By Rodney Brown

In April of 1981, I was living in a hovel (OK it was an apartment, but it was a hovel to me) in South Lawrence, huddling over a 13” Sony Trinitron TV one morning, watching the launch of the very first space shuttle, Columbia, on the first mission, called STS-1.

This was long before the advent of anything like the Internet anywhere except in the minds of science fiction writers. Cable TV was just starting to become a popular way of getting entertainment, and even MTV was a few months away, about to launch in August of 1981 with a video of the song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. Yes, shuttle launches predate MTV.

The first cellular network in the United States was still two years away, and a portable phone (the unwieldy bag phones, with a battery/transceiver combo separate from the handset) were still almost a decade away. The home PC revolution was in its infancy. The Commodore Vic 20 had just come out and the Apple II was a scant four years old. The Apple Macintosh was still three years away, waiting to break through your TV screens with an Orwellian launch ad during the Super Bowl.

Fast forward to the launch of the shuttle Atlantis this morning on the last shuttle mission, STS-135. I watched it at work on a 21-inch Apple iMac, viewing it in full HD via an Internet stream though the site UStream, which was taking the HD NASA feed and redistributing it. In 30 years, I have a single device that is my cable box, my Internet access machine, and if I wanted to use Skype or a similar feature – I’m looking at you Google+ and the new Facebook chat – my phone. It could also be a gaming platform, although the corporate bigwigs would frown on that. Better leave that to the Xbox 360s and the like at home.

Speaking of the Xbox 360, Larry Hryb (AKA Major Nelson), the director of programming for XBox Live for Microsoft Corp., tweeted out this interesting factoid today – there is more computing power in an Xbox 360 than in the navigation computers on the elderly space shuttle Atlantis.

Why didn’t NASA keep up a pace of innovation even remotely close to that of general consumer technology? If it had, we wouldn’t be looking at the possible end (or at least a long hiatus) of manned space flight from the U.S. – we would be celebrating the next platform that would take us into space to replace the shuttle. Where is my space plane, my heavy lifting body rocket, my linear accelerator rail launch system or any of the ideas that have been teased over the decades as a way to reduce the cost of getting into orbit?

I know, it is all about the federal budget, and there is no political will to spend even a dime on developing new technologies solely for exploration and science, particularly during and just after a severe recession. But really the groundwork for a shuttle replacement would have needed to start long before the recent economic troubles. The will to fund space exploration petered out more than a decade ago, and the war on terror (don’t get me wrong, I am not an anti-war-on-terror liberal) stripped away any money that could have gone into a new space vehicle program even if there had been the will to develop one.

And clearly the pace of consumer and corporate innovation has been as rapid as it was over the past 30 years because of the market forces driving it. That is the current plan by the Obama administration – make the moving of goods and materials into orbit a commercial play, and the competition to get there first, then to do it better, will speed up innovation in that area. But that doesn’t address the idea of man in space. All U.S. astronauts will only go to the International Space Station from now on to do any research, and all of them will get there on Russian rockets.

Innovation happens when an existing need is met with a new way of doing things. While most of that can be done in the corporate and consumer worlds, some things are just too big, and too important, to be left to market-driven innovation. Manned space flight and the new technologies it should be employing right now, was one of those things. Sadly, as often happens, politics got in the way.

I would like to think that some day my son can watch the launch of a new U.S. manned space vehicle. Since he is 19 now, it won’t be when he is 21, as it was for me. I only pray it is before he is 51 as I am now.

By Rodney Brown

In my usual early morning perusal of the wire services, I came across this headline: “Authorities Credit Digital Billboards with Capture of East Coast Rapist.” Of course I had to click on it -– the idea that somebody in PR and marketing thought linking the East Coast Rapist to their product was a good idea could be as bad as the Kenneth Cole Egyptian protest tweet.

As it turns out, there really was a compelling story contained in the release. Within five days of the federal authorities putting what little information they had about the suspect in the East Coast Rapist case on digital billboards along highways like Route 95, they had a tip that led them to collect a publicly discarded cigarette butt that matched DNA from multiple rape cases. If you have been following the news on this, the suspect, a long-haul trucker named Aaron H. Thomas, was arrested last Friday in New Haven, Conn.

