome and soon Windows, so yes, it will work in Internet Explorer) are affiliate driven (AdSense & Amazon primarily). Server is licensed.


6) Who and how much financed Hyperwords?

Personal finance.

Discovering startups 1: Stribe

Stribe is a social network for any site, provided as Software as a Service.

Founders Kamel Zeroual, Gael Delalleau and Demba Diallo created the company in March 2008 and released the service in September 2009 during TechCrunch50.

Stribe allows blogs, casual gaming or even an e-commerce sites to create their own social network in theirs sites. It deeply engages the visitors and allows social interactions after an easy 5-minute plug & play installation, which can be fully customized and freely branded.

Stribe won the first place at Le Web 2009 (december, Paris).

Interview with Stribe

1) How many people work in Stribe?

We are 8 engineers working in Stribe

2) When do you plan to reach break-even?

It’s up to the viral effect of our service. We still working in designing the best business model to reach the break even as fast as we can.

3) right now, how many people use Stribe?

We’ve send more than thousand invitation to website and there is around 15000 users registered beta testing our product.

4) what's the business model of Stribe?

It’s Freemium business model: there is a free version for small websites/blogs and we provide premium features.

5) Stribe was and techcrunch50 2009 in september and at Le web 2009 in december (i know u won at le web): would you describe the differences between the 2 events?

TC50 is dedicated about startup launching. It’s the core event and everyone come for that and expect to discover the next “Google or Facebook”.

LeWeb is a conference about a topic with many web gurus and next to this event there is an European competition startup. People, media, bloggers and journalist are very careful about this because it’s a competition and all the web ecosystem are in Paris to meet them up.

Kamel Zeroual at Techcrunch 50, 15th september 2009:

35 best innovators of 2009

After mentioning best innovators of 2008 and 2007, it's the turn of best innovators of 2009.

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.

Theese are the winners of 2009

2009 Innovator of the Year: Kevin Fu
2009 Humanitarian of the Year: José Gómez-Márquez

Andrea Armani (31 - University of Southern California)
Sensitive optical sensors detect single molecules

Michael Backes (31 - Saarland University)
Proving that Internet security protocols can really be trusted

Jeffrey Bigham (28 - University of Rochester)
Free service to help blind people navigate the Web

James Carey (32 - SiOnyx)
Using “black silicon” to build inexpensive, super-sensitive light detectors

Jorge Conde (32 - Knome)
Offering consumers whole-genome sequencing--and software to interpret it

Ranjan Dash (32 - Y-Carbon)
Nanoporous carbon could help power hybrid cars

Adam Dunkels (31 - Swedish Institute of Computer Science)
Minimal wireless-networking protocols allow almost any device to communicate over the Internet

Nathan Eagle (32 - Santa Fe Institute)
Mining mobile-phone data for the public good

Cody Friesen (31 - Fluidic Energy)
Making cheaper, higher-energy batteries to store renewable energy

Kevin Fu (33 - University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Defeating would-be hackers of radio frequency chips in objects from credit cards to pacemakers

José Gómez-Márquez (32 - Innovations in International Health, MIT)
Practical medical devices for use in poor countries

Jeffrey Heer (30 - Stanford University)
Easy-to-use tools allow people to present data in creative and interesting ways

Andrew Houck (30 - Princeton University)
Preserving information for practical quantum computing

Kurt Zenz House (31 - C12 Energy)
Capturing carbon dioxide through cement production

Shahram Izadi (33 - Microsoft Research U.K.)
An intuitive 3-D interface helps people manage layers of data

Ali Javey (29 - University of California, Berkeley)
“Painting” nanowires into electronic circuits

Michelle Khine (32 - University of California, Irvine)
A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips

Anat Levin (31 - Weizmann Institute of Science)
New cameras and algorithms capture the potential of digital images

Erez Lieberman-Aiden (29 - Harvard University/MIT)
Quantitative tools offer new insights into evolution

Andrew Lynn (32 - Ortho­mimetics)
Repairing joints by stimulating regrowth in bone and cartilage

Ellis Meng (34 - University of Southern California)
Micropumps deliver drugs that prevent blindness

Pranav Mistry (28 - MIT)
A simple, wearable device enhances the real world with digital information

Aydogan Ozcan (30 - UCLA)
Inexpensive chips and sophisticated software could make microscope lenses obsolete

Shwetak Patel (27 - University of Washington)
Simple sensors to detect residents’ activities

Andrew Perlman (34 - GreatPoint Energy)
Slashing carbon emissions by converting coal into natural gas

Ashoke Ravi (32 - Intel)
Using software to send diverse radio signals

Vera Sazonova (30 - Nat’l Research Council Canada)
World’s smallest resonator could lead to tiny mechanical devices

