Congrats to the Pittsburgh startup community. Oh, and stop congratulating yourself.
Pittsburgh is simply better than it ever was before. Period. This is a guest post by Greg Coticchia, of ENTRA and Entrepreneur in Residence at the Innovation Institute at Pitt. When I look around I see lots of exciting companies:...
Entrepreneurship@ThrillMill
Recently, I started teaching an intensive entrepreneurship class to the new cohort of 13 startups that were invited to participate in the Thrill Mill year-long program. Thrill Mill is an incubator/accelerator. Lots of people use...
Thoughts on Turkey and entrepreneurship
Turkey has realized that, as a country, they need to integrate innovation and entrepreneurship into the fabric of their economy. This is not a uniquely Turkish initiative – this is occurring all over the world as I have seen in...
Exposing humanity through photography
Carnegie Mellon University produces some of the world’s finest visual artists. In addition, we house some of the best of the best among our faculty. One such person is renowned photographer, Charlee Brodsky, faculty in...
Innovation in speech recognition
“James and Janet Baker, now in their 60s, are computer speech revolutionaries,” wrote The New York Times in an article last July (2012) article about the tragic consequences of the sale of the company, Dragon Systems, Inc.,...
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...
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...
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...