Stanford Student Enterprises launches SSE Ventures

Argentinian MIT-alumnus entrepreneur Richard Monte pointed out to me that Stanford Student Enterprises has launched SSE Ventures as noted by TechCrunch in an article entitled Stanford Launches On-Campus Venture Fund, SSE Ventures. This student-run effort has roped in a handful of VC fund folks as advisors & mentors. They aspire to be "...the newest and largest entrepreneurial funding source for students on the Stanford campus." and "...the premiere destination for student entrepreneurs looking for financial backing as well as the resources critical to every start-up company." If MIT were more entrepreneurial, perhaps we would have launched the tech venture fund I originally proposed a decade ago instead of killing it with complaints and worries. Long story.

Power of Instigation ~ Flagship's Jim Matheson...

Flagship Ventures partner Jim Matheson writes a nice piece in Mass High Tech entitled The importance of instigation on innovation about triggering or provoking the "critical final ingredient that turns ideas and opportunities into action." He's on to something, but I think underplays the importance of orchestration, the rallying of disparate people, connecting them into something emergent, like the conductor of a concert.

Qatar's GTL Project

Shell's ramping up a major multi-billion US$ GTL or Gas-to-Liquid installation in Qatar to transform methane gas into liquid petroleum products, primarily gasoil, but also naptha and other specialty products. This is a domain where one of the global specialists is SASOL, the South African coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids technology giant.

Clean Coal, GreenCoal, BlueGas...

There are multiple interesting approaches out there to clean-up coal. One especially compelling one is GreatPointEnergy whose BlueGas is one of the GreenCoal processes converting coal to other energy use forms, in their case, coal-derived natural gas.

Propane & Butane ~ Underappreciated Sectors...

I've been thinking a lot lately about Propane & Butane, fuels typically delivered via truck or canister in semi-liquid/gas form, often as LPG or Liquified Petroleum Gas. This is today a very fragmented sector, but is attracting growing attention from both roll-up consolidator-financiers as well as technology innovators. Just one example newco innovator is C3 BioEnergy, an MIT spinout. Take a look at their venture pitch...

Cool Cat ~ Very Rare!

From BBC links... "Ta'iri, believed to be the first Northern Chinese Leopard in the UK, is pictured in his enclosure at the Wildlife Heritage Foundation in Kent, after arriving from a Paris zoo last week."

Mapping the Spectrum ~ US Frequency Allocations...

Shuttle Prep Pix!

Paul from GeekPress always delivers! The latest (via Howard Roerig) are stunningly great pix of preparations to launch the NASA Space Shuttle! For instance, installing the rocket motors... Or attaching the shuttle... And, of course, launch!

Inventor of Video Games @ MIT Media Lab!

I saw the originator of TV video games, Ralph Baer, at the Media Lab this Thursday. He told the hoary history of the birth of video games while he was running a big group at Sanders Associates (MIT alum-founded company), now BAE Systems. He did it entirely in secret with a technician in a back room. Ended up showing their light gun and quick game to manager-- who was immediately sold. But had a trickier time with the Board of Directors! How do we make money at this? was the key question. And Baer revealed this was an amazing demo since he recorded his own voice and played it back -- via the TV itself -- where it introduced the seven games it could play! But he persisted and made a whole series of games including ping-pong, etc. Sanders ultimately licensed this to Magnavox to create the Odyssey!

He showed the first Odyssey advertisement... This, together with Space War, the first computer game, was the birth of a modern technology-entertainment industry!

Development Innovations Night @ MIT Museum ~ Fri 4/4 6-9p ~ Jazz, Food, Drinks, Demos!

I'm helping organize a special Development Innovations Night at the MIT Museum on Friday April 4th from 6-9pm showcasing Activities, Programs, and Ventures pursuing international development innovations all organized by the MIT International Development Network!

From 6-7pm, the Night starts with the Hollomon Memorial Symposium organized by the Technology & Culture Forum where MIT's MacArthur Prize-winning international development innovator Amy Smith with share with us her insights on going From Imagination To Innovation: Pioneering Solutions to Global Challenges.

Then from 7-9pm there will be a Development Innovations Showcase featuring some two-dozen inventions, projects, and activities tackling development issues ranging from DIY Education, Clean Energy, Future Cities, Safe Water, Healthcare, MicroFinance, Village Utilities, Creative IDEAS, Humanitarian Innovations, and much more! This will be an informal Jazz-Food-Drinks soiree! Free ~ Open to MIT & Harvard Community & Friends ~ Proper ID Required.

