The Value of Starting Small

I GREW up in Minneapolis. My mother, a former teacher, went back to work when my younger brother went to kindergarten. I was 8. She had a friend whose child had a disability, which inspired the two of them to start the nonprofit Pacer Center. They wanted to help parents of children with disabilities and expand the opportunities for these youngsters. My mother still runs the organization today.

My brother and I collated and filed papers for her, and I put on shows with Muppet-like puppets to teach schoolchildren that disabled kids deserved their respect and friendship. For a long time I didn't realize that although my mother is in the nonprofit sector, she's an entrepreneur. Her second career influenced the direction my life took.

When I was leaving to attend Harvard, my uncle, a professor at the University of Minnesota, told me I was going to learn more from my fellow students than from my professors. He was right. Harvard teaches you humility. People heading there think they're the best at something, but there's always someone smarter. I graduated in 1989 with a degree in history and government.

The summer of my junior year I worked on Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign, which turned me off to politics. It had nothing to do with his candidacy; I concluded that working inside the system is not about changing the world or having an impact, it's about raising money.

After college I got a job as a management consultant at Bain & Company. On one assignment, I spent nine months in Grand Rapids, Mich., in a turkey processing plant helping to increase efficiency using lean manufacturing principles. To show that the plant was wasting food, I spent a weekend in a warehouse-sized freezer, counting the inventory. We fixed a related problem by scheduling production around the most expensive machine in the plant, which was the bottleneck. It was the first time I saw how small changes could have dramatic effects.

I wanted to be responsible for a business, so when one of my friends from Bain told me about a job at Capitol Records for someone with consulting experience, I interviewed. I believe the company hired me because it recognized that music was my passion. I was one of the first to license music for video games, and a friend and I developed the idea to sell music CDs at Starbucks.

I believed that the computer would become an alternative to radio and MTV, and in 1993 I left to start Launch Media, an online music site, with Bob Roback, my best friend from high school. Music is personal, and by giving people control over what they choose to listen to, you can give them a better experience. In 1999 we took the company public and two years later sold it to . Bob and I stayed on for six years.

In 2007 I left to work at Benchmark Capital as entrepreneur in residence. As an Ancestry.com board member, I got to know the team at Spectrum Equity, an Ancestry.com investor. Spectrum wanted to purchase a majority stake in SurveyMonkey, which provides online survey tools. After helping Spectrum executives with that, I joined SurveyMonkey as C.E.O. in 2009.

SurveyMonkey allows customers to create, distribute and analyze surveys. Our tools can be used for customer and employee feedback, or to plan events, for example. We have customers in 190 countries; more than half work in education, government or other nonprofits.

I may no longer be that 26-year-old who started an online music site, but I'm still interested in starting small on something that can make an impact, and I still believe in the triumph of hope over experience. That's what being an entrepreneur means.

Is GPS Making Us Lost and Confused?

The turn-by-turn instructions of GPS-based navigation systems, ingeniously designed though they may be, can't always save us from ourselves.

Consider the experience of a man from San Diego who flew to the East Coast and picked up a GPS-equipped rental car at the airport. After 20 minutes, he sensed he was headed in the wrong direction. Then he realized that he had unthinkingly entered his California address as his destination.

“The navigation system had dutifully set a route back to his home in San Diego, 3,000 miles away,” said Barry Brown, co-director of the Mobile Life Center, based in Stockholm, which does research on mobile communication. The incident happened to a friend of his.

Mr. Brown is co-author of a recent paper titled “The Normal Natural Troubles of Driving With GPS.” The paper illuminates a drawback of GPS technology: that it is designed for docile drivers whose navigational skills have atrophied.

The field work for the study was done last year. Dr. Brown, who was then teaching at the , and a student assistant, Allison Primack, installed two video cameras in cars to record students and their parents as they drove with personal navigation systems of various kinds. The videotapes captured the turn-by-turn instructions, the drivers' responses, and, when things went badly and passengers were present, the in-car conversations about what to do - expletives included.

After analyzing the videotapes of their subjects' trips, the researchers constructed a typology of navigation “troubles,” including destination, route, sensing of the car's location and timing of a given turn instruction.

Human error, as it turns out, was responsible for many of the problems that occurred. When a driver exited the highway to pick up cupcakes while en route to another destination and wanted to return to the highway, her passenger entered the wrong highway junction for the device to use in recalculating the route, so the turn-by-turn directions were wrong.

This was not the fault of the software developers or a map deficiency, but the driver nonetheless placed the blame on the object that was most handy: “These GPS things - it's really confusing.” (“Ahh, shut up,” the passenger said.)

