The Cupertino company ran its latest iPad advertisement during Hollywood’s biggest awards show on Sunday evening, a cutesy, film-themed homage to its latest generations of the iPad.

Worth noting: This isn’t Apple’s first red-carpet appearance. The company has been running iPad ads since Oscar night 2010, where Steve Jobs himself showed up at the awards ceremony.

Enjoy:

This cataclysmic inevitability was brought to my attention over the holidays by my 6-year-old son. Far off though it may be, he believes our solar system’s imminent demise is cause for alarm sooner rather than later. (For him, that means sooner than getting a flu shot — but later than downloading the most recent service pack for Minecraft.)

Of course, I recognize my 6-year-old is thinking too far ahead. Too big.

But he did get me wondering, are the rest of us thinking big enough? Especially those of us who develop — and invest in — new innovations.

If not for being stuck on an antiquated United Airlines plane unequipped with Wi-Fi (is there any other type?), I may not have found the time to commit this thought to paper — I would likely have been overwhelmed by the next flurry of emails or meeting requests. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. In fact, as I survey the current startup landscape and consider the kinds of companies attracting VC dollars, it seems like the investing community isn’t thinking of the big picture at all.

Today, investors are less interested in transformative companies and more interested in trendy ones. Funding is flowing — and flowing fast — toward “quick-response startups.” These companies, more often than not, are launched during all-night hack-a-thons. They’re the wired brainchildren of eager coding buddies and Costco-like volumes of Red Bull.

Do many — or even any — of these startups, still in incubation, believe they can create a billion-dollar company on the heels of a market that’s already matured? No. And we don’t expect them to.

Because typically, companies like these aren’t founded to solve big problems — but rather immediate, narrow (and sometimes trivial) ones. For example, we now have dozens of VC-funded apps that help friends share photos, plan their weekend activities and order drinks more quickly in a bar. Yes, the first mobile photo-sharing app leveraged the social graph in unique ways and was — without a doubt — transformative. Three years later, however, startups continue to evolve the concept, but to what end?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a cool app as much as the next guy. But we can’t continue funding the companies that produce them at the expense of companies that produce truly breakthrough technologies and experiences. It’s bad economics, and, to the extent that this mindset pushes out true long-term transformative thinking, bad for humanity as well.

Indeed, these quick-response startups reflect — and perhaps are causing — a new and worrying trend: As a recent article in the Economist — “Has the ideas machine broken down?” — points out, today’s inventions are producing far less “economic impact” than inventions of the past. Progress actually appears to have slowed since the early 1900s.

It seems, in short, that we have reached a plateau when it comes to the more recent megatrends that stimulated great innovation: Games, social, local and mobile. Now that these digital revolutions are maturing, we’re just tinkering around the edges. Making marginal improvements. Tweaking the charger ports on our iPhones.

This trend, by the way, is not all that different from what happened in the late 90s — when the spread of the Internet was followed by VC investment in every dot-com commerce play imaginable, including dozens of pet-related dot-com startups. (In retrospect, one may have been too many.) In some ways, the early aughts saw a dearth of fresh ideas, too — right after the Web 2.0 innovations hit the market.

Now, we seem to be trapped by the narrowness of our own thinking again. And we have to ask ourselves: What will it take to buck this worrying trend, to push past this period of creative stagnation?

The answer? The same thing it took in the 90s and the early aughts: more companies like eBay, Google and Facebook — startups that brought to life world-changing and enduring ideas.

These companies may have been founded by “hacks” like the ones portrayed in “The Social Network.” But they were hacks that created massive waves of innovation, as did the founders of Yahoo!, Amazon and Twitter. They pioneered at the front end of huge emerging trends, from Web to commerce, from social to mobile.

Today, there aren’t enough of these front-end innovators. Years after these companies created new markets and experiences, we still have startups paddling out into the surf, hoping to catch the big tsunami that long ago passed them by.

What we need, in other words, are more wave-makers. More pioneers. More Yangs, Bezoses, Zuckerbergs, Brins and Pages, not to mention more Jobses, Fords and Edisons.

And make no mistake, the investor community — especially the VC investor community — has a role to play in encouraging that level of genius. In many ways, we just have to return to our roots.

It used to be that venture capital was the most ambitious kind of capital there was. Investors like me would fund startups, and not expect to see the payoff until five to 10 years down the line. We did so because we chose companies of extraordinary promise that trafficked in big ideas — businesses that, with enough time and money, could create products that changed the way humans interact on a day-to-day basis. Microsoft, Google and Apple — these are companies built with long-term VC investment. And they gave rise to the Age of Information.

So, going forward, let’s be as ambitious and smart with our capital as we once were. Let’s take more risks and be more encouraging of big ideas and bold leaders. We can’t get trigger happy with our funding dollars and settle for a quick fix or a “me too” idea.

Let’s also remember that innovation can benefit those living in the developing world. After all, innovation brought automobiles to India that cost less than $2,000 — and stoves to Africa that also charge cellphones.