Elena Shevchenko (32 - Argonne National Laboratory)
Assembling nanocrystals to create made-to-order materials

Vik Singh (24 - Yahoo)
Opening up search secrets to spur innovation

Dawn Song (34 - University of California, Berkeley)
Defeating malware through automated software analysis

Jaime Teevan (32 - Microsoft Research)
Using personal information to improve search results

C. Shad Thaxton (33 - Northwestern University)
Nanoparticles could treat cardiovascular disease by mimicking “good cholesterol”

Andrea Thomaz (33 - Georgia Institute of Technology)
Robots that learn new skills the way people do

Adrien Treuille (30 - Carnegie Mellon University)
Complex physics simulations that can run on everyday PCs

Cyrus Wadia (34 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Identifying materials that could be unexpectedly useful in solar cells

Zuckerberg and the future of Facebook

26th October 2005, Zuckerberg explains how you can monetize users "pretty easily"; today he would have said different things...

Mark Zuckerberg was 19 years old when he created Facebook, with Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It was February 4th 2004 and nobody could imagine that after 5 years Facebook has almost 200 million active users worldwide.

Zuckerberg & friends moved to Silicon Valley during the summer of 2004 (the world is NOT flat, Mr. Thomas Friedman!) and they looked for investors.

October 2008: Zuckerberg says: "What every great internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site. I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I'm pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today."

3 years can mean October 2011! Does Zuckerberg think he has such a long time?

The future of Facebook doesn't depend only on Zuckerberg but it depends on its investors too:

- Microsoft put $240 million

- Li Ka-shing put $120 million

- TriplePoint Capital put $100 million

and others (full list here)

According to Techcrunch (article of October 2008):

"The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone"
[...]

"With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll."
[...]

"It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money."

Time is running out for Zuckerberg, it's going to be "Facebook must make money or sell Facebook"

It would be nice to have an etiquette for Facebook, how long do we have to wait for?

The Economist asked "Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist” at Facebook, to crunch some numbers. Dr Marlow found that the average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120" and "women tend to have somewhat more than men"[...] "Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten."

1st phase Feb 2004-Aug 2005 Facebook only for US university

2nd phase Sep 2005-25 Sep 2006 Facebook only for US university and high schools

3rd phase 26 Sep 2006-today Facebook is open for everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address

What would Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) think about Facebook? He could think it's the Panopticon of the XXI century with important diffences:

- in Panopticon there are prisoners and observers; prisoners don't choose to lose privacy.

- in Facebook people do choose to lose part of privacy

- in Facebook everybody can be an observer

Invention of telephone and national heritage

Sirio187: Telecom Italia telephone with caller ID and SMS - 2000

Who invented the telephone?

Yet we can't be sure at 100%. The problem is that an invention isn't only an artefact but often it is seen as a part of national heritage (similar thing about the invention of radio, i already wrote about it).

From Wikipedia:

the history of the invention of the telephone is a confusing collection of claims and counterclaims, made no less confusing by the many lawsuits which attempted to resolve the patent claims of several individuals

In the USA Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) for very long time was credited with inventing the telephone: patent 174,465 (see the 6-page patent here), including the claim on transmitting vocal sounds, was issued to Bell on 7 March 1876 by the U.S. Patent Office.
But things are much more complicated.

On 11th June 2002 the US House of Representatives passed the second version of bill number H.RES.269 EH

Whereas Antonio Meucci, the great Italian inventor, had a career that was both extraordinary and tragic; (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)

HRES 269 EH

H. Res. 269

In the House of Representatives, U.S.,

June 11, 2002.

Whereas Antonio Meucci, the great Italian inventor, had a career that was both extraordinary and tragic;

Whereas, upon immigrating to New York, Meucci continued to work with ceaseless vigor on a project he had begun in Havana, Cuba, an invention he later called the `teletrofono', involving electronic communications;

Whereas Meucci set up a rudimentary communications link in his Staten Island home that connected the basement with the first floor, and later, when his wife began to suffer from crippling arthritis, he created a permanent link between his lab and his wife's second floor bedroom;

Whereas, having exhausted most of his life's savings in pursuing his work, Meucci was unable to commercialize his invention, though he demonstrated his invention in 1860 and had a description of it published in New York's Italian language newspaper;

Whereas Meucci never learned English well enough to navigate the complex American business community;

Whereas Meucci was unable to raise sufficient funds to pay his way through the patent application process, and thus had to settle for a caveat, a one year renewable notice of an impending patent, which was first filed on December 28, 1871;

Whereas Meucci later learned that the Western Union affiliate laboratory reportedly lost his working models, and Meucci, who at this point was living on public assistance, was unable to renew the caveat after 1874;

Whereas in March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, who conducted experiments in the same laboratory where Meucci's materials had been stored, was granted a patent and was thereafter credited with inventing the telephone;

Whereas on January 13, 1887, the Government of the United States moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation, a case that the Supreme Court found viable and remanded for trial;

Whereas Meucci died in October 1889, the Bell patent expired in January 1893, and the case was discontinued as moot without ever reaching the underlying issue of the true inventor of the telephone entitled to the patent; and

Whereas if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.

