The New York startup scene is literally going to the dogs. Waggit, a platform for finding potential dog sitters among other local pet lovers, on Sunday won the grand prize at Startup Weekend New York City. Like many other Startup Weekend events, the hackathon started off with a massive collision of ideas—some more original than others—then distilled into the final 22 contenders.

Though Audrey Tan actually founded Waggit in August, she says the hackathon gave her the chance to search for potential collaborators. “Waggit is my full-time business,” she says. “I came to Startup Weekend to find talent.” Tan says she is actively seeking designers and developers in particular. She thus far has operated as a one-woman operation the WeWork co-working space in the Soho neighborhood.

Waggit takes the search for dog sitters to the social sphere. Users would create profiles about their pets as well as their interest and availability to take care of other users’ furry companions. Users can then choose to interact further to establish some trust before dropping off their pets. As the grand prize winner of the event, Waggit will receive $200 worth of Web services from Amazon, a book package from McGraw-Hill, a couple of boxes of craft coffee, an Xbox video game console, will be entered into a global startup competition, and other rewards.

Over the course of Startup Weekend NYC, Tan worked with Jenifer Hill, Theo Skye, James Turner, and Nils Weinhold. Though they divvyed up the coffee and a few other prizes, there were no concrete promises to keep the team together. “I would be honored if they had me as part of their lives,” Tan says. “I plan on contacting them. You don’t get that kind of dynamic easily.”

Tan was an IT consultant prior to founding Waggit. She says she currently has not ironed out her financial plans to nurture the business. “I’m still doing some self-discovery with how comfortable I am with    … Next Page »

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Eric Rafaloff, creator of the Can I Park Here app, may have been destined to join New York’s startup community. After he got his first computer when he was eight years old, he wanted to learn how software worked at deeper levels. Now a young man of 19, Rafaloff took first place at last weekend’s NYC BigApps Hackathon, after working alone to create an app that tells users if they are legally parked on New York’s sometimes confusing streets. Rafaloff is now shooting to win the NYC BigApps 3.0 competition currently underway—and the $10,000 prize.

Can I Park Here combines data from the New York City Department of Transportation with Rafaloff’s software to alert users of the current parking rules in their vicinity. “It lets people avoid parking tickets,” he says. “It solves a point of pain for a lot of people.”

Rafaloff and 74 other hackers were given one day at the hackathon, held at software development consulting firm Pivotal Labs, to create original apps that use data provided by the city administration. Ten apps were submitted for judging by the end of the weekend. Rafaloff took home the grand prize: a $1,000 Amazon gift card.

The hackathon is a stepping stone to the annual NYC BigApps competition hosted by ChallengePost in conjunction with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office. The objective in the overall contest is also to create an app that enhances life in New York by using data supplied by the city’s administration. Competitors can also use APIs from participating local technology companies such as bitly, GetGlue, Foursquare, and … Next Page »

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Two Massachusetts companies, Fenugreen and Dynamo Micropower, took home the grand prizes this week at Startup Open, a competition put on by the Kauffman Foundation that recognizes startups with high-growth potential.

Cambridge, MA-based Fenugreen develops all-natural food packaging material called FreshPaper that’s designed to give produce two to four times the shelf life it sees now. Founders Kavita Shukla and Swaroop Samant will participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Congress this spring in Liverpool. Shukla, who has two patents and four more pending for the Fenugreen technology, discovered the active ingredients from a home remedy she was given for stomach ailments while growing up.

The second winner, Dynamo Micropower, works out of Boston’s Greentown Labs cleantech co-working space and develops micro-turbines for more efficient power generation. Dynamo founder Jason Ethier will receive a year of mentorship from Redbox founders Michael DeLazzer and Biju Kulathaka as his Startup Open prize.

The Startup Open’s pool of 50 contestants includes a few other Boston-area startups, such as Zoom, a member-driven car-sharing company targeting India, and Genii, a developer of language learning game technology. Select startups from that pool will have the chance to attend Start-Up Chile, a program that offers companies $40,000 in equity-free funding to launch their business in Chile.

The Startup Open awards announcement kicked off Kauffman’s Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), designed to spur and celebrate innovation across 123 countries with more than 3,500 events put on by universities, non-profits, corporations, startups, and government agencies.

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At the first DC to VC health IT forum organized by Morgenthaler Ventures last fall, Aneesh Chopra, the chief technology officer of the United States, called for more prize-based competitions to encourage innovation in healthcare and other sectors of the economy. So it’s pretty appropriate that this year’s edition of DC to VC is all about competition. The main event at the invitation-only showcase on Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus on September 22 will be a face-off between 11 startups at the seed and Series A stages. They’ll all be vying for the judges’ approval and—even more importantly—the attention of investors.

“The best way to ensure that investments are made in this space is to show people the high-quality companies that are being formed,” says Rebecca Lynn, the Morgenthaler partner who leads the firm’s health IT investing team. “A competition lets us have access to a wide range of entrepreneurs and lets the best bubble to the top.”

On August 24, Morgenthaler published the list of 11 finalists culled from 117 entries, including six seed-stage finalists and five seeking Series A funding. Below we’ve got exclusive in-depth material on each company, including video summaries. They range from a company developing a mobile-phone attachment for inexpensive eye diagnostics to a mobile social network for surgeons to an online platform for cognitive behavioral therapy.

