Second Part

0:09:07 Problems associated with information retrieval; first came across the problem when a student in Vienna; read book by Rudolf Carnap, 'The Logical Construction of the World' and what impressed me was that he started with a single concept of the recollection of similarities through which one could build up all the other concepts that we have in our language, basically by set theory; we now know that Bayesian probabilities is probably a much more elegant way of approaching it; one of the things that I would like to do sometime in the future is to see if we could build a computer that is a probabilistic computer rather than a traditional microprocessor; I hope to put together a group of people to help me think about it including Steve Furber and Steve Young who has been working on speech recognition and that is all probabilistic in Markov chains; we have a wealth of people who know about Bayesian arithmetic; a most valuable company in Cambridge now, Autonomy, run by Mike Lynch is based on Bayesian principles, and we have a very strong group in the Engineering Lab on that; I really think it such a fundamental problem, possibly the most fundamental problem of intelligence that I would like to do more work on it

3:35:02 At Olivetti, I had seven research laboratories all over the world; before taking the job I had spoken to Philip Hughes who ran Logica at the time, who advised me to take it and to learn how big companies worked; it was the right advice; those three and a half years were some of the best in my life; they treated me very well and I had great freedom to do what I wanted; I set up the Olivetti Research Lab here with Andy Hopper; I had another in Palo Alto and in many other places, but the one in Cambridge was by far the most successful; Alfred Marshall the teacher of Maynard Keynes did an interesting study on clusters in Manchester around the textile industry; he famously said that this knowledge about how to do textiles was in the air because people would be constantly talking about it; in Cambridge we have had a few seminal companies like Cambridge Instruments, Sinclair Radionics; Acorn, and CCL, that became the companies that set the gene pool; the Judge Institute did some very nice work on the relationship of the companies that have been formed over the last twenty years and the original company that they worked for; Acorn alumni are responsible for over a hundred companies in the Cambridge area; Acorn plays a similar role in Cambridge to Fairchild's role in Silicon Valley where all the big semi-conductor companies in the Valley are "Fair children"; the overlap between the University and commercial companies is one of the things that really distinguishes Cambridge from other European universities, and  sadly, because of the obsession with conflicts of interest, in the United States, too; Roger Needham was a classic example of somebody who from personal experience was unbelievably helpful to Acorn Computers in the early days; he allowed us to employ people in the Computer Lab on a consultancy basis; some of the chips in the BBC Micro were developed in the Computer Lab by people who were lecturers and they were consulting for us; he also allowed his students to be fed Fitzbillies' buns and spend a bit of time with us; he would come to me for little bits of financial help in the Lab which we gave him; it was totally informal but both the Computer Lab and Acorn benefited from it; at that time it was informal as people trusted each other; it has become a bit more formalized but it needed to as the stakes are higher and the companies bigger and the contracts need to be more precise, but there is still a willingness on both sides to be supportive of each other; sadly, especially many continental universities, don't do that, and have an aversion to work with business

11:39:00 A few years ago there was a great debate about intellectual property rights; the most important thing was that the University decided on clear rules on how to do this; one of the problems we had before was that you couldn't actually go to the University and ask to pay for intellectual property rights and base a company on it because they would not know who the IPR belonged to; they could neither give a licence for it as they couldn't say they owned it, nor say that they didn't own it so go and do it; all they could say is that they didn't know; that particular problem was solved so there are now clear rules; this clear rule set is now being implemented by a subsidiary of the University called Cambridge Enterprises; think we have been quite lucky in the person who heads it, Teri Willey, because she had done a similar job for Chicago University and has spun out a group into a venture capital firm that did that for Chicago, and she has a non-confrontational personality which suits Cambridge; my hope is that this will lead to more spin outs, but there are more rules and it is more regimented than in the past; the IPR arrangements in Cambridge are the most generous in Europe, and more so than both Imperial College, London, and Oxford, and I think that is a good thing; there is movement between Berkeley, Stanford and Silicon Valley, but their IPR arrangements are much tighter than here; however, there are one or two universities in America allow IPR to be used freely rather than assuming that it belongs to the university; cannot see much difference in spin outs between this type and the rest, so both work;

