SiliconBeat

Today marks my return to blogging here after taking a couple months off. I’m going to jump in with some thoughts from an event I attended last night at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

The event was a reception for students and alumni from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Each year, Sloan brings a large contingent of students to Silicon Valley for its “Tech Trek.” They meet with a lot of interesting local companies, soak up some Silicon Valley inspiration, and get to build their networks. I’ve been invited several times to this event, but this was the first year I was able to attend.

After some introductory remarks about the state of Sloan, Dean David Schmittlein interviewed Sloan alum Douglas Leone, a partner at Sequoia Capital. They talked about the state of Silicon Valley, what Leone has learned in his career, and advice he had for students.

What struck me was a comment Leone made later in the exchange. I don’t have the exact quote. But essentially, he said that Sequoia’s portfolio of companies is dominated by founders under the age of 30. That’s no surprise, and a trend that’s been discussed in the valley over the past decade.

But then, Leone came right out and said they focus on people under 30 because people over the age of 30 can’t innovate. If you’re over 30, you can still be in management, Leone said, as a kind of consolation. But  there it was. Read the rest of this entry »

After a nice late-summer vacation, I’m back posting on a (hopefully) daily basis. And first up is news that Technology Review, the influential magazine published by MIT, has released its annual list of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35.

At the head of this year’s class is Silicon Valley’s JB Straubel, a co-founder and chief technology officer at Tesla Motors, who was named “innovator of the year.” Straubel was recognized for his efforts to engineer the Tesla Roadster, the electric sports car.

From the press release:

“Discovering the amazing young men and women who make up the TR35 is one of the highlights of the year for us,” said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review. “The innovators on our 2008 list have made truly remarkable and valuable contributions.”

Other Bay Area Winners include:

• Jack Dorsey: Twitter.
• Seth Hallem:co-founder, president and CEO of Coverity, for developing an improved method of finding software bugs.
• Sundar Iyer: founder of Nemo Systems acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005; recognized for developing a technique that combines the benefits of SRAM (static random access memory) with DRAM (digital random access memory) to make routers faster, cheaper, and more efficient and reliable.
• Andrew Ng – Assistant professor of computer science at Stanford for founding the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project.
• Adam Smith – co-founder of Xobni for developing the plugin to Outlook that simplifies email searches and turns the inbox into a social networking tool.
• Eric Wilhelm – CEO of Instructables, a SquidLabs company (Eric is also a co-founder of SquidLabs) for the Instructables “how to” company.
• Christopher Chang – Assistant professor of chemistry at Berkeley for developing a new way of cellular imaging by changing the way biologists tag cells.
• Michelle Chang – professor of chemistry at Berkeley for research into biofuels. .
• Bilal Shafi – recognized for developing a company to commercialize technology that can help prevent congestive heart failure.

Go here for the full list.

For the past year, I’ve been fortunate to be part of a group of folks who were awarded grants from the Knight Foundation through a program known as News Challenge. My project involved researching and designing the ideal newsroom for the student newspaper at Duke University. We called it the Next Newsroom Project.

One of the terrific things about the program was getting to meet the other grantees who are truly doing some of the most advanced thinking about where journalism and technology and community are headed. This past week, many of them gathered for a conference sponsored by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend. But I’ve been following the tweets and blog posts here.

There’s a ton of blog posts floating around about the event. But a good place to start is at the IdeaLab Blog where there was some liveblogging going on during the event.

My time in the program is drawing to a close. But a lot of these folks are doing some essential work and their projects and ideas are worth following and supporting by anyone interested in how digital media can affect and enhance local communities.