Peter H. Diamandis

4 Lessons In Innovation From The Visioneers At X Prize

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:42:48 +0000

X Prize’s innovation competitions bring together creative luminaries at its Visioneering events to generate no-limits solutions to our biggest issues. Here’s what we can learn from these high-level brainstorms.

“The day before a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea,” says X Prize Founder, Peter Diamandis, who has helped popularize the innovation-through-competition craze that has swept up organizations from Netflix to the White House. A well-crafted competition can spawn entire industries, such as how the Ansari X Prize gave birth to the current race between Virgin Galactic and Space X for dominance of the commercial space travel industry. On the other hand, Netflix’s recent admission that it never used its $1 million dollar prize to improve their recommendation algorithm highlights the need to use funds wisely.

We sat down with the X Prize team and their guests at its annual brainstorming event (or “Visioneering” as they call it) to learn about the strategies and pitfalls of prize-based innovation breakthroughs. Experienced prize managers say that a good prize begins with wild brainstorming, and needs to be followed up with a super-tight problem statement, a dedicated team, and, last but not least, aggressive marketing.

Allow for the Rogue

“We’ve learned time and time again that the winning team or winning solution comes from places we wouldn’t have expected, people we would have thought that might have been able to do it, and, frankly, with approaches that we couldn’t even have fathomed,” says Vice President of Prize Development Eileen Bartholomew.

The genesis for X Prize’s wildly optimistic competitions begin at its all-star Visioneering event, where an eclectic group of creative experts and non-experts brainstorm solutions to the world’s great challenges during aggressively mediated topic discussions. Other than a basic introduction to the history of prizes, Visioneering’s highly curated guests are thrown into hour-long meetings and told to respond with ideas at the direction of a moderator, whose job is to categorize ideas and swiftly move teams along as they go from defining a problem to outlining a competition framework.

The first 15 minutes are dedicated to tossing out one-sentence descriptions of big problems, which participants jot down on paper and stick up on giant white boards behind the moderator. Ideas are clustered into enough categories that would divide the entire group into breakout sessions of between 3-6 people per group. In the education topic group, for instance, actor Rainn Wilson from The Office joined a group about creating schools to teach life skills and One Laptop per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte headed to a group on literacy in developing nations.

Each group is given 20 minutes to fill out a large sheet of paper that defines 1) the prize name, 2) the prize amount, 3) a one-sentence description, 4) specific breakthroughs the innovation will achieve, and 5) the measurement criterion for winning.

The brainstorming whirlwind comes to a peak as representatives from each group try to persuade their peers in timed speeches to vote for their idea, which will advance through a bracketed debate tournament in front of all guests later in the weekend.

During the entire process, moderators point out that seemingly crazy ideas should never be shot down and participants are free to leave a group and fill out a prize sheet out alone. “Allow for the rogue,” says author of Never Eat Alone Keith Ferrazzi, who moderated a few of the all-star brainstorming sessions at the visioneering event.

The entire point of brainstorming with participants who often have little knowledge of the discussion topic is so that the X Prize team is made aware of problems that slipped by experts, because it was too seemingly odd or irrelevant.

“Experts are great at telling you how something can’t be done,” says Diamandis.

It takes a team

“It’s almost like starting a new business every time”, says Bartholomew. Novice prize developers often underestimate the cost of launching a prize–it can run between 50% to three times the prize purse (meaning that a 100K prize would cost between 150k and 300k). After visioneering ends, her team reaches out to countless experts and non-experts to discuss which prizes would have the broadest implications and which ones are likely to be solved by the market itself (a process that Diamandis says takes between 6 to 8 months).

“Your work is only half done when you launch the prize” says Simmi Singh, who helped run prize competitions for the Department of Health and Human Services. In addition to weeding out unfit teams, a good prize leader creates a collaborative ecosystem for the eventual competitors. While there may only be one team who wins the prize, the resulting technology could open up an industry that benefits all of the early adopters. “There’s nothing zero sum, I believe, about the prize movement,” she argues. Mentoring teams, helping with fund raising, bringing competitors together for events, and keeping lines of communication open between teams increases the likelihood that at least one team will develop the basis for a brand-new industry and product line.

Recalling one quote from the Ansari X Prize competition, Diamandis said one participant told him “The first best thing is that I win; the next best thing is that somebody else wins.

Defining the Problem

Though X Prize doesn’t like to dictate solutions, the team still needs to think through all of the possible legal and logistical booby traps that could stop a good idea in its tracks. The Qualcomm tricorder X Prize aims to create “a mobile solution that can diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians.”

Savvy engineers might be able to create such a device that would be wholly unusable by the millions of lay parents, fumbling through the buttons as they frantically try to diagnose their child. In anticipation, X Prize mandated usability requirements for whatever device can technically meet the challenges.

But, even with foresight, clever loopholes and legal quandaries still crop up. “When we announce a competitions, we don’t announce final rules” says Diamandis, who explains that it’s important to work collaboratively with early teams before releasing a final set of rules.

Don’t Forget the Media

“We try to make the competition telegenic,” says Diamandis, who suggests that the best prizes are sexy enough to attract media attention and simple enough to describe to a friend. “Teams don’t just compete in it for the money, they compete for the glory.” The buzz of an exciting, easily relatable prize helps reel in investors, developers, and talent, which fuels even more involvement.

Even for less-than-world-changing prizes, “marketing is hugely important,” argues Singh, who says that even for purses of 25k or 50k, it’s still vital to attract developers from the right channels. “The big trick with small prizes is, first of all, to target the audience of entrepreneurs and innovators you want to reach.”

As prize competitions become more popular, keeping these principles in mind might help ambitious organizations develop more breakthrough solutions.

Singularity University: meet the people who are building our future

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:24:47 +0000

Take top thinkers from Silicon Valley and science, mix them with scientists, innovators and philanthro-capitalists, and you’ve got the Singularity University
– on a mission to seek technological solutions to the world’s great challenges

By Carole Cadwalladr

Peter Diamandis, co-founder of the Singularity University. Photograph: Andrew Brusso/ Andrew Brusso/Corbis

It’s day one at the Singularity University: the opening address has just been delivered by a hologram. Craig Venter, who was one of the first scientists to sequence the human genome and created the first synthetic life form, is up next. And later, we will see two people, paralysed from the waist down, use robotic exoskeletons to rise up and walk.But first, the co-founder of the Singularity University, Peter Diamandis, gives us our instructions for the day. Your task, he says, is to pick one of the “grand challenges of humanity” – the lack of clean drinking water, say. And then come up with an idea that “can positively impact the lives of a billion people”.

It’s 9.30 in the morning. Some of us haven’t even had coffee yet. There’s about 50 of us present and the room has been divided up into tables, one for education, another for poverty, another for water, and I’m not sure where I should sit. Diane Murphy, the university’s PR executive, hesitates for a moment and then directs me over to the table marked “food”. “Tell you what,” she says. “Why don’t you take Ashton Kutcher’s chair over there. He’s not coming until later.” (When he does arrive, he pulls up a chair at the next table over. What can I say? If Ashton Kutcher fails to solve global hunger, it will be my fault.)

The Singularity University is really not much like a regular university. And not just because it’s a place that manages to accommodate the likes of both Venter and Kutcher (and where, during a Q&A session, somebody asks a question about taking the Singularity University into the ghetto, and it turns out to be from the musician will.i.am).

Its courses aren’t accredited, and it has no undergraduates. Stanford University might have been the cradle for a hundred Silicon Valley startups and the hothouse for some of its greatest technical innovations, but the Singularity University is an institution that has been made in the valley’s own image: highly networked, fuelled by a cocktail of philanthro-capitalism and endowed with an almost mystical sense of its own destiny.

