On May 18th of 2009, I signed the papers to legally incorporate my first company. Three weeks later, I graduated from MIT with my BS in biological engineering. Fast forward, and after 10 months of working on the venture, it was decided to not continue.

After failing to get the outcome the team had hoped for, some questions loom: did I make the right decision to jump into the entrepreneurial arena so early in my career? Is it generally a good idea to start a company right out of college?

Before I answer these questions with the benefit of hindsight, I’d like to first take you through the process that led to my decision to just go for it.

During the year prior to making this decision, I had spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do after graduation. I knew I wanted to be a part of the entrepreneurial community, so I began learning all I could about the entrepreneurial process. I read everything I could get my hands on, I talked my way into relevant MBA courses at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, I did projects for startups and venture funds, and I sought advice from members of the entrepreneurial community.

I received a variety of opinions on the best route for getting into the land of startups. Here are the three most common views, along with my brief analysis of each:

Go get a job. Learn how real business is done first. This is the safe advice, which is why it is the most prevalent. By getting work experience, you get a chance to really develop your network, expertise, and understanding of problems in a specific industry. However, working in a mature business isn’t anything like a startup.

Go work for a startup. “Startup” work environments, of course, vary heavily. Some startups are a couple of guys working out of their apartment trying to find a way to make some revenue. Others are more like developed companies, with office space, hours, and managers.

At the time, to me, joining a later-stage startup didn’t seem all that different from getting a job at a more mature company. Joining a smaller band of warriors setting out on the start-up road would have been difficult. In the early stages, such efforts mainly need engineers to get a prototype built. I knew how to code, but programming wasn’t my forte. All in all, this wasn’t a very good option in my eyes.

If it feels right, go do it. The negatives for starting a company immediately after school are the lack of experience, network, credibility, and money. But, there are many positives:

• Access to a lot of help. I find the entrepreneurial community to be incredibly supportive, with lots of vibrant, experienced people happy to help students. I had access to tons of great people through the MIT and Boston communities. I talked with professors, cold called and emailed alumni, and just found a way to get in touch with people. Not everyone would respond, but those who did were extremely helpful.

• Low opportunity cost. You aren’t walking away from a high-paying job in order to attempt a startup, so you have little to lose financially if it doesn’t work out.

• Low responsibility. By this I mean you …Next Page »

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The second half of 2009 provided a good measure of optimism, easing some of the pain investors felt toward the end of 2008 and in early 2009. The stock market has been volatile but up significantly overall. There are signs of increased lending activity. Mergers and acquisitions have picked up. And there’s a pulse in the IPO market.

Yet despite indications of recovery, we shouldn’t be lulled into thinking we’re over the crisis. The labor, housing, and consumer markets are still struggling. And there’s still plenty of fear and uncertainty as we emerge from the longest downturn since the Great Depression.

Keeping that cautionary note in mind, what do the recent positive strands of hope in the IPO, M&A, and credit markets tell us?

To begin with, a potential increase in IPO listings isn’t necessarily a signal that capital markets have returned to normal. Why? Because the companies coming to market are the best of the best, the ones who have survived the past 24 months of havoc and have continued to build on sound business fundamentals.

And that’s the point—we’re not out of the woods yet; every company that wants to go public isn’t going to succeed. After the initial IPO backlog is worked down, the next wave of public offerings, if any, will continue to present a challenge and will come from specific sectors that investors see as the leaders in potentially expanding markets—for example, health care services and technology, financial services, and software and software services. Other, more traditional companies that can provide a compelling investor advantage and return will also be in the IPO mix.

Job growth in the health services and education sectors and annualized spending growth in the equipment and software sectors—ranging from 10 percent to more than 30 percent from Q3 2008 to Q1 2009, and evidenced by recent quarterly earnings growth by industry leaders—give some hint of recovery as well as an indicator of where the money may flow in the near future. Still, even though many institutional money managers need to invest and are waiting for the right opportunities—including IPOs—don’t expect to see a boom.

In fact, it may end up that growth will be fueled more by the credit markets than …Next Page »

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When they write the book on great libraries of the world, a few legendary names will come to mind: Alexandria; Pergamum (the city where papyrus is said to have been invented) in what is now Turkey; the British Library; the New York Public Library; and of course, the U.S. Library of Congress. The new public library here in Cambridge, MA, will not be on anyone’s list. But I have been driving down Broadway past its construction site for several years now, watching as it went from a hole in the ground to a beautiful ultra-modern structure that opened Sunday afternoon. And the same thought passed through my mind each and every day: A great library for a great innovation city.

So you can bet I was there Sunday for the official opening (although I waited until halftime of the Patriots game)—and joined hundreds of others who had descended on the place. Everyone was oozing excitement. And although the checkout line stretched from the spectacular lobby halfway up the stairs to the second floor—it turns out some 1,750 visitors passed through in the three hours the library was open Sunday–no one was complaining. The director, Susan Flannery, couldn’t be happier. “Yesterday, in three hours, we checked out over 4,000 items,” she told me on Monday. “We had a ton of high school kids here today.”

I know writing about a public library is a stretch for biz-tech news blog like Xconomy. But at the same time, education and learning is the source of innovation—and I was personally so inspired by the library that I couldn’t help writing about it. Given the way it was drawing students, especially, I even asked Flannery if we could expect a renaissance of learning and innovation here in Cambridge as a result of the library. Cambridge has always been rich in learning, she responded, not quite taking the bait. “We’re just making it more appealing and easier to do.”

But there are a few things on the technology front worth mentioning that at least go toward that end. Free public Wi-Fi is available throughout the building. The library has nearly 100 publicly accessible computers (a few are dedicated to online catalogs, but the vast majority are unrestricted). About 20 are in a dedicated computer room, another dozen in the teen room, 10 or so in the children’s room, 8 in the research room, and the rest spaced throughout the facility (sadly, they are all Windows machines—no Macs!). There is also an extensive digital media catalog for downloading e-books and audiobooks—but that’s part of the overall Minuteman Library Network that serves 42 libraries in the Metrowest region of Massachusetts and is not special to the new Cambridge library. Flannery says the library has a grant that will allow it to buy some handheld electronic readers (a la Kindle) that may be available for loan, and that it also plans to add Nintendo Wiis to the teen room and purchase a couple of interactive white boards for the general library that can be used for everything from watching movies to collaborating on projects through their touch interface.

