My Weblog

We thought the DFJ Gotham $250k competition was huge, squashing the Forbes $100k and MIT $100k. Although a very niche competition, the Global Security Challenge offers $500,000 cash as a prize as well as mentorship from leading venture capitalist firms such as Siemens Venture Capital. Students are welcomed to enter since they are looking for innovators and new technologies from university labs (71% of security startups actually originate from universities). In general, they are looking for technologies that have potential to aid and increase the United State’s security. The “Crowded Places” category offers a $10,000 prize to protect citizens from terrorist threats and doesn’t require a product or prototype.

The competition is open for submissions. Check out the types of technologies they are looking for and visit their site for more information.

Target Technologies

We seek to uncover the creative capabilities of innovators in universities and infant companies that apply to public security needs. This includes software or hardware solutions that help (a) protect people, critical infrastructure, facilities and data/electronic systems against terrorist or other criminal attacks and natural disasters or (b) help governments, businesses and communities defend against, cope with or recover from such incidents.

Examples of our areas of interest are (but are not limited to) biometrics, detection sensors, network security, data storage, video surveillance, RFID, data-mining SW, biotechnologies, and search software.

For those who are avid gym goers and find it hard to track your routines, you will appreciate the idea that just recently won Ideablob.com’s $10,000 monthly challenge. As a passionate weight lifter, I have often pondered some sort of portable touch screen device that syncs with a fitness-based social networking site. Penn State student and inventor, Matt Allison, will be committing the prize money to building the product that he is aiming to have function like a virtual personal trainer that logs workouts, monitors progress, and that will even come equipped with a personal heart rate monitor. The goal is to have the device upload workouts, future advice, daily nutrition information, and progress charts from the company’s website so that the user has an interactive utility to maximize efforts and efficiency in the gym.

I completely agree with Allison and his partner, Ron Humer, who realized that many people don’t know how to properly exercise and structure routines. I still have trouble balancing and planning routines as well as planning my next steps in the gym even though I have been going and talking to people for years. If designed right, the product has potential to solve many problems. Planning and tracking routines is usually tedious and annoying to do either while working out or after returning home. Searching for the right information is also tiresome and is never readily available when you need it the most in the gym. For these reasons, a service like this could apply to seasoned lifters as well as novices.

Allison is no stranger to the entrepreneurial world; he already has another technology innovations company called M.R. Innovations Solutions, LLC. (more…)

During the 3rd day of the Indiana University Innovation Fellows we had a chance to meet with Professor Mark Long. Long has been involved in 68 different ventures, so he shared with us his insights and experiences. One of his focuses was explaining how many startups benefit from incubators.

Incubators are programs designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array networks, resources and services. They vary in the way they deliver their services, in their organizational structure, and in the types of clients they serve. Launching in an incubator dramatically reduces startup costs; rent is set at low prices and resources such as conference rooms and equipment are pooled.  We’ve covered some of the more famous incubators, such as Tech Stars, Launch Box, Y Combinator and DreamIt, which all take a portion of the company (typically between 2 and 12%) for a seed investment. However, the incubators that Long is familiar with are R&D shops that have a different structure.

Long explained that incubators are looking for businesses that have : 1) Business Plan 2) 6 Months Rent in capital (specific only to some types of incubators) 3) Dedicated management team. For more information and to find an incubator near you click here. Keep in mind, you are not limited to your own state. In the words of Mark Long, “neighboring states love to pull companies”.

For those of you who didn’t hear earlier, just under a month ago Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar sold Auctomatic, a free online service for auction creation and management, to Live Current Media for 2.5M pounds (approximately $5M). The two cousins started their business while still undergraduates studying and working in the university student society Oxford Entrepreneurs, a group for which Kulveer served as Founder and President (for networking with OE I strongly recommend creating an account on YouNoodle and joining the group).

Auctomatic began as the internet auction site Boso.com (Buy Or Sell Online), a service for students supported by Oxfords Sad Business School. The site was almost immediately a home run; it grew into the largest online student marketplace in the UK and eventually hit the radar of Paul Graham of Y Combinator, who took them to the US and put them in touch with 19-year-old computer programmer Patrick Collison. The three revamped Boso.com to become Auctomatic, a service that helps businesses to sell goods on online auction sites like eBay and Overstock.com.

