Month: January 2017

Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos CEO. (credit: Getty | CNBC)

It’s been a rough couple of years for Elizabeth Holmes, CEO and founder of the now-floundering blood-testing company Theranos. The biotech company went from a promising golden child of Silicon Valley, at one point valued at $9 billion, to a disgrace that: put patients in harm's way with tens of thousands of inaccurate blood tests; had one of its two diagnostic labs shut down by federal regulators; lost high-profile business partners; and now faces a mountain of lawsuits. Holmes herself has been banned from the blood-testing industry (pending an appeal).

But the failures aren’t due to defects in Holmes’ unproven blood testing technology or from her hard oversell. It’s really due to a vast conspiracy involving a Wall Street Journal reporter, rats at her company, and a Hollywood movie deal worth millions—at least, that's according to long-time Theranos investor and personal friend of Holmes, Tim Draper.

In an interview with AXIOS, the venture capitalist claimed that “Elizabeth is the victim of a witch hunt." And the WSJ reporter who broke the story of the company’s problems, John Carreyrou, has “some strange vendetta” against her.

(credit: LBL.gov)

Although I write a lot about quantum computing, I've not really paid much attention to performing quantum computations with silicon-based qubits. Luckily Stephanie Simmons from Simon Fraser University in Canada helped me catch up.

The idea with silicon-based quantum computers is that impurities form the basis of a qubits. If you drop a single phosphorous atom into a silicon crystal, it replaces a silicon atom. But it has one proton and one electron more than the surrounding atoms. That single proton and electron behave like their own little artificial atom, one that looks a lot like hydrogen.

A good qubit needs to have certain properties: well=defined states that are long lived, the ability to create superpositions of states, and the ability to entangle and couple different qubits. Now, I don't want to delve into the meaning of any of these particular properties. But suffice to say that phosphorous in silicon does very well at several of these aspects, but it's not very good for coupling multiple qubits.

Enlarge (credit: Westworld, HBO)

Netflix has gleefully poked a stick at its competitors in the video streaming market, after revealing it had added more than seven million subscribers to its service in the last three months of 2016.

HBO also got a special mention. In a letter to shareholders, the company's boss Reed Hastings teased the TV drama maker by noting that, if the BBC was willing to stream shows before they air on television, then maybe HBO—which has rigidly stuck to its strategy of eking out episodes to viewers—should do the same. He said:

the BBC has become the first major linear network to announce plans to go binge-first with new seasons, favouring Internet over linear viewers. We presume HBO is not far behind the BBC.

In short, it’s becoming an Internet TV world, which presents both challenges and opportunities for Netflix as we strive to earn screen time.

But it's worth noting that HBO currently has an exclusive deal with Sky in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, allowing the broadcaster to have first-run rights on the likes of Game of Thrones and Westworld until 2020—so any such change isn't likely to happen in the near-term.