Graphics have proven to be very useful in powering video games where you can zap huge numbers of bad guys in a minute. But now they may prove useful in powering lasers that can zap live mosquitoes out of the sky — all in the name of eliminating malaria.
Intellectual Ventures, the research company founded by Nathan Mhyrvold, created a “laser fence” to protect homes from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. It’s a great example of taking technologies that were invented for one purpose and adapting them for another.
The laser fence taps an Nvidia graphics chip to process the data coming in from a camera to identify a mosquito in real-time and then activate the laser to zap it.
“You have to recognize that it’s a mosquito, versus all of the other bugs that might be flying around, recognize that it’s a female mosquito, and then shoot it down. That recognition of trying to find that mosquito while it’s flying around is done on the GPU,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president of marketing at Nvidia in Santa Clara, Calif., in an interview with KGO-TV.
Malaria still kills a million people a year, mostly in Africa, where pesticides and bed nets are not extremely effective. The Intellectual Ventures researchers say they think that a mosquito zapper can be built for about $50. Incidentally, Intellectual Ventures has been blasted for being a “patent troll” because it is suing some tech companies. This is an example of how the company invents interesting technologies as well. The company would likely find a partner to mass-produce a laser fence.
The servers of RSA, the security division of information storage giant EMC, have been breached and sensitive information from more than 40 million employees may have been compromised.
The information at risk is the two-factor authentication tokens used by employees to access corporate and government networks.
The RSA authentication security system uses these tokens to create a time sensitive number for an employee to enter along with his or her password.
This additional security measure is important because it prevents attempts from hackers who may have uncovered an employee’s password. If the hackers were able to access information from a particular company, they might be able to generate the password for one of its tokens.
Says RSA Executive Chairman Art Coviello, “While at this time we are confident that the information extracted does not enable a successful direct attack on any of our RSA SecurID customers, this information could potentially be used to reduce the effectiveness of a current two-factor authentication implementation as part of a broader attack.”
RSA’s system is currently used by approximately 25,000 organizations, including banks and the US military.
RSA contacted customers asking them to follow a number of cautionary practices. The company says it is examining the breach and is working with the authorities; there is no doubt more information will be announced shortly.
(Editor’s note: Tony Hartl is the founder Planet Tan and author of “Selling Sunshine: 75 Tips, Tools and Tactics for Becoming a Wildly Successful Entrepreneur”. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)
There are a lot of ways to celebrate a company anniversary: You can go the traditional route with cake and punch. You can rent out a restaurant and have an open bar. Or you can simply give people the day off. But those things have inherent shortfalls—employees come to expect them, and that means they won’t value the occasion, leading to more disappointment than excitement when you don’t “meet expectations.”
So when it came time to celebrate our 12th anniversary at Planet Tan, I showed my appreciation to employees and our members in a unique way. I called a meeting with my store managers and office staff. In my hands, I held a stainless steel briefcase. I told my staff how much it meant to me that they had stayed on for so many years and shared with them what a valuable part of the company they were.
I placed the briefcase onto the podium and opened it. The room was silent as the staff caught a glimpse of $100 dollar bills stacked inside. I called up one of my store managers, Jason, who had been with me for 10 years. One by one, I handed him ten crisp $100 bills.
It became a legend at Planet Tan: that day, I handed out $18,000 of my own money to 18 of my employees.
I hadn’t taken it out of the company, because I didn’t want it to impact our financial statements. I hadn’t added it to their paychecks because I didn’t want them to be taxed on it. I took the 18K out of my own personal savings and gave it to my employees to show my appreciation for their loyalty. I was reinforcing the significance of 12 years in business. I handed out cash across the pyramid, including one member of our maintenance staff who had been with us for many years.
The energy created by these types of gift and other unique celebrations is palpable. It cements the idea in staff members’ minds that the company is succeeding, that you care about them, and that they have your heartfelt thanks for the time they’ve given to the company.
What you reward in your business will be reinforced, and you can create stories and legends within your organization that reinforce the company’s values. At the same time, you can give employees opportunities to be proud of the jobs that they do.
When we celebrated occasions in my company, we took care to make it truly memorable. We chartered a jet to eat at Emeril’s Restaurant in New Orleans, then to the House of Blues for front-row seats at a BB King concert. We gave away trips to Cancun and Jamaica as prizes for increased sales. In whatever you decide to do, the important point is to be sure to surprise and delight your staff.
