July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Source: NovoEd

NovoEd students at the Open University of West Africa computer lab in Ghana.

Studying at Stanford no longer requires maintaining a near-perfect GPA while captaining three sports teams, running the high school newspaper, volunteering with a child literacy program, mastering the cello, serving as student council president, finding a solution to world hunger, and $225,000.

NovoEd launched today to make access to courses from prestigious educational institutions available to anyone, starting with Stanford.

The company started out as Venture Lab, a project run by a Stanford professor and a PhD student to make online learning more social, experiential, and interactive. Many Stanford professors were interested in taking their courses online but said presenting material in that format did not allow for the degree of interactivity they desired. Using a combination of techniques in crowdsourcing, design and analysis of reputation systems, and algorithm design, NovoEd’s platform enables collaboration and peer learning. The classes are built around team-based exercises that require students to exchange ideas, communicate, and evaluate each others’ work.

“The platform is designed to map more closely how the world really works,” CEO Amin Saberi said in a Q&A. “It promotes higher engagement and accountability among students through several social processes designed to give them a meaningful sense of activity and membership in a learning community. Together, they create a force that maintains students’ attention, interest, and engagement throughout the course.”

Saberi is an associate professor of management science and engineering. He founded Venture Lab with PhD student Farnaz Ronaghi, whose thesis focuses on creating social incentives in online learning. The first class offered through Venture Lab was titled ‘Technology Entrepreneurship’ and attracted more than 80,000 students from over 150 countries. They formed teams to execute the assigned projects, which required them to use skills in problem solving, communication, and leadership. The top 200 teams found mentors to help them develop business plans, and the top 20 teams pitched their ideas to venture capitalists. The course ultimately led to the creation of multiple companies around the world, and Saberi said a few have even received funding.

The success of Venture Lab encouraged Saberi and Ronaghi to take a leave of absence from Stanford to pursue NovoEd full-time. Starting today, Stanford University will use the platform to offer seven courses to the general public, as well as 10 private courses available only to current Stanford students. Course topics are diverse and include ‘A crash course on creativity,” “Mobile health without borders,” and “Finance.”

Online education portals like Coursera, Udacity, and Khan Academy have disrupted the world of education by making classes available to anyone with an Internet connection and the desire to learn. These Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) lower the barriers to entry and the costs for students that want to boost their resume, develop a new skill, or nurture a side interest. However, one of the disadvantages of online education is isolation — students are not learning in a classroom environment where they can come together to challenge each other, problem solve, and exchange ideas. Saberi said the ability to work with others, cultivate leadership skills, hone communication abilities, and negotiate one’s role in a team are just as important as the content itself.

“I keep telling my students that if you graduate at the age of about 25, you can expect at least four decades in the workforce and the world is going to change four or five times in that time,” he said.  “Because of this, you should not think that you can just rely on the materials that you learn today. It is more important to learn how to address and solve novel and complex problems and to collaborate and communicate effectively to implement the solutions. We need more creative thinkers, leaders, and team players.”

To achieve this goal, NovoEd has raised seed funding of an undisclosed amount from Costanoa Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kapor Capital, Learn Capital, Maveron, Ulu Ventures, and a number of angels. The startup has seven employees and is based in Menlo Park, Calif.

Photo Credit: NovoEd

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Public companies are safer, more boring, less innovative, and take fewer risks than startups, right? That’s a pretty common perception, but now we have a better picture of precisely how much less innovative companies that go public truly are: 40 percent.

Stanford professor Shai Bernstein tracked almost 2,000 technology companies that went public. After the IPO, companies became more “incremental,” less ambitious … and lost their top inventors and innovators. Mediocre performers, however, stayed behind.

The result? Companies turned to acquisitions to bring in new technologies and get fresh talent.

Bernstein tracked the companies between 1985 and 2003, recording how many patents each earned both before and after the IPO. He paired the hard analysis with an estimate of how important each patent was by checking how often it was cited in other patent applications. And then he went one step deeper by looking at companies that almost went public — planned to go public but changed their mind — and compared them to the companies that actually did conclude their IPOs.

