Jonathan Aberman is the founder of Amplifier Ventures.

A few days ago I was minding my own business, enjoying my morning Chocolate Cheerios, when I came across a guest blog post in Venture Beat asking “Is there Hope for D.C,’s Startup Scene?”  Yeesh.  Not a great way to start a day.

Not one to let a good breakfast be ruined without fighting back, I wrote my own blog post standing up for D.C.’s tech scene, and subsequently had some really great interactions with VentureBeat and others in the D.C. tech community about it. I will give VentureBeat full credit for taking my and others’ reactions to heart and recalibrating their headline. The retitled post now asks, “Does DC know startups?” Reading the retitled post, it raises two important questions for D.C. tech: Can you find tech leadership in Washington? And what is the proper role of government in fostering technology?

There is no doubt that when I wrote my original blog, it was to stand up for the place where Amplifier Ventures and I make our home, and where every day I see entrepreneurs and government working hard to make things happen.  D.C. has a tech scene.  It is vibrant and frankly much more diverse and established than tech scenes in many other parts of the nation.  And, the government has a role — a large role in fact — in the tech world both locally and nationally. As someone who has been part of the D.C. tech community since the 1990s as an investor, and has worked in policy areas with both federal and local government officials, I have a firsthand view of the broad aspects of D.C. tech. I also have spent a great deal of time in Silicon Valley over the years, and think it is a terrific place. It has a vibrancy that is essential to our national economy, and is an extremely valuable resource for our future. I believe that D.C. tech has a similarly important role, and understanding its importance will allow all of us to benefit from its contributions and potential.

D.C. startups: Diversity and dynamism

Entrepreneurs follow opportunity (or as we VCs like to say, “entrepreneurs follow the money”).  The D.C. tech scene has a very distinct composition when compared to other regions.  Like Boston, New York, and the Valley, D.C. has a vibrant software startup scene.  We have accelerators, incubators, nationally recognized VC firms, and local government agencies that are committed to fostering further development of this scene.  Perhaps our light software development ecosystem is not as deep as some other regions, but if you aggregate all of the D.C. region’s entrepreneurial activity it is comparable to, and in some ways more dynamic than, Silicon Valley’s. What is not appreciated by many outside our region is that a substantial portion of local tech entrepreneurship is engaged in creating complex software and other technologies and providing it to serve national security and the government.  And, this portion of our tech community has been extremely successful and productive for the last 25 years.

This kind of technology entrepreneurship might not be as blog-worthy as the newest way to share photos of cats, but it has created wealth and entrepreneurial rewards for many people in our region.  Moreover, there is a large technology work force here: There are as many software engineers in the D.C. region as in as the Valley, for example.

Technology M&A is also comparable. Last year I published a report about our region’s M&A activity. I looked at every M&A deal in the D.C. region and the Valley from 2005 to 2011.  M&A in Silicon Valley is concentrated in what it does best: consumer Internet and semiconductors.  Tech M&A in the D.C. region is more diverse.  Overall activity by number of deals was very comparable.  Entrepreneurship in the D.C. region is very symbiotic with the federal government.  That has been its biggest strength, and creates its biggest opportunity.  When you combine that with a healthy light software innovation ecosystem the picture is more nuanced and much more exciting.

If entrepreneurship is measured against its overall success rate, rather than its success against a particular type of innovative activity, the D.C. region has as many, if not more, opportunities for entrepreneurs to come up with a business idea and work it through to a rewarding exit than anywhere in the U.S.  It may not be sexy enough to be part of the tech blog echo chamber, but it’s a fact supported by data and my anecdotal experiences every day working with serial entrepreneurs in the D.C. region through FounderCorps and Amplifier Ventures.

The importance of the federal government

The second question I want to address in this post is the role of the federal government in technology entrepreneurship. Specifically, many in the Valley (and elsewhere) seem to share  a concept that “government doesn’t matter for entrepreneurship — it should just get out of the way.”

I have a problem with that as a broad statement. One of the unappreciated facts about our economy is that there is an almost direct correlation between government spending on R&D (and government regulatory choices) and every successful industrial cycle that that the U.S. has benefitted from, since building the nation’s railroads.  The relationship between basic science, application, national security and subsequent commercialization denotes a highly symbiotic connection between government and investors.

For example, the venture industry and entrepreneurs have benefitted mightily from the Internet, but the basic research to create it happened through U.S. government spending and policy choices.  The venture capital industry does not create industries, it finances incremental innovations in industrial waves.  That’s not a criticism, it’s a fact: Creating industries takes time and many blind alleys.  The VC industry needs rapid growth and returns.  It needs industrial waves to succeed for it to generate returns.

