Stata Ventures, Kaizen interviewee Ray Stata’s venture capital vehicle, recently provided funding to technology startup Lyric Semiconductor. Lyric is developing probability chip technology. Traditional chips use binary “yes/no” switches, but probability chips “can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities, or levels of certainty.” Some of the commercial applications of this technology include: better error correction and faster operation for portable flash drives; better prediction of consumer behavior for websites like Amazon (and better product recommendations for customers); and faster, cheaper large scale data processing.
In our latest issue of Kaizen we feature an interview with Robert Bradley, Jr., former director of public policy analysis at Enron and currently the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research.
Also featured in Kaizen are: more Spring semester student essay contest winners – Brandon McNames and Matthew Weber; Guest Speaker Jeffrey Orduno; and another successful High School Entrepreneur Day.
A PDF version of Kaizen is available here. We will soon post separately the full interview with Mr. Bradley.
If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.
An article in New York Daily News covers the increasing demand for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s (NFTE) courses in our faltering economy. NFTE was founded by Kaizen interviewee Steve Mariotti, who states, “Kids are aware of how fragile a job is and they begin to think about how they could create a job if they had to.” The article also profiles several young graduates of the program who have become entrepreneurial success stories.
Shown above, NFTE graduate Steve Gordon, 18-year-old founder of TatooID.
The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) recently won a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for NFTE’s mathematics curriculum “Entrepreneurship: Owning Your Future”. From the announcement: “Written by NFTE Founder Steve Mariotti, the curriculum teaches fundamentals of mathematics as well as comprehensive guide to developing a business plan. It focuses on critical basic business skills including business communications, negotiating, business ethics, social responsibility, time management, and goal setting.” We interviewed Mr. Mariotti for the August 2009 issue of Kaizen (PDF). Read the full-length interview here.
John Chisholm is the founder, former CEO and chairman of Decisive Technology, a pioneer in online survey software (now part of Google), and of CustomerSat, a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems (now part of MarketTools). A 30-year veteran executive of Silicon Valley, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He chairs the MIT Club of Northern California, serves as trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, as member of the MIT Corporation Development Committee, and as mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. Previously, he has served as Chairman of the Board of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, one of Stanford’s twelve independent laboratories; as a member of the visiting committee of the MIT Department of Mathematics; and as vice president of the worldwide MIT Alumni Association. He is author or co-author of two patents in online polling. We met with Mr. Chisholm in the San Francisco bay area to explore his thoughts on the benefits and challenges of entrepreneurship.
Kaizen: You have founded two high-tech companies, Decisive Technology and CustomerSat. Were you technically oriented as a youth?
Chisholm: I think you would say so. I liked to take clocks apart and try to figure out how the gears and springs worked together. I grew up in Jupiter, Florida, a small town about 20 miles north of West Palm Beach. In junior high school, my best friend Al Pion and I each memorized pi to over 100 decimal places—we would recite it alternating the digits, like tossing a ball back and forth. Talk about geeky!
Dr. Douglas Rasmussen, our final guest speaker of Spring 2010, gave two lectures at Rockford College recently. Dr. Rasmussen is professor of philosophy at St. John’s University in New York and is coauthor (with Douglas J. Den Uyl) of Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2005). Here, Dr. Stephen Hicks interviews Dr. Rasmussen about his talk on Philippa Foot’s book Natural Goodness, given to Professor Klein’s Ethical Theory class:
In our latest issue of Kaizen we feature an interview with John Chisholm, founder of Decisive Technology, a pioneer in online survey software (and now part of Google), and CustomerSat, a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems (now part of MarketTools).
Also featured in Kaizen are: this semester’s Introduction to Philosophy student essay contest winners – Bronson Garcia, Mona Khalifeh, and Erica Price; Guest Speaker William Kline; and news about our professors.
A PDF version of Kaizen is available here. We will soon post separately the full interview with Mr. Chisholm.
If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.
Jeffrey Orduno, Rockford College alum and associate at McGreevy Williams, gave a CEE-sponsored talk last week at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on property rights and the law:
Dr. Kline, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, gave two CEE-sponsored talks this month at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume:
Dr. Kline, Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Illinois, Springfield, gave two talks this month at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on the main points of his talk on business ethics:
Forthcoming: Our interview Professor Kline on David Hume, who, according to a recent vote by contemporary philosophers, is the most influential dead philosopher.
Stata Ventures, Kaizen interviewee Ray Stata’s venture capital vehicle, recently provided funding to technology startup Lyric Semiconductor. Lyric is developing probability chip technology. Traditional chips use binary “yes/no” switches, but probability chips “can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities, or levels of certainty.” Some of the commercial applications of this technology include: better error correction and faster operation for portable flash drives; better prediction of consumer behavior for websites like Amazon (and better product recommendations for customers); and faster, cheaper large scale data processing.