According to TomTom, a leading manufacturer of navigation devices, about 25 percent of all cars in the United States and Europe now have the devices. Turn-by-turn instructions are available as smartphone apps as well, and they are being built right into phones' operating systems, so the challenge of reducing navigation problems through better design is gaining more urgency.

IT'S important to remember that humans can take in only so much information at one time. Today's systems provide drivers with copious information in visual form, in addition to audible instructions. But research suggests that voice instructions without the screen may actually be safer.

A group of researchers led by Andrew L. Kun, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the , placed test subjects in immersive driving simulators and tracked the frequency and duration of their glances at a navigation screen, when their eyes left the road. They found that in a majority of instances, these glances lasted for more than 200 milliseconds, long enough to empirically affect driving.

In the experiment, the display was large and easy to see, mounted atop the dashboard. “You did not have to change your gaze angle much to see it,” Dr. Kun said. Consulting a smartphone's navigation app, on a much smaller screen and held lower, makes it more likely that a driver's eyes will leave the road for longer stretches.

“Voice-only instructions delivered subjects to their destinations, and you could argue that they drove better because they looked at the road more,” Dr. Kun said of his test subjects. “Yet a majority preferred having a navigation screen - they felt anxious without it.”

I asked Walter Hermsen, vice president for product management at TomTom, about the prospect of affordable navigation systems that project visual instructions onto the windshield. This augmented-reality technology has begun to appear as a factory-installed option in some luxury cars.

Mr. Hermsen said I was asking for too much. “The size of the contraption you would need to project a high-quality image in bright daylight would be quite large,” he said. “It's not practical as an aftermarket accessory.”

Still, his company's products have capabilities that the devices used in the academic studies lacked, like Internet connections and detailed, real-time traffic information that covers surface roads, not just highways. The company has also devised optimal routes that draw on a large database of actual road speeds, built with data collected anonymously from TomTom customers.

But no technology, however sophisticated, will ever completely eradicate the Normal Natural Troubles of Driving With Humans.

South Korea Looks to Samsung and Sees Itself

SEOUL, South Korea - When a jury in San Jose, Calif.,  ordered Samsung Electronics to pay $1.05 billion in damages for violating 's patents for the and , it did more than decide who had infringed upon whose intellectual property. To South Koreans, the legal battles that the two giants are waging across continents have highlighted both the biggest strength and the worst weakness of Samsung in particular and of their economy in general.

“The ruling makes us reconsider the brand value of Samsung because it depicts Samsung as a copycat,” said James Song, who monitors Samsung for KDB Daewoo Securities in Seoul. “But a copycat or not, what Samsung has done with its smartphones was a brilliant move.”

“Look what has happened to companies like Nokia, Motorola and BlackBerry, which didn't do as Samsung did,” Mr. Song added, referring to competitors whose failures to adapt quickly to the smartphone boom driven by iPhones have drastically reduced their market shares. “Samsung may lack in innovation, but right now, no one can beat Samsung in playing catch-up.”

For months, the South Korean media have billed the patent lawsuits being fought in 10 countries as “the trial of the century”: Samsung, the world's largest technology company by sales, clashing with Apple, the world's No. 1 company by market value.

South Koreans took pride in the fact that Samsung, having already overtaken Sony and other Japanese companies it once mimicked, has now grown powerful enough to make Apple, the current icon of consumer electronics, feel threatened. But Samsung's legal trouble was also seen as a referendum on the way Samsung - and, by extension, the South Korean economy - has done business.

Calling Samsung 's biggest, most profitable and most globally recognized brand barely explains the intense and often mixed emotions the name evokes among South Koreans. In Samsung, they see the crown jewel of their country's transformation from a war-torn agrarian society into a global technology powerhouse.

Once an assembler of clunky transistor radios, Samsung is now the world's top seller of smartphones and high-resolution television sets, as well as memory chips and flat-panel displays that let those devices and others store and display data. When they travel abroad, South Koreans say they feel proud to see advertisements for Samsung phones.

But Samsung always had an image problem, a stereotype that it tried to dispel through a patent tussle with Apple, the epitome of American innovation. Although Samsung may be pulling in more cash than ever - 6.7 trillion won, or $5.9 billion, in profit on 47.6 trillion won in sales in the second quarter - it was seen not as an innovator but as an imitator, though a very efficient one, in products that it has eventually dominated.

Japanese companies have beaten rivals to the market with hardware innovations like flat-panel televisions and high-end mobile phones. Samsung waited for the others to test the market, and when it determined the time was right, it joined the fray to cash in.

