Cyrillic Partners

Two startups in Silicon Valley are launching a service that will sequence your DNA and report back on the probability you face of contracting certain diseases. VentureBeat has a good summary story of the services.

Such services could turn the insurance industry on its head. Although each profile might be private for each user, meta data might be sold to insurance companies looking for a better profile. The meta data might suggest, for example, that men between 40 and 45 who grew up in a specific town have a higher risk of certain types of cancer. That would allow an insurance company to adjust its premiums for anyone who fit those criteria.

The other side of the meta-data coin is the chance to remedy public health problems before they hurt people. But that still seems a ways off.

For more on each company, check out 23andMe and Navagenics.

Last year, Netflix offered a $1 million prize for anybody who could improve its algorithm for recommending movies by 10 percent. It’s a data junkie’s dream, a veritable “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” for statisticians. Alex and I even thought about entering it ourselves.

Nobody’s hit the target yet, but a team from AT&T Labs has come closest, hitting a 8.43% improvement and scoring $50,000 from Netflix. The team has spent about 2,000 hours working on the problem, which means, at this point, they’ve earned an average of $25 per hour. Not very impressive for a bunch of PhDs.

Alex says he’s gunning for the Princeton team.

Read the NYT’s story.

[This essay first ran in Thomson Financial’s Private Equity Week Wire]

Russia celebrated the 90th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution earlier this week with marches in Moscow. But Silicon Valley saw a different type of revolution taking hold and celebrated in a decidedly different way.

Vladimir Vinokurov, Russia’s Consul General in San Francisco, hosted a bevy of high-profile financiers at his home in Pacific Heights to celebrate the final close of DFJ-VTB Aurora. Venture capitalists and statesmen drank Stolichnaya and sang “Moscow Nights.”

The $150 million fund is appropriately named. Just as its namesake cruiser, anchored at St. Petersburg, fired the first shot in the Bolshevik Revolution; the fund symbolizes Russia’s first shot at revolutionizing its economy toward technology entrepreneurship.

The fund, which has offices across Russia and in Silicon Valley, is the first recipient of money from the Russian Venture Company (RVC). The RVC is a public-private partnership backed by the Russian government. It started out as a fund-of-funds designed to stimulate technology startups through investing in venture capital as a minority limited partner.

This week, however, the government authorized an expansion of the RVC, doubling its monetary commitment to $1.25 billion. The government also tasked it to consider direct investments in startups and establish market development programs. The RVC has backed three firms so far and plans to solicit proposals again in February.

The increased RVC fund size dovetails with certain proposed regulatory changes approved Thursday for further government consideration. The changes are designed to emulate Regulation D in the U.S. and include provisions to protect intellectual property. Experts expect the changes to pass into law before the end of the year.

But Russian hearts must be swayed if the startup revolution is to be sustained. No single government program can remove the stigma of a failed business, or roll back generations of zero-sum thinking. Silicon Valley may have the one model that Russia is supremely positioned to execute: combine brilliant people with money and sprinkle marketing on top.

Taking the precepts of entrepreneurship from the intellectual to the actual requires courage, commitment and trust. Succeeding with startups calls for a character that must be cultivated; and no tree that bears fruit grows overnight.

-Alexander Haislip

[Thanks to Wikipedia for the image]

Dude, you’re waiting tables. That seems like the ultimate payback for the man that was once the face of Dell’s advertising campaign and later busted for buying marijuana.

I know that the Dell Dude, aka Ben Curtis, didn’t make the lousy Dell machine that burned out on me and now serves as a high-priced paperweight a mere two years after I bought it. And I know that he didn’t allow the screen to go through despite the profusion of dead pixels. And I know that he wasn’t responsible for the “customer service” that gave my dad the run around for days when he was looking for the monitor cable the company failed to send.

I know these things, but I still enjoy the Schadenfreude of seeing Dell’s star wain and dim. It’s bad, I know. I would never wish ill on a person, or even a company that had mistreated me and my family, abused us with empty promises and poor-quality products.

But there’s no way I’m getting a Dell again. Forget it. HP, Lenovo, Sony, Apple–don’t care. Just no more Dell.

(Sorry to go off-topic with this post, but what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t go on a rant from time to time?)

J.D. Power and Associates surveyed smart phone users and found that Blackberry users are the happiest with their devices, citing its long battery life and ease of operation.

The survey asked users of various products to evaluate their ease of operation, operating system, physical design, audio quality, battery life and utility features. The Blackberry came out on top.

Still, it hardly seems a fair fight. Nowhere did the survey consider the iPhone, the nerds’ choice de jour.

Interesting tidbits about what users want, from the press release:

• Among smartphone customers, 13 percent report having to get their device repaired, with software application issues, device locking up or display not working being the most frequently reported problems.
• More than 40 percent of smartphone users would like GPS (global positioning system) capabilities on their device, while 26 percent would like Wi-Fi capabilities, 22 percent want touch screen and 19 percent would like to have a TV integrated into their device.
• The average reported purchase price of a smartphone device is $261. Palm owners report the highest purchase price at $313. Motorola has the lowest reported device pricing at $194.
• The top five reasons given for choosing a smartphone brand are: personal digital assistant (PDA)/personal information manager (PIM) functionality (50%), Internet capability (48%), Bluetooth capabilities (46%), general ease of use (44%) and overall design/style (44%).
• Thirty-five percent of smartphone owners download third-party software. Popular software downloads among business users include games (51%), travel-related programs (42%) and business applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel (36%).