After over a century Antonio Meucci (1808-1889) is credited with the invention of telephone ... but Alexander Graham Bell is a hero in Canada (he spent years in Canada and he died on 2 August 1922, at his private estate, Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, at age 75) and after 10 days we have news from canadian Parliament:

Friday, June 21, 2002

Oral question period

Canadian Heritage

Mr. Bob Speller (Haldimand—Norfolk—Brant, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Canadian Heritage.

The minister must be aware now of the silly goings on in the United States capital where the U.S. house of representatives passed a motion claiming that somebody other than Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

I am wondering if the minister will take the time to inform the U.S. congress that indeed yes, Virginia, Alexander Graham Bell did invent the telephone.

Hon. Sheila Copps (Minister of Canadian Heritage, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, this is one planted question that will bear fruit.

The member for Haldimand--Norfolk--Brant has raised a very important point. It has also been raised by my colleague from Brantford and by members on all sides of the House.

I am very pleased to report that right after question period I hope we will be able to table a unanimous resolution of all members of the House recognizing the fact that the real inventor of the telephone was indeed Alexander Graham Bell.

and later the same day:

Routine Proceedings

Alexander Graham Bell

Hon. Sheila Copps (Minister of Canadian Heritage, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask the House for unanimous consent on the following motion, which has been discussed with all parties, regarding Alexander Graham Bell. I move:

This House affirms that Alexander Graham Bell of Brantford, Ontario and Baddeck, Nova Scotia is the inventor of the telephone.

The Speaker: Does the hon. Minister of Canadian Heritage have the unanimous consent of the House to propose this motion?

Some hon. members: Agreed.

The Speaker: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

Some hon. members: Agreed.

(Motion agreed to)

Hon. Sheila Copps: Mr. Speaker, might I suggest that we forward a copy of this to the congress in the United States so they get their facts straight?

--
Not a word about Antonio Meucci, not a single evidence about the invention. Is the important thing to discover the truth about history or to save the national heritage?

There is even a second controversy about a race to the patent office between Elisha Gray (1835-1901) and Alexander Graham Bell (again!): I don't know who should be credited but I do know that Bell is a legend and Gray is completely unknown by the masses...

35 innovators

Last year I already talked about this (35 beautiful minds) and I'm glad to write about it again.

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review (magazine of Massachussets Institute of Technology) have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research they find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.

Theese are the winners of 2008.

2008 Innovator of the Year: JB Straubel
2008 Humanitarian of the Year: Aimèe Rose

Blaise Aguera y Arcas (33 years old - Microsoft Live Labs)
Building immersive 3-D environments

Theodore Betley (31 - Harvard University)
Re-creating photosynthesis

Martin Burke (32 - University of Illinois)
Molecular diversity

Dries Buytaert (29 - Drupal)
Simple, flexible Web publishing

Cristopher Chang (33 - University of California, Berkeley)
Probing chemical reactions in the body

Michelle Chang (31 - University of California, Berkeley)
Designing microbes to make fuels and drugs

Jenova Chen (26 - Thatgamecompany)
Gaming with the flow

Tanzeem Choudhury (33 - Dartmouth College)
Inferring social networks automatically

Peter L. Corsell (30 - GridPoint)
Making the electric grid smart

Jack Dorsey (31 - Twitter)
Personal updates made simple

Stefanus Du Toit (25 - RapidMind)
Programming for parallel processors

Nicholas Fang (33 - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Superlenses for watching cells

Ric Fulop (33 - A123 Systems)
Energizing rechargeable batteries

Julia Greer (32 - California Institute of Technology)
Revealing how materials behave at the nanoscale

Hossam Haick (33 - Technion-Israel Institute of Technology)
Sniffing out cancer

Seth Hallem (28 - Coverity)
Deconstructing software to find bugs

Donhee Ham (34 - Harvard University)
Portable nuclear magnetic resonance

Konrad Hochedlinger (32 - Harvard Medical School)
Turning adult cells into stem cells

Xian-Sheng Hua (34 - Microsoft Research Asia)
Enhancing video search

Sundar Iyer (31 - Cisco Systems)
Making memory at Internet speed

Jeffrey Karp (32 - Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology)
Gecko-inspired surgical tape

