A Gathering for Student Entrepreneurs, This Saturday at MIT

MIT senior Albert Park is putting together an event called Underground 2008 this Saturday, May 3rd. All student entrepreneurs are welcome. As Albert explains it, the goals are:

INSPIRE: Hear the latest and greatest on how your fellow entrepreneurs are changing the world.

CONNECT: Quiz successful entrepreneurs, investors, and each other for some new perspectives on entrepreneurship.

CREATE: Befriend your college's entrepreneurs and learn about what resources are available for you.

Students from MIT, Harvard, Babson, Olin, BC, Tufts, and BU are expected to attend -- but everyone is welcome. Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, will give the opening keynote. That'll be followed by panels on "Student Successes," "Alumni Entrepreneurs," and "Investors in the Hot Seat."

It starts at noon on Saturday. There's a Facebook group, but no Web site for the event. You can RSVP (with your name and college) to apark_87@mit.edu - and sooner is better. In addition to Albert, Underground 2008 is being organized by:

Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum
MIT Science and Engineering Business Club
StudentBusinesses.com

ROFLCon Round-Up

Kudos (!) to the MIT and Harvard students who organized ROFLCon, an exploration and celebration of Internet culture and contagious memes, last week. I dropped in Friday afternoon and Saturday morning... and especially enjoyed a ten-minute disquisition by Tron Guy about whether it is appropriate to wear underwear with a skin-tight white 'Tron' costume. (No, is the answer.)

Carolyn Johnson has a great wrap-up piece in the Globe this morning ... Chris Herot has a blog entry about it ... and David Weinberger, who delivered a keynote on Friday morning, has a number of posts, including one on the LOLcats panel. There's also coverage from Wired News, and photos from the excellent San Francisco-based blog Laughing Squid.

The big news, however, was a street fight between Firefox and the TripAdvisor owl, right outside the venerable Media Lab:

Why Maeda Matters

Sunday's column in the Globe focused on John Maeda, a long-time Media Lab professor (and globally-renowned artist) who was picked in December to run the Rhode Island School of Design. Maeda is funny, thoughtful, wise and challenging -- the perfect personality for an artist pushing boundaries, and a professor nudging students in interesting new directions. He's also all over the Web in video form.

My Globe video is below...with more links after that.



Here's a talk he gave last year at TED.

Here's his video hello to the RISD community.

And here's Maeda in conversation with another young designer, Joshua Davis.

Does Facebook's Revenue Matter?

The Power, Drugs & Money conference at the Seaport Hotel has brought together an interesting mix of people ... Jim Gordon of Cape Wind is speaking now, and I just bumped into someone from the Boston Redevelopment Authority and Noubar Afeyan from Flagship Ventures in the hall.

The first morning panel focused on innovation in New England, and was moderated by Chris Gabrieli of Bessemer Venture Partners and the Massachusetts 20/20 Foundation. Panelists included Bob Buderi from Xconomy, Doug Banks from Mass High Tech, Bob Krim from the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative, and me.

Krim said that Boston has a good track record of gravitating to new ideas once old ones lose steam. (For a long time we fished for cod... then we focused on the telegraph and telephone... later, we invented minicomputers and e-mail.) Krim also has a nice term for the interactions that happen here between investors, entrepreneurs, tech users, and academic researchers. He calls it the "bump and connect."

Doug Banks had a nice turn of phrase when he said that developing technologies that produce cleaner power is "the noble pursuit of the day." I agree, even if some worry about it becoming a bubble.

We bashed Harvard a bit, which Gabrieli suggested looks down upon the process of commercializing new ideas. I mentioned Facebook at one point ... if Harvard had more VCs prowling the hall, or had more of an entrepreneurship infrastructure forging connections with the local innovation economy, would more than one local investor have seen the Facebook deal before the founder moved to California?

Banks said that Facebook doesn't have impressive revenues, and is probably overvalued. He mentioned that the #2 e-commerce vendor, after Amazon, is Staples.com, headquartered right here in Massachusetts. I said to Doug afterwards, that's great, but how many smart young people are moving from Kansas to Massachusetts because they want a job with Staples.com? And how many smart young people are moving from Kansas to California because they want a job with Facebook, or one of the zillions of Facebook app developers out there?

