Researchers Build a Working Carbon Nanotube Computer

In a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the researchers reported that they had successfully built a working computer — albeit an extremely simple one — entirely from transistors fashioned from carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes, which are cylinder-shaped molecules, have long held the promise of allowing smaller, faster and lower-powered computing, though they have proved difficult to work with.

The Stanford Robust Systems Group, however, has made significant progress in the last 18 months, advancing from building individual carbon nanotube transistors to simple electronic circuits made by interconnecting the transistors, and this week to a complete computer made from an ensemble of just 142 low-power transistors.

While Stanford’s prototype computer is assembled from transistors that are gargantuan by industry standards — one micron vs. 22 nanometers — it is what computer scientists refer to as a “Turing complete” machine, meaning that it is capable of performing any computation, given enough time.

“It can run two programs concurrently, a counting program and a sorting program,” said H. S. Philip Wong, a Stanford University electrical engineer, and one of the leaders of the group. “We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time on this; in fact we’ve spent two generations of students on this.”

The computer is based on a subset of 20 of the instructions used by the commercial MIPS microprocessor, which itself was designed by a group of Stanford researchers led by Stanford’s current president, John Hennessy, during the 1980s.

“I think this is a really nice piece of work,” said Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences at I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. “It’s a rudimentary demonstration that carbon nanotubes can be used to build a universal computer, or a Turing-complete machine. This is not the most efficient computer, but that wasn’t the point. It’s one of the first steps.”

Because the factory processes that underlie the modern semiconductor industry require such painstaking precision, any new technology that the industry might use must be perfected more than three years before it can be considered for use in commercial production.

Carbon nanotubes have continued to excite the material science field because of their proliferating array of allotropes — different forms of the material — all with potential. Dr. Guha complimented the Stanford group for maintaining its focus on a single engineering advance.

Currently, semiconductor industry leaders can make integrated silicon circuits with a feature size of 22 nanometers, roughly 4,000 of which could be spread across the width of a human hair. With the arrival of a new generation of smaller transistors roughly every two years, the industry generally believes that silicon will be scaled down to a limit of 5-nanometer transistors sometime after 2020.

The constant shrinking of transistor size over the last half-century has been important because it has significantly lowered the cost of computing, making it possible to build ever more powerful computers that are faster and cheaper, and consume less power with each generation.

While Intel has been generally circumspect about what material technology it plans to turn to when silicon ceases to “scale” down to smaller transistor sizes, I.B.M. has been more vocal and optimistic about the potential for carbon nanotubes.

The company has recently succeeded in creating an inverter, a basic logic element used in electronic circuits, using two different types of carbon nanotube transistors, and plans to demonstrate the device at a technical meeting at the end of the year.

The researchers said that their advance was not a scientific breakthrough, but it was a significant demonstration of the ability to work with a material other than silicon with great precision.

They also stressed that their research project was entirely compatible with industry-standard manufacturing processes based on silicon. This suggests that in the future it will be possible to build hybrid chips using carbon nanotubes at particular locations, and thus extend the life of silicon in computing.

The researchers said they were proud of their tiny prototype.

“This is a general computer and we can do anything with it,” said Max Shulaker, a Stanford graduate student who is a leading member of the research group. “We could in principle run 64-bit Windows, but it would take millions of years.”

The Race to Build a Better Business Class

Six feet six inches long and almost two feet wide, the V concept is the German carrier’s latest weapon in the fierce competition among global airlines. It is designed to withstand shocks 16 times the force of gravity and comes with a cozy padded footrest. It is a new business-class seat, and if you are traveling round trip from Frankfurt to New York, it can be yours for about $5,000.

“Business class is where competition really is serious,” says Björn Bosler, the airline’s manager for passenger experience design, business and premium, who led Lufthansa’s team of dozens of seat designers and engineers. Bob Lange, senior vice president, head of market and product strategy at Airbus, the European plane maker, agrees: “There’s an arms race going on among carriers.”

Billions are being spent on research and development, architects, industrial designers and even yacht designers to pack seats with engineering innovations and fancy features. Just fabricating a single business-class seat can cost up to $80,000; custom-made first-class models run $250,000 to $500,000.

Those who fly coach may have had a glimpse of these expenditures as they shuffled past the elaborate reclining, angled, semiprivate accommodations in business and first class on their way to the knee-scraping spaces and overstuffed overhead compartments in the main cabin. Travelers in business and first class may represent 10 to 15 percent of long-haul seats globally, but they account for up to half of the revenue of airlines like Lufthansa or British Airways, says Samuel Engel, a vice president at ICF SH&E, an aviation consulting firm. Carriers vying for the attention of these passengers, who have money or corporate accounts that pay for their travel, are counting on good design to escape the grinding commodity nature of their business.