It is both Silicon Valley’s elite future thinktank and its global outreach arm: Google and Microsoft both came to the founding conference and gave money, Nasa provided the campus space, and emblazoned across the website is a quote from Google’s co-founder, Larry Page: “If I was a student,” he says, “this is where I’d want to be.” Its aim is “to assemble, educate and inspire a new generation of leaders who strive to understand and utilise exponentially advancing technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges”.

So, no pressure then. Although, of course, the easiest thing would simply to be British about all this and scoff. Ashton Kutcher! (I read later that he’s been cast to play Steve Jobs in a forthcoming film and slightly suspect that he thinks he might actually be Steve Jobs.) A billion people! It’s the kind of thing you can imagine someone in a white coat writing down as evidence just before they decide to commit you. What’s more, Diamandis is the kind of can-do entrepreneur that, as a nation, we’re inclined to lampoon and shun. (He’s good friends with Richard Branson.)

The only problem with this as a strategy is that half the people in the room actually have done things which have had a positive impact on a billion people. Or, in some cases, more. Not just Venter, who has flown in on his private jet; there’s also Vint Cerf, who is considered one of the fathers of the internet – he worked on Arpanet, the internet’s predecessor – and is now “chief internet evangelist” at Google. And Sebastian Thrun, the man behind one of Google’s latest and potentially most disruptive technologies yet, the self-driving car. He’s also the head of the top-secret Google X lab, part of the firm that most employees didn’t even know existed until the New York Times ran a piece on it last November.

And then, there’s Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors, who created the world’s first electric car, and is working on a replacement for the space shuttle. In the audience is Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn. And Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s strategist. Later in the day, Buzz Aldrin shows up. He is, in this company, a genuine celebrity. All the scientists want to have their photo taken with him, and even Kutcher has the good grace to look a bit bashful. “What do you make of the Singularity University?” I ask Aldrin. “I’m a pretty high achiever,” he says. “But I come here and think ‘Gosh. I’ve just got to do better.’”

Star factor

Aldrin’s lack of achievement notwithstanding – second man to walk on the moon, 66 missions flown in the Korean war, one-time duetter with Snoop Dogg – he has a point. The Singularity University’s USP and founding ideology is based on doing better. Its belief in progress is so hard-wired that at times it has a retro-futuristic 1950s flying-cars-and-rocket-packs air about it.

Even the name – the Singularity University – sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel. Largely because its name is something out of a sci-fi novel. “The Singularity” is a term that its co-founder, the writer and futurist Ray Kurzweil, appropriated from an essay by sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge, and although definitions vary, it’s usually taken to mean the point at which computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence. Which, according to Kurzweil’s predictions, and he does have some form on this, will be in 2029.

Kurzweil is a genuine one-off. He’s a scientist, an inventor – he developed one of the first speech recognition systems – an author and a transhumanist: he believes that if he can stay alive long enough for the technology to be invented he’ll be able to stay alive for ever. But what he’s best known for is being a futurist. He predicted the break-up of the Soviet Union, the growth of the internet, the year in which computers would beat the best human chess players, the e-reader, online education, and dozens more. By his own count 89 of 108 predictions he made in 1999 about where the world would be in 2009 were correct, and another 13 were “essentially correct”.

At the heart of all of Kurzweil’s predictions is Moore’s law. This is the rule that computing power doubles every two years, first noted by Gordon Moore, who went on to co-found Intel, in 1965, and who predicted the trend would continue “for at least 10 years”. In fact, it continued for the next five decades, and there’s still no end in sight. Computing power shows exponential growth: one becomes two, and two becomes four, and four becomes eight, and when plotted on a chart, it looks like a rocket taking off.

Of course, it’s one thing to note this about semiconductors, and another to apply it to all other areas of human life, but if you plotted the career path, business plan, and personal wealth of a significant number of people in the room, there would be an awful lot of rocket-shaped lines. Because Moore’s law does seem to describe a lot of what’s happened in Silicon Valley. And it’s really not that surprising, therefore, that some of its wealthiest and most successful inhabitants have bought into the Singularity University’s guiding ethos and spirit.

Vint Cerf tells me that it was Larry Page’s enthusiasm and support for the project that encouraged him to get involved “and then I came and discovered that there were these stunningly smart people here, both speaking and in the audience. I find coming here like walking through a forest of ideas.”

The standard programme at the Singularity University is a 10-week graduate course which costs $25,000 (£15,500) and last year had 2,400 people applying for 80 slots. It’s the Silicon Valley version of an MBA. And demand is such that it has also started doing mini “executive” courses, of the type that I attend. “Billion-dollar companies are springing up overnight,” says Peter Diamandis. “And billion-dollar companies are folding overnight.” Or as Mike Federle, the chief operating officer of Forbes tells me: “CEOs are desperate to know this stuff. Everyone’s trying to figure out what’s coming next.”

What’s more, instead of being held in the Singularity University’s campus at Nasa’s Ames research centre in northern California, we’re in the heart of the Hollywood dream machine, at Fox Studios in Los Angeles. Jim Gianopulos, the chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, went on a Singularity University course, and has since become evangelical about it. Given the traditional antipathy between Hollywood and Silicon Valley (intellectual copyright versus a great big copying machine), this feels like something of a milestone. These ideas are tipping over in the mainstream: Peter Diamandis’s book – Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think – went straight into the New York Times bestseller list at No 2 last month and is still lingering in the top 30.

“The power of computers per dollar has increased trillionsfold since I was at college,” Kurzweil says in his opening address, speaking as a 3D holographic head projected into the room from his home in Boston. “And war, depression, nothing makes an impact. It keeps on increasing exponentially.” Health used to make linear progress, but “it has become an exponential technology”. And with 3D printing, so will “the world of physical things”.

Our problem with pondering the future is that our expectation is “linear, not exponential,” he says. Things aren’t going to change incrementally, they’re going to change explosively. And it was this that captured Peter Diamandis’s attention – he read Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near, while trekking in Chile – and inspired him to set up the university.

At the end of the first session of talks, he tells us to “caucus” among ourselves and come up with some solutions for our “grand challenge”. And then, oh dear God, “one of you will report back on your findings to the rest of the class”.

There’s seven of us at our table. And the idea is that between us, we’re supposed to come up with a solution – or, let’s not be unambitious here, solutions – to feeding the world’s seven billion people. What would Ashton say, I wonder? Although my assumption is that it’ll be a bit like when Mr Gould, my fourth-form maths teacher, used to try a similar technique back in the 80s, and we’d sit around reading Smash Hits until he wrote the answer on the board.

But no, the group around my table start unembarrassedly throwing around actual ideas: it’s possibly why billionaires are billionaires, and chief executives are chief executives. They actually get on and do stuff. “What about artificial meat?” suggests Mike Federle, which in other company might be blue-sky thinking, but here is more factual observation. “We could make a steak right now,” says Robert Hariri, a doctor who founded a biotech company that specialises in pioneering stem cell treatments. “But it’ll cost you $20,000.” I keep my mouth shut and share a sympathetic “we-can’t-all-be-geniuses” smile with a nice Latino man across the table. “Ricardo Salinas”, says his name tag. The second-richest man in Mexico (and 37th richest in the world), I discover later.

There’s a deliberately competitive edge to the proceedings. It plays to the strengths of the chief executives and it’s one of Peter Diamandis’s guiding principles. He was learning to fly when someone gave him a book about Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight across the Atlantic and discovered that it was a journey precipitated by a prize.

It was this theory that led him to set up the X prize, which began with a $10m incentive for the first person or company to create a private reusable manned spacecraft (Burt Rutan and Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, won it in 2004 for their SpaceShipOne). The X prize Foundation has launched many more, the most recent being the $10m Qualcomm Tricorder prize to invent a handheld device – or “tricorder” as it was called in Star Trek – capable of diagnosing 15 diseases.