While companies that stayed private continued innovating at the same pace, the ones that went public saw the average value of their patents decline by about 40 percent over the next five years.

In an sense, it’s obvious: The key leaders of a company benefit most from an IPO, cash out, and go elsewhere to pursue another dream. And those who fit well into the ungreased cogs of a startup don’t mesh with the bureaucracy of a public company with public responsibilities. In fact, inventors were 18 percent more likely to leave than other employees after an IPO.

But something odd happens to the ones that stay, too. Inventors that stay seem to become less innovative, as the quality and value of their patents dropped almost 50 percent after the IPO.

The lesson might seem to be: Don’t go public.

But that’s not exactly the case. In situations where the CEO and chairman of the board are the same person, innovation stayed relatively high. Bernstein attributes this to how a small leadership group with closely held authority is more able to stand firm against the quarter-by-quarter pressures from the market.

photo credit: Tony Fischer Photography via photopin cc

The Kapors, who founded the Level Playing Field Institute in 2001, got the inspiration for SMASH at a 2003 fundraiser they attended in Andover, MA, for a program called (MS)2. (MS)2 brought 100 disadvantaged African American, Latino, and Native American students from select public schools across the U.S. to highly elite prep school Phillips Academy for the summer. The program, which had changed the lives of hundreds of children, showed the students what they could achieve if they worked hard. Given the program’s results, the Kapors didn’t hesitate to make a generous donation.

But when Freada asked how many of the children were from California, she was disappointed, but not surprised, by the answer.

“After a bit of shuffling and staring at shoes,” she told me during my visit to the Stanford program in July, “I was told ‘none’ with an explanation that they had longstanding relationships with several high schools but none west of Chicago or Texas.”

California isn’t considered a priority given the popular myth that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy – a phenomenon I’ve previously highlighted. Blacks and Hispanics constitute only 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent respectively of the Valley’s computer workers — even lower than the national averages of 7.1 percent and 5.3 percent.

Mitch Kapor

The Silicon Valley elite  rarely get to interact with minorities, so stereotypes get propagated, which only serves to make the problem worse. Venture capitalists invest in people who fit the “patterns” of successful entrepreneurs that they know, and hiring managers bring in more of the same types of people they have seen achieve success — in other words: people like them.

Indeed, during the July visit, the Kapors recalled an encounter between Mitch and one of his young Latino colleagues a few years ago. He asked if Mitch invented Lotus 1-2-3 (Mitch founded Lotus Software, and it was acquired by IBM for $3.5 billion in 1995). Mitch said he was puzzled as to how someone in their 20s might know of a software program that was a blockbuster in the 1980s. He explained that his mother cleaned office buildings at night in Sacramento and would sometimes take him to work and let him play on the computer while she cleaned toilets and emptied corporate employees’ trash cans. For him, he said, this was the symbol of another life — of being successful. The interaction left Mitch in tears.

“How many Silicon Valley elites have ever had a conversation with the people who clean their offices,” he asked me, “do they see their kids as having the potential to be top talent in any field?”

This motivated the Kapors to establish SMASH — the Summer Math and Science Honors Academy at UC Berkeley. They established SMASH through the Level Playing Field Institute. While inspired by the (MS) 2 program, SMASH is not a replica of it. Instead, SMASH focuses on providing project-based learning and integrating science and math into contemporary issues rather than an intensive curriculum oriented towards standardized tests.

SMASH provides full funding for high-achieving, low-income high school students of color to spend time on campus for five weeks during the summers after their 9th, 10th, and 11th grade years. They are immersed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), conduct experiments and participate in group discussions. They are taught by leading scholars and provided access to the most advanced research equipment. Then they are provided with year-round academic support, including SAT prep, college counseling, and other support to ensure their academic success.

The results speak for themselves: 100 percent of SMASH graduates have been accepted to competitive four-year colleges, and the overwhelming majority persist as STEM majors, according to Freada. Kids from under-performing public schools who are eligible for free lunches have often never heard of MIT or Middlebury or Morehouse, but those are campuses now populated with SMASH alumni.