But there is only so much space inside a plane. As the more lucrative seats expand, the coach section often contracts, with more seats jammed into the same cabin space and more discomfort for coach passengers.

“The seat is one of the few elements that an airline can actually make its own,” says Patricia Bastard, an architect and designer who has worked with Air France on its first-class cabin. “There are very few elements like it inside an airplane. There’s customer service, of course. Maybe there’s a bar. But seats are unique to the airline. Seats are critical.”

Lufthansa, Europe’s largest airline and the world’s fourth largest in terms of passengers, is investing $4 billion to improve its cabins, offer satellite-based Internet and upgrade its onboard entertainment system. But the new business-class seat, which first appeared last year on the company’s new Boeing 747-8 planes, is perhaps the boldest attempt to lure the high-value passenger. The seat research, design, manufacture and installation accounts for roughly a third of that $4 billion investment, says Mr. Bosler — more than a billion dollars. Eleven planes are now outfitted with the new seats, and Lufthansa is expected to install about 7,000 of them on 100 wide-body airplanes by 2015.

Lufthansa’s task — like that of all the big airlines — was to create a special environment for those big-spending travelers within the inflexible boundaries of an aircraft fuselage.

“The challenge was finding a solution that provides all customer benefits but also tries to save as much space as possible and get as many passengers on board as possible,” Mr. Bosler says. “There’s only one way for Lufthansa to make money. It’s with passengers on board.”

THE first airplane business-class sections date to the 1970s, when the seats were like oversize, padded armchairs that could recline about 40 degrees. More comfortable seats for frequent business travelers came with the arrival in the 1990s of planes that could fly nonstop almost anywhere in the world. This new generation of ultralong-range airplanes that could fly for 10 to 14 hours — like the Boeing 777 — meant passengers wanted to be able to get real sleep, not just a fitful, head-snapping catnap.

DealBook: Entrepreneurs Help Build Start-Ups by the Batch

Peter DaSilva for The New York TimesRon Palmeri and Allison Rhodes Messner of MkII Ventures.

Just two years after its conception, Prism Skylabs has made enormous strides.

The 20-person company, based in San Francisco, uses video surveillance equipment to give retailers Web-like data on customer behavior in their brick-and-mortar stores. It has secured more than $8 million in financing from investors like Pacific Partners and Andreessen Horowitz and has contracts with 70 retailers.

But like many start-ups finding success in Silicon Valley and across the country, Prism Skylabs is not the brainchild of a rookie entrepreneur who risked everything. One of its founders is Ron Palmeri, a longtime Silicon Valley executive. He is among a growing group of professed company builders who are parlaying past successes — along with their own capital and thick Rolodexes — into operating companies and venture funds that work on multiple companies at the same time.

“There’s a group of us who are serial entrepreneurs who know a lot about building something and scaling it,” said Mr. Palmeri, who previously worked with CNET’s founder, Halsey Minor, at Minor Ventures. Minor Ventures used this model to build companies like GrandCentral, now Google Voice, and OpenDNS.

In 2010, Mr. Palmeri started his own operating company, MkII Ventures, with Allison Rhodes Messner, formerly of OpenDNS. The company is working on building out four different ideas.

The concept — often referred to as parallel entrepreneurship — is not entirely new. Back in the dot-com days there was CMGI, which once had a market value of more than $40 billion before dying a slow death and eventually being absorbed by one of its portfolio companies. Idealab, based in Pasadena, Calif., has been doing this for more than a decade, though with mixed results.

What is new is the number of prominent entrepreneurs and investors who are now going this route rather than staking their fortunes on single follow-up acts or taking less active roles as angel investors or venture capitalists.

“Venture doesn’t allow us to explore, only to accept and deny,” said Michael Jones, chief executive of Science, a builder platform in Santa Monica, Calif. He and a longtime entrepreneur, Peter Pham, started Science in 2011 with $10 million in venture backing, followed by $30 million from the Hearst Corporation.

Most of these investors-cum-inventors are motivated by personal passion to create companies. Under this model, entrepreneurs often tap their own networks and wallets to finance their ideas.

“I don’t have any hobbies,” said Max Levchin, a co-founder and former chief technology officer of PayPal. “This is what I do.”

