One of the Boston area’s most intriguing tech startups—because of its global reach—has emerged from a fairly quiet period with a new name and a refined mission.

Boston- and San Francisco-based Txteagle, a mobile research and marketing startup focused on developing countries, has rebranded itself as Jana (pronounced “Jah-nuh”). The name is Sanskrit for “people,” and as co-founder and CEO Nathan Eagle explains, it highlights the focus of the young company. It also fits the aesthetic profile of what the team wanted in a name: “It’s short, has two consonants and two vowels, and is easy to recognize and spell,” he says.

Yes, Eagle is a precise kind of guy. Precisely crazy enough to think his startup can change the world by enabling companies to do market research and mobile marketing in nearly 100 developing nations (and counting) via mobile phones. All by compensating consumers for participating by rewarding them with airtime on their mobile subscriber accounts.

This is interesting because, first of all, most brands and ad agencies don’t have good access to detailed data about consumers in emerging economies. “We want to generate data that simply doesn’t exist,” Eagle says. And, second, Jana has a way of reaching a lot of people with what sounds like a pretty compelling offer. “As far as I know, there’s no other company on Earth that has the capability to instantly compensate 2 billion people,” he says.

Where did this company come from? Ten years ago, Eagle (see photo, below) was a graduate student in the wearable computing group at the MIT Media Lab. He convinced his advisor to let him program a Nokia phone to collect data about his behavior and surroundings, instead of strapping on bulky equipment like other students. “So I wouldn’t have to dress up as a computer for the rest of my graduate career,” he quips. “I’ve been hacking on phones ever since.”

He finished his PhD in 2005, and wanted to make an impact on people’s lives through mobile devices. Mobile phone adoption was taking off fast in Africa, so Eagle took a faculty position at MIT but arranged to live in Kenya, where he taught mobile-app development at the University of Nairobi.

That led to a number of interesting projects. One was an app to enable rural nurses to send text messages about the local blood supply levels in their hospitals, so that centralized blood banks could see where blood was needed. (Previously this was done by having people drive from hospital to hospital, with long delays in information flow.) The first week of the release went well, but in the second week, about half the nurses stopped texting. By the end of the month, all the texting had stopped.

“It failed simply because of lack of insight on my part,” Eagle says. “We were asking these rural nurses to send a text message every day with the data. That was like asking them to take a pay cut. The price of a text message was a surprising fraction of their day’s wage.”

So he went back to the drawing board. Eagle’s work was around mobile phones, but it was also around “big data,” he says. “I was working with dozens of mobile operators in East Africa, … Next Page »

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Written on the whiteboard on the first day of my entrepreneurship class at Tufts was a sobering statistic: 80 percent of startups die in their first four years. There exist a variety of factors that can kill a business. Luckily, Boston is full of programs and organizations designed to help entrepreneurs navigate through the startup process. The National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance’s Sustainable Vision VentureLab, led by James Barlow, is a five-day intensive incubator program for companies doing business in emerging markets (it ran August 26-30). I initially thought that it would be an abbreviated version of a conventional business class curriculum, somewhat similar to what I had experienced in the five-day boot camp organized by MassChallenge: what are the best ways to structure a company, to manufacture, distribute, and market product X in market Y, and how to go about getting VC funding?

On the contrary, it is a back-to-basics introspective program that emphasizes the human element of a business, such as being able to communicate your value proposition in an effective and clear manner. This may sound elementary. The reality is that this is the foundation for any business. James compared it to humming a song in your head. When vocalized you can clearly hear the tune and the words, even though the person across from you may be shooting you a puzzled look. This is a problem many entrepreneurs unknowingly struggle with. Having become so familiar with the intricacies of their businesses, they have lost the ability to break it down into its simplest and most coherent forms. When hearing these entrepreneurs pitch, the listener finds himself unable to understand the core of their idea, akin to listening to a hummed song.

Oftentimes, the founders themselves are confused and are unknowingly in disagreement about what the value proposition of their businesses is. Even if they are aware of the value proposition, they are unable to translate it in a way that speaks to the wants and needs of their market. That is why the VentureLab program focuses so much on deconstructing the human element aspect of your business. This is often a tricky process because it requires you to examine your business in a manner in which you are unaccustomed to and uncomfortable doing. At Roof For Two, we looked at all the factors that could sink our company and discovered the need to connect with different influencers in our product market. It became an exercise in stitching together our business and value proposition in a manner that resonated with each one of these individual actors. For example, our company provides a motorcycle weather accessory for riders in India to shield themselves from the monsoon rains. It saves them time in their commute and increases the efficiency of businesses whose employees lose time when seeking shelter from the downpour. When we started looking beyond our end user and examined other people potentially impacted by our product, we began asking ourselves very different questions from the ones we had originally posed. We had initially asked: What do Indian motorcyclists look for in a product? How will our product affect their lifestyle?

