Venture capital, done the Google way

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--After a little over a year in the venture capital business, Google now has 10 start-ups under its wing and plans further growth in 2010.

A mobile payments company called Corduro became the latest start-up to accept funding from Google Ventures on Monday, as fund executives hosted a wide-ranging discussion on the state of Google Ventures at Google headquarters. Google wants to invest about $100 million this year in interesting emerging start-ups, said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures.

Bill Maris, managing director of Google Ventures (Credit: Google Ventures)

Google Ventures launched in March 2009, but the company had not said very much about its activities in the intervening year. Over the weekend, Google Ventures launched a new Web site and disclosed that its team of full-time employees had grown to 16.

A company most known lately for snapping up start-ups left and right, Google has separate goals in mind when considering venture investments, said CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt, who is an assistant instructor for a venture capital class at Stanford University, said Google wants to emulate the strategies and tactics followed by the traditional venture capital firms that turned groves of fruit orchards in the southern Bay Area into Silicon Valley, but with a Google twist.

Google is interested in compelling start-ups that have computational problems, be they risk analysis, algorithmic processing, or some other complicated type of numerical challenge that is hard for a small company to pull off but second nature to Google. Companies that accept investment from Google can draw upon individuals from among Google's engineering team for specific needs: one Google user-interface design engineer, Braden Kowitz, helped an image-recognition company called Pixazza improve the usability of their Web site and tools.

This is a completely separate project from Google's mergers and acquisitions team, Schmidt said. When Google buys a company it's usually because a project team has identified a need and researched the available companies, or when an interesting company reaches out to Google looking to get bought, he said.

Venture investing, on the other hand, involves "new speculative high-risk investments," Schmidt said. It's also distinct from the investments Google has made through its Google.org arm or the energy investments it has made in that it is being run with a for-profit mentality, he said. Schmidt also moonlights as an investor in Tomorrow Ventures, which does not list him among its partners but which he mentioned briefly to clarify that it was a completely separate operation from Google Ventures.

Google accepts employee recommendations for potential investments, reasoning that its employees are in tune with innovative start-ups in their respective fields.

"Googlers know a lot of people, and the employee base that Google Ventures can tap are people who understand subtleties that the average VC firm can't tap," Schmidt said. "That doesn't mean we are better investors, but it means we understand this stuff."

So where is Google putting its dollars? So far, Google Ventures has put money into start-ups that align with Google's broader interests, such as OpenCandy, a software-distribution and ad network, and English Central, which analyzes video on the Web to help students learn English.

But there is no overarching goal or philosophy behind Google Ventures, Maris said. Google's leadership triumvirate (Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page) does not decide where specific investments are made, although they do set the budget for the fund, which will likely vary on a year-to-year basis.

Still, Maris was mildly surprised to learn for the first time during the roundtable discussion that Schmidt wants Google Ventures to expand overseas in the near future.

Right now, mobile applications are the hot venture investment area because of the low cost of capital needed to get a couple of developers off the ground and the potentially high reward as mobile technologies continue to develop. Google is obviously eyeing that trend with investments like Corduro, but it's important to avoid a "herd mentality" when it comes to venture investing, Maris said. Schmidt took great pains during the discussion to paint Google Ventures as something complementary--rather than competitive--to the existing venture capital industry. Google has plenty of money and technological expertise but it does not have nearly the experience that seasoned VC firms bring to the table, he said.

However, Google Ventures can learn a lot from those firms, he said.
"Venture is a phenomenal achievement of America. My entire life has been defined by the people who created the venture industry," Schmidt said.

Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom.

Be careful when you send e-mails, you can get into trouble!

Never underestimate the power of e-mail

HAVE you ever written an e-mail about someone and sent it to the same person when your intention was to send it to somebody else?

Have you written an angry e-mail and decided that it would be better not to send it, and then accidentally press the “Send” button anyway?

Are you still naive enough to think that anything inappropriate you send out will not come back to haunt you one of these days?

Goldman Sach’s bond trader Fabrice Tourre, who calls himself Fabulous Fab, has learnt the hard way that there are no secrets when it comes to e-mail.

