Venture Forum in Hoboken: Stevens’ Research Day

Stevens Institute held its Research and Entrepreneurship Day conference this past Friday.

It was a chance for this engineering school to give the public a peek at tech projects that have been incubated by professors and students with the goal to commercialize the university’s IP.

Project such as CADEyes (dimensional maps from lasers and cameras), Attila (broadband technology that grabs simultaneous bandwidth from multiple networks), and other efforts were presented during the afternoon’s Venture Forum.

I wasn’t able to make it.

However, one of the spin-off companies, called Instream Media, which developed algorithms to detect deception in text communication, has software that can be tested by anyone.

I decided to give it a try.Continue reading

NYC Next Idea

The New York City Economic Development Corporation is an agency tasked, not surprisingly, with stimulating the local economy. This includes our booming information economy, and in fact NYCEDC are the folks behind the BigApps competition.

Final presentations for another idea of theirs called, naturally, NYC Next Idea, were held this morning at Columbia University’s Shapiro Center. The six startups that made their presentations to the judges—as assortment of entrepreneurs, investors, and Steven Strauss, an NYCEDC director— had been winnowed from over 150 worldwide entries.

The common theme among this group of  university student finalists was their desire to set up shop in NYC.Continue reading