There’s no monetary prize at stake on September 22, but a panel of judges will rank their top choices based on quality of the startups’ presentations. The seed-stage judges include Enoch Choi, an urgent care physician at Palo Alto Medical Foundation; Robert Fassett, chief medical informatics officer at Oracle; Chaim Indig, CEO of Phreesia; Aydin Senkut, managing director of Felicis Ventures; and Jeff Tangney, CEO of Doximity. Series A judges include Brian Ascher, a partner at Venrock; Isaac Ciechanover, a partner at Kleiner Perkins; Tim Chang, a partner at Mayfield (and formerly with Norwest Venture Partners); Alex de Winter, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures; and Lynn herself.

“This competition is not so much about winning as it is having the opportunity to present your thoughts and ideas in front of a key audience,” says Lynn. “Even though you might not win first prize, you might be just the thing that some VC or angel investor in the crowd is looking for. Or there might be somebody who could be a great teammate or senior executive or advisor. It’s really all about the exposure and the connections.”

Lynn was part of a five-person committee from event sponsors Morgenthaler, Silicon Valley Bank, StartUp Health, and the Health 2.0 conference who sifted through the original entries in the competition, which was restricted to US entrepreneurs seeking seed or Series A funding. She says she was excited to see the entrants offering genuinely new solutions to old problems in medicine. “I was blown away by the quality” of the entries, Lynn says. “Everyone is talking about ‘How do we pay for healthcare?’ and that’s just the wrong question. What these companies focus on is how to fix healthcare, and that’s a very different question from how to pay for it. A lot of that is driving out the cost inefficiencies and the procedural inefficiencies, but if they can get these tools in the right hands—in some cases doctors, in some cases payers, in some cases patients—then we can actually fix it.”

On to the finalists. The text summaries, videos, and graphics were provided by the finalists themselves and are used by permission.

SEED STAGE

Careticker

Careticker is the world’s first platform that help patients plan in advance for a hospital or outpatient procedure. Patients on Careticker can register with providers, provide advance notice of their visit and coordinate all of the people, medical supplies and services they need to have a safe recovery at home. With Careticker’s web and mobile application, patients also can create group messaging accounts for receiving and sending messages from doctors, nurses and providers. Patients can coordinate with providers, schedule delivery of medical equipment and supplies, and receive pending status updates. Once at home, Careticker helps patients to manage all aspects of their follow-up care.

EyeNetra

Coming from MIT Media Lab, EyeNetra is the most affordable mobile eye diagnostic ever made. A combination of a mobile phone and a clip-on eyepiece, NETRA allows anyone to quickly measure their own eyes and get a prescription for glasses as well as a diagnosis for cataracts. Through mobile connectivity, our system allows users to easily access back end service providers and caregivers for consultation and treatment, enabling a complete solution from awareness to treatment. Our aim is to empower hundreds of millions around the globe by democratizing access to eye care.

Skimble

Skimble is powering the mobile wellness movement with a cross-platform ecosystem of fun and dynamic social coaching applications. Their latest title, Workout Trainer, is ranked top 10 in health & fitness on iPhone/iPad, and helps members get fit with multimedia workouts led by expert trainers. Skimble’s GPS Sports Tracker allows members to keep track of all their sports activities and share accomplishments with friends.

Surgichart

SurgiChart is a mobile, cloud-based, social-clinical network for surgeons to exchange relevant perioperative, case-centric information.

Telethrive

Telethrive provides patients an instant connection to doctors for a medical consultation using any telephone or computer with complete audio and video conferencing. With no appointments, no waiting, and 24/7 availability,Telethrive eliminates existing and systemic barriers to health care access. Telethrive provides its highly scalable and customizable platform to a variety of healthcare organizations looking to cut cost, improve patient access to care, and better manage the time of the healthcare professionals providing services. A prototype of the platform is currently available direct to consumers in 18 states through Ringadoc (www.ringadoc.com).

Viewics

Viewics is an analytics and business intelligence software company focused on hospitals. The Viewics Health Insighter cloud based platform caters to ancillary departments such as the laboratory, radiology and pharmacy which are key drivers of cost and clinical decision making within a hospital. Our solutions enable hospitals to drive enhanced operational, financial and clinical outcomes.

SERIES A STAGE

AbilTo

Started in 2008, AbilTo creates and delivers set-price, fixed-duration behavioral health programs – via videoconference – that address prevalent, treatable conditions – e.g., depression occurring after a heart attack. The company currently offers programs addressing conditions, such as depression, anxiety and ADHD, as well as life transitions – e.g., career return at the end of family leave. AbilTo’s unique approach has clear advantages over traditional approaches. First, providing remote service, improves access and attendance. There are no office visits. Second, quality service is assured. AbilTo recruits its own network of licensed therapists who utilize proprietary manuals that are based on best practices of cognitive therapy and allow for consistent progress tracking. Third, participants make rapid, positive behavioral changes because each participant works worth both a therapist and a behavioral coach. AbilTo currently offers Cardiac Health Forum to Aetnamembers and Momentum (family leave to career transition) as recently reported about in Forbes.