His most famous e-mail that is now broadcast to the whole world went like this: “More and more leverage in the system. The whole building is about to collapse anytime now … Only potential survivor, the Fabulous Fab … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

And if that is not enough, even his amorous e-mail exchange with “a gorgeous and super-smart French girl” is now a matter of public record.

For Tourre and other Goldman Sachs executives questioned by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last week, their e-mail trail going back to 2007 has provided much of the ammunition for the senators to grill them with.

Whether e-mail or SMS, the reality is that anything we put in writing is potentially a disaster waiting to happen.

If you don’t believe me, you should buy the book Great Email Disasters by Chas Newkey-Burden.
His book, published in 2007, is still selling well.

Asked by a Reuters reporter about Tourre’s e-mail indiscretions, he said, “People have always been indiscreet. We just have more power to mess up at our finger tips.”

According to the author, e-mail is convenient but highly dangerous. With an ill-considered click of the mouse, you can humiliate yourself in front of millions, lose your job or even end up in court.

Let’s get real. All of us commonly use office e-mail for private purposes. Although we are advised to keep our office and private e-mail separate, they often gel into one.

When we give out our name cards, our friends and contacts will often use our office e-mail to communicate with us, even on non-official matters.

Sometimes, we get unsolicited e-mail that may be deemed highly inappropriate from our company’s point of view but they still get through despite the various filters the IT department has put in.

I guess some will say this is an occupational hazard and part of the harsh reality of life in such an interconnected world. But we should never underestimate the power of the e-mail, and its potential of making us from a nobody to an instant celebrity.

Deputy executive editor Soo Ewe Jin was inspired to write this week’s column after watching “My Best Friend’s Wedding” on DVD where the character played by Julia Roberts wrote a fictitious e-mail to wreck her best friend’s wedding. And the Goldman Sachs proceedings too, of course.

Europe’s turn to face debt crisis

In the past, developing countries including in East Asia faced debt crises and suffered from IMF loan conditions. Today, a debt crisis has emerged in Western Europe that threatens the chances of a global recovery. 

THE global economy is slipping into a new crisis, with Greece being the epicentre and several other European countries already experiencing contagion effects.

It is quite surprising that Western Europe, considered a model of good economic governance, is now having to deal with a debt crisis.

Years and decades ago, debt crises hit Africa, Latin America and Asia as well as Russia and Eastern Europe.
The developing countries affected had always been accused of causing their own problems, with the faults variously attributed to corruption, mismanagement, bad governance and crony capitalism.

Greece is accused of fiscal irresponsibility, building up huge government debts and cooking the books to hide the extent of its deficits.

But it is increasingly difficult to ignore structural factors that contributed to the financial crises through the years.

If the lessons had been learnt from the Asian crisis that started in 1997, perhaps this European crisis would not have happened.

On the other hand, it is also vital to learn from Europe’s crisis so that Asia and other developing regions will not fall into new financial crises.

In Africa and Latin America, governments had taken too much foreign loans and crises developed when they did not have enough foreign exchange to service the debts.

In many cases, this was due to the fall in the countries’ commodity export prices, the rise in their oil import prices, increased trade deficits or economica lly unfeasible projects.

These crises exploded the myth that foreign loans to governments were safe as they could not default.
The pendulum then swung and it was thought to be safe to lend to the private sector as it would use the loans for profitable ventures.

The Asian crisis arose when too much foreign funds went to local companies.

This was made possible by financial liberalisation and deregulation. Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia relaxed the rules that had prevented locals from taking loans denominated in foreign exchange, and companies in each of these countries took foreign loans of over US$100bil (RM318bil).

The relaxation of rules also enabled foreign funds and firms to engage in currency speculation and manipulation.

The resulting collapse of the Thai baht had contagion effects on Indonesia and South Korea.

The three countries’ currencies depreciated and they faced default on their foreign loans and had to turn to the IMF.

Malaysia’s currency also depreciated sharply but it did not face a default situation because some regulations on foreign loans to local companies had been retained.

The Asian crisis exploded the myth that foreign loans to companies were safe because the private sector will make correct loan calculations and invest in profitable projects.

