Hilarious You Tube Ad
This is an great youtube ad promoting Google SMS search product. It is a satire on their "big brother" reputation. Remember, Google is watching you....always.
My Portfolio Companies
Blogs I Read:
**
July 16, 2008
July 01, 2008
Economic Development: I'll know it when I see it
The term "economic development" is one of those squishy terms that no one can completely get their arms around and everyone tends to think about it differently. It's kinda like, pornography, your not really sure how to define it, but you know it when you see it. But unlike pornography, everyone thinks economic development is a good thing for communities. Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, MN was an example of that.
Aside from being a great marathon, Grandma's Marathon has a very interesting story behind it. It was started in 1976 when about a dozen guys decided they wanted to start a marathon in Duluth, MN. They got Grandma's Bar and Saloon to sponsor their race to the tune of $500. Flash forward 32 years and the race today has about 10,000 runners and $2.5 million in sponsorships from top tier companies like Wells Fargo and Toyota. I about fell out of my chair watching the news the night before the marathon when they estimated that the marathon would bring in $168 million to the local economy with a population of about 85,000! Needless to say, Grandma's now has several locations in Duluth. Now, that's economic development.
June 17, 2008
Keep up to the minute the IV10 teams
Here is a live blog of all of the IV10 activities.
June 16, 2008
The Next Big Sound
Out of Northwestern, The Next Big Sound is the latest team to join the IVentures10 program.
The Next Big Sound: The Next Big Sound is empowering unsigned artists to clear their
biggest hurdles – gaining listeners, creating a following, and making money.
Online music is great and has been making large strides, but it's still super
difficult for unsigned artists to break through. We're creating a clutter free
environment with an innovative way for listeners to show their support for
artists and to empower artists with tools to help them be
successful.
www.thenextbigsound.com
June 04, 2008
iVentures10 Class of 2008
Congratulations to the winning companies of the Summer 2008 iVENTURES10 program.
Athena Advertising:
Athena Advertising is building a platform that leverages both social
and contextual information to provide more relevant advertising across
various social networking platforms. Leveraging the team's skills in
designing highly scalable advertising systems and applications for
Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Google, the platform will give social
network users the means to monetize their pages, as well as give social
networks as a whole better tools to monetize their traffic.
Fusion.IM:
Fusion.IM is instant messaging that makes sense. The company is
designing a global messaging platform which will keep contacts
synchronized with and between different social networks, e-mail and IM
platforms. This means that there will be no need to manage your buddy
list with contacts that have real names and information. A lightweight
version of the fusion client on these social networks will be made
available for both browsers and mobile devices.
Vision Assisted Fashion Search (Real name TBA):
Online shopping currently provides the advantage of quicker querying
over multiple catalogs as compared to conventional means of shopping.
For some items (e.g. electronics), a text query is appropriate, whereas
for clothing a visual description is more suitable. The company will
use its expertise in machine learning and computer vision to design
better visual search for fashion.
News Aggregation and Categorization (Real name TBA):
The company is designing a service that aggregates news articles and
blog posts and classifies them based on various factors such as
referenced companies, article type, and target audience. The team will
use a proprietary algorithm that is able to extract the general
sentiment of the article based on a variety of features. The news feeds
can be accessed and searched quickly through both a browser interface
as well as through subscribed e-mail and RSS alerts.
June 03, 2008
The Enquirer - The next big Internet thing
The Enquirer - The next big Internet thing
Posted using ShareThis
RiverGlass Welcomes New Board Member
RiverGlass Welcomes New Board Member
Phil Wilmington brings rich experience in the commercial enterprisesolutions space to help advance the company’s growth in new markets
WEST CHICAGO, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Phil Wilmington, formerly the Chief Executive Officer of OutlookSoft Corporation and previously Co-President of PeopleSoft, Inc., has joined the RiverGlass Board as an outside Director.