Farinaz Koushanfar (32 - Rice University)
Locking microchips to prevent piracy

Johnny Lee (28 - Microsoft)
Streamlining human-computer interactions

Meredith Ringel Morris (29 - Microsoft Research)
Searching websites jointly

Andrew Ng (32 - Stanford University)
Building household robots

Kostya Novoselov (34 - University of Manchester)
Two-dimensional transistors

Milica Radisic (32 - University of Toronto)
Patching damaged hearts

Aimèe Rose (34 - ICx Technologies)
Ultrasensitive detectors to sniff out explosives

Bilal Shafi (34 - University of Pennsylvania)
Preventing congestive heart failure

Adam Smith (23 - Xobni)
Making sense of e-mail madness

JB Straubel (32 - Tesla Motors)
Engineering electric sports cars

Joo Chuan Tong (31 - The Singapore Agency for Science, Technology, and Research's Institute for Infocomm Research)
My vision: Personalized vaccines

Eric Wilhelm (31 - Instructables)
Putting DIY projects online

Robert Wood (31 - Harvard University)
Building robotic flies

Ronggui Yang (34 - University of Colorado, Boulder)
Efficient electricity from waste heat

YouTube, we pay

Another step for YouTube: it is starting to pay creators of video

YouTube partners are independent video creators and media companies who are looking for online distribution and who meet our qualifications. Becoming a partner gives you the ability to share in ad revenue from your YouTube videos.

Which percentage will you get? We don't know yet, we know who can partecipate:

1) You create original videos
2) You own the copyrights and distribution rights for the content you upload
3) You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of people
4) You live in USA or Canada

How many people create content?
According to a study (8 months old) only "0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch".
Beside the hype of Web 2.0 (or even 3.0) that's the reality now: every user can create content (such as video, article, photo) but only a tiny minority is doing that. Few prosumers (producer and consumer at the same time) and a lot of consumers.

Stockhausen 1928-2007

Karlheinz Stockhausen, genius of modern music, died few days ago; The Independent writes:

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Composer acclaimed as a genius for his work in electronic music

10 December 2007

Karlheinz Stockhausen, composer and conductor: born Mödrath, Germany 22 August 1928; Artistic Director, Westdeutscher Rundfunk Electronic Music Studio 1963-77, Artistic Consultant 1977-90; Professor of Composition, Cologne State Conservatory 1971-77; married 1951 Doris Andreae (one son, three daughters; marriage dissolved), 1967 Mary Bauermeister (one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved); died Kürten, Germany 5 December 2007.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of only a tiny number of composers born and working in the 20th century who transformed the field of music. Like most prominent composers of his time, what brought him to the fore was not so much his musical talent as his overall vision, intellectual brilliance and work-discipline.

As with many artists, his abilities were apparent in his infancy, but the path he would eventually take did not seem the obvious one. Simon, his father, was a primary school teacher. His mother, Gertrud, came from a prosperous farming family. When Karlheinz was born in 1928, in Mödrath – a small mining village near Cologne – Germany was a depressed country in the thick of inter-war turmoil. Simon Stockhausen was shunted from job to job and, each time, the family moved with him. When Karlheinz was scarcely four, his mother suffered a breakdown and was admitted to the local mental hospital.

Karlheinz's first piano studies were with the organist of Altenberg cathedral. He took to the instrument with such speed that within a year he played duets at local functions. After only one hearing, he could play back popular tunes or operatic themes.

The boy was spontaneously religious. Prayers were part of the daily routine at home. When Simon was "encouraged" to join the Nazi party, however, he had to discourage prayer at school, a discrepancy which made a lasting impact on his son.

Simon left for the front as an officer and Karlheinz Stockhausen was himself drafted in autumn 1944. As a stretcher-bearer he tended wounded soldiers from many different countries. "Death became something completely relative for me," he later recalled. He never saw his father again, and his mother – along with other mental patients – had been killed as an act of government policy.

As a post-war orphan he moved to Cologne and lived hand-to-mouth, working as a car park attendant and night-watchman. His first thought for a vocation was literature; he started to write poems and stories, inspired by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. Music seemed, improbably, a way to earn money. Stockhausen played the piano in cafés, restaurants and bars and, just after he decided to concentrate on music, he spent a year improvising accompaniments for Adrion the conjuror.

Music in post-war Europe was as much in ferment as society and politics. A quarter-century earlier, Arnold Schoenberg had sown the seeds, revolutionising music by devising (some would say discovering) "composition using 12 tones". He would rework a melodic idea until it used all 12 notes of the octave, then extrapolate the intervals from the sequence. This pattern served as the basis for the cohesion and comprehensibility of the music. While Schoenberg saw the method as a continuation of tradition, the rising generation wanted to break with the past. The young Europeans tried to do so by applying the 12-tone principle with conceptual rigour to other dimensions of the music, such as rhythm and tone-colour.

