We want you. To tell our audience what you want to see for the innovation community here in Boston. At Xconomy’s upcoming conference, 6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas.

The Dec. 1 program, which features one cool tech company from each of our six cities, already has a top-notch line-up of speakers, like keynoter Stephen Wolfram; Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (New York); Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk (San Francisco); Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (representing Michigan); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego); and Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston). Not to mention another handful of quick presentations from area startups.

But we want even more entrepreneurs (or academics, investors, and other members of the startup ecosystem) up on stage at 6×6. And that’s where you come in. We put out a similar call for audience rants, ideas, and suggestions at XSITE (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship) this past June. And we got a memorable collection of innovation-minded audience members talking (and, gulp, rapping) about angel investing, putting the venture back in venture capital, banning non-compete agreements, and more. So now we’re aiming to slot in a few good rants or raves, each for just one or two minutes, somewhere around the middle of the program at 6×6.

Write in with strong, passionate, well-thought-out synopses of what you’d like to say (IE keep the run-of-the-mill complaints about Silicon Valley and the public markets away; we’ve all heard those before.) It could be a new take on what’s wrong with the innovation ecosystem in your city. It could be praise or a call for more of a good thing that’s already happening. You could even tell us what whacky-sounding idea out there actually has big potential and why. We’re letting the audience submissions determine the exact shape and tone of this session, so make them good. Send us your ideas at ekutz@xconomy.com or editors@xconomy.com.

And for those interested in attending 6×6, you can register here.

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Plastic, oil, natural gas, paper, solar panels, analytics, semiconductors, blimps, mobile phones, wind turbines, smart grid. These were some of the words tossed around by the six teams presenting at last night’s Cleantech Open Northeast Regional Finals. Three companies were selected to go on and compete in the Cleantech Open Global Forum in California next month. Interestingly, a few of the semifinalists are also part of the local startup program MassChallenge, which like the Cleantech Open, models itself as a startup accelerator and mentoring program with a business plan competition tucked into it.

Can you guess which of the words above apply to the three winning teams below? Take a look and see if you were right.

—PK Clean (a MassChallenge 2011 finalist) is “converting mountains of trash into barrels of oil.” The company has developed and tested a process that converts plastic waste into oil, using a proprietary catalyst. PK’s CEO Priyanka Bakaya, an MIT Sloan MBA, says the 45 million tons of plastic occupying landfills per year can be turned into about 9 billion gallons of oil (representing 25 percent of annual U.S. auto consumption). The company has already tested the tech at a pilot facility in India and is targeting the metal recycling industry as its first customers. After taking apart old cars, metal recyclers are left with plastic remnants that they have to pay to get landfilled. PK will take that away for free to turn into oil. There’s other competition in the field, namely from Portland, OR-based Agilyx (which recently raised $22 million in venture funding), but Bakaya says PK’s catalyst and cheaper process give it an edge.

—Qado Energy, a smart grid analytics startup, was the big IT play in the bunch. While maybe not as sexy as turning plastic to oil or printing invisible solar panels on paper (seriously), it’s aiming to solve a big problem for utilities and energy developers: accurately predicting the distribution and effect of new cleantech sources plugging into the grid. As co-founder Lorraine Wheeler explained, when wind or solar developers want to add their technology to the energy distribution grid, utilities have to perform studies analyzing the impact of the new tech on the grid, and produce a list of needed upgrades that the developer must pay for. Qado’s technology is designed to make this planning process more accurate and efficient, with software that pulls in utilities’ data from different sources and converts it to a standard format. From there, the potential effect on the grid can be modeled and analyzed in displays for utilities, regulators, and energy developers.

—Last up was fabless semiconductor developer Arctic Sand. The company is making smaller, more efficient power converter chips designed to cut down on the electricity needed to run traditional data centers. The company, whose team comes from MIT and Harvard, aims to design the chips for other applications like powering mobile phones and hopes to get its tech to the market through licensing deals with existing computing players, says CEO Nadia Shalaby. Arctic Sand was also a participant in MassChallenge earlier this year.

There were some familiar faces among the other three semifinalists. OsComp Systems—developers of a more efficient natural gas compressor—took home a check from MassChallenge last year and presented at our XSITE Xpo this year. Altaeros Energies also talked about its blimp-hoisted wind turbines at our Xpo. The last Cleantech Open Northeast semifinalist, Ubiquitous Energy, is working on the aforementioned printable solar photovoltaic cells for paper and fabric. The cells are designed to power mobile phones for owners in areas that aren’t even plugged into the power grid, and even further down the line, could enable dynamic displays on surfaces like cereal boxes (think digital display expiration dates). We’ll still have to keep an eye out for those teams.

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Xconomy editor Gregory Huang declared official recess for the heavy events season in Boston’s technology and startup communities. After a week that included WebInno, TechStars Demo Day, Angel Bootcamp, and an awesome all-day innovation forum, I’m not objecting.

But we don’t want you to forget about this year’s installment of XSITE: The Xconomy Summit on Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship, (the aforementioned forum) held at Babson College last week. Lucky for you, we have a three-and-a-half minute long video that should be able to hold you over until our next big event, which you can expect once the temperatures start cooling off. This video comes on top of the photo gallery we put out Tuesday.

As a refresher,  XSITE 2011 looked at what we’ve dubbed The Entrepreneurship Era, through the lens of speakers like Sycamore Networks founder and A123 Systems chairman Desh Deshpande, Intellectual Ventures’ Edward Jung, Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab, Gilt Groupe’s Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, and TripAdvisor founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer. There were also crops of executives of IT, healthtech, and cleantech companies, entrepreneurs who’ve graduated from incubator programs, venture capitalists, and a smattering of people with suggestions or complaints for the innovation ecosystem.

Sounds great, right? Bummed if you weren’t there? Well, lucky for you, this video offers snippets of the talks by Deshpande, Wilkis Wilson, Maes, Jung, and a ranter (can you guess which one he is?), as well as some off-stage interviews.

The video also gives a great snapshot of the diverse audience we drew, of investors, academics, students, consultants, accountants, and entrepreneurs working on startups in the Web, IT, mobile, biotech, and education spaces and more.

Speaking of startups, this video was put together by Pixability. The Cambridge, MA-based company helps businesses without video-editing staffers (Xconomy, for example), put together quality promotional videos. They send you the Flip cameras, you gather the clips and send it back to them, and voila! OK, it might be a little more work than that on their end. Either way, check out the resulting product below or here.

