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Wired.com: Business NewsReal Ad Men Talk About Mad Men
Every week on AMC TV's Mad Men, the men and women at Sterling Cooper create and design retro 1960s ad campaigns, all while obsessively chain-smoking, drinking and womanizing. Wired.com asks a real-world ad man about the show’s realism and relevance to the advertising industry today.
[More] Wall Street plunges, continuing devastating losses
The devastating selling continues on Wall Street, with investors again dumping stocks in early trading. The Dow Jones industrials, already down 2,271 points in seven sessions, are down more than 300 after dropping nearly 700.
[More] Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker's Library
The View From Above Looming over the library is an original Sputnik 1 satellite, one of several backups the Soviets built. At far left is a model of NASA's experimental X-29 jet, with forward-swept wings. "It's the first plane that a pilot can't fly—only computers can handle it," Walker says. On the top of the center shelves are "scholar's rocks," natural formations believed by the Chinese to spur contemplation. Behind the rocks is a 15-foot-long model of the Saturn V rocket.
Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker's library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy.
Jay's Anatomy "What's so wonderful about our knowledge of the human body is how remarkably constrained it has been over time," Walker says. In the center of the table sits the Anatomia universa, an early-19th-century medical masterwork by the Italian illustrator Paolo Mascagni. At front right is a field tool kit for Civil War surgeons. Grasping the box of prosthetic eyeballs at left is the original "Thing" hand from the TV show The Addams Family, signed by the cast. In front of the 19th-century phrenological bust is a book, from about 1500, containing the first published illustrations of surgery on humans. "Pre-anesthesia, of course" Walker says. At the rear are a 300 million-year-old trilobite fossil, a raptor skeleton, and a clutch of fossilized dinosaur eggs.
Wearing a huge can-you-believe-it grin is the collection's impresario, the 52-year-old Internet entrepreneur and founder of Walker Digital — a think tank churning out ideas and patents, it's best-known for its lucrative Priceline.com. "I started an R&D lab and have been an entrepreneur. So I have a big affinity for the human imagination," he says. "About a dozen years ago, my collection got so big that I said, 'It's time to build a room, a library, that would be about human imagination.'"
Walker's house was constructed specifically to accommodate his massive library. To create the space, which was constructed in 2002, Walker and architect Mark Finlay first built a 7-foot-long model. Then they used miniature cameras to help visualize what it would be like to move around inside. In a conscious nod to M. C. Escher (whose graphics are echoed in the wood tiling), the labyrinthine platforms seem to float in space, an illusion amplified by the glass-paneled bridges connecting the platforms. Walker commissioned decorative etched glass, dynamic lighting, and even a custom soundtrack that sets the tone for the cerebral adventures hidden in this cabinet of curiosities. "I said to the architect, 'Think of it as a theater, from a lighting and engineering standpoint,'" Walker says. "But it's not a performance space. It's an engagement space."
Planetarium The massive "book" by the window is a specially commissioned, internally lit 2.5-ton Clyde Lynds sculpture. It's meant to embody the spirit of the library: the mind on the right page, the universe on the left. Pointing out to that universe is a powerful Questar 7 telescope. On the rear of the table (from left) are a globe of the moon signed by nine of the 12 astronauts who walked on it, a rare 19th-century sky atlas with white stars against a black sky, and a fragment from the Sikhote-Alin meteorite that fell in Russia in 1947—it's tiny but weighs 15 pounds. In the foreground is Andrea Cellarius' hand-painted celestial atlas from 1660. "It has the first published maps where Earth was not the center of the solar system," Walker says. "It divides the age of faith from the age of reason."
Inspiration Point Walker frequently meets with the Walker Digital brain trust in the seating area of the library, hoping to draw inspiration from the surroundings. Artist Clyde Lynds (known for integrating fiber optics into his work) created the intricate illuminated glass panels and many other visual elements. Walker himself designed the Escher-like tile floor, modeled after a tumbling block pattern from the Victorian age. He bought the chandelier (seen in the Bond film Die Another Day) at an auction and rewired it with 6,000 LEDs. The open book on the table features watercolor illustrations for an 18th-century papal palace that was never built. The globe has special meaning for Walker: "It was a wedding gift Eileen and I received in 1982."
