Fish & Richardson Adds Principals in Austin Office; Kordzik, Garsson Bring Nanotechnology Expertise to Firm's IP Group
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AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 25  /PRNewswire/ -- The national law firm Fish & Richardson P.C. is pleased to announce the addition of Kelly K. Kordzik and Ross S. Garsson as Principals in the firm's Austin, Texas, office, where they will join the intellectual property group.  Mr. Kordzik and Mr.
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A financial-services executive tracks down information needed for a patent infringement case.
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The United States Patent Office (USPTO) has issued a Notice of Allowance for Patent Protection for a groundbreaking seawater desalination process developed by Long Beach Water Department engineers.
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(InfoWorld) - Kannan Pashupathy, the director of Google's international engineering operations, oversees the company's growing network of international R&D centers. In that capacity, Pashupathy has grown the number of international R&D centers from three to more than 20 in less than three years. But adding new R&D centers at a pace that can match Google's rapid international growth without losing its corporate culture hasn't been easy. Google has worked hard to transplant its corporate values, hoping to recreate a small slice of Silicon Valley in each country where the company sets up shop. To achieve this goal, the company brings new hires from around the world to work at one of its larger offices, such as its headquarters in Mountain View, California, and sends veterans to work in newly opened R&D centers. During a visit to Singapore, where Google recently announced plans to open an R&D center, Pashupathy sat down with IDG News Service to discuss the challenges and opportunities that face Google's expanding international R&D operations. An edited transcript of that conversation follows. IDGNS: Why has Google built up its network of international R&D centers so quickly? Kannan Pashupathy: It's been very challenging to set these up as quickly as we've done it, partly because the industry's evolving rapidly. We know we need a lot more people than we're able to put on projects and we are developing very quickly as a global company with products in multiple languages, we're doing simultaneous releases in multiple languages, and all of these are very, very demanding engineering-wise. So it's important for us to set up these centers. IDGNS: Is there daily interaction between the various R&D centers? How do you share projects between different centers? Pashupathy: There's constant interaction. First, there are the obvious ones: telephone and video. All of our centers are hooked on to a corporate video-conferencing system and the teams are constantly engaging with each other. But as you can imagine time zones play havoc with that. We have some simple rules that we've come up with that allow us to not distribute the work across too many locations and to structure the work so that it doesn't require a lot of day-to-day communication if the teams are not collocated. We also have focus areas for the centers, which work on two to four areas where they have skill sets and are able to contribute to Google. Each of these centers also work both on global projects and on local projects, so we expect them to actually contribute to both those areas. IDGNS: Have you encountered cultural obstacles to the acceptance of Google's corporate culture and flat management style? Pashupathy: When we are hiring people we are looking for people who are actually open to stuff like that. We actually do a very strong test for culture fit, and that's something everybody looks at. In addition to your raw smarts and your analytical thinking and your problem solving and your grade-point average, we do a very strong culture-fit test. Part of that culture-fit test is to look for people who have an open mindset, people who think there is a richness in different cultures, that they can learn from everybody and hierarchy is not important and ideas are. If you're in the company, you're already somehow predisposed to thinking or at least aligning yourself in that direction. But even if you do that, there are people, particularly the more senior types, who are used to one way of doing business and have a tougher time getting used to an environment where a meritocracy rules, and the notion that a person who is fresh out of college yesterday can have the same say at the table as someone who has 20 years of experience. IDGNS: In April, Google released a Chinese software tool that included a database that was developed by one of your rivals, Sohu.com, for a competing product. What went wrong and what lessons did Google draw from that incident? Pashupathy: That was clearly something that shouldn't have happened. We went into an internal investigation of how it did happen, and took some very aggressive measures to make sure it never happens again. These sorts of things help you evolve your practices. In addition to innovating on technology, we're also innovating on processes. We're innovating on how we manage our people. As a culture, we are a very open and transparent culture, and sometimes some things slip through the cracks like this. We are also a very flat company organizationally, so there's not a lot of day-to-day attention that we're paying to people. This one was sort of an intern situation, where the oversight should have been a bit more tight. There's learning there clearly and the lesson is when you are bringing in fresh people, particularly those who have no experience with corporate life, that you can't just assume they'll do the right thing. You have to train them, particularly in places where they may have no such experience prior to that.
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NEW YORK, Oct. 25 -- The new head of Marsh & McLennan Cos., Michael G. Cherkasky, has three key traits working in his favor: clean hands, a reputation for toughness and the right friends.
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Foresight Nanotech Institute has appointed Dr. Pearl Chin to the  position of President. Dr. Chin brings to the organization her extensive  experience in business consulting, operations, sales and marketing, and  customer service, in diverse industries from small to large companies.
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LOS ANGELESâNew Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson urged UC to compete for continuing its management of the national Los Alamos weapons laboratoryâbut to partner up with an industrial company
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Companies tapping into a growing industry called in 'social media' will use an upcoming Arizona tech conference to showcase a new batch of online tools. The idea is to make the web a better medium for sharing information.
