CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA
Computer science professor, Manuel Blum, had been thinking about human computation and authentication schemes for quite some time. So in 2000 when Udi Manber, then chief scientist at Yahoo!, mentioned that bots were logging on as...
Heart to Heart: saving lives with Doug Bernstein and PecaLabs
Young Doug Bernstein shouldn’t be alive. And he wouldn’t be but for exceptional medical care when he was born. Doug was born with a congenital defect that gave him a 2% chance for survival. Resolving congenital conditions like...
Reinventing design
We think of design as being a process by which products are developed to certain physical, emotional, and psychological specifications. Design might incorporate certain product characteristics or features that are required or...
Investment the VentureWell/Village Capital way
Last weekend was the close of the NCIIA/Village Capital VentureWell program where the teams chose which two companies would receive $50K investment each. This is a follow-on post to Crowd sourced investment. How do you teach...
The EB-5 program demystified
It would be an understatement to say that America’s economy is not doing well. While the amount of debt incurred is not increasing exponentially—as it once was—it is making a very slow recovery. As a result, many entrepreneurs...
Once more unto the breach… muses on presenting
One of the most important things that entrepreneurs need to learn is how to present. Some do this naturally – they are natural-born story-tellers, who can present a compelling case for their new venture through words, body...
Crowd sourced investment
A brand new investment model is peer-reviewed investment. This is where the patients get to be the doctor, the inmates get to run the prison, the entrepreneurs get to pick who gets the investment. It’s unique – and it’s powerful....
StatEasy makes sports stats easy
Mike Ressler, founder and CEO of StatEasy, typifies the young entrepreneur: doing what he loves, loving what he does, and scared to shit about what might happen, or what might not! Mike exudes the qualities that are essential for...
Muses on value proposition
As I witnessing 12 university teams from around the nation converge on Amherst Mass for the NCIIA’s VentureLab three-day workshop which just ended, I am reminded of the importance of value proposition. Sometimes that term gets...
The computer science behind beauty
Given the recent successes of start-ups that turned into multi-billion dollar companies and gave the tech industry its magnates and super-stars (names like Zuckerberg and Dorsey come into mind), a lot of attention has been given...