MacArthur Fellows in Virginia

Two Virginians were recently recognized as MacArthur Fellows. They are Marc Edwards, Charles P. Lunsford Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at VA Tech, and Corey Harris, blues musician from Charlottesville.

Another First at IBM

Italian workers at IBM are planning a September strike in Second Life, according to various sources. The Grid Live says that the event will begin on the 25th; the Union Network site has instructions for participants.

Intel has joined IBM in anticipating "the 3D internet", according to Justin Rattner in his keynote speech at the recent Intel Developer Forum.

NextFest 2007 Notes

Wired NextFest 2007 wrapped up this weekend.

Brian Lam's list of the best of the Fest is at Gizmodo; Molly Wood's video is at c|net news; Phuong-Cac Nguyen has a great summary of new gadgets at Cool Hunting; and Brian Heater has a running commentary at GearLog.

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..."

Virginia Biotechnology Industry

Virginia Business magazine reviewed the state's biotechnology industry, noting the research institutions associated with VCU, VA Tech, the University of Virginia, and the new SRI Center being developed in Rockingham County. They quote Randal Kirk, of Third Security: What matters [to biotech] “is the value of the intellectual property.”

The Virginia-based Biotechnology Institute has a short FAQ on the industry, as well as industry and education programs.

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.

Nuclear Virginia

According to the Lynchburg News and Advance:

If the nuclear renaissance is on the way, Lynchburg, home to AREVA NP, might be the new Florence, Italy.

Through a partnership with Maryland-based utility Constellation Energy and Virginia-based BWX Technologies and about $600 m in funding from French utility company EDF, AREVA would like to be one of the first to build its Evolutionary Power Reactor in the United States. The new company, UniStar Nuclear, has made its intentions known to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that it plans to submit applications within the next 12 months to build two AREVA reactors, the first in Maryland.

Sermo with Doctors

Joshua Porter of Bokardo points to the physicians' network, Sermo, as one of the new specialized social networks online. According to the Sermo site, the business model "is one of information arbitrage, the opportunity that arises when breaking medical insights intersect with the demand for actionable, market-changing events in healthcare" and "Sermo technology is the first of its kind to authenticate and credential physicians in real-time. Our state-of-the-art technology is working behind the scenes, re-validating physicians every time they sign in..."

For example, Sermo Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., generally charges $100,000 to $150,000 a year to nonmedical businesses like hedge funds, which use it to research such things as how doctors feel about new drugs. The site, founded by Daniel Palestrant while he was a surgical resident in Boston [was] launched last year... Snippets from the Wall Street Journal

Sermo partners with the American Medical Association, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, the University of Michigan's School of Information Science, and Northwestern University. "By collaborating with Sermo, these partners have accessed a new research tool, opening the door to more efficient research, and increased opportunities for grant funding and research publications."

Bus 2.0 Disruptor List

Business 2.0 recently identified 10 businesses with the potential to rewrite the rules of existing industries or open up entirely new markets.

Here's their list of the The Next Disruptors :

Bloom Energy wants to short-circuit electric utilities by building a power plant in every home. Zink is trying to create a market for mobile printing, without the ink. Blinkx thinks it can become the Google of video. Virgin Charter is helping to launch the air-taxi industry. Expensr is a webtop application for managing personal finances. Zipcar sprinkles its rental cars throughout urban neighborhoods with the densest populations and lets people book online by the hour. Raydiance has developed the world’s first fully software-controlled, desktop-size USP laser that cuts without heating surrounding material. MFG.COM is an online exchange for the manufacturing industry. PatientsLikeMe is an online community where patients can discuss and track medical conditions. Vanu uses software that allows mobile networks to accommodate devices with different standards.

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.

AltLaw Launch

The Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology, and the Silicon Flatirons Communications Program at the University of Colorado Law School just launched AltLaw, a free full text of the U.S. Supreme and Circuit Appeals Courts.

The Program on Law and Technology at Columbia Law School was founded to publicize research on the legal problems created by technological innovation, and to design and disseminate technologies that might serve the public’s interest in law and legal change.

The Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program brings to campus individuals from legal, technical, regulatory and business backgrounds to discuss issues facing the telecommunications community.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer to this new site.

Innovation Challenge 2007

The 5th annual Innovation Challenge returns to the Darden School of Business in November. The enrollment is open now, and ends on September 28, 2007.

The international panel of judges this year includes Charlottesville entrepreneur Elizabeth Pyle.

See Innovation Challenge for more information about this year's event and winners from prior years.

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.