And, most importantly, before we invest, let’s ask ourselves some crucial questions:

• Will this startup change the world — not just my world? Is the problem it solves large enough and its appeal wide enough?
• Does this company meet a critical, unmet need — or does it just bring simplicity or efficiency to an already-tackled issue?
• How difficult is the problem I want to solve? And is my solution unique, based on strong intellectual capital or a patentable idea? Or is it a piece of Web functionality that could be easily and quickly cloned, copied and resold?

In the past, investors haven’t always asked these questions. But if we start now — and answer them honestly and correctly — then we can unleash a new era of greater creativity and better returns.

If my tenure at Foundation Capital has taught me anything, it’s that investing in truly meaningful companies pays off. There are startups with world-changing ideas out there. And discovering what they are — and bringing their ideas to life — will require each of us to slow down and devote some time to big thinking.

If my 6-year-old son can do it, so can we.

Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, focusing on consumer Internet companies. He was previously a founding executive at TellMe Networks and at @Home.

Weird.

– The one-word answer given by Apple chairman Arthur D. Levinson Tuesday afternoon at Stanford Business School, when he was asked about his experience since Steve Jobs’s death

Image copyright iQoncept

Last year’s ruling against Samsung in its legal battle against Apple has demonstrated that the Korean electronics giant has been more capable in the latter than the former. An article in the New York Times highlights Samsung’s unique ability to move quickly from product concept to production to distribution. Anyone who has followed its mobile phone and tablet launches has probably noticed how short its release cycles are — so much so that most of the products banned by the ruling are no longer being sold.

But even with its wide-ranging portfolio of offerings, Samsung has never generated a game-changing product, even as it has aggressively dominated several consumer product categories — from mobile phones to flatscreen TVs. Whether or not you agree that Apple should be able to patent a rectangle with rounded corners, the indictment on Samsung’s lack of imagination is clear.

Why should this be the case for a company that is the cultural equivalent in Korea of Apple in the U.S.? One possibility could be an aversion to making mistakes, which skews the personal risk calculation involved in putting forward new ideas. Innovation happens in areas where there is no right answer, because no one has even asked the question yet. It requires that Jobsian knack for ignoring what people think they need and giving them what they want before they know they want it. It requires courage and knowing that you’re right.

Image: http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/08/24/jury_reaches_verdict_in_apple_v_samsung_trial

What’s particularly telling about this picture is not even the obvious relationship between the iPhone and the Samsung products after 2007. It’s that you can see clear echoes of Nokias, Blackberrys and Palm Pres in the models before.

Samsung, like many other companies, has played it safe, and this is the greatest temptation for all companies that have achieved some level of success. It’s easier to tweak existing operational machinery to achieve incremental but predictable improvements. Greater efficiency in development or manufacturing processes, lead acquisition or customer onboarding — these all help the bottom line and provide a sense of forward progress, of results that match the effort put forth. But it’s the “nobody gets fired for buying IBM” kind of activity that minimizes chances of disaster, and also prevents companies from experiencing major breakthroughs.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In my work in the open source software industry, I’ve also seen this sort of focus on incremental, operational benefits. Open source development methodologies can more quickly bring to market software that is more reliable and secure than proprietary alternatives, and we’ve been keen to demonstrate that with measurable results.

But this highly collaborative and open way of writing software can also lead to a lot of new ideas, and we’ve experienced this as well. Because our software is freely downloadable, Liferay’s ecosystem of users, partners and customers grew very large, and some used our products in ways they weren’t designed for. Because our source code is open, people have found new solutions to old problems themselves, instead of waiting for us to fix things. So it turns out that what’s best for operational efficiency and what spurs innovation can be aligned.

Here are a few of the principles we’ve discovered along the way:

• Architect your product and your ecosystem for innovation. There are a lot of great ideas out there, and sometimes the best thing you can do is give people space to innovate and quietly move out of the way. Create a space for innovation in some area(s) of your product (or organization) where people have complete freedom and independence, but which won’t risk the success or integrity of your most strategic product areas.

  At Liferay, we designed our main product so people can easily build complementary modules that add a lot of value to our platform without adding complexity or maintenance burdens to our engineering team. This model gives people freedom to try new ideas and solve new problems. If they’re successful, our Marketplace rewards their innovation by giving them a place to sell their apps to the Liferay ecosystem.

• Listen to your customers’ needs, not their feature requests. The truly groundbreaking products are those that address real pain points for real people, so it’s tempting to think that means implementing whatever they ask for. But customers usually make feature requests from the vantage point of an existing product, so they ask for incremental improvements thinking they can’t get anything immensely better than what they have today.

  But if you step back and understand why they want that feature in the context of their work, you will have a greater chance of designing a new solution from the ground up that gives them exactly what they need, in a totally unexpected way.

