The Battle for China’s Good-Enough Market

Key ideas from the Harvard Business Review article by Orit Gadiesh, Philip Leung, and Till Vestring

The Idea

Between now and 2030, China will account for one-third of the world’s GDP growth. Yet many multinationals are losing share in this critical market. That’s because local businesses are targeting China’s ballooning cohort of midlevel consumers with reliable, low-cost products that are displacing multinationals’ premium offerings. And the regional upstarts making these “good enough” products plan to use the same strategy to challenge incumbents in other emerging markets.

To defend your China position and prevent local competitors from becoming global threats, say Gadiesh, Leung, and Vestring, consider entering China’s good-enough space. For instance, attack the competition from above by lowering your costs and distributing simplified, reasonable-quality offerings. If you can’t reduce your costs quickly, use acquisitions to gain a toehold in this space.

By managing the risks and opportunities inherent in China’s middle market, you’ll claim your share of this pivotal market. And you’ll strengthen your competitive position elsewhere around the globe.

The Idea in Practice

Gadiesh, Leung, and Vestring offer these guidelines for entering China’s good-enough space:

Attack from Above

Moving to the good-enough segment in China is risky if you’re already thriving in the premium space. For instance, your new offerings could cannibalize your high-end products. To mitigate the risks:

• Analyze the differences between China’s premium and good-enough segments. You may discover strong geographic distinctions you can capitalize on.

Example: GE Healthcare expanded sales of its MRI equipment in China by creating a line of simplified machines targeted at hospitals in China’s remote and financially constrained second- and third-tier cities.

• Determine which capabilities and resources you’ll need to seize opportunities in the good-enough space.

Example: GE Healthcare assigned a special team to observe target hospitals’ operations. Members also talked with administrators and physicians to determine the kinds of medical equipment they wanted, features they needed, possible price points, and required distribution and services. GE then reconfigured its existing networks of sales, distribution, and services to serve this new market.

• Stake claims in the good-enough space to box out emerging local players and global competitors that might be eyeing the same target market. By entering this space ahead of the pack, GE Healthcare defended its position against local upstarts, capturing 52% of the $238 million market in 2004.

Use Acquisitions

If you can’t alter your cost structure or business processes quickly enough to compete with local players, consider mergers and acquisitions.

Example: Anheuser-Busch owned 27% of Tsingtao Brewery, one of China’s largest brewers. It outbid competitor SABMiller to acquire Harbin, the fourth-largest brewer in China. The acquisition enabled Anheuser-Busch to reach the masses while preventing Harbin from swimming upstream.

Note, though, that non-Chinese acquirers are facing tougher M&A approval processes. To increase your chances of gaining regulatory and political approval:

• Draft a compelling business case for the acquisition, citing benefits for local companies and authorities.

• Be willing to adjust the structure, terms, and conditions of the deal.

• Engage in heavy-duty relationship building, to woo critical players.

Also, to ensure that each acquisition delivers the maximum possible value:

• Select a target company that offers cost and distribution synergies with your firm and whose products won’t cannibalize your premium brands.

• Overinvest in the due diligence process.

• Take a systematic approach to postmerger integration.

Bremerhaven

Das heimliche Autoland

Von Boris Schmidt

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Jährlich werden gut zwei Millionen Autos in Bremerhaven umgeschlagen

13. März 2008 Alle deutschen Automobilhersteller agieren längst als die oft beschworenen „Global Player“. Sie bedienen (fast) alle Märkte der Welt, und sie produzieren in vielen Ländern. Die allgemeine Tendenz, mit der Produktion dort hinzugehen, wo der Markt ist, bringt zwar am Standort Wettbewerbsvorteile. Aber dann wird in aller Regel ein Reimport der eigenen Ware fällig.

Beispiele dafür gibt es genug: VW New Beetle, Mercedes-Benz ML, BMW X5 - alles deutsche Autos, aber „not made in Germany“. Kein Wunder, dass der Autotransport boomt. Die Logistiker kommen kaum mit dem Schaffen von Kapazitäten nach. In Bremerhaven hat man diese Entwicklung nicht verschlafen und in den vergangenen zehn Jahren eine veritable Erfolgsgeschichte geschrieben: Statt einer Million Fahrzeuge - wie noch 1998 - werden jetzt doppelt so viele umgeschlagen.

