Head Mounted Display Company

Motion Research is a company that develops technologies that address the issue of information retrieval while in motion, namely two products, based upon its patented technologies: A head-mounted display (HMD) and the Autonomous Personal Data Recorder and Transmitter (APDRT) system.

A person participating in an activity that involves speed or operating in extreme work conditions must continually interface with changing information. Whether informaion is provided via dashboard displays, personal equipment or the environment, it involves a direct shift in visual focus. This shift requires mental and physical effort. The effort is small, but costly, requiring two movements: one to shift focus and retrieve information and a second to again refocus on the effort of motion. This shift of focus can create a dangerous situation. MRC owns the display technology that addresses the issue. Doing more than simply reducing information retrieval time, MRC creates a intuitive, seamless, nearly instantaneous cognitive relationship between user and information flow.

News social class : the creative class

I just bought Richard Florida's book : The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. The author claims study the emergence of a new social class : creative people (researchers, architects, musician, designer, engineer...). His point is that in the old economy, people had to move from one place to where the action is (i.e. where the jobs are, where the big companies are) whereas now, companies move where creative people live (for instance, in the US : Boston, Silicon Valley...). I certainly like this claim :

While I had been studying the location decisions of hight-techn industries and talented people, Gates had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. My list of country's high-tech hotspots looked an awful lot like his list of the places with the highest concentrations of gay people. When we compared the two lists with greater statistical rigor, his Gay index turned out to correlate very strongly with my measures of high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bohemian Index - a measure of the density of artists, writers and performers in a region - produced similar results.

This is very close to an assumption I discussed with Fab.

-> Company growth seems to occur in places that were tolerant, diverse and open to creativity

What about a research center in a squat ?

Is this the future ?Like the Research facility in Distractions (Bruce Sterling)

Disruptive Technology

Via Washington Technology, Joab Jackson :

In 1894, when Italian Guglielmo Marconi invented a way to send messages through the air, the Italian government turned down his offer of first rights because it saw no use for the technology. (...) Marconi's wireless invention represents what some historians call "disruptive technologies." These are technologies -- the internal combustion engine, transistors and the Web browser, for example -- that not only create new industries, but eventually change the world.

A "technological disruption" is the arrival of a technology so radically superior that it has the potential to render entire industries obsolete. It is hence a new product or service that disrupts an industry and eventually wins most of the market share. Clayton M. Christensen coined the term in his best seller, The Innovator's Dilemma, published in 1997 Via accesstoenergy.com :

Christensen defines two types of technology - "sustaining technology'' and "disruptive technology.''

Sustaining technology is that with a developed market. In well-managed companies which supply this technology, the products advance as rapidly as improvements in science and engineering permit -along the lines desired by the customers of the company. Managers carefully determine the desires of their customers and plan engineering development projects to satisfy those customers as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. These companies develop and infuse their work force with ethics, procedures, and goals consistent with this process in their respective industries.

Disruptive technologies, on the other hand, are usually simpler and cheaper than the sustaining technology, but also offer less capability. They do not fit the sustaining market and, typically, provide lower profit margins. For this reason, they are usually shunned by well-managed companies - which are often later destroyed by them.