• Focus on the total experience. There’s no single feature in Instagram that makes it an extraordinary application. But the overall result is the equivalent of an “Easy Button” for being hip. Sure, the designers probably thought in terms of features (i.e., location mapping, comments, photo-taking, filters), but it’s how they put it all together for the specific purpose of sharing cool photos with friends that made Instagram a runaway success.
• Identify good ideas quickly. It’s popular to say, “there’s no such thing as a bad idea,” but we’ve all experienced otherwise, and no one has the time and resources to go after all of them. Gustav Mahler quipped, “I don’t let myself get carried away by my own ideas — I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day.” Learn from the design team at Google and put a priority on having a process to rapidly iterate through different product possibilities, reject the ones that don’t work and refine the ones that do.
• Think beyond the suburban office park. The long flight from our urban centers is over. Today’s enterprise workers increasingly live and work in dense urban cores. More importantly, they’re conducting business inside and outside the office; they’re getting work done in cafes, at home, on the plane or over lunch. The great technologies of recent years — cloud and mobile — are enabling all this and our products should almost be redesigned from the ground up for this new reality.

Better yet, if you can live and work in an urban center, these experiences will be all the more real to you, and put you in the right context to solve these new challenges.

Finally, remember that innovation is not just about new ideas; it’s about applying the right ideas in new ways for new situations. After all, even Apple has been known to borrow an idea or two.

Bryan Cheung is CEO and co-founder of Liferay, Inc., the leading open source provider of enterprise portal platforms. Drawing on his passion for innovation and open source development philosophies for technology and business, Bryan steers the company’s strategic direction and worldwide business development efforts.

1.) Salesforce CEO Benioff Invites Laid Off Yammer Employees to Work for Him

2.) Microsoft Could Make Billions From Office for iPad

3.) Apple Working on Fix for iOS 6.1 Passcode Hack

4.) American Express Cardholders Can Now Tweet to Buy

5.) HBO to Finally Let Subscribers Stream HBO Go to TV Over AirPlay

6.) A Big Year for Apple’s iPhone in India

7.) Bill Gates on Philanthropy, Steve Jobs and the Microsoft Product That Never Was

8.) Yes, Intel Is Building a Web TV Service (A Box, Too)

9.) The Cloud’s Dirty Little Secret

10.) Apple MacBook Pros With Retina Display Get Faster, Cheaper

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

That’s from a cutesy one-off question Gates answered on Monday afternoon while doing an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, the massive social news and entertainment website that often sees celebrity guests stop by to take questions from the masses (guests have included President Obama himself).

Many of the questions swung back to Gates’s current philanthropic activities; Gates is half of the head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where the two multibillionaires seek charitable causes to which they donate much of their vast wealth. That’s why unless you’re working on a malaria vaccine right now, don’t expect Gates to PayPal you a cool million bucks.

But the questions ran the gamut. After one user asked about Gates’s complicated relationship with former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Gates left this little bit of insight: “He and I respected each other,” Gates wrote, citing the landmark deal Apple made with Microsoft years ago to write apps for Mac computers. “I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away.”

Another user asked about the one Microsoft product that Gates wished had shipped but never made it to market. Gates cited WinFS, or Windows Future Storage, a “rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release” at one point, he said, but ultimately it was too far “before its time.” (For the uninitiated: It would have been an interesting release for the data storage wonks in IT, not something consumer-facing.)

Of note: People usually get him books for birthday presents (seeing as he can buy whatever he wants), he’d rather fight one horse-sized duck than 100 duck-sized horses (a Reddit AMA staple question), and he still thinks the “next big thing” will be found in “robots, pervasive screens” and “speech interaction” technologies — things he has trumpeted for some time now.

The best part, however, was how Gates ended the interview with a custom-made request: How do I eradicate this terrible picture of myself from the Internet?

Good luck with that one, Bill.

Common knowledge has it that PC shipments declined in the fourth quarter of 2012, undermined by a weak economy and an increase in tablet usage. But, if you include tablet shipments in this assessment, you get a drastically different result.

Research outfit Canalys did just that and found that worldwide PC shipments during the fourth quarter increased 12 percent year over year. And the PC market leader for that period? Apple. The company shipped 27.0 million PCs (23 million iPads and 4 million Macs), capturing more than 20 percent of the PC market. Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo claimed second and third place, with 15 million and 14.8 million PCs shipped, respectively. That’s about an 11 percent share.

Regardless of where you stand in the is-the-tablet-a-PC-or-isn’t-it argument, these are pretty interesting numbers. They speak to the shift we’re seeing in personal computing right now, and looking them over you can’t help but recall the “post-PC” credo with which Steve Jobs launched the iPad.

“A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they’re looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are built by different companies. And they’re talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with PCs.

“But our experience and every bone in our body says that that’s not the right approach. That these are post-PC devices that need to be even easier to use than a PC. That need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.

“And we think we’re on the right track with this. We think we have the right architecture not just in silicon, but in the organization to build these kinds of products. And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in this market.”