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Ladies and gentlemen, after last week I hereby declare the end of high season for tech events in Boston. We’ve had our celebrations, drunk our grain, and talked our heads off. Now, before we start getting some things done around here, let’s reflect just a little more.

The following took place during a 24-hour period last week:

—Coolio performed at the DartBoston/TechStars Demo Day party.

—The Boston Bruins beat the favored Vancouver Canucks in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals for their first title since 1972.

—Fashion guru Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt Groupe, shared the stage with me at our XSITE 2011 conference at Babson College (photo gallery here).

I’m not sure which of these pairings was least likely—fashion and I have rarely shared the same sentence—but the fact that all three happened in the span of a day suggests Armageddon is upon us. And, given the collective lack of sleep in this region (or at least this office) during that time, I will refer to it as Hell Week—after the Navy SEAL training where candidates are pushed to their limit, sleep less than four hours over 5.5 days, and emerge on the other side stronger than they thought they could be. I mean it in a good way, really.

All of this calls for a retrospective of highlights I’m able to remember through the haze of last week. Let’s get right to it:

1. I remember TechStars Demo Day kicking off with “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys blasting from the speakers of the Royale nightclub—and all the startup teams joining managing director Katie Rae on stage, clapping, wearing a mix of company T-shirts, camouflage tuxedo suits, and other hipster items.

2. I remember a lot of raucous whooping and cheering for the startups (before, after, and sometimes during their pitches), and intro music for each speaker. A bit over the top, but I understand the need to build excitement. One investor called the format distracting, but he was in the minority.

3. I remember a mix of presentation styles, which was nice—from “here’s my life story” to “let’s get right to the business,” from laid-back to in-your-face. Also I remember Walt Doyle from Where (now PayPal) looking like a veteran stand-up comic as he introduced the first TechStars startup, EverTrue.

4. I remember angel investor Bill Warner introducing Ginger.io’s Anmol Madan by saying he was “fearless.” Case in point: some of Madan’s research work at the MIT Media Lab was on “trying to understand women with a computer.”

5. I remember lots more financing being announced by lots more companies than usual over the past couple of years (see this updated list of TechStars Boston financings for the current class). Perhaps Y Combinator’s $150K guaranteed investment for graduates of the program is not so big an advantage anymore.

6. I remember Hardi Meybaum of GrabCAD saying he likes Boston because … Next Page »

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Close to 400 people showed up to Babson College last Thursday for our flagship all-day event, XSITE: The Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship. This year’s conference focused specifically on what we’ve called The Era of Entrepreneurship, taking a look at a driving force in innovation and social and economic impact.

We kicked off the program with keynoter Desh Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks and chairman of A123 Systems. His address looked at the intersection of technological and social innovation as a big force in entrepreneurship and innovation. His talk helped set the tone for the day, which contained a mix of keynote addresses, chats with entrepreneurs, debates, panels, a ranting session, afternoon breakouts on cleantech, healthtech, and infotech, and a series of 12 early-stage startup pitches to end the day.

Beyond Deshpande, the day’s speakers included MIT’s Phil Sharp, Sage Bionetworks co-founder and president Stephen Friend, Gilt Groupe co-founder and chief merchandising officer Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Edward Jung of Intellectual Ventures, the MIT Media Lab’s Pattie Maes, TripAdvisor founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer, FitnessKeeper co-founder and CEO Jason Jacobs, Spark Capital’s Todd Dagres, entrepreneur and investor Lee Hower, Marginize founder Ziad Sultan, serial entrepreneur Joe Chung, a crop of cleantech startup CEOs, healthtech company founders like Bob Fabbio of Whiteglove, and many, many more.

Xconomy editors Wade Roush, Greg Huang, and Luke Timmerman stepped in for a few sessions as moderators, but we also had John Landry, CNET’s Martin LaMonica, and Daniel Isenberg of Babson College.

Most of these speakers you can see below in photos, taken by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press (click on the images for larger versions). We hope you get a sense of the mix of content and speakers. Not pictured, however, is the much-buzzed-about rant that was rapped by Boston College professor and entrepreneur Drew Hession-Kunz before we all broke for lunch. Sorry if you missed it. Ask someone who was there, if you’re so curious.

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I’m still re-adjusting to Pacific time after spending most of last week back in Boston for XSITE 2011, the latest installment of our annual conference that brings together entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and more for an all-day confab on innovation. Among the top-notch speakers and presenters was Edward Jung, a Microsoft veteran and co-founder of Bellevue, WA’s Intellectual Ventures.

Xconomy’s Bob Buderi put together this preview of Jung’s keynote, which centered on ideas for a new approach for solving enormous societal problems, including health care, education, and energy. Jung’s thesis counts on involving government as a key partner, providing long-term, stable financing and finding a big private sector entity to integrate the moving parts.

Even though I was out of town, we still had a good bit of news from the past week on the Seattle-area technology beat:

—Startup Weekend told us about its plans to establish a sister organization that sets up permanent, staffed offices that will give entrepreneurial communities a central place to organize their efforts with academics, investors, non-profits, and the public sector. Called the Startup Foundation, the project is funded by a new grant from the Kauffman Foundation and is kicking off next month in seven cities, including Xconomy hubs Seattle, New York, Detroit and Boston. The Seattle office will be run by current Startup Weekend marketing honcho Jennifer Cabala, a familiar face around the Seattle scene.

—We had two entries in one day from Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN), the Boston-based speech-recognition and mobile software company with a big Seattle presence. First off was an acquisition of SVOX, a Zurich-based embedded speech software company, for $125 million.

We followed that up with this in-depth interview with Brad Bargen, a veteran of Tegic Communications who now oversees customer-care and text-input product development at Nuance’s Seattle office. We talked about all kinds of interesting things, including Nuance’s friendly rivalry with hot crosstown startup Swype, also made up of former Tegic folks, and Nuance’s efforts to make language recognition of all kinds more natural and intuitive.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) took the next step in trying to capitalize on the success of the motion- and sound-sensing Kinect controller for Xbox by opening the device’s software for hackers and modders to play with. This first go-round of the software development kit is limited to noncommercial uses, but encouraging a for-profit developer corps is on the roadmap. I was particularly impressed with Microsoft Research scientist Anoop Gupta’s quick mention of videoconferencing when I asked him where this technology could go next—that has big implications for Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquision of Skype.

