Everyone is pursuing private donors for their nanotechnology research, and Israel is very serious about it, matching private nanotech fund donations made from outside the country, as reported in EE Times: The country’s nanotechnology program, called the Israel National Nanotechnology Initiative (INNI) provides 3-to-1 matching funds for all private donations to nanotech centers, effectively producing [...]

Alexander Zaitchik writes at Wired.com a piece titled Russia Pours Billions in Oil Profits Into Nanotech Race. I’m quoted: “There’s a lot of technical talent in Russia, but not all of the funds allocated to nanotech will be deployed effectively,” said Christine Peterson, a vice president at the Foresight Nanotech Institute, in an e-mail interview. [...]

Registration for Foresight’s Nov. 3-4 Vision Weekend focused on nanotechnology and other advanced technologies — traditionally restricted to Foresight Senior Associates — is being opened to the general public this year as an experiment. Space is limited and participants are advised to register very soon. To warm up for our Sat/Sun afternoon unconference, in the [...]

There’s an arms race between government patent offices and patent filers assisted by private law firms. The folks who work for the former get paid a lot less than the those who work for the latter. This leads to a continual drain away from government review of patent applications toward private generation of patent applications. [...]

Registration is now open to new and renewing Senior Associate members; cost for Senior Associate members to attend the meeting is $65. Space is limited. Join us! —Christine 1st Foresight Unconference to Be Held November 3-4 in Silicon Valley Event will explore nanotechnology, advanced software, life extension, future technologies Palo Alto, CA — Foresight Nanotech [...]

One person whose views on nanotechnology are always worth hearing is VC Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He’ll be speaking at the upcoming Singularity Summit, Sept. 8-9 in San Francisco, but if you can’t get there, you can listen to this ZDNet podcast with Dan Farber in which Steve discusses both nanotech and AI: [...]

Here at Foresight we’ve been interested in nanotechnology based on diamondoid since the beginning, so it’s great to see these structures getting more attention. Someday they’ll be manufactured with atomic precision, in large structures, but for now even small structures are looking useful in today’s nanotech. Nanotechnology.com‘s August 17 Edigest, sponsored by PurpleGoldMedia, features an [...]

We are very pleased to announce the dates and location of the 2007 Foresight Vision Weekend, to be held November 3-4 in at Yahoo! headquarters here in Silicon Valley. We’ve learned that you demand a highly interactive meeting, so this year we’ll be experimenting with a new format including big chunks of time for the [...]

Here in the U.S. we set up nanotechnology corporations all the time. There’s some paperwork involved, and some legal fees. The founders, angel investors, and VCs might sit on the board. In Russia, they still do things differently: Putin Inked Bill on Nanotechnology Corp Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has inked the Bill on Russia’s Nanotechnology [...]

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 in the U.S. gives patent rights for federally-funded research done in universities to the universities themselves, in effect. Many people regard this strategy as a succcess, and many countries around the world are copying it. But is this the best way to handle this publicly-funded intellectual property? After over 25 [...]

Regular readers of Nanodot know that we often disagree with ETC Group — but not always. They have issued a press release condemning a plan by a private firm to seed the ocean with iron particles in an effort to fight global warming. An excerpt: As worrying, Planktos boasts on their website that the iron [...]

Michael Berger of the useful Nanowerk website has produced a clarification essay on the size of the nanotechnology market, helping to put the hype in perspective. Some excerpts: First of all, these market size forecasts are dealing with what is called evolutionary nanotechnology. The goal of evolutionary nanotechnology is to improve existing processes, materials and [...]

Small Times reports on a meeting held in Oregon among a wide variety of nanotechnology-based business participants, at which many commercialization challenges were discussed. One was difficulties encountered with the U.S. Patent office: Start-ups expressed frustration with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Long waits for patent award decisions make it difficult for them [...]

The company mPHASE points out that battery technology advance has been dismal compared to computer chips. Now they’ve used nanotechnology to build a more environmentally-friendly, longer shelf-life battery, and made a two-minute movie, posted on YouTube, to tell us about it. If the link doesn’t work for you, go to YouTube and search for nanobattery [...]

The Harvard Business Review has named its top 20 Breakthrough Ideas for 2007, and home-based, atomically-precise manufacturing makes the list. Business in the Nanocosm, by UC Berkeley business prof Rashi Glazer, does a good job of conveying the future of home-based nanomanufacturing. Excerpts: Conventional manufacturing carves or distills a purpose-suited device from a mass of [...]

Those of you who have tracked nanotechnology for a long time know that Sun Microsystems was one of the first corporations to take an interest in the field, e.g., sponsoring the Foresight Conferences over the years, and more recently helping to fund the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. Now that foresight, combined with their compatibility [...]

We at Foresight are often asked for advice on nanotechnology investing, which we are not qualified to give, so we refer folks elsewhere. Most sources of nanotech investing advice are boosters, so it’s also useful to hear from those taking another view. Over at Nanotechnology Now we get some unusually blunt comments from columnist Pearl [...]

Nanotechnology in China: Ambitions and Realities (pdf) will be the topic of a live webcast on Tuesday, February 6, 2007 at 3 PM EST, sponsored by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center: A senior Department of Commerce official recently claimed that China is rapidly catching up to the United States in [...]

David Berlind of ZDNet, covering the Consumer Electronics Show, found a new way to “see” in the dark using nanotechnology: Look ma, no light! Nanotech is behind ultra-sensitivity of Planet82’s “Nano-Cam” sensor If you’re like me, then maybe you’ve been hearing a lot about nanotechnology but haven’t yet seen the benefits of it in any [...]

Bernie Marcus, co-founder and one of Home Depot’s largest individual shareholders, has been named “Forbes/Wolfe 2006 Nanotech Person of the Year”. I was a little surprised until I read this interview; he’s quite a visionary and is putting his money where his mouth is. Here at Foresight, we like that a lot. Some excerpts: Recently, [...]