Axial Exchange

When a patient transitions between care settings, information gaps can drive up both costs and patient safety issues. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has cited care transition as the single biggest risk in patient safety today. Axial solves this problem by providing proactive clinical summaries for patients that move into and out of hospitals — from ambulance transport arrivals at the emergency room to patients arriving at a primary care physician’s office for post-discharge treatment. Axial’s technology-approach bears more similarity to that of a modern consumer web startup than to that of traditional health IT vendor. Axial has a cloud-native, open source infrastructure that translates data and presents it via a consumer-like experience that accommodates virtually any device with a Web browser.

Empower Interactive

Empower’s online services deliver proven psychotherapy methodologies via an e-learning platform to greatly improve the economics and accessibility of solutions for mental and behavioral health, starting with depression and anxiety. The underlying Empower platform generates customized learning experiences for each user based on Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT) with content including videos, text, quizzes and interactive exercises. Clinicians can be assigned various levels of access to each user, as appropriate, to track individual progress. Overall, the program’s structure ensures that end users will benefit from cost-effective, evidence-based methods to help them improve their psychological well-being.

Jiff

Jiff, which plans to remain in stealth mode until September 22, has created the first HIPAA-compliant iPad platform for patient communication and education—used by doctors, nurses, patients and more. Jiff chairman James Currier is a serial consumer Internet entrepreneur who co-founded WonderHill, a social gaming company, which registered over 30 million people and was acquired in late 2010. In 1999, James founded Tickle, which became the world’s largest self-assessment company, registering 100 million people. Tickle became the 18th largest website in the world and was acquired by Monster.com in 2004. James also co-runs Ooga Labs, an investment and incubation company in Palo Alto.

YourNurseIsOn.com

YourNurseIsOn.com is a health care staff communications company that allows the health care industry to instantly allocate staff and providers where and when they are needed by two-way phone, text and email messaging. Instead of calling staff one by one, 30 people per hour, YourNurseIsOn.com can contact dozens of providers, and have answers in seconds, saving both time and money while improving patient outcomes. CLICK: Instantly contact and confirm your staff by multiple communication methods, including 2-way text, phone and email on any device. CONTACT: For open shift coverage, routine and emergency communications, compliance communications and continuity of operations. CONFIRM: The YNIO communications platform recognizes staff members’ responses and responds appropriately. RESULTS: YourNurseIsOn.com saves time and money while improving patient outcomes and staff satisfaction

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Every commuter wants to find better ways to traverse busy cities. Subway delays and bus route changes may throw carefully timed travel plans into disarray. To ease such headaches, New York startup Roadify has developed a mobile app that delivers updates from transit agencies and input from users on the street.

The app has already won accolades for the one-year-old company. In March, Roadify beat more than fifty other developers to win the grand prize—which included $10,000 cash—at the NYC BigApps 2011 competition. The program, sponsored by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, invites software developers to create technology that improves life in the city. Judges of this year’s competition included Dawn Barber, co-founder of NY Tech Meetup; Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter; and Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures.

Roadify currently provides real-time information on commuting routes just in the New York area, though the company plans to expand its services to other locations. Scott Kolber, chief operating officer with Roadify, says while transit information is typically available to the public, it is often scattered across multiple sources. Roadify collects data from entities such as Google Transit, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the New York Department of Transportation into one platform that can be customized for each user. For example, Roadify can post alerts if there is a service change on a specific subway line. “People want to know what’s going on,” Kolber says. “When is the bus coming? Why is there a train delay? Which bridge or tunnel should I take?”

Kolber says readily available data on traffic from city agencies is vital to the app, but Roadify also crowdsources information from users on the street. When users post the actual arrival times … Next Page »

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At its first-ever developer conference in San Francisco yesterday, Mountain View, CA-based online notekeeping startup Evernote announced that it has acquired Skitch. The Australian startup makes a popular Mac application used to capture, annotate, and share images. Evernote has already made the Skitch app free (it formerly cost $19.95 in the Mac App Store) and says it plans to integrate Skitch’s features into Evernote, so that users can more easily save annotated images in their Evernote notebooks. Evernote also announced the winners of its first developer competition, intended to highlight the work of outside developers building applications that integrate with the Evernote service. The $50,000 grand prize winner was Touchanote, an application that stores shortcuts to Evernote notes on near-field communications tags that can be attached to real-world objects.

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[Updated 6/30/11. See below] Eager entrepreneurs armed with ideas they believe can improve our way of life gathered on Tuesday for the first ever New York edition of the IBM Global Entrepreneur SmartCamp. The competition, which came to Boston last June, brings select groups of startups together with mentors from the investor community. Deborah Magid, director of software strategy with IBM Venture Capital Group, says the objective is to help new innovators hone their plans and foster a fresh crop of companies that IBM may collaborate with.

“What they are working on are outcome-based ideas for changing our corporate and personal lives,” Magid says. SmartCamp, held nine times a year around the world, works in tandem with IBM’s Smart Planet initiative by developing technology to tackle big problems like environmental issues and infrastructure management.