4,000 items were checked out in 3 hours.

But back to my tour. There are three floors above ground and two below—and the modern new structure connects to the old main library, which itself has been completely redone. (Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the public high school, is the next building down—and it is fantastic that this great library is within such easy reach for students. I can happily report that both my kids, who attend Rindge and Latin, can’t wait to go and study there—and if their peers feel the same, the project might have already paid for itself.) I roamed all over the building: the only place I couldn’t go was the lowest level, which houses meeting rooms and a 230-seat auditorium and was closed off for the day. “It’s fabulously gorgeous,” says Flannery of hte auditorium. She says that in addition to state-of-the-art audio/visual system, the space is equipped with an audio enhancement system for the hearing impaired.

The total cost of the project was $90 million, Flannery says (though that included other, non-library work done in conjunction with the renovation). The state contributed a $10 million grant, and the rest was paid for by the city of Cambridge, she says. The lead architects of this great library are William Rawn Associates of Boston, with Ann Beha Architects, also of Boston, as the associate architect. With no floor or carpet glues or other volatile organic compounds, a lighting system that shuts off when there is enough light from the sun, and bamboo flooring in the children’s room, it will be LEED certified as a green building. And here is the landing page for all sorts of other information about the library.

But I didn’t really interview anyone in depth for this story. I just went in, scribbled notes, and took a bunch of pictures. And I reveled. Below are my photos (the first two were taken earlier this fall) and some impressions: the captions come above the images. Click on any image to make it larger.

The long view from Broadway.

Old library meets the new. A glass hallway and courtyard connects them.

Opening day, Sunday, November 8, 2009.

In we go. The place was ablur with action. Really—it isn’t the photo.

To continue viewing photos, go to the next page. …Next Page »

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[Updated 11/2/09 with additional details about 3rd-generation laptop design, see page 2] After the October 24 announcement that the Internet Archive is about to make 1.6 million e-books available free to children with XO Laptops from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, we decided it was time to catch up with OLPC’s founder and chairman, Nicholas Negroponte. The organization has been through drastic changes of late, including a round of layoffs early this year necessitated by disappointing holiday 2008 sales and the pullout of major sponsors, and the subsequent spinoff of its sales and education-software efforts. But last time we talked with Negroponte, back in January, he had ambitious plans for rebooting the One Laptop effort, with an emphasis on getting the computers into new markets.

We wondered how the organization was progressing toward some of the goals Negroponte had laid out in the January interview. Last week, he took time on a recent plane trip to respond to a set of written questions. We’ve reproduced them below, with a few explanatory comments appended.

Of perhaps greatest interest, Negroponte told us the organization has scrapped plans unveiled in May 2008 for an e-book-like second-generation XO laptop, instead focusing on an upgraded version of the current XO and designs for a “3.0″ version of the device that will be “more like a sheet of paper.” And whereas the XO was once described as the “hundred-dollar laptop,” Negroponte said experience has indicated that the total cost of ownership for the device, including Internet connectivity, is closer to $1 per week per child. This amount is “high” but “not outrageous,” in Negroponte’s view; he says discussion in most countries where OLPC is operating has shifted away from whether the machines aid education efforts and toward how to pay for them.

Xconomy: What do you see as the main significance in the Internet Archive making e-books available for the XO Laptop?

Nicholas Negroponte: A further example of why olpc (lowercase) is not just education as we knew it and how learning opportunity can reach the most isolated places in the world.

[Editor's comment: As Negroponte explains below, the organization is actually two separate bodies now---the One Laptop Per Child Association, which builds the XO Laptop, and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, whose mission is to stimulate grassroots technology and education efforts in developing countries. Both groups are undergoing a rebranding of sorts, switching from OLPC to the lowercase "olpc."]

X: You had set as a goal back in January one million digital books. Looks like you overshot. Do you have a new goal? Five million?

NN: No. The next few million do not matter. It is like laptops. There are over a million in the hands of kids in 19 languages and 31 countries. The next million are …Next Page »

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How does $300,000 an hour sound? Walking away with $5,000 for his 60-second pitch, the winner of Thursday night’s MIT $100K Elevator Pitch Contest (EPC), Rouzbeh Shahsavari, seemed pretty excited about it. His idea? Nanoengineered concrete that is twice as strong, cuts CO2 emissions in half, and is dramatically cheaper than typical concrete.

The EPC is the first of three contests that comprise the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. It will be followed by the Executive Summary Contest and the Business Plan Contest. Now in its third year, the EPC is growing at an incredible rate. With over 350 registrations, we had more submissions this year than in the previous two years combined. As for its capacity to produce innovative ideas, just ask Riccardo Signorelli, the winner of last year’s EPC. Last week the Department of Energy awarded his company, Cambridge, MA-based FastCAP Systems, a $5.3 million grant to develop nanotechnology-enhanced batteries.

As an organizer of this year’s EPC, the experience has been pretty incredible. I distinctly remember how much energy I felt in the room during our kickoff meeting, and things seemed to take off from there. I was repeatedly amazed at the amount of work and energy that my peers put into organizing the events. All of that work finally came together at the finale show Thursday night (for a taste of that energy, see the crowd shot below and the small photo gallery at the end of this post).