Jährlich verlassen 1,2 Millionen Neuwagen das Land

Im riesigen Hafengelände (2,1 Millionen Quadratmeter hat das Autoterminal) herrscht ein ständiges Kommen und Gehen: Jährlich verlassen 1,2 Millionen Neuwagen das Land, 800.000 kommen herein. 1300 große Pötte laufen im Jahr den Hafen an, im Schnitt fünf an einem Werktag. Das heißt, täglich müssen 7700 Autos bewegt werden. Fünferteams holen die Fahrzeuge von den großen Schiffen. Einer davon ist dabei der „Taxifahrer“, der die anderen vier vom Schiff zurückfährt oder zum Schiff bringt, je nachdem, ob be- oder entladen wird. Für 1500 Wagen sind rund sieben Stunden nötig. Oberste Maxime beim Ausladen ist - neben dem unfallfreien Fahren -, die Autos so wenig wie möglich zu bewegen, damit die Zahl der zurückgelegten Kilometer später beim Endkunden auf jeden Fall noch einstellig ist.

n den großen Überseefrachtern finden bis zu 6500 Fahrzeuge Platz, eine Asien-Tour dauert ungefähr einen Monat. Nach Amerika geht es etwas schneller. Die Fahrzeuge werden auf 12 bis 16 Decks verteilt und stehen dicht an dicht. Um die reinen Transportkosten für eine Überseefahrt wird gern ein großes Geheimnis gemacht, in der Branche spricht man von weniger als 400 Euro je Einheit.

Schiffskapazitäten und Parkflächen

Für kürzere Distanzen gibt es sogenannte Feeder-Schiffe. Die fahren von und nach Großbritannien sowie nach Skandinavien, immer wichtiger werden Russland und das Baltikum. Manchmal wird gleich umgeladen, ohne Zwischenstopp. Doch das ist der Idealfall. In der Regel lässt der Weitertransport auf Straße oder Schiene meist einige Tage auf sich warten; daher braucht man in Bremerhaven nicht nur Schiffskapazitäten, sondern auch große Parkflächen: Bis zu 120.000 Autos können auf dem Terminal-Gelände abgestellt werden, 40.000 Plätze sind überdacht.

Made for Germany: Die M-Klasse wird ausgeschifft

Wer über das riesige Gelände stromert, sieht viele Autos von BMW und Mercedes-Benz (Exporte, aber auch Importe). Als Versendehafen nutzen Bremerhaven zudem Peugeot und Citroën sowie zum Teil der Volkswagen-Konzern. Übrigens ist Emden als Standort eines VW-Werks mit einer Million Exporte (keine Importe) größter deutscher „Konkurrent“ von Bremerhaven. Kleinere Kapazitäten haben zudem Cuxhaven und Hamburg.

Eine Lagerhausgesellschaft, die längst keine mehr ist

Als Einfallstor wird Bremerhaven unter anderen von Ford, Hyundai, Kia, Mitsubishi, General Motors und Suzuki genutzt. Aber nicht alle japanischen Hersteller kommen an die Weser-Mündung. Nissan wickelt seinen Deutschland-Import über Amsterdam ab, Mazda über Antwerpen, Honda über Gent. Toyota war lange Jahre Kunde (und ist es noch), bringt den Großteil seiner asiatischen Autos jetzt aber über Zeebrugge nach Europa.

Erster Ansprechpartner für einen Importeur ist die 1877 gegründete Bremer Lagerhausgesellschaft (BLG), die über ihr Geschäftsfeld Automobile Logistics für das Laden der Fahrzeuge verantwortlich zeichnet. Doch die BLG ist längst mehr als eine Lagerhausgesellschaft. Sie beschäftigt 13.700 Menschen. Bremerhaven/Bremen ist nur einer von vielen Standorten, wenn auch mit 6500 Mitarbeitern der größte. Außer um Autos kümmert man sich noch ums Containergeschäft und die Teilelogistik von Mercedes-Benz. Der jährliche Gesamtumsatz betrug im Jahr 2007 gut 900 Millionen Euro.

Erst in Deutschland im endgültigen Verkaufszustand

Das angestammte Terrain hat man längst verlassen - auch räumlich: So ist die BLG außer in Cuxhaven und Hamburg auch in Gioia Tauro in Süditalien (wichtig als Tor zum südlichen Mittelmeer) und in Koper in der Slowakei als Autoverlader aktiv. Außerdem transportiert man die Fahrzeuge auf der Straße weiter zum endgültigen Bestimmungsort: 450 Lastwagen fahren für die BLG, und selbst Binnenschiffe sind für die Bremer unterwegs. Zählt man alles zusammen, werden 4,9 Millionen Autos von der BLG umgeschlagen.

