Tenth Annual Business Forum

The 10th Annual Business Forum will be held in Charlottesville on December 6 and 7, 2007, at the Darden School of Business. Workshops include Transforming Ideas into Enterprises, Delivering Innovation through Social Networking, Information Tsunami – Email to Twitter and Beyond, and Crash & Learn – Anatomy of a Failure.

The keynote speaker will be Frank Cappiello, who will present his take on The New American Economy – A View from Wall Street. The Friday morning panelists for Live Fire - The Angel Round represent three of the top angel groups in the United States, from Connecticut, Ohio and New York.

The Charlottesville Venture Group has put on this conference for the past nine years. This year's event is presented by the combined resources of the Charlottesville Venture Group and the Virginia Piedmont Technology Council. On October 2nd, the group will announce their new name, and celebrate their joint venture.

UPDATE: The 11th Annual Business Forum is scheduled for October 30 and 31, 2008. For more information about the CVG Annual Business Forums see the Annual Business Forum blog. For program and registration, see Virginia Annual Business Forums.

New Executive Directors Welcomed

Two new leaders in the entrepreneurial and technology community in central Virginia have just been announced.

The Virginia Piedmont Technology Council recently joined forces with the Charlottesville Venture Group, and announced the new executive director, Tom Thompson of Charlottesville. On October 2, the new organization name will be announced, and Thompson will be introduced to the members.

The NewVa Corridor Technology Council (NCTC), formerly the New Century Technology Council, announced Cory Donovan has taken over from Gordie Zeigler. Their Fall Gala is scheduled for October 12.

PanImages Search Engine

University of Washington's Oren Etzioni, Director of the Turing Center, has announced the launch of PanImages, a multi-language search engine for images. (Description here).

Earlier this year, professor Etzioni received the Englemore Memorial Lecture Award for "longstanding technical and entrepreneurial contributions to artificial intelligence..."

Google Funds Moon Robot

Google announced the Google Lunar X-Prize, $30m in prizes to private firms that land a robot rover on the Moon. The competition to send a robot craft to the Moon is being run with the X-Prize Foundation. The program is also offering an opportunity to send digital photos and humanitarian messages along with the winning spacecraft, through the Lunar Legacy program.

Using Google Earth, one can see a scale model of the solar system superimposed on one's own neighborhood here. Earlier scale models of the solar system were built by the people of Aroostook County in Maine, and by Brian Parks in Madison, Wisconsin. Nearly ten years ago, Mitchell Charity posted links to several scale models of the solar system.

Google and NASA

The NY Times today reports on the ultimate exec perk - a NASA runway for the use of the Google jet fleet. It's good to be the founders of Google Earth, and be able to collaborate on NASA research.

SL Tender

Mark Wallace of 3PointD has written something I thought I'd never see: "God bless IBM". He goes on oto say that

an IBM employee [and entrepreneur] with his own private island in Second Life has had some coins minted that are each worth one Linden dollar. That’s right, you can now hold the Linden dollar in your hand and actually spend it — if, that is, you’re on Tender Island, which has been owned by IBMer David van Gent since March.

Only 75 coins were struck, so naturally, they are becoming collector's items, said to be available on eBay. Of course, the coins were reviewed on Smart Lindens, a new blog dedicated to " helping you save by finding sales, deals and savings on the items that you want to buy in Second Life".

Virtual Stuff

According to the New York Times, Stuff Matters in Virtual Worlds:
When people have the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly, and walk under water in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature.

Second Life residents often take virtual jobs, even poorly-paid ones. They are evidently discovering what inheritors have struggled with for generations: It’s not as much fun to spend money you haven’t earned.

Robert J. Bloomfield, a behavioral economist at Cornell University, studies investor behavior in the real world and recently became interested in how investors behave similarly in Second Life. Reporter Daniel Terdiman's book “Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life” will be published soon. Not only does stuff matter to residents of SL, it provides rich opportunities for research, analysis and publication.

Avatar Faces, Custom and Whole

Want an avatar head and face that is uniquely you? Relatively new to SL, CyberExtruder has been producing personalized avatars for a number of games, including Quake from id Software, The Sims for nearly 8 years. Now they have partnered with Cranial Tap to bring their product into Second Life.

Recently, CyberExtruder and Cranial Tap partnered up with Linden Lab to provide a privatized newbie area, as part of Linden Lab’s efforts to improve user retention.

Between making game avatars, CyberExtruder is in the business of facial recognition for security purposes.

With the perfect custom face, a real life version from Fabjectory is next.

Business in SL - Conference

Conference in London, late September: Achieving Real Business Growth Through Second Life (Note: This conference title is registered) According to the sponsors, The International Quality and Productivity Center (IQPC), most SL residents are Europeans over the age of 30. The presenters' list includes head shots of their SL avatars.

Back in April, Mitch Wagner noted that "quite a few Second Life users are network engineers. These are Cisco's customers, and Cisco is aggressively using Second Life to communicate with them." In May, Business Week described SL in terms of Anshe Chung's "booming land development business, which she has built from nothing two years ago to an operation of 17 people around the world today. As we chat, her story sounds like a classic tale of entrepreneurship." And in July, Sheila Yoshikawa of Sheffield University reported on the Blogher 07 SL Conference, including the business and branding panels. Recent University of Utrecht research on business in SL is summarized Browsing the Metaverse (The full pdf report is available online in Dutch)

Personalized Search, and Cuill

Geeking with Greg has an interesting series of posts summarizing recent research on online brands and branding (especially the importance of Google and Yahoo! brands). The blog tagline, Exploring the future of personalized information, indicates the focus of the articles. Linden says "[Search] Personalization changes what people see based on their past behavior and the past behavior of others".

