Between the FutureM conference, Web Innovators Group, Mobile Monday, the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame, and the MIT tech festival t=0, there wasn’t a lot of time for Boston techies to breathe last week.

To keep you up to date, here are some high-level takeaways from FutureM, the sprawling MITX event that was really 50-plus separate events, focused on the future of marketing—and with a lot of Boston-area companies represented. This is just a small sample of what I saw and heard from a few panels and gatherings:

1. Ad tech sucks. For consumers, that is. Lots of startups and big companies are trying to make it suck less. That was the message from Sim Simeonov, the entrepreneur and angel investor behind Shopximity, a young Boston-area startup that’s trying to improve consumers’ shopping experience using display ads.

2. The frontiers of mobile marketing are automation, engagement, and transparency. Automating the marketing process is key in a world of near-unlimited Web content and cheap ad prices. So is getting (and keeping) people’s attention. “The trend we’re going to see is around making it more clear why [a consumer] would want to explore an ad,” said Lars Albright, a veteran of m-Qube, Quattro Wireless, and Apple. (His new startup is called Session M.) It remains to be seen whether a billion-dollar business can emerge from this sector, however. Albright would bet on Apple’s iAd network reaching $1B, while Paul McNulty of IBM’s enterprise marketing division (he’s from Unica) said, “I don’t know if [a marketing automation company] is the horse I’d bet on as the next EMC.” (I took that to mean because there are lots of different companies with complementary strengths, it’s hard to imagine one big category winner.)

3. “California is a one-night stand, while Massachusetts is a long-term relationship.” That was Senator Karen Spilka (D-Mass.) summarizing the views of a panel of entrepreneurs and investors on building companies in the Bay State versus Silicon Valley. “We’re still number one in education,” she said. “And number two in [venture capital] as a small state is pretty good.” (Alas, non-compete laws are also part of the long-term relationship here. Interestingly, Brian Shin of Visible Measures noted that his thinking on non-competes has changed, presumably from positive to negative: it sounds like he originally thought they would be helpful in retaining a core group of top employees in the state.)

4. Diversity in tech is a challenge and an opportunity. Investor Eric Paley of Founder Collective noted that young entrepreneurs in New York and Silicon Valley “can rattle off names of success stories.” Whereas in Boston, people don’t hear much about companies like EnerNOC, Acme Packet, EqualLogic, and Unica, “because we’re so distributed” across different sectors, he said. “It’s the diversity and the modesty.” Case in point: On the panel, Paley asked Brian Shin if he knew of Unica, the marketing tech firm that would be bought by IBM for $480 million last year, back when Shin was starting Visible Measures in 2005. “I didn’t know any company,” Shin said. On the other hand, he said that “because there is diversity, you can find [a mentor] who’s done something big in almost anything you want to do.”

5. Connecting students with startups, perhaps with VC or government support, is key to the state’s tech future. It’s a well-known issue: top kids go to school in Boston and then leave for the West Coast or New York to join hot startups, or they become business consultants. “We should be insanely aggressive about internships,” Paley said, for undergrads, grad students, and MBAs alike. That means championing broad efforts to get young people who are interested in entrepreneurship (there seem to be more and more lately) to work at local companies for the summer. That echoes something Jon Pierce told me a few months ago: “Working at a startup is the best education you can have as an entrepreneur.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

[Corrected, 4:40pm. See below] Last month, Jon Medved, the founder of Jerusalem-based Israel Seed Partners, a multi-million dollar venture capital fund, came to the University of Michigan to give a lecture on high-tech development. But Medved wasn’t there to talk about Silicon Valley or another U.S. startup hub. Instead he was meeting with a group of students to discuss the future of Israel’s high-tech economy.

Medved’s visit to Michigan was made possible by TAMID Israel Investment Group, an organization founded three years ago by two U-M students. The goal of the group, which has already expanded to a handful of campuses across the U.S., is to give business-minded students a way to connect to the Israeli economy, according to TAMID’s executive director Brett Siegal, a senior in Michigan’s business school. [An earlier version of this story reported that Medved had visited UC Berkeley, not Michigan. We regret the error---Eds.]

Though there are hundreds of campus organizations that connect Jewish students to Israel through cultural or academic activities, Siegal says that before TAMID (which translates to “always” in Hebrew), there was no outlet for students to make connections in a more business-oriented way.