Letztlich gehören durch geschicktes Zukaufen auch die PDI-Zentren in Bremerhaven zum BLG-Reich. PDI steht für Pre-Delivery Inspection, wobei dieser Begriff etwas in die Irre führt. Zur Inspektion müssen die Autos nicht, wohl aber werden sie gewaschen oder entwachst. Bei manchen sind auch kleine oder größere Transportschäden zu beseitigen. Zudem sind fast alle Importeure dazu übergegangen, die Fahrzeuge erst in Deutschland in ihren endgültigen Verkaufszustand zu versetzen. So werden in Bremerhaven Klimaanlagen eingebaut oder Sonnendächer, oder es wird gar die Stoffpolsterung durch Leder ersetzt. 450.000 Wagen im Jahr werden durch die BLG-PDI geschleust.

Einer der großen Wachstumsmärkte

Für BMW und Mercedes-Benz betreut die BLG die Autos sowohl auf der Ein- wie auch auf der Ausreise. Fahrzeuge, die aus Amerika kommen, werden „aufbereitet“, wobei es nicht nur ums Waschen geht, sondern auch hier kommt das eine oder andere Ausstattungsdetail erst jetzt in den Wagen. Gleiches gilt für den umgekehrten Weg: Als wir in der Werkstatt waren, wurde bei einer S-Klasse gerade die 250-km/h-Limitierung aufgehoben - für einen Kunden in Wisconsin. In die PDI-Abteilungen wird die BLG - die zu 50,4 Prozent der Stadt Bremen gehört - bis zum Jahr 2012 weitere 170 Millionen Euro investieren.

Vor allem der für BMW und Mercedes-Benz tätige Bereich soll ausgeweitet werden. Noch in diesem Jahr sollen 150 neue Arbeitsplätze entstehen. Doch der rührige BLG-Chef Dethloff Aden blickt außer auf den Ausbau des Stammsitzes schon längst weiter über den Tellerrand hinaus. Russland ist einer der kommenden Märkte, zurzeit werden Verhandlungen über ein BLG-Terminal in St. Petersburg geführt. Und ans Schwarze Meer muss die BLG auch. Eines ist klar: Die Logistik von Neuwagen ist einer der großen Wachstumsmärkte.

Text: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 09.03.2008, Nr. 10 / Seite V7
Bildmaterial: BLG

Hybrid cars and the power grid

Hybrid cars and the power grid

March 13th, 2008

Today, people who care about the environment are attracted by hybrid electric cars. But in 2020, hybrid cars and trucks might represent 25% of all the vehicles in the U.S. Of course, these vehicles will need to be plugged to the power grid to recharge their batteries. A recent Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) study has evaluated the impact of hybrid cars on the power grid for various scenarios. The study concludes that ‘the growing number of plug-in hybrid electric cars and trucks could require major new power generation resources or none at all — depending on when people recharge their automobiles.’ But read more…

You can see above an example of how hybrid electric cars could recharge their batteries in the future. “Solar panels would provide shade and electricity to recharge the batteries of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.” (Credit: ORNL) Here is a link to a larger version of this illustration.

The ORNL study has been coordinated by Stan Hadley, who works for the Cooling, Heating and Power Technologies Program inside ORNL’s Engineering Science and Technology Division.

Hadley said that previous studies about the impact of hybrid cars assumed that owners will charge them during the night. “That assumption doesn’t necessarily take into account human nature. Consumers’ inclination will be to plug in when convenient, rather than when utilities would prefer. Utilities will need to create incentives to encourage people to wait. There are also technologies such as ’smart’ chargers that know the price of power, the demands on the system and the time when the car will be needed next to optimize charging for both the owner and the utility that can help too.”

So the ONRL study focused on a variety of scenarios. “In an analysis of the potential impacts of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles projected for 2020 and 2030 in 13 regions of the United States, ORNL researchers explored their potential effect on electricity demand, supply, infrastructure, prices and associated emission levels. Electricity requirements for hybrids used a projection of 25 percent market penetration of hybrid vehicles by 2020 including a mixture of sedans and sport utility vehicles. Several scenarios were run for each region for the years 2020 and 2030 and the times of 5 p.m. or 10:00 p.m., in addition to other variables.”

