The Register writes that “[t]he head of one of the UK’s top innovation centers has predicted a future for British citizens as impoverished peasants, painted blue and dancing for tourists because funding for high tech innovation has been pulled. Walter Herriot, Director of St John’s Innovation Centre in Cambridge he said, the money needed for this operation has been diverted to ‘support for first-time house buyers.’ The Innovation Centre is today presenting another two dozen promising start-ups, based on ideas developed in the Cambridge ‘Cluster’ associated with the University. But funding for this incubation centre has been pulled, said Heriot. He accused the government of ‘mortgaging the future’ of the UK.”
In a different article, the Register reveals that “[c]omputer and entertainment companies have announced a plan to standardize video and music files so that they play on any device. The ambitious plan has not been backed by the dominant force in digital downloads, Apple. Through its iTunes software and online shop, Apple is the largest distributor of legal music online, and is responsible for more than 70 per cent of downloads. It has not agreed to be part of the consortium, called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE). ‘To open up the market for digital distribution, we are developing a specification that connects a wide variety of services and devices,’ said Mitch Singer, the consortium’s president. ‘DECE is taking the lessons learned from the successful <buy once, play anywhere> experience that we enjoy with CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray today, and using a similar approach in developing the next generation digital media experience.’”
The Seattle Times reports that, “[r]esponding to the increasingly data-intensive tasks that scientists, engineers and business analysts regularly face, Seattle supercomputer maker Cray launched a lower-cost system Tuesday aimed at a more mainstream market. The company is partnering with Microsoft and Intel on the Cray CX1 high-performance computer, which will sell for $25,000 to $80,000 and can be ordered online — a first for the company, which traces its roots to 1972.”
BusinessWeek has an interesting article today discussing whether today’s entrepreneurs are “kinder & gentler than their forebearers.”
The Mercury News observes that “[t]he epic meltdown in the financial sector this past week and the stock market turmoil has observers reaching back to the good old days of the dot-com bust for historic comparisons. [But] [a]s far as Silicon Valley is concerned, the impact of the two crises couldn’t be more different. For much of the valley’s innovation economy, the latest Wall Street disaster feels more than three time zones away. But in 2001, of course, the valley was the epicenter and suffered the consequences of that era’s excess to a greater degree than just about anywhere else. [This time around,] [w]hile there’s certainly a sense of caution, there doesn’t seem to be widespread panic.”