However, during VentureLab we looked beyond the commuter towards businesses, institutions, and society. We asked ourselves very different questions: What businesses stay open during the heavy monsoon season? Would small businesses have incentives to subsidize our product for their commute sensitive employees? How do we best communicate our value proposition to both the commuters and the businesses that depend on them?

Besides the introspective portion, part of the learning process in programs such as VentureLab comes from the interaction between participants who can help one another, despite operating … Next Page »

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“I am not convinced that I would put my child in an incubator that is made of car parts.”

That’s Krista Donaldson speaking. She’s the CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based D-Rev, and the quote says a lot about the non-profit organization and its philosophy on designing healthcare equipment for the developing world.

You may have read about the incubator in question—it’s called NeoNurture, and is the creation of Cambridge, MA-based design studio Design That Matters. The device made a media splash and won design awards last year for its unique solution to the parts shortages that often render medical equipment inoperable in rural hospitals in developing countries. NeoNurture uses car headlights to keep neonatal infants warm, a dashboard fan for air circulation, and a motorcycle battery for backup power. The machine’s designers reasoned that since car parts and car-repair experts can be found almost anywhere, NeoNurture ought to be easier to maintain than a more specialized unit.

But to Donaldson’s way of thinking, the folks at Design that Matters forgot to ask a key question about their device: Could they imagine selling it to a U.S. hospital? “It’s a great example of a product that resonates with the techie community because it very cleverly solves a real need,” says Donaldson. At D-Rev, by contrast, “Our approach is that we are developing world-class products that meet quality standards here, but are designed to meet the needs of the environment there. With every project, we ask, ‘Is this something that could be used at Stanford Hospital? Is this something I would put my children in?’”

D-Rev isn’t building an infant incubator, but it is building a phototherapy device for treating severe jaundice, a condition that afflicts about an eighth of all newborns. And if there’s a simple premise behind that project and the others underway at the four-year-old organization, it’s that patients and healthcare providers in the developing world deserve access to the same high-quality technology available here—and that sometimes all it takes to make such technology affordable is a little Silicon Valley-style design and engineering thinking, matched with on-the-ground market know-how.

Indeed, if you visit D-Rev’s Emerson Street headquarters, just a couple of blocks away from world-famous design consultancy IDEO (where Donaldson once interned), it feels much like any other Palo Alto startup, with the requisite Macs, iPad, and overhead projector. The only sign that D-Rev is developing physical stuff, rather than software, is in the laboratory, where prototypes litter the floor and there’s a workbench complete with circuit boards and soldering irons. And the only sign that D-Rev is a non-profit is…well, there aren’t any.

D-Rev CEO Krista Donaldson shows a prototype for the Brilliance phototherapy device to doctors in India.

“One of the things that makes us a little out of the ordinary, and one of the things that makes us really successful, is that our methods are 95 percent business methods,” says John Dawson, chairman of the board at D-Rev (the name stands for Design Revolution). “It’s not like we are taking just a little bit of Silicon Valley and shoving it into a non-profit. Most of this organization operates like a startup.”

The main difference, Dawson told me when I visited him and Donaldson in Palo Alto in late April, is that D-Rev is aiming for social benefit, not big profits.

“Our currency is impact,” says Donaldson. “We collect minimal royalties on our products, we have licensing deals, but our measure is how successfully we treat children who wouldn’t otherwise receive treatment, and mobilize people who wouldn’t otherwise walk.” (That’s a reference to the JaipurKnee, D-Rev’s multi-axis prosthetic knee joint for amputees.) D-Rev depends on philanthropic grants to fund early product R&D that the market can’t support—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is its largest supporter. But its product development methods are straight out of the for-profit world. And it doesn’t waste time on products that don’t have a market measuring in the millions of people, or for which it can’t find eager manufacturing and marketing partners.

Donaldson is a mechanical engineer who joined D-Rev in 2009 after working as a product designer with KickStart International (then ApproTec) in Kenya, a reconstruction advisor for the … Next Page »

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The mobile hits keep coming—though I guess “mobile” is officially redundant in the tech world now.