The researchers “found that the need for added generation would be most critical by 2030, when hybrids have been on the market for some time and become a larger percentage of the automobiles Americans drive. In the worst-case scenario — if all hybrid owners charged their vehicles at 5 p.m., at six kilowatts of power — up to 160 large power plants would be needed nationwide to supply the extra electricity, and the demand would reduce the reserve power margins for a particular region’s system.”

As ORNL is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), this study should be publicly available online. It might be, but I haven’t found it. But a special issue of ORNL Review about Pursuing Energy Options contains a detailed review of it, “Giving Back: Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles may have an unexpected value (Carolyn Krause, ORNL Review, Volume 41, Number 1, 2008).

This article says that tomorrow’s hybrid cars “may not only get its energy from the grid but also may give ‘imaginary power’ back to the grid.” What exactly is this ‘imaginary power’? “According to a vision of Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers, the car’s charger would supply the grid with ‘reactive power,’ or non-active power, to help regulate local utility voltage.”

Here are more details about how owners of hybrid cars could give back some energy to the power grid. “DOE also supports research on one way to reduce peak demands on the electric grid: deploy distributed energy resources — microturbines, fuel cells and photovoltaic panels — to provide electricity to both local buildings and the electric grid. The plug-in hybrid could be considered another distributed energy resource, but one that also stores energy.”

Of course, energy utilities have no power — no punt intended — on their customers’ behavior. “Ideally, customers would reduce their consumption of electricity at peak load times in response to market prices or a utility’s request. During hot summers, the demand for air conditioning between 2 and 6 p.m. can boost the peak load to the point that a utility must purchase power from another utility at a higher price. In sharp contrast, the grid on the same night may be so underutilized that energy is sometimes given away.”

But these companies would prefer to see people recharging their cars during nights. “Nighttime battery charging would greatly benefit generation and distribution companies, who normally see their facilities used efficiently for only a few hours each day. Local distribution grids would see a significant change in their electricity usage patterns. For example, early evening charging would probably use a higher proportion of natural gas to coal than nighttime charging, with consequent effects on carbon dioxide and other emissions.”

For more information, you should read a previous ORNL Review article, “More or Less Electricity” (Carolyn Krause, ORNL Review, Volume 40, Number 2, 2007).

Finally, I have a question for today’s hybrid car owners. Do you recharge your car’s batteries during the night or during the day?

Sources: Oak Ridge National Laboratory news release, March 12, 2008; and various websites

Local Area Network Droids

IRobot is developing communications robots for the military.

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

Expendable robots that can be tossed into a building or over a wall, much like a hand grenade, are being developed for the U.S. military by iRobot, the maker of the popular Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. But rather than exploding, these new bots will be used to set up communications networks to assist soldiers in urban battlefields.

The robots, called LANdroids, are being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of a $3 million three-year research program. The aim is to create expendable robots that will be able to overcome the communications problems that soldiers currently face in built-up areas.

"These robots will be used to allow the war fighter to rapidly deploy, maintain, and reconfigure a communications infrastructure, enabling war fighters to stay connected to their lines of communication in dynamic urban environments," says Chris Jones, research program manager of iRobot, which is based in Burlington, MA.

Existing radio communications networks used by the military work well when there is line of sight, but urban environments can hinder this. Obstacles and structures can reflect, refract, diffract, or absorb the radio signals, leading to signal loss and attenuation. The overall effect is that soldiers often have to work with poor and unreliable radio communications.

The LANdroids will be designed to overcome this problem using an autonomous positioning system that will help the robots adapt the communications networks as needed. To do so, the bots will use the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard to form mobile ad hoc networks that can repair and reroute themselves if, for example, the enemy destroys a robot.

But to meet DARPA's requirements, each LANdroid will have to weigh less than a kilogram and have an overall volume of less than one liter--that's about 10 centimeters long, says Jones. A single soldier should be able to carry more than one unit and be able to easily throw them into position, say, onto a roof. All this will cost no more than $100 per unit.

"It's certainly doable," says Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotic Laboratories at the University of the West of England, in the United Kingdom. But the biggest challenge will be power management--for example, ensuring that the robots get the best range while maximizing the bandwidth of the communications channels. "If it's too far away, then the bandwidth has to go down," Melhuish says.