The finale really does have a lot theatrics to it. With ”Space” as this year’s theme, the emcees were dressed as astronauts against the background of a giant spaceship made out of PVC pipe (This is MIT after all, what else would you expect?). Audience members clapped thunder-sticks together and shouted “3, 2, 1, Liftoff!” before each presentation. In addition to the pitches, the show featured an interview with the winner of last year’s BPC, Waseem Daher. When asked about the interview experience, he said: “Being a speaker was a lot of fun—it was definitely strange being on the ‘other side’ so soon, because I definitely still see myself in the shoes of the participants…taking a bold new idea—in our case, rebootless software updates—and making the case for it to everyone who is willing to listen (and some who aren’t).”

The format of the event kept the excitement level pretty high as well. The top 10 finalists from each of six tracks (Energy, Life Science, Development, Mobile, Web/IT, and Products & Services) were announced before hand and asked to be in attendance. Of those 60, the top 2 from each track would then deliver their elevator pitch to the audience and judges. However, the finalists didn’t know who they were until their name was announced and they were called down to give their pitch then and there.

During the preliminary rounds I was mainly out front at the registration desk, so I didn’t get a chance to preview many of the pitches. Seeing them at the finale, I was astounded by …Next Page »

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There’s a big argument over whether venture capitalists and even angel investors are doing as many early stage or small deals these days. The general sentiment is that no, they aren’t. Since we began our monthly roundup of Massachusetts venture deals back in June, however, we’ve argued that the data doesn’t support that view: virtually every month, the number of seed and Series A rounds has topped the number of later-round financings, and often by a wide margin.

Now comes what could be another blow to the small-deal naysayers: new data on the extremely small deals—those between $100,000 and $1 million—that typically aren’t reported in financing tabulations. As my colleague Greg Huang, Xconomy’s Seattle editor, wrote in his own look at small deals in the Northwest earlier this week: “Though small in size, these investments need to be included along with the bigger deals that get more press, if you want a more complete picture of the funding landscape in the innovation community.”

It turns out there were 10 of these “under the radar” high-tech deals—7 in Massachusetts, 2 in Connecticut, and 1 in New Hampshire (see table below)—in New England in September, according to data supplied by our partner ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company that tracks VC, angel, and other investments in private companies.

Six of the 10 deals involved equity investments; the remaining four were debt financings. And they spanned a wide range of fields from medical displays to tracking tags to new approaches to education. To me, the most interesting was OmniGuide, a Cambridge, MA, company we’ve written about before that took in $249,999 (you gotta wonder why that figure). OmniGuide, which raised $1.8 million in May, $25 million last year, and some $50 million before that (it’s a long story, go here), makes highly precise optical laser scalpels; its chairman is Analog Devices founder Ray Stata, and the CEO is MIT materials scientist Yoel Fink.

As the parent of two teenagers, I was also highly interested in the Westonian Group, which raised $170,250. The Westonian Group doesn’t appear to have a website, but it is the company behind Abroad101, a website for sharing information about study abroad programs.

Here, then, are our 10 “under the radar” deals from September.

Carrot Medical (Waltham, MA)                 Equity           $635,000
Ultra-high-definition displays for medical images

SoundTag (Braintree, MA)                         Equity          $535,000
Tracking tags for priority shipments

TenMarks Education (Newton, MA)          Debt            $350,000
New approach to math, science, and English education for children

SpecPage (Attleboro, MA)                           Equity          $313,000
Product marketing information exchange for food service and janitorial industries

SeeClickFix (New Haven, CT)                    Debt              $265,000
Technology for reporting and tracking non-emergency issues via the Internet

OmniGuide (Cambridge, MA)                   Equity             $249,999
Designs and manufactures highly precise optical laser scalpels.

Validus DC Systems (Brookfield, CT)         Debt              $204,000
Direct current power infrastructure for data and telecom centers

Paneve (Florence, MA)                                 Debt               $175,000
Software and hardware to reduce the costs of delivery and display of video media content

Westonian Group (Weston, MA)                Equity             $170,250
Company behind Abroad101, an interactive online community around study abroad programs

EnerTrac (Hudson, NH)                               Equity              $125,000
Fuel, oil, and propane tank monitoring products

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There’s a new tech startup incubator in town. The Founder Institute is accepting applications for its four-month training program, which begins in Seattle on December 7. The program is designed to mentor very early-stage entrepreneurs, with the goal of creating new companies across a wide variety of tech sectors including software, social media, consumer electronics, e-commerce, medical devices, and cleantech.

The program fits with a trend of increasing resources for entrepreneurs in the Seattle area. The Founder Institute was started by Adeo Ressi, the founder of the venture capitalist rating site TheFunded. The incubator recently completed its first session in Silicon Valley, graduating 54 companies (three of which have since rustled up outside funding), and has also announced expansions to San Diego and Washington DC.

Chris Early is leading the Seattle program. He’s a game industry veteran who was most recently general manager of Windows Gaming Technology at Microsoft. He left the company earlier this year, and caught up with Ressi around a month ago over drinks. (The two had known each other for years from the game industry.) Early suggested that Ressi should expand his program to Seattle, and it sounds like it didn’t take much convincing. “It’s been a whirlwind month putting it together here,” Early says.

As he explains, the concept behind the Founder Institute arose from what Ressi was seeing with TheFunded. “A large number of people were coming through at a pre-company stage,” and they were looking for mentorship and money to get started, Early says. So the Founder Institute provides classes on every step of the startup process, led by experienced mentors, including Derrick Morton, the CEO of FlowPlay, and Bryan Starbuck, the CEO of TalentSpring. About a third of the mentors will come from out of town, including David Kidder of Clickable.com and Bryan Thatcher of Empressr (both from New York). The ideal students are entrepreneurs with new companies—less than two years old—or just promising ideas. The goal is for every student to have a business plan and a polished pitch for their company by the end of four months.

OK, so everyone knows entrepreneurs, especially first-timers, need a lot of mentorship. But what’s different about the Founder Institute compared with incubators like Y Combinator …Next Page »

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I can’t do justice to a comprehensive review of yesterday’s FiReGlobal (West Coast) conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. Instead, I’ll just give a few of my key takeaways. The all-day event, organized by Strategic News Service, focused on how to solve some of the most pressing problems in technology, business, and society—in areas as diverse as broadband access, entrepreneurship, education, sustainability and the environment, political discourse, human health, and mobile devices.