His first version of this model, MRL Ventures, helped start the mobile business-rating platform Yelp and created Slide, a personal-media sharing service that Google bought for a reported $182 million but has since shut down. His new project, called Hard, Valuable, Fun, or HVF, will focus on a few big ideas with longer time frames.

Like Mr. Levchin, many of the builders came out of the recent wave of technology successes. Garrett Camp, a co-founder of StumbleUpon and Uber, has started Expa to develop new products and services and build teams to scale them. In Chicago, two Groupon founders, Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky, put $200 million, primarily their own money, into Lightbank, an operating company. Lightbank has a staff of 20 and 60 projects in its portfolio, including Belly, a loyalty platform, and Frank & Oak, an online men’s clothing retailer.

Company builders say they provide a missing link in the life cycle of start-ups and do so more effectively than incubators. “The primary difference is focus,” Mr. Camp said. “I plan on creating just a couple companies per year, and spending significant time with all of them.”

Hunter Walk, a former director of product management at Google, said, “What’s often needed at the early stages isn’t more capital in a vacuum, but people with operational experience who can give their full attention to these companies.” Mr. Walk is raising a venture capital fund, called Homebrew, with another former Google executive, Satya Patel.

Once an idea gains traction, builders typically turn to venture capital firms for additional financing while gradually giving individual teams more autonomy. “It’s like raising children,” Mr. Palmeri said. “There’s a point where they eventually need their own space, but you’ll continue as a trusted adviser.”

Some company builders invest in a mix of their own ideas and early-stage concepts that fit a particular theme. Others, like Mr. Palmeri’s company, focus almost exclusively on homegrown projects, though they will recruit co-founders and teams to expand the companies into independent entities.

“It’s a highly collaborative process,” Mr. Palmeri said. “By the time we look for outside funding, the idea may have taken many different shapes.”

This approach resembles product development at large companies, like Apple or Google, only on a smaller scale. “The cycle of entrepreneurship can be pretty slow, so why not work on several ideas at one time?” said John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks, which was founded in early 2008 and is based in New York. (The New York Times Company is an investor.)

“Over time, you can build common tools, databases, analytics — all the things that give each idea a head start in the marketplace,” Mr. Borthwick said.

One of the biggest advantages to working on several companies simultaneously is the ability to share resources.

“The dollars used in the early stages of start-ups are often highly inefficient because you spend a lot of time and money just to get the business going,” said Mr. Jones at Science. His operating company has 25 people on its staff, specializing in areas like human resources, marketing and real estate.

“The early days of a company should be spent thinking about strategy and technology, not worrying about negotiating leases,” Mr. Jones said.

When start-ups fail, he said, often it is not because the ideas are flawed but because management did not have the tools or resources to execute the idea, were pulled in too many directions or did not move fast enough. Mr. Keywell and Mr. Lefkofsky noticed the same pattern in previous companies they had started or financed.

“We decided to bring those competencies inside of Lightbank,” Mr. Keywell said. “The whole model is designed to reduce risk and increase reward.”

Though some of the large venture capital firms have invested in ideas hatched by company builders, the concept has its skeptics.

“It’s very difficult to manufacture innovation,” said Andy Rachleff, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, former general partner at Benchmark Capital and chief executive of Wealthfront, an online financial advisory firm. “The reason most start-ups are successful is they had great insight, and the likelihood of having that killer insight more than once in a career is exceptionally low.”

While this approach allows individual teams to focus on ideas without having to worry about the nuances of running a business, it can pull the company builders in too many directions.

In 2011, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, who founded Twitter, and Jason Goldman, another former Twitter executive, restarted Mr. Williams’s Obvious Corporation as a builder platform. Recently, however, they said they would each focus more on individual ideas rather than work on several ideas at once.

“Turns out, we like focus,” Mr. Williams wrote in an explanation on the company’s Web site.

Nevertheless, proponents of parallel entrepreneurship argue that the odds are better for those who pursue multiple ideas. “The percentage of companies that are successful should be greater than the traditional portfolio,” Mr. Jones said.

Venture partners can regard company builders as “a monstrous insurance policy,” he added. “If something goes wrong with one of our portfolio companies, we can quickly dive back in and make things work.”

Unboxed: Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers

In telephone call centers, for example, where hourly workers handle a steady stream of calls under demanding conditions, the communication skills and personal warmth of an employee’s supervisor are often crucial in determining the employee’s tenure and performance. In fact, recent research shows that the quality of the supervisor may be more important than the experience and individual attributes of the workers themselves.