SMASH has grown since 2004 from one site at UC Berkeley to four sites throughout the state, including the one at Stanford. Another site is opening at the University of Chicago in 2013, and the program’s organizers are in discussions with 18 other campuses to expand nationally. The goal? Twenty-five sites by 2020.

The biggest limiting factor is funding. The program is expensive, and the universities — even those with large endowments, such as Stanford — still charge the startup nonprofit full price for room and board. It’s the single, greatest line item in the SMASH budget.

SMASH has a rigorous and evolving curriculum, experiments with blended learning, including MySciHigh, which won first place at a recent Startup Weekend. The program also has a detailed operations manual for launching new sites. A STEM teacher training academy is also in its sights as the program explores how to scale its success.

When I visited SMASH at Stanford in July and talked to many of the participating students. They called the program “life-changing” and talked about how it made them determined to become an engineer or a scientist.

Maria Castillo, a senior from Richmond High in California said the program inspired her to become an engineer so she could help solve the energy crisis. SMASH, she said, “inspired me to speak my opinions no matter what other people think.”

Hi Vo, a senior at Del Mar High School in San Jose, gushed about how excited he was about learning math and science because of the great scientists he met at Stanford. Daryle Alums, a student at KIPP King Collegiate in San Lorenzo, Calif., said SMASH got him interested in computer science and that he had started a company with his friends.

I have little doubt that these students’ excitement and the sense of hope they developed is infectious. We just need thousands more like them returning to schools around the country to inspire the others.

[Editor's note: A version of this story previously appeared on WashingtonPost.com]

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations.

Using a 128-node computing cluster, a team of scientists led by Stanford professor Markus Covert incorporated data from more than 900 scientific papers and 1,900 experiments to simulate every molecular interaction and the effects of all 525 genes of the smallest known free-living bacterium: the parasite Mycoplasma genitalium.

And, yes, that bacteria lives right where its name suggests.

Simulating a single cell division takes about 10 hours, according to Covert, and generates half a gigabyte of data. Not exactly big data, but then it is a very small organism. Adding more computing power should shorten the simulation time.

But the reason for building a bacterium in emulation?

“You don’t really understand how something works until you can reproduce it yourself,” says graduate student  and team member Jayodita Sanghvi.

Now that an entire organism has been simulated, researchers believe that Bio-CAD (computer-aided-design) will take a big leap forward. From understanding genes in isolation the scientists look forward to being able to study their interactions, which is an essential step to understanding key issues in health, disease, and growth.

As Max McClure wrote in a story published by Stanford’s news service:

CAD – computer-aided design – has revolutionized fields from aeronautics to civil engineering by drastically reducing the trial-and-error involved in design. But our incomplete understanding of even the simplest biological systems has meant that CAD hasn’t yet found a place in bioengineering.

The new simulation will help scientists understand biology better, and understand cells better, the researchers say. And it will help both speed up research and enable testing that just isn’t possible otherwise.

“If you use a model to guide your experiments, you’re going to discover things faster. We’ve shown that time and time again,” said team leader Covert.

But don’t get your hopes up too high for personalized medicine or helpful simulations of how medication will affect you before you actually have to take it. A fully simulated human being is still a long way off.

Image credit: Image Wizard/ShutterStock, Victor Habbick/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Silicon Valley’s brightest young minds will vie for $150,000 in rewards as part of a full-day entrepreneurial challenge at Stanford University this Tuesday.

The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES), the student-run organization behind the event, has birthed a number of successful companies in its fifteen-year history, notably Kiva, CourseRank and Togetherville. BASES is a hotbed of social entrepreneurship, which is the practice of using business and business process to drive social or environmental change.

BASES events are typically well-attended by entrepreneurs and investors in search of the next big idea. This year saw an upswing in international interest with 1,000 applications pouring in from around the world. The event is supported by the who’s who of Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“We see the BASES Finale as a mecca for entrepreneurship, bringing together the best of Stanford with the best of the valley celebrating the next generation of entrepreneurs,” said Kevin Xu, Chief Branding Officer of the BASES Finale.

