GT VentureLab

VentureLab merges with ATDC

2009-07-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

ATDC, one of the nation's largest, longest running, and best-known university-based technology accelerators, is expanding its mission. ATDC has been merged with Georgia Tech's VentureLab and with the Georgia SBIR Assistance Program. By pooling resources, the new ATDC has increased the staff available to serve its expanded mission of helping Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies. The change will allow ATDC to greatly extend its reach to serve more technology companies along multiple growth paths and at all stages of development.

Founded in 1980, ATDC has helped create millions of dollars in tax revenues by graduating more than 120 companies, which together have raised more than a billion dollars in outside financing. However, according to Stephen Fleming, vice provost at Georgia Tech, "the startup market has changed dramatically over the past few years. Many startup companies do not want or need to pursue venture funding. Some are not even seeking traditional office space. ATDC's new initiatives directly address the demands of today's startup environment."

ATDC will open its membership to all technology entrepreneurs in Georgia, from those at the earliest conception stage to the well-established, venture-fundable companies. "We're interested in any technology business opportunity" said David Sung, one of ATDC's startup catalysts and a former partner with H.I.G. Ventures. "There are many ways ATDC can help startups, from business coaching and providing networking opportunities to financing through angel investment, government grants and contracts, corporate partnerships, and classic bootstrapping. We will support all entrepreneurs, whatever path they may take, through their entire growth process."

ATDC will continue to offer traditional "bricks-and-mortar" incubation space on entrepreneur-friendly terms, both in midtown Atlanta and Savannah. The center will be expanding its recent SeedSpace offering of small single-office leases in Technology Square for the earliest entrepreneurs and will provide a variety of co-working spaces to promote casual interaction among entrepreneurs. Recognizing the sprawl of the Atlanta metro area, ATDC will offer programs outside the Perimeter where dense clusters of entrepreneurs can benefit from its services. ATDC will also take full advantage of social media to build connections with entrepreneurs across the entire state of Georgia.

Since 1999, the state-funded ATDC Seed Capital Fund has made equity investments in Georgia startup companies alongside angel investors and traditional venture firms. With this new merger, ATDC will also manage the Georgia Tech Edison Fund, an innovative investment fund established in 2007 which draws its resources from charitable donors who are interested in helping expand the entrepreneurial ecosystem surrounding Georgia Tech.

"ATDC has always been a focal point for entrepreneurship in Georgia" said Sig Mosley, president of Imlay Investments and member of ATDC's board of advisors. "With these moves, ATDC now is aligned to support the specific needs of the new startup environment. The open door policy is a strong, positive shift and reinforces ATDC's leadership role in the startup community not just within the Atlanta metro area, but throughout the entire state."

The merger of the three units will bring together a broader knowledge base to provide comprehensive services to Georgia's technology entrepreneurs.

"By working at the very earliest stage with university spinouts—not just pre-revenue but pre-incorporation—we have learned a great deal about the coaching required by brand-new entrepreneurial teams that are still establishing their business model" said Roberto Casas, previously assistant director of Georgia Tech's VentureLab. "To date, we've focused on startups based on Georgia Tech intellectual property. By merging with ATDC, we'll be able to offer similar services to any Georgia startup, whether connected to Georgia Tech or not."

ATDC, the former Georgia Tech VentureLab, and the SBIR Assistance program are part of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) at Georgia Tech, which helps Georgia enterprises improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. Stephen Fleming, the former head of Georgia Tech VentureLab, was recently promoted to vice provost of Georgia Tech overseeing all of EI2. He will serve as the initial director of the new ATDC.

"Despite the economic downturn, it's still a great time to build a startup company in Georgia" said Fleming. "The last four years have seen an explosion of groups and organizations supporting the early-stage entrepreneur. With this expansion, we're rebooting the franchise of ATDC as the hub of technology entrepreneurship in Georgia. We hope to work with everyone, at any stage, along any path, to accelerate more technology startups and weave them into the economic fabric of Georgia."

All employees of ATDC, Georgia Tech VentureLab, and the SBIR Assistance Program will be retained in the consolidation. The new ATDC organization will continue to assist Georgia Tech faculty members and other research staff in forming new companies, and will continue to provide assistance to any Georgia small business seeking SBIR funding.

