Adventures in Intellectual Property

As an Internet consultant, I get the opportunity to visit a lot of cool companies. Today I was at Intellectual Ventures, the invention and intellectual property factory in Bellevue, Washington. The company was founded by the legendary former Microsoft CTO, Nathan Myrvold.

Myrvold is an avid collector of weird and wonderful items. In the office we saw vintage movie cameras, dozens of 100-year-old typewriters, rare entomology displays and a giant T-Rex head from the movie Jurassic Park. (above, left)

They have a fascinating business model, a brave new world of intellectual pursuit. They acquire or create patents and inventions and then monetize them. See what Fortune Magazine, The New Yorker and Business Week had to say about the company. Also, check out Myrvold's presentation at TED (below).

Ray Kurzweil: Outrageous Inventor, Entrepreneur, Thinker and Doer

Filmed in 2005 "Prolific inventor and outrageous visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why -- by the 2020s -- we will have reverse-engineered the human brain, and nanobots will be operating your consciousness. Kurzweil draws on years of research to show the speed at which technology is evolving, and projects forward into an almost unthinkable future to outline the ways we'll use technology to augment our own capabilities, forever blurring the lines between human and machine." From TED.com.

On the list of contemporary creative thinkers I'd like to eat a sandwich with, Kurzweil is near the top. I appreciate and respect a person who can simultaneously dream fantastical notions and also perform practical technical feats. He not only thinks, he does. He thinks about the power of cell phone cameras years before the technology is mature. Then he does a project and works with the American Foundation for the Blind to create a working product that will speak the text of photos taken with a modern cell phone so that blind people can read pasta box labels and street signs and love letters.

Check out Kurzweil Technologies to learn about his numerous successful business ventures. He's been building and selling companies since he was a teenager. He's started music product companies, the FatKat Artificial Intelligence investment tool and educational technology companies.

I've always been curious about his thoughts on the coming technological singularity. This is a point in the (near?) future where technology will be accelerating at such a super fast rate that culture will reach an almost magical point. Our tools and combined intelligence will make almost anything possible, including (near) immortality.

A recent Wired article has a current look at the modern Kurzweil. He is making sure that, when the singularity arrives, he's good and healthy. He rides his bike, he's lost 30 pounds, he takes dozens of vitamins and supplements every day and he's on a strict diet. (Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity)

Wikipedia says, "Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced /kɚzwaɪl/) (born February 12, 1948) is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism."

See some of his books on Amazon.
Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
The Age of Spiritual Machines
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology