I agree with much of what Johnson says. He’s exactly right that Europe suffers from the weight of it’s own history; our inability to free ourselves from our history so often holds us back. I left the UK for California in 1996 because I felt the weight of this – real and perceived historical precedents were always being cited for why a good idea was “too hard” or simply “not what we did here”.

A common criticism you hear of America is that it has no history. This profoundly misunderstands one of America’s great strengths – it is a place where people escape from history and are free to re-invent themselves and thus invent the future. The future is a better place to be than the poorly recalled past.

I’m not so convinced by the argument that the tech industry should not look to Silicon Valley as its inspiration. Johnson writes:

The problem with ‘the next Silicon Valley’ was that we took it too literally. Focus on ‘the next’: What will the next huge technology-led industry be? What will the next center of innovation that touches everyone be?”

Silicon Valley has been the global epicenter of innovation and wealth generation for more than 50 years now. The reason it continues to be the home of so many great tech companies decade after decade is because it continually reinvents itself.

Johnson notes how Shenzhen in China has become the region where most of the world’s electronics are built. It took over from Silicon Valley, which as its name suggests, was originally all about building electronics – with companies like Fairchild, Intel, HP and Cisco. That dominance was overtaken by the microcomputer industry which became Silicon Valley’s major driver of innovation in the late 70s and early 80s with companies like Atari, Apple and Seagate.

In the ’90s the web industry — with all due respect to Tim Berners-Lee — was established in California through Netscape and the first generation of dotcoms.

In the 2000s web search and social innovation on the West Coast led to Google, Facebook, Twitter and many others.

Every decade or so, Silicon Valley profoundly reinvents itself. It has repeatedly created the next huge technology-led industry. What drives this? Is there something magical in the water? No. Silicon Valley is not a specific set of companies or industries. Silicon Valley is a way of thinking about the future and creating companies around those ideas. It is an experimental approach that allows people to solve real problems by listening to users when possible and leading them when required.

It is a set of support structures — such as a critical mass of smart entrepreneurs, great technical universities, adventurous venture capitalists, innovative tech incubators — that allow that thinking and experimenting to be quickly embodied into the next great company.

When tech entrepreneurs in Europe talk about creating the “next Silicon Valley” — whether it’s in London, Berlin or Dublin — we mean importing this way of thinking and reproducing these support structures to allow us to figure out and create the next huge tech industry. The Silicon Valley approach is exactly about freeing yourself from the constraints of the past and allowing the experimentation that generates ideas that can change the world.

So, I’m not afraid to say that in London we’re trying to create a new Silicon Valley.

The explosive growth of innovative tech companies here is proof that it’s working. There are companies exploring how to reshape finance, building the new world of personal manufacturing, processing vast amounts of data to make the world work better and even (for my part) trying to make live music work better.

There are hundreds of companies trying to invent the future. Some of them will succeed, thanks to our ambition and using the techniques that work so well in Silicon Valley.

Dan Crow is the CTO of Songkick. He was previously a technical lead/manager at Google, co-founder of Blurb; Chief Scientist at Unicru and engineer at Apple.

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The docks, once crawling with shipbuilders constructing huge constructing vessels like The Titanic, are now an empty sprawl of wasteland dotted with lonely office buildings. And for anyone who remembers the Troubles, an activity as simple as crossing the road or staying at a hotel can carry chilling reminder of brutality that is not easily forgotten.

It’s no surprise that these difficulties have had an impact on the local startup scene too.

From what I heard, the attempt to build a new entrepreneurial culture is there, but it’s slow going. Northern Ireland’s turbulent existence means that the economy remains massively reliant on the British government (around a third of the population work for the public sector) and it is still working hard to attract investment from outside. Meanwhile, locals are still looking for a real champion, a real victory, beyond bluster and good ole boy networks.

Belfast’s problem is that things don’t get consigned to history: in fact, history stubbornly raises its head at every opportunity, bleeding mercilessly into the present and the future. Northern Ireland’s ambitions are too often scuttled like The Titanic, crushed by the pressure of the past.

But the truth is, Belfast is not alone in this. It may feel like an extreme example, but the whole of Europe suffers the same malaise in some shape or form.

Weighed down by the past

From Finland to Faliraki, from Portugal to St Petersburg, Europe is sitting on a vast and varied history that it struggles to move beyond. We’re stuck like flies in amber, our ideas freeze-framed at the moment our societies were at their most successful or most extreme. Britain can’t shake off the arrogance of empire, France clings to its l’exception culturelle,

In a way, this is especially resonant in technology companies — because, after all, they the ones meant to be inventing the future. And because our societies are failing to shake off the worst parts of their legacy and craft a successful vision of where we’re going, we are all left copying Silicon Valley’s idea of what tomorrow will look like.

Look at Nokia — not long ago the world’s biggest force in the world’s fastest growing technology industry, now apparently an also-ran. Although some of its leaders have a bright vision, too many insiders stubbornly cling to a history of greatness that no longer chimes with the rest of us.

Or look at Germany’s attempts to enforce rigid and steadfast privacy rules. These ideas have a totally understandable historical context, but outside of that unique bubble, it would be polite to call them overzealous. Clinging to that history has left German web companies hamstrung while the buccaneering robber barons of the Wild West clean up everywhere else.

The result is that the conversation about our future has become a one-sided dictation from a group of companies who essentially grew out of the same Valley culture. Our tomorrow is their tomorrow.

I was reminded of this failed future when London’s Tech City announced that it had poached top Facebook executive Joanna Shields to run the organization.

Bringing in Shields, an American, is definitely a win for the group paid to cheer on London as a startup and technology capital: she’s got more experience at the top of 21st century web companies than almost anyone else, which gives her a stratospheric level of credibility with the investors that Tech City is desperate to court. She’s smart, savvy and sharp: a great hire.

Shields’ record is not as spotless as Downing Street would have everyone believe — for example, masterminding the $650 million sale of Bebo to AOL was a genius move for company insiders but disastrous for everyone else. And then there’s the little fact that she has presided over companies that avoid millions of pounds of taxes from the country she now represents. But there is a rightful sense of pride at being able to prize somebody away from Mark Zuckerberg’s clutches.

However, bringing her in is also an admission that Britain — and Europe — has no other visions of the future to offer. It’s a tacit acceptance that technology, that innovation, can only be built the way they see it in Palo Alto.

Follow your own path

Perhaps you don’t mind. That’s fine. But I think if we want to find some alternatives — or at least explore them — we need to move on from our history, and our obsession with creating “the next Silicon Valley”.

Earlier this year I gave a talk in Portugal aimed at helping people there understand that they cannot win by chasing the Bay Area’s dreams. Every startup hub across the continent talks endlessly about being “the new Silicon Valley”, every PR flack has pitched the and every journalist (including me) has worked on those stories. But that’s just playing somebody else’s game. You can’t be the next Silicon Valley by doing what Silicon Valley does. It will win every time, because the game is stacked in its favor.

The same thing happens elsewhere. I talked about the reporting I did a couple of years ago from Shenzhen, China, where most of the world’s electronics are now built. Those skills, that expertise, are all in one place — and in just 30 years. Now their advantage is so huge, why would you try to beat them?

The problem with “the next Silicon Valley”, I argued, was that we took it too literally. Focus on “the next”: What will the next huge technology-led industry be? What will the next center of innovation that touches everyone be? What will change the world? Find that, get there early, build now around a vision of the future that you really believe in, and reinvention could work. Use the strengths you have locally — things like engineering talent, design culture, customer service, research expertise — but don’t let them dominate you. Don’t let history weigh you down.

Now, I don’t know what that thing is — biotech, next generation manufacturing and data are all contenders that Europe could focus on. But whatever “the next” ends up being, every entrepreneur across the continent, whether they’re in Belfast or Berlin — must stop looking over their shoulder, shrug off the past and stop buying into somebody else’s dream of tomorrow.

Photograph of Bobbie Johnson and Belfast mural used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr users Luca Sartoni and Infomatique respectively.

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At its core, the research is attempting a big change — building out communications networks that won’t need to convert information back to electronic bits. It’s all photons, no electrons. Eliminating that conversion would cut down on latency, energy and eventually cost if this research can be commercialized. Of course, today’s networking infrastructure is built around zipping electrons over copper and other conductive materials, so that would need to change, but light in the form of fiber optics is encroaching because of its greater capacity and speed.

Currently, long-haul pipes and some last-mile access networks use fiber. On those networks, the bits travel as far as possible in the form of light waves before getting converted back to electronic information to be sent further or read by the communications or data center gear. But as our computing and broadband networks become more distributed and need to share more and more information in real time, networks are getting bogged down.

That’s why startups like Lightwire (purchased by Cisco) Kotura and Luxtera are trying to build silicon photonics to bring light onto the silicon chip for faster on-chip communication. Even companies such as Plexxi are trying to bring fiber gear into the data center to add capacity and speed to scaled out networks. In broadband networks, I’ve covered the move to a terabit age, and companies from Google and Verizon to Ciena and Infinera are all delivering products and services to make that a reality.

That’s the big picture. At the micro level, this research has shown that people can build a device that allows light to interfere enough with existing light waves to allow it to change state. When an electron changes state on a chip, it’s represented as a zero or one — the basis for all of our computer programming. If light can switch physical states, then it too can store data.

From the news release discussing the research:

Glass optical fibers carry many communication channels using different colors of light assigned to different channels. In optical cables, these different-colored light channels do not interfere with each other. This non-interference characteristic ensures the efficiency of a single optical fiber to transmit more information over very long distances. But this advantage also harbors a disadvantage. When considering computation and signal processing, optical devices could not allow the various channels of information to control each other easily…until now.

The net result is faster and more efficient networking, something we can all get behind. Eventually. Currently, the new optical-relay device operates 1 million times per second and the goal is to get it to switch states several billion times per second. However, the current device is fast enough to start using it to connect fiber networks directly to broadband radio networks without the electronic conversion. Here’s a link to the original paper published Thursday in Nature for those who want to learn more.

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Just looking around last week’s IFA event in Berlin, you’ll see what I mean — a whopping great 4K television set from Sony that comes in at 84 inches across; a Windows handsets from Samsung that’s a “crazy thin” “powerhouse”.

But is there anything else out there? Are there any other ways to understand what’s happening?

Unpicking was the idea behind an IFA fringe event I spoke at called The Zeitgeist Project. Over the course of an evening, a group of speakers — including Richard Seymour of design firm Seymourpowell; Tom Uglow of Google’s Creative Lab in Australia; and Michael Wolff, co-founder of legendary branding company Wolff Olins — discussed new ideas in design, unpicked new trends, and found hero products that we thought represented a new future.

My trend was intimacy, something I explained through a short polemic you can see on The Zeitgeist Project site, but that’s worth elucidating here, too. I think it’s one of the driving trends of innovation right now, even if we can’t always see it.

Basically, I think product designers are becoming much more aware of the need to foster intimacy between the things they make and the people who use them — and we’re seeing a new vocabulary of ideas and services emerging that do precisely that.

Why? We often feel ambivalent and distanced about mass manufactured goods, and try to find different ways to make them feel special, intimate and personal. Now we’re developing new methods (both in terms of design and manufacture) to capitalize on that desire.

There are obvious, little ways that we can forge a closer bond with products — the way we use them, the small things we do to customize or personalize them, the memories and personalities we imbue them with. But those are all after the fact, and not really designed into the product itself. Consumer electronics are not like a chef’s pan, which is expected to improve as it become battered and bruised with age — the most desirable state for most electronics is fresh out of the box.

At a design level, I think we’re learning lots of new ways to foster intimacy before customers can even get their hands on the end result. We’re finding new ways to involve people.

That’s one reason Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms have been successful — they create a level of intimacy between the product and the customer. Partly people are buying into a dream, supporting people they are fans of, or just paying for the entertainment value of being part of a movement — but they’re also joining in because they want to have a personal relationship with a product (and the product’s creators). They want to imbue it with a story.

Crowdfunding is really about a method of service design that creates intimacy while the product is still on the drawing board.

