Hot enough or not so hot

An AP story in the local paper (see story here) alerted me to a dating web site for good-looking or "hot" people called www.hotenough.org. The entrepreneurial engineer in me suggests an opportunity. Can www.notsohot.com be far behind.

Don't miss Tech Visionaries talk

Ray Price will talk about his research into Tech Visionaries on Wednesday at noon in 2405 Siebel Center. See here for the ETC lecture series generally and here for the Tech Visionaries talk specifically.

Frank Skinner & innovation at UNCC

I've been carrying on a correspondence with Frank Skinner at UNC Charlotte. Frank heads up mechanical engineering's senior design activity at UNCC and he is keenly interested in both linking universities and industry and teaching innovation in a serious way. I plan to visit with Frank next week in Charlotte to see if we can make some sparks fly. See Frank's Mechanical Innovation website here. Also take a look at the nice blog post on his activities in Swamp Fox here.

share2me gathering steam

The Businessmakers radio show has an interview with Nextumi CEO Mike Blackwell about the new share2me product here. Robert Scoble covers share2me here.

Jakky and Life Skills and Leadership for Engineers

Jakky quotes elaborately (here) from the 1995 text Life Skills and Leadership for Engineers that formed the basis for The Entrepreneurial Engineer. Jakky then laments along the following lines:

Though to me these statements are accurate, if nothing but truth, I find it rather disheartening to not hear of more engineers actively engaged in the creative process of idea generation and problem solving in the real world practicing constructive profession attempting to make a better world through change…

It seems to me that this is changing. The entrepreneurial revolution is placing more engineers in higher positions of decision making authority than ever before. It is also making large numbers of engineers wealthier than in times past. Nonetheless, we can--we must do a better job of educating engineers in the skill sets that will allow them to play these roles better and sooner than we are currently doing. I think classes such as TEE and my new course on Modeling for Tech Visionaries will help do just that.

Epictetus and the NSPE

I just published an article about the Epictetus square (see previous post here) in the National Society of Professional Engineer's PE Magazine. Download a pdf of the article here. This is my 2nd PE Mag article in a few months. See the earlier article, The Joy of Engineering, here.

Intro to venture capital

Another nice lecture at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Engineer class. This one is by Will Price and is an Introduction to Venture Capital. See it at the original post here.