Someone in the audience complained that as venture firms raise larger funds, they tend to be less interested in backing early-stage companies started by wet-behind-the-ears founders. I mentioned some of the new early-stage, smaller venture funds that have started up in the last year or two.

The opening keynote speaker was John Kao, author of 'Innovation Nation.' He offered a picture of what other countries, like Singapore and Finland, are doing to try to build hubs of innovation.

I see countries like those, and states like North Carolina and Michigan, playing offense: trying to attract smart people and fast-growing companies. Our job here (in the US, and in Massachusetts) is to play both offense and defense.

Endy heading to Stanford ... Big loss for MIT

I wrote about synthetic biology pioneer Drew Endy back in 2005, after his group's work had been covered in Wired.

Just saw this piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, which notes that Endy is hopping from MIT to Stanford at the end of the 2007-2008 academic year. Big loss for MIT.

Endy was also a co-founder of the Cambridge company Codon Devices.

(Photo credit: Leah Fasten)

You Heard It Here First: $300K in Prizes for MIT Entrepreneurs

As this blog suggested back in September, the prize money at MIT's entrepreneurship competitions has leapt from $100,000 to $300,000, with the addition of a $200,000 prize for "Clean Energy Entrepreneurship".

Money comes from NStar and the US Dept. of Energy. Prize, according to Robert Gavin of the Globe, "will go to the team that develops and presents the best plan for commercializing alternative energy products and services."

John Maeda's new shoe is *fast*

How fast did John Maeda's limited-edition Reebok sneaker sell out? One hundred pairs went in just one day, priced at $150, according to the Media Lab prof and artist.

Combating Global Warming: Last night's MIT Enterprise Forum

Last night I was at a meeting of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge that focused on "How Innovative Businesses are Combating Global Warming."

Ian Bowles, Massachusetts' secretary of the executive office of energy and environmental affairs, opened the evening with an update from the State House. Bowles talks so fast I am pretty sure his compensation package has a words-per-minute clause. Very smart guy. But he predicted that we won't see any federal action on a carbon tax or CO2 emissions trading, either of which could help mitigate global warming, until the next Presidential administration.

I moderated a panel with Emily Kreps from Goldman Sachs, Daniel Goldman from Great Point Energy, Phillip Boyle from Powerspan, and Professor Daniel Schrag from Harvard. Schrag led things off with a short and dismaying PowerPoint overview of the latest data and projections about climate change: Houston, we have a problem.

Goldman talked about how his company is transforming coal into natural gas, and sequestering the CO2. Boyle explained how Powerspan removes acid-rain-causing pollutants from power plant emissions, and can also sequester CO2. And Schrag explained some of the thinking related to "global dimming" -- figuring out ways to reflect sunlight before the earth's atmosphere absorbs the heat. He's concerned that some country might decide unilaterally to try a global dimming experiment, with dangerous effects, since we don't know enough about how climate works.

The panelists all agreed with Bowles that we're not likely to see any federal implementation of something like the Lieberman-Warner bill soon, which would cap emissions and reduce them over time.

I suggested that citizen action is what's needed, given that we have a little more than a year before our next President takes office. Initiatives like Hull Wind and the CalCars plug-in hybrid movement work. Why wait for Washington to get moving?

Afterward, I met a bunch of entrepreneurs working on swell stuff.... Michael Chen is trying to develop wind farms in China...Jon Strimling from PelletSales.com was explaining the benefits of using biomass fuels to heat one's home...and Benjamin Brown runs the Web site MakeMeSustainable.

Sunday's Globe column: Social Networking Goes to the Dogs

I'm traveling this week, so a bit slow to post the link to last Sunday's Globe column. It focuses on two Boston companies working on intelligent, wearable tags -- one for humans, and one for dogs.

From the piece:

Entrepreneurs of every breed need to make a clean break with reality; their job is to imagine a product or service that doesn't yet exist and that fills a need none of us knew we had. Ideas that seem slightly crazy at first - Bluetooth headsets, anyone? - can become commonplace in just a few years. Or they end up as one more crazy concept that didn't fly.

