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.

Entrepreneurial slideshow at slideshare

Wambo's Xavier Casanova shares his recent slideshow at Stanford's EE203, The Entrepreneurial Engineer at slideshare.com here. Wambo is an instant messaging system with persistence memory.

share2me for our friends from the Netherlands

here.

share2me for our friends from Finland

here.

ZDNet/CNET coverage of share2me's CEO

Erica Ogg has an article in CNET and ZDNet on Selling Shovels to Web2.0 Gold Miners (here and here) that quotes Nextumi/share2me CEO Mike Blackwell:

"Everybody keeps trying to get people to come to a new place, whether it's a new social network, new tool, whatever," said Mike Blackwell, CEO of Share2Me. "It's possible to do that, but generally that's really hard and takes lots of money and lots of time."

I find it interesting that several observers have viewed share2me as merely a "shovel" or a "widget" rather than the system that it is. The design of share2me understands that relationships exist where they exist and that they are the fundamental entity in getting to a trusted, smart web2.0 system. Trying to drive individuals to this or that site is a Web1.0 strategy if ever there was one. Despite the big money being paid for sites such as YouTube, the action for Web2.0 is between sites and it combines a profound respect for relationships, trust, and operational smarts and simplicity.