Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 136
June 11, 2017
Pixar’s Co-Founders Heard ‘No’ 45 Times Before Steve Jobs Said ‘Yes’
With its stunning visuals and storytelling to boot, Disney’s Pixar has been captivating global audiences for decades, helping to transform the way people look at animated feature films. Best known for its use of computer-generated imagery (CGI), Pixar has 17 animated feature films on its record, 12 of which made the list of the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time. (Disney has even released a film showing that all the Pixar films are connected.)
Pixar knows a thing or two about how to tell a story and now anyone can learn how to capture people’s imagination with a scintillating story. In an initiative called “Pixar in a Box,” which is sponsored by Disney, Pixar has teamed up with the Khan Academy to offer free online classes to anyone with an internet connection and a passion for storytelling.
Over the years, Pixar has given audiences the likes of the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Finding Dory. If its back catalogue isn’t impressive enough, Pixar has now given its fans what is arguably its most sacred creation of all — the secret of how to tell tales that make people tick.
I interviewed Alvy Ray Smith, one of the company’s co-founders, and he told me about learning animation from a $1.50 “how-to” book, the role that “Moore’s Law” played in guiding him to success with Pixar, his three golden rules of recruitment and working with the late Steve Jobs.
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In addition to pursuing computer graphics at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), you taught yourself the basics of animation using a $1.50 “how-to” book written by the late Preston Blair, a character animator best known for his work at Disney and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Where did you get your business savvy from?
Alvy Ray Smith: My co-founder, Edwin Catmull, and I were the academic type. We were computer nerds with PhDs and learned business by the seat of our pants. When George Lucas — one of our patrons — lost half his fortune in a divorce, we were forced to start a company to preserve our group. Our first move was to buy four “how-to-start-a-business” books. I also called a former colleague at NYIT, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics (and later, Netscape) and asked him how to do business. He said, “It’s not hard, Alvy. It’ll take you about a year to learn the basics.” That was the extent of our “formal” training. Then, we went through an intense learning process made necessary by financing Pixar. Thirty-five venture capitalists and 10 large corporations turned us down, but we got lots of training presenting the company and “talking the talk.”
Related: High-Tech Startups Need to Ditch the ‘Engineers Rule’ Mentality
Describe the impact that Gordon E. Moore — the founder of Intel — had on your business philosophy.
In my own words, “Moore’s Law” says, “Everything good about computers gets better by a factor of 10 every five years.” So, in 2015, computers were 10 billion times better than they were in 1965. Catmull and I used this “Law” at several crucial points, including the formation of Pixar. In the final year at Lucasfilm, I ran the numbers for a contract with a Japanese company ready to produce the first digital movie. To my horror, I discovered that computers hadn’t arrived yet — by a factor of 10. I had to back out of the deal. Hence, we knew that Pixar couldn’t make movies for another five years. At the end of those five fraught years — right on Moore’s Law schedule — Disney stepped forward to finance Toy Story, the first digital movie.
What positives did you take away from your association with the late Steve Jobs, who was the main investor in Pixar?
Jobs financed us when 45 other organizations had said “no.” He didn’t create or run Pixar, but he did capitalize us as a manufacturing company for those first five years. We ran out of money several times, and Jobs would always write us another check in exchange for equity. His greatest business move was to take Pixar public on the strength of great critical previews of Toy Story.
Related: 3 Mistakes (Nearly) Every Tech Startup Makes — and How to Avoid Them
What business principles did you apply when you co-founded Pixar that could be applied by a founder of a startup today?
When hiring people, live by three rules — hire smarter than yourself, hire the best and give them their space. It’s like being a good parent. You can’t produce creativity, but you can identify it, nourish it and let it grow. Catmull and I aren’t good entrepreneurial models because we failed for five years, staying alive only because of one of our patrons, Steve Jobs. We weren’t successful until we were executing a business that we had truly prepared for, which was making animated movies. What we did have going for us was a clear and clean vision — that is, to make the first digital movie. It was not to make a financially successful company. Pixar’s example taught us that entrepreneurs aren’t always born (sometimes, they’re made), failure isn’t always final (sometimes, it’s just feedback) and recruitment works best by a “rule of three.”
Source:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/294821
June 10, 2017
Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Unleashed in Explosive First Teaser
The trailer for the film debuted during Game 4 of the NBA Finals on Friday night, as the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers faced off for possibly the final time in the competition.
The footage gives fans the first look at such big stars as Lupita Nyong’o (Nakia) and Michael B. Jordan, as well as, of course, Chadwick Boseman, who plays the titular Black Panther. It also previews a sprawling Wakanada — and the political turmoils inside of the region.
The film follows Boseman’s T’Challa, who was introduced in “Captain America: Civil War” and returns to Wakanda after the death of his father, the king of the nation. “You are a good man with a good heart, and it’s hard for a good man to be a king,” warns a voiceover.
Source:
Variety
Google’s AI Vision May No Longer Include Giant Robots
Good news for the deeply paranoid among us: If the apocalypse arrives via giant anthropomorphic robots, they probably won’t be bankrolled by Google. On Thursday, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced that it was selling Boston Dynamics, its premier robotics division, to the Japanese telco giant SoftBank for an undisclosed sum. The deal also includes a smaller robotics company called Schaft.
Boston Dynamics was less a moonshot than a sci-fi horror brought to life. Even before being acquired by Google in 2013, the 25-year-old company had already developed a Beast Wars–style squadron of robot predators with names like BigDog and WildCat, as well as a humanoid model called Atlas. The machines were often developed for the Pentagon under contracts with agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Google and the government both said the robots were being tested for disaster-relief scenarios, but that never stopped the stream of headlines describing them as “scary,” “nightmare-inducing,” or “evil.”
Whether Google’s ultimate plans were benign or nefarious, they never properly got off the ground. Both Boston Dynamics and Schaft were part of a months-long spending spree Google bankrolled to appease Andy Rubin, the creator of Android, who was looking to robots as his next frontier for innovation. But Rubin left Google in 2014, creating a leadership vacuum as the company struggled to get its various robotics acquisitions headquartered around the world to work in tandem. Under Rubin, Google reportedly had plans to launch a consumer robotics product by 2020, but that timeline seems in doubt now. (Alphabet still owns several smaller robotics startupsthat specialize in areas such as industrial manufacturing and film production.)
In the years since the Boston Dynamics acquisition, Google has shown that it doesn’t need to build a robot butler (or soldier) to create a future dominated by artificial intelligence. Machine-learning algorithms now guide most of the company’s products, whether recommending YouTube videos, identifying objects in users’ photo libraries, or whisking people around in driverless cars. The company is partnering with appliance manufacturers like General Electric so that people can control their ovens via voice commands to Google Home. And most ambitiously, at this year’s Google I/O, the company unveiled a suite of new products related to its machine-learning framework, TensorFlow. Developers will soon be able to make use of the same AI engines that power Google’s products to improve their own offerings via the company’s cloud-computing platform.
In the company’s ideal future, every human-machine interaction will be powered by Google, even if a specific app or appliance doesn’t have Google’s name on it. Terminator-style robots (OK, hopefully Jetsons-style) may one day be part of that vision, but the company can easily build an AI army with the products that fill our homes and garages today.
Source:
https://theringer.com/google-boston-dynamics-ai-robots-61a6a6c3bfec