Abundance of ideas

There’s a lot to take in. It’s not even lunchtime and we’ve listened to presentations by Craig Venter on his plans to create biofuels made by microalgae: an acre, he believes, will be able to produce 10,000 litres of oil per year, as opposed to corn, which can produce just 18. He’s just received $300m of investment from Exxon to make it a reality.

Andrew Hessel, the Singularity University faculty member on biotech who is attempting to open-source cancer treatments, talks about how biology is the next exponential technology. The genetic code will become “a programming language”. We’re on the cusp of massive change. DIY bio-hacking has already begun. “Viruses are coming first,” he says. “Viruses are easy to make.” And then there’s Vint Cerf on the “internet of things“. In the near future, devices will talk to each other, he says. “You’ll be shopping and you’ll get a call. It’s the refrigerator saying, ‘Don’t forget the marinara sauce.’”

He ends his talk with his dream of an interplanetary internet. “Darpa [the US defence department's advanced research projects agency] has issued a grant to develop a spacecraft to get to a star in 100 years. At current propulsion rates, that would take 65,000 years, so we’d need a nuclear-powered spacecraft that can travel at two-thirds of the speed of light. But then we have to work out the communication.” And he looks slightly regretful. “And we haven’t done anything on an intergalactic scale yet.”

In this context, it doesn’t seem quite as preposterous as it should when somebody suggests using 3D printers (machines that build up objects layer by layer from a digital file) to print 3D printers, which can then print a pair of shoes. Or a house. Or dinner. “Actually, that’s already happening,” somebody else points out. But then 3D printers – and a prototype house made by extruding liquid concrete from a giant “printer” has indeed already been made – are just one of the Next Big Things coming down the line. We learn about dozens of them in the next two days. This is the “abundance”: Diamandis’s thesis is that we will soon enter a “post-scarcity” world. Forget peak oil. Who needs it when we have “15 terawatts of power from the sun hitting the earth every 15 minutes”? The challenge is simply harnessing it. “And we’re getting better at that all the time.”

It’s not just that this deters us from changing our own unsustainable behaviour, his critics point out; it’s that, as Craig Venter says, this technology is also quite hard. And sometimes doesn’t pan out as well as you’d hoped. When he gets up to speak, his microphone doesn’t work. “And we’re supposed to print out new life forms,” he says.

At times, Diamandis comes across as, well, the motivational speaker that he is. He has a line in aphorisms that sound like they have come from an auto-lifecoach-o-generator (“The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” “If you can’t win, change the rules.” “Bullshit walks, hardware talks”). Though he has a knack, too, of encapsulating an idea. One of his best-known quotes is that a Masai warrior with a cellphone has better telecommunications capabilities than the president of the United States did 25 years ago. “And if he has a smartphone with Google, he has access to more information than the president did just 15 years ago.”

He may be something of a showman, but he’s a showman with form. Whom some of the brightest and most successful people in the world take seriously. Last Tuesday, to take just one example, he launched a company – backed by, among others, Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, and Eric Schmidt, its chairman – to use spacecraft to mine asteroids for rare minerals.

And he has his friend Richard Branson’s knack for marketing. Day two of our three-day course finishes with a party on the set of a New York street in the Fox Studios lot. Two paraplegics rise from their wheelchairs to walk across the stage in powered robotic exoskeletons, and will.i.am gives his thoughts on the day: “It’s changed my whole perspective on life. But I’m worried about our inner cities. I’ve just heard that my niece is going to be dumber than her cellphone. We’ve had a generation who’ve wanted to better their bank balances, not their brains. I want to inspire young people to be scientists and engineers.”

There’s a neat circularity to this. Peter Diamandis grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Greek immigrant parents, and was himself inspired to become a scientist by the Apollo mission, doing degrees in medicine and molecular biology and finally a PhD in aerospace engineering at MIT. The Singularity University isn’t even the first university he’s founded. He set up the International Space University while he was still in his 20s and which has now trained an entire generation of Nasa scientists. It’s why Buzz Aldrin has come along, and why another astronaut, Dan Barry, teaches the SU’s robotics course (Barry’s big prediction: cyberdildonics. Robot sex. “You think it’s funny, right? But I’m also a rehabilitation physician, and sex is a basic human drive robots will be able to fulfil for the disabled, the widowed, the elderly. It’s going to happen. You might as well accept it and get in on the ground floor.”)

Frightening visions

The future isn’t all thrilling robo-sex and free solar energy though. Barry’s talk also includes video of some of the other robots in development. If you think drones are scary, it’s because you haven’t yet seen the video on YouTube of autonomous swarming quadrocoptors. Or the hummingbird-shaped drone that can hover in the air and then fly in through a window, or Big Dog, which looks like something from Blade Runner, or, just last week, a new one with legs that can go where no Dalek ever could: up stairs.

None of these are being developed to help with meals on wheels or palliative care nursing, though. They’re war machines, most of which are being developed with funding or support from Darpa. (I meet its head, the formidably impressive Regina Dugan in the ladies: she doesn’t seem like a warmonger but then a week later, it’s announced that she’s leaving to go to Google.)

Even Dan Barry, who runs his own robotics company, sounds a warning: “I don’t see any end point here. At some point humans aren’t going to be fast enough. So what you do is you make them autonomous. And where does that end? Terminator.”

And it’s not just the robots. Or the fact that schoolchildren will be tinkering with DNA. “Nobody wants their kid to be the first one off the block to make the Ebola virus,” says Venter. “Which is a really small genome.” But nor does there seem to be any practical way, that anyone has thought of so far, of preventing it.

It’s during the biotech presentation that I hear a British voice pipe up and ask a question about regulation. In the break, I chat to the voice’s owner, Simon Levene, a venture capitalist who specialises in technology. He’s here, he says, “because there’s nowhere else that is this multidisciplinary. This stuff is changing so much and so fast that it’s almost impossible to keep abreast of it.” He’s paid $5,000 for the three days and he reckons it’s cheap at the price. “It’s a lot less than an MBA, and I’ve done an MBA at Harvard, and I’ve probably already learned more here.”

The technology is astounding, he says. But, he shares my own qualms about Silicon Valley’s techno-utopianism. “There’s some potentially lethal side-effects, aren’t there? Every solution has unintended consequences. And there are very real ethical and regulatory issues to consider, and which are just being glossed over. The thing is that I don’t trust the market to do it. But then I don’t trust government either. There needs to be international ethical oversight. There’s simply enormous power that’s about to be unleashed. Darpa isn’t here for fun.”

One of the scariest things I hear, though, isn’t ostensibly as scary as autonomous death machines. It’s when Sebastian Thrun is talking. He unveiled his driverless car at TED in 2011 – developed in response to a competition held by Darpa – after they’d already driven 200,000 miles across California, a technology that will surely change our lives profoundly.

It’s been quite a year for Thrun: seeing another presentation at TED by Salman Khan about his online education site, the Khan Academy, Thrun decided to video one of his artificial intelligence classes at Stanford and put it online. An astonishing 160,000 people enrolled, of whom 23,000 graduated. Top of the class was a disabled woman called Melody Bliss, who works full-time, and has kidney dialysis three times a week.

It was enough to persuade Thrun to resign his tenure at Stanford and set up Udacity, a free online university, open to all, that may change the face of education. That’s the good news. But he’s also founded and is head of Google X, Google’s top secret special projects division. It’s prototyping “Google glasses”, augmented reality spectacles, that will stream the internet direct to your eyeballs. But it’s what Thrun says is around the corner that to me seems as if it could be even more life-changing. Massive data. Of everything. “I honestly believe that in the next 10-15 years, computers will be able to capture the experience of a life,” he says. Every aspect of your life will exist online forever. And it’s not a lonely scientist in a distant computer lab saying this. Thrun, to remind you, works for Google. Memory, the thing that defines who we are, what makes us human, that distinguishes us intellectually, and gives us a narrative sense of our own lives will “be outsourced”. That world, says, Thrun, “is not very far away”. Enjoy the luxurious privacy of your own memories while you still can.

