Check out this interesting story from FOX News :
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=9457980
Applying GPS technology to help doctors diagnose diseases and assist surgeries is an emerging frontier in the medical device industry. Local firms like Medtronic and superDimension are using GPS technology.
The winner, who will receive $50,000 and business support services, will be announced Sept. 11.
Barrier1 Network Security Appliance
Team Leader: Steve Sahl
The Barrier Group has created, developed and is now selling the patent pending network security appliance named Barrier I that is a revolutionary vehicle to stop “blended threats” - the biggest threat facing network security in the past 20 years. The company, led by Steve Sahl, is bootstrapping it with only three employees and winning business away from large, well-financed international competitors, while remaining cash flow neutral.
CoreSpine Technologies
Team Leader: Christine Horton
Formed in June 2005, CoreSpine Technologies is focused on developing and producing advanced surgical devices for the complete or selective removal of nucleus and cartilage material from the lumbar disc space. Led by Christine Horton, this proprietary technology will enable the next generation of emerging spinal therapies and will set the standard for preparing the spinal disc for implantation of an artificial disc nucleus and minimally invasive interbody fusion devices.
Klodas Foods: Fibre and Beyond
Team Leader: Elli Ansari
Elli Ansari, Barb Birr and Elizabeth Klodas are working together to produce physician-formulated premium whole natural and organic foods that address both general health maintenance and the dietary requirements of patients with specific chronic diseases. Fibre, the first Klodas Foods innovation, is a cardiologist-formulated organic food product that allows individuals to conveniently incorporate healthful ingredients into their diets.
Team Leader: Sue Kruskopf
Sue Kruskopf and Nancy Bush created this free Web site that allows members to plan and personalize their own funeral. MyWonderfulLife.com (MWL.com) eases the burden on the surviving loved ones as it eliminates the guesswork incorporated with funerals and allows greater time to grieve.
Wilcraft
Team Leader: Tom Roering
Tom Roering, Connie Roering and Dave Plan created an amphibious drivable ice fishing shelter called Wilcraft that offers a safe, comfortable and convenient ice fishing experience. Its light footprint also allows access to early and late ice - the most coveted times of the season.
2008 Minnesota Cup Student Finalists
Sirkl
Team Leader: Brian Limborg
Brian Limborg, John Borowicz, Dan Kantor and Anwar Bhimani developed a software application that runs within social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, to provide a set of services and tools for setting up and managing high school and university sponsored clubs and other formal membership organizations. Sirkl creates a virtual clubhouse environment where members and alumni can meet, organize, plan, discuss, view photos/videos and stay informed about their organizations’ events, activities and latest news.
Wireless respiratory carbon dioxide sensors
Team Leader: Shyam Sivaramakrishnan
Shyam Sivaramakrishnan and Rajesh Rajamani plan to produce ultra-small wireless carbon dioxide (CO2) sensors that would enable analysis of CO2 concentration in the breath and indoor-air monitoring applications. New technology developed at the University of Minnesota promises to deliver such sensors within two years.
Zipnosis
Team Leader: Jonathan Pearce
Led by Jonathan Pearce, Zipnosis creates electronic visit - E-visit - software to allow patients and doctors to conduct secure electronic visits and help make family practice doctors financially viable. The unique, adaptive software guides a patient through a consultation creating a note the physician can quickly review.
The Mayo Clinic said it will donate $5 million over five years to the Hormel Institute Medical Research Center in Austin. The money will fund laboratory equipment and program support for researchers from the Hormel Institute, Mayo Clinic, and the University of Minnesota.
Established in 1942, the Hormel Institute is the medical research arm of the U. The institute focuses mainly on cancer treatment such as the development of natural, non-toxic alternatives to chemotherapy.
“Collaborations, like this between The Hormel Institute, Mayo Clinic and University of Minnesota, will enable us to make discoveries much more quickly,” Mayo CEO Glenn Forbes said in a statement. “Mayo’s commitment to research extendsbeyond our campuses, and we’re especially interested in the cancer research conducted by [Hormel Institute executive director] Dr. Zigang Dong and his team. We hope this gift will help provide the resources necessary so that The Hormel Institute will continue to thrive.”
The institute is in the midst of an ambitious expansion project, including a new state-of-the-art science lab building and space for 100 new researchers. The grand opening is scheduled October 3 followed by a three-day World Cancer Research Conference, with 200 scientists from around the world expected to participate.
In February, the institute purchased a Blue Gene supercomputer from IBM. The computer, among the fastest in the world, can run 5.6 trillion calculations per second, computing power that will allow the institute to triple the amount of projects it undertakes.
The boy genius appears out of nowhere and slides into the seat across from me. He speaks softly, is unfailingly polite, but unshakably guarded. He wears a crisply pressed blue shirt, tucked neatly into black slacks. I make lame jokes (mostly because I’m nervous) but the kid barely blinks. I really shouldn’t call him “kid” because he’s only a year younger than I am but he could easily pass for 20, maybe 19.