Stockhausen became a pioneer of this "total serialism". In Kreuzspiel (1951), not only were the pitches organised in a series, but the durations too. Kontra-Punkte (1952-53) uses six different groups of timbre, which drop out one by one, until only the piano is left. Six degrees of volume are gradually reduced to a continuously soft level, and a diversity of note lengths gradually slims down to similar durations.

Total serialism, as practised by Stockhausen and peers such as Pierre Boulez, was soon attacked as "Augenmusik" – music for the eyes, not for the ears. If you wrote this way, it was argued, you took the notes from your intellectual schemes, not from what you heard in your head – and listeners could not follow them.

Certainly, Stockhausen and his followers tended to couch descriptions of their work in terms of "research", and were constantly inventing scientific-sounding terminology such as "group" and "moment" form. When Stockhausen worked in Paris in one of the early electronic music studios, he proposed a study made up of tiny permutations of a single sound. "Don't do that," the studio director, Pierre Schaeffer, advised. "You'll only hear background noise." Stockhausen persevered, and eventually played the result to Schaeffer. "All you heard was 'shuuutt'," Schaeffer remembered. "He was terribly pleased with it."

Characteristically, Stockhausen carried on, taking no account of criticism. He saw total serialism through to its conclusion, in works such as Gruppen, for three orchestras (1955-57) and his piano pieces. Kontakte (1959-60), for piano, percussion, and tape, tackled the compositional problem of relating acoustic and electronic sounds, in a way which remains unsurpassed. Zyklus (1959), his percussion solo, took Stockhausen's electro-acoustic researches and applied them to an instrumental work.

At the end of the Fifties, Stockhausen was undoubtedly the national composer of Germany. Although he was barely 30, he employed a series of compositional assistants, and held a pivotal place in the major music summer schools in Darmstadt and later Cologne.

In 1951 he had married Doris Andreae, daughter of a wealthy Hamburg shipbuilder, and for the next decade she was "the ideal wife", looking after their domestic affairs, leaving him free to work, and keeping open house for visiting composer friends. Early in the Sixties, however, his artistic connections with the painter Mary Bauermeister spilled over into an affair.

Since Stockhausen's music is on the surface highly intellectual, it is easy to overlook his emotional life and its relation to his work. It is, though, there for all to see. He dramatised his conflict of loyalties, for instance, in his lengthy Momente (1961-64), for soprano, four choir groups, and 13 instrumentalists. The material is grouped into K (Klang, timbre), M (melody) and D (duration) moments, which also happen to stand for Karlheinz, Mary and Doris.

Beginning in the mid-Sixties, Stockhausen turned towards a more intuitive type of music-making, providing form but not content for the players. Scores such as Prozession (1967) and Kurzwellen (1968) consist of signs directing the musicians to transform sounds spontaneously in specific ways. He formed his own performance group, and coached its members to play his new pieces in what he felt was the appropriate way – which from time to time led to clashes.

In May 1968 – that time of global crisis – Mary Bauermeister left him. Responding creatively as usual, he went into seclusion and wrote a series of text scores, elusive in their instructions. "Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe" is the invitation of one text. "What shall I do with that?" asked Group Stockhausen's pianist, Aloys Kontarsky.

Mantra (1970), for two pianos, ring modulators and incidental percussion, marked a return to conventional notation, and a new approachability. Stockhausen later remembered with pride that while touring the work he and the pianists would often hum the motif which forms the basis for the work.

It was around this time that his spiritual leanings, which he had long fulfilled through Catholicism, intensified, latching on to an amalgam of apocalyptic thought and Eastern mysticism. Sirius (1974), for instance, is premissed on Jakob Lorber's pronouncement that the human race was founded thousands of years ago by benign space-travellers from the Dog Star. The piece begins and ends with the depiction of space-ship engines landing and taking off.

The early Seventies marked the zenith of Stockhausen's popularity (his standing among fellow-composers was at its greatest 10 years earlier). By the Eighties, the music establishment took him less and less seriously, and his influence dwindled.

This was partly due to his personality. Charming, albeit opinionated, as a young man, many felt that after his crisis in the Sixties he had become a megalomaniac. Some people were offended by his polygamous relations with his female interpreters (to whom he referred on occasion as his "squaws") and by the apparent nepotism of including family members in his performances. He fell out with his publisher and record company over what they felt were unreasonable demands.

Partly, too, his falling sign was the flip-side of his early success. For Stockhausen, as for many who made their name at an early age (consider Orson Welles), it was hard to satisfy public expectations when he had been acclaimed as a genius while still in his twenties. From 1977 onwards, he subsumed his compositional work in a single project – Licht (Light), a cycle of seven operas, named after the days of the week. Stockhausen declared that he would devote the rest of his working life to its completion, straddling, he planned, the millennium. Commissions which came his way for short works could be the occasion to compose an individual scene. He could build up most of each opera in this piecemeal way, until a major opera house agreed to mount the whole.