I would argue that the current challenge in the venture industry (which is related to its inability to generate extraordinary returns) is a direct reflection of the maturing of the most recent industrial wave and its monopolization and concentration.  This is why you currently find two types of venture funds succeeding: funds that can make big bets and withstand monopolistic market power from the Five Horsemen of Technology, and funds (and angels) that grow quick acqui-hires for these same monopolies.  But, they are not funding new industrial waves.

The big question to be answered is: Where do the next industrial waves come from?  Casting one’s eyes towards life extension, material science, artificial intelligence, man/machine interface, alternative energy, conservation, robotics and space, as just some examples, you see a large role being played by government R&D spending and policy in shaping these nascent industrial waves.  To say that government should just stay out of these things is to completely miss the point. In a world of hedge fund-driven financial investing and public company constraints, just about the only source of long-term R&D capital for emerging technology in our economy is the federal government.

There is certainly a large ideological battle being played out in our society about the role and expense of government.  It is playing out in the grinding fight over tax rates and government spending.  Heck, when golfers complain about their tax rates (thanks, Phil Mickelson, for crying about your 62 percent tax rate and demonstrating that you have the worst accountant on the PGA tour) we clearly have reached a point of saturation.  But, balancing a budget without recognizing the importance to our economy of government funded tech R&D and consumption is just silly.  It is like burning your furniture to stay warm.  At some point you are going to need someplace to sit.

Over the last 18 months I have worked with extremely committed people in DOD, DARPA and elsewhere in our federal government to figure out how to get the next generation of technologies matched with entrepreneurs and into the commercial world. This is a big effort and one that is of crucial importance to national and economic security. I expect that many of these technologies will get developed and industries will get established in Boston, New York, Silicon Valley, and the D.C. region, as our entrepreneurial communities innovate. But, make no mistake, the role of D.C., both in its entrepreneurs and in the government, will be an important part of our next industrial waves.

My message therefore is pretty simple.  Either on the level of the entrepreneur, or on the level of being a source of industrial waves, the DC region is highly relevant and important to our national economy.  To my friends in the Valley I say hello, and invite them to come spend some time with me here in DC.  It might open your eyes — and, as is often the case for entrepreneurs — some of you might move here.  After all, entrepreneurs follow the money.

Jonathan Aberman is the Founder of Amplifier Ventures, an investor in government-related, technology-driven companies. He is also Chair of FounderCorps, a regional not-for-profit focused on mentorship and entrepreneurial development in the Washington, DC region, and an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. He is the co-host of the nationally broadcast politics and business program Leftjab Radio on SiriumXM. Follow him at @jaberman.

Top photo: U.S. Capitol via Shutterstock

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You think your dual-core smartphone is the last word, don’t you, Mister Techface? Thanks to Moore’s Law and Intel, that chip’s gonna look like a Big Wheels tricycle next to a Harley Davidson when researchers take a new 48-core chip from the lab into production.

Intel researchers working at an Intel laboratory in Barcelona told Computer World that the still-in-development chips could make their way into tablets and smartphones within the next decade, and likely quite soon.

The researchers also said that with smartphones this smart, your mobile device would become powerful enough to be your primary computer.

Researchers first started talking about the 48-core chip back in late 2009; however, mobile devices weren’t part of early experiments with those chips, which were originally thought of as perfect for large data centers and heavy-duty servers.

Over the past couple of years, however, Intel’s R&D folks have been focusing on making the chips more functional and getting the multiple cores to better communicate with one another. With many cores running in parallel to efficiently manage simultaneously running applications, your mobile device would be much faster, much more stable, and much more powerful.

“I think the desire to move to more natural interfaces to make the interaction much more human-like is really going to drive the computational requirements,” said Intel CTO Justin Rattner.

“If it’s doing speech recognition or computer vision … that’s very computational[ly] intensive. It’s just not practical to just take sound and pictures and send it up to the cloud and expect that some server is going to perform those tasks. So a lot of that will be pushed out to the client devices.”

Top image courtesy of Adam Radosavljevic, Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Research in Motion founder Mike Lazaridis, who created the BlackBerry smartphone, has donated $100 million to a new center pursuing radically small computing innovations.

The Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre will open tomorrow, Bloomberg reports, and it’s where Lazaridis will double-down on his efforts to promote technological improvements in quantum computing and nanotechnology.