SNIF [Labs] is the second local start-up to introduce wearable tags for information exchange. Charlestown-based nTag Interactive has raised $14 million to market smart name tags that enable conference-goers to swap contact information, peruse the day's agenda, play ice-breaker games, or respond to a speaker's survey question.

Both companies trace their genealogy to the MIT Media Lab. In 1995, the lab was organizing a party to mark the launch of a research initiative, called Things That Think. The objective was to explore what might happen when computers were embedded into all sorts of objects.

And here's the video ... a short conversation with SNIF Labs CEO Noah Paessel:

Today's Globe column: The Elixir/Sirtris Rivalry

As a journalist, it's hard to resist writing about rivalries -- especially when big personalities are involved.

Elixir Pharmaceuticals and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, two companies founded to exploit the science of sirtuins (which are enzymes thought to be linked to the aging process and age-related disease), have the big personalities: Jonathan Fleming and Ansbert Gadicke, heads of the two biggest biotech VC firms in Boston, are on the board of Elixir, and Christoph Westphal, the golden boy of Boston life sciences, runs Sirtris. (Westphal worked for Polaris Venture Partners before deciding to become a CEO.)

And Sirtris managed to go public first; Elixir is now trying to follow suit.

But the crucial difference is that Sirtris is still very much pursuing drugs based on the sirtuin work of local researchers like Harvard's David Sinclair, while Elixir has in-licensed a diabetes drug already approved in Japan (which has nothing to do with sirtuins), and is trying to get it approved in the US. Elixir, five years older than Sirtris, has decided to develop a near-term product, while Sirtris is still focused on the long-term vision.

“The decision was made that the company needed to really get commercial as quickly as it could,” Ed Cannon, Elixir’s first chief executive, told me. [His comments were snipped from the column before it ran.] “They needed later-stage molecules,” he says, referring to drugs that are closer to winning FDA approval.

Cannon is bullish on both companies' prospects (he still holds some stock in Elixir). “I think Christoph has been a magician,” Cannon says. “And it’s not just smoke and mirrors. He has surrounded the company with terrific scientists, and terrific business people and investors.”

Here's the video, featuring MIT prof and Elixir co-founder Lenny Guarente talking about his research:

Howtoons: The book that'll turn your kids into inventors, scientists, or engineers

I saw Joost Bonsen, the Mayor of MIT, earlier this week, and he showed me a fresh-off-the-presses copy of his first book, Howtoons: The Possibilities are Endless!

If you know children, this is what to buy them for Christmas, Chanukah, or Kwanzaa. It's a compilation of fun projects that kids can do -- like making a marshmallow shooter, or a turkey baster flute. Bonsen guarantees that they will be accepted into MIT if they read it; actually graduating is their problem.

To get a feel for Howtoons, check the Web site.

What's Andora Up To?

Bob Langer's lab at MIT seems to be going through a particularly fertile period -- I heard tonight that two Langer Lab companies are currently out talking to VCs.

Ryan McBride of Mass High Tech had a fun piece last Friday about another recent Langer Lab spin-out, Andora, basically speculating about what they may be up to. The company raised $4 million earlier in the year.

Andora (no Web site yet) is in Kendall Square, and were until recently was cohabitating with Tempo Pharmaceuticals, another Polaris-backed start-up. Avid surfer Amir Nashat is running the company. Oddly, Jon Flint from Polaris, not usually a life sciences investor, is on the board.

MIT's Business Plan Competition: From $10K to $300K?

MIT's annual Entrepreneurship Competition started in 1990, with $10,000 of prize money... so for a long while, it was known as the $10K competition. In 1996, the purse grew to $50,000, and then to $100,000 last year.

The competition has a pretty good track record for spawning companies. While some never make it past the embryonic stage, Akamai Technologies was a finalist in 1998. Direct Hit won the competition in 1998, and then was acquired two years later for half a billion dollars. In 1995, Harmonix (makers of the hit videogame "Guitar Hero," now owned by MTV Networks) was a finalist.