It was an audacious ambition, taking his character and his way of working to their natural conclusion. Licht was eventually finished more than a quarter of a century later, in 2003, and Stockhausen embarked upon Klang (Sound), a still unfinished cycle based on the 24 hours of the day.

Time: iPhone is the invention of the year

Time chose the iPhone as the invention of the year (it won also as gadget of the year).
This is why:

Invention Of the Year: The iPhone
By LEV GROSSMAN

Stop. I mean, don't stop reading this, but stop thinking what you're about to think. Or, O.K., I'll think it for you:

The thing is hard to type on. It's too slow. It's too big. It doesn't have instant messaging. It's too expensive. (Or, no, wait, it's too cheap!) It doesn't support my work e-mail. It's locked to AT&T. Steve Jobs secretly hates puppies. And—all together now—we're sick of hearing about it! Yes, there's been a lot of hype written about the iPhone, and a lot of guff too. So much so that it seems weird to add more, after Danny Fanboy and Bobby McBlogger have had their day. But when that day is over, Apple's iPhone is still the best thing invented this year. Why? Five reasons:

1. The iPhone is pretty
Most high-tech companies don't take design seriously. They treat it as an afterthought. Window-dressing. But one of Jobs' basic insights about technology is that good design is actually as important as good technology. All the cool features in the world won't do you any good unless you can figure out how to use said features, and feel smart and attractive while doing it.

An example: look at what happens when you put the iPhone into "airplane" mode (i.e., no cell service, WiFi, etc.). A tiny little orange airplane zooms into the menu bar! Cute, you might say. But cute little touches like that are part of what makes the iPhone usable in a world of useless gadgets. It speaks your language. In the world of technology, surface really is depth.

2. It's touchy-feely
apple didn't invent the touchscreen. Apple didn't even reinvent it (Apple probably acquired its much hyped multitouch technology when it snapped up a company called Fingerworks in 2005). But Apple knew what to do with it. Apple's engineers used the touchscreen to innovate past the graphical user interface (which Apple helped pioneer with the Macintosh in the 1980s) to create a whole new kind of interface, a tactile one that gives users the illusion of actually physically manipulating data with their hands—flipping through album covers, clicking links, stretching and shrinking photographs with their fingers.

This is, as engineers say, nontrivial. It's part of a new way of relating to computers. Look at the success of the Nintendo Wii. Look at Microsoft's new Surface Computing division. Look at how Apple has propagated its touchscreen interface to the iPod line with the iPod Touch. Can it be long before we get an iMac Touch? A TouchBook? Touching is the new seeing.

3. It will make other phones better
jobs didn't write the code inside the iPhone. These days he doesn't dirty his fingers with 1's and 0's, if he ever really did. But he did negotiate the deal with AT&T to carry the iPhone. That's important: one reason so many cell phones are lame is that cell-phone-service providers hobble developers with lame rules about what they can and can't do. AT&T gave Apple unprecedented freedom to build the iPhone to its own specifications. Now other phone makers are jealous. They're demanding the same freedoms. That means better, more innovative phones for all.

4. It's not a phone, it's a platform
when apple made the iphone, it didn't throw together some cheap-o bare-bones firmware. It took OS X, its full-featured desktop operating system, and somehow squished it down to fit inside the iPhone's elegant glass-and-stainless-steel case. That makes the iPhone more than just a gadget. It's a genuine handheld, walk-around computer, the first device that really deserves the name. One of the big trends of 2007 was the idea that computing doesn't belong just in cyberspace, it needs to happen here, in the real world, where actual stuff happens. The iPhone gets applications like Google Maps out onto the street, where we really need them.

And this is just the beginning. Platforms are for building on. Last month, after a lot of throat-clearing, Apple decided to open up the iPhone, so that you—meaning people other than Apple employees—will be able to develop software for it too. Ever notice all that black blank space on the iPhone's desktop? It's about to fill up with lots of tiny, pretty, useful icons.

5. It is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come
the iphone has sold enough units—more than 1.4 million at press time—that it'll be around for a while, and with all that room to develop and its infinitely updatable, all-software interface, the iPhone is built to evolve. Look at the iPod of six years ago. That monochrome interface! That clunky touchwheel! It looks like something a caveman whittled from a piece of flint using another piece of flint. Now imagine something that's going to make the iPhone look that primitive. You'll have one in a few years. It'll be very cool. And it'll be even cheaper.

35 beautiful minds

Since 1999, the editors of Technology Review (magazine of Massachussets institute of technology) have honored the young innovators whose inventions and research we find most exciting; today that collection is the TR35, a list of technologists and scientists, all under the age of 35. Their work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world.

