If your name is Borya Shakhnovich, people tend to make assumptions about you. One, they don’t want to play you in competitive chess. Two, they wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you introduced yourself by saying something like, “I am scientist.”

OK, I’m stereotyping here (a real time-saver, I know), but at least one of those assumptions has some basis in fact. Shakhnovich is the founder and CEO of Brookline, MA-based iAMscientist, a global community and resource site for researchers and institutions in science, technology, and medicine. He has raised $1 million in seed financing from angel investors including George Whitesides, the famed Harvard University chemist and co-founder of more than a dozen companies including Genzyme (which was acquired last week by Sanofi-Aventis for some $20 billion).

What iAMscientist does is give researchers and institutions some interesting new tools to connect with each other. The idea is to create an online community and directory of top-tier people so that research teams, companies, and other organizations can find the right person to answer a difficult question, decipher a new paper, or lead a research project. All of this is especially important for interdisciplinary ventures—like when biologists team up with physicists, computer scientists, or electrical engineers to model things like genetic pathways or disease mechanisms, and then someone wants to commercialize the findings.

“We provide an organization with the ability to find that one person who is the foremost expert in an obscure area—our value is in that matching mechanism,” Shakhnovich says. Some of the most valuable knowledge and experience that researchers have “isn’t really in their papers, it’s in their heads,” he says. “You want to get in touch with them and maintain a relationship.”

Academic social networks are not new, of course. Services like Academia.edu, Epernicus (Boston-based), Labmeeting (founded by a Harvard grad), Nature Network, Pronetos, ResearchGate (which started in Boston but recently moved to Germany), and, to some extent, LinkedIn, all help … Next Page »

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The University of Washington Business Plan Competition hosted by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) came to a close Thursday night, handing out $60,000 in prize money to an impressive field of technologies. It brought a bittersweet end for my team’s company, Shockmetrics. We did not take the $25K grand prize award that we spent months of sweat equity to win.

Nanocel, the company led by the scrappy entrepreneur Daniel Rossi, took home the big check with their compelling innovation and rock solid business plan (version 15). Maybe I should have stayed up until 2 am blogging about the my Business Plan experience on Xconomy like Daniel did to be as sharp during the Q&A. Maybe we should have pushed for a few more iterations of our business plan (we submitted only version 10). Honestly, I am not so bitter to lose to such a strong competitor; even though, my team was the one exchanging the ‘good natured taunting’ Daniel mentioned in his late night blog. Of course I am not bitter to collect a generous $5K check as a finalist . . . but the extra $20K in cash would have been nice!! I am mainly disappointed because the loss means we failed to effectively communicate to the judges that the Shockmetrics System will be saving lives in hospital intensive care units within the next five years. Then again that is the sweet part. The Shockmetrics System will be saving lives WITHIN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS.

So allow me to re-phrase my first sentence:  The UW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Business Plan Competition brought a bitter, sweet BEGINNING for my team’s company, Shockmetrics.

Shockmetrics core technology was invented by Dr. Ken Schenkman, Wayne Ciesielski and Lorilee Arakaki, PhD, to provide non-invasive and continuous real time monitoring of one of the most common cause of death in the ICU, medical shock. I first met Ken and Wayne at the Science and Technology Showcase co-hosted by the Science & Engineering Business Association (SEBA) and CIE. At that time Shockmetrics technology was disclosed to UW Tech Transfer. Chris Porter, a prominent medical device entrepreneur and LaunchPad Entrepreneur Advisor along with Erik Roby, a UW TechTransfer intern, came on board first to size up the commercial potential of this technology.

Chris and Erik’s research identified the need to create a company around the compelling Shockmetrics Systems technology. Tech Transfer charged Erik with the task of forming a business development team that could create an effective plan for Shockmetrics. Erik leveraged his connections in SEBA and the MBA Biotech Club to find Ryan Bergsman, an MBA student and Process Development Engineer at Dendreon, and myself, a PhD student in bioengineering and Co-Founder of nPostBio. At that same time, Deborah Kessler, a UWTechTransfer Entrepreneur in Residence, formerly of Rosetta Inpharmatics, had taken notice of Shockmetrics and joined as the candidate CEO. We all came together with a single goal in mind: winning the Business Plan Competition.

Realistically, $25K is small potatoes compared to the millions necessary to launch a medical device, but the business plan competition value proposition to us was not the money. We wanted to throw ourselves in an environment that would force us to hit milestones, meet deadlines and above all fuel our desire with competition. We had a goal to compose a solid business plan that was driven by the exciting yet intense environment the Business Plan Competition provides. From crunching numbers to discussions over hockey stick financials to perfecting pitch decks, we fought through three rounds of scrutiny from 300 judges from the local entrepreneurial community and more than 90 competitors to place in the finals. More importantly we have developed a real business plan that is being put into action and have taken the first critical steps out of the lab and into the market.

As Paul Thelen, founder and chief strategy officer of Big Fish Games, stated at the awards dinner, “The biggest reasons an entrepreneur fails is that they fail to start.” Thanks to CIE, Shockmetrics along with many other UW based companies have successfully navigated that initial hurdle. The rest will be up to us.

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Last week, the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering department hosted a special workshop sponsored by Google and the National Science Foundation. The goal of the three-day program was to instruct professors on how to teach Google-style computing—which includes harnessing huge amounts of digital data and doing “cluster computing” over large-scale, networked servers. The weekend before that, Google also sponsored a workshop at UW to teach high-school math and science teachers about computer science—everything from programming and robotics to cryptography and security.

It’s an example of Google ramping up its local outreach as the search giant builds a larger presence in the area. Google Seattle, located in the Fremont neighborhood, has grown from 0 to 180 employees since opening last October, while on the east side of Lake Washington, Google Kirkland boasts some 400 workers. “Having Google in the Seattle area—and particularly having them in the city of Seattle—is huge,” says Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering at UW (and an Xconomist). He adds that he worked “very hard over several years” to encourage Google to open an office in Seattle proper.

Not that Google’s relationship with Seattle is anything new. Lazowska’s department has 150-plus alumni working for Google—many based at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA, but an increasing number in Kirkland and Seattle. “We have dozens of undergraduate students doing summer internships at Google, many graduate students carrying out their research at Google, and two faculty members spending the year there on sabbatical [Gaetano Borriello and Steve Gribble],” says Lazowska. And Brian Bershad, director of Google’s Seattle site, is a UW computer science professor on leave.

Some would say Google’s main mission in Seattle is to compete for talent against a certain home-grown software giant that has done more than its share of outreach in computer-science education over the years. So while Google’s latest efforts are highly welcomed, it will probably take some time for the search company to become as deeply established in the community.

“Despite all this, Microsoft is [still] the University of Washington’s #1 corporate partner,” explains Lazowska. “Google is fantastic, but they have a lot of ground to cover to catch up.”

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