—Seattle social-game startup Giant Thinkwell, part of the first class of Seattle TechStars companies, started building up to today’s rollout of its first official celebrity-endorsed game: Mix-N-Match, a collaboration with Seattle hip-hop legend Sir Mix-A-Lot. Mix-A-Lot has always shown a humorous bent in his music, so it’ll be fun to see what he and Giant Thinkwell have up their sleeves. It’s a big step for the startup, which has been searching for celebrity partners as it tries to build a business around personality-branded Facebook games.

—Finally, we saw stealthy consumer electronics shopping startup Decide throw open the curtains on its site, which hopes to help shoppers save money and avoid new-model buyer’s remorse by synthesizing a ton of market information in one place. Others are playing in this sector, but Decide does boast co-founder Oren Etzioni, the University of Washington professor who was also behind airfare-shopping prediction site Farecast, which was purchased by Microsoft for $115 million in 2008.

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When we asked readers two weeks ago to send their biggest gripes with or suggestions for the innovation community, we told them to not hold back. Well, we got we asked for at XSITE 2011: The Entrepreneurship Era.

For example: “These laws don’t need to be tweaked, they need a shotgun murder and a burial behind the barn,” said Jeremy Brown.

Brown was ranting about laws in the Bay State that enable companies to make workers sign agreements that bar them from joining a competing company for at least a year. He said the binding agreements, which states like California don’t have, prevent his small Cambridge, MA-based robotics startup Rep Invariant Systems from attracting top talent from other veteran robotics companies in the state.

Then there were Josh Bob and Chris Palatucci, who had somewhat contradictory complaints. Bob, CEO and founder of Boston-based Textaurant said tech entrepreneurs should flesh out their product and get some potential customers before hitting up angel investors for cash. Eventually they should “get it through their thick skulls that they should get some traction before they go out and get money,” he said.

Palatucci, of Palatucci Executive Search, said that investors need to “put the venture back in venture capital,” particularly when it comes to life sciences. He said angels look all too much like VCs and VCs look more like private equity investors. He asked venture capitalists to take a risk on biotechs with pre-clinical data.

Jason Evanish of Greenhorn Connect used Jason Terry of the 2011 NBA champion Dallas Mavericks to inspire the audience. Terry had the NBA trophy tattooed on his arm before the beginning of the season, showing his confidence that the Mavericks had the right team and resources to make it to the top. Evanish said Boston should be equally confident in its own arsenal, pick up some “swagger” and tell entrepreneurs they should move to Boston rather than migrate to Silicon Valley.

And last but not least, there was Drew Hession-Kunz, founder of i-Nalysis and an adjunct business professor at Boston College. He rapped. The audience clapped. It was a bit of a struggle on both sides. He had complaints about angel investors, company founders, schools, and venture capitalists. And yes, he voiced those in a three-minute-long rap.

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The first time you do something, it’s a novelty. The second time, it’s a pattern. The third time, it’s a tradition. After yesterday, the “Xpo” lightning-presentation portion of Xconomy’s annual XSITE conference now qualifies as a Boston-area tradition—one that’s so fun we think we’ll keep it around for a while.

A dozen early-stage startups joined the informal competition, where audience members were the judges (we used a mobile applause-meter app to gauge the response to each startup). Prizes were awarded in three categories: information technology, cleantech, and healthtech/life sciences. The prize for each category winner was a $100 gift certificate at Gilt.com, generously donated by Gilt Groupe (whose co-founder, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, was an XSITE speaker earlier in the day).

Today we want to recognize and honor the three winners:

Cleantech

The competitors: CoolChip Technologies, Altaeros Energies, Greenbean Recycle, OsComp Systems

The winner: Greenbean Recycle, Shanker Sahai, founder. Greenbean is developing a new type of “reverse vending machine” that encourages recycling by ingesting soda cans, water bottles, and juice and sports drink bottles and providing refunds (in the case of containers covered by bottle-bill refund law) in the form of digital cash sent straight to a user’s PayPal account or campus cash card. The refunds can be tracked on a mobile app, which also provides a platform for gaming and competition between individuals or teams. The company is pilot-testing the machines on the MIT campus this summer and plans to try them at Tufts starting this fall.

Information Technology

The competitors: WaySavvy, Proper Cloth, Smarterer, STELLAService, PoKos

The winner: WaySavvy, Michael Raybman, co-founder. WaySavvy is combating travel-info overload. Rather than visiting dozens of sites to find the right hotels or flights, WaySavvy users can find the best flights and hotels within their budget in a single click, thanks to optimization technologies and social-profile data. Visual tools allow users to validate and customize the algorithmic recommendations before buying. Raybman says the company is starting out by targeting business travelers who manage their own travel reservations.

Healthtech

The competitors: REBIScan, Ginger.io, Strohl Medical

The winner: Strohl Medical, Heather Keith, founder and CEO. “In the world of stroke, time lost is brain lost,” Keith says. Strohl Medical is developing a medical device aimed at helping emergency-room doctors diagnose ischemic strokes as quickly and reliably as they can use EKG machines to diagnose heart attacks. The Strohl kit fits over the patient’s head and can detect differences in activity on the right and left sides of the brain that indicate stroke. That means some patients could be treated sooner with medicines such as tPA that can reduce the damage.

Congratulations to our winners, a hearty thanks to all of our competitors for taking part, and good luck to next year’s Xpo startups!

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The sun finally came out and heated up the day a bit yesterday—and at our XSITE 2011 conference at Babson College, things were smoking. We had a great crowd of close to 400 speakers and attendees, among them nearly 100 startups, for this year’s event, themed The Entrepreneurship Era. We had inspiring keynotes, insightful chats, and lively debates—all followed by a reception in the Babson pub where we continued to congratulate each other on the Bruins’ victory.

We will soon be posting some recaps from the day—including the audience selections from our XSITE Xpo startup competition and highlights from Sound Off, where five esteemed members of the innovation community ranted about what needs to change here in New England, and how to bring that change about. And we will be posting photos, videos, and more next week. But right now I wanted to take a little time to thank our speakers and all the great supporters who made XSITE 2011 such a success.

