Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 221 04/12/2012
Once upon a time I used to travel to Las Vegas, Taipei, Hannover or Tel Aviv in pursuit of new technology, but these days I don't go to many press events at all. As befits my status as a non-decorated veteran of the OS, Browser and CPU wars, I prefer now to recline in a bath of warm asses' milk, nibbling bon-bons and trying to maximise my views-per-photo on Flickr. Nevertheless the other day I was tempted out to an event in the real world, to whit the finals of "Discovering Start-Ups 2012", held in the City. This was a competition - a sort of MasterChef for new tech ventures - organised by Cambridge Wireless and Silicon South West, and attended by high-powered potential backers from Google, RIM, Vodafone, Orange, Broadcom, Qualcomm and numerous venture caps.
The last time I'd been to a start-up presentation was a one-to-one meeting with engineers on the science park in Cambridge, but this was a quite different sort of affair. For a start there was the venue. I hopped off a 46 bus at Shoe Lane, walked down a small inconspicuous alley and emerged into Alphaville. I don't visit the City much but I was vaguely aware there's been a lot of building - the Gherkin, the Shard and so on - but this still gave me quite a shock. What once was a small Dickensian square was now bounded on all four sides by glittering, high-rise, all-glass offices, adorned below with swanky wine-bars and purveyors of fancy coffees, chocolates and superior sandwiches, but the narrowness of the adjoining streets more or less hid it from Shoe Lane. I managed to locate the competition despite it being in the only block *without* a 10-foot-high sans serif street number.
I got to see around half the twenty finalists' presentations and there were some pretty impressive ideas on show: personal devices for monitoring everything from carbon footprints to skin cancers; low-power tracking devices, smart 4G antennas; ebook streaming and shared shopping services; even one that measures your emotional state in real time and tells your therapist via your smartphone. The winners included Anvil Semiconductors (www.anvil-semi.co.uk) who've made silicon carbide power semiconductors as cheap as silicon that can improve the fuel efficiency of hybrid cars by 10%, and D-RisQ (www.drisq.com) from Malvern who employ formal software validation techniques to reduce development costs of complex systems by up to 80%, as successfully used on the Eurofighter control computer. But what struck me most forcibly was how far the world has changed since my heyday.
I'm pretty used to talking to engineers with eccentric hair-styles, woolly upper garments and a slight hint of Asperger's Syndrome (as we're no longer allowed to call it), and I used to enjoy the experience as they plunged deep into technical explanations, eyes burning with enthusiasm. Not of any more. This was wall-to-wall white shirts and shiny suits, with few technical explanations pitched any more difficult than a BBC Four documentary. The really deep discussion was instead about patents, Intellectual Property and exit strategies. Today's start-ups are nobody's patsies and go in with eyes wide open, the enthusiasm visible in their eyes being for a buy-out by Google, Qualcomm or whoever within five years, for a eight or nine-figure sum. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and my nostalgia for those dodgy haircuts is strictly limited. For years we've been moaning about the way British inventors failed to exploit their discoveries - little stuff like the jet engine and television - and left it to the Americans to cash in, but that isn't going to happen any more. I've written here before about how it was ARM Ltd that really broke that bad habit, and this competition was, if you like, part of a search for the next few ARMs.
What does worry me is that this emphasis on moving fast and getting out rich might eventually erode the innovative impulse itself, and if you think that's misplaced, just check out the ridiculous Patent Troll wars currently raging between the world's mobile corporations. The Register recently ran an article by Matt Asay called "Apple's patent insanity infects Silicon Valley", which reprinted a mind-boggling chart of who's suing who for patent violations (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/patent_trolls/). It looks a bit like a poster of the Krebs Cycle that used to hang on our lab wall, only more complicated. Microsoft, RIM, Google, Samsung, Kodak, Oracle, LG, Huawei, HTC, ZTE and several more are all suing each other, and they're all suing and being sued by Apple. Even Business Week now proclaims that the start-ups' creed must be "patent first, prototype later". The idea is that you should fully exploit all the golden eggs you have in the fridge, but there's a danger that you may in so doing forget to feed the goose...
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