For a guy who’s made beaucoup bucks by helping to invent PayPal and YouTube, Jawed Karim doesn’t attract much attention and I think he prefers it that way. As the lesser known member of the trio that founded YouTube, Karim keeps a low profile. So low that I jokingly refer to Karim as the Third Tenor, you know, the guy that no one can remember after Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo?
On this day, however, on the grounds of the University of Minnesota, Karim is here to discuss his latest project, Youniversity Ventures. The fledgling venture capital firm will invest $50,000 to $300,000 in Internet software startups founded by college students. University students are a potential goldmine of lucrative ideas and no one knows that better than Karim. After all, he’s a doctoral student at Stanford University, whose alumni include Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) and Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google).
Karim, a St. Paul native, is spending his summer looking for startups in the Twin Cities. He might find slim pickings; Minnesota is not known to be a hotbed of Internet innovation. So far, Youniversity Ventures has only invested in two startups, both in California: Blubet.com, a social betting website, and Tokbox.com, a free online video conferencing service. So far, Karim and his two partners are only investing their money but may accept capital from other VC firms.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation:
Patent Pending: Why start Youniversity Ventures?
Jawed Karim: After YouTube, I wanted to stay involved in entrepreneurial activities. I’m also interested in specific kinds of innovation. I like technologies that equalize the playing field. YouTube being a great example. In the past, you had these singular, evil, big powerful companies that controlled everything that you saw on TV. And now I am really happy; thanks to user generated content and thanks to creative people out there, the playing field has been leveled so now that the masses are more in control of what gets seen and what doesn’t.
What we decided to do with Youniversity Ventures is that we realized there is a underserved segment for entreprenuers. People may be working on something that is very useful but they may not know how to take and translate that into an acutal business. There are VCs but they serve a segment that is kind of little bit higher up. If you go to a VC, you are expected to have a fully polished business plan.
We want to be involved in a much earlier stage. We act as almost co founder for the first six months. We just enable the team to get off the ground. Whereas you go to the VC, they usually expect to invest several millions of dollars and the VCs have very large funds and it’s not worth their time unless they invest $3 million.
PP: How did you get started as an entrepreneur?
JK: It’s very difficult to get started. The best advice I can give is to learn by example. I was surrounded by other successful entrepreneurs. And I did a lot of reading. Pick a company that you admire and find out everything about it: who’s behind it, how they got started. For me, the companies were FedEx, Best Buy, Oracle, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google. I just knew everything about how they got started. I was just trying to emulate the companies I was interested in.
I was always interested in software. I was interested in creating software that had a positive impact on how people use technology. I knew the founder of MP3 player. I thought it was great because Mp3s just make so much more sense. It did not make sense to me to buy a CD album for $16 with one good song on it. It was a very clear path of progress in terms of how people use the technology. I was very interested in developing something useful to people.
PP: How is the fund going so far?
JK: We are getting a lot of ideas. We work on a very informal basis. We will coach people along if it falls into our area of interest, even though we don’t make an investment. We are working with a lot of companies right now even the ones we are not investing in.
PP: What’s the difference between being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley versus Minnesota?
JK: Silicon Valley has a lot of noise, a lot of hype. People are very excited about all of the Facebook stuff, Facebook applications. It’s just been a huge hype for the last year when actually…there isn’t really that much value. It’s just a bubble. It’s almost a distraction.
Whereas here, there is certainly less activity. But at the same time, you don’t have these bubbles of nonsense out here. Things here seem a little too formal. I think that it’s inhibiting productivity. People in Silicon Valley will just get together and shoot around some ideas or program something together. Here we have to go to a specific conference to meet people. We have to go to some officially organized event to talk about this stuff. Silicon Valley, you just do it all of the time. Silicon Valley is much informal business environment than here. If [Minnesota] was less informal, it would probably increase surface area between people.
PP: It seems that Minnesota is much more risk adverse than California. Why is that?
JK: It’s a cultural issue. In California, you see everyone taking lots of risk. So comparatively to them, you are not taking that much risk by doing a startup because everyone is doing it. Whereas here, when you do a startup it’s like: ‘Oh my God! Like, I am doing a startup. No one else I know is doing a startup. So I am taking lots of risk’ when actually you are not but it’s compared to everyone else. The local culture might discourage risk.
It’s great to have that center of innovation (medical devices) here. But it’s not a sector where people can easily enter into, which is probably why it keeps away the outsiders and newcomers. The great thing about the Internet and software is that anybody can get into. The costs are very low, and the potential is very huge and the time frame is quicker too.
PP: What will spark innovation in Minnesota?