The problem is that the release came from the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and contains self-serving quotes from the association. Now that, of course, happens all the time. And nobody would look with disfavor on any release in which some organization tied its members’ products or services to any normal event — a presidential visit or an entertainment event like the circus. But when such an association is made with a horrific or tragic event, that release becomes not just run-of-the-mill self serving, but truly distasteful.

But it doesn’t have to be. If that message had been first told to me by, say, 60 Minutes, or even Wired, as a fully reported piece, I would have been fascinated. It could have been exactly the kind of behind-the-scenes “bet you didn’t know” type of story we all love. But having it crowed by the mouthpiece organization for the industry taints it with the biofilm of distasteful self-promotion.

This comes surprisingly close on the heels of a panel I was on for the Publicity Club of New England last week. Along with other media types and a couple of marketing execs, we talked specifically about the use of social media in product launches. But of course the topic veered into the more generic area of “what is PR doing wrong” from the media standpoint. Kudos to the PR industry attendees who put up with our –- OK, mostly my -– rants about the problems with the PR industry. And here is one big one. You are not the right messenger in situations connected to unpleasant events. We are. And your story can be told — often told well — by the media, which would get the story out while washing away that unpleasant stain of callous self-promotion.

The next time you have a wonderfully compelling story that is connected to an truly unpleasant topic like the one the OAAA has, call your favorite media contact and tell her about it –- get her excited about it. If you don’t do that, your message will not get anywhere near the level of exposure it could have otherwise, entirely because of the sense of callous self-promotion it will engender in the journalists that are the target. And that does a disservice to your client, or to your boss if you are an in-house marketer.

To be clear, this isn’t an appeal to the OAAA to give me their next such release in advance –- they are outside MHT’s New England coverage area and it isn’t really the kind of tech story we would do because it isn’t a business story. But it is the kind of fascinating glimpse at the use of tech that we all can’t get enough of –- if it comes from the right source.

By James Connolly

Yes, I’ve watched man versus machine on Jeopardy! the past two nights. Yes, Watson is very impressive. However, I’ll argue that the brain of the average human — not to mention that of any genius — is still superior to what Watson has to offer.

First, credit to IBM. Watson, like other computer advances before it, represents a huge step beyond what was thought possible even a few years ago because of the level of reasoning. If you haven’t seen the gameshow, Watson is taking on two of Jeopardy’s past champions and is taking text input of a phrase, parsing the words and coming up with probabilities for three possible answers. A voice simulator then reads the top answer aloud. Looking beyond a TV show, think of the possibilities down the road for applying this technology to things like online technical support for consumers or, as IBM suggests, analyzing a patient’s symptoms in a medical scenario.

What Watson is doing on the show, however, is incredibly fast analysis of a single phrase or sentence. In most cases he was right, crushing his human competitors. Of course when he was wrong, he was really wrong. All of us mere humans could snicker when Watson shifted O’Hare and Midway airports from Chicago to Toronto. Stupid computer, the question was about a U.S. city.

So, what makes us so smart? Watson’s brilliance is in how he (it?) cranks through a single problem using essentially one input (text) and one output (voice simulation). Humans are the ultimate multitaskers.

Think about how much processing your brain does the next time you are driving through your neighborhood. Thinking about work. Listening to the radio. (Not texting, thank you.) Tree over there, I think it’s a maple, can’t wait for spring. Right foot on the gas with just the right amount of pressure. Speed limit is 35, going 30-something. Glance at mirrors, nothing out of the ordinary. Seeing a car coming down a side street to your left (Stopping? Not stopping? Driver paying attention?) Touch the brake or not? Other car is stopping, no need to hit the brake. Shaw’s or Hannaford’s to get stuff for dinner? Chicken or beef?