Then there is the impact of mobility on the robot's power supply, he says. "Going up and down stairs, being able to peer out of windows--these are things that we take for granted but are difficult for a robot." Robots can do these things, but it comes at a power cost.

Fortunately, DARPA's vision doesn't require stair climbing. In fact, making the robots mobile is not so much to allow them to travel as to enable them to position themselves to get an optimal signal. In an urban environment, where an area can be flooded with multiple signals reflecting off structures, moving a relatively short distance of less than a meter can have a dramatic effect on signal quality.

Even so, the LANdroid will still be required to be smart enough to avoid obstacles and navigate a typical indoor environment, be it concrete or carpet. What's more, it will have to be able to do so at speeds of half a meter a second and be capable of functioning for up to 10 hours. Both requirements could prove difficult to implement in a small robot.

The form and means of locomotion have yet to be decided, says Jones. But, he says, the pace of the robots' development is likely to be rapid. First prototypes could be ready by the end of the year.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Hulu, a Web-based video venture from NBC and News Corp., officially launches

By Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Hulu.com, a joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal, plans to open its online library of ad-supported TV shows and movies to the public on Wednesday, the company announced.

Users of the service will be able to view more than 250 full-length episodes of shows such as ''The Simpsons'' and ''The Office,'' as well as some 100 movies, including ''The Big Lebowski'' and ''Ice Age.''

Short clips from films and TV shows such as ''Napoleon Dynamite'' and ''Saturday Night Live'' are also available through the service, which is accessible at Hulu.com, as well as on Time Warner Inc.'s AOL site, Yahoo Inc. and other popular Web portals.

The public debut of Hulu, which has been available to a test group by invitation since October, comes as studios seek ways to make money providing ad-supported video online.

The entertainment companies behind the service have been feuding with popular online video sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube, where unauthorized clips from shows often appear. Viacom Inc., which owns MTV and Comedy Central, is suing Google for copyright infringement.

The Hulu.com programming comes from 50 TV networks, movie studios and Web-based producers of content. Viewers of some movies and TV shows are given a choice of advertisements to watch.

NBC Universal is a unit of General Electric Co.

How to create a fast-growing company

Seed capitalism

Mar 11th 2008
From Economist.com

How to create a fast-growing company

TO UNDERSTAND why America remains the world’s most successful entrepreneurial economy, look no further than AeroGrow International. Housed in a nondescript office building on the edge of Boulder, Colorado, this young company is thinking big: it claims to have created a new product category—kitchen crop appliances, which allow people to grow plants quickly without soil—with potential global sales of (it hopes) billions of dollars.

AeroGrow was started in 2002 by Michael Bissonette, who is a serial entrepreneur—an increasingly important role in America’s system for creating new firms. Mr Bissonette was driven by nothing more than a desire to start another successful company. By taking a technology that had largely been left to scientists and criminals and making it accessible to ordinary consumers, AeroGrow may have found growth where nobody thought it was possible.

Herbs without a garden

Mr Bissonette previously sold a voice-recognition based remote-control company and a wireless home-security company. Looking for his next big idea, reading journals and chatting with contacts, he became excited about the potential of a technology called aeroponics. Originally developed by NASA, aeroponics accelerates the speed at which plants grow by drizzling nutrients onto their roots, which dangle in the air instead of being planted in soil.

Commercial aeroponics systems have long been available, but they were big, clunky and expensive (at around $900 each)—not consumer friendly. That was because they were bought mostly by the geeky criminals of the crop-production world: people who grow marijuana at home.

They cared neither about the look of the product nor about its effectiveness at growing anything other than cannabis. But with the demand for fresh, organic produce booming, Mr Bissonette saw a potentially huge market for an aeroponics system that looked good, was easy to use, and worked with the kind of crops (tomatoes, strawberries, legal herbs) that home kitchens need.

This proved easier said than done, which highlights two other key characteristics of the successful entrepreneur: persistence and perfectionism. Mr Bissonette had expected to have the new product on the market within a year to 18 months. In the end, it took four years.

Experience had taught Mr Bissonette that “when you launch a new category, you make one mistake and it could be your last chance.” So each new version of AeroGrow's kitchen garden was tested to destruction with people whose fingers were anything but green. “We kept building the best system we could, watched how people would kill their plants, and changed it so they couldn’t kill their plants that way any more,” says John Thompson, AeroGrow's marketing director.