Event Partners include the MIT Public Service Center, MIT Dean for Graduate Education, Technology & Culture Forum, 15th Annual Hollomon Memorial Symposium, 14th Annual International Development Conference at Harvard, MIT Museum, both the MIT Muddy Charles & Thirsty Ear Pubs and the Dave Fox Trio!

Doug Wolf of Wolf Greenfield & MIT Enterprise Forum on HighTechFever

I hosted Doug Wolf -- Intellectual Property attorney with Wolf Greenfield and key volunteer with the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge -- on my HighTechFever TV show tonight. We discussed the role of intellectual property, or IP, including Patents, Trademarks, Trade Secrets, and more, for businesses large & small. Doug has special interest in startups and heads Wolf Greenfield's small business practice. FYI, Doug especially recommended that young inventors & entrepreneurs check out educational resources on the US Patent & Trademark Office website as well as the Q&A booklets on his own firm's site. We also spotlighted next week's Nanotech night with keynote Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital & Live Case QD Vision at the MIT Stata Center on Wed April 9th from 6-8p, the main monthly event of the Innovation Series organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum.

MIT Davis Prize-Winners...

Delightful to see Zahir Dossa and Mustafa Dafalla with their Selsabila project and Shammi Quddus with her Building Bridges team both win the Davis Projects for Peace $10,000 Prizes!

Helping Hand for Zimbabwe ~ a Post-Dictator Prosperity Package

The FT today had an excellent comment piece on transforming Zimbabwe entitled A rescue package for the stricken of Zimbabwe written by Michael Holman, the former Financial Times Africa editor. He writes...

If you lack a stick, then use a carrot. As Zimbabweans prepare for a final heave, their bravery needs to be supplemented by hope: hope that stems from evidence that their future will be marked by a rapid improvement in their wretched circumstances.

And Holman then recommends a package of international and humanitarian commitments in the agricultural, tourism, health, transport, education, wildlife, and other key sectors, all poised for execution and delivery to post-dictatorial Zimbabwe. Holman concludes...

This package of measures would be published and made available to every Zimbabwean, telling them what the future holds. Who better to co-ordinate the programme than the Commonwealth...

An excellent idea and one which could be strategically replicated to bring the Helping Hand of Prosperity to other troubled zones, including potentially Burma, North Korea, some of the 'stans, and elsewhere in Africa as well.

Ultra Slo-Mo Slap!

Paul from GeekPress found this one via Clicked. Ultra slow-motion of a face slap...

Howtoons for David Macaulay!

I met one of my childhood heroes, David Macaulay, yesterday at his talk at MIT! Macaulay author of such wonderful works as Castle, City, Unbuilding, Cathedral, How Things Work and most recently Mosque and Ship among others. He gave a full-on hour-plus talk weaving together his studies at RISD, love of ruins and Rome, efforts to help others learn complex things more simply but still accurately, homages to Escher, his use of models and field research to get the details right, his attempts to understand the Body and Brain, and more!

At the end, I asked the first question What's Next? Two things in the short run: a book on Leonardo's sketching and a big project on The Earth. He said he knows very little about how the Earth works, but that's never stopped him before! Excellent & inspiring attitude! After the talk he was signing copies of his books which people had remembered to bring. MIT-Lemelson Invention Prize winner (and co-host of DesignSquad) Nate Ball brought his copy of How Things Work. I didn't have a book for him to sign but instead shook his hand and said Thanks, your work was one of the inspirations behind my colleagues and I creating and publishing our Howtoons book! I showed him a copy and he loved it, so I gave it to him. And he wanted it signed! Way cool guy.

MIT Project Mercury --> Center for Future Banking

It's excellent to see that Bank of America has committed to a multi-year research agreement with the MIT Media Lab. What I'm especially pleased with is that this is a direct decendent of the MIT Project Mercury proposal I first made in 2001-2 to think of the MIT campus as a wireless-mobile technology testbed where we could run exploratory product and service experiments. If done well, this would make the Institute a predictive microcosm of the world at large and allow us to see the future first.