As the CEO of OutlookSoft, Mr. Wilmington led the company’s growth up to the sale of the company to SAP in 2007. In his 15-year career at PeopleSoft, Mr. Wilmington served in a variety of roles culminating with his responsibilities as Co-President. He was instrumental in driving the company’s global expansion and revenue growth.
“RiverGlass will greatly benefit from the experience and knowledge Phil has garnered over the impressive course of his career,” observes Kirk Dauksavage, RiverGlass CEO. “Our strongest growth area is in the enterprise business search market and Phil’s background is spot-on to help guide our future strategies in that software arena. We feel very fortunate to have him as a member of the RiverGlass team.”
“RiverGlass’meaning-based approach to information discovery fundamentally advances the ability to find content of real interest. Organizations that learn how to put the Internet (and other unstructured data sources) to their strategic advantage will find competitive success through improved, more agile act-based decision-making. It comes down to that,” said Mr. Wilmington.
About RiverGlass
RiverGlass, Inc. (www.riverglassinc.com) is a leading provider of advanced, intelligent web information collection and analysis solutions. The company was formed in 2003 to commercialize eight years of grant-funded research at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. RiverGlass provides application solutions to government agencies and commands in defense; intelligence; law enforcement; and major corporations. RiverGlass is a private company with principal offices in West Chicago and Champaign, Illinois.
The development of the RiverGlass technologies was funded in part through a grant by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
Posted using ShareThis
May 20, 2008
April 22, 2008
IVentures10 Partners with Mozilla
IllinoisVentures announced today a partnership with Mozilla to take its IVentures10 program to the next level. iVentures10, sponsored by IllinoisVENTURES, is a new kind of summer
intern program for computer science students with a great idea for a
software or web based start-up company. During the 10 summer weeks,
student teams will develop their idea into a working prototype and lay
the groundwork to launch their start-up. For more information, visit http://www.iventures10.com.
The program will now be open to students world wide interested in developing on the Mozilla weave/prism platform and coming to Champaign for the summer to start their company. Weave is a open platform by Mozilla that will enable next generation web applications by giving users to control their personal information through integration with the Firefox browser. Here is an example use case from their web site,
Personalization made portable - Myk likes to visit his Mom on weekends. He doesn't have a laptop, so he uses his mom's computer when he visits. He used to be annoyed because, though he installed Firefox on his Mom's PC, he missed having easy access to his favorite sites and RSS feeds, and having to remember all his account names and passwords. He logs into his Mozilla account and his personalized experience returns. And, just as importantly, when he logs out, all of the cookies, bookmarks and other information is cleared from his Mom's PC so that she doesn't accidentally log in to his email account or anything else he was browsing.
As a part of the partnership, Mozilla Labs people will come to Champaign to train students on how to best use the platform. Mozilla will then promote the applications through their various channels at the end of the programb. It will be exciting to see what new IV10 ideas are incubated and launched through this partnership.
April 21, 2008
Vote to Increase H1B Visa Quota
Image via Wikipedia
As a venture capitalist involved in University technology transfer deals, I am pleased to see some movement on the obvious issue - that is to dramatically increase the quota on H1B visa and permanently account for growth. See the article House Republicans Move to Increase H1B Visas .
The USA, hands down, has the best science education system in the world. As such, a large and growing percentage of advanced science degree's are earned by foreigners. Not just any foreigners either, but the smartest, most innovative foreigners. Logic might say, "hey, if we educate them here in this country, we may want require them to stay for a period of time to work to add value to our economy". We have the opportunity to attract and retain the best and brightest in the world! Instead, current H1B Visa policies makes it very difficult for them to stay and we send them home. Yes, we educate them and send them home. As manufacturing moves overseas, our biggest advantage in the world is our ability to out-innovate our competition. USA educated foreigners that want to stay to work should be able to - period, end of sentence.
The next battle to to give start-ups a fair shake at the quota. How does a start-up compete with a team of Microsoft or Intel lawyers who are charged to suck up the entire quota as fast as possible?
My Other Blogs
Add to Google