The firm boasts that each seed planted in its gardens has a 99.9% probability of growing successfully. But Mr Thompson says the company is “still trying to figure out what to do about people who put it on their radiator and bake their plants.”

Among the other challenges were finding the most effective way to deliver the nutrient to the roots, identifying plants that would grow in a small enough space to make the garden kitchen-friendly, developing low-energy lighting and automatically adjusting the nutrient for chemical differences in tap water. After solving these problems, the firm spent another six months perfecting the machine’s look.

In 2006 the product was launched. It was marketed using another technique that America’s entrepreneurs have mastered better than anyone else: the television infomercial. AeroGrow's included convincing displays of greens growing twice as quickly in an aeroponics machine as they did in soil.

One obvious problem facing a start-up that launches a consumer product is that there are plenty of big kitchenware firms that can crush an innovator with a branded imitation of the new idea. Mr Bissonette has followed several strategies in the hope of warding off the big boys, at least for a while.

One is to use the “razor and blade” approach that has worked so well for giants like Gillette. AeroGrow’s appliances (the razors) are relatively cheap—now around $150—but the firm makes its real money from selling seeds (the blades) in specially designed capsules that only work with their gardens.

Also, AeroGrow had to get many fiddly things right before it could sell its gardens, which may make it harder for established firms to rush out a copy-cat product. “There are so many processes that the quick knock-off guys aren’t going to touch it,” Mr Thompson explained, “while the people with brands will take two or three years at least to get it right.”

To keep it that way, AeroGrow is continuing to innovate—another lesson that American entrepreneurs learned long ago. Rather than resting on its laurels, it is now working on versions of its product that meet every taste and price range, from a small $29 plastic garden to a $350 cool, metallic version.

It is also adding one- and three-plant gardens to its standard seven-plant version, and has designed a flower garden that allows a plant to be put in a vase for up to 48 hours before resuming its aeroponic growth. AeroGrow’s gardens were sold in around 4000 stores in America last Christmas (up from around 700 in late 2006) and are also available in Britain, Australia and, since last month, South Korea.

AeroGrow’s products consistently occupy a number of the top ten slots among Amazon.com’s bestselling indoor plants. In the final quarter of 2007, AeroGrow’s revenues topped $14m, three times its revenues from the last quarter of 2006. It is approaching profitability.

Mr Bissonette believes annual revenues for the aeroponics industry could eventually rise to $1.5 billion—the sort of vision that could only occur to someone in the grip of entrepreneurial animal spirits. But if he is even close to right, it would be remarkable if the big beasts of consumer electronics or kitchenware did not try to dominate the new product category—though that would probably let Mr Bissonette sell his firm at a juicy price.

Already his mind may be moving on to the next project. Last month, he appointed a new chief executive, a veteran of several leading consumer businesses, to help the firm grow even faster (he says he will remain at the firm in a less hands-on role).

Lest anybody doubt that the product works, look at the behaviour of cannabis growers. The AeroGrow garden is too small for their plants, and anyway the firm does not supply that sort of seed. Nevertheless, a crop of websites has sprouted explaining how to adapt the AeroGrow garden for growing marijuana. No wonder sales keep reaching new, er, highs.

Organic Transistors That Assemble Themselves

A simple way to pattern organic semiconductor material could mean cheap, large, bendable electronics.

By Prachi Patel-Predd

Researchers have found a quick and simple way to make arrays of high-performance electronic devices from organic semiconductor material. The development, led by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in Gaithersburg, MD, could lead to a simple, low-cost method to manufacture large, flexible electronic circuits that use organic semiconductors.

The researchers coax organic semiconductor molecules to self-assemble around chemically pretreated electrodes to form field-effect transistors, which are often used to switch pixels on and off in displays. The technique results in an array of transistors that have good electrical properties and are insulated from one another. While the current work was done on a hard silicon substrate, it should be transferable to flexible substrates, says David Gundlach, the NIST researcher who led the work.

Current flat-panel displays, such as liquid crystal displays, are rigid because they use amorphous silicon to make the transistors that control the pixels. Organic electronic circuits could pave the way for roll-up displays: foldable electronic readers, large screens that can be rolled up and tucked into cell phones, and smart bandages that monitor wounds and sense the need for drugs. However, a practical method to cheaply produce high-performance organic electronic circuits has proved elusive.

