MBET Blog
Patents: The Muse Is in the Software
Interesting stuff on inventing & innovating. Well, ok, the NYT writer manages to not jump on the buzzword of the week, "innovation", but I think Kurzweil's problem-solving strategy is all about innovating.
I think the people who have the most to fear from a "cyber-poet" are political speechwriters, the people who already churn out the most structured and content-free prose around today. No doubt they could be put out of business in a second. And imagine it... when a politician needs to be somewhere, no need to get the writers out of bed. Just feed in a few keywords, blend in auto-poetry and a bit of google news and *poof* a speech. Awesome,
Booknoise.net | The Flickering Mind
This is stuff I like. If only there was a business opportunity in taking computers out of schools. And don't tell me to open my own school - the new Ontario government is rolling back a private school tuition tax credit which is going to result in an oversupply of private schools now that the subsidy is gone. I'm not a big fan of private education - it smacks of bourgeois climbing too much. Private school is for the obscenely wealthy people, face it. And I'm no fan of religious schools - frankly I think the government should overturn the British -North America Act and pull public funding from Catholic schools in Ontario. I have nothing against Catholics, I just don't see why one group should get funding when others don't. Some people argue that funding should be opened up but that's idiocy. One public school system. And fund it like hell.
Chapter 1 - Inspiration: From Concept to Commercialization
This was a fantastic event put on at U of Waterloo by Communitech. It was great. Ken Morse from MIT gave the keynote and the networking was great. THis is the kind of event that really adds depth to this program - talking to other entrepreneurs, VCs, lots of exciting people.
Definitely stay tuned for the second part in 2004.
Telidon!
Did anyone else ever use one of these... I suppose they must have. It seemed logical enough at the time but I suppose they didn't built an entire teletex system just for the amusement of me and my friend back in the early 80's. It's interest to see these projects that ended up as evolutionary dead ends which were nothing short of incredible at the time.
Half Bakery is a forum for people's ideas for businesses or inventions... brilliant name.
The Entrepreneurial Mind is a great blog I found via
Kaleem Aziz. He has a ton of links listed
here. Like
Tim Oren, a VC at Pacifica. Good stuff.
Things I Like
Ice cream.
No, seriously, one great thing about MBET is the informal nature of all the lectures. Today's law class is about business structure but we get to quiz the prof (Darren Charters) about liability issues related to sole proprietorships.
Of course, our class is only 23 people. Next year will be more - maybe as many as 50. So it won't quite be the same. Not to mention doubling the number of people inthe room will make things pretty tight. I don't know how you'd get more than 40 people in here comfortably.
But for now, this number of students and the level of interaction is great.
BusinessPundit
Hm, so, it's too hard to blogroll with basic Blogger, plus I'm lazy so I'll just link there once and let people find it...
Ryan
So...
Ryan doesn't like class. OK, sure. Sometime class sucks. But really...
Classes are not really the reason I came to business school. I came to b-school to make friends, give my career a kickstart, write Top 10 lists for the Wharton Journal, and eat cheesteaks. And I'm going to do those things.
OK, exactly how much does tuition run at Wharton? You want to make friends? Drop out and spend half that money on beer. Give it away next to a frat house. You'll have lots of friends. Give your career a kickstart? I suppose. Write Top 10 Lists? Didn't they do that in
High Fidelity and get paid, as opposed to paying, for the privledge? Cheesesteaks? Maybe I'm getting old - I eat cheap.
Personally, I came back to school to take the damn classes. To read the readings. To write the papers. Why the hell else would I be here? Pass up $90K+ of income and pay $20K tuition to make friends? Don't get me wrong - my classmates are great. But they're not worth $110K. I don't think anyone needs an A in finance to figure that one out.
Anyway, Ryan - not trying to be too hard on you. But me, I like accounting.
Respect.
L'Oréal e-Strat Challenge 4
So we got a team of 3 and entered the L'Oréal e-Strat Challenge. It's not about technology or entrepreneurship but it's sure as hell about business and it looks like a lot of fun.
Advisors
Steve Biancaniello from
Prinova is in for operations class talking about advisors. Interesting to hear some stories from the trenches about finding advisors, taking advice and not taking advice.
Does IT Matter?
Does IT Matter by
Nicholas Carr was published in HBR in May 2003. Interesting stuff. Of course those with interests in the industry are attacking Carr's article like rabid dogs... their businesses are built on the notion of continual adoption of new technology.
Of course, if Carr is right,it doesn't bode well for companies selling high-tech products (like software) where IT is one of your major target markets. So think hard about what you're selling - does it really offer competitive advantage? How can you push your product past the early-adopter market and into the mainstream?
Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?
Entrepreneur.com is running an interesting article on
whether entreneurship can be taught.
Unfortunately Blogger's web client just ate my thought-provoking article on the topic. So enjoy the article sans editorial insight.
Something Relevant
So, back on-topic.
In the last couple on speaker sessions we had Tim Jackson from
TechCapital partners and Gerry Hurlow from
HSD Partners.
Both Tim and Gerry are venture capitalists, but they're quite different in their approach. TechCapital is a more "traditional" VC firm in that they invest in early-stage companies. They see a lot of pitches. It's pretty interesting to hear about what they look for, how they weed people out, what they're looking to achieve. HSD is more management-focused, looking for bigger potential opportunities. They worked with MKS, for example, an established company, that needed to restructure both management and their financials. Gerry still had a lot of things to say to new ventures though.