TR 35 for 2007

The TR 35 Innovators for 2007 were announced in the recent issue of Technology Review. The 2007 Young Innovator is David Berry, seeking renewable petroleum from microbes. Tapan Parikh of the University of Washington is the Humanitarian of the Year. The full list of young innovators under 35 is here.

In addition to academic and corporate researchers, entrepreneurs on the list include Sanjit Biswas of Meraki Networks, Garrett Camp of Stumbleupon, Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Jeff LaPorte of Eqo Communications, Christopher Loose of Stericoat, Neil Renninger of Amyris Technologies, Kevin Rose of Digg, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

New Visualizations

Designer Manuel Lima's Visual Complexity site points to numerous related books available through his Amazon aStore. Thanks for pointers to several of the pages below.

Ink Trails by Robert Hodkin. Thanks to Future Feeder for the pointer.

The 32nd America's Cup Circling Galaxy display. Thanks to Great Map for the pointer.

Chris Harrison's projects, including the Clusterball visualization of the three levels of of wikipedia.

Paul Dunn's Visuwords, an online graphical dictionary.

Lee Byron's Lisening History posters from Last.fm software.

Finally, Walk2Web creates a visualization of your own web activity. (An example of an opening page to begin visualizing your history, below)

Editing Wikipedia

Thanks to for TechDirt for pointing to the new Wikipedia scanner service by Virgil Griffith. It lists anonymous Wikipedia edits from interesting organizations.

Wired is maintaining a running tally of the most Shameful Wikipedia Spin Jobs. One might have expected such efforts from Scientology, and both national political parties, but ... employees of the New York Times? Disney? MySpace? Diebold? Microsoft AND its PR firm, Waggener Edstrom? the National Security Agency?

Singularity Summit

Tickets are still available for the Singularity Summit for Artificial Intelligence to be held in San Francisco in early September.

The 2006 Singularity Summit, the first academic symposium focused on the singularity scenario, was held at Stanford.

Speakers include academics from MIT, Stanford, and Yale, as well as business people from IBM, Powerset, Google and Teknowledge and representatives from several foundations and institutes. Abstracts of the talks are available now.

NASA PAV Challenge Winners

Accordng to c|net news, winners were chosen Saturday in the NASA-sponsored competition of Personal Aircraft Vehicles, the first annual PAV Challenge. The Cafe Foundation, a nonprofit group of flight test engineers, held the race at the Charles Schultz Sonoma County Airport.

The winner was the modified short-wing Pipistrel Virus, a Slovenia-built sport aircraft. A highly modified kit plane, Vans RV-4, won the speed challenge and the low-noise challenge. A Cessna 172, the most popular small plane in production since the 40s, won the handling competition.

The PAV race is part of the NASA Centennial Challenges, a series of competitions that support space exploration and aviation technologies in private industry. The Beam Challenge and the Tether Challenge are coming up in October. (full Challenge list and descriptions)

The blog, Space Prizes has detailed information about space-related competitions, past teams and winners, and annual competitions like the National Space Society's Art Prize (November 30 submission deadline). No doubt the Society's sponsored art work will grace the rooms of Galactic Suite, the space hotel scheduled to launch in 2012.

More from Gartner

These new-era brokers use the Web as a transformational — rather than a supplemental — channel and leverage Web 2.0 functionality, including new programming techniques, blogs and social communities. Traditional brokerages use the Internet simply as a different channel through which to provide the same content and services that they provide through branches, telephone and regular mail.
Snippet from Gartner press release. Additional information from “Early Efforts at Web 2.0 Brokerage Will Challenge Existing Providers.”

Gartner's Financial Services Technology Summit 2007 will be from August 27-29 in New York City. Hon. Michael Oxley, former Congressman who is now vice-chairman of the NASDAQ, will be a keynote speaker. In mid-September, Gartner will present the new CIO Summit in Barcelona.

Startup Junkie Show

According to the WSJ's Startup Journal, the new reality show "Startup Junkies" will focus on serial entrepreneur Ron Wiener, founder and chief executive of Earth Class Mail, seeking venture funding. Earth Class Mail makes postal mail available online, acting as a virtual post office box. Before agreeing to do the show, the company ensured that camera crews would not interfere with daily operations, and that Earth Class Mail could decide when cameras would be present and would have final control of the edit button.

Starting in January, "Startup Junkies" will be featured on MOJO among finance-focused shows like "Wall Street Warriors." MOJO, which targets young, professional men, was formerly called INHD.

Perhaps the experience will eventually be reflected on TheFunded.com, which was recently covered by BGNonline and by the Startup Journal.