Finding the entrepreneur
I make entrepreneurs honest. Yesterday I wished that, instead of offering slots in the Thrill Mill accelerator as a result of pitches by a team for a particular idea, we could just pick by interviewing the people to discover if...
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...
Innovation @ U Pitt
The University of Pittsburgh has a lot of exciting things starting around innovation and entrepreneurship. 2014 promises to be a ramp-up year for new entrepreneurial initiatives, starting with the campus-wide Innovation...
The seedy side of entrepreneurship
Everybody loves entrepreneurship: the geek in the garage making stuff that will change the world, the excitement, the freedom, the lure. Entrepreneurship is sexy as a career choice. Entrepreneurs surmount the odds and create...
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...
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...
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...