And then Diamandis asks the scientists there for their best predictions for the next five to 20 years. “AI abilities are going to be indistinguishable from those of human abilities,” says Thrun. Most jobs will no longer exist. “There will be an explosion,” he predicts, “in art and music.” Our definition of what it is to be human is going to change, says Dan Barry. Normal will no longer be enough. Robots are being taught to emote. We are going to start relating to them.

Christopher deCharms, a neuroscientist who has helped develop a new sort of MRI machine that can do brain imaging in real time, goes even further. “I believe that in 10 to 20 to 30 years, truth detectors will work. And they will be retrospective back today. There is going to be a revolution in privacy. Transparency is going to come all the way back to our thoughts.”

In his opening address, Ray Kurzweil points out that an IBM computer called Watson, had recently beaten the greatest human champions of the TV quiz game Jeopardy: “And that’s not just through statistical analysis. I think it’s very significant. It’s pattern recognition, which is what people do. It had to understand puns and metaphors and similes and jokes. It can read natural language documents. It read all of Wikipedia. That’s 200 million pages of documents. It took three years. But at the end of the three years, there’s a natural advantage to machine intelligence.”

The singularity really is near, he claims. It’s less than 20 years away. “I said it would be 30 years from 1999. The consensus then was 50 years. Today the consensus is about 20 years.”

However, when I email Sebastian Thrun and ask his opinion, he says: “It’s not a one-time event; it’s a continuum that is well under way. It’ll be hard to tell how much of it is already happening. In many ways, computers outsmart people today.”

He has a point. “Siri [the iPhone voice recognition assistant] reminds me of the woman who’s told a dog plays chess and is asked, ‘Isn’t that amazing?’” says Kurzweil. “And she replies, ‘Yes, but its endgame isn’t very good.’”

The endgame is likely to get better. And the world is changing. In ways we can’t even begin to imagine. And whatever else it’s doing, the Singularity University is looking at problems differently. Peter Diamandis never refers to overpopulation or limited resources. He talks about “three billion new minds coming online” in the next few years, Silicon Valley-speak for “being born”. These minds are an opportunity, he insists, because “the rate of innovation is a function of the number of people actually communicating and this is growing explosively with the internet”.

At lunchtime, I talk to him as he dandles his twin babies on his knees, and is matter-of-fact, rather than techno-triumphalist, about what he’s trying to do. He believes people can do extraordinary things. “Because that’s my experience: I’ve seen people do extraordinary things.”

And then he asks me a question: “Haven’t you? In these last two days?” It’s true. I have. There are reasons to be cheerful. Though when it comes to man versus machine, I’d have to say that my money’s on the machines.

Asteroid Mining Plans Revealed by Planetary Resources

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:21:20 +0000

Seattle, Wash. – April 24, 2012 – Planetary Resources, Inc. announced today its plan to mine Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) for raw materials, ranging from water to precious metals. Through the development of cost-effective exploration technologies, the company is poised to initiate prospecting missions targeting resource-rich asteroids that are easily accessible.

View our multi-media news release with photos and video: http://prn.to/PlanetaryR

Resource extraction from asteroids will deliver multiple benefits to humanity and grow to be valued at tens of billions of dollars annually. The effort will tap into the high concentration of precious metals found on asteroids and provide a sustainable supply to the ever-growing population on Earth.

A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals mined in history. “Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space. As access to these materials increases, not only will the cost of everything from microelectronics to energy storage be reduced, but new applications for these abundant elements will result in important and novel applications,” said Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc.

Additionally, water-rich NEAs will serve as “stepping stones” for deep space exploration, providing space-sourced fuel and water to orbiting depots. Accessing water resources in space will revolutionize exploration and make space travel dramatically more economical.

“Water is perhaps the most valuable resource in space. Accessing a water-rich asteroid will greatly enable the large-scale exploration of the solar system. In addition to supporting life, water will also be separated into oxygen and hydrogen for breathable air and rocket propellant,” said Eric Anderson, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc.

Of the approximately 9,000 known NEAs, there are more than 1,500 that are energetically as easy to reach as the Moon. The capability to characterize NEAs is on the critical path for Planetary Resources. To that end, the company has developed the first line in its family of deep-space prospecting spacecraft, the Arkyd-100 Series. The spacecraft will be used in low-Earth orbit and ultimately help prioritize the first several NEA targets for the company’s follow-on Arkyd-300 Series NEA swarm expeditions.

Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer, said “Our mission is not only to expand the world’s resource base, but we want to increase people’s access to, and understanding of, our planet and solar system by developing capable and cost-efficient systems.”

“The promise of Planetary Resources is to apply commercial innovation to space exploration. They are developing cost-effective, production-line spacecraft that will visit near-Earth asteroids in rapid succession, increasing our scientific knowledge of these bodies and enabling the economic development of the resources they contain,” said Tom Jones, Ph.D., veteran NASA astronaut, planetary scientist and Planetary Resources, Inc. advisor.

Planetary Resources is financed by industry-launching visionaries, including Google CEO Larry Page and Ross Perot, Jr., Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group, who are committed to expanding the world’s resource base so that humanity can continue to grow and prosper:

- Eric E. Schmidt, Ph.D., Executive Chairman of Google, Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Planetary Resources, Inc. investor: “The pursuit of resources drove the discovery of America and opened the West. The same drivers still hold true for opening the space frontier. Expanding the resource base for humanity is important for our future.”

- Ram Shriram, Founder of Sherpalo, Google Board of Directors founding member and Planetary Resources, Inc. investor: “I see the same potential in Planetary Resources as I did in the early days of Google.”

- Charles Simonyi, Ph.D., Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Planetary Resources, Inc. investor: “The commercialization of space began with communications satellites and is developing for human spaceflight. The next logical step is to begin the innovative development of resources from space. I’m proud to be part of this effort.”

The company’s advisors include film maker and explorer James Cameron; General T. Michael Moseley (Ret.); Sara Seager, Ph.D.; Mark Sykes, Ph.D.; and David Vaskevitch.

Founded in 2009 by Eric Anderson and Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Planetary Resources, Inc. is establishing a new paradigm for resource utilization that will bring the solar system within humanity’s economic sphere of influence by enabling low-cost robotic exploration and eventual commercial development of asteroids. For more information, please visit www.PlanetaryResources.com.

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Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think

admin — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:27:04 +0000

I was in a coffee shop recently and overheard a young couple discussing whether or not it was morally responsible to bring a child into today’s world given all of the global challenges we face.
What’s curious about their question and the dark contemporary mood it represents is that in a very measurable way, the world is better off than its ever been.

I’ll start with poverty, which has declined more the in the past 50 years than the previous 500. Over the last 50 years, in fact, even while the population on Earth has doubled, the average per capita income globally (adjusted for inflation) has tripled.

We’re not just richer than ever before, we’re healthier as well. During the past century, maternal mortality has decreased by 90 percent, child mortality has decreased by 99 percent, while the length of the average human lifespan has more than doubled.

As Steven Pinker has lately made clear, since the middle ages, violence on Earth has been in constant decline. Homicide rates are a hundred-fold less than they were when they peaked 500 years ago. So we’re not only healthier, we’re safer as well.

If your measure of prosperity is tilted towards the availability of goods and services, consider that even the poorest American’s today (those below the poverty line) have access to phones, toilets, running water, air conditioning and even a car. Go back 150 years and the wealthiest robber barons couldn’t have never hoped for such wealth.

Right now, a Maasai Warrior on mobile phone has better mobile communications than the president did 25 years ago; And, if they’re on Google, they have access to more information than the president did just 15 years ago. They are effectively living in a world of communications and information abundance.

Even more impressive are the vast array of tools and services now disguised as free mobile apps that this same Maasai Warrior can access: a GPS locator, video teleconferencing hardware and software, an HD video camera, a regular camera, a stereo system, a vast library of books, films, games and music. Go back 20 years and add the cost of these goods and services together — you’ll get a total well in excess of a million dollars. Today, they come standard with a smart phone.

So this brings us back to the question of our contemporary mood. If this is really the true picture of the world, why are so many of us convinced otherwise?

Turns out there are about a dozen reasons. Alongside my co-author Steven Kotler, I have a new book coming out (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think) in which we address all of them. There isn’t time for that here, but I do want to mention a few.

For starters, the amygdala. Every second our brains are bombarded with a deluge of data, working continuously to sift through and sort the information, trying to tease apart the critical from the casual. And since nothing is more critical to the brain than survival, the first filter most of this incoming information encounters is the amygdala.

The amygdala is the part of the temporal lobe responsible for primal emotions like rage, hate, and fear. It’s our early warning system, an organ always on high alert, whose job is to find anything in our environment that could threaten survival. So potent is the amygdala’s response to potential threats that once turned on, it’s almost impossible to shut off, and this is a problem in the modern world.

These days, we are saturated with information. We have millions of news outlets competing for our mind share. And how do they compete? By vying for the amygdala’s attention. The old newspaper saw “If it bleeds, it leads” works because the first stop that all incoming information encounters is an organ already primed to look for danger. We’re feeding a fiend. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.

Compounding this, our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Things have changed since. Many of today’s dangers are probabilistic — the economy might nose-dive, there could be a terrorist attack — and the amygdala can’t tell the difference. Worse, the system is also designed not to shut off until the potential danger has vanished completely, but probabilistic dangers never vanish completely. Add in an impossible-to-avoid media continuously scaring us in an attempt to capture market share, and you have a brain convinced that it’s living in a state of siege and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

But nothing could be farther from the truth. Today the average citizen is more empowered to change the world than ever before.

A wide range of very powerful exponentially growing technologies (infinite computing, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, robotics, digital medicine, etc.) are now allowing small teams of dedicated individuals to take on the kinds of challenges that were once the sole province of governments. A global communications network has arisen where individuals can problem solve together, like never before. Lastly, thanks to the continual spread of the Internet and smart phones into the developing world, over the next decade, our collective meta-intelligence, is set to expand from 2 billion to 5 billion people on line, adding 3 billion news minds into the global conversation.

Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the world. So while I can’t tell you if bringing a child into this world is the morally-responsible to do, I can say that the future, much like the present, is going to be a whole lot better than you think.

X PRIZE Benefit Celebrates Innovation in Oil Cleanup, Sets Sights on Breakthroughs in Life Sciences, Education & Global Development

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:26:20 +0000

San Francisco, CA (October 25, 2011) — The X PRIZE Foundation honored the benefactor and winners of the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, during its 2011 Radical Benefit for Humanity at the Regency Center in San Francisco on October 20. More than 400 “who’s who” from San Francisco, the Silicon Valley and around the globe attended the event that raised more the $2.7 million. The event, to benefit the nonprofit X PRIZE Foundation, was co-hosted by luminaries Wendy Schmidt and James & Suzy Cameron. CNN’s Chief Business Correspondent Ali Velshi served as Master of Ceremonies.

Academy Award winning filmmaker and explorer, James Cameron set the tone. “I joined the X PRIZE Foundation’s Board of Trustees because I believe that many, if not most, of humanity’s challenges can be solved by passionate, dedicated teams empowered by today’s exponentially growing technologies,” he explained. “Personally, I’m excited to work with the Foundation to help create the prizes that will inspire and motivate innovators to drive radical breakthroughs.”

Inspiring remarks throughout the evening included those of Dr. Diamandis, Chairman & CEO and Robert K. Weiss, Vice Chairman & President of the X PRIZE Foundation; Wendy Schmidt, President, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and Title Donor, Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE; and Don Johnson, team leader, Elastec/American Marine that recently won the first place prize in the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE by nearly quadrupling the industry’s previous best oil recovery rate tested in controlled conditions.

“As a friend and supporter of the X PRIZE Foundation for several years, I’ve been consistently inspired by the idea that incentive competitions are a great way to spur innovation and create real opportunities for positive change,” said Wendy Schmidt. “It is the best kind of experience for a philanthropist – to have such a measurable and valuable outcome delivered to the world. For those of you who have challenges you want to solve, I encourage you to talk to the X PRIZE Foundation about creating your own X PRIZE or X CHALLENGE competition.”

“This was an amazing evening for the X PRIZE Foundation. Our incredible co-hosts, donors, sponsors and staff made this possible. The funds we raised will develop critical X PRIZES and X CHALLENGES that will address global problems in markets that are currently ‘stuck’ without solutions,” said Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, Chairman & CEO, X PRIZE Foundation, headquartered in Los Angeles. “The incredible results of the recent Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE show how we can inspire and incentivize people from around the world to go beyond what is acceptable and find the real solutions to real problems.”

Dr. Diamandis continues, “We are particularly grateful to Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry, his wife, Heidi, and the Roddenberry Foundation for their support. As the largest donor of the night, we are proud to partner with them in solving critical global issues in areas focused on science, technology, environment, education and humanitarian advances. Among the many concepts in development, we look forward to making his father’s, Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek vision a reality with the medical ‘Tricorder’ competition.”
VIP attendees included Ron Conway, Founder, Angel Investors LP; James Gianopulos, Chairman & CEO, Fox Filmed Entertainment; Honorable Gavin Newsom, California Lieutenant Governor; Goldie Hawn, Actress, Film Director and Producer; Bill Brady, Chairman, Credit Suisse; Princess Beatrice of York; David Clark, Astronaut Relations, Virgin Galactic; George Whitesides, CEO, Virgin Galactic; Dennis Crowley, Founder, Foursquare; Naveen Jain, Chairman, Intelius; and Zachary Bogue, Co-Founder, Founders Den.

During the reception, guests viewed exhibits that offered overviews of the Foundation’s awarded, current and the future competitions as well as its other activities in areas where innovation is needed. Among the exhibits, Ekso Bionics (previously Berkeley Bionics) demonstrated its technology that helps people with physical limitations improve their ability to function independently. Following the reception, Ajay Verma, Vice President of Biogen Idec, addressed the crowd, reinforcing the need for innovation and breakthrough technologies.

Live auction items included one-of-a-kind experiences such as a Scripps Institution of Oceanography adventure for two on a research ship to the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot on Earth; a Virgin Galactic sub-orbital flight on SpaceShipTwo with Dr. Diamandis during its first year of commercial operation; a weightless flight aboard ZERO G for six people with one of the participating astronauts, Anousheh Ansari, Richard Garriott de Cayeux or Brian Binnie; and original paintings of Steve Jobs and Bono created by Erik Wahl during an inspiring stage performance.

2011 Radical Benefit for Humanity Co-Hosts Suzy & James Cameron and Wendy Schmidt join Dr. Peter Diamandis, Chairman & CEO of X PRIZE Foundation, for the annual fundraiser to support the Foundation’s ongoing mission to solve the world’s Grand Challenges.

