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.
Venture capitalist Kevin O’Connor, interviewed in the April 2009 issue [PDF] of Kaizen, is now co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. FindTheBest, as described by Mr. O’Connor, “was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way.”
He explains further: “I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare. Or, I found sites offering their “top 10” recommendations, only to discover they were secretly getting “kickbacks” from the sites they were recommending.”
His solution, FindTheBest, is now in beta version. It allows the user to compare search results (similarly to travel websites like Expedia), and to narrow down the results by various criteria (much like browsing Amazon). Like Wikipedia, users can also contribute to the site, updating existing areas or creating new listings in which they have expertise.
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.
February 2010 Kaizen interviewee John Chisholm has a new article at Global Customer Experience Management. Mr. Chisholm covers recent trends in the customer satisfaction industry and gives advice on how to better measure customer satisfaction. He also urges companies to be efficient, accountable, and timely in their dealings with customers.
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!
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.
Judy Estrin, CEO of JLabs, is the co-founder of seven technology companies. She was the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000 and has served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company and FedEx, the advisory board of Stanford’s School of Engineering and Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board. Most recently, she is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2008). We met with Ms. Estrin in Menlo Park, California to explore her thoughts on educating and managing for entrepreneurship and innovation.
Kaizen: What was it like growing up in a high-powered science-and-engineering family?
Estrin: That’s hard to answer because I don’t know anything but growing up steeped in science. A lot of the trips we took during the summer were to academic scientific conferences throughout the world. As I talk about in the preface of Closing the Innovation Gap, it wasn’t just that my parents were both academics, but both were Ph.D.s in electrical engineering — it was quite rare at the time for a woman to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. And so I just grew up in an environment where I was surrounded by academics and scientists.
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.