The massive donation in nascent technology isn’t anything new for Lazaridis: In 2000, he founded the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and has donated around $150 million to it so far. He’s also donated more than $100 million to the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

Lazaridis and his RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie both stepped down from their roles in January, after facing criticism for not innovating RIM’s hardware and software to compete with the iPhone and BlackBerry. But things aren’t shaping up much better for new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who in June announced that next-gen BlackBerry 10 devices won’t appear until 2013.

Why the fascination with tiny computing? Both nanotechnology and quantum computing have far-reaching applications in fields like biotechnology, allowing us to develop treatments that work at the cellular level. Lazaridis also tells Bloomberg that this research could lead to tiny energy sources and self-repairing elements for nuclear plants. Most importantly, the move towards nanotech and quantum computing will allow us to leap beyond the limitations of Moore’s Law, the notion that number of transistors on integrated circuits double every two years.

“We can’t offer [people working at the center] ocean, beaches, or mountains, but we can try and offer them the best environment, the best collaborators, the best equipment that would be conducive to them making the breakthroughs of their lifetime,” Lazaridis told Bloomberg. “One of the best ways to describe this is, we’re trying to break the known laws of physics.”

Photo via textlad/Flickr

Microsoft is making a major expansion to its Research arm with the opening of a New York City lab.

With the move, Microsoft aims to tap into the fledging tech ecosystem of the city, one that is home to both a growing start-up scene and an established academic community. The lab will join Microsoft Research’s twelve global locations, which span seven countries.

The news comes the acquisition of fourteen former Yahoo! researchers who will head up the new operation. Three of the higher profile hires include Duncan Watts, David Pennock, John Langford, all of whom are leaders in their respective fields.

Pennock, who specializes in algorithmic economics, will act as assistant managing director for the new lab alongside Microsoft researcher Jennifer Chayes, who will continue to direct Microsoft Research New England (pictured above).

In their new jobs at Microsoft Research, the team will focus on, broadly, taking data sources from the Web and applying them social sciences, and, potentially, actual Microsoft products. The Manhattan location should not be overlooked: The new lab gives Microsoft a viable connection to the academic institutions of NYC, not to mention the growing tech and startup ecosystems.

This is something the researchers stress as vital.

“My ambition for the New York City lab is that it will become a leading center, if not the leading center, for computational and experimental social science,” Watts said in a press release. “Leveraging the intellectual capital of the New York City academic community, the tremendous data assets of Microsoft and Microsoft’s partners, and the rapidly growing local tech scene.”

Editor’s note: If you’d subscribed to my email newsletter, you could have been reading this column yesterday!

In Microsoft’s vision of the future, Kinect sensors are everywhere: In your living room, your kitchen, at school, and even in the supermarket, above the fruit display.

And why not? The $150 motion-sensing device provides a cheap way to add gesture and voice controls to any application. Plus it’s got a camera and two 3D depth sensors that give computers a tool to map out spaces in three dimensions, recognize people by their faces, identify real-world objects, and create 3D models of those objects.

I spent a day at Microsoft’s Redmond campus this week attending TechForum, a small gathering of about a dozen journalists hosted by Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie. Part strategy briefing, part new-product showcase, part science fair, TechForum was a chance for us writers to see an array of recent and upcoming technologies that Microsoft’s been working on, both in its commercial products as well as in its pure research labs.

Kinect sensors weren’t the day’s primary theme, but it was fascinating to see how many contexts in which the flat, three-eyed black bar kept popping up.

• Kinect sensors are built into the gestural controls in the futuristic demonstration home on Microsoft’s campus. In the living room and entertainment room, large-screen TVs use Xbox-like gestural and voice-command interfaces to let you select music and videos as well as control your home environment.

• Whole Foods, together with development house Chaotic Minds, showed off a robotic shopping cart that uses a Kinect sensor (mounted above the cart’s handlebars) to sense where you are so it can roll along the aisles following you. The Kinect could also be used to identify items you place in the cart, although for the demo we saw, the system used RFID instead.

• Nissan is planning a Kinect-powered interactive app to show off its new 2013 Pathfinder at the upcoming New York Auto Show, and maybe in dealer showrooms after that. Development company Identity Mind is building the app, which lets you view the Pathfinder from different angles by moving your body; a Kinect sensor identifies where your body is and adjusts the view accordingly.
  

  Aaron Greenburg from Interactive Entertainment Business demos the Kinect for Windows SDK.

• Interactive television shows for children are in the works, including a new Sesame Street series and a show called National Geographic Wild. These shows will use Kinect sensors to let children answer quizzes and play games by moving their bodies.

• Engineers in Stevie Bathiche’s group Applied Sciences Group have used a Kinect sensor to create a 3D display connected to a stereo camera that moves left and right as you move your head left and right, so the perspective shifts just as it does in the real world.
  