He also points to Search Engine Roundtablereports from the recent SES 2007 (Search Engine Strategies conference).

The stealth search engine, Cuill, is reviewed in John Battelle's Searchblog; there's an overview at TechCrunch.

Smashing Data Visualization

Smashing magazine recently published a great piece on data visualization. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the pointer.

Managers See the Future

The Business Pundit points to a new piece on managers: 90% think they are in the top 10%. He notes that "This highlights one of the major reasons many corporations run lousy operations - they [the managers] don't face reality. Most everyone thinks they are right."
Business Week polled 2,000 managers, and found that:

In a decade, the average person will have better working conditions. Women and minorities will have an easier time getting ahead. And more of us will be on a first-name basis with someone in India. That, anyway, is what we were told when we polled 2,000 U.S. executives and middle managers this summer. Most of us, it seems, are happy and optimistic. Not to mention bursting with self-esteem: an impossible 90% of respondents believe they're in the top 10% of performers.

Fortune Lists, 2007

In August, Fortune Small Business named the finalists for their 6th Annual Business Plan Competition: Calle Soccer from Brigham Young University; SweetRiot (chocolateers) from NYC; Idea Storm Products, from Pace University; Mulligan Stew Pet Food from Wyoming; Green Dragon Pest Solutions from Georgia; and Saatwic Food (for diabetics) from Tennessee.

Earlier this year, seven companies headquartered in Virginia were among the 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2007, recognized by Fortune: Network Appliance, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One Financial, MITRE, SRA International, Stanley, and CarMax, which is located in central Virginia.

More recently, Fortune identified the Best Colleges for Entrepreneurs; the University of Virginia made that list that for their partnership with the University's medical school.

Favorite Blog Names

A few of my favorite blog names:

The Perfect Face for Radio, and DaMomma (Motherhood is not for Wimps). Don Ray's ChriquiChatter, where I found the pointer to a priceless eBay auction description, and the old saying:

You need only two tools. WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn’t move and it should, use WD-40. If it moves and shouldn’t, use the tape.

Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed, on which one can find the story of the misplaced Maserati. And of course, cartoonist Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void; he's looking at social gestures at the moment.

A Few New Web Sites

This quirky site, Should Do This, offers everyone the opportunity to advise ... everyone else. (They also offer an integrated suggestion box for companies.)

Other interesting new startups at Killer Startups include the un-enclopedia, EnWikopedia, the entrepreneurship interviews at Hatch That!, the Damsels in Success, and a potential Craigslist competitor, OddBark.

Is a Virtual Business Life Worth Living?

Entrepreneur Magazine had a recent piece, Virtual Life Worth Living? about the experiences of businesses who tackled a presence in SL.

According to their experts, especially Steve King, lead author of the recent Intuit Future of Small Business Report: Technology Trends (pdf), there aren't enough users, it's not attracting the mainstream, businesses haven't figured out how to translate the physical into virtual worlds, and businesses haven't figured out how to successfully market in virtual worlds.

There's a rather different perspective in ComputerWorlds's What Second Life Business Exodus?, the Business Communicators of Second Life, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute's The Coming Second Life Business Cycle. There's also a collection of articles about SL and virtual worlds at Business Week.

Accelerating Inovation

The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation has announced a new contest, for a short video on innovation.

Deadline is September 10. According to the Task Force site:
The video should illustrate how scientific discoveries resulting from federally funded research in the physical sciences have changed our lives. The video can focus on past transformational research or showcase what the future might bring ... to help celebrate American innovation, now and for the future. The top prize: $1,000 and a trip to Washington, D.C.

The rules (pdf) provide for Task Force use of any of these three-minute videos in its activities, including Capitol Hill presentations and posting video on the Internet. Expect to see the winning video on their site by October 5.

The Task Force also initiated the American Innovation Proclamation (pdf) last March. Here's the photo of the signing of the America Competes Act (HR 2272) In related news, it's good to see that Joe Meredith, of VTKnowledgeWorks and Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra have joined the board of the Accelerating Innovation Foundation.

State of Play V Update

Thomas Malaby's notes on the panel discussion at the State of Play V conference, Building Businesses in Virtual Worlds are available now. He especially notes the tension faced by real world organizations operating in virtual worlds: how to maintain control over their brands while tapping into the innovation that virtual world users can provide.

Workshops today, the final day of the conference, include Educational Applications, Law and Regulation, Managing Identities in Virtual Worlds, Commercial Applications, and Online Poker.

Podcasts and videos from the event should be available here.

Red Herring Redux

Josh Catone at Read/Write Web reviews the up and down history of Red Herring magazine as their website relaunched this week. He especially notes their new social networking elements.

Red Herring might want to note the O'Reilly Rader review of HarperCollins new initiative to make 14 new books available for download to the iPhone. A quick look at the thousands of posts in the Lulu Community Forum might also be informative.

The HP marketing blog recently changed its name to Digital Mindset. The long running joke Mintz mentions, that HP would have marketed sushi as "cold dead fish", no doubt came to HP by way of Compaq, nee Digital Equipment Corporation.

Startup Matchups

The WSJ's Startup Journal has an interview with serial entrepreneur Wil Schroter, of GoBigNetwork, which bills itself as the world's biggest community of startup companies.

Other entrepreneur/investor matchup sites mentioned were RaiseCapital and FundingUniverse.

Organized groups that bring together investors and entrepreneurs include Astia, for women technology innovators; HYSTA for Chinese entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley; the BrainGain Network, a world wide network of Philippine technopreneurs; the Northwest Entrepreneurs Network, dedicated to helping entrepreneurs succeed in the Northwest.