16:10:16 On spin out companies, I did not set out to have so many links but they just happened over the years; I suppose it is partly because of Acorn Computers and partly because during the 1980's and 1990's when there wasn't a lot of venture capital around I suppose I was about 50% of the angel money; they knew I was a sucker for technology and if they came to me with an interesting project I would try my best to either fund it myself or find them funding; I am always happy to speak with people even if I don't find funds for them as I am always interested in new projects and new technology; set up a venture capital fund, Amadeus, in 1997, at a time that people did not believe in technology venture capital, especially not in Europe; all the money we got came from America although now most comes from Europe; people then did not believe there was enough deal flow but I knew there was as I had too many projects to cope with; Richard Friend and Plastic Logic; raised the largest amount ever, $200,000,000, for the company which I set up with Richard Friend; we had built the world's first plastic electronics factory in Dresden, Germany, which will be opened on 17th September; it is quite an historic event because it will be the first time in fifty years that a new semi-conductor goes into mass production; the last semi-conductor was silicon and here is a new one made out of plastic; it came out of work in the Cavendish Laboratory where Richard did his Ph.D. just one year after me; we have a new product called an e-reader that I think will change the way that people read; it is a product category between a personal computer and the mobile phone; it is clearly lighter and you can hold it in one hand easily; you will be able to change pages by touch and it is very paper-like; it is a reflective rather than emissive display like a lap top, and because it is reflective display and bistable, it consumes no power at all when you read it but only when you change the page; means that this unit will probably have an endurance of three weeks; there will be two models, one 2gb the other 8gb; the latter will hold 2,000,000 pages, so about 10,000 books; it has three main uses, e-books, e-newspapers and the paperless printer; people are emotional about books and accuse us of trying to destroy them; I am reading a book on molecular cell biology at the moment in bed, but there are 1000 pages so it is the most awkward thing to read, and weighs 5kg; it would be much better if it were 300g, and easy to hold in one hand; it has many things in common with paper; one is that it is reflective and therefore you can read it under any lighting conditions; in particular it is very good in sunlight where personal computers are no good; secondly, the contrast ratio between black and white is 10:1, exactly the same contrast ratio to paper and because it is bistable it does not flicker at all, so people have a reading experience which is as close to paper as any display that has ever been invented; we have over seventy-two patents; it has a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi interface as well as a USB so when you connect it to your computer you will have a shared folder so anything in it will be synced to the e-reader; there is a search function on the e-reader itself and you bring up a keyboard by touch interface and type in the search query; you can type in data but this is not the aim; the Kindle is a 6" display whereas this is  11"; the former weighs the same although a lot smaller; this is lighter as it is the first implementation of plastic transistors whereas the others have glass as a substrate where we have polyethylene; if you tried to produce a display of this size in glass it would be very much heavier and would break easily

27:09:18 Richard Friend's group in the Cavendish Lab have been unbelievably productive; they first invented polymer organic light emitting diodes which went into a company called CDT (Cambridge Display Technology) which I was also involved in which was bought by Sumitomo; the second spinout was Plastic Logic with Henning Sirringhaus, one of Richard's brilliant students who is now a professor himself at the Cavendish; Richard has a wonderful new approach to photo-voltaic cells, again based on plastics rather than silicon; I am very excited about that, and maybe we can produce another company; the energy problem is so big and this is such a neat, long-term solution; all the others, perhaps with the exception of wind, are band-aids; using the sun which had been the provider of energy on earth for the past four and a half billion years, it is a wise thing to use; the main advantage over solar panels, which use silicon, is cost; silicon is about 20% efficient now and plastic solar cells are about 6-7% efficient at present, so we need to get their efficiency up; people like Richard have a wealth of experience in the electronic structure of polymers so I have every confidence that they will be able to increase the efficiency rapidly over the next few years