Five finalists are chosen for each SmartCamp and, following their presentations, meet with venture capitalists who help steer their ideas to survive in a competitive market. The New York finals began at Baruch College and will conclude tonight at the SUNY Levin Institute. The startups will be judged and one winner will be chosen to receive 12 weeks of mentoring, Magid says. The winner from each SmartCamp city goes on to compete in the global finals slated for first quarter 2012.

… Next Page »

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Cloud computing was my big theme last week, but we also covered stories about renewable energy, and we brought back a report from the future (the way the Churchill Club sees it, anyway).

—I profiled Heroku, the Y Combinator-backed Ruby on Rails platform that was acquired by Salesforce.com last December for $212 million. Co-founder Adam Wiggins shared previously undisclosed details about the company’s crucial “pivot” prior to the acquisition, from training ground for Ruby on Rails programers to true application hosting company. Coincidentally, Heroku today announced a major upgrade of its cloud-based services.

—Speaking of cloud computing, I took a look at Emergence Capital, the San Mateo venture firm known for being one of the earliest and most active investors in Software-as-a-Service-based startups, including Salesforce.com (which brought it an 80x return when it went public in 2004).

—I attended the annual Churchill Club “Top 10 Tech Trends” dinner in Santa Clara, and came back with a post-game report summarizing this year’s featured trends and the reactions from the audience and from panelists Aneesh Chopra, Paul Saffo, Steve Jurvetson, and Ajay Royan. One of the highest ranked trends: the emergence of trusted social networks to supplement Facebook.

—In my Friday column, I wrote about the economic impact of “ephemeralization,” including the tendency of software and hardware makers to distill the functions of many old devices into just a few new ones such as smartphones and tablet computers. Ephemeralization (and its cousin, efficiency) are probably net destroyers of jobs, I acknowledged, but I listed a few reasons why there may be room for optimism about the long-term employment picture.

—Ford Motor Company listed the San Francisco Bay Area as one of the 25 regions in the country best prepared for an influx of electric vehicles, when it comes to the availability of charging stations and other infrastructure, my colleague Bruce reported.

—South San Francisco-based Solazyme (NASDAQ: SZYM), which is developing technology to turn plant sugars into hydrocarbon fuel, saw its stock price shoot up after its initial public offering last Thursday night, as Luke reported. Solazyme shares rose more than 16 percent on Friday and are up another 8 percent in trading today.

—We compiled details about four summer competitions open to startups, including the Kauffman Foundation’s Startup Open, Morgenthaler Ventures’ Health IT Startup Showcase, Evernote’s developer competition, and Kaggle’s dark matter competition.

—Google bought Sparkbuy, a Seattle-based electronics shopping startup that had just launched last November, as my colleague Curt reported. At first it looked like a classic case of Google “acqhiring” a team of talented engineers, but Google later commented that it intends to foster the Sparkbuy  business within Google.

—In other acquisitions news, Jive Software bought OffiSync, BuyWithMe brought Groop Swoop, and Twitter confirmed that it had purchased Tweetdeck.

—In funding news, Everloop raised $3.3 million, GainSpan raised $10.2 million, VuClip raised $8 million, Revel Systems raised $3.7 million, BlueStacks raised $7.6 million, Zozi raised $7 million, CrowdStar raised $23 million, RelayRides raised $673,000, MobileIron raised $20 million, Intel Capital unveiled a series of four tech-startup investments totaling $24.5 million, Google invested $55 million in wind power company Terra-Gen, and Innovalight won a $3.4 million grant from the Department of Energy.

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You weren’t actually thinking about taking Memorial Day Weekend off, were you? If you’re an entrepreneur and you want some (relatively) easy money or fame, it’s time to get moving on your entry for one of the many startup-oriented competitions underway this summer. Here are just four that have hit my inbox this week.

—Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, CA, is organizing its second annual “Health IT Startup Showcase.” It’s a search for 10 outstanding startups seeking seed or Series A funding for technology ideas that could improve the quality or cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. The finalists will be paired with investors and other startup founders to help them prepare for presentations to an audience of VCs, angels, and entrepreneurs at Morgenthaler’s DC to VC Summit in Mountain View, CA, on September 22. Two categories of startups are eligible: those under two years old with less than $500,000 in funding, and those under three years old with less than $1.5 million in funding. Applications are due August 9; the details are available in this PDF at Morgenthaler’s website.

—Mountain View, CA-based Evernote, maker of a cross-platform system for storing digital notes of all kinds, has organized its first-ever Developer Competition. Aimed to spur the creation of more apps for the “Evernote Trunk” (the company’s third-party app ecosystem), the competition carries $100,000 in prizes, including a $50,000 grand prize, six $5,000 finalist prizes, a $10,000 student prize, and a $10,000 “wildcard prize.” The winners will be showcased at the company’s Evernote Trunk Conference on August 18. The submission deadline is July 15; Evernote published all the details in a May 23 blog post.

—The Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO, announced the Startup Open this week. The competition is designed to identify the 50 most promising startups around the world. Any company that has had a “startup moment” since November 22, 2010 is eligible—meaning “any action related to launching a new business, such as incorporating a company; officially opening the doors for business; completing a first sale; or securing outside funding,” according to the foundation. Applications are due September 15. The 50 finalists will be announced on October 15, and those companies will compete for prizes during the foundations’ Global Entrepreneurship Week event in mid-November. Last year’s grand prize winner, Resolute Marine Energy founder Olivier Cebiero, received a trip to Richard Branson’s private island.

