mit

I had a great lunch with associates from rSmart, Unicon, and MIT today at the JA-SIG Conference, and we talked about a vexing issue that plagues software, open source and proprietary alike (though it hurts the open source vendor more): the high cost of sales. (I credit John Lewis, Chief Software Architect, Unicon, for any intelligence in my musings, and take full blame for the inane shrapnel that is my personal contribution to the thread.)

The proprietary world's P&L operates much like the VC's: high, upfront return (license) to cover the expense that Purchasing puts vendors through to earn its business. (Repeat visits, RFPs, etc.) In other words, the proprietary vendor spends five figures on five deals to hopefully get a "home run" return on one of them to subsidize and exceed the costs.

Open source vendors operate differently, as Larry Augustin pointed out at OSBC. [PDF] Open source vendors are about volume in leads, with the leads finding their way back to the company to purchase. Four figures (or less, often) to close a deal, with the intention being that more deals within the pipe will close.… Read more

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have found that suppressing a particular enzyme has reversed some symptoms of autism and mental retardation in mice.

An enzyme is a protein that triggers a chemical reaction, and this one, called p21-activated kinase (PAK), affects neural connections in the brain. Suppressing it can counteract the effects of Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), the leading cause of retardation and a genetic autism, MIT said Sunday.

"Our study suggests that inhibiting a certain enzyme in the brain could be an effective therapy for countering the debilitating symptoms of FXS in children, and possibly in autistic kids … Read more

A team of scientists from MIT has come up with a way to light a 60-watt lightbulb. The trick is that the bulb is located about seven feet from the power source and no wires connect the two.

Wireless electricity, or "WiTricity" as MIT likes to call it, could one day allow consumers to carry notebooks or cell phones without batteries. It could also make it easy for contractors to remodel homes. Someday. To make it happen, the waves would need to be targeted and tracking mechanisms would need to exist to link the power source and the … Read more

Kids now have their own computer programming language, thanks to researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and at UCLA.

MIT on Tuesday introduced a programming language called Scratch, which is designed for kids age 8 and up to create interactive Web stories, games and animations that can be shared online. Kids have already used the language to write a story about a polar bear school and to create an outer-space attack game.

MIT compared the programming language, which lets kids snap together graphical blocks to build a Web site, to the simplicity of Lego "bricks." (… Read more

Domo can be said to be a descendant of MIT's two other famous robots Cog and Kismet, because it combines features of both. Like Cog it was built to duplicate human head, neck, arm and hand movement, and like Kismet, it's an anthropomorphic robot designed to be expressive and interact with humans on an emotional level.

These are the mechanical progeny of The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where much of the world's robotic magic happens. We toured the facilities at the Ray and Maria Stata Center (designed by … Read more

If only we had one of these in high school gym. This nifty invention by some enterprising MIT students can climb a rope all by itself at the astonishing rate of 10 feet per second--carrying 250 pounds all the while.

The success of the "Rope Ascender" apparently hinges on the concept of strength derived from winding the rope around a cylinder multiple times. The students' efforts, which led to the formulation of a company called Atlas Devices, have reportedly been rewarded already with a U.S. Army contract.

As an example of its very practical uses, Coolest-Gadgets notes … Read more

Nathan Ball, a graduate student at MIT, has invented a motorized pulley that will let paramedics and firefighters zip up the side of buildings like Spider-Man.

Ball's Atlas Powered Rope Ascender can pull a firefighter loaded down with 80 to 100 pounds of equipment up a 30-story building in 30 seconds. Trudging up the stairs weighed down with equipment can take six to eight minutes.

Ball is this year's recipient of the Lemelson-MIT award, a $30,000 prize for invention annually awarded to a student at the school. The Atlas works as follows. A rope is fixed to … Read more

Boston -- I moderated a panel entitled "Where Do I get My Web 2.0?" at the MIT Enterprise Forum's "Brave New Web" event this morning. We had four execs from companies that make Web tools (Phil Hollows, FeedBlitz; Brian Shin, Visible Measures; Scott Smigler, Exclusive Concepts; and David McRaflane, Nexaweb) and services on the panel, talking to an audience of entrepreneurs about business models, customer interaction, and start-up funding.

What I found most interesting about this audience was how quickly it steered the conversation towards big business. Out here, it appears, entrepreneurs want to … Read more

BOSTON--So-called user generated content is being built into the business models of forward-looking media companies as they venture out onto the Web, according to experts who spoke today at the MIT Enterprise Forum's Brave New Web conference on Wednesday. (See this CNET News.com story.)

Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of online video company Brightcove, said that Web is a tiny fraction of the overall media industry but that's changing because media companies are starting to distribute video over the Web. Brightcove itself is building social media features to its video distribution system which will allow people to post … Read more