Business Development and Marketing Strategy in Early‐stage Technology Start-­up Businesses: The Importance of Understanding the Customer

The author sets out to explore the role of a marketer and the importance of the customer in an early-stage technology start‐up business when exploring the commercial options for a new technology or product. The author sets learning objectives around the use of an academic model to explore the development of the enterprise and the role of a marketer within a start-up team. In order to reach these aims, the author compares three strategic marketing models and draws on insights from academic and practice-­based literature to justify the use of Kotler and Armstrong’s Marketing Process Model. The author then implements Kotler’s model, detailing the practical elements of his role as the marketing and business development lead across three different projects, exploring the commercial potential for three different technologies/or products. The author recommends the use of Kotler and Armstrong’s Marketing Process Model for early-­stage start-up business teams that are exploring commercial options for a new technology or a product. He recommends a customer-­led approach to marketing within a technology start-­up team. The author recognizes the importance of a marketer’s role in establishing, maintaining and nurturing relationships with potential customers in order to drive and inform product development

Revising Reasonableness in the Cloud

Save everything—just in case––and search for it later. This is a modern mantra fueled by the ubiquity of smartphones, laptops, tablets, and free or low-cost data storage that leads users to store massive amounts of data in the cloud. But when users trust third-party cloud storage providers with private communications, they also surrender Fourth Amendment constitutional certainty. Existing statutory safeguards for these communications are lower than Fourth Amendment warrant and probable cause standards; this permits the government to seize large quantities of users’ private communications stored in the cloud with only minimal justification. Due to the revealing nature of such communications, the existing protections for them are insufficient under the Fourth Amendment. To prevent broad intrusions into users’ reasonable expectation of privacy, this Comment proposes an approach akin to Berger v. New York, where the Supreme Court invalidated a statute that allowed invasive real-time eavesdropping because the statute did not require sufficient particularization. Like in Berger, seizures of private communications in the cloud should require a warrant based on probable cause that is sufficiently particularized to protect against indiscriminate, large-scale data collection and roving searches by the government

Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel in its relations with contemporary French thought

This brief sketch of the currents and, cross-currents of contemporary French thought will, we hope, serve to illuminate many of the themes in Gabriel Marcel's doctrine which we are about to discuss, and also place this doctrine as a whole in the nexus of intellectual relationshipb from which no philosopher, least, of all an Existentialist, should be' sundered. It may also make clear that'the Existentialist movement in France is not only much more complex than would appear. to the uninitiated, but that its roots are, to a greater extent than is realised, and without discounting the obvious external, influences, in traditional French thought

Growth in Public Interest and Scientific Research on Kinesiology Taping

Kinesiology taping has grown in popularity, though there are a number of unsubstantiated claims made by some kinesiology taping advocates. An investigation was conducted into trends in general and scientific interest in kinesiology taping. Data in the public domain (Google Trends and Google Scholar data) indicated significant growth of interest both in terms of public search queries and scientific publications relevant to kinesiology taping. Cyclical trends in interest relevant to kinesiology taping were identified. Segmented regression indicated some of the growth in interest in kinesiology taping may be attributed to exposure of spectators of the Olympic Games to kinesiology taping in athletes. Despite substantial growth in research on kinesiology taping there remain unsubstantiated claims

An adaptive model for learning molecular endpoints

I will describe a recursive neural network that deals with undirected graphs, and its application to predicting property labels or activity values of small molecules. The model is entirely general, in that it can process any undirected graph with a finite number of nodes by factorising it into a number of directed graphs with the same skeleton. The model\u27s only input in the applications I will present is the graph representing the chemical structure of the molecule. In spite of its simplicity, the model outperforms or matches the state of the art in three of the four tasks, and in the fourth is outperformed only by a method resorting to a very problem-specific feature

Steps towards the development of a ‘culture of innovation’ amongst undergraduate industrial designers

Developing innovative solutions to problems is no easy task. Firstly there has to be a desire within the individual to seek out the innovative solution; secondly there is the problem of how to identify what constitutes an innovative solution; and finally one has to combat the natural tendency toward risk aversion. Successful industrial design is by its very nature innovative. Therefore generating a culture of innovation is a vital requirement in the development of a successful designer. Do we know how to stimulate, incubate and nurture innovation? What are the factors that give rise to an innovative mindset? This paper describes the experiences of an industrial design programme that for five years operated with a degree of success. However on review the programme was deemed to be lacking in innovation. Changes were made and after three years the impact was assessed and quantified and the results are now reported. Through the review strategies were developed which led to the creation of an environment for the promotion and nurturing of innovation appropriate to an undergraduate industrial design programme. Following the three year review further refinements to the model have been implemented, this will be the subject of further study

A two-stage approach for improved prediction of residue contact maps

BACKGROUND: Protein topology representations such as residue contact maps are an important intermediate step towards ab initio prediction of protein structure. Although improvements have occurred over the last years, the problem of accurately predicting residue contact maps from primary sequences is still largely unsolved. Among the reasons for this are the unbalanced nature of the problem (with far fewer examples of contacts than non-contacts), the formidable challenge of capturing long-range interactions in the maps, the intrinsic difficulty of mapping one-dimensional input sequences into two-dimensional output maps. In order to alleviate these problems and achieve improved contact map predictions, in this paper we split the task into two stages: the prediction of a map's principal eigenvector (PE) from the primary sequence; the reconstruction of the contact map from the PE and primary sequence. Predicting the PE from the primary sequence consists in mapping a vector into a vector. This task is less complex than mapping vectors directly into two-dimensional matrices since the size of the problem is drastically reduced and so is the scale length of interactions that need to be learned. RESULTS: We develop architectures composed of ensembles of two-layered bidirectional recurrent neural networks to classify the components of the PE in 2, 3 and 4 classes from protein primary sequence, predicted secondary structure, and hydrophobicity interaction scales. Our predictor, tested on a non redundant set of 2171 proteins, achieves classification performances of up to 72.6%, 16% above a base-line statistical predictor. We design a system for the prediction of contact maps from the predicted PE. Our results show that predicting maps through the PE yields sizeable gains especially for long-range contacts which are particularly critical for accurate protein 3D reconstruction. The final predictor's accuracy on a non-redundant set of 327 targets is 35.4% and 19.8% for minimum contact separations of 12 and 24, respectively, when the top length/5 contacts are selected. On the 11 CASP6 Novel Fold targets we achieve similar accuracies (36.5% and 19.7%). This favourably compares with the best automated predictors at CASP6. CONCLUSION: Our final system for contact map prediction achieves state-of-the-art performances, and may provide valuable constraints for improved ab initio prediction of protein structures. A suite of predictors of structural features, including the PE, and PE-based contact maps, is available at

Loyal after the End: The Endurance of Organizational Identification

This paper develops and tests a model of the role of organizational identification in members’ propensity to express loyalty to a defunct organization through participation in activities that sustain its most valued elements. It also identifies four antecedent factors to organizational identification that can explain its persistence after formal organizational membership ends as well as the effects of loyalty behaviors. Survey results were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling procedures. The resulting model demonstrated strong fit with the data according to several goodness-of-fit indices