But we’re also learning new ways to make things in ways that can foster intimacy. The craft and artisan movement has had a big impact across lots of areas — food and drink, for example — but it’s now starting to move, in a fashion, into the way we manufacture some more complex goods. And not in a hokey way either!

At one end, you have small batch manufacturing. The way that web platforms like Alibaba have helped democratize access to the resources for building products, particularly from the Chinese manufacturing base, is helping change the economics of many products. Not long ago, it would take huge capex and big teams. Now you can outsource it as easily as emailing a design.

I think the zenith of this trend may be something that’s been around for a little while, 3D printing. What started out as a way of producing rapid prototypes and three-dimensional models is now starting to bleed into the world of real products. It’s the ultimate small batch, because each product is made individually, automatically and so can be built in a fashion that is both crafted and manufactured at the same time. It’s opening the door to a level of intimacy and personalization that we haven’t seen before in products like this.

Now, I’m not claiming 3D printing will save the world. There are plenty of people who seem to be doing that, and they’re overestimating it. 3D printing, as it is, won’t change everything. But if you agree with me that fostering intimacy is a way of making better products, then you may be able to understand why, in the right circumstances, I’d encourage a product printed individually, personalized to your needs and tailored to your requirements. Imagine a pair of glasses designed to fit you and nobody else, or a handset that was actually made to fit the dimensions of your hand.

I think the combination of those things — being able to make people part of the product before it ever goes on sale, and being able to develop and produce goods that are individually tailored and made in the smallest possible batches at the right price — is the herald of a new sort of storytelling in products, an intimacy that could change the way we think about what we do.

The product I picked that best explained that trend was the Makie doll, a 3D printed doll that I’ve written about before. It’s one of the first applications of this technology in a real way, and it is all about the story — all about the relationship between you and your personalized product.

I wasn’t alone in thinking along this road: some of the other suggestions from were about ways to feel closer to products; through sound or manipulating our brains (Oxford neuroscientist Charles Spence had a great presentation); through the act of making; through emotional resonance. If you want to hear more about their ideas, you could turn to Adam Tinworth’s comprehensive liveblog or this post by the organizers, Freestate.

Will we see more of it? Perhaps not on the show floors of trade shows, at least not very soon. But in the sheds, the garages and the dreams of people all over the world, I think there’s a quest for intimacy that we should all take notice of.

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Launched last September, the New York-based startup has developed a system of tiny, electronic modules that snap together to make simple electronics projects. The company on Wednesday announced that it has raised $3.65 million in new funding and forged a critical partnership with supply management company PCH International, which will start producing littleBits in August. The Series A financing round was led by True Ventures (see disclosure below) and included Khosla Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Lerer Ventures.

So far, the company has mostly sold to individuals through its website, but founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir said the new partnership with PCH International will let the company quickly ramp up production to fill individual web orders, as well as distribute to schools and toy stores.

“We really want to get kids thinking differently about electronics and engineering and technology very early on,” she said. “But I also think we have the opportunity to change the way the toy business operates. Instead of toys being very limited and restricted in what they can do, we can really bring back this idea… of science kits.”

As of now, the company sells 28 individual bits and two kits, which include a selection of different bits. Each bit falls into one of four categories (power, input, output and wire) and serves a unique function, from generating power and sensing surrounding light to buzzing and flashing a light. With those bits, people can exercise their inner inventors and assemble (along with other basic materials) all kinds of things, from an interactive piggy banks to a light up Halloween pumpkin to a sound-triggered bubble maker.

The prices range from $10 for one bit (although bit prices vary depending on their function) to $89 for a kit, which seems a tad steep. But Bdeir said the company wants to make littleBits affordable, so it’s possible they could explore other payment models that make the price more appealing to an average consumer.

With the new funding, Bdeir said they plan to expand the product line with more bits and kits, including specialty kits that can be more mechanical or sensor-based or better suited for younger kids. The company also intends to add as many as 20 new hires in New York by the end of the year.

As the company takes on the toy market, Bdeir, who is an alum of the MIT Media Lab, said her inspiration is Lego.

“[They’ve] really been able to enter every household at a very young age and continue to be something you play with as you get older,” she said. “You have a long lifetime for the product or toy and it’s actually providing value at a very real level.”

Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in littleBits and the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The company, which specializes in producing Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi and other chips, announced on Tuesday that it had entered into an agreement to sell off the business. The all-cash deal will move the focused on mobile connectivity become part of Samsung’s component division — the group that supplies electronics to customers like Apple.

On top of the purchase, Samsung is also buying a 4.9 percent share of CSR for a further $35 million, a move which will — perhaps crucially — give it access to CSR’s intellectual property and ownership of 21 crucial U.S. patents.

Around 300 staff will move to Samsung as a result.

“I believe that under Samsung’s ownership the handset operations will be in a better position to prosper in the global handset market,” said CSR chief Joep van Beurden in a statement. “I would like to thank all our colleagues who will be transferring to Samsung for their outstanding service to CSR over many years.”

It’s been a tough time for CSR, which was founded in Cambridge, England some 14 years ago and went public in 2004. With its profitability reliant on the success of its customers — many of whom, such as Nokia and Research in Motion have seen their businesses struck by calamity — the business has watched its profits plummet and its share price fall by some 50 percent over the past two years.

In particular, its purchase of the U.S. video chip specialist Zoran last year, a deal which cost it $484 million, has come in for criticism. More than 1,000 jobs were cut following the move, which generated some shareholder unrest after the company posted significant losses.

CSR will be hoping to ameliorate some of that opposition by returning the money from the deal to shareholders: in fact, the company says, nearly all of the money from the deal — some $285 million, before taxes and costs — will be issued as a dividend.

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Today you’ll only find a vacuum tube in a guitar amp or by rooting around in your grandfather’s old Hi-Fi. But vacuum tubes – or at least their underlying principles – may be set to make a resurgence. A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are investigating the possibility of replacing silicon with vacuums as the medium for electron transport in an effort to build faster and more efficient electronic machines.

As Moore’s Law shrinks down the transistor to nanometer size on today’s integrated circuits, the electrons are running out of space to move around, explained principle investigator Hong Koo Kim in a Pitt news release:

The ultimate limit of transistor speed, says Kim, is determined by the “electron transit time,” or the time it takes an electron to travel from one device to the other. Electrons traveling inside a semiconductor device frequently experience collisions or scattering in the solid-state medium. Kim likens this to driving a vehicle on a bumpy road—cars cannot speed up very much. Likewise, the electron energy needed to produce faster electronics is hindered.

The best way to avoid that kind of scattering is to use no medium at all, either a “vacuum or the air in a nanometer scale space.” Kim said. “Think of it as an airplane in the sky creating an unobstructed journey to its destination,” he said.

Kim isn’t advocating a return to the old red-hot vacuum tube, rather he and his team are building on today’s silicon foundations. They’re developing a method in which electrons can be extracted from semiconductors into the air and then directed via vacuum channels over the surface of the circuit.

If the Pitt researchers can develop a commercially viable vacuum channel technology, it could mean another revolution in microelectronics, creating a new class of high-speed and low-power transistors. That would allow chipmakers to keep riding Moore’s Law and device makers to build more powerful computers, smartphones and tablets that drain less energy.

Kim’s team published their conclusions this month in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. But for a more concise – and entertaining – explanation of their efforts check out the Nation Science Foundation’s podcast on the top: Vac to the Future.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user SPbPhoto

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Lightwire's optics transceiver

Cisco said Friday it is buying Lightwire, a company that makes optics chips using traditional chip manufacturing techniques in a deal valued at $271 million. This is a significant acquisition for Cisco because it stays true to its core networking business and advances it with some pretty deep technology, which is just the thing to keep Cisco ahead of the growing pack of lower-cost competition on the switching side and the looming threat of open, software-defined networks.