About ATDC
ATDC helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies. Founded in 1980, the Advanced Technology Development Center has provided business incubation and acceleration services to hundreds of Georgia startups—most of which are not based on Georgia Tech research, but which benefit from the close proximity to the university. ATDC currently has three facilities; two at Georgia Tech's main campus in Atlanta, and one at Georgia Tech's satellite campus in Savannah.

About SBIR Assistance Program of Georgia
The state of Georgia has one of the nation's leading SBIR/STTR assistance programs which, since being established in 2005, has educated and helped hundreds of Georgia entrepreneurs access these sources of federal funds. With the program's direct assistance, 150 companies have submitted one or more proposals resulting in more than $30 million in federal awards. By merging into ATDC, the program will be able to interact with more entrepreneurs across the state, including those who may have never considered applying for federal grants, and bring more of these awards into Georgia's startup ecosystem.

About VentureLab
In 2001, Georgia Tech became a founding member of VentureLab, a program of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). VentureLab helps build spinout companies around cutting-edge university research. With its emphasis on technologically-grounded business analysis, access to early-stage funds, and recruitment of experienced management, Georgia Tech's VentureLab has launched more than two dozen successful companies and serves as a model for other universities seeking to commercialize their discoveries. GRA's VentureLab Program now extends to four other research universities in Georgia; with an investment of some $13 million from GRA, more than 150 Georgia-based startups have been created around university intellectual property in the state. GRA also recently launched a new venture fund to make equity investments into these spinout companies.

Doing Business Locally

2009-06-22T19:44:00.003-04:00

There is nothing more important to a startup than customers. They are the lifeblood of a business; providing much needed cash, credibility and hope. Your first customers are always the most difficult to land. You are not a known entity. You don't have the money for any advertising. And you don't have a sales history with any customers yet. So, what to do? Go local I say.

Even if your product can be sold over the Internet, it is usually best to find customers physically close to you. Why? Because you can meet them in person. Without a history to fall back on, you must build a rapport with your prospects. They have to learn to trust you and believe that you will take care of them This is critical to closing your first sales.

How do you find these first prospects? Your best bet is always a warm referral. I can't teach you to be a great networker, but I can tell you that being humble and asking lots of questions will get you a long way. People want to help you.

Unless you just got off a spaceship from Mars, you surely know a number people. Think outside the box. Talk to people in your neighborhood. At church. In your class from school (maybe Facebook will come in handy some day?). Don't forget your lawyer or accountant. As long as you are specific with what you're looking for, a referral is an easy thing to get. You're not asking for money or even any work on their part, just a name and maybe an email on your behalf. And it is going to take time and be painful at times. Remember, a startup is hard work. For some, this can be quite uncomfortable, especially if you're not used to socializing. But landing your first customers is never something you can outsource. Only YOU can close the first sales. Just get out there, never give up and believe the payoff will happen.

As a final note, you must know what is going on in your community. If you're in Atlanta, you must invest in a subscription to the Atlanta Business Chronicle and try to read the AJC every Sunday.

Baseball and Startups

2009-05-26T08:05:00.002-04:00

You've heard the 'startups are like baseball' analogy 100 times. Maybe 1,000 times.

"How many of those companies would have had solid base hits exits if the venture investors had not been swinging for the fences?"

"To be a premier venture capitalist, one must hit a home run."

"For every Google-type home run there are countless other startups that strike out"

I think it is a useful, but sometimes overused metaphor. But, the one thing that for me holds true, is that it is a statistical game. Hank Aaron did not hit a home run every time he was at bat. Tony Gwynn did not get a base hit every time. And, there was no way to predict when the home runs or base hits would come. They just got back in the batters box and tried again, even though they failed nearly 70% of the time.

There is no such thing as a guaranteed hit in a startup. It is a risky proposition, many times driven by the vagaries of marco economic conditions, technology disruptions, competitive forces beyond our control and simple fate.

How to get past this? Develop the skills to be a top entrepreneur and get up to bat as many times as you can.

Suniva wins Envention Prize

2009-04-13T20:29:00.001-04:00

Have we really not blogged about Suniva in nearly a year?

