MIT Media Ventures 2010 ~ Plans, Strats, & Maps

Earlier this month my colleagues Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Frank Moss, and I hosted the finale sessions of our 2010 joint MIT Media Lab-Sloan School class on Media Ventures. This Media Lab Entrepreneurship & Digital Innovations Seminar was the first run of our Spring semester flagship course within the Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program where we first surveyed a broad landscape of emerging media technologies, followed by live- and historic-cases of inter- and entrepreneurship-based on Media Lab ideas, culminating in a term project. The core goal was to gain increased understanding of how emergent media and digital innovations translate into commercial reality and transform society. We survey case examples of both successful and failed businesses and generally grapple with the difficulties of deploying and diffusing products and as a means of exploring a range of business models and opportunities enabled by emerging Media Lab innovations. This year we focused especially on personal health care, financial service innovations, mobile transactions, and social media generally. The term projects came in three flavors -- Venture Plans for new startup, Strategic Analyses of commercialization opportunities, and Innovation Roadmaps investigating long-term technology and market dynamics -- and included these...

1. StoopSwap ~ Community Rental Network
2. everauthor ~ Social Reading, Shared Comments
3. Mi Clinica ~ Affordable Care Clinics (Mexico)
4. FitFriends ~ Health Club Engagement Tools
5. HotSpot ~ Parking Spot Market
6. Imprezo ~ Presentation Coachware
7. MyDateMistake ~ Dating Stories Site
8. peerTransfer ~ International Money Movement
9. PerfectSight ~ Mobile Eye Prescription App
10. PickUp ~ Social Game for Dating
11. Red Ink ~ Personal Analytics Tools
12. WiseArrow ~ Not Creepy Dating Site
13. Zocalo ~ Community Food Marketplace
14. Comcast Response to Online Video
15. Media for Creative Lifestyles
16. Social Analytics at Lockheed Martin
17. Cisco Prototype Testbeds
18. Mobile Claims Assistance
19. Keep It Real ~ Financial Purchase Advisor
20. Future of Online TV
21. Democratizing Telemedicine
22. Education Platform 2015
23. Sound Matters ~ Future of Digital Audio Technology
24. Tecos ~ Tween Ecosystem
25. Quantified Self ~ Evaluating All Measuring Tools
    
26. Evolution of Radio on Demand
27. Brazilian Mobile Industry
28. Promise of Sleep ~ Monitoring & Education for Insomnia
29. Sociometers for Recruiting & Training
30. Future of Augmented Reality
31. One World ~ A Journalism Roadmap

This group included some really great projects and we fully expect the best ideas -- and most motivated people -- to continue onward in the future, either as new startups or being absorbed by established organizations.