First, our speakers, several of whom journey from across the country, or up from New York (which is like another country) to take part. In approximate order of appearance, they were: Rick Miller, Len Schlesinger, Desh Deshpande, Stephen Friend, Phil Sharp, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Edward Jung, Pattie Maes, Stephen Kaufer, Drew Hession-Kunz, Jason Evanish, Chris Palatucci, Josh Bob, Martin LaMonica, Paul Sellew, Brian Chemel, Frank van Mierlo, Aaron Mandell, Troy Campione, Bob Fabbio, Veer Gidwaney, Michael Martino, Norm Wu, Joe Chung, Ellen Rubin, Jules Pieri, John Landry, Jason Jacobs, Sean Creeley, Charlotte Hubbert, Ziad Sultan, Daniel Isenberg, Todd Dagres, Jamie Goldstein, Lee Hower, Jeanne Sullivan, Katie Rae, Pedro Santos, Jordy Leiser, Timo Platt, Seph Skerritt, Michael Raybman, Karan Singh, Heather Keith, Alain Goubau, Jennifer Fremont-Smith, William Sanchez, Justin Shaka, and Shanker Sahai.

Great thanks as well to our wonderful event hosts, Babson College and Olin College—to their two presidents, Len Schlesinger and Rick Miller, respectively, and to their great staffs. You guys rock!

Another round of heartfelt thanks goes to our event sponsors, starting with Gold Sponsor Microsoft; Cleantech Track Sponsor, Latham & Watkins; Healthtech Track Sponsors AT&T and MFA—Moody, Famiglietti & Andronico; and our IT Track Sponsors, Invest Northern Ireland; Next Stage Solutions; Turnstone; and Windstream Hosted Solutions.

I’d also like to thank our event partners, Dog Patch Labs; MassBio; MassChallenge; The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council; MITX; New England Venture Capital Association; and TIE Boston.

Thanks, too, to our Event Supporter Nutter McLennan & Fish; our Lanyard Sponsor, Carbonite; and our Startup Supporters, Flybridge Capital Partners; Redstar; and Spark Capital.

Our elegant, beautiful stage furniture was provided once again by Turnstone.

We’d also like to thank the underwriters and venture members who support us throughout the year. Without you, Xconomy would not be possible. First, our charter underwriters, who have supported us since our launch in mid-2007: Alexandria Real Estate Equities; Biogen Idec; Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and WilmerHale.

Our other great underwriters are: Aderly/Only Lyon; AT&T; BNY Mellon Wealth Management ; Goodwin Procter; Invest Northern Ireland; J. Robert Scott Executive Search; the Kauffman Foundation; Latham & Watkins; MFA—Moody, Famiglietti & Andronico; Next Stage Solutions; NYSE Euronext; SRI International
; Turnstone; UK Trade & Investment; and Windstream Hosted Solutions.

Our venture capital members include: Advanced Technology Ventures; Arch Venture Partners; Atlas Venture; Avalon Ventures; Bain Capital Ventures; Boston Millennia Partners; Excel Venture Management; Flagship Ventures; HLM Venture Partners; LaunchCapital; North Bridge Venture Partners; and Polaris Venture Partners.

And, last but certainly not least, thanks to you, our fantastic audience.

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We try to avoid the obvious pun around here,* but we are excited about XSITE 2011, our big full-day conference, which takes place tomorrow at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. We have had an outstanding response to this year’s event, with more than 400 people signed up—including around 100 startups (you can see the lineup here, and the startup list here). And now, on the eve of the event, we’d like to announce three great prizes that will go to the next three people to buy full-priced tickets to the event.

The prizes will be awarded in this order:

—Samsung SCH-LC11 4G Mobile Hotspot and 4G SIM card good for 30 days (courtesy of Google)

—$100 gift certificate to Gilt, the online fashion site (courtesy of Gilt Groupe)

—$100 gift certificate to Gilt (courtesy of Gilt Groupe)

Remember, you have to buy a full-priced ticket to qualify—student tickets, Startup Specials, and other discounted registrations don’t qualify. And you have to be present at XSITE to claim your prize.

Thanks to Gilt and Google for donating the prizes. Even if you don’t move quickly enough to grab one of them, we feel certain the event will be worth the price of admission. You can register here. Hope to see you there.

* Editor’s note: That’s just a lie.

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[Updated 6/15/11, 5:55 pm]. See below Earlier this year, it seems that Washington, DC (and much of the rest of the country) started to identify something that we here at Xconomy have known since our inception: that entrepreneurship will be a major force in driving technology breakthroughs and economic growth.

So what better time to shape our flagship event (XSITE-The Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship) even more around entrepreneurship than it usually is? The theme of this year’s event is The Entrepreneurship Era. We’ve populated the day with keynote addresses, plenary sessions, CEO chats, breakouts, panels, demos—even a rant-and-rave session. They examine various aspects of entrepreneurship, from Founders Stories to Managing Growth to Entrepreneurship Driven By Technological and Social Innovation, and all are tied together with the common thread of entrepreneurs daring to think big—in areas like venture investing, drug development, energy, and ecommerce.

As always, a large portions of our audience will be made up of entrepreneurs and investors. This year’s event will also have the highest number of startups (speaker and attendees) XSITE has seen yet. With two days still to go before the event, we’ve tracked 98 startup companies who have signed up to be at XSITE this Thursday. [Updated: Earlier we reported 74 startups as registered, but we received another rush of registrations and tracked some that we missed in the first list.] Check out the full list of startups below (those participating in the program are marked by an asterisk). If we missed your company, let us know. And if you want to be part of the crew, be sure to register, and we will add you to the list. There’s even a special startup rate.