Make sure that you show what you value through your celebrations—and not through Christmas bonuses that your staff could come to expect (and which could cause resentment if you did not give them out). It should be something new and different and surprising, and if done right, it will always result in an adrenaline surge in energy channeled for your company.
In the long term, keeping your celebrations fresh and unexpected will help you to retain your best talent. It might even convert them to evangelists among their friends, helping you lure high quality employees.
Whatever you value most, align all conversations and communications and incentives around what you’re trying to achieve. Channel all your energies toward that. There were other incentives toward tenure which we used, such as subsidized tuition, health insurance, increased vacation time, even a 30-day paid sabbatical at their seventh year. The longer team members stayed with us, the more they were appreciated, and it kept the best performers from looking elsewhere.
Watch out, Amazon.com: Someone’s trying to bump your shopping cart.
Consumer-electronics review site Retrevo today launched a marketplace that combines e-commerce and research for tech shopping. It’s aiming to simplify shopping for electronics — and muscle in on the $35 billion business of helping consumers decide what to buy and the most convenient way to buy it, cofounder Manish Rathi told VentureBeat.
Retrevo’s software, which it calls a recommendation engine, currently processes 100 million data points across 1 million products every day to provide users with a “Value Map,” or a way to look and compare products based on more than just price.
The company said it is aiming primarily at consumers that buy electronics via big-box retailers or e-commerce supersites. In other words, Retrevo’s main competitors are Best Buy, Walmart and Amazon.com.
However, it has tailored its AI for its own in-house needs over a five-year period via a team of engineers and algorithm refinement — though there is a case to be made that it is tarting up its marketing by associating itself with IBM’s Watson efforts.
Regardless, the company claims that using artificial intelligence makes its reviews more reliable and easily applicable to a specific user’s needs — versus the user reviews on Amazon.com whose accuracy and relevance are sometimes difficult to assess.
It’s hard to argue with Amazon.com’s results, however. By letting shoppers rate reviews on whether they found them useful to a purchasing decision, Amazon.com generates an additional $2.7 billion in revenue, a 2009 study found.
Retrevo’s e-commerce platform will feature a “Do Not Add To Cart” button on products that Retrevo’s A.I. deems “undesirable.” The button is intended to prevent buyer’s remorse and educate people about products that may better suit their needs.
Rathi said he is confident the company’s new offering will be a credible competitor because no one has the technology to help people decide what to buy, and do it at scale, reviewing virtually every product in the market, every day.
“As we enter into the e-commerce space with our marketplace, our goal is to ‘Sell’ without ‘Selling out,’ maintaining our unbiased recommendations, and only offering recommended products for sale,” said Rathi. “This is a bold move for a startup like Retrevo, but we are uniquely positioned to unite content and commerce to give our users a better shopping experience.”
One limitation to that experience: Retrevo is not stocking any items itself. Instead, it is referring shoppers to other retailers. To date, it has only signed up 10 relatively minor retailers like eForCity and SF Planet, and says it is talks with larger retailers like Target and J&R.
To date, Retrevo has received two rounds of funding, for a total of $12 million. Its last round consisted of $8 million raised in March of 2008.
Does your car have an app for that? If Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has his way, it will.
The electric-car maker’s CEO said at a conference today in San Francisco that the much-hyped Model S electric sedan will support third-party apps and text-to-voice capabilities.
Musk made the announcement during the question-and-answer portion of his keynote speech at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt in a standing-room-only crowd full of suits.
“We want people to develop car-specific applications [for the Model S],” he told the audience. “And text-to-speech technology can address some of the issues with driver distraction.”
With its large 17-inch touchscreen console, car fans and investors have long suspected that third-party apps might be part of the Model S plan, but Wednesday’s announcement was the first acknowledgement from Musk that the company is courting a developer community.
Musk also said he was optimistic about SolarCity, the solar-panel installation company where he is chairman. He said he believed that there was a “good chance” that the company would put more solar panels on homes in the next three years than have been cumulatively installed to date.
Graphics have proven to be very useful in powering video games where you can zap huge numbers of bad guys in a minute. But now they may prove useful in powering lasers that can zap live mosquitoes out of the sky — all in the name of eliminating malaria.
The servers of 
Watch out, Amazon.com: Someone’s trying to bump your shopping cart.
Does your car have an app for that? If Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has his way, it will.