The sweeping conference had the tagline, “Global technology driving local solutions.” Interesting, as that’s sort of the reverse of Xconomy’s mantra, which is reporting about local stories with global impact. But I think they’re two sides of the same innovation coin.

So, in “ESPN plays of the day” style, here’s my top 10 list from the conference (if only I had the video to go with it):

10. Setting up entrepreneurial zones. A panel led by Ty Carlson of Microsoft proposed denoting special “R&D zones” from Oregon to British Columbia geared toward supporting startups in fields like renewable energy, sustainable farming, and biotech. The idea would be to offer tax credits and other incentives to create a more entrepreneurial culture in the Northwest, especially in rural areas.

9. What government should and shouldn’t do. Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias of Seattle-based Kashless said, “Startups and investors can’t make a 10-year bet when you have a two-year tax credit.” Those conditions freeze out small companies, especially in costly ventures like energy. So government should create open markets and set minimum market sizes for new technologies, Tobias said. But it shouldn’t pick the technology winners themselves.

8. Northwest tech startups do the Olympics. Tom Guthrie, CEO of Seattle-based Twisted Pair Solutions, said his company has helped numerous agencies on the Olympic Peninsula inter-operate their radios—a key problem in disaster response and other scenarios. Twisted Pair, which is backed by Ignition Partners and other investors, is also working on a laser system to deliver broadband signals. Meanwhile, Paul Manson, CEO of Vancouver, BC-based Sea Breeze, talked about his company’s project to build a high-voltage, direct-current undersea cable between Victoria, BC, and Port Angeles, WA. This would be a fast, controllable power transmission component of a smart grid; it should be under construction by mid-2010, he said.

7. The world according to Dell. In a chat with Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service, Michael Dell said he is excited about China and the rest of Asia as fast-growing economies. He anticipates a U.S. recovery from the recession, but says, “I don’t think you’ll see an immediate snap-back.” And he likes South America as an emerging market (Dell does sales of more than $1 billion in Brazil alone). But Europe, not so much—he sees a lot of uncertainty in the workforce there.

6. Get ready for Dell smartphones. “Mobility is absolutely the theme,” Dell said. He was talking about the relative importance of desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices to …Next Page »

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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, or “the stimulus”) totaled approximately $787 billion. Of this, approximately $21.5 billion (2.7 percent) was for the support of R&D—$18 billion for the conduct of research and $3.5 billion for facilities and equipment.

Why R&D as part of the stimulus? Because it employs people (that’s what we do with federal research grant funding), but more importantly, because it lays the foundation for America’s world leadership. Consider my own field, computer science: just about every sector of the information technology industry can trace its roots to innovations arising from federally-sponsored research. The challenges that our nation faces today—in information technology, energy, health care, transportation, and other fields – will only be surmounted with a vigorous program of R&D.

ARRA R&D funding was distributed across the full spectrum of federal science agencies. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) received the lion’s share: $10.4 billion. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was next, at $2.9 billion, followed by the Department of Energy (DoE), at $2.4 billion, and others. Awards are only just beginning to be made—quality is ensured through a highly competitive peer-reviewed proposal process that inserts some unavoidable delay in the loop.

So, how’s it going? NIH is the only agency with an easily accessible database of ARRA R&D awards. As The Seattle Times recently reported, the University of Washington currently is tied with the University of Michigan for the largest dollar value of first-year ARRA R&D awards from NIH: $99 million. (Most research awards extend over multiple years, but the NIH database reports only the first year of funding.)

It’s worth reflecting on how remarkable this is. Here are the numbers for a dozen top-ranked institutions nationally:

First-Year NIH ARRA Research Funding for
12 Universities With Top Research Medical Schools
As of 10/5/2009

Annually for several decades, the University of Washington has ranked among the top few institutions in the nation in federal research obligations—research at UW brings $1 billion to the state annually, employing thousands and enriching the education of thousands more. This NIH ARRA research award performance is consistent. However, despite this extraordinary performance, lack of institutional diversity hurts Washington State overall. Our state has 385 NIH ARRA research awards: 241 to UW, 48 to the Hutch, 21 to Seattle Childrens, and a total of 75 to all other organizations. California, by contrast, has received 1,708 awards; Massachusetts 1,226; New York 1,136; Pennsylvania 807; Texas 668; North Carolina 556; Illinois 502; Maryland 476; Ohio 449; Michigan 395.

What’s the bottom line? America’s competitiveness, and Washington State’s competitiveness, will be dramatically enhanced by R&D funds awarded as part of the stimulus. Our ability to tackle society’s grand challenges depends on it.

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Every second year, the Technology Alliance gathers policymakers and leaders from the innovation community at a retreat designed to explore issues affecting Washington’s technology sector and to map out strategies to increase our state’s long-term competitiveness. We organize the retreat around what we call the “three drivers” of a vibrant innovation economy: excellent K-12 and higher education systems; strong research capacity at our public and private research institutions and companies; and a robust entrepreneurial climate that nurtures the growth of young startups generating new technologies, services and jobs in our state.

This year’s conversation was all about talent.

Much has been made by our organization and others about the need to increase our students’ college and work readiness; to improve science and math teaching and learning in our schools; and to invest in high-impact, high-demand programs at our public universities. These have been priorities of our organization and our partners in the innovation community for a long time. Now, it’s time to get serious. Washington is at a crossroads. We have the framework to enact meaningful education reform with the enactment of Senate Bill 2261, and the design of an important new tool to track student progress and teacher effectiveness through a longitudinal data system.

The latter is particularly important when one considers the data we heard at the retreat, and a lack of awareness on the part of many in our state who could help drive change. Here are just a few key points we heard during our retreat that everyone in this state should know:

• According to Postsecondary Opportunity, our education pipeline isn’t so much leaking as it is hemorrhaging: for every 100 students who start 9th grade, only 69 graduate from high school four years later; only 33 of those enter college the following fall; only 24 return sophomore year; and only 17 earn a four-year degree within 6 years of enrollment. We start with 100 high school freshmen, and we get 17 college graduates. Seventeen.

