Copacetic

David McWilliams predicts downbeat (but realistic) economic future as China focuses inward.

You know your doing something right when the Government feels compelled to respond writing.

Sorry Sarah, fixed the link, thanks for the tip Jarek.

I see Unisys are cuddling up to Redhat (nee JBoss). Shouldn’t somebody have bought the shameful shell of Unisys by now?

Maybe they were too embarassed, and who could blame them?

Andrew Tridgell (developer of Samba) seems to have speared Microsoft at the EU anti-trust hearings this week.

“It’s not certain Samba will benefit, but the IT industry as a whole will," Tridgell said in the interview. "That’s why this case is seminal for the IT industry. The interoperability the Commission is demanding from Microsoft will allow the industry to return to the sort of cooperation that existed in the 1990s,� he said. “Cooperation is the norm."

Sarah asks some pretty hard questions about life before birth in a thought provoking article over on GUBU.

Big Bill didn’t have much good to say about MIT’s 100 dollar laptop at the Microsoft Government Leaders forum today. One might ask why  Bill gives a a damn about this project given that he makes his money from software. It doesn’t take too much thinking to realise that its pretty hard to spend $300+ on a office suite that is going to run on a $100 PC.

The final ignominy for Bill is that these upstarts at Google and MIT insist on putting a Linux O/S on the thing so he can’t flog Microsoft Office even if he wanted too….

InterTradeIreland held its fifth annual Private Equity Conference today in the Waterfront Hall in Belfast. HotHouse popped for my attendance so I slipped into a jacket (the invite coyly requested Business Attire) and slept sweetly all the way to Belfast on the Enterprise Express.

David McWilliams hosted the proceedings and kept the whole show from losing momentum that the gaps between speakers often engenders. He opened with a brief commentary identifying the complementary nature of the North and South of Ireland economies, with huge demand in the south and significant surpluses in the North. He went on to note that one of the problems for both sides of the border is the final resting home for all free cash on the Island is inevitably property. If we could redirect some of this into Entrepreneurial activity we could build much larger companies faster and cover the dead ground between an idea and a fully fledged startup via the business Angel.

Surprisingly for a Private Equity Conference there were no presentations from VC’s or signficant investors (although several VCs appeared on panel discussions). In general the the number of VCs in attendance were vastly outnumbered by the numbers of entrepreneurs and advisors. Of the Dublin VCs I spotted Shay Garvey from Delta, Brian Caulfield from Trinity Venture Capital and Niall Carroll of ACT (webhint to ACT: loose the Macromedia Flash front page guys will ya?).

Bert Twaalfhoven spoke first. Bert founded and is still heavily involved in the Indivers consortium of (primarily) manfacturing companies. Bert has been an entpreneur all his life and placed a huge stock in identifying failure as well as sucess. He himself has had 17 failures and 37 successes in his life. When interviewing people he asks them about their failures and if they haven’t had any he won’t hire them. He went on to comment on clusters (the first of many) saying that many of his failures were related to failing to align his businesses with the appropriate development clusters around the world with regarding to manfacturing, IT etc. Regarding startups he cautioned to expect at least 30 months of looses and in his estimation it took at least 5 years to create a business.

Gordon Murray, a professor of Enterpreneurial Management had some unfashionable (but to my mind true) things to say about investment and the role of government. He had twelve points to make about VCs and the following of his twelve rang true for me,

• Europe is Not America, we can borrow ideas from America but we have to find our own fundamental solutions.
• If you think all men are born equal don’t become a venture capitalist - VCs award merit and excellence.
• Market Failure is what happens when you don’t give me money - A rational financial analysis is what happens when I don’t give you money.
• Governments have as much chance of being successful VCs as England has of winning the next X world cup (X=any sport)
• Its fatuous to expect VCs to invest in bad deals
• VCs love seed capital - as long as they don’t have to provide it
• Keiner Perkins requires investors to wait 10 years for a return on their money (Governments typically want it back in three)
• Specialist buyers don’t care that a piece of software was developed in a small village in th fijords of Norway e.g. regional development and venture capital are incompatible in their requirements (its hard to create a cluster in Waterford when all the ecomomics forces speak to Dublin)

He echoed the comments of many other speakers about the economies of scale not existing in Ireland. We need to expand to a pan-european view of investment, develop key clusters of technology and poor the investment in en-mass rather than spreading it thinly over hundreds of companies who can’t help each other. Risk capital is not social philanthrophy.

There was then a panel the discussion at which Niall Carroll of ACT (Is Niall Carroll the scariest VC on this Island? everytime I see him he puts the shits up me) threw up some interesting statistics,

• There are 50% less VC firms now than there were in 2000
• Europe’s GNP is the same as the US but we only have about one fifth of the VC available. In the US pension funds invest 7% in VC enterprises in Europe its only 2%.
• There are the same number of startups in Europe as a whole as in the US

Colin Walsh of Crescent Capital was asked what the most popular exit strategy for Northern Ireland companies, his answer, Recievership.