JK: In Silicon Valley, what really helps is that people are always working together. You see people hanging out all of the time even from competing companies talking about stuff. It’s that interaction that creates the motivation to do something. Here people are more separate. They don’t interact as much. What it will take is much closer collaboration in a much less formal environment. It’s great that we have a venture conference here and they are very useful but in Silicon Valley, people network all of the time, on the street corner, coffee shops, dorm rooms, garages. Conference stuff, that just happens once a year. You go there just to check out a couple a new things.
PP: I hear you are a private person. Will that change with Youniversity Ventures?
JK: It’s not about public versus non public. It’s just the specific thing I am interested in: the intellectual aspect of innovation and entrepreneurship. I am interested in working with people to understand and analyze how to make a business successful.
PP: Will you start another business again?
JK: I think if the right opportunity presents itself, I am definitely going to be an enterpreneur again. I don’t think you can always be an entrepreneur. There are people out there who are always an entrepreneur. I don’t think it makes sense to be a entrepreneur for the sake of being an entrepreneur. I think you have to be an entrepreneur to convert something specific into reality like a concept that you are really passionate about. I think I will be an entrepreneur within the next few years for sure.
A new study published in The Lancet medical journal concludes that telemedicine (the use of advanced broadband technology, including interactive video, data imaging, and audio) led to better medical decisions in treating stroke victims than consulting doctors over the telephone.
That should make the folks at Virtual Radiologic Corp. giddy. The Minnetonka-based company contracts with radiologists across the United States to interpret and analyze imaging data from CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds sent over encrypted broadband networks 24 hours a day.
The study, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes, California Institute of Telecommunications Technology, and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs research division, validates Virtual’s main raison d’etre: the lack of doctors, especially specialists in cardiology and neurology, means hospitals must look beyond their geographic borders to see top medical advice from physicians anywhere in the country.
The evolution of broadband technology allows a hospital in St. Cloud to send images from a CT scan or MRI over the Internet to a doctor in Los Angeles who analyzes the data and sends a recommendation back to the hospital in real time.
The study sought to see whether doctors consulting via telemedicine or telephone correctly recommended the use of thrombolytics (anti-clotting drugs) to 234 patients with stroke symptoms. The selection of thrombolytics was not by accident: to be effective, the drugs must be given within the first three hours of the stroke symptoms and only at the hospital.
According to the study, doctors in the telemedicine group correctly prescribed the drugs 98 percent of the cases vs. 91 percent for the telephone group.
“Stroke telemedicine consultations result in more accurate decision making compared with telephone consultation and can serve as a model for the effective of telemedicine in other medical specialities,” the study says. “The more appropriate decisions, high rates of thrombolysis use, improved data collection, low rate of intracerebral haemorrhage, low technical complications, and favorable time requirements all support the efficacy of telemedicine for making treatment decisions, and might enable more practitioners to use this medium in daily stroke care.”
The study also helped refute one major knock on telemedicine: that the technology is often faulty and unreliable and prone to crashing.
“Despite the complexity of the telemedicne system, technical problems did not affect the successful completion of the trial,” the study says. “The reliability of the site-independence and quality of service technology is shown by the fact that only one consultation was not possible because of technical failure.“
Marti Nyman, a well-regarded executive who served as Best Buy’s top liaison with Silicon Valley, has left the company amid rumors of a shakeup in the retailer’s fledgling venture capital unit.
Nyman left the Richfield-based company a few weeks back, said Best Buy spokeswoman Susan Busch. She did not say why.
Nyman did not return a message left on his cell phone.
As director of Best Buy’s Global Innovation Network, Nyman lead the company’s efforts to court venture capitalists. Over the past four years, the company has quietly built a network of contacts in Silicon Valley to identify start-ups with promising technology that eventually may land on a Best Buy shelf near you.
Nyman’s work led Best Buy to Sling Media. Founded in 2004, the Foster City, Calif.-based start-up developed a device called the Slingbox, now sold at all Best Buy stores, that allows users to connect a PC, laptop, or smart phone into their home televisions. The company also developed software that remotely controls any audio/video device, including a digital cable box, satellite receiver, digital video recorder and even a still video camera.
EchoStar Corp., a satellite television provider, acquired Sling Media for $380 million last year.
Nyman was to also help find opportunities for Best Buy’s new venture capital fund, Alpha Capital, which would purchase financial stakes in promising startups.
Who will be the next Medtronic? What will be Minnesota's next breakthrough industry? Patent Pending will provide you the latest information and commentary on the people, companies, and trends driving innovation in Minnesota. From visionary entrepreneurs to game changing technologies, this blog will offer a window into the future of Minnesota's economy.
Thomas Lee writes about growth/emerging companies with a special focus on medical technology.
He has previously covered food, retail, and financial services but gets his biggest rush from focusing on the "What next?" versus the "What now?"
You can reach Thomas at tlee@startribune.com.
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