We recently spoke with Paul Saffo, the technology forecaster best known for his associations with the The Institute for the Future (which he left earlier this year) and The Long Now Foundation, whose mission is to replace society’s ‘”faster/cheaper mindset” with “slower/better thinking.” Saffo also teaches a course on the future of engineering at Stanford, where he requires students to envision their projects — 30 years from now.

Saffo says a startup must take a long view of its place in the world — even imagine its legacy — if it is to succeed, especially in a recession. And what, in his view, is the best way to achieve this? “Focus on doing good, in addition to doing well.”

F|R: It’s hard to stop and consider “the forest” when you’re just trying to get a beta launched, meet payroll and stay afloat to the next funding opportunity. Can founders pressed by such demands make time for the “long view”?

Saffo: It is hard being an innovator, so most entrepreneurs think, “I just don’t have time to think about the rest of the world. I’ve got other things to do.” But such a micro focus is actually bad for business. At Long Now, we often invoke the phrase: “The whole point of life is to learn how to become good ancestors.” If you brood on that at a business level, it says that it is no longer sufficient to do well. You must also do good.

F|R: An infamous litmus suggests there are only two kinds of founders: those who want to be rich, and those who want to be king. Where does the do-gooder-founder fit in?

Saffo: Every entrepreneur has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. The angel is saying “Change the world!” The devil is saying “Get rich! Get rich!” If you’re only trying to get rich, you’re not going to innovate. You’ll be like late arrivals in the dot-com bubble — the managerial equivalent of cholesterol in our veins. Only listening to the angel isn’t right, either. That just creates a children’s crusade — sounds wonderful, doesn’t get anywhere. Those who are most successful, like Steve Jobs, say, “Of course I will change the world. I will do something nobody else has done, and my just reward is that I will get rich.” But the Andrew Carnegie model of selling your soul for profit, then buying it back with good works won’t fly anymore. We all have to find our way to make a contribution, and waiting until you’re a big company isn’t enough. Quite simply, the world cannot wait for you.

F|R: Starved for time and resources, what sorts of good works can startups realistically do?

Saffo: In the dot-com era they bought billboards, so buy a roadside clean-up sign instead. Or in lieu of the Christmas party, donate the party money to charity. Let your employees vote on which one. These things are becoming quite standard in Silicon Valley, and they have tax benefits that help your cash flow. But this shouldn’t just be do-gooder activity. If you apply the same entrepreneurial spirit to it that you applied to creating your company in the first place, you will find ways to do good that benefit your company in very tangible ways.

It’s an old example, but look at Interface, the residential and industrial carpet company. It bugged founder Ray Anderson that his product was getting thrown out whenever anyone remodeled. So he wrote his 1-800 number on the back of his carpets. “Call us, we’ll pick it up.” Installers loved it because it eliminated dump fees. Customers loved, it was environmental, etc. So Ray takes it a step further: He stops selling carpets and starts leasing them. Now he says, “We’ll charge you if you don’t return it.” So people start replacing only the damaged parts, like corners that were stained. Guess what this inspires? FLOR tiles. Suddenly Ray isn’t in the carpet business anymore; he has innovated a whole new consumer line of “beautiful flooring.”

It all comes down to share of mind: If you do good, you stand out. And if you stand out, that makes your customers feel good, and you get more attention. So doing good is strategically valuable, especially in a recession, when you have to fight so much harder to win business.

There is some seriously good stuff on our network of sites today. Here are our top picks, for your Friday reading pleasure:

• NewTeeVee: Liz Gannes has a simple and logical way for YouTube to monetize the much-loathed but very popular user-generated videos, including Nora the piano-playing cat.
• Earth2Tech: T. Boone Pickens is set to spend $12 billion on the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, but his water investment in the area — around $100 million so far — could make an equally big splash for the ex-oilman.
• OStatic: Red Hat has entered the virtualization game by announcing their own hypervisor.
• WebWorkerDaily: Coping with FON-liness. One user decides that the WiFi-sharing service FON is not for him; he explains why he’s giving up on the service that promised to change the world.
• Refresh the Net: Why Five Nines is not enough when it comes to web infrastructure, considering how flexible the term availability has become.