And through a three-phase program, the group’s members get to do just that. The students get a crash course in important business concepts, and the chance to invest the group’s fund of Israeli securities or to do consulting work for a variety of Israeli companies. In addition, TAMID sends the students to Israel—and pays many of their expenses—for internships with Israeli companies or multi-national corporations with offices in the country.

Though the group works with companies ranging from a startup focused on solar housing to big firms like Thomson Reuters, Siegal says the nature of the Israeli economy means that much of TAMID’s work is focused on startups and the high-tech sector. “It’s about a 30-year-old economy, essentially, as a developed economy,” Siegal says. “The economy, for a number of different reasons, sort of spawns a lot of startups.”

According to Siegal, the Israeli government sponsors about 20 startup incubators and also participates in institutionalized venture capital programs that match private investments.

Though Israeli government involvement plays a large role in the proliferation of startups in the country, Siegal says the nature of Israeli culture also helps to foster self-starters. Compulsory military service “creates these very self-motivated people,” Siegal says. In addition, many of the immigrants that came to the country in large waves from the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s were scientists in their home countries, and the Israeli government attempted to help these immigrants commercialize their ideas.

It’s for all of these reasons that Israel “has the highest level of startups outside of Silicon Valley,” according to Siegal. In addition, the country is home to between 3,000 and 4,000 high-tech … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

[Updated 3:30pm 1/9/10 with clarification (see below)] If you want to know which companies are looking to hire top young business talent around town, just ask the group of 20 or so first-year MBA students from MIT Sloan School of Management. The students from Cambridge, MA, are in Seattle this week looking to make contacts for jobs and summer internships.

It’s all part of the annual “tech trek” program in which some 150 Sloan MBA students split up to visit companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the Boston area. The students on the Seattle leg visited Adobe, Microsoft, and RealNetworks yesterday, and they are at Amazon, Starbucks, and T-Mobile today.

I met up with a group of them over drinks last night. They had a refreshingly candid perspective on job prospects at Seattle tech companies, and some valuable insights into the local tech-business scene. (Almost worth the $43 parking ticket I got from the BluWater Bistro lot—it’s been one of those weeks.)

“The job market is better than last year. Companies are very receptive, and positions are open,” says Sloan student Hilda Tang, a former management consultant in New York City and a native of Vancouver, BC. Tang helped organize this year’s trip to Seattle, together with fellow first-year Ryan Thurston, a former design engineer and product manager at Seattle-based Impinj. “Everyone’s hiring, but they’re hedging their bets,” Thurston says.

Kathryn Wepfer, another Sloan student, previously worked for four years at General Electric in Massachusetts managing a technology development program (defense work). Wepfer went on the Silicon Valley leg of the trip earlier this week, where Sloan students visited VMware, Cisco, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Zynga. Last year, Google and Yahoo didn’t participate, as their hiring was on hold. This year, the students say Google is hiring selectively for positions in finance, operations, marketing, and business development; Yahoo didn’t impress, with one student commenting, “What are [they], really?”

It sounds like some companies were much better at marketing themselves to students than others. The strongest reaction I got was when I asked about their visit to Apple (in Silicon Valley). “Everyone came away totally creeped out,” one student said, adding that the company came off as “secretive” and “sterile,” and that during their visit, at least one Apple employee admitted it wasn’t a great place to work while Steve Jobs was on leave.

[This paragraph added on 1/9/10 for more context on Apple---Eds.] This student followed up with me later to say, “We heard from people in finance, marketing, and product management—everyone hands down was very excited about their job and being part of the Apple community. It’s a very attractive company to me, but it is somewhat difficult to see the reality of the secretive culture that may be necessary to maintain Apple’s ability to create products that change the world. I, and I think the rest of the group, appreciated their openness and honesty.”

On the Seattle front, I had to wonder about Microsoft, which is coming off a year of … Next Page »

Comments (9) | Reprints | Share:          

Business school applications require many thousands of words’ worth of essay questions, usually dealing with those universal but ephemeral corporate themes of Teamwork, Impact, and Dealing With Difficult Situations. Somewhere within this morass the applicant is generally expected to answer the question, “What are you going to do with an MBA?” To this there are three types of answers:

1. The Exceedingly Grandiose (“Harness the power of sustainable development to change the fate of the Third World”).

2. The Believable But Contrived (“Leverage my current skill set and augment it with a top-notch experiential education”).