1. 1366 Technologies*
2. 1Minute40Seconds
3. Adaptive Machine LLC
4. AdUpon
5. AHT Enterprises
6. Altaeros Energies*
7. AM Strategy
8. Artvenue
9. BayTech Services
10. BEAN
11. Beta Ltd.
12. Boston Device Development
13. Carefuze
14. CloudSwitch*
15. Collaborative Reasoning
16. CoolChip Technologies*
17. CraveLabs
18. Daily Grommet*
19. Dailyfeats.com*
20. Digital Lumens*
21. Doxsite
22. Embed.ly*
23. Embera NeuroTherapeutics
24. Enhanced Outcomes
25. Eragy
26. Family Health Portfolio
27. Fenugreen
28. Fergen
29. Fitness Keeper*
30. FloDesign Wind Turbine
31. Gilt Groupe*
32. Ginger.io*
33. Goodplates
34. GoodTwo
35. Greenbean Recycle*
36. Halley Tucker’s Book Box
37. Hamburger Corporate Management
38. HanGenix, Inc
39. Harvest Power*
40. imedcenter
41. Immuneering
42. InCrowd
43. Innovation World
44. Ipfolios.com
45. Jaoovation
46. Joule Unlimited*
47. Kyruus
48. Licensecompanion
49. Loom Decor
50. M.E.Me
51. Made in the Commonwealth
52. Marginize*
53. MC10
54. MessageAMP LLC
55. Mobilife
56. NetBlazr
57. New Leaf Legal
58. Oasys Water*
59. OmniStrat
60. OP Energy/Downeast LNG
61. OpSaniTx
62. OsComp Systems*
63. Pathogenica
64. Performable*
65. Picsha
66. PlasmaLogic LLC
67. Play140
68. PoKos*
69. Privy
70. Progeny Solar
71. Proper Cloth*
72. Qliance Medical Management*
73. Radaris
74. REBIScan*
75. Redstar*
76. RSV 1
77. SCME
78. Senexx
79. Skill – Guru
80. Smarterer*
81. SocialSci
82. Solar Machines
83. Sportlyzer
84. Springleaf Therapeutics
85. Startup Community Innovation Centers
86. STELLAService*
87. Strohl Medical*
88. Swifton CFOs
89. Take the Interview
90. TeenLife
91. Textaurant
92. The Portfolio Partnership
93. Truventis
94. Verona Systems
95. WaySavvy*
96. Whiteglove*
97. Xpertise LLC
98. Zarzatech

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Every day in the world’s great science and technology clusters, brilliant people go to work thinking about innovation—how to innovate in research, how to build and grow startups, how to keep innovating at public companies so the startups don’t eat their lunch. Edward Jung admires all that work, but believes it can only go so far—that it can’t provide solutions to the world’s biggest problems. For that, he believes, you need a whole new approach to innovation.

Call it Innovation at Large Scale. And it will be the topic of Jung’s keynote talk at XSITE 2011 (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which takes place this Thurday, June 16, at Babson College in Wellesley, MA.

Along with noted visionary Nathan Myhrvold and two other colleagues, Jung is a co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, the Seattle-area intellectual property firm best known for buying and licensing patents around the world—and for bringing top thinkers together for brainstorming “invention sessions” to create new patents. He is also the former chief architect of Microsoft.

I spoke with Jung last week to learn more about his planned talk at XSITE. I have to say I was expecting something about the importance of invention and patenting. But it turned out he is going to talk about how to bring innovation to some of the world’s biggest and most pressing problems—health care, energy, and the like. “It’s new and it’s not really just about Intellectual Ventures,” Jung told me.

I don’t want to steal too much of Jung’s thunder in advance of XSITE. But here are some notes from our conversation.

First, he’s talking about a model of innovation that actively involves government—rather than asks government to get out of the way. That’s because the problems he means to tackle are so huge and fundamental, government has to be involved. “There’s a whole bunch of problems to solve,” Jung says. “Whether dealing with healthcare in the developing world, or very large-scale problems through energy. It’s at a scale of problem that a single startup can’t solve, and it’s very inefficient to try to create lots of startups. Large companies can’t solve them either.”

One example he gave involves diagnostics medicine and that much-envisioned day when an array of diagnostic sensors—genomic, proteomic, visual, chemical, and behavioral—might warn us in advance of disease risk factors and provide tailored preventative treatments as well as personalized therapeutic regimens. A host of firms, such as Kaiser Permanente, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Baxter, Unilever, Walmart, and even IT powerhouses like Microsoft, Google, Intel, and Cisco—which might provide ways to store and access personal medical information—have released their own visions of the field and how their companies fit into them.

But each of these organizations, no matter how large and important, is only one bit player in what diagnostics medicine will ultimately become, and therefore their roadmaps only point to a piece of the field’s future. Think of a passenger airline industry without an Airbus or Boeing—that’s what diagnostics medicine is today, Jung says. “It’s like having a whole bunch of companies that make parts for airplanes try to talk about the vision of the airplane,” he says. What’s more, he adds, “You have no such uber company for a lot of the problems that were looking at.”

Since hundreds of separate companies aren’t going to spontaneously assemble themselves into a solution, “this is one of the cases where a government has to step in and play a role,” Jung says.

Specifically what’s needed, he says, is a master architect or “integrator” to contract with companies to provide all the pieces and then weave them together into a system that works. Now before you shout out—”Hold on, Uncle Sam as integrator, give me a break”—that’s NOT what Jung says the government should be doing. Instead, he says government should de-risk these big efforts by providing long-term guaranteed funding. It should then choose an integrator—in much the way NASA chose the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to manage its Mars Exploration Rover Project.

“Lots of new innovation can be tapped if you can just unlock the integration problem,” says Jung. The government can’t be that integrator, but it can be a demand customer who “changes the risk profile” of taking on big problems—both for large companies and startups, he says.

I’ll leave it to Jung to fully explain what he means at XSITE—and then hopefully answer some of your questions. I’m really looking forward to his talk, though, which will add an important dimension to our discussion of the Entrepreneurship Era, the theme of this year’s conference. We have speakers from startups, universities, public companies, and venture firms—including Desh Deshpande, Gilt Groupe founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Biogen founder and Nobel Laureate Phil Sharp, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer, and Todd Dagres of Spark Capital.

Jung’s talk figures to be the icing on the cake—as it brings the entrepreneurship and innovation discussion to mega problems and projects, including how government fits into the picture. Register here. I hope to see you on Thursday.

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We know you’re out there.

You have gripes about the way innovation is done, in Boston or beyond—or ideas for how to make entrepreneurship and innovation even better.

Maybe one of those pet peeves is that Silicon Valley is poaching all the hot young tech talent from the East Coast. We get it. We’ve all heard about it, read about it, talked about it, written about it. But that gripe probably won’t get you on stage at XSITE (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which will take place on June 16, at Babson College.

