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!"

What 'Micro-hoo' could do for mobile

A Microsoft-Yahoo ticket would significantly increase the Redmond, Wash.-based company's share of the online advertising you see on your PC. But it could also ramp up its presence on the smaller screen.

Microsoft ( already makes one of the top-selling mobile operating systems, which runs on over 140 devices made by phonemakers such as Samsung, Motorola

Yahoo meanwhile, is strong on the applications side - it recently launched a new version of its mobile Web portal, called "Go," that includes search, mapping, news and other services, and has inked several mobile advertising deals with carriers.

Should the proposed acquisition go through, analysts say the two could become a powerful player in the mobile industry. They could also turn into a challenging competitor to Google "open" operating system for cell phones the leading search engine unveiled late last year.

Although Google has managed to get four phonemakers to sign on to Android's "Open Handset Alliance," a consortium of manufacturers, developers and carriers, a Google-running phone isn't expected until later this year. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Android phones won't ship in significant volumes until 2009.

Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, meanwhile, already runs on about 9% of phones worldwide, comparable to BlackBerry maker Research in Motion ( global market share. Symbian, the world's largest mobile operating system, has over 50% market share and runs on the majority of Nokia ('s handsets.

"A merged Microsoft/Yahoo could start to develop the kind of integration between platform and applications that is still only a gleam in Google's eye," Ovum analyst John Delaney said in written commentary published Monday. He added that the two companies could "interwork" Yahoo's offerings with Microsoft's operating system, enabling easy-to-use and more tightly integrated mobile applications.

Put simply, thanks to its operating system, Microsoft could provide greater reach for Yahoo's mobile applications, while Yahoo could give Microsoft the content and services - and so-called "stickiness" factor - it lacks.

"Microsoft has focused more on the operating system end and Yahoo has focused more on applications," Ovum analyst Delaney said in a phone interview. "Together, the combined companies would have both pieces."

Of course, Google has also gained some traction on the mobile services end. It is the mobile search provider for several large carriers, including Vodafone.

Although the Android operating system doesn't have any end users yet, Strategy Analytics analyst Chris Ambrosio says a Microsoft-Yahoo alliance doesn't necessarily mean Android will be doomed.

"Right now I'm of the opinion that a rising tide lifts all ships," says Ambrosio.

All three companies - Microsoft, Google and Yahoo - have their eyes on the real prize: Cell phone-based ads, a still-nascent market analysts predict will bring in revenue ranging from $5 billion to $19 billion by 2011. Nearly three billion people worldwide have a cell phone - a much larger audience than online advertising has today.

And, unlike the PC, mobile devices have the ability to serve up highly targeted ads based on an individual's location.

It's unlikely the mobile effects of the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be felt for several years, as the industry itself is still in its infancy. But unlike some of its more well-known consumer offerings - e-mail and online search, for example - mobile is one area Microsoft can afford to heavily integrate Yahoo offerings with its own without running the risk of alienating current users. That's because, when it comes to mobile services such as search and news, there aren't that many current users to alienate.

While mobile expansion isn't the principal motivation behind Microsoft's bid for Yahoo, analysts say it is a key component. Ovum analyst Delaney calls it the "icing on the cake" for Microsoft.

"Like a good chess move, an acquisition should change the game along multiple vectors," says IDC analyst Shiv Bakhshi. "Microsoft has so many business under its umbrella, and you can bet mobile will be one of the ones affected by this move."

Is Facebook the Future of Search?

Baking a tarte tatin seemed an ambitious task for a newbie cook, but with the inclement weather outside and an orchard's worth of ripe fruit and other requisite ingredients in the pantry, I decided to tempt fate. But, as is typical with my ventures in the kitchen, things quickly got out of hand. I was about to Google the solution to my cooking dilemma, until a response to a status update on my Facebook profile — which read "Bill is cooking tarte tatin" — pre-empted that move and caused a dramatic paradigm shift in my view of the Internet's utility.

Before I could search for a solution, the solution found me.

That brought to mind the brief history of search-engine domination. If we trace the roots of our Internet behavior back to the Net's wild-west days in the mid-to-late '90s, most of us were probably launching into cyberspace from a portal page like Yahoo's, or through Excite or Lycos (remember them?). And by the new millennium, search engines, especially Google, had become the place to begin and end our Internet days. Then came Generation Y and the social network. What began as a younger-user phenomenon quickly caught on with 25-to-34-year-olds and older, and now social networks are changing the way we use the Internet in our daily lives (if only businesses could find a way to make money off that traffic). Is it any surprise, then, that search engines are no longer the most popular sites in the U.S.? Those bragging rights now belong to social-networking sites like Facebook — sites that as of June 2006 surpassed search engines as the most popular category by market share of visits

Do social networks herald the end of search? I wouldn't go that far. What may be in danger, however, is the serendipitous nature of search — for example, the gratuitous queries that we type into Google while we're on hold with India, waiting for tech support to solve our issue du jour. But, now, when we have idle time, we don't go to Google anymore; we go to Facebook. And on Facebook, we don't have to seek information. Instead, information just comes to us.

I continue to use search engines, of course, to seek important information, but over the last several months I've noticed that more and more information is also being pushed at me by my new friends (since shamelessly soliciting Facebook friendships in a previous column, I now have more than 900 new friends) — new music from Daisy's playlist, what books Mel is reading, what movies made the top of James's list — whether I've requested it or not. Perhaps the nature of the pure search will evolve this way too. Perhaps Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is onto something with the alpha release of his new (currently the 400th most visited engine in the Hitwise directory of search engines in the U.S.), which combines the push of social networks with the pull of information search by allowing users to edit and monitor search results Wikipedia-style.

Back to my kitchen caper. As I explained to my wife that I had concocted a free-form rustic tart (read, one very messed-up tarte tatin), one of my new Facebook friends, Alex, who lives in France, seeing my Facebook baking status, sent me a message informing me that the cookbook How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman had the best tarte tatin recipe around, and that I could find it on page 700. In a sense, Alex's message summed up my vision for the future of search: I don't just want the information faster, I want it before I even ask for it.