Reading Room In the foreground are several early-20th-century volumes with jeweled bindings—gold, rubies, and diamonds—crafted by the legendary firm Sangorski & Sutcliffe. On the table (first row, from left) is a 16th-century book of jousting, a Dickens novel decorated with the author's portrait, and (open, with Post-it flags) an original copy of the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle, the first illustrated history book. Second row: the 1535 Coverdale Bible (the first completely translated into modern English), a medieval tome with intricate illustrations of dwarfs, a collection of portraits commissioned at a 17th-century German festival ("Facebook in 1610!"), a tree-bark Indonesian guide to cannibalism, and a Middle Eastern mother goddess icon from around 5000 BC.
Walker shuns the sort of bibliomania that covets first editions for their own sake—many of the volumes that decorate the library's walls are leather-bound Franklin Press reprints. What gets him excited are things that changed the way people think, like Robert Hooke's Micrographia. Published in 1665, it was the first book to contain illustrations made possible by the microscope. He's also drawn to objects that embody a revelatory (or just plain weird) train of thought. "I get offered things that collectors don't," he says. "Nobody else would want a book on dwarfs, with pages beautifully hand-painted in silver and gold, but for me that makes perfect sense."
What excites him even more is using his treasures to make mind-expanding connections. He loves juxtapositions, like placing a 16th-century map that combines experience and guesswork—"the first one showing North and South America," he says—next to a modern map carried by astronauts to the moon. "If this is what can happen in 500 years, nothing is impossible."
Gadget Lab A brand-new One Laptop per Child XO, far left, sits next to a relatively ancient RadioShack TRS-80 Model 100. In back, a 1911 typewriting machine and a 1909 Kent radio. The large contraption at center is the Nazis' supposedly unbreakable Enigma code machine. The book to its left is a copy of Johannes Trithemius' 1518 Polygraphiae, a cryptographic landmark. On the right is an Apple II motherboard signed by Woz. An Edison kinetoscope sits beside an 1890 Edison phonograph (along with three of the wax cylinders it uses for recording). Nearby is a faithful copy of Edison's lightbulb. The gadget with the tubes is an IBM processor circa 1960. In front of it stands a truly ancient storage device, a Sumerian clay cone used to record surplus grain.
Walker struggles to balance privacy with his impulse to share his finds with the outside world. Schoolchildren often visit by invitation, as do executives, politicians, and scholars. Last February, the organizers of the TED conference persuaded him to decorate their stage with some of his treasures. But he's never invited any press in to see the collection—until now.
Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) profiled sci-fi author Neal Stephenson in issue 16.09.
[More] IBM Q3 Profit a Positive Sign for Tech Sector
For the second time this year IBM offered an early peek at its quarterly results, showing in a surprise announcement that it was still plenty prosperous in the third quarter despite the worsening economic climate. The company's results, released more than a week ahead of schedule, will likely help stop a steep slide in IBM's stock price and could lift other big technology stocks in Thursday trading. IBM is a component of the Dow Jones industrial average.
[More] Market Free Fall: 10 Depressing Facts
The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 678.91 points (-7.33%) Thursday, its seventh consecutive loss. Here are 10 less-than-fun facts about to put today’s carnage in perspective. And please share your coping mechanisms with us.
[More] Whitman Sampler — Pick a Silicon Valley Exec for Treasury Secretary
At last night’s debate John McCain was asked who he might choose as his Treasury Secretary. He dropped the name of billionaire Warren Buffett but his top pick in all seriousness was former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. Who else do you think the new president should consider from Silicon Valley, if anyone? Vote early and often, and suggest your own choices.
[More] Google's 'Mail Goggles' Combats Drunk Emailing
Google releases a useful new Gmail feature which could help prevent the intoxicated from sending embarrassing late-night emails they might regret in the morning.
