Just in case you hadn't heard...

I should probably announce this 'officially' on here, although I doubt there's anyone who doesn't already know or at least have a clue:I'm going to be leaving the delightful world of academia to go and work for the even more delightful world of D-Wave Systems very soon. I'll be working as an Experimental Physicist.I'm very excited about this new job :)I feel that academia has been an interesting and enjoyable experience in many respects, but in order to work on really big picture, far reaching projects one needs to move outside the University research-grant-oriented framework. I think I've mentioned on this blog before about what I call the 'funding gap' - there is a lack of grant support to push research from a fundamental level to a commercial level in many areas of science. University schemes exist to help spin-off companies to start up, but there is not always a smooth transition between research and market. In particular, there are cases where there is an inescapable need to really ENGINEER a technology to a commercial level, perhaps for several years.I would class superconducting electronics and quantum computing as two such cases.