The company launched last year with additional financial backing from (more…)

We recently revealed Tim Draper’s advice on securing funding and now DFJ Gotham Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a leading seed and early stage venture capital firm, will host and judge the second annual DFJ East Coast Venture Challenge at Columbia Business School on May 15th, 2008. Student entrepreneurs from all eight Ivy League schools and NYU will pitch to a panel of judges from DFJ and DFJ Gotham in front of an audience of investors and entrepreneurs, with the winner taking home $250,000 in seed funding. The DFJ East Coast Venture Challenge offers one winning team the richest prize of any student business plan competition.

The pitches will be followed by a networking session during which all participating teams will have the opportunity to network with leading investors, entrepreneurs and representatives from event sponsors, including the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Merrill Datasite, First Republic Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, AlwaysOn and the Horn Group.

I will be attending the incredible event and will report back on the teams, presentations and words of wisdom offered by the VCs, entrepreneurs and industry experts.

The Inter-American Development Bank has launched its grant program called Innovation for Inclusive Development. The grant is aimed at fostering development and dissemination of innovations in products, processes and services and engender solutions with the potential of improving the quality of life of poor and/or excluded people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Up to six grants, ranging from $30,000 to $100,000, will be awarded to the selected individuals to develop, test and pilot the projects in the region. Here is a link to selection criteria of award.

The deadline for submission of project proposals is June 20, 2008 (5pm EST). For more information visit the Innovation for Inclusive Development website.

Two MIT student projects to promote peace in Sudan and in Bangladesh have won Davis Projects for Peace grants of $10,000. The Davis Projects for Peace is an invitation to undergraduates to design grassroots projects that they will implement during the summer of 2008. This year, the program funded projects from 81 schools and universities.

Mustafa Dafalla (MIT ‘09) and Zahir Dossa (MIT ‘0 designed Selsabila (from the Koran meaning “a river that springs forth in heaven”), a non-profit organization that will sell and distribute treadle irrigation pumps to low-income farmers who rely on manually watering the crops with buckets of water. The pumps will on average triple the crop yield. Dafalla and Dossa propose to use the Davis funds to purchase Selsabila’s first pumps to be sold to small-scale farmers.

MIT News reports that the students traveled to Sudan to find managers to monitor the project and then to India where they tested the pumps and contracted with local manufacturers of the technology. Dafalla and Dossa plan to sell the pumps for $100 and expect to be able to sell the first 100 by May this year. The two students intelligently hope to put the infrastructure in place in order for the pumps market to be self-sustaining.

Shammi S. Quddus (MIT ‘10), the lead on the second winning project, plans to unite high school students through leadership training in order to work towards common goals. The projects name is “Building Bridges through Leadership Training.” The high school students will come from three different school systems in Bangladesh .

Techcrunch just broke the story that Stanford, the alma mater of many of the greatest entrepreneurs of the past century, will provide seed funding to student-run ventures in exchange for a small percentage of the company. The funding will be managed and provided by Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE), a student organization with several hundred employees and $13 million in assets. The venture fund will be named SSE Ventures.

Today is a great day for aspiring entrepreneurs at Stanford University. I’m actually surprised that it has taken this long for Stanford to establish such an institution. Yale University has a similar organization, but it doesn’t take any equity. The Yale Entrepreneurial Institute mentors and assists the startups much like an incubator.

has seed funded over 80 startups. They offer $5,000 plus $5,000 per founder and usually take an equity stake of 2-10% in return. Some of their ventures are quite promising: Justin.tv, Reddit, Scribd, Xobni and Loopt. The summer program entails a three month stay at their Cambridge or Mountain View office, during which selected startups will receive advice, support and mentoring from seasoned entrepreneurs. In 2005, their first year, they only had 8 startups, but last summer in 2007, they had 19, so the number that they take on is steadily increasing. The success of the fund has resulted in the founding of other incubators:

(Click on the images to be directed to their sites for more information.)

Anyway, they are all great opportunities. The Y Combinator application is due April 2nd. Hurry up and get yours in! Our other company Textworks, has made a submission to a couple for Wamblr. If you haven’t checked out our new logo and design, check it out over here.