  A stereo camera that moves to match the motion of your head, as tracked by a Kinect sensor (not shown).

• Other Microsoft researchers have built a demo called “Behind the Screen” that uses Kinect sensors and transparent LCD displays to give you a sort of window for looking at 3D objects that you can manipulate with your hands. You put your hands behind the transparent screen, and a Kinect sensor pointed down at your hands detects where they are and what you’re doing with them. The system projects 3D objects onto the screen, superimposed on your view of your hands, so it looks like you’re interacting with the digital objects. Another Kinect sensor pointed at you adjusts the view to the position of your head, so the perspective always appears correct.
  

  Microsoft Research intern Jinha Lee from MIT Media Lab demonstrates the Behind-the-Screen Interaction.

• Andy Wilson’s research group has created a sort of magic mirror called the “Holoflector,” which puts a half-silvered mirror three feet in front of a large LCD screen. If you stand three feet in front of the mirror, a Kinect sensor picks up your body position and can use that to display images on the screen behind the mirror. Because the screen is exactly as far from the mirror as you are, its images look like they’re coexisting with you in the three-dimensional world. That lets the system create some interesting interactive effects, such as turning you into a pixelated mannequin, displaying a floating “hologram” above your outstretched palm, or raining little bouncy balls all over you.
  

  Microsoft Research's Andy Wilson and Craig Mundie demonstrate the Holoflector project.

• Finally, Microsoft created a demonstration grocery display for TechForum that uses a Kinect hidden above your head, pointed down at a rack of fancy fruit. There’s also an LCD screen behind a half-silvered mirror that sits above the fruit rack. When you pick up a piece of fruit and hold it in front of the mirror, the Kinect recognizes what you’re holding. The display then wakes up and superimposes images on the reflection, showing you (for instance) what the fruit is, where it comes from, and what kinds of recipes use it. Naturally, you can use gestures to navigate through the interface, swiping left and right to see different information cards.

Microsoft is not alone in embracing the Kinect as a platform for interface innovation. Almost as soon as the Xbox accessory launched, hackers and programmers quickly started seeing what they could do with the device — build robotics platforms with 3D vision, for instance. Microsoft not only didn’t mind the hacking, it encouraged it. To facilitate the experimentation, Microsoft last month released Kinect for Windows, a development kit that’s expressly made for experimentation. Students can buy it for $150 and if you want to incorporate it into a commercial product, it costs $250.

Microsoft now says that more than 300 companies are working on products that will use the Kinect, including the Whole Foods and Nissan projects I mentioned above.

Last year, Mundie said, about 90 percent of the Kinect projects by outside developers were based on the gestural interface. This year, an increasing proportion are using its equally-impressive voice interface.

Even without delving into hard-core coding, Microsoft sees a way that Kinect can be useful for more than just playing games. The company showed a video of the Lakeside Center for Autism, a Seattle-area organization, which uses Kinect games to help autistic children learn to interact with the world and with each other. Apparently, the gestural interface is much more direct and intuitive for these children than traditional computer interfaces, and draws them out of their “shells” more effectively than traditional forms of teaching and human training. (Autism researchers have discovered similar advantages to using Apple iPads, whose touchscreen interface also seems appealing and engaging to children who otherwise have difficulty communicating.)

It’s not hard to see why the Kinect, which provides cheap 3D sensors that just two years ago would have cost thousands of dollars, is such an appealing platform for Microsoft’s innovators. The company is smart to make it so accessible to outside developers, and so cheap. For that reason, you can expect to see (and be using) a Kinect in the next year, regardless of whether you own one.

Are you building Kinect applications? Let me know about your projects, and send me links to short videos. I’ll include the best examples in a future story.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile carrier by revenue, is making its presence known in the U.S. today with the launch of its Xone research and development center in Silicon Valley.

The company isn’t gearing up to expand its network to the U.S. (it already owns 45 percent of Verizon Wireless). Vodafone is instead aiming to assist U.S. companies that want to launch products on its global network, which covers more than 382 million customers in over 30 countries.

The Xone R&D Center was created for the purpose of “expediting innovation, productizing it and pushing it to market,” Rick Rasmussen, head of Vodafone US R&D Operations & Logistics, told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday.

The company’s R&D group will single out innovative tech from startups, R&D labs, venture capital portfolios and universities. The group will be provided with resources including commercial feedback, a direct connection to Vodafone’s global network and support from staff with expertise in network architecture, business development, content delivery and more. The space will be able to fit up to 24 companies at once.