You heard me. We’re offering you a public platform to sound off your discontent with, or your best idea for, entrepreneurship: whether it’s surrounding funding, tech talent, government support, R&D, academia, or office space. You tell us.

We want some of the snarkiest, most passionate people we can find—with real, legitimate concerns and ideas—who can stir up the pot before we all break for lunch next Thursday. We will choose a few people—two or three, say—with the most original and interesting rants or recommendations to share their views with the XSITE audience and gain even more fame by being written up in Xconomy. If you haven’t already registered and we choose you, you ‘ll get a free ticket to the event. If you have already registered, we’ll let you bring a guest. And either way, you’ll also get a $25 coupon for use on Gilt, the high-end fashion site co-founded by one of the XSITE speakers.

So email us (ekutz@xconomy.com, or editors@xconomy.com). Tell us what you’d like to sound off about and why. This soapbox portion of this day is supposed to be electric, so don’t hold back.

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What do recycling and a rectal exam have in common?

Well, people tend to put off both things as long as they can. And, OK, they’re both a little more difficult (and one is a lot more uncomfortable) than you’d like them to be. I can even speak with, shall we say, recent authority on one of these topics, but let’s move on.

No, the big thing they have in common is that we wanted both to be represented next week at our startup “Xpo”—part of XSITE 2011, our full-day flagship conference at Babson College on June 16. Yes, I understand that people won’t be lining up to get a prostate exam—or, sadly, to recycle—but bear with me.

Last week we put out an open call for the final speaking slot in the Xpo session. We had 11 early-stage startups confirmed. We wanted a dozen. But we received such a flood of compelling and entertaining pitches that we decided to take two more startups instead of one.

Here are the two we chose, based on their novelty and potentially broad impact:

—Greenbean Recycling (Shanker Sahai)
Community program of recycling machines plus software to track and display results.

—MedicaMetrix (Christopher LaFarge)
Medical device for measuring prostate size, and other urological diagnosis applications.

These companies strongly fit our theme of entrepreneurial innovation at XSITE. Innovation is about changing behaviors and impacting society. It’s about getting out of your comfort zone and (sometimes) making others uncomfortable. And, often, it’s about facing unpleasant realities—and dealing with them in an efficient way.

But, alas, MedicaMetrix is heads-down in meetings and studies, and just informed me that they can’t make it on June 16. So you, my dear audience, are off the hook, so to speak, in terms of not having to hear about the company’s drive to create “a new gold standard for digital rectal exams.” (Trust me, a picture is worth…well, a lot here.)

And we are left with one more presenter, which is what we wanted in the first place: Greenbean Recycling joins an action-packed list of potentially transformative startups already confirmed for the Xpo. These 12 young companies span the fields of alternative energy, medical devices, consumer Internet, mobile software, and e-retail. On tap will be everything from high-altitude wind turbines to stroke detectors to mobile networking to online travel software.

Here’s the full lineup (Katie Rae from TechStars and Project 11 is the emcee):

Cleantech track: Altaeros Energies, CoolChip Technologies, Greenbean Recycling, OsComp Systems

IT track: PoKos, Proper Cloth, Smarterer, STELLAService, WaySavvy

Health-tech track: Ginger.io, REBIScan, Strohl Medical

Each company will get three minutes to impress our audience of investors, entrepreneurs, executives, researchers, students, faculty, and service providers, who will vote for their favorites. You can register here, and we look forward to seeing you at Babson on the 16th.

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Founding a startup means facing so many hazards and unknowns that it can feel like establishing a new country. How are you going to encourage immigration to build up your population (i.e., customers)? How do you husband your natural resources (capital) and attract strong leaders (employees)? What if your constitution (your business plan) needs to be revised? How do you respond when there’s civil unrest, or you’re attacked by a rival nation?

Okay, I don’t want to take the metaphor too far. But given the Boston region’s history of supporting revolutionary ideas, it seemed appropriate that Xconomy Boston’s flagship annual event, XSITE, should include a few conversations with the founding fathers (and mothers) of local technology startups. The “Founders’ Stories” afternoon breakout session at XSITE 2011, which I’ll be moderating, is what I want to tell you about today.

In keeping with the overall theme for XSITE this year—”the entrepreneurship era”—our idea for the Founders’ Stories track was to assemble veteran entrepreneurs and investors from the Web and information technology sector to share personal experiences illustrating both the challenges facing early-stage Internet and technology startups and the solutions available to meet them. We’ve recruited four of the area’s most thoughtful entrepreneurs for this panel; they’ve all made frequent appearances in Xconomy’s pages:

David Cancel is the founder and CEO of Performable, a Cambridge, MA, startup focused on automated Web analytics that help online brands generate more clicks, sales, or other forms of “conversion.” A veteran of the Boston startup scene, Cancel previously co-founded Web traffic monitoring company Compete (sold to UK market research firm TNS in 2008) and a short-lived Facebook advertising network called Lookery. The first time we interviewed Cancel about Performable, back in early 2010, the company was focused on automated multivariate testing, a way for small companies to test many variations of a Web page to see which one produces the desired results most effectively. Since then, the company’s vision has expanded significantly; as my colleague Greg reported, Cancel now says he wants Performable to be “the Salesforce.com of online marketing,” offering technology that tracks every interaction with every customer and provides recommendations for improvement. Of course, there are plenty of other startups that want to be the next Salesforce.com—and at XSITE, I’ll ask Cancel about the challenges of positioning his startup in a crowded, fast-moving technology area.

Joe Chung is co-founding partner at Redstar Ventures, a Cambridge, MA-based venture incubator that provides a home base for pre-startup entrepreneurs-in-residence who are busy evaluating business trends and market opportunities. It’s similar to TechStars and Y Combinator in that it intends to invest in the companies it develops, but different in that it’s banking on seasoned entrepreneurs rather than specific pitches. I’ll get Chung to tell us more about what’s going on inside Redstar, but I also plan to ask him about two contrasting experiences in his own entrepreneurial past. In 1991 Chung co-founded Art Technology Group, which became a mainstay in the e-commerce software world, went public in 1999, and was acquired by Oracle last year for $1 billion; it’s one of the Boston area’s great Internet-era success stories. Chung’s next e-commerce venture, Allurent, didn’t fare quite as well. Founded in 2005 to promote what Chung called “Shopping 3.0″—enriching online shopping experiences through flexible new user interfaces—Allurent was hard hit by the economic collapse of 2008-2009, slimmed down drastically in 2010, and was ultimately acquired by Jenzabar, a maker of university administrative software. I’ll ask Chung to compare the ATG and Allurent experiences, and to talk about how entrepreneurs decide when it’s time to move on.

