Día: 28 abril, 2012

See on Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

The cost of sequencing the human genome continues to fall, reaching a low of $1,000 this year due to a new microchip and machine designed by genetics company Life Technologies Corp. And unleashed by those lower costs, a small cadre of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley is exploring ways to harness this data to enable us to live longer and healthier lives.

Dr. Dietrich Stephan, a human geneticist, has spent the better part of a decade trying to achieve that goal. Until recently, it has been costly and time-consuming to map the 3 billion units of DNA, known as base-pairs, which make up the human genetic code. But now, he said, with the low cost of gene sequencing technologies, we are on the brink of banishing a one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.

“Every disease has a genetic component, and yet largely none of the available genetic information is being used today to treat patients,” he said.
Until recently, genome sequencing had been limited to a select few. According to biographer Walter Isaacson, the late Steve Jobs had his DNA sequenced for $100,000 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

To biotech entrepreneurs, bringing gene sequencing to a mass market is the most exciting development since the completion of The Human Genome Project. According to Joe Betts-Lecroix, a biophysicist and entrepreneur, that major international undertaking was expected to yield a map of the mutations that cause disease. Instead, genetics researchers found that the genes only seem to account for a tiny percentage of inherited traits and differences between a healthy and sick person.

“The Human Genome Project was a monumental achievement, but also a huge disappointment,” said Betts-Lacroix, who recently delivered a rousing TEDx SF talk on using genetics to cure aging.

“It’s not about the human genome, but more the human gene pool. To really understand what’s going on, we’ve found that we have to sequence the DNA of millions of people. This work is only beginning, and will require much lower-cost sequencing. Fortunately, that seems to be upon us,” said Betts-Lacroix.

At a select few hospitals across the country, the work has already begun. In 2010, the Children’s Hospital in Boston recruited Dr. Dietrich Stephan – a biotech entrepreneur fresh from the success of Sequoia-funded genetics startup Navigenics – to join the Gene Partnership Initiative, one of the first efforts to gather genetic information about disease. Relying on his experience as a biotech entrepreneur, Stephan developed the hospital’s first sustainable program to sequence the genomes of 100,000 young patients.

The program is still ongoing, and researchers are finding links between genes, the environment, and complex genetic disease. Already, the flood of genetic information is being used to produce drugs that are better targeted to patients. Not everyone processes medicine in the same way; by understanding patients’ genomic make-up, doctors can provide a therapy they’ll respond to best. That’s an important capability considering that this year alone, close to 800,000 people were injured or died due to adverse reactions to drugs. Leer más “Genome entrepreneurs say their data will help you live longer”

See on Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

By now, you’ve probably heard that the JOBS Act passed. The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups,” or JOBS Act, will allow entrepreneurs to crowdfund online to fund small businesses and startups. Plus, entrepreneurs can raise funds from non-accredited investors. The catch: The regulations aren’t in place until the SEC review period is up in January 2013.

While the bill itself is effective immediately, still pending are how the sections that fall under the SEC scope will be regulated. The SEC has 270 days to focus on how to regulate the offerings targeting non-accredited investors. In the meantime, entrepreneurs will be able to crowdfund only to accredited investors beginning July 4, 2012. Leer más “Entrepreneurs: What the JOBS Act means for you right now”

See on Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

There were two pretty incredible tech events in New York this Tuesday. I only managed to score an invite to one of them, the Lerer Ventures CEO summit at Citi Field. The other was Union Square Ventures more exclusive Hacking Society get together, which luckily was live streamed. It’s worth taking a look at these two gatherings to get a sense of where the Silicon Alley scene is at right now and how the most powerful players in the East Coast tech world are thinking about the future.

Lerer Venture’s CEO summit brought together the heads of all the Lerer Ventures portfolio companies, along with a number of bankers, investors and journalists. There were panels and demonstrations. The aim was to strengthen the Lerer network through an exchange ideas and best practices. How do you fire someone who’s not working out? What’s the best way to keep a company culture intact as you scale past 100 employees? Will the Mets ever win another World Series? Leer más “Entrepreneurs and investors meet in New York to organize for profit and for revolution”

See on Scoop.it – human being in – perfección

The most successful companies are ones that are never satisfied with the status quo. They are too busy looking for ways to improve their products, personnel, and experience for their customers.

There are many approaches a company can take to improve itself. For us, it meant trying something revolutionary that would arm our employees with a new skill set, bring our technical and non-technical teams closer together, and provide the entire company with a deeper understanding and appreciation of what we do.

To accomplish this, we set an ambitious goal of having all of our employees learn how to write code in 2012.

Three months ago, we announced to our 60-person company that each employee was going to learn how to code in 2012. We named the initiative the “Codinization Project”. After the initial moments of surprise in the room faded, I explained to our employees the reasons why we were undertaking this initiative.