The new technique, presented in Nature Materials, could be faster, and hence cheaper, than current methods to make flexible circuits. There are several existing ways to make organic circuits over large areas. One is a lithographic technique similar to those used to make conventional silicon chips; this involves coating the entire circuit's surface with the organic semiconductor and then etching it away wherever it is not needed. A more efficient method is inkjet printing, in which nozzles put down liquid droplets of plastic semiconductors in a desired pattern. In fact, two companies that have announced plans to commercially manufacture plastic electronics use these two different methods. (See "Plastic Electronics Head for Market.")

The new method eliminates the need to pattern the semiconductor layer. Once the researchers have patterned the source and drain electrodes using lithography, they dip the circuit in a special chemical to treat the electrode surface. Then they coat the circuit with a thin layer of an organic semiconductor solution.

Near the electrodes, the semiconductor crystals assemble themselves in an ordered way so that they carry current well. Away from the electrodes, however, crystals are randomly oriented so that the material acts as an insulator. "Now we can make circuits without patterning [the semiconductor] at all," says Thomas Jackson, an electrical engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, who was involved in the work. "We simply spin it on and we're done. We don't have to go through the step of removing the material where we don't want it."

Getting rid of this step makes the manufacturing process significantly simpler, says John Kymissis, an electrical engineering professor at Columbia University. Patterning the semiconductor layer is one of the most delicate steps in making an organic electronic circuit, he says. If any semiconductor material accidentally spans the electrodes of two adjacent transistors, that could allow current to flow between transistors, making the circuit dysfunctional. In a display, for instance, two pixels might go on instead of one. "Even if you print the electrodes, if you don't have to pattern the organic semiconductor, [the process] is going to be faster," says Kymissis. "It is a huge advantage."

Compared with current techniques, the simplicity of the new method should make it more practical to manufacture organic electronic circuits on a large scale, says Natalie Stingelin-Stutzmann, a materials-science researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. "Inkjet is simple, but if you can cover large areas with a simple coating technique, it will be cheaper," she says. "At the end, it is the cost which will determine if organic electronics makes it or not."

Microsoft releases very early version of Internet Explorer 8

SEATTLE (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. gave early testers their first glimpse of its next-generation Web browser Wednesday, and said Internet Explorer 8 will adhere to the same standards as competitors' programs.

Microsoft's browsers, including the current Internet Explorer 7, gained notoriety among Web developers for handling Web page code differently than Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Apple Inc.'s Safari, the now-defunct Netscape Navigator and others.

For the most part, major non-Microsoft browsers and outside developers who built Web pages worked with agreed-upon technical standards, while Microsoft was accused of adding proprietary code to those standards. The result: Web pages that looked good in Internet Explorer but broke on other browsers, or vice versa.

At a Web developer conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager for Microsoft's Internet Explorer division, made light of Microsoft's past spotty standards and pledged to do better.

Hachamovitch said that in early Internet Explorer 7 days, his kids would hear about broken Web sites and ask, ''Daddy, did you guys break the Web?''

''And most of the time I could honestly say, 'No.' But, you know, Web developers might answer that question a little bit differently,'' Hachamovitch said.

He elicited a laugh, but developers have sometimes had to build Web sites from scratch a second time to devise a version that worked with Microsoft's browsers.

Microsoft said the new version of the browser, when complete, will support industry-standard versions of the code that tells browsers what Web pages should look like, including CSS 2.1, by default.

''That's a big deal,'' said Chris Swenson, a software industry analyst for the NPD Group.

While most Web surfers might not feel a huge impact, Swenson said it will bring ''a sigh of relief'' for developers, who will spend a lot less time tweaking Web pages to work with different browsers.

However, both Swenson and Microsoft note that Web standards continue to evolve, and that definitive tests to determine compliance don't yet exist. Microsoft indicated Wednesday its intention to step up involvement with this process.

Microsoft's decision might also help it fend off a new antitrust investigation in Europe.

Regulators there are looking into whether the software maker held other browsers back by not following open Internet standards. The probe was launched after Norwegian browser developer Opera Software ASA filed a complaint in late 2007.

Microsoft unveiled a few features in the new browser that may appeal more to average Web users. For example, right-clicking on a Web page will give people more ''to-do'' options than they'd see today. Users will be able to ''Send to Facebook,'' ''Map with Live Search'' or ''Define with Dictionary.com'' with a quick click.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 site:

http://tinyurl.com/2t3vsq

3-D Modeling Advance

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a Web service called Make3D that lets users turn a single two-dimensional image of an outdoor scene into an immersive 3-D model. This gives users the ability to easily create a more realistic visual representation of a photo--one that lets viewers fly around the scene.