Well, Project Mercury inspired my co-founding and running the Digital Anthropology class in 2003 which incubated the MIT Innovation Club which organized a dozen tech testbeds at MIT -- including ones with Nokia, HP, and RIM. The Project Mercury and Digital Anthropology initiatives also inspired a 2005 proposal (also entitled Project Mercury) in the Communications Futures Program. This was subsequently renamed LivingTheFuture in 2006, but it was still basically the same core thing. While LivingTheFuture was perhaps overly ambitious -- it required CSAIL, the Media Lab, Sloan, and MIT IS&T to all collaborate together on an MIT-wide effort reaching even into Cambridge & Boston -- the LivingTheFuture proposal did attract the attention of Bank of America who chose to concentrate resources on the Media Lab and encourage faculty and student to imagine and invent banking and financial services of the future through the new Center for Future Banking.

Met with Visiting Colombian Delegation ~ MIT Entrepreneurship Ecosystem & MIT Innovation Tour

I met yesterday with a visiting delegation of Colombians from Bogota-based Universities. They all have responsibilities for running the research aspects of their respective institutions and they were especially interested in hearing how MIT organizes things. This is an extension to the Renewal of Research Universities program from 2006 with Colombian University Presidents. Martha Bonilla-Penalosa of MIT's Urban Studies & Planning department pulled together an agenda including speakers from the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, Technology Licensing Office, Enterprise Forum, and more. I shared a bit about the MIT Entrepreneurship Ecosystem, including the results from the MIT Founders Project I ran a decade ago and some ideas about how MIT catalyzed the Technology Venture Zone surrounding the Institute. I also walked them around the campus a bit, giving them my MIT Innovation Tour!

Michael Osofsky ~ Founder of MIT Innovation Club & NetBase / Accelovation!

I was very pleased today to re-connect with MIT Sloan alumnus Michael Osofsky, my partner in co-founding the MIT Innovation Club who went on to co-found and build NetBase (previously known by my favorite spinoym Accelovation, or Accelerating Innovation;-) inspired in part by Professor Eric von Hippel's Lead User methodology.

Michael was instrumental in many key things at MIT, but the most personally notable was his suggestion to Saul Griffith and me to create a Howtoons with kids counting in binary using their fingers! Great idea which our superhero illustrator Nick Dragotta drew into our Possibilities are Endless book and rendered as great a one-pager...

Next Billion Network ~ Center for Developmental Communications @ MIT

Jhonatan Rotberg at the MIT Media Lab runs the Center for Developmental Communications. In addition to teaching the ICT4D development class this semester, he is incubating a new Next Billion Network initiative to deploy an "ICT-enabled platform that leverages the growing ubiquity of low-cost, mobile devices in the developing world in order to expand people’s opportunities for entrepreneurship from the bottom up." This basically means marketizing those people who are currently disconnected from market-mechanisms using the transformative power of mobile phones.

Entrepreneurship @ Harvard...

MIT undergrad Albert Park just wrote a piece on Xconomy.com entitled Harvard Entrepreneurship Lives! (A Report from an MIT Student)

In my reply comment to Albert, I pointed out that...

there have been several waves of activity at Harvard, including a club co-founded by Bill Haney who started FuelTech in his dorm on the Yard and later Molten Metal Technologies, and also a later business club effort by Dan Hart who was early at Silicon Spice, Deploy Solutions and Echo music. And that’s just Harvard College efforts.

Curiously enough, it’s been easier for Harvard grad school folks to enter — and become finalists and even win — in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition than to participate in things in other schools at Harvard. HBS is notoriously isolationist in this respect (despite the fact the MIT technologists have been the core of multiple winning teams in the HBS competition, including LowCostEyeglasses and Bang Networks).

We have several examples of Harvard people doing well in the MIT competition, for instance, Harvard Law’s Gary Culliss of DirectHit and Belinda Juran of Actuality come to mind, Grand Prize winner and Runner-up winner in the $100K (back in its $50K days). And Harvard Medical’s Shai Gozani of Neurometrix and Nina Dudnik of SeedingLabs. And in the Developmental Entrepreneurship class I teach at MIT, we’ve had dozens of very entrepreneurial cross-registrant students from both the Harvard Kennedy School and Education School, including key leaders of three out of the five semi-finalists in the Development Track in this year’s MIT $100K.

But I ran into HBS Professor Karim Lakhani this afternoon and he tells me interesting plans are afoot. When Harvard University moves Science and Engineering activities to the Allston side of the Charles -- co-located with HBS -- it opens up tremendous opportunities for better technology-business connections at Harvard. (This, btw, is something I've been personally championed and been involved in since 200o-2001 as the founding TA for the first-ever joint MIT Media Lab-HBS class on Technology & Competitive Strategy with Professors Joe Jacobson and Brian Silverman.) Stay tuned for updates...