Have to brag about one of our poster children spinouts. Dr. Ajeet Rohatgi from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been leading one of the world's top photovoltaic research centers for twenty years. A couple of years ago, VentureLab helped him pull together a business plan, management team, and seed financing to launch a startup company to commercialize his inventions. It's exactly what VentureLab is all about.

With a billion-dollar backlog in orders, the company now employs more than 60 people in its solar cell fabrication facility in Norcross, with expansion planned soon.

Last week, the Atlanta Business Chronicle awarded Suniva its Envention Award, given to a new product developed by an Atlanta company or individual that exhibits outstanding environmental or green benefits.

Read the entire article here.

Simatra in TAG Top 40

2009-01-10T11:47:00.001-05:00

The first slot in the 2009 TAG Top 40 has already been spoken for! Simatra Modeling Technologies -- a VentureLab graduate and ATDC member -- won the special Startup Gauntlet competition in December. Simatra is developing high performance computing technologies for numerical simulation and analysis in industries such as aerospace, pharmaceutical research, and finance.

TAG is now looking for 39 more companies to be featured at the annual Georgia Technology Summit, March 3, 2009, at Cobb Galleria Center. This year's Summit will feature a keynote presentation by Thomas Friedman, author of "Hot, Flat and Crowded" and "The World is Flat."

The competitive selection process will focus on the companies' products, services and technologies. The Top 40 companies will participate in a showcase at the Summit, expected to draw over 1,000 leaders from the state's technology community. Ten particularly outstanding companies from the Top 40 will also make short presentations to the Summit attendees, including venture capitalists, angel investors, potential customers and partners.

Applications for the Top 40 Innovators program will be accepted through the end of January via the TAG Web site at http://www.tagonline.org.

It's the Execution, not the Idea that Matters

2009-01-08T15:11:00.003-05:00

A recent Slashdot article addressed a question from a Computer Science student about whether his ideas would be 'stolen' by the University. I am not going to directly address the question or get into the explanation of University IP ownership and Bayh-Dole. I'll leave that for someone else. :-)

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/06/1622232

But, what I though was interesting was something said by a commenter to the article. It was this anecdote:

Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told ... how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.

Herbert might as well have been talking about technology. Don't get me wrong. Ideas are important. Research is critical to advancing our society. But when it comes to commercialization, it is only a small part of the puzzle.

Building a business involves a tremendous number of challenges completely unrelated to the technology itself. Building a team, finding capital, identifying a target market, creating a sales channel, designing complete products, printing sales collateral, finding efficient and low cost manufacturing, structuring partnerships, recruiting a strong board, raising more money, setting up customer service, drafting useful documentation, crafting whitepapers and example designs, legal issues, human resources, leasing office space, attending board meetings, making customer visits, going to trade shows ... I'd go on, but I'm out of breath. You need to do well in all of these areas and still get lucky if you want to have a successful startup business. That is called execution.

The bottom line is that customers, those people who pay our bills, care about your solutions, not your ideas. And if you don't execute and deliver a complete solution, you don't get paid.

At VentureLab, we look at ideas all day long. Many of them are brilliant, exciting, compelling and completely original. But we have to add in the cold reality of execution details and try to envision a path to the market that involves the hundreds of details completely unrelated to the original idea.

Keep coming up with ideas though, they are great places to start.

VentureLab is Hiring!

2008-12-23T11:09:00.001-05:00

VentureLab just celebrated its seventh birthday, and our impact on the Georgia technology community has been growing every year. Our mission is to commercialize technology developed in Georgia Tech research labs. We review all the intellectual property being reported by faculty, decide how best to use the technology, and then nurture startup companies coming out of the process.

So far, we've evaluated more than 1,000 inventions, identified 117 potential startup opportunities, and launched 22 companies since 2001. Beyond those raw numbers are the dollars: we've managed $7.3 million invested by the Georgia Research Alliance to start these companies; the survivors have attracted more than $250 million in venture capital -- a 34-to-1 leverage!

You can read the list of current VentureLab projects here, or more about how the program works here.

We're expanding our staff to deal with the increasing percentage of biotech and life sciences opportunities at Georgia Tech (mostly, but not exclusively, coming from the School of Biomedical Engineering). You get to work with some of the smartest people in the world, and help shape their inventions into successful startups. We have a great group of people working here already, and now we need one more.