Now, the European crisis is exploding the myths that European countries are well governed economically, that there is no or little risk in loans to their governments, and that countries within the Eurozone are especially safe, as any nation in trouble will be helped by the others.

Many European governments have built up large debts and the loans have to be rolled over or new bonds have to be issued to service old loans and fund new budget deficits.

Greece has been struggling to obtain fresh credit to avoid a default on loans due this month.

It tried to raise new cash through the market but the interest has been priced so high due to the risks perceived that the government was unable to afford market loans.

For months, Greece has sought a loan package (at less than market rate) from Eurozone countries and the IMF but the terms and amount were still being haggled over, with Germany in particular insisting on stringent policy conditions.

Speculators have been blamed, including by some European governments, for making the situation worse by accentuating the increase in risk premium on Greek debt and the decline in the euro.

Last week, credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s downgraded Greek government debt (to junk status) as well as the debt of Portugal and Spain.

This triggered panic until moves for a final Eurozone-IMF package calmed the situation at the week’s end.
The package is now expected to be €120bil (RM508bil) to cover three years’ needs.

Even then a number of economists have concluded that eventually Greece needs a restructuring of its debts, with creditors and bond-holders taking a “haircut” or a partial repayment.

According to them, it is better for an orderly debt workout up-front now rather than a prolonged crisis and a possible messy default and unilateral restructuring later.

The fallout of a Greek default can be serious as European banks have US$189bil (RM601bil) exposure to Greek loans.

They also have claims of US$240bil (RM764bil) on Portugal and US$851bil (RM2.7tril) on Spain, according to a Financial Times article.

There are concerns that the crisis may spread to other countries through contagion.
According to OECD data, in 2010 the public debt to GDP ratios are 95% for Greece, 63% for Portugal, 42% for Spain and 38% for Ireland.

The public budget deficits are 9.8% of GDP in Greece, 7.6% in Portugal, 8.5% in Spain and 12.2% in Ireland.

Meanwhile, these countries are preparing austerity measures that are bound to cause a lot of pain.
In return for the loan package, Greece is asked to drastically cut government spending, salaries and allowances, freeze government jobs, overhaul the pension scheme and close state entities.

The angry reaction to this news in violent street demonstrations over the weekend shows how difficult it will be for Greece to agree to these terms.

When the measures are implemented, the reactions will be stronger. Asia can learn from this evolving European crisis.

It cannot be expected that governments can almost automatically roll over their debts or successfully float new bonds at reasonable interest rates.

Governments have to be disciplined in managing public finances and in limiting deficits and debts.
There also has to be the re-regulation of finance to avoid excessive leverage, speculation and unethical practices.

Global Trends by MARTIN KHOR

8 Sessions You Shouldn’t Miss at Web 2.0 Expo

Tomorrow’s web is being built by a vast community of programmers and designers spread around the globe. They’re all forging new paths on their own, but it’s when they find the occasion to get together and compare notes that the sparks really fly.

Such a gathering is happening this week in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Expo, a conference put on every six months or so by tech publisher O’Reilly.

Just like other developer conferences, there’s an expo floor and parties at night, but the meat of the event is the mix of talks, hands-on sessions, keynotes and presentations about all things web. There are sessions on browsers, Flash, HTML5, geolocation, JavaScript, advertising platforms, cloud computing and online communities.

It can all be a bit much, so here are our picks for the sessions you simply shouldn’t miss at the Web 2.0 Expo. Certainly, there will be others of great importance to you depending on your area of expertise (and you can view the full schedule here), but these are the sessions that we Webmonkeys are most looking forward to.
All sessions are taking place at Moscone West in San Francisco. The conference sessions start Tuesday and run through Thursday morning. Intensive educational tracks are taking place Monday, May 3. Follow coverage here on Webmonkey and on Twitter under the hashtag #w2e.

HTML5 vs. Flash: Webocalypse Now?

Tuesday, 10:00am, room 2001
Design guru and author Eric Meyer leads this discussion about the future of Flash on the HTML5-powered web. Don’t expect a Flash-bash session, though. It’s true that Flash has been taking a beating lately, but it still has a place in the modern, media-saturated web. Meyer will examine issues central to the Flash vs. HTML5 debate, including openness, security and performance.

