2K, the 2,000 Year Old Programmer & a bit of RFID

Meet 2K, the 2,000 Year Old Programmer from the Bronx and Auto-ID in The MarkMagic Chronicles.

“That’s the problem these days,” 2K says. “Nobody wants to do work hard. Everybody wants easy. In my days, we knew what heavy lifting was. I had to carry rocks to my cave in the office. We carried rocks to write on. We wrote our code with a hammer and a chisel. That’s not software kid. That’s hardware.”

Nature Insight: Regenerative Medicine to keep you updated!

The 2006 Nature Insight: Stem Cells edited by Nature Report Stem Cells editor Natalie DeWitt is still a basic reading for me. The newest Nature is accompanied by a similar supplement called Nature Insight: Regenerative Medicine

Innovation is still bottom-up in IT, what about biotech?

Just a simple filtering & highlighting & regurgitating for you based on Andy Oram’s post apropos of the opening of a larger Cambridge, Massachusetts Google office : Why open source developers can be more productive, and other tales from a Google open house

Along the lines of self-motivated employees, I asked a manager whether most of their new products came from the individual employees or from management. He expressed the conviction that most innovation in most companies comes from individual employees. Where management can help is in finding effective places to fit new features into the organization and product line.

Google found that releasing too many products prevented the public from learning about them and adopting them. Adding a feature to an existing product such as Gmail or Blogger could mean that millions of people adopt it, whereas releasing it as a stand-along product might limit adoption to a few thousand.

The question for me is always how these experiences can be compared and applied to the biotech industry, in this case I am curious how biotechnological innovation is going in the profit sector outside academia. So if you are working at a biotech startup or at a big pharma please share us your opinion (anonymously if you like) in the comments on the nature of innovation at your company!