—This one’s far out—literally. Kaggle, a Melbourne, Australia-based Web startup that crowdsources scientific data analysis through online competitions, has announced a competition for new computer algorithms that could help to measure the distribution of dark matter in the universe by gauging the apparent ellipticity of images of distant galaxies. The competition is being sponsored by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Royal Astronomical Society, and the winner will be invited to present his or her solution at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The entry deadline is August 18. (Working with the Heritage Provider Network, Kaggle is also running a longer-term “Heritage Health Prize Competition” aimed at eliciting an algorithm that can predict, based solely on insurance claims data, which patients will be admitted to hospitals. You’ve got until April 3, 2013 to enter that one.)

—This one isn’t an organized competition, but it’s great for mobile game startups: San Francisco-based TinyCo, which makes games such as Tiny Zoo and Tiny Chef and is backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, said this week that it has set up a $5 million “TinyFund” to help developers get iOS and Android games to market. TinyCo said it will provide selected teams with up to $500,000 in funding, along with marketing, development, and business support.

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Hundreds of people packed the Bell Harbor Conference Center on Seattle’s waterfront yesterday for the University of Washington’s annual Business Plan Competition. Now in its 14th year, the competition is a great showcase of energy and ideas from student entrepreneurs and some of their more experienced collaborators.

Last night, the group of 37 teams was whittled down to the “sweet 16″ semifinal round. You can learn more about the particulars of the competition at the Foster Business School website, and check out the list of the 16 semifinalists.

I wasn’t there as a judge, but decided to compile a few capsules of the proto-companies that caught my eye—even though some of them didn’t make the next round, or even have websites yet, we could be hearing more from these folks in the future.

Yoi! Gaming
Massively multiplayer video games are not exactly mainstream, but the people who are into them are really passionate—there are mini-celebrity players who make a living in competitive gaming, John Madden-esque online commentators, and big tournaments with serious prizes.

But Yoi! Gaming CEO C.J. Wong says there’s a gap between those big tournaments, which can be difficult to qualify for, and the smaller, local competitions that rely on having everyone in the same place. “We feel like we’re in 1918 before the NFL started—there’s a bunch of small leagues out there,” Wong says.

The idea behind Yoi! is to set up online matchmaking that can sort people into quick groups for competing against each other, with buy-ins and prizes—something that should sound familiar to anyone who’s seen online poker sites explode in the past decade.

Wong says, however, that online video gaming competitions have avoided the heat that regulators have applied to poker companies because the games are seen as more skill-based, and not related to gambling. Yoi! already has a license from Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of hugely popular game StarCraft—which, I am not making this up, is so popular in South Korea that tournaments are shown live on TV.

ZeroBrane
These guys are developing a small, cheap robot that uses a smartphone as its brain. The little machine, which looks like an iPhone riding a miniature pair of Segway wheels, is intended mostly for entertainment purposes on the consumer side right now—tooling around the house or “chasing your cat,” … Next Page »

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Utah may be known for many things, but who would have thought that Utah, and particularly Brigham Young University (BYU), would be participating in the transformation of entrepreneurship?

I spent last weekend in Utah at BYU as a guest of Professor Nathan Furr, (a former Ph.D. student of our MS&E department at Stanford,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship. The most visible step was the first International Business Model Competition, hosted by the BYU Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology.

What’s A Startup?
We’ve been teaching that the difference between a startup and an existing company is that existing companies execute business models, while startups search for a business model. (Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.) Therefore the very foundations of teaching entrepreneurship should start with how to search for a business model.

This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This solution stack proposes that entrepreneurs should first map their assumptions (their business model) and then test whether these hypotheses are accurate, outside in the field (customer development) and then use an iterative and incremental development methodology (agile development) to build the product. When founders discover their assumptions are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn’t a crisis, it’s a learning event called a pivot—and an opportunity to update the business model.

Business Model Versus Business Plan
The traditional business plan is an essential organizing and planning document to launch new products in existing companies with known customers and markets. But this same document is a bad fit when used in a startup, as the customers and market are unknown. A business plan in a startup becomes an exercise in creative writing with a series of guesses about a customer problem and the product solution. Most business plans are worse than useless in preparing an entrepreneur for the real world as “no business plan survives first contact with customers.”

I suggested that if we wanted to hold competitions that actually emulated the real world (rather than what’s easy to grade) entrepreneurship educators should hold competitions that emulate what entrepreneurs actually encounter—chaos, uncertainty and unknowns. A business model competition would emulate the “out of the building” experience of real entrepreneurs executing the customer development / business model / agile stack.