This week, I've bumped into a few Sloan students who've suggested to me that the prize money is heading north again this year...to as much as $300,000. One judge I spoke to said he has been hearing rumblings, too.

Bill Aulet, one of the Sloan school lecturers involved in supporting the competition, said yesterday he wasn't ready to confirm any numbers, and several other people connected to the competition didn't return my calls. Given that the most recent change to the competition was adding a new $50,000 "Development" category, which focuses on businesses that can improve low-income communities or developing countries, I'd expect the additional prize money to focus on a new category -- like energy or the environment.

Increasing the prize money three-fold wouldn't be about convincing more students to enter the competition -- just about anyone with an entrepreneurial inkling at MIT knows about it already, and has plenty of motivation to get involved. I think the increase would have three benefits:

1. Marketing: Ensure that the competition remains prominent on the national scene...attracts more media attention...makes more prospective B-school students aware of Sloan...and brings in more venture capitalists to look at the finalists and winning companies as prospective investments.

2. Pocket change: Give the winning companies a bit more prize money to use in their start-up stage, assuming they don't find funding quickly from VCs.

3. Spark more entries in a particular sector, like cleantech.

With $250,000 or $300,000 in prizes, it seems like the MIT competition would be the country's biggest.... the state of New Hampshire ran a competition with $250,000 in cash prizes from 2003 to 2005, but they haven't repeated it since. Across the pond, the London Business School has a $500K competition, focused on homeland security.

Memo to Wearable Computing Gurus: You Are Not Welcome at Logan Airport

From CNET News.com:

Star Simpson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student, was arrested at gunpoint Friday morning at Logan Airport when authorities suspected she had a bomb strapped to her chest.

Simpson was wearing a black sweatshirt that had a circuit board with wires, green LED lights and a 9-volt battery attached to it. When an airport employee asked about her shirt, Simpson walked away without answering so the employee called the authorities, the Boston Globe has reported.

Here's the Globe piece.

Salon has links to WBZ video of Simpson's arraignment, and a quote from a state police major, who says the MIT sophomore is "extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used. She's lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue."

And BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin has a great collection of links, including a link to Simpson's homepage (which seems to be down right now.)

New-and-Improved MIT Museum will Open in Late Sept.

I'm really excited about the MIT Museum's $3 million renovation project. This is a place that has too long been hidden away, when it deserves to be a big part of Boston's tech and cultural communities. From Felicia Mello's piece in the Globe today:

The new gallery will eschew historical exhibits to focus on cutting-edge projects including a stackable electric car, new-generation robots that explore the ocean floor, and tropical fish that are helping scientists in the search for a cancer cure. It is the brainchild of museum director John Durant, who arrived two years ago from a British science museum with frenetic energy and what he calls a bullish outlook about the ability to engage the average Joe or Jane in learning about science.

...Durant has pushed to raise the museum's public image, helping start a citywide science festival earlier this year. He is one of many science museum directors looking to dust off their collections and update them to reflect recent discoveries.

Conference tech start-up nTAG grabs $8.3 million

nTAG started out as a cool demo at the MIT Media Lab -- intelligent nametags that could exchange information with one another. Researcher Rick Borovoy decided to turn the demo into a company.

Some of the earliest deployments were kind of sketchy; at PopTech in 2003, attendees seemed more interested in talking about what was wrong with the tags, which were supposed to help identify like-minded folks, than what was right with them.

But now nTAG has developed into more of a full-fledged "event technology" company, offering conference organizers technology for surveys, personalized agendas, and cell phone audience polling.

Today, the Boston-based company announced an $8.3 million second round of VC from Sevin Rosen and Pilot House Ventures. An earlier jolt of funding was $6 million last January, from the same funds. Company has raised a total of $23 million, according to VentureBeat.

Top Innovators Under 35: From Technology Review

Technology Review, MIT's alumni newsletter, put out its annual list of the most interesting innovators under 35 today.

Who's on the list from New England?

- David Berry is their "Innovator of the Year." Berry is a partner at Flagship Ventures in Cambridge who earned an MD from Harvard and a PhD from MIT; his most recent work was on engineering molecules to produce biofuels, work which serves as the foundation for the California start-up LS9.