A Conversation with Paul Buchheit

Tuesday, 4:10pm, Main Hall
This keynote interview will occur on the main stage, as Web 2.0 Expo program chair Sarah Milstein dishes the tough questions to Facebook’s Paul Buchheit. Now one of Facebook’s lead engineers, Buchheit originally arrived at the social networking giant when it acquired his start-up, FriendFeed (he was also one of the engineers behind Gmail at Google). Facebook has since incorporated many of FriendFeed’s innovations around real-time social publishing into its core product, the constantly-updating News Feed that scrolls down your Profile page. But that’s just the beginning of Buchheit’s story at Facebook. We can expect some discussion around the company’s new Open Graph platform it launched in April.

A Conversation with Kevin Lynch

Wednesday, 9:30am, Main Hall
On Wednesday morning, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch takes the hot seat. He’ll be answering questions about the future of Flash on the open web, on Apple and Android devices, and on developer’s desktops as a programming environment. Lynch often stays close to the Adobe script, but it’s likely that whatever he says will add fuel to the HTML5 vs Flash debate — already a heated topic among browser vendors, mobile device makers, and proponents of open web technologies. Web 2.0 Expo program chair Brady Forrest is the interviewer.

The Search Platform: Friend Or Vampire?

Wednesday, 10:15am, Main Hall
Where do you get your news? If you’re getting it from Google, content providers like Rupert Murdoch are gunning to shut down your favorite delivery system. There’s currently a lot of chatter about whether search providers have the right (via fair use) to reprint excerpts of the news articles they’re linking to, and most of the negative rhetoric is being voiced by news publishers. But on a searchable web governed by the link economy, there has to be a balance between linking and re-publishing for anyone to extract any value. Danny Sullivan of the Search Engine Land blog breaks down what it will take for search engines and publishers to get along.

What to Expect from Browsers in the Next Five Years

Wednesday, 11am, room 2006
This open discussion examines where the browser is headed next. No doubt, it will be smaller (fits in your pocket!) and more powerful. And it will probably handle your identity on social networking sites and play videos without plug-ins, too. Ajaxian editor Dion Almaer moderates the panel, and Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford (a JavaScript guru), Mozilla’s Brendan Eich, Opera’s Charles “chaals” McCathieNevile, and Microsoft’s Giorgio Sardo are the panelists.

The Innovative APIs Fueling Location on the Web

Wednesday, 3:40pm, room 2006
Former Webmonkey contributor Adam DuVander runs down all of the free tools available on the web for creating geodata-driven location-aware applications. Before you go, also check out Adam’s most recent project: Geomena, an open database of wi-fi access points you can use for geolocation.

State of the Internet Operating System

Thursday, 9:00am, Main Hall
Mr. Web 2.0 Tim O’Reilly kicks off the final day of the conference with his keynote presentation on what he calls the “internet operating system,” the collection of technologies and concepts — hardware sensors, identity, mobile phones, location APIs, advertising, cloud-based processing, et cetera — that are shaping the future of computing. Tied to our desktops no longer we are, young Jedis.

Web Fonts: The Time Has Come

Thursday, 1:00pm, room 2001
This panel looks at the state of typography on the web, and as you may be able to guess from the title, these guys think things are looking up. Fonts aren’t as limited as they used to be, thanks to innovations in CSS, JavaScript and web services like Typekit, which dole out really nice-looking fonts across the web using a new licensing model. Jeff Veen of Typekit is the moderator, and panelists include FontShop’s Stephen Coles and JQuery’s Paul Irish. For a preview on this topic, check out the very first episode of The Big Web Show, which discusses web fonts and features Veen as a guest.

By Michael Calore

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Making Rain Clouds With Lasers

Shooting lasers at the sky can make the germ of a rain cloud, a new study shows. In an experiment that smacks of science fiction, scientists used a high-powered laser to squeeze water from air, both indoors and out.