ABOUT THE X PRIZE FOUNDATION

Founded in 1995, the X PRIZE Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization solving the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development worth far more than the prize itself. The organization motivates and inspires brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual and financial capital for the benefit of humanity. The X PRIZE Foundation conducts competitions in four Prize Groups: Education & Global Development; Energy & Environment; Life Sciences; and Exploration. Prizes won include the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for private, suborbital space flight; the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE for creating safe, affordable, production-capable vehicles that exceed 100 MPG energy equivalent (MPGe); the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X CHALLENGE for advanced rocket development; and the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE for highly effective oil spill cleanup methods. Active prizes include the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE and the $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE presented by Medco.

Edison2, X Prize Winner, Claims 350 M.P.G. Equivalent for Prototype

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:25:29 +0000

Edison2, the tiny, Virginia-based engineering company that won the $5 million mainstream class in the Automotive X Prize last year, recently tested the performance of its all-electric, four-passenger Very Light Car design — a rounded pod with outboard-mounted wheels — at Roush Laboratories in Livonia, Mich.

The design slips through the air with very little resistance, returning a drag coefficient of 0.16, and weighs in at just 1,140 pounds. And the company claims gaudy efficiency for the E.V., a combined rating of 350 miles per gallon equivalent on the dynamometer. The electric prototype also achieved a per-charge range of 114 miles in the company’s tests.

The car that won the X Prize had a small turbocharged gasoline engine that ran on E85. For the E.V., the company used a relatively small 10.5-kilowatt-hour lithium-polymer battery and a modest 41-kilowatt, 55-horsepower electric motor to make the technology financially scalable for production. According to Brad Jaeger, Edison2’s director of research and development, a production version of the car could be built for $25,000 or less.

With such a small battery, the vehicle takes about seven hours to charge from a standard 110 outlet.

Mr. Jaeger said that a production version could be built with a 200-mile range, which may require a larger battery. Crash testing would be a hurdle, but Mr. Jaeger said that the Roush testing offered encouragement on the Very Light Car’s safety performance.

“By focusing on platform efficiency, we can reduce the size of the battery pack, cut back on the charging time and give greater range,” Mr. Jaeger said in a telephone interview. “Our car has a battery that is 40 percent the size of the pack in the Nissan Leaf, and yet it can travel farther on a charge.”

Oliver Kuttner, the founder and chief executive of Edison2, said in an interview that the company has never intended to become an automaker.

“Too many people like me have tried to build a car and gone bankrupt,” he said. Instead, Edison2 hopes to license its technology. Mr. Kuttner said that he had a letter of intent from a California-based company, Eckhaus Fleet, that wanted to produce electric meter-maid vehicles with 140-mile range using Edison2’s proprietary technology. Tim Yopp, Eckhaus’s chief technology officer, confirmed the letter of intent, adding that that there was an opening in the market for such a vehicle, which could offer reduced pollution, maintenance and operating costs.

Mr. Kuttner also said that Edison2 was in discussions with a large Chinese company to produce a plug-in hybrid vehicle, with some similarities to the Chevrolet Volt, for the Chinese market, but he would not reveal the company’s name.

The Edison2’s aerodynamic design is, by its makers’ own admission, unconventional, but the vehicle’s basic form factor was seen recently in numerous concepts shown at the Frankfurt auto show, including the Volkswagen Nils and Audi Urban Concept, offering some vindication to the company. The Aptera, another electric car of that type, has been unable to reach production.

Mr. Kuttner stands by the shape, saying that the teardrop-like fuselage represented a pathway to the highly efficient cars of the future. “It can’t be done any other way,” he said.

Illinois Team Wins Oil Spill Cleanup X CHALLENGE

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:23:51 +0000

Team Elastec, an Illinois-based veteran company in the oil spill cleanup business, developed giant grooved discs that skimmed oil more than three times better than the industry standard to capture the $1 million top prize in the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE, the X PRIZE Foundation announced today.

In a competition born out of frustration of oil cleanup technology in last year’s BP Gulf oil spill, Elastec/American Marine company of Carmi, Illinois, and Cocoa, Florida, deployed a system that slurped oil in the test tank at a rate of 4,670 gallons (17,677 liters) per minute, with an efficiency of 89.5 percent. (Only 10.5 percent of the oily mix in the recovery tanks was water.)

(See all the competitors and their technologies: “Pictures: X PRIZE Contest Seeks Improved Oil Spill Cleanup”)

X PRIZE officials said the recovery rate was three times the industry standard, and in fact conventional systems tested in the facility where the competition took place typically achieve 900 gallons (3,400 liters) per minute. And as for typical efficiency: The U.S. government concluded that only 3 percent of the 4.9 million barrels (206 million gallons/780 million liters) spilled in last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster was retrieved by skimmers. It drove home to the world that technology had not advanced since the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years earlier, where only 14 percent of the oil was recovered by cleanup crews.

The X PRIZE Foundation launched the challenge last summer even before the well was permanently capped, when Wendy Schmidt, president of the energy and natural resources-focused Schmidt Family Foundation and wife of Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, stepped forward to sponsor the competition. It was designed “to challenge the status quo,” said Schmidt at the awards ceremony in New York, “and to do so in a matter of months, not years.”

Elastec emerged at the top of set of ten finalists, who were chosen from more than 350 applicants to share in the $1.4 million prize purse.

Second prize of $300,000 went to Norway’s Team Nofi, which deployed V-shaped flexible boom to capture 2,712 gallons (10,266 liters) per minute and an efficiency of 83 percent. None of the other teams achieved the competition minimum recovery rate, so the $100,000 third prize was not awarded, and will be returned to the X PRIZE Foundation for further contests focused on marine and ocean environmental issues. But the third and fourth place teams, OilShaver of Norway and Team Koseq of The Netherlands, both achieved recovery rates and efficiency rates in excess of the 2,000 gallons per minute and with efficiencies of about 90 percent.

The winners were announced in an event center overlooking the East River in Manhattan, only about 20 miles (32 kilomters) north of the saltwater tank on the coast of Sandy Hook Bay in New Jersey where the ten teams took turns this summer demonstrating their technologies. The tests were held at the 2.6-million gallon (10-million liter) tank at the U.S. Government’s Ohmsett facility. Run by the Department of Interior but located on the high-security Naval Weapons Station Earle, Ohmsett is the largest saltwater wave tank in North America and the only facility in the world designed for full-scale oil spill response research and training in controlled conditions.

The X CHALLENGE required the largest volume oil ever used in more than four decades of testing at Ohmsett.

Inconceivable Recovery Rate

Elastec already is the largest oil spill cleanup manufacturer in the United States, exporting its systems to 20 countries. Its own Hydro-Fire® Boom was used in last year’s BP spill for the controlled burns that actually eliminated more oil from the water oil than skimmers.

For a skimmer to achieve a more than 2,500 gallons (9,500 liters) per minute recovery rate, with an efficiency of 70 percent (no more than 30 percent water in the mix) “wasn’t even conceivable” prior to the BP oil spill, Elastec team leader Don Johnson when he stepped up to the podium to accept the prize. But he said if his company would have developed the grooved disc technology before the Macondo well blowout, “We would have been hard-pressed to find a customer willing to buy it.”

Only the spill of oil for 87 days from BP’s out-of-control well off the coast of Louisiana underscored the need for the technological breakthrough his team achieved. “The lesson we all learned is we need to be prepared,” he said. “It created a demand for this equipment.”

The oil spill cleanup challenge was well suited to a competition, said Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive of the X PRIZE Foundation, which he said seeks to step into “places where market failures exist and where capitalism has not done its job.” Since its founding in 1996, the X PRIZE Foundation has been staging competitions designed to prompt research collaborations to tackle urgent world challenges in energy and environment, education, life sciences, and space and ocean exploration. Its informal motto is “revolution through competition.”

“What these teams were able to accomplish is truly remarkable and will have a significant impact on future oil cleanup efforts and better protect our ocean ecosystems and economies,” Diamandis said.

Since its founding in 1996, the X PRIZE Foundation has been staging competitions designed to prompt research collaborations to tackle urgent world challenges in energy and environment, education, life sciences, and space and ocean exploration. Its informal motto is “revolution through competition.”

The disc skimmers in Elastec’s system are four to five times larger than the disc skimmers typical in the industry and they are attached to huge rows of drums. By applying groove technology to drum skimmers they increased the surface area and also made a channel that the oil could adhere to, creating a capillary effect. Johnson said it was also important for the team to develop a vessel that could maneuver well and was capable of high transition speeds to work seamlessly with the grooved disc skimmers.

Norway’s Team Nofi took home the second-place prize with a system that corralled oil into the end of its V-Shaped boom, where a separator removes it from water. The team became a favorite among the X PRIZE contest officials for unflappably handling the interruption of its tests on the New Jersey shore in late August when Hurricane Irene struck. The team had to evacuate inland for five days until power could be restored to the test facility.

“Opposed to what almost everybody thinks, the main reason [oil spill cleanup technology] fails is not waves, it is current,” said Dag Nilsen, team leader. “Normal oil booms cannot be towed or used in areas with current, since oil escapes [underneath] even if the surface is a smooth as a mirror. This technology solves this current problem. I know we are going to benefit from this system.”

Nilsen praised the X CHALLENGE competition “for being a catalyst and a practical motivator for developing better cleanup.”

Only The Beginning

David Lawrence, executive vice president for exploration for Shell* Upstream Americas, a supporting sponsor of the competition, struck a similar note. “All of us will benefit from this competition,” he said. Shell provided its support, including the test oil and $1.4 million toward rental of the Ohmsett facility because of the importance of the effort to improve industry safety, he said. “The world will need more energy,” said Lawrence. “Energy demand is expected to double by 2050. We need to provide that energy, we need to do it safely and we need to do it cleanly. This competition will help us meet those goals.”

He stressed that not just the winning technologies, but all of the technologies tested have the possibility of helping improve oil spill response. The next steps will be more testing in performance outside of the controlled tank environment. “If you think this is the end, this is nowhere near the end,” Lawrence told the competitors. “This will be commercialized, further developed and further advanced.”

X CHALLENGE benefactor Schmidt said that such advancements were crucial.

The winners were announced in an event center overlooking the East River in Manhattan, only about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the saltwater tank on the coast of Sandy Hook Bay in New Jersey where the ten teams took turns this summer demonstrating their technologies. The tests were held at the 2.6-million gallon (10-million liter) tank at the U.S. Government’s Ohmsett facility. It is the largest saltwater wave tank in North America and the only facility in the world designed for full-scale oil spill response research and training in controlled conditions. Twenty-four countries and numerous private companies have conducted oil spill cleanup testing there.

“We know that today’s success is only the beginning,” said Schmidt. “And while all you’ve done is impressive and meaningful and will be a positive addition to the toolkit available in the marketplace, we have not solved the problem of oil spills. We’ve only created a better band-aid. We haven’t addressed the bleeding. We haven’t addressed the disease that causes the bleeding.

“We are all participants in a system” whose failures can be catastrophic, she said. Due to “our relentless demand,” the oil industry is venturing into more risky environments, including into deep water. “And although the safety of the industry has improved over time, this is a fundamentally dangerous business. It dangerous for people, for ecosystems, for the whole intricate web of life we are only beginning to understand.”

*Shell is sponsor of National Geographic’s Great Energy Challenge initiative. National Geographic maintains autonomy over content.

Forbes – Wendy Schmidt’s X Prize Oil Cleanup Challenge Names Winners

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:21:45 +0000

Think the X Prize and lunar landings, robotic cars and other futuristic endeavors pursued by tech geeks in garages come to mind. But on Tuesday, the X Prize Foundation awarded more a million dollars for a more down-to-earth innovation: technology to clean up oil spills.

The Wendy Schmidt (yes, that Schmidt) Oil Cleanup Challenge named Elastec/American Marine, an Illinois firm, the winner of the $1 million grand prize for developing a more efficient skimmer technology to sop up petroleum spills. The second-place $300,000 award went to a Norwegian company called NOFI that has built a boom that collects oil and then separates it from the water.

“Last summer as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was under way, management and the trustees started to talk about what we could do to help the situation,” says Cristin Dorgelo Lindsay, the X Prize Foundation’s vice president of prize operations. “We sent out a request to donors and trustees about whether there was interest in taking on an X Prize competition for something that could be a shorter-term response. Wendy Schmidt stepped right up.”

Or as the competition guidelines put it, “While many important efforts are devoted to the development of new, cleaner, and renewable energy sources, the world remains fundamentally dependent on oil to drive many sectors of our economies. As long as oil continues to be a significant energy source, the risks associated with accidental release of oil will continue to pose a threat that must be managed.”

“Breakthroughs are needed to increase the efficiency and scope of efforts to clean up oil spilled into the environment,” the X Prize Foundation stated.

The urgency of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico led the Oil Cleanup Challenge to focus on mechanical cleanup technologies rather than absorbents (such as the recycled surfboard waste I wrote about in the current issue of Forbes) or chemical dispersants.

That meant the judges – cleanup specialists from industry, government and non-profits – were looking less for a moon shot than for technologies that could be developed and launched in a short time, according to Lindsay.

“How quickly could this be assembled and deployed in real world was the focus,” she says. “How much would it cost? How hard would it be to deploy, how hard to rig?”

The judges decided not to award a third-place prize, concluding that none of the eight other finalists met that criteria after the teams put their entries through real-world testing.

“That there was no third place winner shows where we had to draw the line between audacity and practicality,” says Lindsay.

Private Industry’s “Moon Race” Now Underway

admin — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:48:15 +0000

by James Heiser

With the landing last week of America’s last space shuttle, the nation stands at a critical point in the history of space exploration. For some, the last flight of Atlantis — a mission officially designated as STS-135, was “bittersweet,” as one writer termed it. The landing of Atlantis may presage a difficult era in the “Space Age,” or it may herald the beginning of the end of the government’s virtual monopoly on mankind’s exploration of the heavens.

As reported previously for The New American, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has been marked by significant controversy regarding both the future of his agency, and the future of manned space flight. The Obama administration quickly killed George Bush’s “Constellation” program, which had set a return to the Moon and an eventual mission to Mars as part of U.S. space policy. However, NASA’s new, Obama-era goals quickly put the Moon and Mars back on the timetable — but pushed them farther away. Meanwhile, NASA’s budget remains fundamentally stable, despite the end of a shuttle program which had previously consumed a substantial portion of the budget. As Mike Wall recently wrote in an article for Space.com:

When NASA’s space shuttle program was announced back in 1972, it was billed as a major advance — a key step in humanity’s quest to exploit and explore space.

The shuttle would enable safe, frequent and affordable access to space, the argument went, with flights occurring as often as once per week and costing as little as $20 million each. But much of that original vision didn’t come to pass. Two of the program’s 134 flights have ended in tragedy, killing 14 astronauts in all. Recent NASA estimates peg the shuttle program’s cost through the end of last year at $209 billion (in 2010 dollars), yielding a per-flight cost of nearly $1.6 billion. And the orbiter fleet never flew more than nine missions in a single year.

In other words, the shuttle was a government program, which means that by definition it came with appropriately astronomical high costs and chronic underachievement — at least in terms of the lofty prognostications of the program’s early proponents. The shuttle program carried out at least ten missions for the Department of Defense (a department nearly defined by budgetary bloat) and accomplished numerous scientific achievements, including launching, repairing and maintaining the Hubble space telescope. However, two of the 135 missions ended in disaster, with 40 percent of the fleet — two of the five shuttles — being destroyed. The program has been a powerful reminder that the exploration of space is not without its risks and costs. Still, public opinion has not rejected the concept of manned space flight on the basis of such expenses.