Described by organizers as a “student fair on steroids”, the BASES finale is split into four funding competitions: the E-Challenge, Social E-Challenge, Product Showcase and Forge Program. The winners will be announced starting at 5pm, following a keynote speech from Sequoia’s Alfred Lin.

“Stanford is one of the most entrepreneurial universities in the world and BASES is at its epicenter. Many of the most important technology companies were born out of Stanford — including Cisco, Google, Network Appliance, NVIDIA, PayPal, and Yahoo,” said Lin, the former COO/ CFO of Zappos. “We look forward to partnering with many more of them in the years ahead.”

The event takes place from 10:00AM to 7:00PM at the Arrilaga Alumni Center. To view the agenda, click here. To register and secure a free ticket, go to 150kfinale.eventbrite.com.

Stanford campus image via ShutterStock

Thirty-five years of Apple memorabilia make up a museum-like collection of company archives that are hidden away in an off-campus Stanford University warehouse.

Stanford’s Apple Collection takes up more than 600 feet of shelf space in a climate-controlled facility at a location kept secret from the public, said the Associated Press, which paid a visit to the archives.

Should you ever be let in — and one can only dream at this point — you would find a company video of co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs talking about the Apple I computer, the iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad, a video interview of Wozniak recounting the story behind the company’s name, early financial reports, old letters and thousands of Douglas Menuez photographs from his time chronicling Jobs’ stretch at NeXT.

The story, according to the Associated Press report, is that Apple ditched its plans for a corporate museum in 1997, shortly after Jobs’ return as CEO, and instead donated an expansive collection of documents, books, photos, software, videos and early magazine and TV ads to Stanford for preservation.

The archives, part of Stanford’s larger Silicon Valley Archives collection, continue to be replenished by the ongoing donations of former Apple employees, past executives and company fans.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce.com has elevated Executive Vice President George Hu to the role of chief operating officer, the company announced today.

Salesforce.com did not have a COO (in name at least) previously, which is a little peculiar for such a high-profile company. Hu will still report directly to larger-than-life Salesforce CEO and chairman Marc Benioff. (On a related note, Salesforce.com’s general manager and executive vice president Byron Sebastian will be speaking at CloudBeat 2011, VentureBeat’s upcoming cloud technology conference.)

“George’s leadership over the past nine years has been key to driving salesforce.com’s growth to over a $2 billion run rate,” said Benioff, in a statement. “I look forward to seeing his vision and leadership as COO scale our growth toward $10 billion and beyond.”

Hu has worked for Salesforce.com since 2002 and has served in a variety of roles that have helped him prepare for the COO position. Previously, Hu was VP of product marketing, senior VP of applications, executive VP of products, and the company’s chief marketing officer. In the COO role, he will help manage all functions of the company, including technology, facilities, security, marketing and development.

Before Salesforce.com, Hu worked in consulting roles for Boston Consulting Group and North Point Communications. In terms of education, Hu has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford.

CloudBeat 2011 takes place November 30 – December 1 at Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. These case studies will highlight the core components of the cloud revolution: security, collaboration, analytics, mobile usage, increased productivity, and integration. Join over 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Tickets are limited!

We have teamed up with Stanford’s StartX, a heralded startup accelerator for Stanford student entrepreneurs to discover technologies that only still-growing brains can think up.

Students will have an opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges from venture capital firm Accel Partners and communications giant Alcatel-Lucent. The judges will provide feedback on how to grow the presenter’s innovation right there at the meeting. The most compelling of these presentations will be offered a spot at the DEMO conference.

Only 30 companies who apply will be chosen to pitch in Stanford, so apply now! Deadline to apply is July 15, 2011.

We will follow up with details on exact location and timing if you are selected.

Excited to see what the last generation is innovating for next generation technology.

Got six minutes to launch your game changer? We’re finding top shelf thinkers from around the world ready to showcase their products at DEMO Fall, on the same stage where companies like Netscape, TiVo, E-Trade, and Java got their start. After you sweat out your six minutes of fame, head off the the DEMO pavilion to chat with potential investors, partners and show off the goods.  Apply for your spot here. Demo Fall 2011 is located at the Hyatt Regency in Silicon Valley, September 12-14.