To convert the still images into 3-D visualizations, Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, and Ashutosh Saxena, a doctoral student in computer science, developed a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data. For example, says Ng, grass has a distinctive texture that makes it look very different close up than it does from far away. The algorithm learns that the progressive change in texture gives clues to the distance of a patch of grass.

Larry Davis, a professor and chair of the computer-science department at the University of Maryland, in College Park, says that turning a single image into a 3-D model has been a hard and mathematically complicated problem in computer vision, and that even though Make3D gets things wrong, it often produces remarkable results.

Make3D is not the first site to extract a 3-D model from a single image. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) launched Fotowoosh in May 2007. (See "A New Dimension for Your Photos.") But Fotowoosh's algorithm is limited because it labels the orientation of surfaces as either horizontal or vertical, without taking into account such things as mountain slopes, rooftops, or even staircases, says Ng. Based on these restrictive assumptions, Fotowoosh infers the depth of a scene to reconstruct the image.

Derek Hoiem, who built Fotowoosh's algorithm, admits that unlike Make3D, his work does not give a good estimation of depth. "I can say this point [in an image] is a lot further [away from the foreground] than that point, but I can't say that this point is five meters away," he explains. Hoiem developed Fotowoosh with CMU faculty members Alexei Efros and Martial Hebert. (Hoiem is currently a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)

Saxena says that by knowing the depth values of objects in a scene, Make3D creates a higher-quality 3-D model. In a survey performed by the Stanford researchers in 2006, users preferred Make3D's images twice as often as images created using Fotowoosh.

Hoiem says that he has been trying to extend his work to deal with arbitrary angles, but he has yet to come up with a solution and is "impressed" with the Stanford researchers' work.

To build Make3D's algorithm, the Stanford researchers used a laser scanner to estimate the distance of every pixel or point in a two-dimensional image. That 3-D information was coupled with the image and reviewed by the algorithm so that it could learn to correlate visual properties in the image with depth values. For example, it will learn that a large blue pad is probably part of the sky and farther away, says Saxena. There are thousands of such visual properties that humans unconsciously use to determine depth. The Make3D algorithm learns these kinds of rules and processes images accordingly, he says.

To process an image, the algorithm divides the still image into tiny pieces or segments, says Ng. "It tries to take each of these small pieces and simultaneously figure out their 3-D position, angle, and orientation in the image."

When a new image is uploaded on the site, it only takes a couple of minutes for the algorithm to reconstruct it to a 3-D model and make a movie of the scene. However, the website is not yet optimal, so it takes about an hour for the user to receive an e-mail message indicating that her visualizations are ready. A user can store images and movies in a personal gallery on the site. The researchers are working to connect their site to photo-sharing sites like Photobucket and Flickr, says Saxena.

Make3D can also take two or three images of the same location to create a 3-D model similar to Microsoft's Photosynth application. (See "Microsoft's Shiny New Toy.") But Photosynth is a more expansive project that uses hundreds of images to reconstruct a scene, and when there are that many images to work with, computing the depth of scenes is not as mathematically complicated and is more accurate, says Hoiem. Make3D's focus is on processing single images for the general consumer, who might only take one image of a scene, says Ng.

Alex Daley, the group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, says that there is a complementary relationship between single-image processors and multiple-image processors: improving single-image processing will ultimately make it easier for other systems to match multiple photos together. "Mixing and matching these for the right set of images will provide the best set of results," Daley adds. (He says that Microsoft is open to working with applications such as Make3D, but the company has not yet spoken with the Stanford researchers.)

Make3D's current algorithm only works on outdoor scenes or landscapes and a few kinds of indoor scenes, such as those that focus on staircases, and it's meant to help users share experiences or relive their own. The researchers are working to extend the algorithm to a broader range of settings so that it can recognize things like humans and coffee mugs and be used to create real-life environments for gaming and virtual worlds. Saxena is also working to incorporate the technology into robots to improve navigation and assist them at carrying out such tasks as unloading a dishwasher.

CMU's Efros says that the work provides a new perspective on the computer-vision problem and will hopefully result in a deeper understanding of how human vision functions.

Multimedia

•	See a 3-D model of a building in Amsterdam.
•	See a 3-D model of the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
•	See a 3-D model of the Pyramids.