New research calls into question other beliefs. Employers often avoid hiring candidates with a history of job-hopping or those who have been unemployed for a while. The past is prologue, companies assume. There’s one problem, though: the data show that it isn’t so. An applicant’s work history is not a good predictor of future results.

These are some of the startling findings of an emerging field called work-force science. It adds a large dose of data analysis, a k a Big Data, to the field of human resource management, which has traditionally relied heavily on gut feel and established practice to guide hiring, promotion and career planning.

Work-force science, in short, is what happens when Big Data meets H.R.

The new discipline has its champions. “This is absolutely the way forward,” says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Most companies have been flying completely blind.”

Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies.

Digital technology also makes it possible to conduct and aggregate personality-based assessments, often using online quizzes or games, in far greater detail and numbers than ever before.

In the past, studies of worker behavior were typically based on observing a few hundred people at most. Today, studies can include thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers, an exponential leap ahead.

“The heart of science is measurement,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “We’re seeing a revolution in measurement, and it will revolutionize organizational economics and personnel economics.”

The data-gathering technology, to be sure, raises questions about the limits of worker surveillance. “The larger problem here is that all these workplace metrics are being collected when you as a worker are essentially behind a one-way mirror,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group. “You don’t know what data is being collected and how it is used.”

Companies view work-force data mainly as a valuable asset. Last December, for example, I.B.M. completed its $1.3 billion acquisition of Kenexa, a recruiting, hiring and training company. Kenexa’s corps of more than 100 industrial organizational psychologists and researchers was one attraction, but so was its data: Kenexa surveys and assesses 40 million job applicants, workers and managers a year.

Big companies like I.B.M., Oracle and SAP are pursuing the business opportunity. So is eHarmony, the online matchmaking service. It announced in January that it would retool its algorithm for romance so it could examine employee-employer relationships, and enter the talent search business later this year.

THE penchant for digital measurement and monitoring seems most suited to hourly employment, where jobs often involve routine tasks. But will this technology also be useful in identifying and nurturing successful workers in less-regimented jobs? Many companies think so, and can point to some encouraging evidence.

Tim Geisert, chief marketing officer for I.B.M.’s Kenexa unit, observed that an outgoing personality has traditionally been assumed to be the defining trait of successful sales people. But its research, based on millions of worker surveys and tests, as well as manager assessments, has found that the most important characteristic for sales success is a kind of emotional courage, a persistence to keep going even after initially being told no.

The team of behavioral and data scientists at Knack, a Silicon Valley start-up firm, uses computer games and constant measurement to test emotional intelligence, cognitive skills, working memory and propensity for risk-taking. Early pilot testers include the NYU Langone Medical Center, Bain & Company and a unit of Shell, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s C.E.O.

At Disney Parks, a Bracelet Meant to Build Loyalty (and Sales)

Fantasyland? Hardly. It happens starting this spring.

Disney in the coming months plans to begin introducing a vacation management system called MyMagic+ that will drastically change the way Disney World visitors — some 30 million people a year — do just about everything.

The initiative is part of a broader effort, estimated by analysts to cost between $800 million and $1 billion, to make visiting Disney parks less daunting and more amenable to modern consumer behavior. Disney is betting that happier guests will spend more money.

“If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Disney Parks and Resorts.

The ambitious plan moves Disney deeper into the hotly debated terrain of personal data collection. Like most major companies, Disney wants to have as much information about its customers’ preferences as it can get, so it can appeal to them more efficiently. The company already collects data to use in future sales campaigns, but parts of MyMagic+ will allow Disney for the first time to track guest behavior in minute detail.

Did you buy a balloon? What attractions did you ride and when? Did you shake Goofy’s hand, but snub Snow White? If you fully use MyMagic+, databases will be watching, allowing Disney to refine its offerings and customize its marketing messages.

Disney is aware of potential privacy concerns, especially regarding children. The plan, which comes as the federal government is trying to strengthen online privacy protections, could be troublesome for a company that some consumers worry is already too controlling.

But Disney has decided that MyMagic+ is essential. The company must aggressively weave new technology into its parks — without damaging the sense of nostalgia on which the experience depends — or risk becoming irrelevant to future generations, Mr. Staggs said. From a business perspective, he added, MyMagic+ could be “transformational.”