The study is among the first to propose a direct test of how quantum entanglement, an effect that inexorably links two electrons in a way that Einstein called “spooky,” could change the behavior of whole animals.

Although the technique is unlikely to be an instant rainmaker anytime soon, it could plant the seeds for more eco-friendly cloud manipulation.

“This is the first time that a laser was used to condense water from both laboratory experiments and from the atmosphere,” says Jérôme Kasparian of the University of Geneva, a coauthor of the study. The work appeared in the May 2 Nature Photonics.


Atmospheric scientists have been trying to build artificial clouds since the 1940s, with mixed success. The most popular method, shooting particles of silver iodide into the sky, relied on the fact that raindrops need something to condense around.

“It’s just like when you take a shower with hot water — it’s very humid in your bathroom, but it’s not raining,” Kasparian says. Water droplets need a surface to condense on, like a mirror in a bathroom or a speck of dust or pollen in the atmosphere.

Previous experimenters hoped droplets would form around flakes of silver, salt or other materials just like on a bathroom mirror. “The idea is, you provide more condensation nuclei, you get more condensation,” Kasparian says. “It seems obvious, but in practice no one could really prove that it works.”

Kasparian and colleagues took inspiration from a mist-making apparatus that was invented in 1911 to detect cosmic rays, highly energetic subatomic particles that come from deep space. A physicist named Charles Wilson noticed that when cosmic rays strike a sealed container filled with water vapor, they leave a visible trail of water droplets behind them. This works because the cosmic rays knock electrons off the water molecules, leaving behind charged particles that act like specks of dust for water to congeal around.

“Our idea was to mimic what happens in a Wilson chamber,” Kasparian says. “If you get some condensation with cosmic rays, we should get even more condensation with a laser.”

Kasparian and his colleagues tested this idea by shooting a high-powered infrared laser into a cloud chamber. The laser shot extremely short pulses of intense light, which each carrying several terawatts — or a trillion watts — of energy.

The view fogged up immediately. Droplets about 50 micrometers in diameter formed first, and grew to about 80 micrometers in diameter over the next three seconds. “The effect in the cloud chamber was very spectacular and visible by bare eye,” Kasparian says. “We expected an effect, definitely. But that magnitude was pretty much a surprise.”

Next, the researchers took the laser out in the backyard to try it on the sky. They rolled the laser, called “Teramobile” for its terawatt power and its mobility, onto the lawn behind the physics building at the Free University of Berlin on several nights in the fall of 2008. The clouds, if they formed, would be too distant to see with the naked eye, so the team used a second laser to confirm the cloudy view.

“It also worked quite well in the free atmosphere,” Kasparian says. “That was quite surprising, and a very good surprise.”

Kasparian thinks lasers could provide a more reliable and environmentally friendly way to build clouds. “If you can seed clouds and get some control or at least modulation on the weather, the implications are huge for agriculture, many other economic sectors, many aspects of human life,” Kasparian says. “There are potentially huge consequences.”

“It is a clever technique,” says John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. But he’s skeptical that laser-built clouds could actually make it rain on demand. “Rainfall production requires many conditions to be met,” he cautions.

Image: Jean-Pierre Wolf/University of Geneva
By Lisa Grossman, Science News

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Believing is Seeing: How Mindset Can Improve Vision

PhysOrg.com) -- How you see isn't just about how good your eyes are - it's also about your mindset, according to a study published in Psychological Science. For example, in one experiment, if someone was told that exercise would improve their vision, they saw better after doing an athletic activity - jumping jacks - than an unathletic activity with the same effect on heart rate - skipping.

The researchers, led by Ellen Langer at Harvard University, were interested in how the mind and body connect, particularly how mindset affects the body's performance. Langer has studied this kind of connection for decades. "Many of the things that we think we can't do are a function of our mindset rather than our abilities to do them," she says. In this case, she was interested in whether what we think affects how well we see.

People expect to see only the first few lines on traditional eye charts. Volunteers in an experiment who read a eye chart arranged in reverse order (the letters got progressively larger, with the giant "E" in the last row) saw a greater proportion of the smallest letters than when they viewed a traditional eye chart.