Samsung's strategy was to build something similar to another company's product but to make it better, faster and at lower cost. When it pounced, it flooded the market with a wide range of models that were constantly updated with incremental improvements at a speed its rivals found hard to keep up with - a strategy best illustrated by its smartphone business. Heavy investments are not a problem; it once secured low-cost loans from a government-controlled banking sector friendly to big businesses and now draws on its own coffers, which are sloshing with cash.

Several years ago, Sony, Sharp and Panasonic were the first companies to market flat-panel televisions. But they obsessed over craftsmanship or held onto the old cathode-ray tube while dithering over the rival flat-panel technologies of plasma screen and liquid crystal displays, or LCDs. Samsung placed billion-dollar bets on mass production of television-size LCDs. Its economies of scale helped it drive down prices to create, then clinch the LCD television market.

AlleyCorp\'s Secret to Creating Tech Companies

Kevin Ryan reclines in a designer chair in his Park Avenue office, wearing a Luciano Barbera suit and a vintage Rolex watch. A picture of Mr. Ryan with President Obama is on the wall and an ornate Oscar de la Renta gown hangs from the door.

This is not a man who would blend in among the sneaker-clad start-up ranks of Silicon Valley. Yet Mr. Ryan, chief executive of the Gilt Groupe and a founder of several prominent Internet companies, is one of the technology world's most influential people, with a career trajectory that mirrors the rise of New York's tech scene.

Mr. Ryan and Dwight Merriman run a start-up factory called AlleyCorp, after Silicon Alley, a nickname given to New York's answer to Silicon Valley. It has churned out companies that have almost nothing in common, from e-commerce to publishing to database software.

When asked about this start-up grab bag, Mr. Ryan smiled and said, “Are you saying I have a focus problem?”

Gilt.com, which sells luxury goods like designer clothes and vacation packages, is considering going public next year. Business Insider, another AlleyCorp company, is a blog publisher with 19 million readers a month, run by Henry Blodget, the infamous former Internet stock analyst. And 10gen, which makes MongoDB, open-source database software that is used by companies like Disney and Foursquare, was valued at $500 million by venture capitalists who invested $50 million in May.

These companies contribute to New York's growing role as an Internet hub, particularly for the new generation of online media and retail companies. Last year, 256 New York tech start-ups raised $2.2 billion in investment, up from 149 and $1.3 billion five years ago, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

“Silicon Valley is on their fifth generation,” Mr. Ryan said. “We're on our second or third generation of New York entrepreneurs, combined with a bigger and better infrastructure to support it, so the scene is just mushrooming.”

Mr. Ryan made his name during the first tech boom as chief executive of DoubleClick, the digital advertising company that Google bought for $3.1 billion in 2007.

“He doesn't fit into the Valley mold as much, but he's definitely one of the most prominent people here,” said Chris Dixon, a New York tech investor and entrepreneur. “He went off and did this thing that entrepreneurs fantasize about, starting multiple companies and having them be really successful.”

Other veteran entrepreneurs are doing variations on the idea of a factory for start-ups, including Evan Williams and Biz Stone, two of Twitter's founders, who now run a start-up lab called Obvious, and Craig Walker, who developed the technology that became Google Voice and now runs Firespotter Labs. Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg, started a similar company called Milk before joining Google in March.

Mr. Ryan compares his formula to dating - try out a bunch of start-ups and see what sticks. He and Mr. Merriman started the companies and then hired people to run them when they began to take off. In the case of Gilt, Mr. Ryan hired Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson as co-founders, then returned to run it himself once it became big.

He now spends most of his time at Gilt but splits 10 percent of it between Business Insider, where he is chairman, and 10gen, where he is a board member. Mr. Merriman is chief executive of 10gen.

Two other AlleyCorp companies, ShopWiki for comparison shopping and Panther Express for delivering content over the Web, were acquired, but not at prices high enough to make the deals profitable.

Mr. Ryan's ideas are not novel. He borrowed the idea of flash sales at Gilt from vente-privee.com, a flash-sale site in France. Business Insider followed blog networks like Gawker Media, and 10gen's software is similar to Oracle's MySQL.

“Hardly anything is a really brand-new idea on a global scale,” Mr. Ryan said. “What makes companies successful is a different version of something.”

He considers his greatest skill to be hiring the right people. And increasingly, those people are in New York instead of the Bay Area.

When tech meant only hardware and chips, Silicon Valley, home to Stanford's computer science department and large swaths of land for big factories, was the obvious epicenter. But today, a new tech company is more likely to be in retail, media or advertising - all industries based in New York.