Aside from benefiting Disney’s bottom line, the initiative could alter the global theme parks business. Disney is not the first vacation company to use wristbands equipped with radio frequency identification, or RFID, chips. Great Wolf Resorts, an operator of 11 water parks in North America, has been using them since 2006. But Disney’s global parks operation, which has an estimated 121.4 million admissions a year and generates $12.9 billion in revenue, is so huge that it can greatly influence consumer behavior.

“When Disney makes a move, it moves the culture,” said Steve Brown, chief operating officer for Lo-Q, a British company that provides line management and ticketing systems for theme parks and zoos.

Disney World guests currently plod through entrance turnstiles, redeeming paper tickets, and then decide what to ride; food and merchandise are bought with cash or credit cards. (Disney hotel key cards can also be used to charge items.) People race to FastPass kiosks, which dispense a limited number of free line-skipping tickets. But gridlock quickly sets in and most people wait. And wait.

In contrast, MyMagic+ will allow users of a new Web site and app — called My Disney Experience — to preselect three FastPasses before they leave home for rides or V.I.P. seating for parades, fireworks and character meet-and-greets. Orlando-bound guests can also preregister for RFID bracelets. These so-called MagicBands will function as room key, park ticket, FastPass and credit card.

MagicBands can also be encoded with all sorts of personal details, allowing for more personalized interaction with Disney employees. Before, the employee playing Cinderella could say hello only in a general way. Now — if parents opt in — hidden sensors will read MagicBand data, providing information needed for a personalized greeting: “Hi, Angie,” the character might say without prompting. “I understand it’s your birthday.”

Australians Surge in Quest to Build Quantum Computer

In an article that appeared on Thursday in the journal Nature, a team of Australian and British scientists, led from the University of New South Wales, reported that they had successfully constructed one of the basic building blocks of modern quantum computing by relying on manufacturing techniques now used by the modern semiconductor industry.

Quantum computing will potentially lead to a new generation of supercomputers that are not intended to replace today’s machines but will instead open new computing vistas, from drug and material design to code breaking, by offering speed to address a new class of problems.

“We are used to designing cars and airplanes with computers,” said Andrew Dzurak, a physicist who is director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility and lead researcher on the latest advance. “Imagine if you could start building your molecule or your material on a computer and then completely simulate its behavior.”

The basic building blocks of quantum computers are quantum bits, or “qubits.” Unlike today’s digital computers, which process information in a binary fashion based on logic states of “on” and “off,” a qubit can for brief periods represent multiple states simultaneously. Potentially, this means it is possible to tackle vast new problems by performing parallel computations using a relatively small set of qubits — perhaps as few as several hundred. The advance by Dr. Dzurak’s team involves placing a single electron — embedded in a silicon chip — in a “quantum state,” and then repeatedly measuring the state.

In February, a second group based at the University of New South Wales published an article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology reporting their advance: the construction of a single-atom transistor using a different but related design approach.

In both cases, the research teams are international. There is an increasing awareness, however, that Australian scientists have made significant advances this year toward this long-promised new type of computing.

While there is a growing consensus among scientists that working quantum computers will emerge during this decade, there is also a growing belief that they will not replace the conventional computers that are now carried in the pockets of more than half the world’s population. For one thing, most of the quantum computing approaches only worked when temperatures were cooled to near absolute zero.

Though there are only a handful of workable algorithms designed to run on quantum computers, scientists say their application may prove vastly more useful than today’s technology in simulating a wide variety of biological, chemical and physical systems. That means they could become the standard tool for a wide range of new industries, like drug and material design.

The achievements of the two teams is a payoff from an investment the Australian government began making in the 1990s.

“Both groups are highly competitive and leading in the world in what they do,” said Gerhard Klimeck, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue, who has collaborated with both groups and was a co-author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper.

Dr. Dzurak’s group’s work contrasts with a research team led by Michelle Simmons, director of the ARC Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales. That group has taken an approach based on placing individual atoms using a scanning tunneling microscope, allowing great precision in building devices on an atomic scale.

The team led by Dr. Dzurak uses conventional semiconductor techniques to implant a phosphorus atom just 10 to 15 nanometers below the surface of a silicon chip. That approach has the twin advantages of using industry standards and potentially extending the individual electron’s duration in a quantum state.

The United States has federally financed, corporate and university research efforts under way to design usable quantum computers. I.B.M., for example, recently expanded its research at its Almaden laboratory in California.

Andreas Heinrich, a physicist who is a quantum researcher at I.B.M., pointed out that neither Australian group had shown the ability to interconnect multiple qubits. That capability is necessary for a quantum computer.

Dr. Dzurak said he believed that capability could be achieved as soon as a year from now.