• Meanwhile, we were told that 80-90 percent of parents surveyed expect that their kids will get a bachelor’s degree. That is particularly sad when you remember that our high school graduation requirements do not, at present, align with the minimum requirements to enter our public baccalaureate institutions.

• Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, shared sobering data on our performance internationally. We in the tech community know we are competing not just with other states but with the rest of the world. We don’t do well: in the 2006 PISA test given to 15-year-old students in 26 OECD countries, the United States ranked 22nd in mathematics and 19th in science.

• In higher education attainment, the U.S. is one of only two OECD nations (out of 30) in which today’s young people are less educated than their parents.

• Teacher quality matters more than anything else. Studies …Next Page »

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For the past three years, Jeff Fagnan of Atlas Venture and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst Partners have teamed up to hold a charity wine tasting and auction event to raise money for select non-profit groups. This year, the pair tell me, they are going themselves one better—setting up their own organization to more directly advance their cause of promoting entrepreneurship and innovation programs for young people in New England. They’ll do that largely by recruiting help, money, and ideas for spending the money from the technology and innovation community of which they are a part.

The new organization, called TUGG, for Technology Underwriting Greater Good, will be formally launched at the 4th Annual New England Venture Charity Wine Party, which takes place on October 22 at Artists for Humanity in South Boston. Here is Tugg’s mission statement, from its placeholder website (the full site launches October 23), where you can also purchase tickets to this year’s wine event for $150 apiece: “By harnessing the power of the region’s technology ecosystem to source, screen and fund social innovation, TUGG helps young people to realize their full potential through entrepreneurship, education and life experiences. TUGG empowers both the individual and the community to identify important issues and collaborate to solve them.”

Last year’s wine tasting drew more than 250 people and raised $40,000 for Build, a Palo Alto, CA-based non-profit dedicated to helping students start small businesses. Part of what drove Fagnan, Taneja, and Dana Samuels, investor relations director for Atlas and the third Tugg founder, to start their own charity was that Build had intended to open in New England but decided not to, at least for the time being, in part because of the economy. “We feel like New England missed out,” Fagnan says. The trio plan to at least partly fill the void by beating last year’s fundraising by a wide margin. “We raised $40,000 last year, and we’d like to see if we could raise $80,000 this year,” says Fagnan.

Tugg will not be branded as a General Catalyst or Atlas organization. Instead, as indicated in the mission statement, the hope is to involve a host of others in the technology, life sciences, startup, and (especially) venture communities—not just for help in raising money, but in deciding what to fund. “The purpose of this is to be collaborative,” says Samuels.

“We’ve got a really vibrant entrepreneurial community,” and Tugg’s mission is to engage that community in a way that brings both ideas and a sense of ownership in the effort, Taneja adds.

The new organization will not just use its funds for its own programs. Indeed, in some sense, it will act almost as a “fund of funds,” dispersing money directly to various individual programs or initiatives, as well as to other non-profits in the region for them to dispense. “Think of it as almost an open-source charitable foundation,” says Fagnan.

He, Taneja, and Samuels say they hope to fund different innovation initiatives each quarter, supporting anything from a new program for youth entrepreneurship to a trip for inner city students who want to tour Silicon Valley as part of a school project to helping provide materials for a charter school. While entrepreneurship is a big theme they want to promote, Tugg’s activities could involve more general education and life experience programs as well, they say.

It all kicks off at this year’s wine tasting (the wines for the tastings and auction are being donated by producers, distributors, and private individuals). The event will feature five tastings, with two wines vetted at each tasting, says Samuels. One wine will be from the Old World of Spain, Italy, or France, the other from the Americas. In addition, bottles of wine will be raffled off throughout the evening, and the event will also include both a silent auction and a live auction of wines, retail items, or experiences such as special dinners or overnight stays. And after the wine party, “Club Tugg” will open for dancing. “We really want people to think about this as a party,” says Fagnan.

I’ve added Tugg to our list of new 2009 initiatives to help Boston area entrepreneurs.

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Just a few days before we kicked off the month-long San Diego Science Festival in March, I wrote a post for the Xconomist Forum that concluded, “if we mean to achieve the essential goal of reviving American Science, the San Diego Science Festival is poised to provide an important start.”

It proved to be a daunting task: 30 days; 350 collaborating organizations; 500 free events; 200,000 participants. So, what did I learn from spearheading this event? (More on that later.) And why am I taking on an even larger initiative—the creation of the first National Science Festival in Washington D.C.?

One reason is because it matters. It matters because scientific breakthroughs are crucial to our innovation economy. It also matters because our leadership in science and technology innovation is central to the way we view ourselves as Americans. From Ben Franklin to Thomas Edison and Burt Rutan, we see ourselves as ingenious, entrepreneurial, independent, and inventive.

Our goal for the inaugural San Diego Science Festival was to celebrate science with a science party because—to quote inventor, entrepreneur and FIRST Robotics founder Dean Kamen—“Society gets what it celebrates.” What he means is that if scientists are perceived as boring and science careers as dull, Nobel Laureates can’t compete with rock stars or sports heroes in the minds of our nation’s youth. But if scientists are perceived as cool and sexy, then perhaps our next generation can see science careers as a way to improve the world. So our goal was to create the festival as a fun opportunity for our community and or city to come together to discover, explore, discuss, be amazed, and be inspired.

We modeled the San Diego Science Festival after popular science festivals in Europe and Australia. These festivals last seven to fourteen days, and draw between 100,000 and 1 million people to celebrate science through inspiring lectures, hands-on activities and exhibits, contests, theatre, comedy, poetry, art, film, and music—all celebrating science.

