The finale of MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is tonight in Kresge Auditorium, with posters before-hand and live keynote and presentation starting at 7pm. See which of 6 Finalist teams take home the $100,000 check this year!
Our Spring 2011 MIT Media Ventures action lab on the opportunities and challenges for businesses based on big data, mobiles, and new media innovations had final presentations this morning! Several dozen great venture concepts, strategic analyses, and innovation roadmaps including (in purely alpha-order)...
"Did the dots appear to stop changing color when they began to rotate? If so, give the animation another look: the dots change color throughout, but their spinning motion somehow suppresses the viewer's ability to detect those changes."
"... a wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance, a form of electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation. The sensor also measures temperature and activity."
"...an award-winning course where young people learn to create imaginative mobile apps that change their world. [...] We don’t just “teach a subject”. We help young people ready themselves for employment, self-employment and entrepreneurship in the real world."
Beyond honoring your own mom today on Mother's Day, let's also remember Millennium Development Goal #5 -- Improving Maternal Health -- and do what we can for the millions of mothers who lack the essentials. As Nicholas Kristof writes in his NYTimes OpEd Beyond Flowers for Mom, let us... "...commemorate motherhood by saving the lives of mothers halfway around the world -- such as in this impoverished nook of Somaliland in the horn of Africa [where] an extraordinary Somali woman, Edna Adan, runs a maternity hospital here to make childbirth safer. We in journalism often focus on villains, but Edna is one of my heroes. She’s a tireless 73-year-old whose passion is to save her countrywomen’s lives, get them access to family planning and end female genital mutilation. [...] In a column a year ago, I suggested that we move the apostrophe so as to celebrate not so much Mother’s Day -- honoring a single mother -- but Mothers’ Day, to help save mothers’ lives around the world as well."Hear, hear! And let's salute social entrepreneurs like Zubaida Bai whose AYZH business creates and distributes the JANMA Clean Birth Kit which allows rural Indian midwives to deliver babies under the most hygienic conditions possible. Just this past week at the Muddy I met with entrepreneurs making affordable endoscopy tools for fixing fistulas. And our MIT Sloan Global Health students recently presented their work on effective health care operations. Our D-Lab students similarly just yesterday. All of these and more are tangible examples of development action. For the sake of mothers and their children everywhere, let's accelerate our efforts and achieve the Goal before this decade is done.
"When Christian Schallert isn't cooking, dressing, sleeping or eating, his 24 square meter (258 square feet) apartment looks like an empty cube. To use a piece of furniture, he has to build it. Located in Barcelona's hip Born district, the tiny apartment is a remodeled pigeon loft. Christian says its design was inspired by the space-saving furniture aboard boats, as well as the clean lines of a small Japanese home."
"American companies are finding new overseas tax havens to legally protect some of their profits from the U.S. tax rate of 35 percent, among the highest in the world. Lesley Stahl reports."
"The Southern California companies that outfit and customize catering trucks -- or lease them out -- enjoy a boom as the craze spreads throughout the country. [...] The food truck craze has revived one of the region's classic postwar businesses -- catering trucks -- breathing new life into the companies that sprang up decades ago to make the vehicles that frequent construction sites, factories and movie shoots. Hopeful gourmet truck entrepreneurs come from all over the country to get retired vehicles transformed into gleaming, rolling emporiums that dish out everything from comfort food to exotic fare."
Edwin Heathcote asks in the FT about the relative merits of Liveable v lovable cities and revealing... "...the fundamental fault that lies at the heart of the idea of measuring cities by their “liveability”. The most recent surveys, from Monocle magazine, Forbes, Mercer and The Economist, concur: Vancouver, Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Copenhagen and Munich dominate the top. What, you might ask, no New York? No London? No LA or HK? None of the cities that people seem to actually want to emigrate to, to set up businesses in? To be in? None of the wealthiest, flashiest, fastest or most beautiful cities? Nope. Americans in particular seem to get wound up by the lack of US cities in the top tier. The one that does make it is Pittsburgh. Which winds them up even more. The big cities it seems, the established megacities of the US, Europe and Asia are just too big, too dangerous, too inefficient. So what do these top cities have in common? How exactly do you measure “liveability”? [...] Joel Garreau, the US urban academic and author, agrees. “These lists are journalistic catnip. Fun to read and look at the pictures but I find the liveable cities lists intellectually on a par with People magazine’s ‘sexiest people’ lists.” Ricky Burdett, who founded the London School of Economics’ Cities Programme, says: “These surveys always come up with a list where no one would want to live. One wants to live in places which are large and complex, where you don’t know everyone and you don’t always know what’s going to happen next"Why not both? Maybe there's a third alternative combining livable and lovable!
"Evidence is piling up against acquisitions of farmland in poor countries [...] When deals [...] first came to international attention in 2009, it was unclear whether they wereNot good. I wonder can deals be structured in a participatory way such that locals would benefit economically and socially?“land grabs or development opportunities”, to quote a study published that year. Supporters claimed they would bring seeds, technology and capital to some of the world’s poorest lands. Critics, such as the director of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, dubbed them “neo-colonialist”. But no one had hard evidence to back up their claims. Now they do. Two years on, a conference at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) of the University of Sussex, the biggest of its kind so far, examined over 100 land deals. Most judgments are damning. [...] What makes land grabs unusual is their combination of high levels of corruption with low levels of benefit. Ruth Meinzen-Dick, one of the authors of the IFPRI study, says that in 2009 the balance of costs and benefits was genuinely unclear. Now, she argues, the burden of evidence has shifted and it is up to the proponents of land deals to show that they work. At the moment, they have precious few examples to point to."
Matthias Schepp writes in Der Spiegel about Change in Russia's Far East: China's Growing Interests in Siberia... "There are just 6 million Russians left on the Siberian side of the border with China. Ninety million Chinese, backed by a voracious economy, live on the other side. China's influence in Russia's far east is growing rapidly and Siberia has become the raw material supplier to Beijing's economic miracle. [...] Could an alliance develop in this region between two powerful countries that would finally put an end to American dominance of the world? One of the two has the raw materials that the other one needs so urgently. Or will the land of Vladimir Putin become a bulwark against an increasingly self-confident China, and thus become the natural partner of the West? Or will neither of these scenarios come to pass, when overpopulated China simply swallows up depopulated Siberia? [...] Forgotten by the Kremlin? Siberia, which covers three-quarters of the landmass of Russia, is home to only a quarter of the country's population: 38 million people. This is the equivalent of the population of Poland, except that Siberia is 40 times the size. It is a situation that many fear could once again spark the eternal rivalry between Russia and China, a rivalry that last produced military clashes in the 1960s."Surely the Russians can figure out how to profitize their incredible advantages as an asset-rich Eurasian bridgeway to Asia?
Check out the many elements of MIT's FAST light show!