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Microsoft Corp has appointed a new in-house lawyer to handle cases in EMEA, including its ongoing antitrust spat with the European Commission.  The company has promoted from within, handing the role to Erich Andersen who has been a part of Microsoft's in-house legal team since 1995.
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By Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post Staff Writer  Apple Computer Inc. said yesterday that Google Inc. chief executive Eric E. Schmidt will join the company's board of directors, creating a bond between two technology powerhouses that compete fiercely with Microsoft Corp.
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When tech experts Josh Ackil and Matt Tanielian were looking to name their new lobbying firm, they had little hesitation. They decided to call themselves the Franklin Square Group -- even though their offices aren't on Franklin Square.
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SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Biotechnology company Genentech Inc. received a subpoena from the US Attorney&#39;s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania requesting documents related to the promotion
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The biotech giant is hit with a subpoena requesting documents related to the promotion of Rituxan, its best-selling drug. Just two days before its third-quarter earnings release, biotechnology pioneer Genentech
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Microsoft preached its "new world of work" mantra at the company?s Global High Tech Summit 2007 conference in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday.Noting synergy between the disciplines of business and IT, the event is intended for professionals from both realms, said Tyler Bryson, Microsoft's newly announced general manager of the U.S. Manufacturing Industry portion of the company?s Industry Solutions Organization."At Microsoft, we believe that alignment [of business and IT] is critical to innovation," Bryson said. Also featured at the event were speakers from chipmakers Intel and Freescale Semiconductor, who talked about modernizations to their systems and processes.Trends are accelerating, such as globalization and market growth that are creating a new world of work, Bryson said. Other relevant trends include the pressure to improve operation performance, quality-driven regulatory compliance, and rapid cycles of product innovation.Globalization and technology create entirely new ways that people think about work, and everyone must adjust and respond, said Bryson. "The world is transforming what it means to be at work," he said.The morning's presentations had a bent toward high-tech manufacturing. Bryson said the National Association of Manufacturers expects a 40 percent turnover in the manufacturing work base; companies must cope with transferring knowledge to employees."Most manufacturers are reporting a shortage of skilled workers," he said. A culture of innovation must be created that can attract the best talent, said Bryson.New tenets of work, according to Bryson, include creating a culture of innovation, empowering the workforce, driving operational excellence, running a customer-centric business, using compliance as a tool of transparency, and operating in a global environment.At Freescale, the company is undertaking several upgrades, including moving to a single global instance of SAP for supply chain operations. Freescale is what Janelle Monney, senior vice president of business operations at the company, described as "a 50-year-old startup" that was part of Motorola until 2004.The company also has initiatives in manufacturing and business intelligence, she noted. Freescale's business intelligence platform is intended to bring multiple data streams altogether into a single data warehouse."One of the key objectives of IT is to turn data into information for decision-making," said Monney.Also, employees can access e-mail on cell phones equipped with Windows OSes, she said.With Intel, the company is extending itself to accommodate three market opportunities: mobile Internet devices, consumer electronics, and development of low-cost PCs, said Stuart Pann, an Intel vice president and co-general manager of customer fulfillment, planning and logistics."One of our goals is how do we configure the supply chain to take advantage of these new opportunities," Pann said.Intel is running a new manufacturing process on Intel systems and Microsoft operating systems at its high-volume plant in Arizona, Pann said. "That is virtually run on Intel architecture and on Microsoft operating systems, so we've made the transition over the years, and we've found that the combination of these two products is more than robust enough to run $3.5 billion factories," said Pann.Among other improvements, the company is developing a new workspace that is a fundamental change to the company's cubicle culture, he said. Phone booths will be created, more privacy options will be offered, and the company will get rid of underutilized office space, said Pann.Also, author and consultant Geoffrey Moore, managing director of TCG Advisors, lectured on the challenges of finding a competitive advantage and innovation in a marketplace that faces frequent commoditization."You must innovate in order to continue to sustain advantage," Moore said.Differentiation also is important, he said. Apple with its iPod has customers acknowledging it is different, he said. But past differentiation can erode so that a company?s core competency is no longer core, he said."Our friends at Dell are dealing with that right now," with the industry catching up and Dell having to reinvent itself, said Moore.Microsoft officials briefly noted the company's new unified communications platform, which features Office Communications Server and provides such capabilities as IM, voice, and videoconferencing.
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Injectable products maker American Pharmaceutical Partners Inc. said Thursday that it named Alan L. Heller as president and chief executive officer, effective immediately, and expects to appoint him as a director at the company&#39;s next annual meeting.
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By Kathleen Gallagher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  Dec. 14--A former top executive at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's patenting arm and a high-profile university researcher are forming the state's third embryonic stem cell company.
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Nortel Networks Corp., North America&#39;s bigger maker of phone equipment, named Clent Richardson as its chief marketing officer, filling a position that was vacant for almost two years.