Vodafone R&D’s head of U.S. and China Fay Arjomandi told VentureBeat that companies will have access to a full replica of its global network. “Capabilities include 2G/3G/LTE radio and an Internet Protocol (IP) network together with access to the IP service framework IP Multimedia Subsystem,” the company said in its press release today. Additionally, companies will also have access to Vodafone’s network via Verizon Wireless R&D Centers across the country.

The Xone Center will ultimately allow companies to test their apps and services on Vodafone’s network much more easily, not to mention at lower cost, than they could in the past.

The space will also be used as a community center of sorts to familiarize the Valley with Vodafone. The company plans to host conferences, events, meetups, hackathons and the like to connect with the community.

Vodafone Ventures, the company’s investment arm, is co-located at the Xone Center as well, and will use the opportunity to invest in interesting companies that come through. A dozen companies will be demoing at a launch event today for the Xone Center, which is a good sign for Vodafone’s future startup events.

With Steve Jobs stepping down from the CEO job at Apple, it’s easy to overlook the computer industry’s other big invention factory: Microsoft.

While it’s not often regarded as a font of innovation, Microsoft actually devotes substantial resources — to the tune of $8 billion annually — to research and development. The company was the third-most prolific recipient of patents in 2010 (after IBM and Samsung), with 3,094 patents granted, putting it far ahead of Apple’s 563, which ranked it 46th on the list.

And the company’s research facility in Redmond is a Mecca for computer scientists. The company employs 850 Ph.D.s around the world in its research efforts, and many are located in the Redmond campus’s Building 99.

I visited the facility earlier this year, before leaving Wired to come work at VentureBeat, and after some delays my story appeared recently: How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck.

Wired photographer Jim Merithew and I started out somewhat skeptical of the idea of spending a day at the home of Windows 7, Outlook and Clippy the Office Assistant. But then we were ushered into a world filled with mad scientists, intent on re-imagining the way that people interact with computers.

Some of these visions were more impractical than others. I’m not convinced, for instance, that we’ll ever need wrist cuffs that “read” our finger positions based on the electrical signals emitted by our forearm muscles.

Microsoft senior researcher Andy Wilson shows off a new interface.

On the other hand, some of the inventions we saw that day could take us far closer to the day when you can walk up to a video wall and peer through it at people on the other side of the world, just as naturally as you’d look through a window into the next room. In this vision, the scene changes for each viewer, so as you move your head side to side, you see slightly different views, while the person standing next to you sees their own perspective, just like in real life.

So while Microsoft makes most of its money from Windows and Office, it is definitely pushing the limits of innovation. Some of these mad-science inventions even make their way into products.  You can see a direct line from these R&D projects to truly inventive products like the Kinect. The real question, then, is why Microsoft isn’t making better use of all those patents.

It’s an open question. But if the scientists in Building 99 are even partially successful, Microsoft will continue to play a significant role in inventing the interfaces of tomorrow.

Photos by Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Related articles

• How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck (wired.com)
• How Microsoft designed Kinect to withstand gamers and lightning strikes (venturebeat.com)

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nokia announced today that it will cut its workforce by 4,000 employees by the end of year 2012. The majority of the reductions will be made in Nokia’s home country Finland, Denmark and in the UK. Nokia will also refocus its research and development operations.

The cuts are a part of Nokia’s restructuring as the company decided to switch from Symbian to Windows Phone as its primary smartphone operating system, a deal led by new CEO Stephen Elop (pictured left).

Nokia also announced a collaboration with Accenture. With the collaboration all Nokia’s Symbian software activities and about 3,000 jobs will transfer to Accenture by the end of year 2012. Nokia’s Finnish employees have estimated that about half of the 3 000 jobs going to Accenture will be from Finland, reported Helsingin Sanomat, the largest newspaper in Finland. (Beware, the story behind the link is in Finnish)

Transitioning employees, located in China, Finland, India, United Kingdom and the United States, will initially work on Symbian software activities for Nokia. Over time, Accenture and Nokia will seek opportunities to retrain and redeploy transitioned employees.

All employees affected by the reduction plans can stay on the Nokia payroll through the end of 2011. Nokia expects personnel reductions to occur in phases until the end of 2012.

Each of Nokia’s research and development site will have a clear role and a mission. The company will close some of its R&D sites but it did not name them yet.

Nokia will focus its Windows Phone development to San Diego, Beijing and two sites in Finland: Salo and Tampere, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop said in a press conference in Finland.

The first Windows Phone smartphones from Nokia are expected to come out in year 2012.