Boston- and San Francisco-based Txteagle, which makes a mobile-messaging platform for developing markets, has raised $8.5 million in Series A financing led by Spark Capital in Boston. The company’s other seed investors, Flywheel Ventures, RBC Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, and New York angel investor Esther Dyson, also participated in the round. The news was reported earlier by All Things Digital, the Boston Globe, and Mass High Tech.

Txteagle is led by CEO and co-founder Nathan Eagle, a Stanford and MIT Media Lab alum. The company, which started in 2009 (when Xconomy first wrote about it), focuses on software for mobile marketing and market research via text messages, with a twist. Through partnerships with wireless carriers in dozens of countries from Afghanistan to Kenya to Vietnam, Txteagle helps companies and organizations compensate consumers and workers for their texting airtime, which can be expensive. (Basically it’s a way to reward people for responding to mobile ads, and to do good too.)

For those who complain that Spark Capital doesn’t make enough investments in Boston-area startups, Txteagle is just the latest counterexample. Spark has also invested in peerTransfer, 8D World, and Linkwell Health, to name a few recent deals.

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Sproxil, a provider of a mobile authentication system for identifying counterfeit medicine in developing countries, has brought in $1.8 million in equity funding from one investor, according to an SEC filing. The firm, which started in Somerville, MA, in 2009, first hit our radar when it won IBM’s SmartCamp competition last summer, and has participated in other business plan competitions like MassChallenge. In January, Sproxil chief financial officer Alden Zecha told me that the startup was adding to the pool of pharmaceutical companies that use its service and was eyeing Series A money to increase its staff. Neither Zecha nor CEO Ashifi Gogo could be reached for comment this morning, but we’ll be sure to update this space if they have anything to say on the newest financing.

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Nicholas Negroponte walked into the Starbucks holding some sort of thin, tablet-like computer. I couldn’t tell what model, because it was zipped inside a carrying case—but I was hoping for a prototype of the XO 3, the next-generation tablet Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child Foundation wants to create for children in the developing world for something like $75 per machine.

“That’s not an iPad?” I asked, hoping it was not.

“It is an iPad,” Negroponte replied, crushing my hopes for an exclusive early look at the envisioned device. “We’re fast, but not that fast.” We met last Friday at the Starbucks in the Galleria Mall, here in Cambridge, MA, not far from OLPC headquarters. It was kind of ironic how deftly Negroponte wielded the iPad, using it to look up information and send me pictures and PowerPoint slides as we spoke, and flipping it around occasionally to demonstrate similarities and differences between it and the planned XO 3. As I snapped off a few pictures, he joked that they would make a nice ad for Apple (except he hadn’t seen the quality of my pictures).

While the dimensions of the iPad and planned XO 3 are very similar, the differences between the machines—one for upscale consumers, the other for children in developing nations—are profound. But perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation was Negroponte’s assertion that OLPC might not have to build anything at all to get an XO 3-like tablet to market (more on all this later).

We were speaking as part of several interviews I have been doing with OLPC personnel and advisors to catch up on the group’s progress and ambitions. On Tuesday, I profiled the OLPC Association, the business side of the organization. This article, based primarily on my interview with Negroponte, looks at the OLPC Foundation. Negroponte is the founder of and top figure in the entire organization, but the foundation (which he chairs) is his chief focus. Its mission is really twofold: to bring laptops, starting with the current XO model, to children in new areas such as Gaza and Afghanistan, and to oversee development of the XO 3 tablet.

Both efforts, it turns out, are utilizing innovative new initiatives and ideas—with what might be called mixed success. Negroponte’s update included a sobering assessment of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, and a report on OLPC’s Gaza plans that wasn’t unlike reports of Mideast peace talks: things are frustratingly slow to develop. There was better news on the XO 3 front: as I reported on Monday, semiconductor maker Marvell recently committed to a $5.6 million grant to fund the tablet’s development. Along the way, Negroponte had some observations about the evolution of computing I found fascinating—including his assertion that tablets were not creating the market for e-books, but that it was rather the other way around. And my overall impression was that while the days of ubiquitous praise and head-spinning press about the OLPC project are long past, the organization is actually settling into a pace and place where it could make by far its biggest impact in the next few years ahead.

Getting Laptops to Afghanistan and Gaza

We spoke first about efforts to expand OLPC’s reach. Most of the organization’s success so far has come in South America and Latin America (primarily Uruguay and Paraguay), and to a lesser degree parts of Africa. Negroponte now seems to be focusing mostly on the Middle East: Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq. And to do it, he’s had to come up with an entirely different model for getting laptops into the hands of kids, one based on humanitarian donations rather than convincing governments to purchase the machines.