The 47th (-46) Annual Business Model Competition
From the seed of this initial idea last summer Professor Nathan Furr, and his team at BYU created a global business model competition, receiving over 60 submissions from across the world. Alexander Osterwalder, Professor Furr and I were the judges for selecting the winner from … Next Page »

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“In the Obama Administration, entrepreneurs are welcome.” So said Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer of the United States, in a keynote speech yesterday at “DC to VC,” a summit on healthcare IT investing organized by Morgenthaler Ventures partner Rebecca Lynn in San Francisco and co-sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and Venrock. Speaking to a group of venture capital partners, entrepreneurs, and media representatives at the posh St. Francis Yacht Club, Chopra argued that under Barack Obama’s leadership, the federal government is doing more than ever before to adopt the latest infotech innovations coming out of Silicon Valley, and to shape federal regulation to encourage entrepreneurial solutions to big challenges like improving public health and nutrition.

I had a chance to delve into the specifics of the administration’s pro-entrepreneurship policies with Chopra in a one-on-one interview after his speech (see below). But the big picture, for the charismatic New Jersey-born son of Indian immigrants, is that the government sorely needs the ideas of its citizens—especially programmers—and that it can best stimulate those ideas by making the government’s vast troves of data more accessible to outside developers, and then getting out of the way to see what they build.

As a case in point, he cited the story of Dave Augustine, Bob Burbach, and Andrew Carpenter, three developers from San Francisco-based non-profit WestEd Interactive who came up with a new way to search the antiquated Federal Register as part of the Sunlight Foundation’s “Apps for America” contest. “The Archivist of the United States found out about Bob and Dave and Andrew in March, and said, ‘You guys have built the best killer app I’ve seen, can you rebuild the Federal Register website?’ and they said, ‘Sure,’” Chopra recounted. The new FederalRegister.gov, launched this summer, makes it easy to browse the once-impenetrable collection of government notices, rules, procedures, and documents by topic or date. “These were just random dudes who didn’t have lobbyists or procurement departments, but just smart ideas—’cognitive surplus,’ as Clay Shirky would say.’”

President Obama named Chopra as the nation’s first CTO in April 2009. As an associate director within the Office of Science & Technology Policy, Chopra’s formal assignment was to work with chief information officer Vivek Kundra to set federal technology policies that would make government more efficient and more transparent. “The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and ensure that they know exactly how we’re spending their money,” the President said when he appointed Chopra.

But Chopra has gone far beyond that initial charge, becoming known as an outspoken advocate for making government databases more accessible to developers of consumer software applications, using open source software more widely within government, and spurring innovation through prize-based competitions. Obviously, those are all causes dear to the hearts of most private-sector innovators and entrepreneurs, and Chopra has become a popular figure in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs. Even before joining the Obama Administration, Chopra, the former secretary of technology for former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, had been labeled a “venture governmentalist” for his efforts to invest in high-risk internal technology projects. Bay Area technology guru Tim O’Reilly has gone so far as to call Chopra a “rock star,” saying that he “understands that government technologists need to act more like their counterparts in Silicon Valley.”

In his speech at the Morgenthaler summit, Chopra gave numerous examples of the way the Obama Administration is opening government data to entrepreneurial uses. One was the Apps for Healthy Kids competition, a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to reduce childhood obesity; the winners of the contest, which challenged entrants to create computer games or tools that make “fun and engaging” use of USDA nutrition data on 1,000 commonly eaten foods, were announced by the White House last month. Chopra said the developer of “Smash Your Food,” one of the winners of the $60,000 competition, got so excited about the power of software to help people eat better that he … Next Page »

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Recently, the X Prize Foundation awarded a total of $10 million to three companies at the forefront of building the world’s most efficient cars. It was the culmination of a competition that began in 2008 with 111 teams and was pared down to nine finalists. The competition was rigorous: it demanded teams to engineer and design cars that get at least 100 miles per gallon on average and survive grueling real-world safety, emissions, durability and range tests.

The goal of the X Prize Foundation is visionary—to show us how small, innovative car companies can lead the way toward creating highly efficient cars that will transform the way we use energy and dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

As I listened to members of the winning teams talk about the competition and the challenge, they focused not just on the specifics of the engineering task that was in front of them, but more importantly on the implications for society. They want to fundamentally change the game—to change the way we look at cars in order to have an impact on the big picture issues of creating new economic and environmental opportunities in this country.

The nonprofit X Prize Foundation, with its theme of “Revolution Through Competition,” is representative of a new mindset that focuses on the intersection of engineering and technology to solve seemingly intractable problems.

In early October, on the campus of the University of Southern California, X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis will join a group of scientists, policy makers, educators, entrepreneurs, business leaders and communicators who will converge at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges Summit to discuss real-world solutions to some of the most pressing and complex issues of our time.

The summit is part of a bold movement in the world of engineering—two years ago, the NAE launched the idea of 14 Grand Challenges in Engineering. The grand challenges are ultimately tied to fundamental societal needs and priorities: sustainability, vulnerability, health, and the joy of living. They cover a wide spectrum of issues—making solar power more economical, providing access to clean water, engineering better medicines, preventing nuclear terror, securing cyberspace and restoring and improving the urban infrastructure, among others.

The grand challenges are encouraging us to tackle issues surrounding the environment, healthcare, and technology, issues that clearly interest professional engineers and issues that will inspire future engineers. We are in a new era in which engineers and technologists work with their counterparts from other disciplines to understand relevant problems, help classify and analyze them, understand the constraints, and help design solutions that will address these problems.