Jules Pieri is founder and CEO at Daily Grommet. The Lexington, MA-based startup runs a curated marketplace for consumer products made by companies with interesting, authentic, inspiring stories to tell—and it tells them through short home-grown videos, with one new product featured each day. Pieri’s background is in industrial design—she worked for Burroughs, Data General, Continuum, Keds, and Ziggs (a LinkedIn competitor) before launching her own company. When I first met her back in 2009, she explained that she wanted Daily Grommet to be movement, not just a business. So many new consumer products are launched (and so many fail) every year that it’s hard for small or family-owned manufacturers to get noticed, even if they have innovative ideas—and Pieri’s idea was to get her own customers involved in identifying and supporting companies doing meaningful work. Today the company calls that concept “Citizen Commerce”—they’ve even trademarked the phrase. I’ll ask Pieri how she lined up support for such an unconventional idea, what she’s doing to spread the word about Citizen Commerce, and what it’s been like to launch an e-retailing operation in a part of the country better known for building enterprise software and hardware.

Ellen Rubin is the founder and vice president of products at Bedford, MA-based CloudSwitch. The company has a distinguished history at XSITE: Rubin brought the cloud technology startup partway out of stealth mode during our inaugural XSITE Xpo lightning-presentation contest back in June 2009. Today CloudSwitch offers a system that helps big companies with their own on-premises computing infrastructures tap into public computing clouds such as Amazon’s EC2 computing platform and S3 storage service. The idea is to mask the boundaries between internal and external computing resources, so that companies can run their biggest computing jobs in the cloud without having to rearchitect their software. Rubin hatched the idea for CloudSwitch (and lined up support from Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture, and other leading New England venture firms) after a long stint as a marketing executive at data warehouse appliance maker Netezza, which went public in 2007. I’ll ask her how she’s applying the lessons from Netezza’s growth to CloudSwitch, and how (like Performable) her company is coping with competition that is the downside of being in a red-hot technology field.

As always, we’ll leave plenty of time for you to frame your own questions for our talented breakout panelists. But you’ll only be able to do that if you register soon for XSITE, which is just two weeks away. Remember—the first 50 people to register in June will be entered in a drawing to win a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer courtesy of Google. I reviewed this tablet last month and I think it’s the first Android device that’s in the same class with Apple’s iPad.

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As if there weren’t already enough reasons to be looking forward to the June 16 Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, today we’re adding a thin, shiny reason with HD video and front and rear cameras. We’re going to throw the names of the first 50 folks to register in June for XSITE 2011 into a drawing for a limited edition Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, provided by Google.

Our own Wade Roush, well known to have a certain, shall we say, fondness for Apple products, deemed this 10.1 inch Android tablet to be a worthy rival to the iPad. And for the Google geeks among you there’s a special bonus: The machine is one of only 5,000 made for last month’s Google I/O Developer Conference and has a custom back imprinted with Google’s “bug droid” logo. Also, did I mention it’s shiny?

We’ll be pulling the lucky winner’s name out of a hat at XSITE 2011, so you have to be there, on the Babson College campus, to claim your prize. (You also have to have a paid, non-student registration to qualify to enter the drawing.) But of course who wouldn’t want to be there? This year’s program features 40-odd speakers—including legendary serial entrepreneur and super angel Desh Deshpande; Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of the uber-hot Gilt Groupe; Edward Jung, former software architect of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures; and many many more.

So sign up soon to make sure you’re one of the next 50 49 48…probably best to sign up now. We look forward to seeing you on June 16—and perhaps introducing you to your new Galaxy Tab.

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OK, let’s cut to the chase here. We’re looking for The One. One more cool, young startup that could change the world. We’ve got 11 confirmed. We want an even dozen. Do you have what it takes?

The setting: It’s our third annual flagship conference, XSITE, at Babson College on June 16, and the startup “Xpo” goes from 4:00-5:00 pm. The format: Three-minute pitches from our lineup of dynamic entrepreneurs, emceed by Katie Rae of TechStars and Project 11 Ventures. What’s at stake: Exposure to our audience of several hundred investors, executives, entrepreneurs, students, faculty, and service providers; some nice prizes for audience favorites (more on that soon); and beer, lots of beer.

Here are the criteria (which, admittedly, are quite broad):

—Early-stage startup in information technology, healthcare/biotech, or cleantech/energy.
—Potentially transformative in its industry.
—Dynamic founder who will light up the room.
—Hasn’t taken much outside funding yet (seed round or small Series A at most).
—Hasn’t been written up extensively in the media (except Xconomy and maybe one or two others), and hasn’t demoed at a major conference yet.

Given the short notice, this will probably be a New England-based company/entrepreneur. But heck, if you can get here from Seattle, San Francisco, Wichita, Moscow, or Beijing, we want to hear from you too; this is a wild-card entry, after all.

If this sounds like you, drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com or write me personally at gthuang@xconomy.com, and tell us about your company and why you want to present at XSITE. If you make our Top 5 list, we will provide a free pass to the whole conference. (And even if you think we already know you, you should write in, because in all the excitement we might have temporarily forgotten.)

Here are the 11 startups confirmed for the Xpo so far (most are based in Boston or New England), so you can see how the competition stacks up:

—Altaeros Energies (Alain Goubau)
High-altitude wind turbine. Yes, we’re talking about a tethered, helium-filled blimp that hangs out at 2,000 feet.

—CoolChip Technologies (William Sanchez)
Air-based heat sink for cooling CPUs, servers, and data centers in an efficient way.

—Ginger.io (Karan Singh)
Health and wellness monitoring via mobile phones, to help people analyze and visualize trends in their behavior.

—OsComp Systems (Pedro Santos or Jeremy Pitts)
A new kind of compressor to make natural gas cheaper and more efficient.

—PoKos (Timo Platt)
Point-and-chat social networking. As my colleague Erin puts it: Yes, that stranger across the bar can text you. No, it’s not as scary as it sounds.

—Proper Cloth (Seph Skerritt)
Online customized dress shirts for men. Based in New York City.

