The Latest on U of M Technology Innovation and Commercialization
The University of Minnesota is among the top patent producers in the world, ranking #4 on Scientist Magazine’s list of “Patent Powerhouses,” behind only three other major American universities. Yet, quantity of patents hardly paints the entire picture. What about helping to start up companies to commercialize those patents?
According to the U’s own business development people (see link to Powerpoint presentation at bottom), the 20-year success record of the U’s technology company spinoffs is only half the university average nationally — and less than one-fourth the success record of the nation’s premier schools. What’s more, in one recent year (2004), for example, the U of MN spun off only one company compared to 14 at the University of Michigan and 16 at the University of Illinois. Why I am focusing here on spinoffs? Well, because, according the U’s own business development people, creating university spinoffs is “much more profitable than licensing (revenues)” to the school. Read more
Tumblon.com - Parenting Site Focused on Child Development
Tumblon.com - the new project from Jonathan Dahl of Hopkins-based web application development shop Slantwise Design - quietly opened it’s doors earlier this month. Unlike other parenting-oriented websites or general-purpose weblog engines, Tumblon focuses on child development milestones as the structure for sharing.
Emerging Digerati Showcase at U of MN
Today was the Emerging Digerati Showcase at the University of Minnesota, Weisman Art Museum. The focus was a College of Liberal Arts, new media festival featuring digital technology, art and research.
It was inspiring to see the innovation and boundary pushing being done in this market and the passion people are bringing to digital technologies.
- Starting off was artist Lynn Fellman, who merges art and science with her beautiful DNA inspired digital, vector art. Ms. Fellman has been in the interactive space since the early 1990’s.
- Minnov8’s own Garrick Van Buren showcased his creation, Cullect, a collaborative feed reader with amazing capabilities
- Brad Hosack and David Ernst from the Academic & Information Technology, College of Education & Human Development department showed Video ANT, an innovative way of moving video beyond just content delivery through a tool they’ve developed to allow easy annotating of video
- Justin Grammens and Minnov8’s own Phil Wilson showcased Localtone Radio, an innovative site for local bands to showcase their songs and for music lovers to discover (and vote upon favorite) bands and music. Their buzzphrase? Listen, Share, Learn
- Terry Schubring demonstrated an internal UofMN engine called “MediaMill”, which facilitates transcoding of video and its display on to any web page
Twin Cities is First with New Comcast ‘Wideband’ Internet
When given the chance to be among the first couple of companies in the Twin Cities to receive an install of Comcast’s new DOCSIS 3.0-driven high speed service (50 megabits per second download speed and 5 megabits per second upload!), do you think they had to ask twice!?!
If you haven’t heard of DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) and don’t know why this is important, it’s the next generation of cable standards for delivering data over cable with theoretical speeds between 170mbps and 340mbps download with uploads speeds of 120mbps.
Comcast indicated that the Twin Cities is their first market to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 technology and is a clear demonstration of how the company is evolving from broadband to wideband. It’s also just the beginning of even faster speeds to come, they claim, but my 50/5 internet speed isn’t any demo….it’s real, working and fast.
My experiences thus far have been amazing. When we first started to use it after the install, I broke into a huge grin as pages loaded instantly and I ran a 345MB update which hit my downloads folder and completed in what seemed like two minutes (it actually downloaded so quickly I forgot to watch it and time it). I’ve been achieving ~40mbps down and 3.4 to 4.1 upload speeds on average (which, of course, are dependent upon so many variables like internet traffic, server load and so on).
Our business (and yours too, I’ll wager) now depends on the internet in the same way 20th century business depended on the phone and then the fax machine. Speed is money and with more of our applications in the “cloud” (i.e., hosted Web applications), an accelerating number of us living an always-on and always-connected lifestyle, coupled with the need to move ever bigger digital files to one another over the ‘net, I’m delighted to have access to this kind of speed and am already fully utilizing it.
One thing most small business miss when they begin to use all of these new online services and applications: you run out of bandwidth very, very fast. Now that we’re delivering webinars, are using webcams, Skype, and Vonage in the office, we’ve been noticing that our need for bandwidth to satisfy all users of our connection has increased dramatically in the last six months. I believe that our ability to have sufficient bandwidth for all of these activities simultaneously has become a business imperative.
Emerging Digerati Week at the UofMN
Though it would’ve been nice to have time to cover the entire week-long event, Minnov8 will be covering the New Media Showcase on Friday, April 4th from 10am-4pm at the Weisman Art Museum and two of our founders, Garrick Van Buren and Phil Wilson, will be involved in showcasing their own startups at this event.
If you are interested in what’s happening right here in Minnesota when it comes to Internet and Web-centric new media innovation, carve out time from your busy schedule and head on over to the Weisman this Friday.
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The "Minnov8 Gang" Podcast