Sound familiar? It’s all in a matter of seconds. You are doing all of that, processing input from senses, drawing on memory, reacting if necessary, in the time it takes Watson to answer just one question about which painter did which work of art. And, Watson isn’t even looking at Alex Trebek to see if he has that smug everyone-knows-this-one look.

This is your brain. It’s pretty cool.

By Galen Moore

In Boston startup circles, the so-called Innovation District is something of a joke. Many founders cynically call Mayor Thomas Menino’s pet project on the South Boston Waterfront ‘the innovation ghetto.’ In the scattered buildings among the mud flats, it’s hard to get high-speed Internet, which is kind of a problem for Web startups.

The perception, the infrastructure and the density of the neighborhood all could change, if Babson College sets up a satellite campus there, as the Boston Herald reported this morning.

The Herald report was a little shaky – quoting no one at Babson, but relying on unnamed sources from competing colleges. But it’s a compelling story nonetheless, because it makes sense. To date, the biggest innovation that’s come to the district has been MassChallenge – a startup competition that surprised many  by actually setting up a highly acclaimed startup incubator in a brand-new (and otherwise nearly empty) office tower on the waterfront.

Of the 110 startups that participated in MassChallenge, 19 came out of Babson.

Menino said last month  the city is talking to a university about locating on the Waterfront. It stands to reason Babson’s a likely candidate. The school has one of the highest-rated MBA programs for entrepreneurs in the nation, but it’s all the way out in Wellesley. Being near Route 128 must have been fine in the 1980s, but the region’s high-tech center is shifting.

The action now is in Cambridge and Boston. I suppose Babson could open a campus in Kendall Square – but the rent is pretty high there, and it’s not considered Cantabridgian to advertise. Fortunately for Babson and Boston, perhaps, Mayor for Life Tom Menino has no such inhibition.

By James Connolly

The drumbeat of last week was Genzyme’s plans to lay off 1,000 employees worldwide over a 15-month period. There are no specifics yet regarding where the layoffs will hit within the 12,000 employee Cambridge company or the state, and it remains to be seen how that 1,000-job figure relates to the company’s claim that it will add 500 jobs, and to news that it is selling its genetic testing business for $925 million in cash to Laboratory Corporation of America.  North Carolina-based Labcorp said it plans to offer jobs to Genzyme Genetics’ 1,900 employees, but as with any like acquisition, there are bound to be questions about where and what those jobs are.

So, it’s a time for natural stress on Genzyme employees who may face life-changing layoffs, the pain of seeing coworkers severed, or concerns about whether they will stay in Genzyme Genetics’ Westborough location or deal with relocation. For Genzyme employees there is also the concern about whether the firm will end up being acquired by Sanofi-Aventis or another suiter.

Layoffs stink, whether you are the victim or the survivor.

Yet, despite the news from Genzyme and a handful of other companies like Thermo-Fisher (closing a 66-employee facility in Rhode Island last month), maybe it’s time to pause and look back at where the Massachusetts and New England tech communities are today versus a period not so very long ago.

A year ago MHT pulled together a map showing companies that had shut down during the recession. Even more telling was a map we assembled and maintained in late 2008 and the first half of 2009. We tracked layoff announcements in our tech community. There were 25 here, 400 there, 2,000 in places. It was the heart of recession, and there was blood letting. The total may have been 10,000 jobs just in eastern Massachusetts companies.

Nobody felt safe.

In comparison, one company stands out today for cutting up to 1,000 jobs.

On the positive side, placement firm Robert Half International jumped on the numbers coming out of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor Workforce Development, which announced last week that the private sector added 4,000 jobs in August, making it the seventh straight month of job gains in the state, and unemployment slipped to 8.8 percent.

That’s good news, even though the greatest jobs gains came in what often are lowly-paid sectors such as hospitality and food service, while tech-related sectors showed minimal gains, such as 900 jobs in “Professional, Scientific and Technical Services.”

So, while we still tread a little more carefully than we did a few years ago, watching for an economic pitfall, we can take some solace in the fact that when bad news hits, the community at large feels a little less of a sting than it did.