Some common things from both VCs: Know what you're taking about. Don't lie. Don't make stuff up. Don't exaggerate - they know if something is ridiculous and they don't have the time to correct your mistakes. Timing counts for a lot - if the VC market is down, it's down and it'll be next to impossible to raise cash even for really strong companies. Companies that are trendy will get funding even when solid, un-trendy companies don't... for example, if you're in WiFi today you're golden.
All in all, a good look behind the curtain.
Porn
So, everyone is all up about porn. Is this news? Eric Raymond, who does some cool stuff but is mostly odd,
rants about Naomi Wolf's
essay where she rants about the general badness of pornography. Reading the blogs is like watching a a string of firecrackers go off... each as loud and predictable as the last one.
This summarizes some of the feedback.
Ok, so why rehash extremely old news by "internet standards" (there's an oxymoron)? Why is everyone so caught up in the banality of sexual pornography? That's what I want to know. We are surrounded by porn. As Madge says, "You're soaking in it."
What am I talking about?
- Home Porn. A lot of people like being at home. Most people's homes suck. Well, most people thing there's something they want to change at the very least. But can they? No... they don't have the money, they don't have the time, they don't have particularly good taste. So they suffer. Much like all us average looking people have to suffer having sex with one another. But why? When you can live vicariously through television! Tired of your home? Watch other people make their homes look better!
- Emotional Porn. Now I'm not going to list each and every show on TLC but it's basically the hard-core porn network of the new millennium. For everything in your life you wish was different, TLC will remember it for you wholesale.
- Time Porn. What the hell do these people do for a living? In the real world, unlike erotic pornography, people don't just start fucking at random all day long. Sadly, however, this is slightly closer to reality than Friends. Even if the characters were as rich as the actors are they wouldn't be able to slack off constantly like that. I truly believe that people are getting lazier because their internal norms of how busy they should be are being reset by constant exposure to shiftless yet seemingly well-off people on television.
- Violence Porn. I was going to link to WWE, but hey, let's call a spade a spade. Some people are a little too fixated on violence - specifically the editorial staff at CNN. Is it horrible that violence continues in a world that has millions of dollars to spend on producing, well, porn? Yup. Has everyone been touched by violence? Sure, at some level... but then again, by that argument, everyone has just about been touched by Kevin Bacon. Most people and certainly the vast, vast majority of North Americans, live non-violent lives. Yet a lot of what we see glorifies violence. I won't get all preachy here, but all I'm saying is that it's certainly as destructive as erotic pornography. Last time I checked people with violent urges generally don't have private options like masturbation. They go out and beat people up. Or do other stuff.
Did I have a point here? Oh yeah. People who rant about erotic pornography are really just trying to justify their uncontrollable urges to talk about sex some more. Its has nothing to do with the power dialectic between men and women... Naomi Wolf is obsessed with sex. As is Eric Raymond disturbingly enough. But there's plently of stuff other there just as damaging to the human psyche that everyone seems to think is just peachy keen. One word - hypocrites.
HaloScan
So I'm trying out comments by
HaloScan instead of having a spam-attracting email link. If you're curious about the MBET program and want to email me, just leave a comment and I'll try to reply to it. You can also look up Karen Gallant's email address on the
CBET web page.
Update
So my laptop is getting fixed and I've swapped temporarily to a different physical unit... swapped the hard drive. Everything's peachy, right? No! Of course not!
MS Office decided that I needed to reactivate. Fawk! I swapped the drive between two identical thinkpads... how Office can tell I have no idea. But it needs the Office CD. Which is not at school. Damn them. Damn their eyes!
Anyway, IE works, so more blogging on the way.
It's been a few days... my laptop is busted. Film at 11. Blog posts to come.
Innovation Challenge
The Innovation Challenge looks like a fun contest... too bad I just missed it. Oh well. MBET class of '05 - don't miss this one!
Testing
Today's Globe and Mail has an
article about standardized testing in grade 3. While it doesn't really apply to graduate school directly I think it's a good general commentary on testing in general. Plus I think the article is hilarious - the Ontario test would probably be too hard for most high school graduate from my memory of high school english class.
Allow me to quote in case the article disappears:
Now have a look at Ontario's test from 2000-01. It begins with a story called Round and Round Again. The story is five pages — not paragraphs, pages. Instead of multiple-choice questions, the test demands written answers, and in some cases mini-essays.
Question 1. "Round and Round Again is like a story in some ways and like a poem in some ways. Tell how it is like a story and how it is like a poem." (Reader, ask yourself honestly whether that didn't stop you for a moment.)
Question 2. "The story begins: 'Let me tell you a story — it's funny but true — how Mama changed old things into new.' Do you think this is a true story? Use examples from the story and your own ideas to explain your answer." Wow. To think that eight-year-olds all over Ontario are picking up their pencil stubs and scratching out their thoughts on the nature of truth in fiction. I'm in awe.
So, if I graduate from MBET with a 70% average, does it mean I'm not very smart or that the program is hard? Grades have to be calibrated against some standard and for a new program, there is no measure available. Measure my mark against MBA school? Unlikely. Why even give us a mark? I think that's the real question.
