The unknown man who has such an outsized impact on our lives. That’s John Karlin. If I would have heard his name in passing I would have never known who he was. But when I hear what he is responsible for, his “inventions,” I know him instantly. The man basically invented the modern telephone. A couple of weeks ago Mr. Karlin past away at age 94. The New York Times had a nice obituary for him, available here.

Isn’t problem solving amazing? Everyone’s trying to figure out how to make smaller batteries store more power so we can run devices for longer times. But what if we went the other way? Smaller batteries that don’t last as long but can charge fully in seconds. Amazing research being done, via this video:

If this doesn’t inspire everyone, especially teenaged girls, to explore science I don’t know what will.

Besides the feeling of awe when watching this video, the other thing that jumped out at me was that she could do this at all. When I was in third grade we tied notes to balloons and let them go, seeing if anyone found them and would call to tell us about it. (We got at least one call.) But Lauren, the girl who conducted this experiment, got to watch the entire thing via mounted cameras at multiple angles. Ten years ago the cameras would have been too heavy to send into space. Five years ago, too expensive. Now? If their destroyed, oh well!

The joys of potentially disposable technology: great for our minds, bad for our landfills.

Interesting news yesterday that Opera is dropping their custom backend for WebKit. WebKit is the HTML rendering engine used by Safari, iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and BlackBerry with its latest OS. From the press release:

When we first began, back in 1995, we had to roll our own rendering engine in order to compete against the Netscape and Internet Explorer to drive web standards, and thus the web forward. When we started the spec that is now called “HTML5”, our goal was a specification that would greatly enhance interoperability across the web.

The WebKit project now has the kind of standards support that we could only dream of when our work began. Instead of tying up resources duplicating what’s already implemented in WebKit, we can focus on innovation to make a better browser. Opera innovations such as tabbed browsing, Speed Dial and data-saving compression that speeds up page-load, have been widely copied and improved the web for all.

Some developers will be concerned that innovation will stop now, with all but two major browsers using the same engine. I’m not concerned about that. In fact I think quite the opposite will occur. We will see increased innovation on top of the consistent WebKit base as each Google, Apple, Opera and BlackBerry attempt to innovate on top of what is there already while maintaining compatibility for what came before.

As for developers, more consistency is a very good thing. For anyone who has tried to make their web sites compatible with Internet Explorer 6 knows… yeah, consistency is a very good thing!

If you are unaware, Dell, Inc. went private with a $24.4 billion buyout funded by Silver Lake Partners, Michael Dell, Microsoft, and some banks. The question Om Malik asked yesterday about Michael Dell is an interesting question. In short, why? Why is Michael Dell putting his reputation and personal fortune on the line to save the company that bears his name? Om’s answer is simple, and one any of us running a company we founded will understand:

Every so often people say that its not personal, its business. Nonsense! It is always personal and it will always be personal. If you spend your lifetime nurturing and growing a startup, it is nothing but personal. Outsiders will never understand — for a founder, failure, defeat and ignominy are always personal, just as success and fame. For founders, our identities are intertwined with the companies.

I can relate. By no means do I keep Infinity Softworks going for irrational reasons but here I am, 16 years later, running a business that doesn’t pay for itself. I’ve spent plenty of time asking myself why I keep going. I could have walked away at any point having felt good about what we attempted, even if we didn’t accomplish our goal of changing math education. We’ve distributed 20 million software calculators, helping students and professionals all over the world. I’ve kept a business running for a decade and a half. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

For me, I keep going because I still have hope to accomplish what I set out to do. We’ve been using the same tools to work with numbers since the 1970s but we now carry always connected computers around in our pockets. In 40 years the tech has changed; the products we use haven’t. I have one more shot, I believe, to re-invent the way we work with numbers and I’m going to take it.

Obviously Dell Inc. is a different deal. Here’s a company, and Dell a man, who accomplished his goals. But those goals morph as maybe they did for Michael Dell. His name is literally on the line. Here’s hoping, from all of us running the companies we started, that Dell makes it happen.