Another experiment took advantage of the belief that pilots have good eyesight. College students in the ROTC were brought into a flight simulator, given army fatigues to wear, and told to fly the simulator. They did simple flight maneuvers, then did an eyesight test by reading markings on the wings of planes ahead - actually lines from an eye chart. A control group of ROTC students was put in the same conditions, but they were told the simulator was broken, and that they should just pretend to fly the plane. The people who had performed like pilots, as opposed to those who just pretended, saw 40 percent better.

These findings suggest that visual acuity is influenced by mindset and might be improved by psychological means. Just being aware of this might help people improve their eyesight, says Langer - if they pay attention to when they can see well and when they can't, for example, or simply believe that they can see better when they aren't sitting in a dark room at the optometrist's office. These findings along with others from Langer's lab lead them to question how many of our limits are of our own making. The research is part of a larger inquiry into the psychology of possibility.

Provided by Association for Psychological Science

Source: http://newscri.be/link/1089861

Comparing China And India

 

I’ve been traveling around this week giving talks on my new Oxford University Press book, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, and one of the works I took along to divert me on planes and trains (I started it while flying to D.C. on Monday and finished it on an Amtrak ride to New Jersey on Wednesday) was an excellent new Princeton University Press publication by Berkeley economist Pranab Bardhan. As soon as I dipped into Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India, one thing that struck me was how much it had in common with the book I've been promoting--and not just because each is a general interest work by an academic that has been issued by a press linked to a prestigious university.


Here's a rundown of some similarities between the two works:

1) Each is short. (Mine clocks in at 164 pages; Bardhan's at 172.)

2) Each strives to dispel some common misconceptions about China, including the notion that it will inevitably democratize as its economy grows.

3) Each has only a small number of footnotes and tends to steer clear of specialized terminology.

4) Each stresses the dangers of making firm predictions about what is to come, yet ends with a forward-looking chapter. The last one in Bardhan's book is called “Looking to the Future: Through the Lens of Political Economy,” while the “The Future" is the title of the last one in mine.

All this could suggest that I would have trouble enjoying Bardhan’s book because of a sense that it was in direct competition with mine. This was not, however, the case. I was able to take pleasure in reading and learning from it without any niggling worry that people who buy it won’t be tempted to purchase China in the 21st Century. This is because, for all the similarities between the two books, there are a pair of crucial differences between them.

The first relates to topical focus. Bardhan is an economist, so not surprisingly he is primarily concerned with economic issues. Those are not the sole focus of my book, which explores topics ranging from Confucian thought to consumer culture, from generation gaps to the World Expo. Bardhan has valuable things to say about non-economic topics (politics, the environment, etc.), but his attention remains fixed throughout on the dynamics of development.

The second contrast between our books is even more important: his is equally concerned with two different countries, whereas I concentrate on just one (albeit with a variety of brief forays into comparison). Bardhan makes his interest in a pair of countries clear in his book’s title and subtitle: Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India. (One thing I like about that title is that it is refreshingly free of any allusion to a totemic animal. No cliched “dragon” vs. “elephant” word play for him.)

Bardhan writes with remarkable clarity about complex issues, such as the widely varying ways that corruption can affect the economy, and the positive as well as negative legacy of the Maoist era for China in terms of its recent trajectory. (For example, he stresses the importance of the upsurge of literacy during the pre-Reform era, which meant that a relatively well-educated pool of workers were ready to contribute to the country's take-off after Deng Xiaoping came to power.) He also shows some welcome stylistic flair, quoting poetry to good effect in one section (how often do economists do that?) and slipping a lovely bit of alliteration into the title of a chapter: “Infrastructure: The Dazzling Difference.”

One thing that I was relieved to discover when I reached the end of the book was that, while I certainly gained new insights into many specific issues from reading it, nothing I came across in Awakening Giants caused me to wish I could go back and alter fundamentally anything about my own brief treatment of China-India comparisons in China in the 21st Century. This is hardly surprising, though, since one person I read to prepare to write that part of the book was Bardhan--a fact I acknowledge by listing one of his recent articles (that is available free online) in my book's “further readings” section.