To make a lasting impression among San Diego’s youth, our month-long festival rolled out in a progression:

—First, we brought scientists to …Next Page »

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The Northwest deal flow in the past week tended toward small partnerships and acquisitions. But there was still some significant activity in software, Internet, and entertainment.

—As ghostbuster Bill Murray once said, “Dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!” Seattle-based Pet Holdings, operators of I Can Has Cheezburger (Lolcats) and other humor websites, formed an advertising partnership with San Francisco-based social network Dogster. Dogster will sell ads for the Cheezburger network in exchange for the greater traffic on Pet Holdings’ popular sites (which will hit 1 billion page views this week). Details of the revenue split were not given.

—The Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) joined forces with advocacy organization TechAmerica in Washington state, thereby broadening its membership to include more companies in hardware, electronics, and devices. WTIA has now become TechAmerica’s exclusive management and marketing partner in the state.

—Seattle-based Appature is getting close to securing its first round of venture funding. No deal has closed yet, but the bootstrapped and profitable healthcare marketing startup has generated a lot of interest in the VC community. Appature was founded in early 2007 and develops software that helps companies in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices understand their customers better and do more effective marketing.

—Kirkland, WA-based Digeo, the home entertainment company backed by Paul Allen, was bought by Arris, a Georgia-based broadband communications firm, for $20 million in cash. Arris will acquire Digeo’s high-definition digital video recorder, called Moxi, along with about 75 Digeo employees and their expertise in video networking and multimedia services. About 10 Digeo staff members will lose their jobs in the transition, however.

—Seattle-based Maveron and Boston-based Spark Capital co-led an $8 million Series A investment in Altius Education, a San Francisco company deveoping online higher education programs through partnerships with nonprofit universities. The Noah Fund also participated in the funding. Maveron was founded in 1998 by Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan, and focuses on investments in consumer and tech companies.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) acquired the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), a parallel computing software firm in Waltham, MA, as Ryan reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t given. ISC’s chief executive, Bill Blake, and the firm’s technical experts are moving into Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, MA.

—This was not a new deal, but I took a closer look at Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners’ investments in cloud computing and virtualization. The VC firm’s biggest win to date is XenSource, the Palo Alto, CA-based virtualization company that was bought by Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) for $500 million in 2007. Three other Ignition investments in the space—Skytap, InstallFree, and Xeround—are still in pretty early days, but are off to promising starts.

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Len Schlesinger wryly refers to himself as president of the finest business school between Route 128 and I-495. And indeed, Wellesley, MA-based Babson College is, for many folks around Boston (and elsewhere), often over-shadowed by Hub institutions I don’t need to name.

Yet Babson is also one of the country’s top business schools. I’m not going to cite all the high rankings it gets from places that track B-school programs, because I don’t believe in such metrics. More to the point, Babson has a first-rate faculty, and we here at Xconomy seem to be writing increasingly about its graduates. Off the top of my head, I can reel off Jason Jacobs, who founded FitnessKeeper, maker of a highly popular run-tracking application for the Apple iPhone 3G called RunKeeper; Rush Hambleton, who founded Canditto, a Cambridge-based service that rents out photo-sharing kiosks; and Matt Lauzon and Jason Reuben, who launched Paragon Lake (the subject of a previous X Factor column), which is out to revolutionize jewelry design and sales, when they were mere undergrads at Babson.

This kind of evidence, not rankings, is what caught my attention. So I was pleased to be able to visit recently with the dynamic Schlesinger, who took Babson’s reins in July 2008 and wasted no time trying to lift the college’s profile.

The Babson president has a unique academic and business background that includes some 20 years at Harvard Business School and eight years as a top executive at Limited Brands, his most recent position before coming to Babson (full bio here). And he says the combination of business and academic experience gave him three sets of skills that serve him well in his new job. First, thanks to his development work at Harvard and, later, Brown University, he knows how to raise money. Second, he has been able to bring the perspective of a business executive to the management of Babson, which has helped shape his plan to strike partnerships with universities around the world (more on this below). And third, he is intimately familiar with the ways of academia, which has helped him understand the process of getting buy-in from Babson faculty.

Now, Schlesinger is an energetic and thought-provoking speaker—and he can be hard to keep up with when taking notes. (If you want to see what I’m talking about, check out this YouTube spot.)

What follows is a much-condensed overview of Schlesinger’s rapid-fire comments on innovation and entrepreneurship, and his ambitions for Babson, which was founded in 1919 as the Babson Institute (it became Babson College in 1959) and is now home to some 1,900 undergraduate and 1,600 graduate students.

1) Entrepreneurship rules—and it can be taught.

On this point, Schlesinger quotes or paraphrases the Bangladeshi economist and microlending pioneer Muhammad Yunus: “We’re all entrepreneurs, only too few of us get to practice it.”

Based on academic work at Babson and other institutions, Schlesinger believes that the principles and practice of entrepreneurship are “documentable, codifiable, and consequently teachable to anybody.” That is a tremendous opportunity for Babson, he says. “This is our time…and the world can benefit enormously from a much more expansive diffusion of what it is that we do.”

2) The underlying assumptions of most business plans, such as a skilled, abundant labor market, cheap energy, and easy access to credit, are things of the past. Outcome measures for businesses must be extended beyond the traditional profit and loss to embrace three categories of measures related to “people, planet and profit.

“The last year has just been spectacular in terms of demonstrating the limitation of the operating model that most businesses and most communities operate under,” Schlesinger says. “We need …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Maveron and Boston-based Spark Capital have co-led an $8 million Series A investment in Altius Education, based in San Francisco, according to a press release today. The Noah Fund also participated in the deal. Maveron was founded by Dan Levitan and Howard Schultz in 1998, and focuses on consumer and tech companies. Altius was born in 2007, and is developing online higher education programs through partnerships with nonprofit universities.

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Tadayoshi Kohno spends his career looking at life through the eyes of a criminal, and he’s teaching University of Washington students to do the same. The UW computer science and engineering assistant professor studies computer security and privacy, which to Kohno means anticipating the bad guy’s moves before he does. I chatted with him recently to find out more about the “security mindset,” how you teach it, and what this mysterious bad guy could do using ingenious technology hacks.