—REBIScan (Justin Shaka)
Handheld vision scanner to detect amblyopia or “lazy eye,” the leading cause of preventable blindness in children.

—Smarterer (Jennifer Fremont-Smith)
Online skills testing for jobseekers, recruiters, and human resources.

—STELLAService (Jordy Leiser)
Third-party rating service for online retailers. Based in New York City.

—Strohl Medical (Heather Keith)
Portable stroke detection device for emergency room doctors.

—WaySavvy (Michael Raybman)
Online travel site trying to make it incredibly easy to book a trip.

So let us know if you are a young, exciting startup and want in on the Xpo. We’re looking forward to seeing you all on the 16th.

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We are getting more and more excited about XSITE 2011—the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, our annual full-day innovation conference set to take place on June 16 at Babson College.

We began announcing keynoters and other featured speakers several weeks ago, and the list has been building—to more than 40 speakers. They run from legendary serial entrepreneur and super angel Desh Deshpande to Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson to Edward Jung, former software architect of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures—to participants in featured sessions such as our annual Startup Xpo, where 12 young startups vie for audience votes.

Now, although we have a few small holes to fill in, we are releasing the full agenda, so you can see how the day will play out, and begin to consider what breakouts you will attend, and maybe where you will come out on our highly interactive session, Do You Really Need an Incubator?, where a quintet of entrepreneurs will debate this key question under the humorous and insightful moderation of Lead Dog Ventures’ John Landry.

The theme of this year’s XSITE is The Entrepreneurship Era, paying tribute to the newfound attention entrepreneurship is getting from the White House to college campuses. Who better to kick this off than serial entrepreneur and super angel Desh Deshpande, who has not only been a prime driver of innovation here in New England, but in his native India as well. Desh recently sent in the title of his talk: Entrepreneurship Driven by Technological and Social Innovation.

You can peruse the lineup yourself. We have one additional keynoter we hope to announce soon, and we will also be revealing the identities of the 12 Xpo companies next week. But here is the rest of the agenda, including the breakouts.

Get your tickets now—and take advantage of our saver registration rate.

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Most days, I report and write about traditional things people would consider healthcare innovations with big business potential—new drugs, devices, and diagnostics. Most of these things end up adding costs to the healthcare system. But given the ever-rising costs of healthcare in the U.S., more and more entrepreneurial energy is being channeled in other ways to tackle health problems while (here’s the big trick) lowering costs for the system.

What are some of the ideas out there with this kind of potential? I’m excited to bring together a group of four sharp innovators coming at this question from different angles, during a moderated panel on healthtech innovation at XSITE 2011, the big annual event Xconomy is organizing June 16 at Babson College. Here’s who you can expect to hear from at this afternoon session:

—Veer Gidwaney, CEO, Dailyfeats.com. This startup, with offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York, is designed to reward consumers with coupons for local merchants when they engage in healthy life activities like exercising, eating a healthy lunch, tucking in their kids at night, or saving money. The idea is that by encouraging people to take small steps toward healthy living in their daily life, it will add up to big savings for everyone, Gidwaney says.

“If we’re going to solve our biggest social challenges, we need to get people to change their behavior,” Gidwaney says. Obesity, for example, isn’t likely to be solved by a new wonder drug. “We need to encourage people to eat less junk and exercise more,” he says.

—Bob Fabbio, CEO, WhiteGlove House Call Health. This company, based in Austin, TX, and with services in Massachusetts, offers primary care at home or the office that’s supposed to help reduce costly emergency room visits. Leslie Norwalk, the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, serves on the board of this venture-backed company.

—Norm Wu, CEO, Qliance Medical Management. This Seattle-based company, which has raised cash from Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, and the actor Drew Carey, is building up what it calls a “direct primary care” model. The idea is sign up patients for a set monthly fee, and provide unlimited access to primary care medical services, without any messing around with health insurance. Patients are still advised to get a limited form of health insurance for real emergencies that go beyond the scope of primary care, but the combination of Qliance’s primary care, and catastrophic insurance, is supposed to save employers money, and save hassles for everyone else.

—Michael Martino, senior vice president of innovation and business development, CareFusion (NYSE: CFN). CareFusion, a San Diego-based spinoff from medical products giant Cardinal Health, makes products that are supposed to reduce medication errors and hospital-acquired infections that cost hospitals and taxpayers a bundle. It’s a pretty big business—CareFusion has 15,000 employees and a market capitalization of $6.5 billion.

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It is less than a month until XSITE 2011—the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, our annual full-day innovation extravaganza that will take place this year on June 16 at Babson College. We have already announced most of the keynoters and many other speakers, which you can find here, along with the registration information.

Now we’d like to share a brief note from one of the main keynoters, Desh Deshpande, about what he plans to talk about—both to you and with you, as he has let us know he plans to take a lot of question.

Desh, of course, is co-founder of Sycamore Networks, chairman of A123Systems, progenitor of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, and one of New England’s most prominent super angels. He is active not just in the U.S., but also in his native India. And his interests go far beyond making money, into nurturing ecosystems, improving health and education, and mentoring new generations of entrepreneurs . He has created a social entrepreneurship center in northern Karnataka, India. And just in the past six months or so his foundation committed $5 million over the next five years to support the Merrimack Valley Sandbox, a new innovation center at the University of Massachusetts Lowell that, as Greg wrote earlier this year, “will work together with local colleges and nonprofits to boost entrepreneurship among students and professionals, and to develop local leadership through mentoring and seed funding programs.”

It is absolutely fantastic that Desh will share his ideas and insights at XSITE. Here is what he sent us about what he has in mind:

“Innovation is about coming up with new ideas, and entrepreneurship is about making the new idea a reality. I will discuss how entrepreneurs and innovators can join together to come up with technological innovations that have a higher probability of impact, resulting in new companies and economic activity. If we connect innovators with relevance as they innovate, they are more likely to come with innovations that are targeted at burning problems in the world.

“Social innovation, on the other hand, starts with a deep understanding of the relevance, and bringing innovation to relevance to solve a problem. I will use the example of the Merrimack Valley Sandbox to discuss how social innovations have a potential to create opportunities for entrepreneurs to have big social impact.”

Once again, Desh says he plans to spend a lot of time taking your questions. So please have them ready and join us at XSITE. Register here, and we hope to see you on June 16.

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