There’s a final contrast between our two books worth noting. Only mine was written in a question-and-answer format, a hallmark of the “What Everyone Needs to Know” series of which it is part. And yet, when I got to the end of Awakening Giants, I definitely felt that most of the questions I had about the Chinese and Indian political economies (and I suspect these are ones that other Americans interested in Asia are likely to have as well) had been answered very effectively.

Jeff WasserstromBio
Professor of History, editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know

Source: http://newscri.be/link/1089853

AMD risk on the rise for Asians; retinal vein 'bypass' may help many CRVO patients

The May issue of Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, includes a surprising, first report on increasing rates of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) among Asians, and describes an innovative "bypass" laser surgery that may help many people with central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) avoid serious vision loss.

Are Asians as Vulnerable to AMD as Caucasians?

A major review by Tien Yi Wong, MD, MPH, PhD, and Singapore Eye Research Institute colleagues concludes that Asians may be just as susceptible to age-related macular degeneration as Caucasians. Asians have long been considered a low risk group for AMD, which is a leading cause of vision loss in older Caucasians. Since the number of elderly people is increasing in Asia, Dr. Wong's study suggests that health systems there need to prepare for an onslaught of AMD.

Pooling results from nine standardized-diagnosis studies in five Asian populations (Japan, China, South Korea, India and Singapore), Dr. Wong's group confirmed prevalence of early-stage AMD as 6.8 percent and late-stage as 0.56 percent, comparable to Caucasians at 8.8 percent and 0.59 percent, respectively. All rates pertain to people aged 40 to 79 years. Also, among those with late AMD, the "wet" (neovascular) form appeared to be more prevalent in Asians than in whites. Asian men were more likely to develop late AMD than white men and much more likely than Asian women.

The researchers speculate that Asian men may be more susceptible to polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy (PCV), abnormal development of blood vessels in the deeper layers of the eye. Whether PCV is a sub-type of AMD or a separate disorder remains controversial; it is also unclear whether PCV responds well to medications that inhibit abnormal blood vessel growth (anti-vascular endothelial growth factor drugs such as Avastin and Lucentis) that help many wet AMD patients keep their vision.

"Future studies should evaluate whether there are 'Asian forms' of AMD and discern other racial/ethnic differences in Asian susceptibility," Dr. Wong said."Our meta-analysis could not adjust for important risk factors like smoking, common among many Asian men; nor did this study include all relevant Asian racial/ethnic groups," he added.

"Bypass" May Lead to Vision Gains for CRVO Patients

Central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) affects one to four percent of Americans older than 40 and very often causes severe vision loss, including "legal blindness" (20/200 vision). While current treatments reduce CRVO symptoms such as macular edema-swelling of the center of the eye's light-sensitive retina-none address the underlying problem, the blocked retinal vein. Ian L. McAllister, MD, Lions Eye Institute, Australia, and his research team took direct aim at the problem, using lasers to create a "bypass" around the constricted retinal vein with the aim of restoring near-normal blood flow to the retina.

In three-quarters of the eyes treated the "bypass" was successful, and patients achieved significant vision gains by the 18 month follow-up. This study was also the first prospective, randomized trial to compare the bypass approach, called laser-induced chorioretinal venous anastomosis (L-CRA), with conventional treatment.

L-CRAs were successfully created in 76.4 percent of the 58 patients in whom the procedure was attempted. Overall, bypass-treated patients achieved significantly better visual acuity and were more likely to gain 20/40 vision (the legal standard for drivers in many countries) than were control group patients. Bypass patients were significantly less likely to have moderate or severe vision loss. While about 18 percent of L-CRA-treated patients developed a significant complication-abnormal blood vessel growth at the surgery site-the researchers report that due to close monitoring and effective management, negative consequences from this and other complications were minimal.

"The risk of complications from L-CRA should be weighed against the substantial vision loss faced by CRVO patients with standard treatments," Dr. McAllister said. "In future studies of L-CRA, optical coherence tomography (not widely available when our study began) would be another useful outcome measure for L-CRA effectiveness," he added.

Provided by American Academy of Ophthalmology

http://newscri.be/link/1089328

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