Now, the post-shuttle era begins, and private industry is demonstrating an eagerness to expand its role on the new frontier. New York Times writer Kenneth Chang observes that “Now that the last space shuttle has landed back on Earth, a new generation of space entrepreneurs would like to whip up excitement about the prospect of returning to the moon.” Google’s $30 million cash prize for the first private venture the Moon has certainly proven a significant incentive, but only insofar as it helps fuel a drive which was already underway to reach out into the heavens without hitching a ride with Uncle Sam. Google’s Lunar XPrize provides an incentive to contestants, offering the winner the opportunity to recover some of the expenses for a private sector Moon race. In Chang’s words:

Spurred by a $30 million purse put up by Google, 29 teams have signed up for a competition to become the first private venture to land on the moon. Most of them are unlikely to overcome the financial and technical challenges to meet the contest deadline of December 2015, but several teams think they have a good shot to win — and to take an early lead in a race to take commercial advantage of our celestial neighbor.

While NASA had wanted to send astronauts back to the moon, its program was canceled last year, a victim of budget cuts and shifting priorities. But it has awarded $500,000 each to Moon Express, Astrobotic and a third competitor, Rocket City Space Pioneers, the first installments of up to $30 million that it will contribute to the X Prize efforts.George Xenofos, manager of NASA’s Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data program, said he expected one or more teams to make it to the moon.

“It’s definitely not the technical issues that’s stopping them,” he said.The contestants’ goals do not appear to face legal hurdles. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, ratified by 100 nations including the United States, bars countries from claiming sovereignty over any part of the moon but does not prevent private companies from setting up shop. As for mining the moon, it could fall under similar legal parameters as fishing in international waters.

Given such an understanding of the Outer Space Treaty, private industry may prove that it can “boldly go” where government cannot go: Establishing a human presence off of the Earth’s surface and possibly beginning a process which could eventually lead to human settlements throughout the solar system. The first tentative steps were taken being taken even as the shuttle neared its last days; it remains to be seen whether or not such efforts will accelerate and take flight in the days to come.

Teams Begin Testing in the Final Stage of the $1.4 Million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE

admin — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:36:02 +0000

Leonardo, N.J. (July 28, 2011) – The X PRIZE Foundation, the leading nonprofit organization solving the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, global incentivized competitions, began the field testing phase of the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE on July 22 at the OHMSETT – The National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility in Leonardo, NJ. OHMSETT is a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) facility and is the largest outdoor saltwater wave/tow facility inNorth America. Developed in July 2010 in the wake of the deepwater horizon spill, this X CHALLENGE is designed to inspire entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists worldwide to develop innovative, rapidly deployable, and highly efficient methods of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface.

“The X PRIZE Foundation and our expert panel of judges are eager to see these innovative technologies at work during the testing phase of this competition,” said Cristin Dorgelo Lindsay, Vice President of Prize Operations for the X PRIZE Foundation. “We look forward to seeing these technological advancements having a positive and significant impact on future oil cleanup efforts and better protect our ocean ecosystems and economies.”

Teams are scheduled to test their equipment individually over a 10 week period. The teams will be overseen by an experienced panel of judges as they demonstrate their technology’s ability to recover oil on the sea-water surface. The team who displays the highest oil recovery rate (ORR) above 2,500 gallons per minute with an oil recovery efficiency (ORE) of greater than 70% will win the $1 million Grand Prize. Second place will win $300,000 and third place will win $100,000.

Shell, the only industry participant, in an effort to ensure that advancing technologies emerge and are introduced into the marketplace, has pledged its support and collaboration to the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE. As part of this ongoing association, Shell is assisting with direct support for the technical, operational and scientific components of the Competition, creating a valued partnership within the X PRIZE Foundation.

One team and one judge will be at OHMSETT during each week of testing in the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE. The schedule is as follows:

7/22-8/3: Vor-Tek (California) and Judge John Joe Dec, retired U.S. Coast Guard hazardous substance spill response professional
7/29-8/10: Pacific Petroleum Recovery (PPR) (Washington) and Judge Dave Westerholm, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response and Restoration
8/5-8/17: OilShaver (Norway) and Judge Peter K. Velez, global emergency response manager for Shell International Exploration and Production
8/12-8/24: Elastec (Illinois) and Judge Skip Przelomski, vice president and senior technical advisor of the Clean Caribbean & Americas (CCA)
8/19-8/31: CRUCIAL (Louisiana) and Judge Hung Nguyen of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE)
8/26-9/8: NOFI (Norway) and Judge Eugene Johnson, retired U.S. Coast Guard captain and former chief of marine safety for the Fifth U.S. Coast Guard District
9/1-9/14: Voraxial (Florida) and Judge Donald A. Toenshoff, Jr., executive vice president of the Marine Spill Response Corporation
9/9-9/21: Koseq (Netherlands) and Judge John Joe Dec, retired U.S. Coast Guard hazardous substance spill response professional
9/16-9/28: Lamor (Finland) and Judge Skip Przelomski, vice president and senior technical advisor of the Clean Caribbean & Americas (CCA)
9/23-10/5: OilWhale (Finland) and Judge Dennis Takahashi-Kelso, director of science and policy direction for the Ocean Conservancy

The winners of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE will be announced at an Award Ceremony in October. This competition is part of the X PRIZE Foundation’s Energy & Environment Prize Group presented by Cisco.

ABOUT THE WENDY SCHMIDT OIL CLEANUP X CHALLENGE
The $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE is a competition designed to inspire a new generation of innovative solutions that will speed the pace of cleaning up seawater surface oil resulting from spillage from ocean platforms, tankers, and other sources. It is a one-year competition with head-to-head competitive demonstrations taking place at the OHMSETT – National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility in Leonardo, NJ, USA(www.ohmsett.com). A $1 million prize will be awarded to the team that demonstrates the ability to recover oil on the sea surface at the highest oil recovery rate (ORR) and the highest Oil Recovery Efficiency (ORE). For more information, visit www.iprizecleanoceans.org.

ABOUT THE X PRIZE FOUNDATION
Founded in 1995, the X PRIZE Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization solving the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development worth far more than the prize itself. The organization motivates and inspires brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual and financial capital for the benefit of humanity. The X PRIZE Foundation conducts competitions in four Prize Groups: Education & Global Development; Energy & Environment; Life Sciences; and Exploration (Ocean and Deep Space). Prizes won include the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE for private, suborbital space flight; the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE for creating safe, affordable, production-capable vehicles that exceed 100 MPG energy equivalent (MPGe); and the $2 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X PRIZE CHALLENGE for advanced rocket development. Active prizes include the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE, the $10 million Archon Genomics X PRIZE, and the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X CHALLENGE. For more information, visit www.xprize.org.

ABOUT WENDY SCHMIDT
Wendy Schmidt is President of The Schmidt Family Foundation that works to advance the development of clean energy and support the wiser use of natural resources. She is founder of the foundation’s 11th Hour Project and of Climate Central. Her other work, at ReMain Nantucket, focuses on generating a model for smart community downtown development on the island. With her husband, Eric, Wendy created the Schmidt Ocean Institute in 2009 to provide future opportunities aboard research vessels for urgent ocean studies. Wendy earned an M.A. in Journalism from The University of California at Berkeley, and a B.A. magna cum laude from Smith College. She serves on the boards of GRIST, The Nantucket Dreamland Foundation, The Natural Resources Defense Council, The California Academy of Sciences, and The Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute.

ABOUT CISCO
Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), sponsor of the X PRIZE Foundation’s Energy & Environment Prize Group, is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. This year celebrates 25 years of technology innovation, operational excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

Media Contact:
Alan Zack
alan.zack@xprize.org
(310) 741-4880