What Makes Samsung Such An Innovative Company?

There are critics of Samsung who argue that its success is mostly due to copying and then tweaking the innovations of others. There is a good deal of truth in this, especially around the early Galaxy designs.

But Samsung is a global leader in screen technology, TVs, batteries, and chip design. So in terms of innovation it is doing a lot right. But we know very little about how.

We know how its competitors innovate – we look at Google and see the 20% time, the big adjacencies, the search for disruption, the bold statements about the future of autos, for example.

We know that within Apple when a project gets to a critical stage, the company assigns three teams to its development, each of which competes against the other. We know the importance of design thinking, an attribute Google is learning about. And of customer experience.

What does Samsung do in comparison? How does it line up against these American masters or conversely are Google and Apple good enough to compete against Samsung?

There’s no doubt that patent circumvention is an aim when Samsung innovates. From its early forays into innovation, competing against Toshiba in washing and drying machines, Samsung has chased patents in areas where its competitors appear to have protection and has oriented its innovation efforts to find new patentable ideas in its competitors’ backyard.

Samsung has nurtured a close relationship with the Russian Academy of Science since then. There is a framework agreement between the two parties. And the Korean Government has its own agreement under which it funds Korean small businesses to develop projects on the back of Academy research. Samsung meanwhile appears to help the Academy to increase its patent count and to exploit its inventions.

The relationship with Russian science was the introduction of TRIZ, an innovation method that Samsung adopted from 2000 onwards but which only reached American companies from the mid-2000s onwards.

TRIZ is a methodology for systematic problem solving. Typical of its origins in Russia, it asks users to seek the contradictions in current technological conditions and customer needs and to imagine an ideal state that innovation should drive towards.

Samsung had early successes with TRIZ, saving over $100 million in its first few projects. It was also adopting Six Sigma at the time.

But it was TRIZ that became the bedrock of innovation at Samsung. And it was introduced at Samsung by Russian engineers whom Samsung had hired into its Seoul Labs in the early 2000s.

In 2003 TRIZ led to 50 new patents for Samsung and in 2004 one project alone, a DVD pick-up innovation, saved Samsung over $100 million. TRIZ is now an obligatory skill set if you want to advance within Samsung.

At the Samsung Advanced Institute for Technology, Hyo June Kim, who wrote The Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, a foundation text on TRIZ published in Korean, trained over 1,000 engineers across Samsung companies in 2004 alone.

At Samsung even the subsidiary CEO has to take TRIZ training. From looking at the various presentations I estimate that engineers get about 15 days of training plus 7 days specific project work. That’s quite an investment in method and people.

So the answer to why Samsung is so innovative – with at least two major product announcements this month – is that it is heavily invested in its people, it goes in search of special talent wherever it can find it, but specifically made astute moves into Russia early on; it targets its innovations towards specific competitors and patents that it wants to overhaul (as Apple did under Jobs); and it has an innovation culture based on extensive training, repeatable methodology and creative elite formation, backed by the highest levels of management.

Elon Musk: an exceptional innovator

Elon Musk is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. In these two companies, products manufactured have never been proposed before. For SpaceX (USA), the company is able to sell a rocket launch for satellites for 12000 dollars / kg as cost for Ariane 5 (Europa) is 23000 dollars / kg and for Proton (Russia), 18000 dollars / kg.

As ILIAD for French Telecommunication, SpaceX is completely redefining the market of space rocket launch. He obliges restructuring Safran (Ariane) into Airbus group in June 2014.

Elon Musk is also the CEO of Telsa, a company selling only electric cars in USA! Elon Musk is a serial creator, as he was the creator of Paypal sold to Ebay in the 2000’s years.

“If a company depends on its patents is that it does not innovate or when it does not innovate fast enough.” It is with these words Elon Musk justifies his last “madness” make patents Tesla, the electric car manufacturer, accessible to all. And therefore its competitors, now free to take the technologies that have made the success of the models of the Californian company.

“Technological leadership is not defined by patents, history has shown repeatedly that they represented only a small protection against rival determined continued Mr. Musk. Rather, it is defined by the ability to company to attract and motivate the most talented engineers. “And therefore the ability to constantly innovate. “You want to innovate much faster than your previous patents lapse,” says Mr. Musk. It is demonstrated by the success of SpaceX, his second company, specializing in space launch and has only a limited number of patents.

Tesla web site: http://www.teslamotors.com

SpaceX web site: http://www.spacex.com

Will we be able to predict natural disasters soonly?

In June 2013, scientists from the NASA’s IFloodS program were on hand to study the powerful storm. The researchers gathered data radar dishes, ground moisture sensors and rain gauges, which they then compared to data and images gathered by orbital satellites passing overhead. Their goal: Double-checking estimates of rainfall based upon satellite data. If they’re able to fine-tune those calculations, they eventually hope to use their weather satellites to spot and provide an early warning of when midwestern rivers may overflow their banks and cause flooding.

