Techworking

I’m surprised and disappointed that Apple, the emblem of hip, has trotted out this moldy hunk of marketing copy cheese.  And with the new generation of iMacs, the minimalist aesthetic seems to be treading into “cold and barren” territory. This looks like the machine Mussolini would use. Come to think of it, same goes for the tag line.

Just days after a local economic development official engaged in a round of happy talk, word comes that 300 IBMers in Dutchess County, mostly at the East Fishkill microelectronics plant, will lose their jobs. (At about 4 percent of the 7,000 local employment base I’ve repeatedly seen cited, it appears to be the biggest round of layoffs by IBM since the mid-90s.)

IBM does indeed make Dutchess the technology hub of the region, but there’s no guarantee things will stay that way. That’s why over-reliance on IBM and other Fortune 500 companies is a flawed strategy. We need more efforts toward making the area hospitable to entrepreneurs and the startups that can be the real job and development engines. Big Blue is a great base to build of off, but it alone can’t be expected to carry the local technology sector, let alone the whole local economy.

Kingston’s TechCity has a new tenant in the newly-formed Solar Energy Consortium, headed by retired IBM-VP Vincent Cozzolino. This piece from the Daily Freeman is predictably boosterish, and there is reason for optimism. But there are also a lot of unanswered questions. It’s unclear exactly what the consortium will do: research? manufacturing? marketing? It’s also heavily (if not totally) reliant on state and federal money. As the story says: “Significant funding issues are still being worked out.” The Record story has a few more details, saying the group is looking for $136 million over five years. Yikes! Let’s hope they bring some private money in to ensure better accountability and returns.

Another eybrow-raiser: a 36-member board of directors. I’m sure they’re all smart and accomplished, but a board that big sounds like a recipe for inaction.

The consortium will take 300K square feet at the former IBM campus, a decent dent in the total 2.5 million square feet of space  in 27 buildings on about 260 acres. According to the TechCity site,  there are currently nine tenants, mostly small and medium-sized businesses, though IBM still maintains a presence and Bank of America is there, too. I attended a Hudson Valley Center for Innovation event there in March, and found the vast emptiness of the campus a bit depressing. Anything that will get some warm bodies into TechCity should have at least some upside.

                                                         Originally uploaded to Flickr by jdlasica

Local Pork - $200K of federal money tagged for Albany Wi-Fi.

BBQ’d Pork - TechConnex summer BBQ networking event Thursday, July 19 in Renssealer.

Let’s face it, Poughkeepsie’s no Palo Alto. I’m all for dreaming big. Heck, this blog is dedicated to chronicling and encouraging the development of the Hudson Valley’s tech economy. We’ve got IBM, of course. And Sematech and (fingers crossed) AMD will have an ever-bigger  impact on the Albany area. But let’s maintain some perspective, shall we? (House ad found in Hudson Valley Business Journal).

Score one for the Hudson Valley startup scene. Pump Audio’s tag-line is “Be Independent,” but the Tivoli-based company is indy no more. The company, which licenses independent music for use in movies, commercials, and web sites, goes to photo giant Getty Images for $43 million. Getty certainly has the chops for licensing content across multiple platforms, so moving into the $3 billion music-licensing business seems like a smart move. Six-year-old Pump recently announced a deal to let Photobucket users put Pump music to their videos and slide shows. Photobucket has since been bought by MySpace, opening Pump up to a seemingly limitless user base.

Update: As PaidContent.org reminds us, this is a double win for the Hudson Valley since Troy-based High Peaks Venture Partners (along with NYC’s Greycroft Partners) led Pump’s $2.5 million first and only round of funding last year. 

The “un”conference phenomenon known as BarCamp is coming to TechValley (specifically, Schenectady) on Saturday, June 23. While it’s a tech conference, you don’t have to be a total geek to participate. But participate you must.  It’s a self-organizing event  where the presenters and the participants are one and the same. You can give a presentation on the topic of your choice, help out a friend doing the same, or volunteer your services in other ways. Check out the wiki and maybe I’ll see you there.

Magic Black Beads

This network of black magnetic beads, smaller than a postage stamp, is one of a number of input-output “memory” units in the new “704″ electronic calculator built by International Business Machines.

Photo by Ezra Stoller, via Shorpy.

• Small Tech, Big Paycheck: Albany Nanotech chief’s 667K clams makes him the highest-paid state worker in NY.

This post by Derek Powazek over on Om Malik’s startup resource site, FoundRead, is a good read that rings true to this former journalist and tech enthusiast. Here are two point I would add about the lessons that can benefit both journalists and startup founders:

• As Powazek says in Lesson 4, both have to “produce something.” The unfortunate consequence of this is that the external pressure to produce, driven not by the needs of the story or the company itself, too often results in “something” that is a piece of junk. Of course, a Web startup can iterate and improve quickly. Journalists are getting better at that, but they still put out papers that are too often full of deadline-induced crud.
• In journalism there’s a saying about half-baked ideas: “That’s a subject, not a story.” For example, if you go to your editor and say, “I want to write about this hot new Twitter thing,” they will (hopefully) reply: “What about it? Twitter is a subject, not a story.” The equivalent in the startup world is: “It’s a feature, not a company.” Of course many great features get started, funded, and bought by actual companies. Thankfully so.

Speakers at yesterday’s CIRCA ‘07 conference in Saratoga Springs talked about the power dynamic, specifically that each new generation of microprocessor consumes far less power, but that total demand will continue to increase as computing functionality extends into ever more areas of life.

This reminded me of the One Laptop per Child piece that aired Sunday on 60 Minutes. I’ve heard a lot about the program, but wrongly assumed that a $100 laptop (currently $150 w/ $100 the target unit price when they hit their desired scale) would be a pretty basic affair. Actually, to meet the demands of kids in developing country, it has to be a pretty sophisticated little machine. Among other things, its CPU uses about 1/10 the power of a typical laptop. That’s impressive. But that’s still a huge increase in absolute power usage, given that these are all new users. These kids aren’t swapping power-sucking Dell’s for the OLPC machine. But…the likelihood that they’ll be powered by the fossil-fuel-burning grid is pretty slim, since functioning outlets can be few and far between in the developing world. So it’s designed to be human-powered via crank or pulley.

And that put me in mind of a piece I read earlier that day in the Sunday Times Magazine’s green-design issue that looks at the eco-friendly lifestyle of Ed Begley Jr. The most interesting part:

Exercise routine: Every stationary bike in America is plugged into the wall the wrong way. They are using power! Mine does the reverse. I generate enough power from 15 minutes of biking to run my computer all day.

Imagine the reductions in both power consumption and ill-health if we all hooked our computers up to exercise bikes?