The position profile and requirements are posted here and we're accepting applications already. If you're interested and have relevant background and experience, please click on the link and apply!

Two VentureLab Companies win SBIR Awards

2008-12-01T11:41:00.003-05:00

InterCAX and Graphene Works have won $100,000 Phase I SBIR awards from NASA. InterCAX makes software to help systems engineers run simulations against their SysML models. For example, they are helping JPL to simulate future missions to the outer planets. Graphene Works is building that stuff you put inside of pencils. Sort of.

Congratulations to both companies for the big wins.

An Invisible CAPTCHA

2008-11-26T13:27:00.001-05:00

Do you know what a CAPTCHA is? It's those irritating wavy numbers and letters that a Website uses to determine if you're a human.

Pramana, a VentureLab graduate company that's now being incubated in the ATDC, has created a better way to eliminate fraudulent use of a Website while being friendlier to customers. Forbes quotes Sanjay Sehgal (former VentureLab Fellow and now CEO of Pramana) as saying:

Instead of submitting users to a test, the Atlanta-based company's technology plugs into Web sites and invisibly analyzes users' online behavior to determine who's a human and who's a bot. "We don't demand that users prove they're human," Sehgal says. "We simply watch them and decide for ourselves."

Read the rest of the article here.

Business Models to Avoid

2008-11-25T08:24:00.003-05:00

Having spent some time with Startup Gauntlet, Pitch Camp and Startup Riot, I've had the chance to see some really terrific business ideas. And some remarkably bad ones too.

When building a startup idea, it is critical to think through your business model. How do you trade your widget or service for cash? There are some good ones, and there are some bad ones.

Here are a few models to avoid:

Spaghetti: "We have five ways of making money." If one model is good, isn't five better? This is like a football team with three quarterbacks, they really have none. Don't throw spaghetti against the wall to see if one of them will stick. Pick the most compelling model and focus on that.

Field of Dreams: "If we build it, surely they will come." One of the worst things to ever happen to entrepreneurship was the horribly, horribly misleading quote - "If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door." Uh, no, they won't.

Boil the Ocean: It's good to think big, but don't think too big. You need to prove you can be successful with a few customers and then scale.

China: "If we can only get 1% of the Chinese market for our widget, we will be a billion dollar company." Sure you will. Where do I sign up? Pick a small market and a way to dominate it. If you can't find a way to do that, redefine your market. Whatever market you go after, you must be a leader.

Venn Diagram: "We will build A. People want to buy B. We think they might overlap." Maybe. Probably not.

Bill Clinton: The man from Hope. That's all I need to say about that.

Do you have any other favorites? Send them to me and I will add them to the list.

Coming soon to a blog near you - some really good business models.

InVenture Prize

2008-11-04T09:30:00.001-05:00

VentureLab is proud to be one of the sponsors of the new InVenture Prize. In addition to cash, the winning team will be automatically accepted into VentureLab for commercialization assistance. Georgia Tech OTL will also help pay for patent filings, if needed.

Read more about it at http://inventureprize.gatech.edu/.

What the Bilski decision means for software patents

2008-10-31T11:00:00.004-04:00

I am not a lawyer. I think that needs repeating, I m not a lawyer. :-) So, please get an opinion from a true IP attorney.

I have been doing a bit of digging around the last couple of days to try to understand what this decision means. I can't possibly do as good a job as the Patent Law Blog, so go here and read the whole thing:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/10/in-re-bilski.html

I'll summarize what I think is the most important point:

"the court made clear that business methods and Software will still be patentable – if they meet the machine-or-transformation test."

As long as the software is tied to a specific thing, such as software to control a fuel injection system on an automobile. But, you have to remember this:

"A general purpose computer is not a particular machine, and thus innovative software processes are unpatentable if they are tied only to a general purpose computer."

However, you also have the transformation test. So, what is "transformation"?
"transformed articles must be physical objects or substances [or] representative of physical objects or substances."
And, then there's this:

"a claimed process where every step may be performed entirely in the human mind. In that situation, the machine-or-transformation test would lead to unpatentability"

In my personal view, it would appear that there are still many potentially patentable software innovations. But, patenting pure algorithms is out. Sorry, your new method for improving the bubble-sort probably won't fly.