As leading technology companies have shown time and time again, being smarter than the competition and building superior technology is the only way a company can succeed over the long term. We felt that this Codinization Project was the challenging yet necessary step we needed to build a deeper understanding across the company of the intricacies of our technology platforms and products. If we could equip our employees with a solid foundation of knowing why our products do what they do, the more intelligent they would become in every element of our business, from product planning to client communications, implementations, and customer support. Leer más “Why one company is making all its employees learn how to code”

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A big part of the tech boom in New York has been the arrival of several accelerators and incubators which are minting new classes of top tier startups. Today, in a presentation at Google Ventures in Manhattan, DreamIt Ventures announced its newest class of 15 companies for its New York Accelerator.

DreamIt Ventures is also moving into the old office of Fab.com, following in the footsteps of TechStars, who took Foursquare’s former office in search of some magic startup mojo.

Five of the companies selected are part of the DreamIt Access program, a dedicated effort to launch 15 minority-led startups over the next 12 months. Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corporation, is an investor in the DreamIt Access program. Leer más “DreamIt Ventures’ NYC accelerator announces new class, moves into Fab’s old office”

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This sponsored post is produced by MicroVentures.

The new Crowdfunding laws are about to open up angel investing to almost everyone. Gone are the days where you have to risk $50,000 or more, receive a personal invitation to invest from a friend, or only see a limited number of deals from the few available in your area. The new crowdfunding laws will go into effect sometime in 2013, but what can you do to take advantage of crowdfunding right now?

MicroVentures, a securities broker dealer, has been raising money for startups online for over a year and has helped raise millions of dollars for over 15 companies by bridging the gap between startups and potential investors. They use a model similar to crowdfunding which allows you to invest smaller sums alongside others and to invest in deals stretching from Boston to Silicon Valley.

MicroVenture helps investors learn about companies they may have never heard of, and to invest smaller sums, which is virtually unheard of with traditional investing.

The service matches companies seeking capital with investors looking to invest anywhere from $1,000 to $30,000 or more. MicroVentures helps investors with the initial due diligence process by filtering startups and then providing documents to help investors conduct their own due diligence prior to making a final investment decision.

The key to becoming a successful angel investor, of course, is to invest in the right startups. To get there, you need:

1) Good deal flow, allowing you to spot potential winners from many potential options.
2) The ability to invest in multiple deals so you gain experience.
3) A knack for spotting potentially successful companies, and more importantly, management teams and entrepreneurs that will succeed. Leer más “You can help startups raise capital at Microventures”

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On the surface, value propositions seem incredibly straightforward. I’d argue that this is why, in practice, they’re often given such short shrift.

In reality, getting a value proposition right requires some focused thinking and structured analysis, some of which I’ll preview here. Given my particular background, much of what I recommend will have a bias to B2B startups — though, in many instances, I think that you’ll find applicability to virtually any endeavor.

I recently lectured to a group of students and aspiring entrepreneurs as part of my series of talks at the Harvard Innovation Lab (feel free to presentation slides). For this particular session, we examined the DNA of a value proposition by stripping it down to its foundational elements and reassembling it, workshop-style, around a variety of new business ideas.

But before we dig in, let’s define a value proposition.

In its simplest terms, a value proposition is a positioning statement that describes for whom you do what uniquely well. It describes your target buyer, the problem you solve, and why you’re distinctly better than the alternatives. Leer más “Must-read for founders: A VC explains how to build a killer value proposition”

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By Justin Fox
Follow @foxjust

It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature.

Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries and say, “It was an actively creative society. Then the internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.”

Justin Fox

Stephenson was clearly trying to be provocative. But he’s not alone in the judgment that we’re not actually living in an era of great innovation. Economist Tyler Cowen’s e-book-turned-book, The Great Stagnation, made similar points: Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century wrought by electricity, cars, and electronic communication, the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.

Electricity is still electricity, and still generated mostly with fossil fuels; cars are better but not all that much better, and still propelled almost entirely by fossil fuels. Only communication has been truly transformed, but is the transformation really as profound as the advent of telegraphs, radio, and TV? (For much more on this, consult economist Robert J. Gordon’s productivity research.)

We have no colonies on Mars, we still can’t get by without prehistoric fuel, the dishwasher still doesn’t get all the dishes clean, and very few of us have personal jetpacks. You call this progress?

The 15 years since the internet became a major part of our lives has been marked here in the U.S. — birthplace of the internet — by mostly disappointing economic growth.

More prosaically, the 15 years since the internet Leer más “When Will This Low-Innovation Internet Era End? | Wired Opinion | Wired.com”