Lightwire, which was formed in 2002, makes an optical transceiver using traditional CMOS manufacturing technologies. Competitors include Luxtera, Intel and IBM. Such transceivers are becoming more important for two reasons. One, thanks to the ability to use the CMOS manufacturing process ,the chips are priced for mass use in the data center, unlike traditional optical chips. Two, the use of optics means the chip can deliver faster bandwidth using less power, speeding up I/O between servers. Both are good in today’s power-constrained and highly demanding data centers, running applications such as Hadoop clusters or data analytics. Here’s the money quote form the release:

The acquisition of Lightwire will support our data center and service provider customers as they manage the continuing deluge of network traffic alongside tight capital and operating budgets,” said Surya Panditi, senior vice president, Cisco Service Provider Networking Group. “With the combined know-how from Cisco in silicon design and Lightwire in CMOS photonics, we will transform Cisco’s optical connectivity business to an integrated technology platform that supports our customers’ burgeoning need for cost-effective high-speed networks.”

The deal plays to Cisco’s networking strength and also advances it with some hard-core chip technology — a key element of Cisco’s plan to differentiate itself from competitors using merchant silicon, such as Arista. Sources in Silicon Valley in the networking space have been telling me that Cisco needs to counter the threat of merchant silicon by either adopting it and driving prices (and Cisco’s margins down), or by investing in “physics problems” — basically the type of R&D that got Lightwire to its product.

Earlier this month, Cisco CEO John Chambers said Cisco was ready to make more acquisitions . This one looks worth watching.

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Employees at three major plants in Finland, Hungary and Mexico had been waiting anxiously for the announcement, which becomes the latest in a series of massive cuts to the company’s staff as it tries to find around $1 billion in savings to bolster the bottom line. Over the last year as Nokia tries to reorganize around its Windows Mobile strategy, the struggling mobile giant has slashed jobs, outsourced its Symbian development and closed a factory in Romania.

The company said that it reviewed its smartphone manufacturing operations and come to the conclusion that it made sense to move its manufacturing centers closer to the component suppliers, who are largely located in China. Instead, the remaining staff at the three locations would focus on receiving phones made in Asia and customizing them for the European or American market.

In a statement, executive vice president of Markets, Niklas Savander, said it would allow Nokia to act faster and be more responsive — two weaknesses that have been severely criticized as the business struggles to cope with the rise of rivals like Apple and Google’s Android.

“Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market. By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive.”

Nokia hasn’t actually said how much money it hopes to save through the changes, but it is clearly hoping to squeeze more out of its relationships with suppliers and get products out without the extensive delays they seem to have been subjected to.

In many ways, the move has been a very long time coming — the vast majority of the electronics industry has already moved manufacturing to China, either in-house or outsourced to companies like Foxconn, and Nokia’s decision will add an extra layer to the ongoing question of whether Western factories can compete at all with the Asian market.

That was one of the subjects explored in a recent New York Times series focusing on Apple’s manufacturing operations, which have shifted from American factories to China over the years.

Of course, the job losses will sting — and cuts in Finland will hardly boost its standing at home. But the reality is that the company had few options: inside a generation, China has become not only one of the cheapest electronic manufacturing markets in the world, but also the one that sports the greatest amount of expertise.

Could Nokia have done anything else?

Photograph of Nokia plant in Salo, Finland, used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user uncle-leo

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The headrest mount, which works with Wallee’s existing iPad case mounting system, attaches to the headrest rail of any vehicle, and rotates in and out to provide viewing to one or more unruly kids who need entertaining in the back seat on long trips. It’s a simple, sturdy design in and of itself, but it’s really more impressive as the latest proof that Wallee’s creators at Studio Proper are into delivering long-term value rather than chasing short-term gain.

A lot of my favorite cases for the original iPad, including the ZAGGmate iPad keyboard case, required me to buy a new version in order to play nice with the iPad 2. The Wallee also required a new case, but it stung much less since all the accessories the case is designed to work with remained useful. Wall mounting disks, stands and a VESA mount still work with the new iPad 2 version of the Wallee case, and recent additions to the line, including a hand strap for easy one-handed use, and the upcoming Wallee Lock for secure, interactive iPad-based displays mean investment in the system continues to feel fresh, two years after the original Wallee’s introduction.

Most mobile device users will likely go through piles of device accessories that quickly become as outdated as the gadgets they’re designed for, so it’s nice to see a system that embraces and builds on its past, rather than simply starting fresh with each new whim of Apple’s design department.

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