Live Blogging from the NanoBusiness Alliance Meeting

So I’m here at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square attending the NanoBusiness Alliance meeting, and I thought I’d jot down a few impressions:

First, there is no square at Times Square-- it’s just a three way intersection of Broadway, 7th Avenue, and 45th Street. Now down in Murfreesboro, TN, which is the nearest town of any consequence to where I live, we have a proper square, with a courthouse in the middle, and traffic that circles around it. If you look up Main Street, you see the courthouse and the square right there at the end of it. Our square looks just the way that God, Walt Disney, and Norman Rockwell determined that a Square should look. None of those atrocious three story flashing billboards.

Times Square has a McDonald’s. The hamburgers cost twice as much as they would anyplace else, but I still doubt they make money, given the cost of real estate here. It’s got to be there just for the advertising value. Every TV shot of Times Square features McDonalds and its Golden Arches, right there at the intersection.

CNBC’s Squawk Box aired live from the conference here yesterday, so I guess nanotech is prime time stuff now, if you consider prime time to be 6:30 to 9:30 Eastern Time. Which it is, for financial junkies.

I caught the end of fellow blogger Darrell Brookstein’s act here yesterday. Wherein it was revealed that while there are many people interested in investing in nanotech, almost none of them are financial analysts or stockbrokers. Even right here in the belly of the beast. Nanotech still has few fans on Wall Street, apparently.

I also witnessed a “Keynote Address” in which Lux Capital’s Josh Wolf was interviewed by MIT’s Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. Josh is nothing if not intense. But he has this weird habit of leavening his shtick with ersatz Chinese proverbs. For examples:

“Kill one; put fear in the hearts of ten-thousand.”

Or, “A peasant was about to be put to death by the emperor. The peasant says “Wait. If you give me one year, I can teach your horse to talk.” The emperor thinks about it and decides, why not, what’s one year. The peasant’s friend says to him, “What, are you crazy?” The peasant says, “A year’s a long time—a lot can happen. The emperor may change his mind, the emperor might die, I might die, and perhaps the horse will talk.”

What does it all mean, and what does it have to do with nanotech? As far as I can see, nothing.

I think Josh has taken his cue from Chance the Gardener, Peter Seller’s character in the movie Being There. Chance was constantly making banal comments about gardening which the masses took for great wisdom. They elected him President. I always thought the movie was a commentary on the Reagan Administration.