DFJ Ventures Managing Director Steve Jurvetson is bullish on nanotechnology.  Jurvetson made this prediction during an exclusive interview with AlwaysOn: "Within the next three years, we will create artificial lifeforms from scratch." The key breakthrough that's occurred in the last few years, he says, is our ability to treat the code of life like a computer program. In the past, we could only cut and paste from biology, but the reality today is that we can write the code of life from scratch.
 
Anything that does not exist naturally in the environment can be generated, Jurvetson anticipates. So far, researchers have generated viruses and changed the species of one bacteria to another by swapping out its DNA. The goal of generating a new kind of organism that has never existed is "tantalizingly close."
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On May 21st and 22nd, the Innovation Journalism conference at Stanford is bringing the driving forces of journalism and innovation together. For the AlwaysOn members and bloggers, it’s going to be a great time to network and interact with innovation and journalism bigshots.

The conference will also host a visit by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which will present its new Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media, supporting the media and entertainment industry partnership with the WEF.

David Nordfors, conference chair and Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Innovations in Learning, will be a member of the council, which is being inaugurated in Dubai this November.

One of the program highlights is keynote speaker Tony Perkins, AlwaysOn’s founder and CEO....

Male entertainment portal Giant Realm today announced a $2 million investment from Softbank Capital, bringing their series A total to $5.5 million.

Softbank joins existing investors Comcast Interactive Capital, Edison Venture Fund and William Morris Agency.

Giant Realm targets men "from puberty to marriage," CEO James Green told AO's Matt Bowman. Its communities focus on video games, movies, TV and music. 

Shrinking production costs are creating huge opportunities for startup studios. That's a good thing for young directors with inspiring stories--and the guts to ambush a Hollywood superstar.

Three months after their homeless father died in jail, twin brothers Logan and Noah Miller cornered 4-time Oscar nominee Ed Harris in an alley outside the Castro Theatre and pitched him on their autobiographical movie, Touching Home.  With a trailor built on credit card debt, the brothers won Harris over and landed a deal. Welcome to the new Hollywood market.

Check out the movie at www.touchinghomemovie.com

mshopper, a mobile shopping service, was launched in September of last year and has already had over 3 million unique visits. The company powers Sprint's private-labeled mobile shopping platform, is available on Verizon's mobile web portal, and will be partnering with another unnamed major Telecom soon. They're also getting their feet wet in UK and have received an Asian investment, with plans to launch in China before the Olympic games. AlwaysOn's Phyza Jameel talked with David Gould, CEO of mshopper, about the company's unique offerings and global march.

If you haven't seen this yet, it's worth an hour of your time--skip Blockbuster next Friday and just watch Randy Pausch's last lecture. The CS prof at CMU expects to die from cancer at any moment.

The professor is one of Carnegie Melon's most popular, thanks in part to his pioneering project-based Virtual Reality class. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he summed up his life's lessons last September before a packed hall at CMU's McConomy Auditorium. The video has been downloaded many millions of times.

Randy entitled the lecture "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," and gave students advice on how to accomplish their life's ambitions. The most inspiring thing is Randy's own sense of humor.

Unfortunately the humor doesn't come across in these pull-quotes below, but it's still worth highlighting some of the gems:
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What do a Danish energy company (Dong Energy), a Silicon Valley startup (Project Better Place), and an Israeli-American entrepreneur (Shai Aggasi) have in common? They all believe that electric cars might be the best answer for our transportation future. Using Dong Energy's wind stations, the electric car network will start up with a mass deployment in Denmark, with about 20,000 wind-powered recharging stations. Denmark is the second country to embrace a massive electric car project—Israel was the first, announcing in January that it will have an electric car network powered by renewable energy.

While the $42 million project is geared up for a start date in 2011, the technology still has some infrastructure challenges to sort out. AlwaysOn sat down to talk with Rudolph Blum, General Manager of Dong Energy, and learned how his...

By Phyza Jameel
The Fisker camp has broken its silence about the Tesla suit. Last week, Tesla Motors alleged that KARMA, Fisker Automotives' new hybrid electric car, is a copied design of Tesla's own white sedan. Tesla sued Henrik Fisker for stealing trade secrets and design concepts to design his own eco chic automobile- the Karma. Here is what Alan Niedzwiecki, President and CEO of Quantum Technologies had to say:



The Karma, a product of Quantum Technologies and Henrik Fisker is ready to kiss the roads in 4th quarter of 2009, with annual production projected to reach 15,000 units.


image credit: Steve Jurvetson

April 7-9, 2008 @ the Four Seasons Hotel. Venture Summit East features the most influential institutional investors, VCs, corporate buyers, ibankers and analysts in the Eastern US.

The Archives are now online! Check the out here: http://alwayson.goingon.com/page/display/26310

Andrew Baron, founder of Rocketboom, is selling his Twitter account with all 1500 followers on eBay. Call it a publicity stunt or a meaningful speech act (ala Chris Anderson's pr email expose)--either way it'll spark some interesting debate about credibility and privacy.



If Twitter allows the transfer to happen, and if Baron doesn't back out (as he's been hinting he might), 1500 subscribers who signed up for Chris could suddenly be getting spam.

Should Twitter allow it?
Yes. For the same reason PayPerPost should be allowed in the blogosphere. If writers want to sell their voices, that's their business. Why can't they auction their community? In both cases, they risk diluting their credibility, and readers catch on and tune out quick if the content's irrelevant or advertorial....