The iPhone gets a $100 million iFund

Silicon Valley venture capital giant John Doerr said Thursdsay that his firm will launch a $100 million "iFund" to help finance the development of software applications for Apple's iPhone.

The fund raised by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is intended to ignite a flurry of new games, productivity tools and so-called widgets using Apple's software development kit unveiled Thursday. Kleiner Perkins will essentially open a bank for startups focused on iPhone applications.

"We're all here today because we love Apple products," Doerr said at an Apple's event at the company's Cupertino, Calif. "And I'm here because I love Apple entrepreneurs."

Apple, which also announced new software to make the iPhone compatible with corporate e-mail systems, plans to open "the App Store" with the next release of iPhone software. The feature will allow people to purchase and download new applications for their phones.

According to the business plan, as explained by Apple, developers will participate in a revenue-sharing arrangement. Apple will keep 30 percent of sales from every app sold. Plus Apple will host and take care of credit card fees. The software developers get to keep 70% of the proceeds, said Jobs.

The move comes four months after Google announced its $10 million Android fund. Unlike Apple's revenue sharing model, Android is structured like a bakeoff where the best mobile applications written for Google's open-source mobile platform will receive as much as $100,000 in prize money.

Both efforts aim to break wireless carriers' near-monopoly on what applications can be downloaded to cell phones.

In typical Silicon Valley hyperbole Doerr summed up the move as the beginning of a new world order. The iPhone, he said, is "bigger than the personal computer. If you want to invent the future, the iFund wants to help you build

Is nanotechnology the key to curing cancer?

In nanotechnology, we think small -- very small. A nanometer is the length of ten hydrogen atoms placed end to end. If you take the nanoparticles that we make, 30 of them, and string them end to end like beads on a pearl necklace they would span the tiniest blood vessel in the human body.

What does working at that scale enable us to do?

Naomi Halas has a vision of a world where cancer is no longer a threat

NH: They're the perfect size to interact in the most effective ways with biological systems because it's a size where one is just a little bit bigger than the fundamental natural building blocks - atoms and molecules. In just the same way that Mother Nature controls atoms and molecules when our bodies make cells or make new types of molecules like proteins or DNA, with nanotechnology we can start to do some of that control ourselves.

Tell us about your nanoparticles.

NH: We invented a particle that we called nanoshells. The structure is basically a coated sphere. The inner core of this particle is made out of glass and the outer shell is made out of g

How do they work?

NH: Nanoshells are essentially nanolenses. They capture and focus light around themselves. By controlling the inner and outer thickness of this metallic shell we can control the wavelength of light that this nanoparticle will absorb. They can be effectively delivered to a specific organ or tumor through the bloodstream.

Once in place, infrared light is shone through the skin and to the tumor. The nanoshells have dramatic heating properties. They absorb the light and convert light to heat with incredible efficiency. This raises the temperature of their local environment by ten to twenty degrees. It turns out, of course, that we are very temperature-stable organisms, so if you raise the temperature of our cells by twenty degrees our cells will die. So this is a way of very gently and very non-invasively inducing cell death. If I take a nanoshell and I attach it or place it directly next to a cell that I want to destroy and shine light on it then it will convert the light to heat and it will very gently destroy the cell.

How do nanoshells compare to conventional cancer treatments?

NH: Compared to current cancer treatments, this will be very safe and non-invasive. Obviously, there might be several adjacent cells [that also get destroyed] but that's microns, very tiny dimensions. If you compare that to traditional types of surgery, the precision is just extraordinary.

The computer that decides if we live or die

A serious injury leaves a loved one in a coma. Relatives may face the hardest decision of their lives: to wait it out or turn off the life-support machine.

The program may help families decide what action to take if a loved one is critically ill

But now, that critical decision may be turned over to a sophisticated computer program. New software should soon be able to predict more accurately than loved ones how comatose patients would choose to be treated, if they were able to make the decision themselves.

Bioethicist David Wendler at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C., and his colleagues, used very elementary past research to build up patterns in patients' choices. "There was very little data available and the approach we used was incredibly simplistic," Wendler concedes. "But even with a little amount of data, we did very well."

The study compared how accurately their computer-based tool predicted a patient's preferred treatments compared with what loved ones said. Results showed both methods got it right around two-thirds to three-quarters of the time.

Wendler hopes to build up a broader data bank of personal profiles, which will include age, gender, religious and ethnic background, to advance the software. He is confident that will enable more accurate patient predictions. "We have very good reason to believe we can get significantly better results," Wendler says. "Maybe ten or fifteen percent more accurate than (next of kin)."

Patients have gained more control over their medical care in recent years but many still fail to sign a directive looking to the future. Few discuss treatment preferences they would elect if they lost the ability to make decisions. Without a self-directed advance medical plan for a patient, relatives are often asked to step in and act on a loved one's behalf.

"We've always gone with the idea that people who know the patient best are also best positioned to make the decision about treatment," Wendler says. "My concerns were that this process puts a burden on families. I wanted to develop an alternate approach."

Wendler is acutely aware of the problems a software program like this might pose for the community at large. "Some people say, 'of course this is good' and others think 'this is crazy'," Wendler says.

The Spirit of Music: The Science of Pop

Since the early days of pop music, the music industry has been searching for the secret formula to writing a successful song -- for that special alchemy that separates a Grammy-winner from a dud. For a period in the 1970s and 80s, the self-styled King of Pop Michael Jackson seemed to have stumbled upon it, but somewhere along the line he, too, seems to have misplaced it.

Hit Song Science claims to be able to predict whether a song will be a pop hit

But now a piece of software claims it can compute whether a song has chart-topping potential, and a number of record companies and musicians are using Hit Song Science (HSS) to gauge whether they have a hit on their hands.

The software, developed by Barcelona-based Music Intelligence Solutions, works by breaking down more than 60 elements of a song, including melody, harmony, tempo, pitch, octave, beat, rhythm, fullness of sound, noise, brilliance and chord progression, and compares it against a database of over 3.5 million past commercial hits.

The program organizes songs into clusters with similar-sounding equivalents and then rates the song on a scale of one to ten, with a score of 7.3 being deemed likely to do well in the music charts.

Curiously, clusters of songs do not necessarily contain songs that sound the same to the human ear, but from a mathematical perspective they share similarities. HSS analyzed music from Norah Jones' first album before she broke through and the program's algorithms placed her in a cluster with Linkin Park, Aerosmith and JayZ.

If you have ever wondered why you sometimes find yourself humming along to some smooth jazz on the radio when you consider yourself a strict thrash metal fan only, then perhaps HSS has discovered the scientific answer.

Besides Norah Jones, the program also predicted success for Mika, while "Turn Your Car Around," a song penned by Ben Novak, a singer-songwriter from New Zealand, was rated as a potential hit by HSS, who recommended it to Sony Music in the UK. It eventually ended up as a vehicle for ex-Blue band member Lee Ryan and scored a respectable UK chart position of 16 in 2005.

Much Ado About Media

Shoot out at a school. Blame it on media. Women victimized by a crowd. Blame it on media. Actor commits suicide. Blame it on media. Sania refuses to play. Blame it on guess who? Looks like, Akon could jolly well re-write his chartbusting lament as "You can put the blame on media". Why is it that every time something goes wrong, media is most conveniently made the scapegoat?

Media surely didn't cook up a Sania controversy out of thin air. It wasn't media that had objections to her playing in short skirts or shooting at a mosque. Media was just being what it is - a medium for people to voice their views.

Now if someone doesn't agree with the views of those who don't approve of Sania's sartorial sensibilities, and criticizes media, it is only a classic case of shooting the messenger!

"It's the orthodox thinking that's to be blamed. Few opinionated people try to hog the limelight. They just wait to get enough fat to fry an egg. None of them realizes that such opinions could disturb a player's constancy of purpose and kill the joy of playing," says veteran cricketer and commentator Navjot Singh Siddhu.

He sympathises with Sania saying, "Tennis is already such a high pressure game, and it can get unnerving for any player to be the target of constant nitpicking. Sania is being pelted with stones, but remember, it's only a tree laden with fruits that's pelted with stones." Point taken Mr Siddhu!

This time the proverbial stone-pelting came from Bhopal based "flag advocate" RK Pandey who filed a PIL against Sania for dishonouring the Indian flag. And mind you, RK Pandey is no newcomer to the limelight zone. He had filed similar PILs against Sachin Tendulkar, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Mandira Bedi, M.F.Hussain and the list doesn't end there! So this time if he decided to add Sania to his glorious list of disrespectful Indians, why malign the media?

If we do some honest soul searching instead of simply heaping all the blame on media, lot of us as media consumers and curious Indians (not in that order always), would find ourselves responsible too.

One bad performance by Mohammed Kaif and his house in Allahabad was under siege by the locals. One defeat at 1982 Asian Games by Mir Ranjan Negi and his wedding ceremony was jeopardized. Is it media or we, who gave in to such spasmodic, irrational acts of vandalism?

The voyeurs that we are, let's not be hypocrites at least! Don't we ourselves derive vicarious pleasure in prying into others' lives, and react in utmost illogical fashion when our expectations are not met?

"People derive a morbid pleasure in miseries of others" says Atul Wasan, former Indian cricketer and commentator. Regretting such a sadistic scenario, Wasan puts the onus on fans and audiences even as he doesn't completely absolve media and celebrities. "Instead of crying foul, celebrities also need to grow up and act more mature," says Wasan.

Media is not some unknown, undefinable Matrix conrolling our lives and reactions. We are not awaitng a Neo to unplug us, and make us see the reality! When it comes to media, we are the 'One'! So if Sania refuses to play, let's not put the blame on media. For once we (including celebrities) could be honest in saying " You could put the blame on me!"