I was recently talking to Richard Donaldson (an adviser of ours at Panorama Capital) of United Layer about a novel approach to optimizing data center cooling – using forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras.

United Layer rents a FLIR camera, he told me, the kind typically used to help pilots see at night or in dense fog, to create an infrared thermal image of equipment racks in which inefficient configurations can be easily detected. Once they’re found, United Layer works with the customer to redesign their rack layout, improving equipment performance, lifetime and total cost of ownership. Of course, this process also makes it easier to cool the data center, which helps control United Layer’s operational costs. As Donaldson explained to me in an email:

I think what we can see is that the “densifying” of the racks can become rather problematic when not thought thru – drive arrays should have spacing and be placed at base of cabs or close to cooling. I think that as existing facilities continually try to pack more into racks they will begin to really see how grossly inefficient the old “monolithic” paradigm of trying to cool the whole data center really is. The thermal images allow us to see exactly how each rack layout is good or bad for future design recommendations – all the temperature sensors in the world don’t give this kind of granularity…We also wanted to see real time thermal shots of our cold row heat containment strategies to prove and further illustrate what we knew from limited data.

Using FLIR to examine each equipment rack in a data center appears to be a novel and unique approach to optimizing cooling. I’ve seen thermal scans used to examine entire buildings for thermal leaks and hotspots, but never the use of FLIR to examine actual rack layouts in such detail. While a good quality FLIR camera sells for upwards of $10,000, Donaldson rented one for $80/day — what he called “an entrepreneurial approach.”

There are other new and interesting approaches to measuring the physical environments of data centers, such as the wireless sensors and benchmarking capabilities from Synapsense. But for $80/day I’m tempted to get Donaldson to hook me up with his FLIR camera rental company so I can check out our equipment racks myself.

Image credit: United Layer

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

In an interview published this morning in the Financial Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wouldn’t be looking to pick up any other Internet companies just because the Yahoo deal failed. One can only imagine how far shares of Facebook would have plummeted on that comment had the social networking site been publicly traded. Ditto for Slide and RockYou, both of whom recently raised money at lofty valuations.

“People don’t understand what they’re talking about,” Ballmer told the FT. “At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications.” And for Microsoft, according to the interview, the primary ad platform is search. That makes sense as search is a billion-dollar, proven business.

Application companies have some ad revenue, but right now they’re kind of like cable channels for the web, while an ad platform is the means to a business model that supports that cable channel. Microsoft wants to own the keys to the business model. So to prove their worth, it’s time for application developers to prove their business model.

Verizon President and Chief Operating Officer Dennis Strigl made a big splash at NXTcomm 08 yesterday when he announced that the entire Verizon FiOS footprint could now get speeds of 50 megabits per second. Typically such bandwidth news wouldn’t cause that much of a furor, but there wasn’t much to write home about from the show, which was held in Las Vegas this week.

In his speech, Strigl pointed out that the U.S. has the highest number of broadband users when compared with other countries, in particular that broadband is available in every U.S. zip code. Good point — and one that I’ve made in the past myself — except that it’s no longer true. By that metric, China now leads. Yes, the FCC used to defined broadband as a service that offered, at a minimum, 200 kbps downloads, but it’s since changed that requirement to 768 kbps.

But where Strigl went too far was when he suggested that three-quarters of American households have two providers to choose from — aka a duopoly, which is not my idea of a competitive marketplace. If you factor in wireless and satellite, he said, there are actually six or seven competitors. Talk about twisting the facts to fit one version of the truth! This part of his speech, however, had me choking on my breakfast cereal.

“Massachusetts and New Jersey have similar population density to Korea and Japan and similar broadband penetration. Unlike other countries, what we have accomplished has come not through [government] policy but through private investment.

How telling. So subverting government policy via lobbyists and highly biased friends at the FCC to ensure a future monopoly is all part of good, capitalistic, private investment theory? Maybe Harvard can include that in its future MBA curriculum.