The IFloodS program is just one part of NASA’s other, less-publicized but extremely critical mission of trying to find ways to protect humans from various natural disasters on our own planet.

To that end, NASA spends more than $1.8 billion annually on earth sciences — more than it spends upon studying other planets. The agency’s research programs include efforts to predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, forest fires and powerful storms, and to give us more warning to prepare for them, largely by using data gathered by satellites from the vantage point of orbital space. In addition, NASA’s Near Earth Object Program uses both Earth-based and orbital observatories to identify and track asteroids and comets whose paths bring them close to Earth –including some that might possibly smash into our planet’s surface and cause massive devastation and loss of life, or possibly even trigger a wave of extinctions.

Predicting Hurricane Intensity

If you live in a coastal region in which you’re vulnerable to hurricanes, there are two crucial pieces of information that you want from weather forecasters. The first is what the hurricane’s path will be, so that you know whether or not it’s going to hit the place where you live. The second is how powerful the storm is going to be.

In 2014, NASA is planning to launch a new array of satellites that may give weather forecasters even more help in predicting hurricane intensity. The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), developed by engineers at the University of Michigan, will put a constellation of eight small satellites into a low-Earth orbit. The satellites’ sensors will measure various properties in the ocean and the atmosphere, with the aim of coming up with a more precise model for how tropical cyclones form and how they strengthen.

Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis

Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have one important tell-tale sign in common. As the pressure in them builds up before they unleash their fury, they cause small deformations in Earth’s crust. If scientists could spot those subtle changes, they might be able to predict more precisely when catastrophic eruptions and quakes will occur.

In 2011, Song and Ohio State University professor C.K. Shum used Japanese GPS data to analyze the particularly destructive tsunami generated by a March 2011 earthquake off northern Japan, and discovered that the wave actually was composed of two different wave fronts that merged and doubled in intensity as they passed over rugged ridges on the seafloor. That knowledge may help forecasters in the future to predict similarly super-powerful waves, and hopefully speed evacuations of coastal areas.

Killer Asteroids

In February 2013, a 60-foot-across (18-meter), 11,000-metric ton (12,125-ton) meteor exploded in the sky over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,200 people. Coincidentally, that same day, an even bigger object–an asteroid half the size of a football field–passed about 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers) from Earth. Had it struck, it would have exploded with a force of about 2.4 million tons (2.2 million metric tons) of dynamite, the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima-sized A-bombs.

To hunt for them, NASA has repurposed an existing satellite, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, originally launched in 2009 to search for distant stars and galaxies. NASA envisions that WISE will discover about 150 previously unknown near-Earth objects and gather information about the size and other properties of about 2,000 more.

WISE and the NEO program hopefully will give NASA advance warning of an object on a collision course—and time to implement a defensive strategy, whether that means diverting the asteroid with gravity tractors, solar sails or other future technologies, or simply destroying it with a nuclear blast. That might help us to avoid the worst natural disaster ever.

Related articles

• 6 oct nasa asteroid 2013 (educationbulletinboard.com)
• Nasa Shuts Down ‘Asteroid Watch’ In Wake Of US Government Crisis (huffingtonpost.co.uk)
• NASA will not warn us about asteroids over Twitter during the shutdown (washingtonpost.com)
• How is the Government Shutdown affecting NASA? (io9.com)
• Risk of bigger tsunamis (radionz.co.nz)
• Scientists find evidence of supervolcanoes on Mars (forobserve.wordpress.com)
• Photos: Natural Disasters From Space (abcnews.go.com)

Nginx: russian company host 12% of the world’s websites

76 million websites managed

For being the server to web stars. Between WordPress, Hulu, Netflix, Pinterest and Wikipedia, Nginx hosts about 12% of the world’s more than 630 millon websites and gained about 2 million new hostnames in December 2012. With a total of 76 million websites under its belt, Igor Syosev’s Nginx is one of the premier online servers.

Nginx, first release in 2004

Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Igor Sysoev started development of Nginx in 2002, with the first public release in 2004. Nginx is known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

Nginx scales in all directions

Nginx is one of a handful of servers written to address the C10K problem. Unlike traditional servers, Nginx doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.
Even if you don’t expect to handle thousands of simultaneous requests, you can still benefit from Nginx’s high-performance and small memory footprint. Nginx scales in all directions: from the smallest VPS all the way up to clusters of servers.

Who uses it

Who uses it — Netflix, Facebook, Zappos, Groupon, LivingSocial, Hulu, Dropbox, WordPress.com, to name a few. But also millions of domains on the Internet.

Related articles

1. http://nginx.com/company.html
2. http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2013/industry/russia
3. http://wiki.nginx.org/Main