3. The True But Obviously Unacceptable (“Get a job that doesn’t make me want to kill myself”).

Needless to say, upon matriculation these claims are immediately forgotten, as the practical matters of schoolwork and socializing take over. But right around the time that everyone starts giving serious thought to their summer internship, the question, unbidden, comes roaring back. What am I going to do with my MBA?

The summer internship, as the mid-point of the two-year MBA, carries far more import than regular people usually ascribe to the word “internship”. It is often assumed that upon graduation the student will give serious consideration to a full-time position at the summer employer or, at the very least, remain in the same general industry. This past January, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, anxieties around internships began to escalate. As a first-year, I found the whole process to be like a pop quiz, blindsiding me into making a life-changing decision before I was ready. I mean, I came to business school to escape the real world.

Eventually, however, an attractive opportunity presented itself. Through an old colleague I was introduced to a startup in Boston called WordStream, which got its funding a year ago and launched its product in January. WordStream is run by Rob Adler, a serial entrepreneur who was brought in a month after the company’s funding to be CEO. Rob, a Harvard Business School grad, exudes enthusiasm, and is one of those mysterious people whose number of connections on LinkedIn is listed as “500+”, which always make you wonder exactly how much larger than 500 people their network is.

WordStream is still at the stage where the company’s strategy is constantly being reexamined and openly discussed amongst everyone in the company (there are currently only 18 full-time employees). Who is our target customer? What exactly is our value? How should the product change?

The entrepreneurship professors at Sloan, veteran entrepreneurs themselves, often speak in quasi-romantic tones about working for a startup as a capitalistic ideal, the intersection of high-minded business strategy and dirty, sweaty reality. They could not be more correct. About a week after starting at WordStream, Rob came over to me, looking grave. “I’d like to speak with you for a minute,” he said. He brought me into … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

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

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

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

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

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

I’m sure some of you have heard a version of this quote before: “In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, large families in the U.S. sent their fifth or sixth child to work for the government or a utility company under the assumption that the later the child was born the less intelligent he/she was.” Even for most of us from the generation X (or Y or Z, whatever they are calling us these days) any mention of government or utility jobs brings visuals of diesel locomotives coughing dark soot and slowly chugging away to, well, nowhere. When was the last time you saw a glossy business school brochure highlighting how many students they place with the Bureau of Land Management or Pacific Gas & Electric? Exactly.

Is this about to change? Has it suddenly become sexy to work for the government and/or a utility company? There definitely are some signs here at the MIT Sloan School of Management that attitudes are changing. More than a handful of my classmates have accepted summer internship offers from utility companies and/or government agencies this year.

“How is this possible?” I’ve been asking myself. How can two such dissimilar worlds—the business schools that are the ultimate centers of capitalist education and the utilities and government offices that are the ultimate conservative workplaces—come together? Well, it turns out that we’re living in a new world in 2009.

Today, with $900 billion of stimulus capital being handed out, Washington, D.C. is being touted as the new Wall Street. After decades of inaction, there is suddenly urgent talk of building 220-volt electricity transmission lines all across the U.S. Today, consumers want an hour-by-hour update of their electricity consumption. Today, new business models are being talked about to get ready for carbon pricing. It’s in this environment that students from business schools are expected to thrive.

“Working at the US Department of Energy (DOE) today is like working at NASA during the Apollo program,” says Leland Cheung, a first-year Sloan student. Leland will spend his summer at the Advance Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in Washington. ARPA-E, under the DOE umbrella, has been tasked with dispensing $400 million to companies moving advanced energy technologies toward commercialization.

Cheung, with a pre-Sloan career in the venture capital industry, hopes to get valuable exposure to the energy sector and develop his network while at ARPA-E this summer. While he does not think a full time job in the government is something he would prefer, he says “I would try to adopt and incorporate best practices from the private sector in the government to make it more attractive for bright and energetic individuals.”

Obama Administration policies seem to be making government jobs more attractive. “Obama changed the tenor of what it means to pursue an energy career with the US government,” Christina Ingersoll, a first-year Sloan student, told me. “Under Bush’s administration, I would have felt different and probably more suspicious of working for the government.” Ingersoll will spend her summer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, CO in the Technology Transfer Office.

Prior to starting at Sloan, she had not given any thought about working for the government. She changed her mind after talking to a faculty member at MIT Sloan and fellow MIT students. “NREL is a phenomenal place if you’re interested in renewable energy,” she says. “I knew I would work hard, but with smart interesting people. I have the chance to develop an expertise, and to have access to some of the leading scientists in the world on energy. Also, Colorado is a great location for the summer!”