2007 Innovator of the Year: David Berry
2007 Humanitarian of the Year: Tapan Parikh

Here's the complete list:

J. Christopher Anderson (31 - University of California, Berkeley)
Creating tumor-killing bacteria

Erik Bakkers (34 - Philips Research Laboratories)
Combining semiconductors

David Berry (29 - Flagship Ventures)
Renewable petroleum from microbes

Sanjit Biswas (25 - Meraki Networks)
Cheap, easy Internet access

Josh Bongard (33 - University of Vermont)
Adaptive robots

Garrett Camp (28 - StumbleUpon)
Discovering more of the Web

Mung Chiang (30 - Princeton University)
Optimizing networks

Adam Cohen (28 - Harvard University)
Making molecules motionless

Javier García-Martínez (34 - University of Alicante - Spain)
New zeolites for cracking petroleum

Ali Khademhosseini (31 - Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology)
Living Legos

Tadayoshi Kohno (29 - University of Washington)
Securing systems cryptographically

Tariq Krim (34 - Netvibes)
Building a personal, dynamic Web page

Ivan Krstic´ (21 - One Laptop per Child)
Making antivirus software obsolete

Jeff LaPorte (30 - Eqo Communications)
Internet-based calling from mobile phones

Ju Li (32 - Ohio State University)
Modeling designer materials

Karen Liu (30 - Georgia Tech)
Bringing body language to computer-animated characters

Christopher Loose (27 - SteriCoat)
Beating up bacteria

Anna Lysyanskaya (31 - Brown University)
Securing online privacy

Tapan Parikh (33 - University of Washington)
Simple, powerful mobile tools for developing economies

Babak Parviz (34 - University of Washington)
Self-assembling micromachines

Kristala Jones Prather (34 - MIT)
Reverse-engineering biology

Partha Ranganathan (34 - Hewlett-Packard Labs)
Power-aware computing systems

Neil Renninger (33 - Amyris Biotechnologies)
Hacking microbes for energy

Kevin Rose (30 - Digg)
Online social bookmarking

Marc Sciamanna (29 - École Supérieure d’Électricité and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-France)
Controlling chaos in telecom lasers

Rachel Segalman (31 - University of California, Berkeley)
Cheap electricity from heat

Shetal Shah (32 - State University of New York, Stony Brook)
Cushioning preemies

Abraham Stroock (34 - Cornell University)
Microfluidic biomaterials

Desney Tan (31 - Microsoft Research)
Teaching computers to read minds

Doris Tsao (31 - University of Bremen - Germany)
Shedding light on how our brains recognize faces

Luis von Ahn (29 - Carnegie Mellon University)
Using “captchas” to digitize books

Xudong Wang (31 - Georgia Tech)
Powering the nanoworld

Lili Yang (32 - Caltech)
Engineering immunity

Mehmet Yanik (29 - MIT)
Stopping light on microchips

Mark Zuckerberg (23 - Facebook)
Circle of friends

100 living geniuses

Today Daily Telegraph showed us the top 100 living geniuses.

The list, compiled by a panel of six experts in creativity and innovation, is jointly topped by Sir Tim and Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who created the drug LSD.

They are followed by George Soros, the American financier and philanthropist, Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Nelson Mandela, the former South African president.

Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm, chose their geniuses by awarding scores out of 10 to each entrant against a number of factors: paradigm shifting; popular acclaim; intellectual power; achievement and cultural importance. The firm emailed 4,000 Britons this summer and asked them to nominate up to 10 living people who they considered geniuses.

The journalist Aislinn Simpson is so proud of the british in the list:
"Britain has more living geniuses per head of population than anywhere else in the world, according to a new survey which reveals the country's influence on science, technology, business and the arts.
[...]
With 24 Britons in the list, the country has generated one living genius per 2.5 million people – a higher proportion than any other country."