- Chris Loose from Stericoat, which won MIT's 100K business plan competition in 2006.

- Mehmet Yanik of MIT

- Kristala Jones Prather of MIT

- Ali Khademhosseini of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology

- Adam Cohen of Harvard

- Ivan Kristic of One Laptop Per Child, who develops anti-virus software

- Roboticist Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont

- Anna Lysyanskaya of Brown, who works in online privacy

Times Magazine Piece on Sociable Robots

This Times Sunday Magazine piece, which ran yesterday, focuses almost exclusively on "sociable robots" being developed at MIT...and includes some cool video demonstrations. From the story:

Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s. Thirty years ago, few people guessed that the bulky, slow computers being used by a handful of businesses would by 2007 insinuate themselves into our lives via applications like Google, e-mail, YouTube, Skype and MySpace. In much the same way, the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years.

How iRobot is Like Intel

TIE-Boston put on a really interesting event last night at the MIT Museum: "Mobile and Sociable Robots: At the Leading Edge of Computing."

Cory Kidd from the Media Lab was there, demoing his robotic weight loss coach, which he's hoping to commercialize once he leaves the Lab. I talked with the CTO of Bluefin Robotics, Christopher Wallsmith, about some of their new underwater 'bots that can glide for long periods of time, or hover in place. (Hiawatha wrote a great piece in the Globe earlier this month that included Bluefin.)

But the thing that struck me as most interesting was Helen Greiner's opening talk. (Helen is the co-founder and chairman of iRobot.) Two things struck me, actually.

First was how authentically iRobot has been living up to its mission statement: Build cool stuff, Deliver great product, Make money, and Have fun. They've shipped 2.5 million of their Roomba robotic vaccuum cleaners thus far.

The second thing was that iRobot is the closest thing Boston has to a Google, an Apple, or an Intel: a company that is so clearly the leader in its field that all the best people want to work there (aside from those who're happier in academia). Helen said iRobot now employs about 200 engineers and researchers. These kinds of "magnet" companies not only attract great people, they also make it clear that the region is a center of gravity for their particular industry -- and they start spinning off start-up companies. Q Robotics, one of the other companies on last night's panel, is just such a spin-off. Q CTO Joe Jones was one of the developers of iRobot's Roomba.

That's pretty cool.

(Photo by Jason Grow / Business Week. Chris Brady took some great photos at tonight's event.)

Watts by Air

Science News has a great piece about how an MIT team successfully transmitted electricity over the airwaves ... something people have been puzzling over since Nikola Tesla began exploring the problem early in the 20th century.

From the piece:

"What they've done is take some very basic physics concepts [and] brought these ingredients together. It's the synthesis which is the novel thing," says [John] Pendry [, a physicist at Imperial College in London].

Shanhui Fan, a physicist at Stanford University, says that the use of magnetic resonance as a means of transferring energy is a completely new concept, and "very clever." Although it's a simple principle, nobody seems to have thought of it before, he says. "Many great things look simple from hindsight."

[MIT prof Marin] Soljacic and his colleagues have applied for two patents, and they have branded their idea with the name WiTricity to suggest an electrical-power version of Wi-Fi wireless-Internet technology.

But if the physics is simple, why didn't anyone think of it sooner? Soljacic suggests that before the spread of cell phones and laptops, there was little need for a wirefree power source. In fact, Soljacic admits that what got him thinking hard about wireless power was the frustration of being awakened at night by a beeping cell phone that needed to be recharged.

Which Three Boston Notables (and One Company) Will Be at the White House This Friday?

President Bush hands out the National Medals of Science and Technology this Friday at the White House.

Who's on the list from our part of the world?

1. Chuck Vest, former president of MIT
2. Bob Langer, head of MIT's Langer Lab and founder of numerous biotech and med device companies, among them Alkermes, Alnylam, Pervasis, and MicroCHIPs
3. Daniel Kleppner, an MIT physicist whose work led to ultra-accurate atomic clocks and the global positioning system
4, Genzyme Corporation.

A Globe blog post on the winners is here.