Last week, I made a call to entrepreneurs that it is time to change the boardroom structure. Startups, after all, have evolved over the past 20 years, but boardrooms haven’t.

Startups now understand what they should be doing in their early formative days is search for a business model. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. And to track their progress, startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas.

Yet even with all these tools, early stage startups still need to physically meet with advisors and investors. That’s great if you can get it.  But what if you can’t?

What’s missing is a way to communicate all this complex information and get feedback and guidance for startups that cannot get advice in a formal board meeting.

We propose that early stage startups communicate in a way that didn’t exist in the 20^th century: Online – collaboratively through blogs.

We suggest that the founders/CEO invest 1 hour a week providing advisors and investors with “Continuous Information Access” by blogging and discussing their progress online in their startup’s search for a business model.

In essence, they would:

• Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative
• Keep score of the strategy changes with the Business Model Canvas
• Comment/Dialog with advisors and investors on a near-real-time basis

What Does this Change?
1) Structure. Founders operate in a chaotic regime. So it’s helpful to have a structure that helps “search” for a business model. The “boardroom as bits” uses Customer Development as the process for the search, and the business model canvas as the scorecard to keep track of the progress, while providing a common language for the discussion.

This approach offers VC’s and Angels a semi-formal framework for measuring progress and offering their guidance in the “search”
 for a business model. It turns ad hoc startups into strategy-driven startups.

2) Asynchronous Updates. Interaction with advisors and board members can now be decoupled from the once every six weeks “big event” (aka the board meeting). Now, as soon as the founders post an update, everyone is notified. Comments, help, suggestions and conversation can happen 24/7. For startups with formal boards, it makes it easy to implement, track, and follow-up board meeting outcomes.

Monitoring and guiding a small angel investment no longer requires the calculus to decide whether the investment is worth a board commitment. It potentially encourages investors who would invest only if they had more visibility but where the small number of dollars doesn’t justify the time commitment.

A board as bits ends the repetition of multiple investor coffees. It’s highly time-efficient for investor and founder alike.

3) Coaching. This approach allows real-time monitoring of a startup’s progress and zero-lag for coaching and course-correction.  It’s not just a way to see how they’re doing. It also provides visibility for a deep look at their data over time and facilitates delivery of feedback and advice.

4) Geography. When the boardroom is bits, angel-funded startups can get experienced advice – independent of geography. An angel investor or VC can multiply their reach and/or depth. In the process it reduces some of the constraints of distance as a barrier to investment.

Imagine if a VC took $4 million (an average Series A investment) and instead spread it across 40 deals at $100K each in a city with a great outward-facing technology university outside of Silicon Valley. In the past they had no way to monitor and manage these investments. Now they can. The result: An instant technology cluster with equity at a fraction of Silicon Valley prices.  It might be possible to create Virtual Valley Ventures.

At Stanford our Lean Launchpad class ran an experiment that showed when “the boardroom is bits” can make a radical difference in the outcome of an early stage startup.

Our students used Customer Development as the process to search for a business model. They used a blog to record their customer learning, and their progress and issues. The blog became a narrative of the search by posting customer interviews, surveys, videos, and prototypes. They used the Business Model Canvas as a scorekeeping device to chart their progress. The result invited comment from their “board” of the teaching team.

We were able to give them near real-time feedback as they posted their results. If we had been a board rather than a teaching team we would have added physical reality checks with Skype and/or face-to-face meetings.

While this worked in the classroom, would it work in the real world? I thought this idea was crazy enough to bounce off five experienced Silicon Valley VC’s. I was surprised at the reaction – all of them want to experiment with it.

Jon Feiber at MDV is going to try investing in startups emerging from Universities with great engineering schools outside of Silicon Valley that have entrepreneurship programs, but minimal venture capital infrastructure. Kathryn Gould of Foundation Capital and Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate also want to try it.

