Judy Estrin – former Cisco CTO – has written a book entitled Closing the Innovation Gap.

She is Featured today in a article at Wired.

America is facing an innovation crisis. To fix it, corporations need to find new ways of funding fundamental research into physics and environmental sciences.

There is no question this is true. If you operate outside the echo chamber of the Bay Area you know this is the case. We have completely abandoned fundamental research in basic science. With China and India churning out advanced degrees in science and engineering at fantastic rates the numbers in the US continue to decline. While we continue to price our children out of higher education while other countries seek to educate their way of third world status.

It is even worse in the corporate world:

“Corporations focused on efficiencies and productivity started to make research more short term and tailored to the company’s needs,” says Estrin in an interview with Wired.com, “with the result that most research done at corporations now is applied research.”

…

Neglecting research in basic science also has big repercussions for computing and other applied science areas, because many innovations, such as the transistor, originated in basic research, not applied research.

So new innovation models have to be created to fill the vacuum created by the cutbacks in corporate research spending, says Estrin.

The net effect of this is that the base innovation fired by research is being done outside the US. Most of our large established corporations are openly hostile to innovation (see the behavior of the telecoms where VoIP is concerned). Our patent system has become a significant barrier to research and innovation – not because you might get sued by a patent holding company, but because of the risk injected into the process of innovation.

This is what happens when you are so busy protecting what you have that you fail to recognize what comes next.

Read the article and the book…

There is a new Mozilla project called Snowl that is supposed to bring all of you communications together…
Take a look and let me know… doesn’t this look like drinking water through a fire hose? I know just keeping up with my RSS, Twitter and Facebook information is impossible. At what point is too much… just TOO MUCH?

Mozilla Labs announced a new project today called Snowl. It is an add-on for Firefox that aims to bring all of your messages together in one place, whether it is from email, SMS, Twitter, or RSS/Atom feeds. The project right now is an early, buggy prototype that only supports RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. So that is nothing special.

But once email and SMS is folded into the mix, it could become a very powerful messaging center, built right into the browser. It will allow you to search through all of your messages and feeds, both public and private, no matter where they originate.

[From Snowl: Unified Messaging In Your (Firefox) Browser]

From Jeff Pulver’s blog this morning comes news that FWD (Free World Dialup) is going to begin charging for VoIP Service. FWD has long had a very large user base and significant challenges generating any revenue from that base… they’ve seen Vonage, Broadvoice etc create businesses from the basic idea they’ve been working since 2001.

Full post from Pulver’s Blog

I do not see this as a bad thing… FWD will need to generate revenue to survive in the near/mid term. This, however, doesn’t really change the reality that the cost of making a call is on a steady march to 0.

more after the jump…

The challenge is simple – no one has yet found a compelling set of value added services (or features if you insist on the telecom terminology) beyond a base “phone call” that consumers are willing to pay for. That, however, is still the future of revenue in communications – and what we are executing against at cosinity.

At cosinity we are simply taking a different approach – we are not providing phone numbers, connection to the PSTN, SIP trunks or registration. There are 2 reasons for this:

1. There are plenty of CHEAP resources for that – and we have no interest in becoming another minute provider competing on price.
2. If we did that we would have to restrict our services to “our network” to defend the revenue generated by selling minutes.

We are committed to the idea that the application is valuable an the phone call (or other communication mechanism) is a pure commodity. You have phones/phone numbers/devices/etc what you need is applications that make them more USEFUL and deliver real value to you or your business.

Here is what Jeff had to say and a link to the full post.

The email below went out to inform the nearly one million registered users of Free World Dialup of plans to adopt a $30 annual membership fee as of September 1, 2008. Daniel Berninger has responsibility for day to day operations of FWD as CEO, but I wanted to add a few words on the motivation for taking a stand for paid membership.

Yogi Berra said, “When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it.” I don’t know if anyone predicted that the entire VoIP industry would end up with business models dependent on traditional telecom revenues, but it seems hard to deny with Skype, Jajah, Ribbit, and a long list of others chasing per minute revenues. We are risking the exodus of the FWD user base (and inevitable hate mail) to prove there exists an alternative. FWD will move forward in support of communication between paid members and anyone else with VoIP devices connected directly to the Internet. We will provide no services to facilitate interconnection with the telephone network. This represents a recommitment to the work that motivated the FCC to issue the Pulver Order in 2004 recognizing FWD as entirely unregulated. We believe the energies dedicated toward gaming the telephone network would produce much better results if applied to the task of creating services, applications, and content for communication devices directly connected to the Internet. Chasing an experience based on charging per minute immediately erases the prospect for an Internet like experience independent of geography and usage charges. FWD is the only VoIP enterprise going this route, and plentiful options exist for those looking for cheap minutes. I hope people will remember FWD’s 12 years as a free service and wish us luck as we put action to our convictions.

[From Free World Dialup moving to $30 annual membership]

Everyone (and there are A LOT of them) who say Arizona is a engineering, math and science wasteland should read this and understand just how big of a deal for Arizona this is. The UofA is leading this entire mission from Tucson – for the first time in the history of NASA. The mission has been wildly successful and many, many Arizona educated engineers and scientists were at the fore.

Congrats to everyone down at UofA – and thanks for reminding us (Arizona), the US and the world that the future in AZ is bright (not just sunny).

NASA just announced that the Phoenix Lander has successfully scooped up a Martian water ice sample and placed it in its oven for scientific analysis. “Mars Odyssey discovered this ice six years ago, but we’ve now touched it and tasted it, which is something that hasn’t been done before,” said a scientist at today’s press conference. The sample has been dubbed the “Wicked Witch” (because it’s meeeelting, meeeelting—get it?) and it will continue to be analyzed over the course of the coming weeks as data trickles in. Exciting, exciting stuff from this very successful mission. More details are rolling out right now.

The team has also decided to extend the mission to the end of the fiscal year, to a full 126 martian Sols (was scheduled for 90 sols initially). A new full-color, 360° panorama should hit the web soon as well. [NASA]

[From Phoenix Lander Has Touched Martian Water For the First Time [Water On Mars]]