The humanitarian donation idea, he says, is almost “totally new.” Outside of very few exceptions, the 1.5 million laptops distributed to date (plus another 500,000 on back order) have been funded by the governments of the countries for which they’re intended. But that won’t work in … Next Page »

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Walter Bender and the One Laptop per Child organization are back together again. The architect of the Sugar learning environment at the heart of every XO laptop, who had teamed with OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte to launch the project but split with the organization 30 months ago, saying it had lost its way as a disruptive power, is now once again an integral part of the effort. He and his Sugar Labs colleagues are teaming with OLPC personnel to deliver laptops and help create a software development ecosystem in South America and other parts of the developing world. It’s part of what seems to be a renewed push to advance the foundation’s goals of enhancing learning and to create an economic framework to help emerging nations help themselves.

This reunification was the most surprising and important thing I learned about last week when I visited OLPC board member and strategic advisor Chuck Kane in his office at MIT for an update on the organization. Bender joined us by telephone for much of the interview. The big catalyst of the reunification was Kane, who started working with OLPC three years ago. “One of the things I really wanted to do was get Walter back into the mix, because Walter was at the front end of this project,” says Kane. “When Walter left, we kept in close touch, and when it became clear that Sugar Labs would be a natural fit to our joint mission, we decided to work together again.” The renewed collaboration began about eight months ago. And, says Kane, “He’s really had an impact on our capabilities since coming back. Now it’s a joint effort again.”

“In some sense, it’s the same as it ever was,” adds Bender. After all, he notes, OLPC has never shipped a laptop that didn’t have his Sugar environment at its core—so at least on one level, “the Sugar Labs team has never stopped working with One Laptop Per Child.” Still, he acknowledges a vastly improved relationship with the organization—and says that’s because its interests seem once again more tightly aligned with his own. “What’s different,” he says, “is that there’s a much more concerted effort to get the message out that this is not just a laptop project, it’s a learning project.”

I get into more details of what brought Bender back below, and how that is going. But first, a general update from Kane about what the organization’s been doing since I last met with him and Negroponte early last year.

The short answer, says Kane: “a lot.” Indeed, at the time we last spoke, the OLPC organization was going through a round of layoffs and splitting into two main groups. That split has now been entirely achieved. The OLPC Foundation, led by Negroponte, is continuing to develop a next generation computer while also pursuing new opportunities to bring laptops to places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gaza—parts of the world where, in Kane’s words, “our intention is to provide by way of some kind of donation computers to the children in those areas.” That work, he says, is proceeding apace—and we will have more from Negroponte in the next few days.

The other big block is the OLPC Association, which is what Kane is part of. It is basically the business end of the enterprise, working with customers—most of them so far in South America—that buy computers rather than acquiring them by way of donations. This is the side of OLPC that handles sales, manufacturing, the supply chain, and so forth. It has moved its headquarters from Cambridge, MA, to Miami, where Kane now keeps an apartment and where CEO and chairman Rodrigo Arboleda runs day-to-day operations, closer to OLPC’s biggest customers in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru. “Most of our rollouts have been in Latin America, Miami is the capital of Latin America, so it’s worked out very well,” says Kane. Indeed, he says, OLPC has now delivered 1.5 million of its XO laptops, and “we’ve got about a half million on backlog right now.”

Another change in this part of the organization is that, for the first time, OLPC has built in what Kane says is a “very small” profit margin to help the organization support itself in the face of waning corporate donations. Even with this extra margin, the XO is “still by far and away the least expensive computer” in the world, he says. But the price gap is narrowing between it and commercial netbooks and laptops. “Whereas our competition was very limited two years ago, our competition today is high level, from a number of computer manufacturers,” Kane says. What’s more, he says, “they are targeting the education market in a big way.”

Which in a way is where the reengagement with Bender and Sugar Labs comes in. One … Next Page »

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The One Laptop per Child Foundation and Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor maker Marvell have cemented a partnership announced last spring, with Marvell agreeing to provide OLPC with $5.6 million to fund development of its next generation tablet computer, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte tells me. Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011.

“Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” he says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.”