1= Albert Hoffman (Swiss) Chemist 27
1= Tim Berners-Lee (British) Computer Scientist 27
3 George Soros (American) Investor & Philanthropist 25
4 Matt Groening (American) Satirist & Animator 24
5= Nelson Mandela (South African) Politician & Diplomat 23
5= Frederick Sanger (British) Chemist 23
7= Dario Fo (Italian) Writer & Dramatist 22
7= Steven Hawking (British) Physicist 22
9= Oscar Niemeyer (Brazilian) Architect 21
9= Philip Glass (American) Composer 21
9= Grigory Perelman (Russian) Mathematician 21
12= Andrew Wiles (British) Mathematician 20
12= Li Hongzhi (Chinese) Spiritual Leader 20
12= Ali Javan (Iranian) Engineer 20
15= Brian Eno (British) Composer 19
15= Damian Hirst (British) Artist 19
15= Daniel Tammet (British) Savant & Linguist 19
18 Nicholson Baker (American Writer 18
19 Daniel Barenboim (N/A) Musician 17
20= Robert Crumb (American) Artist 16
20= Richard Dawkins (British) Biologist and philosopher 16
20= Larry Page & Sergey Brin (American) Publishers 16
20= Rupert Murdoch (American) Publisher 16
20= Geoffrey Hill (British) Poet
25 Garry Kasparov (Russian) Chess Player 15
26= The Dalai Lama (Tibetan) Spiritual Leader 14
26= Steven Spielberg (American) Film maker 14
26= Hiroshi Ishiguro (Japanese) Roboticist 14
26= Robert Edwards (British) Pioneer of IVF treatment 14
26= Seamus Heaney (Irish) Poet 14
31 Harold Pinter (British) Writer & Dramatist 13
32= Flossie Wong-Staal (Chinese) Bio-technologist 12
32= Bobby Fischer (American) Chess Player 12
32= Prince (American) Musician 12
32= Henrik Gorecki (Polish) Composer 12
32= Avram Noam Chomski (American) Philosopher & linguist 12
32= Sebastian Thrun (German) Probabilistic roboticist 12
32= Nima Arkani Hamed (Canadian) Physicist 12
32= Margaret Turnbull (American) Astrobiologist 12
40= Elaine Pagels (American) Historian 11
40= Enrique Ostrea (Philippino) Pediatrics & neonatology 11
40= Gary Becker (American) Economist 11
43= Mohammed Ali (American) Boxer 10
43= Osama Bin Laden (Saudi) Islamicist 10
43= Bill Gates (American) Businessman 10
43= Philip Roth (American) Writer 10
43= James West (American) Invented the foil electrical microphone 10
43= Tuan Vo-Dinh (Vietnamese) Bio-Medical Scientist 10
49= Brian Wilson (American) Musician 9
49= Stevie Wonder (American) Singer songwriter 9
49= Vint Cerf (American) Computer scientist 9
49= Henry Kissinger (American) Diplomat and politician 9
49= Richard Branson (British) Publicist 9
49= Pardis Sabeti (Iranian) Biological anthropologist 9
49= Jon de Mol (Dutch) Television producer 9
49= Meryl Streep (American) Actress 9
49= Margaret Attwood (Canadian) Writer 9
58= Placido Domingo (Spanish) Singer 8
58= John Lasseter (American) Digital Animator 8
58= Shunpei Yamazaki (Japanese) Computer scientist & physicist 8
58= Jane Goodall (British) Ethologist & Anthropologist 8
58= Kirti Narayan Chaudhuri (Indian) Historian 8
58= John Goto (British) Photographer 8
58= Paul McCartney (British) Musician 8
58= Stephen King (American) Writer 8
58= Leonard Cohen (American) Poet & musician 8
67= Aretha Franklin (American) Musician 7
67= David Bowie (British) Musician 7
67= Emily Oster (American) Economist 7
67= Steve Wozniak (American) Engineer and co-founder of Apple Computers 7
67= Martin Cooper (American) Inventor of the cell phone 7
72= George Lucas (American) Film maker 6
72= Niles Rogers (American) Musician 6
72= Hans Zimmer (German) Composer 6
72= John Williams (American) Composer 6
72= Annette Baier (New Zealander) Philosopher 6
72= Dorothy Rowe (British) Psychologist 6
72= Ivan Marchuk (Ukrainian) Artist & sculptor 6
72= Robin Escovado (American) Composer 6
72= Mark Dean (American) Inventor & computer scientist 6
72= Rick Rubin (American) Musician & producer 6
72= Stan Lee (American) Publisher 6
83= David Warren (Australian) Engineer 5
83= Jon Fosse (Norwegian) Writer & dramatist
83= Gjertrud Schnackenberg (American) Poet 5
83= Graham Linehan (Irish) Writer & dramatist 5
83= JK Rowling (British) Writer 5
83= Ken Russell (British) Film maker 5
83= Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (Russian) Small arms designer 5
83= Erich Jarvis (American) Neurobiologist 5
91=. Chad Varah (British) Founder of Samaritans 4
91= Nicolas Hayek (Swiss) Businessman and founder of Swatch 4
91= Alastair Hannay (British) Philosopher 4
94= Patricia Bath (American) Ophthalmologist
94= Thomas L. Jackson (American) (1) Aerospace engineer 3
94= Dolly Parton (American) Singer 3
94= Morissey (British) Singer 3
94= Michael Eavis (British) Organiser of Glastonbury 3
94= Ranulph Fiennes (British) Adventurer 3
100=. Quentin Tarantino (American) Filmmaker

(1) the Daily Telegraph wrote Thomas A. Jackson but the correct name is
Thomas L. Jackson