Changes in regulations, including feed-in tariffs/decoupling/advance metering, seem to be making the utilities a sought-after destination for business school students. A group director at Massachusetts utility NSTAR told Pavel Gavrilov, a first-year Sloan student, that she felt change was coming due to the increase in MBAs coming through the organization. Gavrilov was one of those interested students. He has accepted a summer internship offer from NSTAR.

Gavrilov would like to see further changes at utilities. “For too long it’s been slow and steady growth as the only option for utilities and thus they just build rate base” he says. ” I think with changing regulations they are able to fulfill their shareholders needs in other ways–just look at decoupling.”

Veronica Metzner, another first-year Sloan student, agrees with Gavrilov and says that the utilities should go further. “It is critical for the utilities to asses how to best meet the needs of their customers by helping them become as energy efficient as possible while at the same time continuing to deliver sustained and respectable returns to shareholders,” says Metzner.

Metzner accepted a summer internship offer from the California’s largest utility, PG&E. She added that she always wanted to be in the energy field, but the support of MIT’s Energy Club and other campus resources helped her maintain a focus and get access to career opportunities.

Like other organizations, government agencies and utilities expect students to have a grasp of both traditional management skills and cross-disciplinary concepts. A strong focus on energy related activities and quantitative skills help immensely, Metzner and Ingersoll commented. Gavrilov on the other hand thinks that while MBAs are becoming a more important part of utilities, there’s a long way to go for most of them. To apply skills learnt and using the MBA experience to help the organizations flourish in these changing times will require some time and patience.

What remains to be seen is whether the change that seems to be getting business-school students excited about working for government agencies and utilities will continue, or whether these organizations will settle back into the conservative status quo ante. Can a bunch of motivated business school students armed with management and quantitative skills catalyze this change? Stay tuned.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

If you are a student enrolled in a MBA program these days, phrases like “Boy, your timing in going back to school has been perfect!” and/or “This is the best time to be a <fill in your standard business school career choices>” are serenaded quite often in your direction. Typical reactions to this would range from a self-congratulatory smile to a deadly stare. Ah, the wonders of summer internship recruiting season for first year MBA students!

Across most business school campuses, the months of December and January bring with them a flurry of activities: case discussions like your life depended on it, mock interviews on getting your “story” right for a career in finance, and trying to find reasons why your background in Romance languages is a great fit for a career in energy. We first-year MBA students at the MIT Sloan School of Management are no different. If you happened to stumble into Sloan’s main building any day in January you would not have missed the organized chaos of summer recruitment preparations.

With the economy in its current state, students’ anxiety levels are naturally all over the charts. I don’t yet have a quantitative picture of this spring’s recruiting season, but I have come across a range of interesting opinions and statements from students on campus. I have also looked briefly at a few trends in recruiting from past years.

The top recruiting industries at most business schools are consulting and finance. General management, operations, and marketing/sales round out the industry pools that recruit at MBA-granting schools. At MIT Sloan, there’s historically a large group of students interested in entrepreneurship as well. Students have had interesting recruiting experiences in all these industries this spring.

“In most years we would have given you an offer” was one of most common responses students got after their final round interviews at consulting firms. There is no question that internship offers in this industry are down. I went back and looked at the recruiting numbers for consulting the last time we had a recession and noticed an interesting trend. Officially the last recession started in 2001 and ended in 2003. At Sloan, consulting offers dropped from 35-40 percent of of the class in 1999 to 15-17 percent in 2003 at MIT Sloan. It took almost two years for those numbers to climb back up to earlier levels.

Recruiting for finance internships has been equally interesting. It’s a safe assumption that with the financial sector at the center of the economy’s malaise, internships would be hard to come by. Students who poured their hearts out at MIT Sloan (and other schools I presume) preparing for finance interviews found out first hand. The consensus opinion was that the internship pools at most banks have shrunk significantly. One could sense the frustration in a classmate when he saw a posting for “Career in Finances” lecture in mid-January. He said, “Let me guess: they aregoing to tell us how this is the best time to start a financial career. Same **** different day.”

Notwithstanding the lull in traditional hiring, industries recruiting for general management, operations, marketing, strategy and sales functions has been active. Some students who had their minds set on traditional MBA internships are re-evaluating their interests and strengths and are finding other avenues to learn during summer.