Shawn Carolan of Menlo Ventures not only thought the idea had merit but seed-funded the LeanLaunchLab, a startup building software to automate and structure this process. (More than 700 startups signed up for the LeanLaunchLab software the day it was first demo’d.) Other entrepreneurs think this is an idea whose time has come and are also building software to manage this process. Citrix thought this was such a good idea that their Startup Accelerator has offered to provide GoToMeeting and GoToMeeting HD Faces free to participating VC’s and startups.

For startups with traditional boards, I am not suggesting replacing the board meeting – just augmenting it with a more formal, interactive and responsive structure to help guide the search for the business model. There’s immense value in face-to-face interaction. You can’t replace body language.

But for Angel-funded companies I am proposing that a “board meeting in bits” can dramatically change the odds of success. Not only does this approach provide a way for founders to “show your work” to potential and current investors and advisors, but also it helps expand opportunities to attract investors from outside the local area.

The startup has partnered with 20 universities for its launch, out of which it is launching pages for Harvard, Stanford, and Syracuse today, with the rest likely to follow in the coming weeks. Representatives or eager students from universities not currently in the program can apply to join.

Once equipped with a page, universities can have students “follow” their accounts, and use the page to broadcast messages and activities. Students and staff, meanwhile, can share and discover “Tips” when they check-in — information on buildings, landmarks, traditions, secrets, shortcuts around campus, etc. — and earn badges and discounts. For example, the campus bookstore may choose to run a special for people who hold the “Bookworm” badge, earned by checking in frequently to the library.

The geolocation service already has somewhat of a reputation for its young, urban “hipster” demographic, and this is a sensible move to reach out to a broader, yet similarly poised audience. College students may not be based in as urban a location as the service has targeted to date, but there are lots of them, and you can bet they want to keep up with the latest new thing in town as much as anyone else.

Universities have been a great traction point for startups looking to gain critical mass. Lest we forget, they were almost single-handedly responsible for Facebook’s emergence. So it’s not surprising to see Foursquare seek out that direction.

Foursquare is based in New York and was founded in 2008 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. The company raised $20 million back in July from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our Needle in the Haystack discovery business idea competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click on this link.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

A startup team made up solely of college students may find themselves making tons of rookie mistakes, but a company founded by veterans may be trapped in yesterday’s thinking. And any company made up solely of either demographic has virtually no chance of getting VC money. That’s why Heidi Roizen, managing director for Mobius Venture Capital, says the best way to turn heads is to have a combination of both in this older, but still relevant entrepreneur thought leader lecture given at Stanford University.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/swf/player-ec.swf

Held at Stanford, the competition provided great insight on the interests of some of Silicon Valley’s future business leaders. More importantly, it provided an opportunity for Stanford students to practice pitching to VCs, and get consideration for CRV’s Quickstart program, which provides $250,000 in seed money for promising ideas.

Sixty students made pitches of 60 seconds — for a total of one hour — evenly divided between first and second year members of Stanford’s MBA program, with a couple of computer science students thrown in. See the pie chart below for the distribution of students’ interest areas. You will see that the general category of digital media/advertising ideas makes up the lion’s share.

The panel of four selected what they thought were the best five ideas — with a lot of weight given to the presentation style, obviously, given the short pitch time. The top three then pitched the whole group of students, with a clap-o-meter determining who came in first place. Congrats to Ned Tozun, a second-year MBA student who took the honors (pictured above). He took home a $2000 prize for his idea to provide a LED-based source of light to replace kerosene in the developing world.

Here are the other winners:
2nd: Rohin Dhar, $1000 prize. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Digital media/advertising.
3rd: Jeff Piper, $1000 prize. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Financial services.
4th: Vanessa Stanley-Miller. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Digital media/advertising.
4th: (tied) Ben Savage. 2nd year MBA student. Category: Mobile (gaming).
Finally, thanks to 2nd-year MBA student, John Anderson, for helping coordinate the event.

CRV’s partners, Susan Wu, Bill Tai, and George Zachary, told VentureBeat they may change the format of the competition going forward, to provide more feedback to the students. They plan Berkeley next.