30:20:13 There were six founders of the Cambridge Network which straddles the business community and the University; the University was one of the founders and it was set up with an objective of bridging the gap between academia and the business community; it now has over a thousand companies as members, all the Departments of the University are members; there are open lectures for both academics and business people as contributors; it has a vibrant web site and newsletter; we didn't expect it to be so successful when we founded it some ten years ago with the help of Alec Broers; it is also concerned with how Cambridge presents itself to the rest of the world so has a close relationship with the Munich Network, Shanghai Network, Stanford Network and one or two others, so is part of a network of networks; it runs the corporate gateway so connects well to big companies; Kodak came here because of it, so did Nokia; an unexpected boon is that the web site has now become the main jobs web site for companies

32:55:00 The early attraction of Cambridge was the girls and punting; I was at King's for my Ph.D.; one of the really nice things about Cambridge was that, as an Austrian with a bit of an accent, you were accepted here - not odd, but interesting; when people ask me which organization I identify with in Cambridge, it is really King's because I lived here, had lots of student friends here, and the exposure during formative years creates the bond; I am proud of the University, the Cavendish, but the strongest emotional bond is with the College; Herbert Huppert, as another physicist, I have stayed close to; I had a nice relationship with Alan Bilsborough who was my tutor at the time; at one point I thought I wanted to change from physics to artificial intelligence; he gave me a lot of good advice and introduced people for me to talk to; a lot of artificial intelligence work was being done in the King's Research Centre and he introduced me to people there; in the end I thought it better to finish the Ph.D. and then do something in computing, which I did; Pamela, my wife, like Alan Bilsborough was a physical (now called biological) anthropologist; first met her in the King's bar and we married in the Chapel

36:35:24 Over the past twenty years the high tech environment in Cambridge has blossomed; people often ask me what I thought about the next five to ten years; I am quite optimistic about it; think that many of the building blocks that made  Silicon Valley so successful are finally in place in Cambridge; there has never been a problem with technology but there was a real problem with management, we just didn't have experienced managers; we now have many second generation serial entrepreneurs; an interesting data set is that in Amadeus I 17% of the deals that we did were with serial entrepreneurs, in Amadeus II this had risen to 40%, and now in Amadeus III it has risen to 70%, all in just ten years; so we have home grown talent we can now work with and we can also attract some of the best managers from all over the world; so Solexa, our latest billion dollar company was grown by a John West who ran a billion dollar operation of ABI, the lead company in sequencing machines; we went to him as a little Cambridge start-up saying we had a machine that was a hundred times better than the one he was selling, and that we wanted him to sell ours; he looked at the machine, and as a physicist understood the technology, and agreed; for Plastic Logic I just hired the most senior person I have ever hired in my life, Rich Archuleta, who ran a ten billion dollar business for HP; this was something that we couldn't do ten years ago; we also have technology based venture capital, like Amadeus, to put syndicates together; there is also a local culture now of people who are quite willing to engage in start-ups - a low-risk environment to do high-risk things - so people can dare to join a start-up which might have a shaky future as if things don't work out there are enough other start-ups where they can get a job without having to move; the other criticism that people make is that there are not any more interesting things to do; I have never seen more exciting new projects as I am seeing now

40:19:22 The belief that China will build what we dream up is a very short-lived phenomenon; they clearly don't just do Nike shoes; one early example of that is a company they called Huawei which produces telecoms equipment and is now one of the largest in the world; a few years ago they had a huge court case that Cisco brought against them because they were copying Cisco kit, Cisco being the largest provider of network equipment in the world; now Cisco hopes to copy what Huawei is doing because it's kit is now ahead of Cisco; they are the innovators now, Cisco the follower