There has been an increasing focus at MIT Sloan on entrepreneurship in the past few years. While debates rage as to whether entrepreneurship can be taught in a classroom, students seem to believe so. Enrollment in the entrepreneurship and innovation program at MIT Sloan has been steadily increasing. Some of the students in this program are making plans to either work on their own startup in the summer or spend time at a startup to learn what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

Times may be less than optimal for us MBA students now, but there is still an abundance of optimism on campus. There is a strong belief that most industries will recover to a certain extent by the time our class graduates, in 2010. Until then most of us plan to hunker down, use our time to build a strong foundation, and smile and nod whenever someone says, “Isn’t this the best time to be in business school?”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Want to know who’s hiring the top young business talent around town? Just ask Saleem Hussain, an MBA student from Boston. In a brutal market for tech industry jobs, he gave me a fresh perspective on the next-generation talent pool and where it’s headed, in terms of both big companies and startups.

Hussain is a first-year MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, MA. He is one of the organizers of a 16-student Sloan contingent that made a “tech trek” to Seattle last week, on Thursday and Friday. It’s part of an annual program that takes 150 Sloan MBA students to companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the Boston area to make job and internship contacts and learn about the respective markets.

In the Seattle area, the group visited Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, Adobe, Starbucks, and Digeo. The students met with recruiters and executives to ask about business challenges the companies are facing, and to learn what MBAs need to do to land jobs in the current market. “As far as internships go, there are lots of opportunities at big companies,” says Hussain.

Despite the economy, he says, Amazon and Microsoft “seem to be really hiring in full swing” on the MIT campus. Adobe has a lot of openings in Silicon Valley, he adds, but not as many in Seattle. Interestingly, Google and Yahoo usually host the Sloan students (in Silicon Valley), but did not this year. “A lot of companies are delaying,” says Hussain. “They’ve held back interviews, putting hiring on hold.”

I also asked Hussain about Sloan’s contacts with Seattle-area startups. If there’s one hiring issue I hear about in the innovation community, it’s the relative dearth of top management, sales, and business development talent—so tapping programs like Sloan’s seems like an obvious way to address the matter. The Sloan tech trek focuses on bigger companies that tend to hire on campus, but Hussain says organizers would embrace meetings with startups as well. “In Boston, we have a lot more access to small companies and strategy consulting firms, because of neighbor relationships,” he says.

As for broader impressions, some in the Sloan group were expecting a wary market for new jobs and internships, given tightening budgets and the prospect of layoffs seemingly around every corner. But the Seattle companies were very receptive, Hussain says. “They seemed surprisingly welcoming in talking to MBA students.” As for any wariness or uncertainty (about internships anyway), he says, “we didn’t see any of that.”

“A lot of people in business school are excited about coming out in this economy,” Hussain says. “For companies, it’s very pivotal for them. It’s such an important time to be working at these companies. That’s what makes it so exciting, and that’s what drives our visits.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Budding student-entrepreneurs awaken: Highland Capital Partners says it’s accepting applications for its second annual paid summer entrepreneurship program for undergraduates and graduate students, and for more than 20 summer internship positions at Highland-backed companies in Massachusetts.

Highland launched its “Summer@Highland” program last year. Under the program, which is similar in some ways to Paul Graham’s Y Combinator effort, Highland selects teams of up to four students apiece to spend 10 weeks at its Lexington, MA, or Menlo Park, CA offices, where they develop their business ideas with advice from Highland’s investment professionals. Highland provides a stipend of $7,500 for single-person teams or $15,000 for multi-person teams. In return, the firm asks teams for the option to co-invest in up to 50 percent of any venture financing round the team raises within six months after the program.

The summer program is “a further continuation of Highland’s long commitment in partnering with fast-growth companies at all stages of their development,” said Highland general partner Peter Bell in the company’s call for applications yesterday. Teams can apply online until April 22.

Meanwhile, Highland senior vice president Michael Gaiss tells Xconomy that the company has just opened more than 20 summer internship positions at local companies backed by Highland, including Going, Gotuit, Streambase, and Turbine (the company behind The Lord of the Rings Online). The internships “help connect our companies earlier with exceptional college students interested in gaining experience at venture-backed companies and start-ups,” Gaiss says. The open positions are listed at Highland’s Career Network portal at http://www.hcp.com/career-network/index.php (select “internship” in the status field).

Comments | Reprints | Share: