Intel announced a $3.5 billion initiative “to support investment in U.S.-based growth-oriented industries and detailed a commitment to significantly increase jobs available this year for recent college graduates.”

The headline of Intel’s press release says, “Invest in America Alliance to Fund American Technology Companies, Create Jobs for College Grads.” The story was covered bytechnology reporter Claire Cain Miller in the  New York Times, as well as by many others.

Miller begins her article by saying, “Technologists have been worrying aloud for years that America is losing its competitive edge as other countries invest more heavily in technology education and innovation.”

The alliance is led by Intel and is supported by 24 leading venture capital firms and corporations, aims to further anchor America’s competitiveness on the global stage. Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini said the announcement represents ”an investment in the country’s innovators and a signal to the global marketplace about America’s commitment to innovation and future competitiveness.” (read the full transcript of Otellini’s speech).

Venture Capital firms joining the Invest in America alliance include:

• Advanced Technology Ventures
• Braemar Energy Ventures
• Bridgescale Partners
• Canaan Partners
• DCM
• Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Flywheel Ventures
• Good Energies
• Institutional Venture Partners
• Investcorp Technology Partners
• Khosla Ventures
• Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Menlo Ventures
• Mohr Davidow Ventures
• New Enterprise Associates
• North Bridge Venture Partners
• QuestMark Partners
• Sevin Rosen Funds
• Storm Ventures
• Telesoft Partners
• Updata Partners
• U.S. Venture Partners
• Venrock and Walden International

Companies joining the Invest in America alliance include:

• Accenture
• Adobe Systems Incorporated
• Autodesk
• Broadcom Corporation
• CDW LLC.
• Cisco
• Dell
• eBay
• Inc.
• EMC Corporation
• GE
• Google
• Inc.
• HP
• Liberty Mutual Group
• Marvell Semiconductor Inc.
• Microsoft Corporation
• Yahoo!

In a blog post that could only have struck the most resonant chords in my heart, Jeffrey Phillips writes, “Innovation does not equal technology.”

Phillips isVP of Sales and Marketing at OVO, the innovation consulting division of NetCentrics. He blogged that while giving a speech recently to a university audience, he was confronted by a senior staff member who argued that innovation was equated to technology, and only scientists and engineers could bring new technologies to life. 

Phillips argument in response was (rightly!) that “that definition of innovation is awfully narrow.” Readers of this blog, and anyone who has taken my “Markting Complex Innovation” course will know that my cardinal equation is:

Innovation = Invention + Marketing

As I tell my students, and as I frequently tell our clients, transforming inventions into innovations is how money is made. And those transformations are not just the responsibility of your technical staff. To quote myself (because I can), “Without great technology PR, every great innovation is worth less, and maybe even worthless.” That is to say that innovation management is not only about creating a technology for the market, but also about creating a market for the technology, or what I like to call “engineering perception.”

Phillips says, “Technology innovation is a subset of innovation generally, and while all technology innovation is innovation, all innovation is not technology innovation.” Well put. And it’s because I love engineering and the technological invention it produces that I’ve spent most of my adult life dedicated to giving a voice to those technologies. Because that’s how invention turns into innovation.

Readers of my blog know I’m an unabashed fan of NYT columnist Thomas Friedman. Why? Because he consistently gets the world of innovation and how innovation drives, is driven by, and interconnects with so many aspects of geopolitics and economics (from micro to macro).

In his latest column, “More (Steve) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” Friedman says President Obama should launch a “moon shot” initiative to get millions of American kids excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. Friedman calls for the President ”to make 2010 the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America” (a veiled reference to “Startup Nation” perhaps?)

Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators, Friedman advocates, and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over” — and make that his No. 1 priority.

Friedman’s line in the sand (and I would dearly love it if someone would put this on an index card and put it on the President’s desk tomorrow morning) is this: “Inspiring, reviving and empowering Start-up America is [Obama's] moon shot.” Readers of this blog will not be surprised to know that I LOVE IT.

Let us, the innovators, the entrepreneurs, and yes even (or especially?) the marketers, endorse Thomas Friedman’s epic call to action. Let us tell the President we stand ready to help launch a year, a decade, a century of innovation. Let us ask for his leadership, and then let’s march forward to ride the twin rocket engines of innovation and entrepreneurship to all the economic recovery this world needs.

I spent just one day at CES last week – clearly not enough time to take in all the gadgetry, but then again, it was plenty.

What I was certainly able to discern was the palpable difference from just one year ago when attendance felt tepid, and the mood was somber. At that time, we were just a few months removed from the economic nosedive, President Obama was still a couple weeks away from being inaugurated, and the stress of so much uncertainty was pretty much freaking everyone out big time.

This year, there was a bouyant giddyness in the air. Not only have we survived (sure, I know we could double-dip, etc., but…), but everyone seemed to be saying, “look at all this innovation we’ve produced while Rome was burning.”

In face, the Consumer Electronics Association says over 20,000 new products were unveiled last week in Las Vegas. That’s a lot of innovation.

3DTV technology abounded (I must have tried out a dozen different disposable eyeglasses), and numerous technologies sought to eliminate, once and for all, the tangled mess of wires that pervades our connected lives.

As a lover of technology, I was exceedingly pleased at the positive vibe pervading each and every acre of show floor space at this year’s show.

I boarded the red-eye home with a great feeling that my own optimism (based on how much innovation I see among our clients on a daily basis) is justified, confirmed and shared throughout this big innovative industry of ours.