The OLPC tablet, which Negroponte hinted at last November in an interview with my colleague Wade Roush and formally announced last December, is known as the XO 3 because it represents the third-generation of the XO laptop currently sold by OLPC (the foundation scrapped plans for its e-book-like XO 2 computer and is moving straight to the tablet). Marvell is a longtime corporate sponsor of the foundation, but with this grant has formally stepped up to take the lead on engineering development. “They’ve been sponsors all along,” Negroponte says. “But they were one of ten. Now they are the technology partner.” The deal, he says, means the tablet’s development is “fully funded.”

Negroponte also reiterated what he said back in May—that Marvell and OLPC will have something concrete to show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early this January. He stopped short of promising a working prototype, however. And he emphasized another point he has also made previously—that whatever will be shown will not relate directly to the XO 3.

Instead, it will form the basis of what might be called an interim step, a tablet developed by Marvell (and also apparently modeled partly on its own Moby tablet for the education market) that is intended for children in the developed world. As such, it won’t be the machine OLPC wants to distribute in developing nations. That tablet would be made entirely out of plastic, so that it is bendable but unbreakable, and would have a dual-mode display that works indoors as well as in bright sunlight. The Marvell tablet will also utilize the Android operating system, while the XO 3 will be based on Linux, among other differences, Negroponte says.

“The first one would definitely not have our brand. It’s a First World machine,” Negroponte says. The plans are for Marvell to develop this initial machine, in partnership with OEMs and a partner in education, and release it for sale sometime in 2011, he says.

Negroponte says a follow-on version, based more completely on OLPC’s designs, will hopefully be ready in 2012. “The second one…would have our brand on it, because it will be identified with and for the developing world,” he says.

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It seems only fitting that the creators of one of the most popular children’s toys in history would want to honor the creator of the most successful children’s computer in history.

Today the Denmark-based Lego Group, of plastic brick fame, announced that it has awarded its $100,000 Lego Prize to Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

The company said that the prize, which it created in 1985, was being awarded to Negroponte “for his passionate vision of one laptop per child and his ability to make his vision come alive.” Nearly 2 million XO Laptops built by the foundation have been distributed to children in 40 countries.

“In the Lego Group, we see children as our role models,” Lego owner Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen said in a statement. “Children look at the world with open eyes, unconstrained by the past and willing to ask why? and what if? By connecting them and enabling them to learn and develop, OLPC creates totally new possibilities and a hope for a much brighter future for the world.”

Reached by Xconomy in Copenhagen, where he will receive the prize at today’s Lego Idea Conference, Negroponte said the most important meaning of the prize was that “Both OLPC and Lego stand for learning by playing.”

Negroponte’s association with the Lego Group is a longstanding one: the company was one of the earliest sponsors of the Media Lab, where researchers’ offices are perennially littered with Lego bricks. “We are celebrating our 26th year of collaboration with Lego,” Negroponte says, so visiting Copenghagen to pick up the award “may be more like [being with] family.”

I asked Negroponte how the prize helps to validate OLPC’s mission of supplying low-cost laptops to children in developing countries. “There is not much left to validate any more,” he replied, via e-mail. “The only open question is how to pay for OLPC. The full cost of acquisition and ownership is $1 per week per child.”

Negroponte said he doesn’t have any plans so far for using the prize money. The last person to receive the Lego Prize was New Hampshire-based inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, in 2008.

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If you’re interested in creating technologies for developing countries, or involved with a Web-based software startup in the Northwest, you definitely want to know Will Poole. OK, that covers a lot of people, but it’s not an overstatement.

Poole is one of the most prominent ex-Microsofties to leave the company in the past year. Until last September, he was vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group (one of the better division names, in my opinion), and was in charge of providing software to markets in less-developed nations around the world. Before that, he was responsible for the Windows desktop operating system, so he knows a few things about shipping large-scale products. He first came to Microsoft in 1996 through its acquisition of eShop, a company he co-founded in 1991. Some of his post-Microsoft insights can be found on his “creative capitalism” website here.

I recently spoke with Poole to find out what he’s up to. I got the sense that his new role as a dedicated social technologist and investor is yielding a slew of projects we’re going to be hearing about soon. He also had some provocative thoughts on the challenges faced by organizations like the One Laptop Per Child Foundation—and anyone selling technology globally.

“Most people advised me to take a whole year off, but that’s not in my nature,” Poole says. “My overall goal is to contribute to the formation and growth of companies that can, by virtue of their successful and [large] scale operation, deliver good financial results to investors and shareholders, and also deliver on social and economic development.” That could mean improving education, nurturing an ecosystem of collaborative software developers, solving problems of how technology can assist healthcare, and so forth.

It sounds like he’s in a better place to do that now. “The thing I’m enjoying now is operating across a broader range of organizations that have a greater range of ways of doing things,” says Poole. “Microsoft does [software as a service] that goes out over global distribution channels. That’s only part of the story. What I get to do now is work more closely with nonprofits, thought leaders in academia,” and other groups, he says.

His most public new role is as co-chairman of Redwood City, CA-based NComputing, which provides personal-computing technologies to schools and businesses in developing markets. “I saw they had a disruptive technology,” Poole says. “It delivered a computing experience at a dramatically lower cost—at initial purchase and in ongoing management and energy consumption. It really changed the game.”

Poole says NComputing is having a “profound effect on markets that were previously unable to use computer infrastructure because of cost.” His role is to help the company build its business from a strategic perspective, using his knowledge and contacts from around the world. “The exciting thing about NComputing is they’re already at scale,” he says. “It’s cheaper to fill up a school [with these PCs] than any other choice out there.” Poole says NComputing has about 150 employees in 14 countries, and they’re currently selling into 90 countries.

The most important lesson from his time at Microsoft and NComputing? … Next Page »

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Many people wouldn’t touch coffee or cereal without sugar. And the XO laptop would be useless without Sugar—the standard, Linux-based graphical interface for the little green laptop, nearly a million of which have been distributed to classrooms in developing countries by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation.

While OLPC and Microsoft have been talking for nearly a year about shipping XO laptops that run Windows XP rather than Linux and Sugar, that hasn’t yet happened. Which means Sugar and the XO are still cohabitating, despite the acrimonious divorce last year between OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and Sugar creator Walter Bender, the foundation’s former president of software. In fact, not only are Sugar and all the programs that come with it (“activities,” in Sugar lingo) still the keys to the XO laptop’s educational value, but they’re spreading beyond the XO to other platforms—and may well end up overshadowing the little laptop when it comes time to write the histories of technology and education in the developing world.

Bender came by Xconomy’s Cambridge office yesterday to give us the latest news about Sugar, whose development is now led by Sugar Labs, the non-profit, open source community he set up after leaving OLPC last April. Sugar Labs—which Bender says is based in “cyberspace,” though he himself works from his home office in Newton, MA—provides a forum for the global community of educators and volunteer developers that has sprung up to support and extend Sugar.

Perhaps the biggest piece of news from Sugar Labs is that Sugar is going portable: the community has created a version of the Linux-Sugar stack that can be copied to a so-called “Live USB” thumb drive, which can then be used to boot virtually any laptop or desktop PC into the Sugar environment. Bender calls it “Sugar on a Stick,” and he’s in discussions with USB drive manufacturers to create a branded version that would be available for sale from the Sugar Labs website (though you can also create your own version for free). The implications are big: separating Sugar from the XO means that any child or teacher, in Minneapolis or Mumbai, could take advantage of Sugar’s educational tools without having to wait for OLPC to find funding to get XO laptops into their schools.

And next month, Sugar itself is getting an upgrade, in the form of the next major release, called “Sucrose 0.84.” Bender says he and the Sugar community have built some major improvements into the new release, including a better system for storing and accessing saved work (the Sugar environment is built around an automatic diary called the Journal rather than old-fashioned files and folders); easier ways for users to edit the Python source code underlying Sugar activities; and a portfolio presentation tool designed to make it easier for students and teachers to engage in periodic critiques. As Bender explains, critiques of open-ended problem-solving work—as opposed to standardized testing of students’ performance on closed-form problems like arithmetic or vocabulary questions—are a big element in the constructionist educational philosophy from which Sugar grew.

When OLPC announced drastic staff cuts last month, the last two people who were being paid full-time to work on Sugar development lost their jobs. And Sugar Labs has yet to raise the money Bender says it needs to bring the community together for more face-to-face brainstorming and software critiques. But overall, it sounds like the split between OLPC and the Sugar community may end up being a healthy one, with each platform now free to develop in its own direction. Indeed, Bender says “a lot of people have actually come forward now [to help with Sugar] because they see a cleaner separation between the two organizations.”

Certainly, “Sugar on a Stick”—or on a netbook, or another low-cost laptop like the ASUS Eee PC—could help the software find its way into classrooms around the world much faster than OLPC is able to build and distribute XOs. And if there’s one thing Negroponte and Bender agree about, it’s that the One Laptop effort is about learning, not about hardware.

An edited version of our interview follows.

Xconomy: Thanks for coming by. So, where are you with Sugar?

Walter Bender: [Holding up a USB thumb drive] This is where we are. Live USB is going to be a really big part of Sugar in the next year or two, because it’s an easy way in the door. Most schools’ IT departments don’t even let teachers install software. The overhead associated with large IT infrastructures forces these people to be very conservative about adopting new ideas. So having Sugar on a stick means we can hand this to a teacher or a student and they don’t have to have any impact on the existing infrastructure at all. They can be off to the races using Sugar and all its advantages, in a computer lab, a classroom, at the library, at home, on their parent’s computer, at an Internet cafe—wherever they can get a computer that they can boot off a USB, which is most computers these days. Everything is stored on the USB, so essentially, your schoolwork walks around with you, in the form of your journal. We think it’s going to really make Sugar a lot more accessible.

X: It sounds like “Sugar on a Stick” lets you pretend you’re using an XO laptop, without actually having one.

WB: You get all the advantages of the XO software environment, but you don’t need to be tied to any particular hardware. You don’t even need a laptop—you could do it with a desktop. So, that’s a big thrust, in terms of our strategy for outreach and getting Sugar into the hands of more kids.

X: But if you boot into Sugar on a home computer or a library computer, aren’t you missing the mesh networking built into the XO and the collaboration aspect that’s so important to the pedagogical theory behind Sugar?

WB: When you stick in the Live USB, you’ve got Sugar and you’ve got collaboration. You might not be doing the collaboration through peer-to-peer networking; you might be doing it through Jabber [an open-source instant messaging platform]. But the mesh-networking is not necessary to make Sugar work. It’s a nice-to-have. And one issue with a lot of schools is that they don’t want kids using the Internet—-they want to keep the kids containerized. With Live USB, you could run a classroom environment over a local Jabber server and have the kids collaborate without ever going out onto the net.

X: What are your plans for distributing the USB version? Can people make their own?

WB: If you’ve got a blank USB drive, you can download the Sugar image off our website. For Windows and Ubunto and Fedora, there are utilities for writing the image to a USB key. There must be one for the Mac as well. At conferences, we set up little USB stations so that if you’ve got a key, you can walk up and we’ll make you an image right there. I’m also talking with a couple of USB manufacturers about … Next Page »

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Last Thursday, April 24, nanotechnology entrepreneur Anita Goel, founder of Medford, MA-based Nanobiosym, testified on the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Innovation. Following is an adaptation of Goel’s testimony.

Nanotechnology to me is the ability to probe and control matter and systems on increasingly finer scales, at the nanoscale and smaller. This is important because it gives us a new level of control over matter. Nanotechnology is a platform science which combines several traditional fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. The applications that stem from these capabilities likewise cut across several different sectors from medicine and energy to the environment and materials science. For example, the ability to control the assembly and arrangement of atoms and molecules in a nanomaterial could give it the durability of steel and the weight of plastic.

Nanotechnology provides a platform for innovation across conventional boundaries of science, technology, and commerce. Furthermore, by its intrinsic multidisciplinary nature, it fosters collaboration across conventional political and economic boundaries.

Nanobiosym was founded as an idea lab and research institute to innovate at the convergence of physics, medicine, and nanotechnology. Nanobiosym, and its commercial partner Nanobiosym Diagnostics, have been privately developing Gene-RADAR, a portable nanotechnology-enabled platform that can rapidly and accurately detect genetic fingerprints from any biological organism. The company’s vision is to give patients worldwide real-time access to their own diagnostic information via low-cost handheld devices.

Nanobiosym has been the direct beneficiary of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. We have received multiple rounds of competitive funding grants as some of our technology platforms transitioned from the pure R&D stage to the more applied or prototyping stage. Without the resources that the Initiative brought to bear—not only funding, but also coordination and a sense of national priority—Nanobiosym would not be where it is today.

As the Subcommittee considers how best to update and improve the Initiative, I hope that our experience as an emerging nanotechnology company (in moving across the gamut from science and technology innovation, to proof of concept development and developing commercial products for global markets) will help identify what has worked well and what could be improved to encourage other companies like us.

A Roadmap for Harnessing Nanotechnology to Drive the New Global Economy
The 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act focused primarily on basic research. This led to dynamic growth in America’s nanotechnology research infrastructure primarily in academic settings, and sowed the seeds of nanotechnology commercialization throughout the country.

Today, five years later, we are beginning to see the results of this initial investment, as nanotechnology-enabled products start to enter the marketplace across the spectrum of industry sectors, from water purification to materials engineering to healthcare. The growth of the next five years could be exponential. The United States has a historic opportunity to drive nanotechnology to maximize its impact on global challenges, including health, environment, energy, and even building the new global economy.