After Lunch David White the Director of Innovation Policy for the EU talked at length about the EUs role in fostering innovation. He pointed out some key demographics for Europe relevant to anybody starting a business,

• Low birth rate
• Aging population (many with early retirement options)
• One third of companies will change ownership in the next ten years due to owner retirement

If we want continued growth (in order to pay for our existing and future lifestyle) we need one or more of,

• Land or other resources
• More people in the labour market
• More innovation

Its obvious which one David was plugging. Governments don’t create innovation, they create the conditions for innovation. Those conditions are,

• Entrepreneurs : People with ideas and vision, who percieve a market and identify niches
• Technical Staff: To build the solution, solve the problems of delivery
• Additonal Skills: Management, ICT
• Capital: Money to fund the venture
• Marketplace: A regulated place to do business where all participants conform to a set of agreed standards.

He identified clusters as a safe zone where small companies can work together to get off the ground, help each other and reinforce the effectiveness of external investment. Clusters need,

• Universities to generate a pool of talent
• Large technical companies to provide validation, expertise and a launchpad for the smaller companies offerings
• Incubators to provide day to day support
• Actors/Advisors in the areas of Intellectual property, HR etc.

These clusters must be regional or sub-regional (there is no such thing as an EU cluster). Governments roll is to make sure clusters don’t become too insular and introverted.

David’s final comments were around VC and they reflected Niall Caroll’s stats. European VCs are too small in general and make too many small investments. The net return on VC across Europe averages 0%, whereas in the US it runs at a whopping 20%.

Alan Gilmore of Meridio wrapped up with a Dos and Don’t of raising Venture Capital. Most of this stuff was old news to me except for one bit of advice, VCs hate investing to pay debt.

The conference was pretty good overall and the quality of the speakers was universally high. I would have preferred more input from the floor, but that is always a hard thing to manage. I was surprised to find that the VC’s had to pay fees like everybody else. I think the disco model of “girls get in for free” would work a treat in this instance.

Landmine clearance is an idea I’ve given some thought to, but I can’t execute on it right now. So I thought I’d park it here and update it as I find out more about the problem space. As far as my limited knowledge goes the problem is defined by the following parameters,

• The one common ingredient in all landmines is explosive
• One landmine costs about $3 dollars to lay and between $300 and $1000 to defuse
• Landmines (particularily anti-personnel mines) are often scattered indiscriminately over a wide area (often by air)
• There are over 110 million landmines extant today (mostly in the third world)
• Clearing landmines is an extremely dangerous occupation

Any solution to the problem must have the following characteristics (to my mind):

• Be of the same order of magnitude in cost as the cost of laying (lets say $5)
• Not involve any human interaction
• Detect all kinds of explosive devices (purpose built landmines and home made devices)

Ergo, build a self-contained, self-sustaining, insect-like robot. The robot will have,

• A chemical sniffer for detecting explosives
• Solar power so it can operate without recharging
• A wireless network capability so it can communicate with its peers
• GPS so it can pinpoint the location of landmines to its peers (and a master)
• A simple search algorithm so it can operate in isolation
• A more complicated search algorithm so it can collaborate with its peers if they are detected
• A non-lethal tamperproof mechanism to discourage theft, tampering

A network of these could be scattered by helicopter over affected areas and scour the area searching for mines. Once detected the mines need to be disarmed (I don’t know how we might do this at the moment, but detection is a great start). The GPS would allow each robot to indicate its search route and the master could be used to collect and upload search data to a central location. This map could be overlaid over a standard topo map to indicate danger areas, unscanned areas or areas left to be cleared. Each robot would attempt to link to all the others to form a mesh network. This network could then be used by the group to establish new areas to check or to scan existing areas twice etc.

The hard problem is not the individual components, its fitting them all into a resilient, cheap, easy to manufacture package that can be deployed with a minimum of expertise and used directly by locals with a minimum of training.

Potential Problems:

• Still don’t have a good plan for disabling them
• Getting everything into a small enough package is a challenge
• How do we prevent theft damage of the devices before they do their job
• What if you were to attach a mine to these devices and use them as the weapons they were intended to protect against
• Can a chemical sniffer be made that can detect all the most common kinds of explosives
• Is GPS accurate enough to allow safe detection (the mesh network may be able to triangulate itself, though)

My robotics links are on delicious.

Pretty good analysis from Clay Shirky of why you me and just about any body who isn’t an A-list blogger is unlikely to become one.

Oh well there go my plans for global domination…

There is a follow-up by Clay on his blog.

Sarah writes an affectionate piece about Garret Fitzgerald today. Now she is a card carry member of Fine Gael, but all the same I can’t help agreeing that Garret is that rare thing, a genuinely sincere, good person who accidentally fell into politics and never really recovered from the experience.