Certainly no calendar flip would be complete without a laundry list of predictions for the new year. FierceWireless has put together a compelling predictions for the wireless industry. To summarize:

• Net neutrality will pass, but with exceptions for wireless
• Palm will be purchased by another handset vendor
• Pricing, coverage issues will hinder cable companies’ wireless offerings
• Sprint Nextel’s 4G leadership will help revive the carrier
• Huawei will get one LTE deal in North America
• At least one wireless carrier will experiment with usage-based data pricing
• Motorola will show some signs of recovery thanks to Android (last year, FierceWireless predicted “Motorola’s handset division will cease to be“)
• Computer makers’ attempts at Android smartphones will flounder

Read the full FierceWireless report here.

 

Meanwhile, Juniper Research has drawn up a list of predictions for the coming year, all neatly wrapped up as the top ten predictions for the mobile and wireless industry for 2010. Summarized as follows:

 

• Mobile Data Traffic Explosion to strain 3G Networks, spur data pricing overhaul
• Mobile Ecosystem starts to go green
• Mobile Heads for the Cloud
• New Category of Merging Smartphone Functionality and Netbooks to Emerge
• Apps Stores All Round
• Mobile Social Networking to Integrate with other Applications including M-Commerce
• NFC phones appear in the shops
• At least 10 LTE networks to be launched into service
• Smartphones to Get Augmented Reality Makeover
•  Christmas Kindle sales expected to herald the rise of the connected embedded consumer devices

The first prediction is one I’m hearing a lot about from our infrastructure clients. As Juniper says, although 3G is less than ten years old, 2010 could be the year when 3G networks begin to fall over under the burden of mobile data, due largely to some 33.8m iPhones that have been sold since launch.

 

Then there’s Dean Bubley‘s predictions from his Disruptive Wireless blog. Dean lists “heroes, zeroes, and no-surprises” as follows:

 

Heros

• HSPA+
• Apple iPhone
• Android
• Augmented reality
• Facebook
• Consumer femtocells
• Huawei
• “Comes with data”
• Connection-sharing
• Operator-on-operator applications

Zeros

• Mobile IMS and RCS
• LTE
• Virtual conferences
• NFC
• Twitter
• Enterprise femtocells
• Embedded 3G netbooks
• Smartphone profit margins
• Operator AppStores
• Aggregated social networks
• The terms “dumb pipe” and “over the top”

No surprises

• WiMAX
• Open network APIs
• WiFi
• Nokia
• BlackBerry
• Consolidation
• Mobile TV (“Was dead, is dead, will stay dead.”)
• Data roaming prices

And finally, WirelessWeek compiled its list by soliciting input from “industry leaders” on the following topics for 2010:

• Prepaid & data
• Net neutrality & mobile web
• Emphasis on competition, emerging devices
• Race to converged connectivity
• Wireless in the enterprise
• Content & apps purchasing on rise
• Video optimization as prevalent as web optimization
• Synthesis for M2M services
• Mobile money expansion
• Smartphones for more people
• M2M is major growth area
• Large brands recognize value of mobile applications
• Mobile backhaul providers embrace COE to meet needs

Lots of predictions in a volatile industry. I came away from the holidays with one prevailing observation – as we turn the decade clock to 2010, one thing is far different than ten years ago. My extended family had a lovely time together as always, but everyone sure spent a lot of time on their various mobile devices. At one point, I looked around the table at more than a dozen siblings, children, neices & nephews and saw why the room was so quiet – everyone had a mobile device in their hands.

My prediction: This mobile thing is going to be big.

When Rainier client CopperGate was acquired by Sigma Designs a couple months ago, plenty of people made some nice sums of money. What I didn’t know at the time was that Tmura, the Israeli Public Service Venture Fund would convert options granted by CopperGate six years ago into $100,000!

Founded in 2002 to increase the involvement of the high-tech community in non-profit activity in Israel, Tmura receives donations of equity from (mainly private) Israeli and Israel-related high-tech companies and uses the proceeds from successful “exits” such as a public offering or acquisition to fund education- and youth-related initiatives in Israel. “Tmura” is the Hebrew word for “change” or “metamorphosis” and also means “value for money”; it is also a play on the word “truma”, which means “donation”.

CopperGate was Tmura’s 21st such exit event – exits to date have generated more than $2,600,000 for charity, which has benefited more than 20 different non-profit organizations in Israel.

Tmura grantees are mainly youth oriented. For example, Kadima youth centers have received Tmura money to help operate a network of youth clubs in poor neighborhoods. In another example, Tmura has also helped an Israeli humanitarian aid organization called Latet (Hebrew for “to give”). Latet aims to mobilize Israeli society to greater involvement in the humanitarian field, through heightened social awareness and the fostering of values such as mutual responsibility and giving.

I love the basic concept behind Tmura – everyone wins in an exit event. Especially the kids.

Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of (MIT’s) Technology Review, has written an important essay titled “On the Evolution of Technology.”

The second sentence in the essay articulates the very reason I founded Rainier back in 1993: “When a technology first appears in the world, it is not understood: no one knows what to do with it.”

Pontin discusses Brian Arthur‘s book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, and Arthur’s explanation of why truly new technologies are so slow to be adopted. New technology domains, he says, betray “missing pieces” that technologists must develop before useful applications can be successfully commercialized. One of these missing pieces, I believe, is the ability to clearly communicate new technologies to the market.

Pontin says the real economic value of new technologies is almost always imperfectly understood because the technologies’ markets do not yet exist. It’s been interesting for me to note over the years how true this is for so many of the technologies we are involved with bringing to market – especially those which are truly disruptive, or don’t quite fit into existing market categories.

Brian Arthur’s question, “What [does the new technology]allow people to do that could not be done before?” is one we ask our clients all the time.

The answer(s) are so crucial to successfully marketing a product, that we won’t even agree to launch a new technology until we’re satisfied the disruption, and all its necessary ecosystem components of success (what Arthur calls the “missing pieces” technologists must develop before useful applications can be successfully commercialized), has been thoroughly and defensibly defined.