Occam's Razor

Silicon Labs buys Silembia for 20M$

Silicon Laboratories Inc. has agreed to buy Silembia SA ( Rennes, France), a developer of semiconductor intellectual property for digital television demodulation and channel decoding, for  $20 million.
Founded in 2004 by former employees of Philips, Silembia went on to create the EMB5000 DVB-C digital video decoder core. The Silembia acquisition brings a design team with experience in digital demodulation and system architecture design to Silicon Laboratories ( Austin, Texas)

Mapping technologies

Interesting mapping technologies can be found here . Smart waysto map complex data-sets into geographic representations illustrated in the following two examples:

• future global polution in 2300:

By 2300 the United Nations forecasts that the global population will be just under 9 billion. World population is expected to rise, peak and then decline slightly between 2050 and 2300. The highest long term population growth is predicted for Africa. Africa is currently underpopulated and has the lowest life expectancies. Other regions' populations are predicted to stay level or decline. Between 2050 and 2300 the areas currently known as India, China, the United States and Pakistan maintain their ranked order as having the world's highest populations. The numbers shown here are estimates - based on predicted future behaviours.

• current royalites and licence fee export :

Only 18 (out of 200) territories are net exporters of license fees and royalties. This means that a few people living in less than a tenth of the territories in the world between them receive the US$30 billion of net export earnings for these services.

The International Monetary Fund explained that royalties and license fees include "international payments and receipts for the authorised use of intangible, non-produced, non-financial assets and proprietary rights ... and with the use, through licensing agreements, of produced originals or prototypes ...". Thus these export earnings are payments for past ideas.

[Source B Giussani]

Zaragoza's manuscrit

I'm on my way to the Innovate Europe 2006 conference that will stat tomorrow morning with an interesting PitchCamp where we will grill 25 startups on the art of pitching and business planning.

The conference starts on Monday evening with a great lineup of speakers.

I'll try to report/comment live during the first 3 days.

Total immersion raises 4.5M€

Total Immersion raises new 4.5M€ round led by Elaia partners, with returned investors Partech and ISource. For the last  5 years the company  has invested in delivering D’FUSION, an Augmented Reality solution : .

IBM buys Unicorn

Congratulation to Zvi Schreiber, CEO of Unicorn (meta data integration technology build on semantic web standards), former CEO of Tradeum (one of the best IRR of Reuters Greenhouse investments, sold to VerticalNet in 2000), for building Unicorn for 7 years, and creating an  exit to IBM.

Commitment vs. Intelligence

Very relevant essay from Paul Graham adapted from one of his talk at the start-up school. The section on commitment is a must-read.

1. Release Early.
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
3. Make Users Happy.
4. Fear the Right Things.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination….

…You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill you. But lose even

a little

bit in the commitment department, and that will kill you very rapidly.

…But if you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting you long before you actually quit. Everyone who deals with startups knows how important commitment is, so if they sense you're ambivalent, they won't give you much attention. If you lack commitment, you'll just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to your competitors but not to you. If you lack commitment, it will seem to you that you're unlucky.

….Whereas if you're determined to stick around, people will pay attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with you later. You're a local, not just a tourist, so everyone has to come to terms with you.

….You can't fake this. The only way to convince everyone that you're ready to fight to the death is actually to be ready to.

….You have to be the right kind of determined, though. I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined, but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn't just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong direction briefly if that will help. The one thing he'll never do is stand still.

6. There Is Always Room.
7. Don't Get Your Hopes Up.
8. Speed, not Money