“We’re seeing computers in all aspects of our lives, in medical devices, exercise equipment, cars, airplanes, utility systems, power lines, everywhere,” Kohno said. “One of my main concerns is that while we’ve thought a lot about security for our desktop computers, computing is much broader than that, and we need to address security for all of it.”

Kohno’s interest in security goes back to his teenage years, when as a 10th grader he won the Colorado History Day competition with an essay about the history of cryptography. During his doctoral work, Kohno revealed security flaws in the software of electronic voting machines. The machines, which were rising in popularity following the 2000 presidential election, could easily be hacked to manipulate votes or reveal people’s voting choices, Kohno said.

Since then, he and his graduate students at the UW have pointed out security holes in technologies such as implantable cardiac defibrillators, pacemakers, radio frequency identification tags (which are used, among other places, on many credit cards and Washington state’s new enhanced driver licenses), and the Nike + iPod sport kit (the workout tracker that fits inside running shoes). His group has also recently developed software that causes messages or data to self-destruct after a set period of time. The program, Vanish, is one step towards a security answer to the problem of putting all your information into the “cloud” of sites such as Facebook or Google, Kohno said, where it might be backed up and never fully deleted.

I found his group’s revelations about implantable medical devices especially chilling. Right now, devices such as cardiac defibrillators signal wirelessly only over short distances, to allow doctors to adjust them without surgery. But in the future, Kohno said, he can see technology advancing to the point where those wireless signals have a longer range, and that’s where the real danger to the patient comes in. Beyond just gleaning a patient’s medical and other personal information, a defibrillator hacker could send signals to shut off the device or send electric shocks to the patient’s heart. In 2008, Kohno’s group managed to perform these potentially fatal hacks on a real defibrillator (not in a person).

“This is a wake-up call for the industry and the FDA that these are serious issues, or could become serious in the future,” Kohno said. “I believe that providing the first concrete evidence is the first step toward having a broader impact.”

To figure out which piece of technology he’s going to hack into next, Kohno asks what the next big thing in technology is going to be over the next five to 10 years, that people might not have examined for security gaps. Then he tries to think of every damaging thing a devious person could do with that technology, if they hacked into it. “I think I have always liked to play the game of looking for holes in the system,” Kohno said, when I asked him how he first got interested in security.

Kohno, who is kicking off the Technology’s Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series with a lecture this morning, also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on computer security at UW, and is planning a security lecture or event for middle school and high school students sometime in the next year. Even though most of his students won’t go on to become security professionals, Kohno sees his courses on the “security mindset,” or how to think one step ahead of the hackers, as valuable for the computer industry, so that those working on new technologies will know when to call in the experts. “I want students have the habit of saying ‘what if’ when they see a new system,” he said. “The gritty details are much less important than having the mentality of asking, ‘What if something bad happens?’”

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One of MIT’s leading business professors, Richard Locke, came to Seattle yesterday to talk about the “S” word. Yes, we’ve been hearing a lot about sustainability lately, in the context of technology and business. Big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing are talking seriously about the issue. Smaller Seattle-area companies like Verdiem, Powerit Solutions, and R.W. Beck have been making progress in important areas like energy efficiency and water management. To Locke, and many others, sustainability is much more than a corporate buzzword.

Locke is deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a professor of entrepreneurship and political science at MIT, based in Cambridge, MA. His research specialties include labor standards and practices, global entrepreneurship, and sustainable businesses. I sat down with him at the Westin Hotel downtown to get his perspective on Northwest companies’ green initiatives, and their possible partnerships with MIT. Locke was coming from meetings with Intel in the Portland area the previous day (the Santa Clara, CA-based chipmaker has manufacturing and development facilities in Hillsboro, OR). His other meetings in Seattle included a stop at Amazon to speak to Sloan School alums about the changing face of MBA education, and about sustainability in the corporate realm.

Locke defines sustainability broadly as “using resources today in a way that permits future generations to use them as well.” By this he means not just natural resources—energy, materials, water—but also social resources like people, jobs, and standards. “Let’s redefine sustainability in such a way that we can show the opportunities available, not just the constraints,” he says. “Once you broaden the definition, you expand the scope for individuals and organizations to try to do something about it.” (As I understand it, this definition of sustainability could include managing employees so they don’t burn out, creating jobs that last, and establishing fair labor standards that endure.)

Take Intel, for instance. Locke says the company is pursuing a series of initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint, improve its supply chain efficiency, and reshape the way it uses energy, water, and people. “Are there ways they can make, for example, new chips that might require less energy? They’re having a very interesting internal discussion about chip speed versus energy consumption. I find it fascinating that a large company in an extremely competitive sector, that still does manufacturing in …Next Page »

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[Updated and corrected, August 11---see below]
Anyone who has spent much time in universities knows that openness, teamwork, and collaboration are widely taught, but not always widely practiced. And when it comes to implementing entirely new models of education, well, let’s just say that institutional barriers, turf wars, bureaucracy, and tradition all too often derail significant change.

Better to start from scratch.

That, anyway, was the watchword of an experiment begun 12 years ago in Wellesley, MA, when the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering was created. Built on 70 acres purchased from Babson College next door, Olin was founded specifically to pioneer a new model of engineering education. It has no academic departments, and no tenure. The curriculum is designed to be retired after seven years. Students focus on real-world projects crafted around a commitment to design, functionality, and usability far more than an understanding of science. And, oh yeah, everyone who’s admitted in gets a full ride on tuition, or at least they did (more on that later). [The last sentence originally said Olin intended to offer students free tuition and room. Olin officials say that while free tuition was planned in perpetuity, the school only intended to offer room for the first class, which it did.]