The reauthorization of the National Nanotechnology Initiative should focus on four new areas in addition to basic research:

1. Nanotechnology Education

If America is going to compete effectively in the global nanotechnology revolution, we need a highly skilled and qualified workforce. We need scientists, engineers, and technicians who have a vision for nanotechnology, seek to innovate with it, and are capable of working at the nanoscale. We need professors and teachers who can educate about the nano world, and we need business professionals who can turn the scientists’ work into useful products. It is already difficult to meet the demand for PhDs with nanotechnology backgrounds, and that demand will only increase in the coming years.

Nanotechnology education, like nanotechnology research, is necessarily multidisciplinary. Because nanotechnology spans physics, materials science, chemistry, and biology, it needs to be taught throughout the science curriculum. And like other subjects, nanotechnology is best learned by doing. Programs that improve access to basic nanotechnology tools will help inspire a new generation of students to pursue careers in science because they will be able to see firsthand nanotechnology’s potential.

Our education system must start transcending conventional boundaries between academic disciplines, between academic and corporate training programs, and between U.S. and international training experiences. I would suggest the creation of more international exchange programs. Just as other countries send their students here, we should start sending our people around the world to be trained not only in nanotechnology but its broader international context.

The reauthorization bill will be an excellent investment in America’s future if it promotes nanotechnology education from grade school through graduate school. If it does not, we will continue to rely in the short term on foreign science students who will often end up returning to their home countries to compete against us after completing their studies.

2. Bridging the Gap Between Nanotechnology Research and Commercialization

America’s competitiveness in the global market is being tested in the field of nanotechnology, where Russia, China, Japan, the European Union, and other nations are making major investments in translating basic research into … Next Page »

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Today MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation announced grants totaling $1.03 million to MIT researchers working on ten different projects with potential repercussions for the developing world, ranging from “nanosprings” that could store power without batteries to ways of making clean-burning propane from cellulose and other forms of biomass.

The center’s semiannual Ignition Grants and Innovation Grants back projects making their way from the labatory proof-of-concept stage to the marketplace. Since 2002, the Deshpande Center has spent about $8 million on 68 separate projects, 11 of which have grown into independent startup companies.

“We give the researchers working on these high risk, high potential projects the resources and assistance to prove their technologies,” said Leon Sandler, executive director of the Deshpande Center, in a statement. “It’s an investment in the future.” The Deshpande Center is itself funded through an initial $20 million gift from Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, the co-founder and chairman of Sycamore Networks, and his wife Jaishree Deshpande.

The grant recipients include:

Yet-Ming Chiang, Department of Materials Science & Engineering

Chiang is using advanced materials to create a small, low-cost, portable infusion pump for delivering intravenous and other parenteral drugs to patients.

Utkan Demirci, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology

Demirci is developing a microchip for a low-cost, disposable blood-testing device that can analyze the CD-4 T lymphocyte counts of HIV patients in less than one minute.

Elazer Edelman, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology

Edelman is working on a new, safer way to administer drugs to heart failure patients undergoing surgery.

Gerald Fink, Department of Biology

Fink is working on compounds that boost the efficacy of monoclonal-antibody drugs.

Carol Livermore, Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Timothy Havel, Department of Nuclear Science & Engineering

As an alternative to chemical batteries, Livermore and Havel are studying how to store energy in dense networks of carbon nanotubes that act like springs, potentially leading to products such as watches that run for a month between windings.

Keith Nelson, Department of Chemistry

Nelson is developing a compact, high-power source for Terahertz pulses, a non-ionizing form of radiation which could be used to improve explosives screening at airports and industrial quality control.

Donald Sadoway, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Sadoway hopes to use advanced materials to build a prototype of a durable, low-cost, high-amperage device for storing electrical energy on a commercial scale.

Henry Smith and Rajesh Menon, Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Research Laboratories of Electronics

Smith and Menon are combining optical and photochemical approaches to develop cheaper, higher-resolution, higher-throughput, non-damaging imaging techniques for studying nanoscale structures.

Jefferson Tester, Department of Chemical Engineering

Tester is desiging methods for turning renewable biomass materials such as sugar, starches, and cellulose into clean-burning propane.

Ioannis Yannas and François Berthiaume, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Yannis and Berthiuame are studying protein fragments that stimulate blood vessel growth and prevent infection in wound sites covered by artificial skin substitutes.

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