What do you think? Please add your thoughts in the comments.

Happy Birthday, Tech Square!

2008-10-29T14:27:00.001-04:00

Technology Square at Georgia Tech opened five years ago this month. (The photo above shows former GT President Wayne Clough speaking at the opening celebration, with Mayor Shirley Franklin waiting her turn to his right.)

In five years, Tech Square has transformed Midtown, vastly improved Georgia Tech's physical and social connectivity to the rest of Atlanta, and become the hub of high-tech commercialization and startup activity for the region.

Off the top of my head (I'm sure I've forgotten some neighbors; my apologies), it's now the home for:

Georgia Tech

College of Management
Global Learning Center
Bookstore (Barnes & Noble)
Enterprise Innovation Institute
Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), incubating around 30 startup companies
VentureLab
Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC)
Graphics Visualization and Usability Center (GVU)
Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology (GCATT)
Georgia Tech Foundation

Friends

Georgia Department of Economic Development
Technology Association of Georgia
Atlanta Technology Angels
three venture capital firms
every semiconductor company in Georgia (all five of them!)
TechDrawl (ssh!)
Accenture
Georgia Power
Interface
Carbon Motors
LifeSync
GSE Simulations
Samsung
Siemens
Georgia Tech Hotel
a dozen shops and restaurants, including
the all-important Starbucks!

Not bad for a few blocks that used to be dangerous, dirty, and under-developed.

Congratulations to the Georgia Tech Foundation, The University Financing Foundation, Fifth Street Management, and everyone else who helped make Tech Square a success!

Now is the time to invest in R&D

2008-10-13T08:43:00.003-04:00

In the early 1930's, there was another financial crisis you might have heard about. In the midst of that, Thomas Watson of IBM made the decision to invest $1M to build a stand-alone research facility in Endicott, New York. That was a significant amount of money back then, in fact, it was 6% of IBM's revenues. There is no doubt it was a brilliant move. A great lesson for today?

Teaching Cats to Swim

2008-10-06T22:07:00.001-04:00

So I was at the NCET2 University Startups Conference in Washington last week, and one of the hot topics was the role of faculty members in university spinout companies.

I have strong feelings about this, which I've documented here. But since not all the readers of this blog will have suffered through one of my presentations, I figured it was worth writing about.

Jack Biddle (co-founder of Novak Biddle, a top-notch VC firm in northern Virginia) started the controversy by saying that his goal was to pull faculty members out of the university... and that smart universities (he explicitly mentioned Stanford) will have liberal leave-of-absence policies to encourage just that. He minimized the value of licensing the university's intellectual property... "If we have the people, we don't need a license. And the license isn't worth anything without the people."

Niloo Howe from Paladin Capital responded by saying that they typically don't want the people... they just want the technology. "Companies led by professors focus on science experiments, and we don't fund science experiments.)

My take? They're both right, and they're both wrong.

As I've said so many times over the last few years: Teaching faculty members to be entrepreneurial is like teaching cats to swim.

It can be done.
You will lose blood.
You’ll never be satisfied with the results.
You will annoy the cat.

At Georgia Tech's VentureLab, in most cases, we try to discourage faculty members from becoming CEO of their startups. CEOs require a particular mindset, a particular focus... and, usually, a particular set of experiences and scar tissue that most faculty members don't have.

(There are exceptions to every rule, including this one.)

Faculty members make great Chief Scientists, or Chief Technology Officers, and even board members. (And Georgia Tech faculty can spend significant time on such tasks without taking a leave of absence.) As the originators of the technology underpinning a startup, they deserve significant founders' equity. But once you've made tenure at a university like Georgia Tech, you have developed a certain skill set that frequently doesn't transfer to an entrepreneurial startup. (As Cali Tran of North Bridge Venture Partners pointed out, faculty members frequently manage laboratories with dozens of employees and million-dollar budgets... but "laboratories don't scale. Companies have to.")

At Georgia Tech, we actively recruit VentureLab Fellows... experienced entrepreneurs who use their market knowledge to evaluate innovations and build new companies. Typically, a VentureLab Fellow has already built one or more startup companies, so they have a deep understanding of the non-technical issues involved... recruiting, fundraising, dealmaking, etcetera.