During a time when we see gridlock in the world of politics and experience the uncertainty of a stubborn and difficult economic recession, there is still great potential to actually solve pressing societal issues.

At the X Prize event, there were a host of luminaries from the political world who acknowledged this gridlock and called on innovators to lead the way. U.S. Senator Mark Warner from Virginia, where the Edison2 team based in the town of Lynchburg captured the $5 million X Prize for mainstream vehicles, voiced the sentiments many Americans share.

“We need a few more real engineers,” Warner said. “These are the next great innovators who will lead our country forward.” I could not agree with him more.

I believe that engineering can empower society by creating new tools, devices, methodologies, and ways of thinking, of innovating and communicating. Removing constraints and outside the box thinking are fundamental qualities of the best engineers, and I believe the results of this kind of thinking will be a fundamental driver in technological and societal change.

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Ambiq Micro, a startup involving business school students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has won $250,000 from venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and communications technology company Cisco Systems, according to a news release. Ambiq Micro, which is working on energy-efficient microcontrollers, beat out 15 other finalists in the competition, which required contestants to make their case using Cisco’s TelePresence communications suites. The presenting members of the Ambiq Micro team were U-M’s Scott Hanson and Phil O’Niel.

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Berkeley, CA-based Magoosh, a developer of low-cost online multimedia materials for the lucrative test preparation industry, is one of two startups to snag the top prize in North Bridge Venture Partners‘ first seed capital competition. Both Magoosh and Pittstown, NJ-based Profitably, a business intelligence software startup focused on small businesses, will receive $50,000 in seed capital from North Bridge, along with $25,000 worth of in-kind software development support and six months of incubation space in the firm’s offices.

The winners were named in an announcement yesterday. It’s the first time North Bridge has run the competition, as the Waltham, MA- and San Mateo, CA-based firm’s answer to the profusion of seed funding and incubator programs springing up across the Bay Area and Boston investing scenes.

There’s no shortage of takers for such programs. North Bridge didn’t publicize the competition widely, but received “an awful lot more” applications than it had expected, according to Cali Tran, the San Mateo-based principal who co-organized the contest. The firm therefore had its pick of the litter across the sectors North Bridge invests in, including software, digital media, wireless and communications technology, materials, and healthcare.

In fact, the firm started off intending to hand out the $50,000 top prize to just one startup, but “based on the quality [of the applications], we opted to double our prize and pick two,” Tran says.

“The top 10 were all pretty amazing,” says Tran. “One of the things we were delighted and surprised about was the level of maturity of the products, even at the seed stage. A fair number of the top 10 were already [earning] revenue.”

The other seven finalists, chosen from entries that consisted simply of 10-slide PowerPoint decks, included the following startups:

—Bizstro, a social media marketing firm
—Cause It’s Cool, ane-commerce product review service
—DPL Health Games, a social gaming service
—Launchtime Mom, a social networking site
—MobileMob, a community for wireless consumers
—Neoflect, acloud-based personal computing startup,
—Ubiqi Health, a mobile health management firm.

Each of these finalists received feedback and criticism from the North Bridge partners who reviewed their entries.

Tran says seed investing is a long tradition at North Bridge. He says more than half of the firm’s deals since its founding in 1994 have been seed investments (meaning investments on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, often in return for convertible notes rather than equity). But despite that, North Bridge isn’t widely known among entrepreneurs as a company that invests at the seed stage, Tran says. “One of the objectives of this competition was to introduce ourselves to a community of entrepreneurs who may not know us,” he says.

The North Bridge competition differs from other venture-incubator programs such as TechStars and Y Combinator in that it anoints fewer startups (just one or two in comparison to about 10 per session for Y Combinator and TechStars) and provides them with quite a bit more cash (TechStars companies get up to $18,000 and Y Combinator companies get … Next Page »

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Mobile Sign Language Systems, a University of Michigan startup developing smart phone software that translates spoken English into real-time video of sign language, has won an Ann Arbor SPARK business pitch competition, beating out four competitors. The company will get incubator space in Ypsilanti, MI, and $50,000 in business acceleration services.

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MassChallenge, a Boston-area nonprofit focused on encouraging innovation, is “convinced that entrepreneurship is the answer” for everything to unemployment to the housing crisis to pollution, in the words of CEO and co-founder John Harthorne.

To put its money where its mouth is, the organization is unleashing a global startup competition with $1 million available in award money. MassChallenge officially launched the contest Wednesday to a standing room-only crowd at the new Fan Pier building on Boston’s waterfront, which will also be the organization’s future home.

From now until June 11, early stage startups from around the world can register for the contest online. Immediately they’ll get access to online training, discounts on services, and access to a network of companies in similar positions. The organization will select 300 semi-finalists for in-person pitches in July.

Up to 100 finalist businesses will actually have the opportunity to move into MassChallenge’s new office space in Boston’s seaport area, which has been designated an “innovation district” by Mayor Thomas Menino’s office. There, they’ll pair up with mentors, get strategic advice from industry experts, and link with members of the Massachusetts support system for entrepreneurs, including investors. At the inaugural competition’s conclusion in October, as many as 20 winning companies will receive $50,000—no strings attached (meaning that MassChallenge won’t require an equity stake in the companies, as many venture incubators do).