Regardless, I thought it would be fun to see how Massachusetts and New Jersey really square up against South Korea and Japan when it comes to the price of a broadband connection:

Average broadband speeds in South Korea and Japan are 49.5 megabits per second and 63.6 megabits per second, respectively. The average U.S. speed is about 4.9 megabits per second, making it the 14th-fastest country in the world. The average price in South Korea and Japan is about 83 cents per megabit. In the U.S, it’s about $2.83.

But since it would be unfair to use average U.S. stats, I went with Verizon’s prices, the ones it’s going to offer in Massachusetts and New Jersey. On Verizon’s FiOS network, a 50 Mbps connection costs $140 a month — or about $2.80 a megabit. In fact, if you went with Verizon’s 20 Mbps service, you would be paying $3.25 per megabit. (To be fair, Verizon’s price-per-megabit is still cheaper than the $5.25 Qwest charges for its 20 Mbps connection, which costs $105 a month.)

In other words, not until Verizon starts selling a 50 Mbps connection for $41.50 a month and 20 Mbps fiber connection for $16.60 a month can Strigl get away with comparing U.S. broadband with that of the rest of the world.

OK, so AMD refuses to comment on rumors that it plans to introduce a low-power chip aimed at the mobile Internet device market, where it would compete with Intel’s Atom chipset and offerings from several other rivals. And it refuses to claim a block diagram floated by eeepcnews.de as its plans for such a chip.

I was kind of hoping AMD might stay out of this MID market opportunity and focus on its core CPU business and getting its promising graphics processor and CPU platform off the ground instead of chasing Intel, Nvidia, Via, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments and their hopes for a pocket PC market. Plus, AMD’s been here and done that — back in 2002, when it purchased Alchemy Semiconductor and its line of MIPS-based, low-power personal device chips. That deal was a response to Intel’s Xscale assault, and AMD turned around and sold the Alchemy line in 2005.

AMD did, however, keep the low-power x86 chips for the embedded and personal device market that it purchased from National Semiconductor in 2003. The x86 architecture was more familiar to AMD’s existing chips, and the Geode line is still used in low-power devices, but isn’t very fast and wouldn’t be competitive for the MID opportunity.

It’s surprising that AMD doesn’t have anything better on offer already. Especially given AMD CEO Hector Ruiz’s 50×15 project, which aims to get computers and broadband to half of the population by 2015. An AMD-designed, low-power, high-performance chip would have been perfect for the project and then later for the MID market. However, the One Laptop Per Child laptops AMD is using for the project use a Geode processor. If this diagram represents AMD’s answer to Intel and the gang, why the heck has it waited so long? They had a perfect market for an MID chip and they let it pass them by. If anything, AMD could have sacrificed short-term profits for large volumes if it had to. Its main rival isn’t shy about doing that.

Updated: Silicon Valley, once known for groundbreaking innovation and amazing new inventions, these days makes news by personnel moves and executive exits. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — but it’s worth pointing out. Here are some of the latest moves:

• Facebook got a new COO, Sheryl Sandberg, a month after Chief Revenue Officer Owen Van Natta left. Last month, CTO Adam D’Angelo left. Today, Matt Cohler, one of the oldest Facebook employees, left the company to join Benchmark Capital as a general partner. No surprise by Matt’s move because he’s really tight with the eBoys. His exit says a lot about Facebook and its future. Looks like Sheryl is making some changes there. Matt called and pointed out that I was totally wrong about his relationship with Sheryl, who remains a close friend of his. My bad.
  
• Jeremy Zawodny, ex-Yahooer, is joining Craigslist. I couldn’t be happier for him and his new bosses, for they are like peas in a pod.
• Yahoo is losing even more executives — Senior VPs Brad Garlinghouse, Qi Lu and Vish Makhijani are hightailing out it of Dodge, continuing a Yahoo executive exodus that started nearly two years ago but went unnoticed. The only organization more dysfunctional than Yahoo? The New York Mets. My two cents: Jerry should totally recruit from outside of Silicon Valley and bring in a lot of fresh blood. Yahoo needs a cultural cleanse, quickly.