This model works. The professor focuses on continually pushing the edge of the technology. The entrepreneur focuses on building the business. A few graduate students may be attracted from the laboratory to the startup, and that's not a bad thing (as long as academic conflicts of interest are avoided). And investors put their money into a proven entrepreneur who is building a professional management team, not an academic who may be distracted by science experiments.

We've done this a dozen times or more at VentureLab. Investors have endorsed our approach with over a quarter billion dollars in private equity investment. We plan to keep it up.

Qualtré closes on $5M A round from Matrix

2008-08-19T14:40:00.001-04:00

Qualtré, a company working on advanced motion sensors, has closed a $5 million Series A round from Matrix Partners. Mike Slawson, a VentureLab Fellow, built the company based on research from Farrokh Ayazi in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (among others). The company was initially funded through grants and loans from the Georgia Research Alliance as well as a DARPA contract.

Qualtré was in our latest round of VentureLab graduates, and is now a member of ATDC.

You can read more in the Tech Journal South story here.

This makes a nice compare-and-contrast to the Appcelerator saga that has dominated the Atlanta tech blogs lately. There's not a single right answer for everyone, and different companies will take different paths. For now, I'm just happy to cheer on Mike, Farrokh, and the rest of the Qualtré team!

How will your pitch go over at the pool party?

2008-08-18T07:30:00.001-04:00

We've all done it. Corralled an investor and pitched him on our spectacularly brilliant concept for a startup. Anybody with half a brain would rush home to get their checkbook, right? But, of course, that never happens.

Think about why people invest in startups. Especially people who haven't known you for 20 years. I'm primarily thinking of angel investors you're introduced to. An angel investor has already won the lottery. They created a startup and it went big. Or they got in early on a company that went IPO. Or they made a killing as a real estate developer. Or they're the only orthodontist in a county with especially un-straight teeth.

An angel is not just trying to make money by investing in startups. They want to feed their ego. And in order to do that, they have to brag about the cool company they've invested in. This being the case, there are two absolute musts if you want an angel to invest. First, it has to be a sexy idea. Nobody will brag about investing in company that makes lower cost polyalkylene glycol.

Equally important, your idea must be easy to share. If an investor is to brag to his neighbors, his friends at the gym, to his wife, they have to be able to explain it simply. They need to show how smart they are by getting in on the deal early. They need a story or a simple explanation they can share at the pool party.

Don't think just about your pitch to an investor, think about how they share your idea at a pool party.

The Hollywood Startup Model

2008-08-16T06:48:00.004-04:00

Have you ever thought about how movies get made? Here's the simplified version. A producer finds a script that they think would make a terrific movie. They option the script and then work to put a team together that could make the movie. They find a director. And stars to play the key roles. Then they approach the studios for financing of the movie. Once they have everything in place, they pull the trigger and the movie gets made.

Think of your startup in the same way. You are the producer. You have an idea which you've turned into a business plan (the script) and it is your job to pull together the other pieces to make a successful startup (the movie). Can you get a CEO to commit to the project (your director)? Can you find engineers to design the product and salespeople to sell it (the actors)? Once you have all the pieces lined up, you go look for funding from VC investors (the movie studios).

Some movies are independent films, not financed by the studios, but by outside investors (angels). If you want to get the backing from a studio, you have to have a top director and recognizable actors and a incredibly tight script? Does your movie have that?

There's nothing wrong with independent films, that's how most producers and directors and actors get their start. After you've made your first successful picture, it is far easier to gather top talent and get studio backing. They might even give you a development deal and pay you to put deals together (Entrepreneur In Residence).

If you think of your startup, and your serial-entrepreneur career arc as being similar to a movie producer, it might all start to make much more sense.

(btw, can you tell what movie is being filmed in the pic?)

Summer's over. Ga Tech is back in session

2008-08-16T06:37:00.002-04:00

Fall is still a month away. It's 88 degrees outside. But school is back in session starting Monday. A whole new crop of graduate and undergraduate engineers coming in. And, there's going to be a few startup companies in there. VentureLab is here to help.

(btw, do you know who's dorm room that is?)