“MassChallenge is a celebration of these risk-takers,” Harthorne says.

The competition is drawing some pretty fresh entrepreneurs, including three senior students from Worcester, MA-based Clark University whom I chatted with at the launch event. They’re taking advantage of MassChallenge to turn their class project—a company called Delish Nutrish that makes allergen-free food products—into a business reality.

“We really want this to get somewhere. We don’t want it to just be a year-long project,” says co-founder Eva Fang. Another co-founder noted that MassChallenge will be particularly helpful in getting the students the contacts they lack as young entrepreneurs.

State and local officials lauded the MassChallenge organizers’ goals of promoting job creation and economic recovery in Massachusetts. “Our economy here in the Commonwealth has always been about what’s next,” said Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

Mayor Menino, who also spoke at the launch, repeatedly exuded pride over MassChallenge’s impending relocation to Boston. (The organization previously had office space in Kendall Square’s Cambridge Innovation Center, but will move in July to the Fan Pier space—which oddly enough currently resembles the CIC’s unfinished expanded space). “Where else can you find such intellectual firepower and such a strong network of supportive services?” Menino asked.

The competition’s reach will go beyond the companies directly involved in it, says Brian Burke, the northeast director for state government affairs at Microsoft, a top-level sponsor for the competition. In increasing its presence in Massachusetts, Microsoft also sought to invest in other startup efforts and further fuel the innovation economy, Burke says. “The Challenge is a core part of our DNA,” he says of the startup competition.

I caught up with one attendee who says his business will benefit from the influx of startups that MassChallenge will encourage. “MassChallenge is doing a great job promoting entrepreneurship from a business standpoint; we’re trying to do it from a legal standpoint,” says Benjamin Hron, a co-founder of two-person firm VC Ready Law Group, which seeks to provide cost-effective legal services to startups.

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Portland, OR-based DeltaPoint has won $170,000 in the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network’s angel investment competition today. DeltaPoint is developing diagnostic software that performs “virtual biopsies” on suspected cancers, starting with breast cancer. The company was a finalist in the OEN event’s “launch stage” category. Portland-based Enjoy Life, which says it is the producer of the first authentic, premium Sangria in the U.S., took home $25,000 as the winner of the “seed stage” category.

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Kent, WA-based LaserMotive has won $900,000 in a NASA competition to build a small prototype device that one day could help lead to a commercial “space elevator,” a cable that could transport cargo to and from outer space. The news was reported by the New York Times and other outlets. LaserMotive, a laser power-beaming company, is led by Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, who both also work with Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures. The power-beaming project and competition was reported by TechFlash earlier today.

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick today announced the creation of a $1 million annual business plan competition designed to attract more high-growth startups to the state. The competition, which will get underway next year, will be modeled on similar contests at MIT and other universities, but will be open to all teams of entrepreneurs willing to headquarter their companies in Massachusetts, Patrick said.

The so-called MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition, organized by a new Cambridge, MA, nonprofit called MassChallenge, will provide seed funding to some 30 startups each year. Each finalist will receive a combination of cash and equity investments worth roughly $1 million—far more than the $100,000 top prize handed out by the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the nation’s most famous university business plan competition.

The governor made the announcement at the end of a speech to a group of several dozen infotech sector stakeholders known informally as the Massachusetts Information Technology Collaborative. The group was invited to Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center today to discuss how to expand the infotech sector in Massachusetts.

Patrick said the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is seeding the competition by contributing $100,000 to the prize pot, with the actual funds coming out of the budget of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s John Adams Innovation Institute. Boston-area technology entrepreneur and philanthropist Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, Microsoft, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation have also signed on as founding sponsors of the competition.

Greg Bialecki, Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, told Xconomy after Governor Patrick’s announcement that the new competition will contribute to the governor’s larger effort to draw attention to Massachusetts as an epicenter of business creation. “We think the program itself, and the fact that people will be applying to create companies in Massachusetts, and the recognition that comes to the winners, will attract attention and will be a tangible sign that Massachusetts supports innovation and entrepreneurship,” Bialecki said.

“The other thing we find potentially very powerful…is that it’s an opportunity for people to work together on something that is bigger than any single industry,” Bialecki said. In other remarks at the Information Technology Collaborative meeting, Bialecki said state agencies are working to promote not just the infotech sector but clean energy, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing.

The MassChallenge competition will welcome startup teams in all of these areas and more. The formal competition categories will include clean technology and energy, information technology, healthcare and life sciences, nonprofit, and software and gaming. To be eligible for the competition, companies must agree to base their companies in Massachusetts and must commit to creating at least five jobs in Massachusetts during their first year of operation. (Also, their employees must be U.S. citizens or have work permits.)

In remarks immediately prior to the MassChallenge announcement, Governor Patrick said the U.S. economy is undergoing a shift unlike any since the Industrial Revolution. If Massachusetts wants to be an incubator for the companies that will create tomorrow’s new jobs—whatever industry they’re in—then “we had better lay a foundation for collaboration and entrepreneurship,” Patrick told meeting attendees. “Our job [in state government] is not to … Next Page »

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