Olin graduated its first class just four years ago, so the experiment is still an experiment-but one with encouraging early results and exciting long-term possibilities. I went out to Wellesley recently to learn more about Olin first hand from director of business development Ron Guerriero, VP for development J. Thomas Krimmel, and rising junior and entrepreneur Evan Morikawa. Not everything has gone as planned, according to this crew. But the upstart college has already produced a crop of Fulbright scholars and is finding ready jobs for its graduates at Microsoft, Google, Akamai, and a host of other leading companies. It even has a plan for introducing its model to more traditional schools.

Here are some highlights:

—About 300 total students, all undergraduates
—Three degree programs: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and a broad Engineering degree
— 9-1 student-teacher ratio
— 91 percent of students graduate (40-60 percent appears to be the norm for U.S. colleges, according to the statistics I found)
—42 percent of this year’s graduating class, and 54 percent of the incoming class, are women (the highest in the country for an undergrad engineering program, according to Olin) [An earlier version of this point said that 47 percent of the incoming freshman class were women. Women will be about 47 percent of the entire student population this fall. ]
—17 percent of the study body are alumni of FIRST Robotics, Dean Kamen’s popular student robotics competition

The overriding concept behind Olin is that to compete successfully in today’s global economy, American engineering students need strong technical skills coupled to a better understanding of business and entrepreneurial thinking and broad cultural experiences offered by the arts and humanities. The engineering coursework is geared at providing loads of experience in creating real-world products—with product teams, timelines, and all the rest.

The college was founded by the Franklin W. Olin Foundation, named for the early-20th-century ammunition magnate, in 1997. After purchasing land from Babson College and creating Olin College, the foundation then dissolved itself.

The first employee—Rick Miller, the only president the school has had—was hired in 1999. Initial faculty came the next year, from places like MIT, Harvard, and Vanderbilt, and the core of the first class arrived in the fall of 2001, roughly 30 of them. They are known as “the partners,” …Next Page »

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Bill Aulet, an Xconomist and one of the most energetic advocates for entrepreneurship and innovation in the Boston area, has been appointed acting director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, according to an announcement made internally yesterday by MIT Sloan School of Management Dean David Schmittlein. Aulet takes the reins from fellow Xconomist Ken Morse, the dry-humored, quick-witted head of the center since 1996.

Morse told Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe he is going to write a book on global entrepreneurship. Aulet took time to praise Morse as a “fantastic” colleague he had worked alongside of for several years while serving as a senior lecturer at the Sloan School and entrepreneur in residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Still, he says, “Anytime there’s a change of guard then there’s a chance of revisiting things” and doing new things.

“I’m real excited about this. We’re going to implement, basically, the philosophies I espoused in my Xconomy article.” (I didn’t ask him to say that). He was talking about a piece last fall in which he explained his philosophy of “educate, nurture, network, and celebrate,” which he has used in talks and workshops around the world to try to spur energy innovation. “We did that for energy and it’s worked really, really well,” he says. “I want to do that for all of entrepreneurship at MIT.”Aulet says that involves building ties both within the MIT community and between it and the outside word, in order to “smooth the glide path for our entrepreneurs from the idea through getting it funded.”

While he remained vague about any forthcoming partnerships, Aulet says he has been visiting or has planned visits with Stanford, Babson, the Cambridge Innovation Center, and other institutions to build new relationships and collaborations “consistent with Metcalfe’s law that the power of the network is exponentially related to the number of nodes on it.” He also says he will look at Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and beyond to examine “what new ideas can we implement to make it a more dynamic place for students to foster more entrepreneurship and nurture it.”

The MIT Entrepreneurship Center will continue to be chaired by MIT Sloan School of Management professor Ed Roberts, who founded it. MIT also named Sloan associate professor Fiona Murray as associate director of the Entrepreneurship Center.

You can read Aulet’s bio here. He has long experience at IBM and has subsequently been both an entrepreneur and an executive of a public company, biometrics firm Viisage Technology, where he was chief financial officer. Aulet and I played basketball together in Ireland as part of the World B. Tour in 1990. That’s not in his bio.

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Think about the technological tools you use most often. For many of us, cell phones and computers rank high up on that list. But these devices are designed with the hearing and sighted in mind, and are constantly evolving, so there are numerous hurdles to clear to make a phone or a computer usable to the blind or deaf.

The University of Washington’s Richard Ladner, along with students in the electrical engineering and computer science departments, is using engineering and computational tools to work on several of these hurdles—and the commercial applications could have far-ranging impact.

“When you think about a person with a disability, such as a blind person, most people think that’s a medical problem,” he said in a recent interview. “Just restoring the human function may be a solvable problem, but probably not for a long time. But maybe there’s another way to get the same thing done, to allow a person to read a book or talk to their family. So thinking non-medically, as an engineer, there are other ways to solve these problems.”

Ladner, who was born to two deaf parents, also believes that technologies developed for the blind and deaf may eventually lead to broader technological advancements—not such a far-fetched idea, as it’s happened before. Mobile GPS was originally developed as an aid for the blind, Ladner said, as was optical character recognition, a technology developed in the 1960s to turn an image of text (such as a photo of a book page) into digital text, which would then be read out loud using speech synthesizers. Now, the same technology is ubiquitous in turning pictures of text into digital text;Google uses it to digitize books.

Ladner used to work on computational theory before shifting to accessible technology in 2002. He and colleague Eve Riskin, professor of electrical engineering, are now trying to take their long-running project on accessibility for the deaf, MobileASL, to the market. This project uses video compression technology to enable signing over video cell phones on low-bandwidth wireless networks (such as those in the U.S.). Currently, deaf people can’t reliably use video cell phones to communicate using sign language, because the videos are too choppy to be intelligible. Ladner and his colleagues are working with UW TechTransfer on commercializing MobileASL.

“We’re trying to get it out and get it in actual use,” he said. “It’s in high demand. I get hundreds of e-mails about it.”

Although designed with the deaf in mind, MobileASL could be used by anyone who wants better quality video phone calls, Ladner said. Bringing it to market is slightly complicated by the fact that …Next Page »

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