Open Publishing of NIH Funded Research

2008-07-30T11:16:00.002-04:00

In the 2008 Labor-HHS bill, Congress is now requiring that all scientific papers that are based on NIH funding, must be submitted to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central on line archive. Since most all papers are initially published in scholarly journals, the legislation allows up to 12-months for the paper to be submitted to the open database.

The research is funded by the US Government. The research is usually performed in state-owned University facilities. The Universities retain the right to claim ownership of any intellectual property. It is the the direction of Congress that the results of the research be available for all to see and available in a designated on-line database.

Who could be opposed to this? Apparently not all journals are on board. When a paper is published, the journal takes ownership of the copyright of the paper. They do not compensate the authors. They also do not compensate the peer-reviewers either. And they have a one-year exclusive to the paper itself. The American Psychological Association has decided that they will not allow the authors to submit the paper to the online database, and they will charge the Universities $2,5000 for each paper submitted to the database.

What do you think of this new law and the APA's policy? For more information on the topic, go here.

InterCAX ParaMagic - Now available

2008-07-28T11:04:00.003-04:00

VentureLab company InterCAX has released their first product. ParaMagic is a software tool that works with MagicDraw, the world most popular UML drawing tool. It allows system drawings to be simulated for the very first time. As NoMagic says - "it makes ... models come alive".

It will work with any SysML drawing and can be applied to system engineering, business process analysis, and financial modeling. Anything that can be modeled using SysML.

Congratulations to Dirk Zwemer, Manas Baja and the rest of the team at InterCAX.

Requiem for a (patent) dream

2008-07-22T11:23:00.006-04:00

If your software business is based more upon your patent portfolio than your ability to execute, your reality is about to change. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has just added two important new tests for patentable subject matter will invalidate many if not most software patents.

With a recent (June 2008) decision, the USPTO has taken the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.” Most software patents are process inventions but can meet neither of these requirements: they do not generally physically transform anything, and they are usually defined broadly so that they can protect the invention while running on any general purpose computer. Very specifically, the USPTO has categorically stated that a general purpose computer is not a "particular machine."

The Patent Law Blog has a lot more information on this important ruling.

SBIR Conference in Atlanta

2008-07-17T11:07:00.001-04:00

Just a reminder... next week, the 10th annual National Institutes of Health SBIR/STTR conference is being held in Atlanta, and it's being hosted by the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute.

Who should attend?

Small businesses wanting to develop novel technology products
Highly motivated small business entrepreneurs and research managers
Small businesses interested in new NIH SBIR/STTR initiatives and program changes
Institutional researchers interested in partnering with small businesses on collaborative R&D projects
Large companies interested in developing strategic alliances with successful SBIR/STTR awardees
Organizations and consultants providing support to interested SBIR/STTR applicants

It's focused on NIH/biotech grants but, honestly, there should be a lot there of interest to any entrepreneur thinking of going after SBIR/STTR money. Read more at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/funding/SBIRConf2008/index.htm.

At last count, nearly 500 people had registered! Online registration is closed, but you can register onsite with cash or check (sorry, no credit cards). Be there!

A cup of coffee and wheat toast

2008-06-30T13:43:00.004-04:00

Seth Godin writes one of the world's most popular blogs. If you're not reading his blog on a regular basis, you're missing out on a great resource.

Traditional advertisements on TV and radio are classified by Seth as interruption marketing, which interrupt the customer while she is doing something of her preference. Seth introduced the concept of permission marketing where the business provides something of value to the customer and thus obtains her permission and then does marketing.

Recently, Seth posted a nice, tight taxonomy of marketing, breaking it down into five, easy pieces: data, stories, products, interactions, and connections. I encourage you to take some time to appreciate his succinct, wonderful post.

17 Mistakes Startups Make

2008-06-24T12:59:00.002-04:00

John Osher started Dr John's SpinBrush in 1999 to make a $5 electric toothbrush. He sold the company to Proctor & Gamble 2-years later for $475M. John, who apparently knows something about startups, has come out with his list of the 17 mistakes that startups make. Great reading for anyone who wants to avoid these common pitfalls. Here are some of my favorites:

Mistake 1: Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it's viable.

Mistake 4: Overprojecting sales volume and timing.

Mistake 6: Hiring too many people and spending too much on offices and facilities.

Mistake 14: Lacking simplicity in your vision.