[More] Fruits of the Comcast-Plaxo Marriage: Fan Pages
If it wasn't immediately obvious why Comcast forked over a reported $150 million for Plaxo, a social networking site, it may become clearer later this month, when Plaxo officially launches Fan Pages for FanCast, Comcast's online video site. The social features available in beta now let users join fan groups of various TV shows, where they can share episodes and discuss plot developments to their heart's content with fellow obsessives.
[More] Clive Thompson: Why Veteran Visionaries Will Save the World
Don't trust anyone over 30. That's the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley, a land once again bestrode by millionaire CEOs who just learned to shave. Many people believe that the breakthrough ideas come only from the young. And why not? Media stories constantly recite the ages of a few famous founders: Bill Gates of Microsoft, 20; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, 20; the Google boys, 25; YouTube's Chad Hurley, 28. Tumblr founder David Karp is 21 — and on his second successful company.
Young people rule tech innovation, we tell ourselves, because they have several key advantages. They're fearless and naive, so they'll try anything. They can spy markets that elders, with their locked-in views, cannot. And without dependents or spouses, twentysomethings can work the sort of pyramid-building hours necessary for a startup. It's a kind of Logan's Run world: If you're ending a third decade, you're obsolete.
But hold on. A recent study has finally collected some data on age and high tech innovation and found that older geeks are just as successful as young Turks. What's more, the chronologically advanced are especially successful at solving problems we increasingly — and desperately — need solved.
In other words, the high tech future may belong to the over-30 set. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation surveyed 652 US-born CEOs and heads of product development who founded high tech firms in the boom (and bust) years of 1995 to 2005. Both the average and median ages were 39 — far older than the mythic dorm-room visionary. Turns out those youthquake pioneers don't really represent the pack. They're outliers.
So why is our intuition wrong about this? Because young and old founders create different types of startups.
Mature entrepreneurs tend to launch startups that require huge amounts of capital — biotech companies, energy firms, outfits that make expensive hardware. Startup costs in these areas include tens of millions for research resources, large staffs, maybe a laboratory. Then, to take their invention to market, they have to navigate complex, entrenched industries, which requires connections. "You need to know how to run a company right off the bat and inspire confidence in investors," says Vivek Wadhwa, a Harvard Fellow who coauthored the Kauffman Foundation report.
In contrast, those sexy Web-service firms that have dominated headlines on and off for the past decade require almost no capital. The "social software" market also rewards people who intuitively understand new media experiences. "There's been social change, too," says Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, a seed-funding firm. "Ten years ago, it was bizarrely unusual for someone graduating college to launch a startup. Now almost everyone who gets a computer science degree at least thinks about doing it."
In essence, the high tech world divides itself: Young people create the way-kewl consumer software — the Twitters and the Loopts — and older folks tackle the heavy-industry stuff. Young founders hack information; old founders hack atoms.
But we're moving to a world where we need more and more of the latter. Think of some of the thorniest high tech challenges — solar energy, battery systems, plug-in cars. These all reside in the world of atoms. Whoever cracks the problem of carbon sequestration is going to reap a multibillion-dollar reward. But they'll have to solve some hellishly complex physics puzzles and then introduce the solution to an energy industry riddled with byzantine state-by-state regulations and run by an old-boy network of cigar-chewing gazillionaires. Not something easily accomplished in sweatpants.
When you look at it this way, the constant hype over social applications like Facebook or Tumblr can seem a bit misplaced. I'm not saying that Web 3.0 or 4.0 apps are going away (or that they'll stop being fun). But here's my bet: When we finally start solving our global energy and resource dilemmas, the next generation of media-feted tech CEOs will look more like your parents than your kids. Or, to put it another way: Don't trust anyone who wants to put an age limit on innovation.
Email clive@clivethompson.net.
[More] Wall Street Tumbles Amid Global Sell-off
Wall Street tumble, joining a sell-off around the world, as fears grow that the financial crisis will cascade through economies globally despite bailout efforts by the U.S. and other governments. The credit market remained under strain, and investors piled into government bonds. The Dow Jones industrials skidded more than 300 points.
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