Today's engineers must be entrepreneurial

Venture capitalist and Stanford engineering faculty member, Donna Novitsky, says that today's engineers have to be entrepreneurial. See the full article in the Stanford Daily (here).

MoneyTree venture stats

The PriceWaterhouse MoneyTree report has cool stats about venture funding here. Overall in 2006, $25.5 B was invested US companies in 3416 deals ($7.6M/deal), down from a high of $105.0 B invested in 7913 deals ($13.3M/deal) in 2000 (for full table go here).

In Q4 2006, Illinois ranked 13th among the 50 states (table here), with 14 deals totaling $95M going to Illinois ventures ($6.8M/deal). Illinois is the top state in the midwest, but VC activity in IL pales by comparison with California with 354 deals total $2.93B ($8.28M/deal).

More on Nextumi-share2me launch

Read the press release here. Read the GigaOm article here. Read the DEMO 07 press release here. My favorite quote comes from Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO:

"Share is a must-have application," said Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO. "Share2Me is an easy to use, one step browser button that takes the hassle out of sharing content with others. This is why I selected Share2Me to launch at the DEMO 07 conference."

Still time to hop on a plane and see us demo at DEMO. Or sign up for the private beta at the share2me site www.share2me.com.

Nextumi launching share2me at DEMO 2007

DEMO 07 released it's list of companies launching new products next week, and Nextumi, Inc., a 2-year old company I co-founded is on the list (see here). At the conference, Nextumi's CEO, Mike Blackwell will launch share2me, a ubiquitous sharing product to permit crossplatform, multimedia sharing, anytime, anywhere, with anyone.

Still the master of happy

I just finished a (nother) book-by-book tour of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics aided by the video lecture commentary of Father Koterski and his lovely Teaching Company course (here). I am a big fan of the positive psychology movement (here) and its emphasis on human happiness, and indeed applying the methods of social science to human happiness is a recent phenomenon; however, the conclusions of the movement are largely Aristotle's, so why not read it from the source?

A billion bits or bust

IlliGAL Blogging has coverage of the recent breaking of the billion-variable barrier with genetic optimization Check it out here.

TEE and CMTV courses online

I'm teaching two TEE related courses this semester, The Entrepreneurial Engineer (see here), and Creative Modeling for Technology Visionaries (see here). Both are available online. I taught TEE for the first time last fall and it went swimmingly. CMTV is a new course, but I'm quite psyched about it. Check out the courses. They're one hour a week for 15 weeks with a proportionate work load, and they can be taken online or in person.

Life after Google

There is a terrific SF Chronicle article about early employees of Google leaving the company (here). It is estimated that the Google IPO created 900 millionaires, many of them in their 20s and 30s. It must be fairly disorienting to have an adequate nest egg at such a young age. The stories are as diverse as they are engaging.

More Teaching Company gems

I've blogged repeatedly about the Teaching Company but they continue to knock my socks off with great courses. I just finished Natural Law and Human Nature by Joseph Koterski of Fordham University in DVD (see here) and I'm half way through Philosophy of Science (Audio CD) with Jeffrey L. Kasser of NC State (see here). I'm revisiting Koterski's lectures on Ethics of Aristotle (see here) in connection with his natural law course.

I watch the videos while doing my morning cardio, and I do audio versions riding around town in my car. I only live 2 miles from campus, but it is amazing to me how much extra course material I squeeze in by listening to the lectures on CD in place of listening to talk radio or music.

One tip is to look for the current sales. The discounts are fabulous, and the catalogs say that each lecture goes on sale at least once each year. Take a look at the current sale courses here.

Reflecting on the nature of engineering

My logical positivist colleagues never met a qualitative approach they couldn't dismiss. Nonetheless, my colleague Michael Loui and I have been organizing an activity at Illinois called Engineering and Technology Studies at Illinois or ETSI (see here). This all started with some of my TEE blogging about the philosophy of engineering (see here), but we now have 30 people in engineering and across campus interested in the activity.

The web site has more information, including a whitepaper (here) and a presentation (here), but the key set of activities revolves around a lecture series (here). We hope to record and post these lectures for viewing on the web. Stay tuned for further developments.