Inside a nondescript warehouse on a nondescript street of this Seattle suburb is a research laboratory that looks like it came out of a James Bond movie–had Q the gadget master been a gastronome.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt had an awkward encounter this morning at the Sun Valley mogulfest this morning — and after Google detailed plans Tuesday to create software it hopes will challenge Microsoft’s dominant Windows operating system.
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. … Myhrvold wanted to make insights–to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. … One rainy day last November, Myhrvold held an “invention session,” as he calls such meetings, on the technology of self-assembly. What if it was possible to break a complex piece of machinery into a thousand pieces and then, at some predetermined moment, have the machine put itself back together again? That had to be useful. But for what?
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