Charles River neighbors Harvard and MIT are working together on technology to power free, online coursework for students. The two schools will share ownership of the new $60 million edX initiative but the underlying MITx technology will be open-sourced for use by other schools. Read More »
Clarence Wooten had some words of wisdom for MIT Sloan School of Management grad students who might go the startup route. Wooten-backed startups include Image Cafe which debuted in 1998 and was bought for $23 million seven months later by Network Solutions/Verisign. Read More »
The chip industry has a problem — can looking to the architecture of the web help? The tradeoff between faster performance and power consumption has led the chip industry to add more and more cores to each chip to keep delivering more speed and features to … Read More »
We’ve seen 3-D printers that create previously designed objects, but what about smart grains of sand that self-replicate things? It’s not science fiction: MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is demonstrating intelligent, 1 cm cubes that can assume any shape through magnetism principles and algorithms. Read More »
Hot Berlin startup Amen has got plenty of hype for building a simple app that lets you say if things are good or bad. But fresh money and major new additions — including deep integration with Facebook and iTunes — could make it a whole lot … Read More »
MIT next spring will launch a pilot of MITx online-only courses geared to reach prospective learners around the world. And, the university plans to open source the underlying technology coursework infrastructure for use by other educational institutions. Read More »
Most venture capitalists obsess on the latest shiny object for youngish consumers. That’s remarkably shortsighted. The aging U.S. population is a potential gold mine for entrepreneurs that can build technologies to help this huge population remain active and stay in their homes as long as possible. Read More »
The latest version of Affectiva’s mood-sensing wristband combines its sensor with Bluetooth so the device can broadcast your emotions to a web site. Granted, the $2,000 sensor is used primarily in research and certain medical situations, but it doesn’t have to stop there. Read More »
Exclusive: There are lots of great summer internships at Silicon Valley startups. But top engineering students often pass them up for the money and name recognition companies like Google can provide. So Kleiner Perkins has partnered with InternMatch to attract top-flight students to its portfolio companies. … Read More »
Several of the young entrepreneurs at this week’s MIT Emtech 2011 conference were executives from established companies but many more were academic researchers who said the divide between “pure research” and commercialization is bigger than ever as the lengthy recession persists. Read More »
Most of the entrepreneurial pitches this week at MIT’s Emtech 2011 focused on elevating high-tech for markets that are already pretty tech saturated. Folks talked about smart vehicular networks that will allow cars to share information. Two entrepreneurs went the other way. Read More »
Imagine if your car could know about a huge pothole just ahead. Or a traffic snarl. Or both. Would that be of interest to you? USC researcher Bhaskar Krishnamachari is working to enable a peer-to-peer network of “smart” cars that share information as they travel. Read More »
More Must Reads
The Jetson’s Rosie the Robot is not reality yet, but new-age robots are getting smarter and more adaptive given new toolsets, artifiical intelligence and good old-fashioned training, according to robotics experts at the Emtech 2011 conference at MIT this week. Read More »
There’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation, but that hasn’t stopped businesses and technologists from bridging the distance that separates us using telephones, video conferencing, fancy robots, and now wormholes, to give the illusion of being there. So what do these services need to succeed? Read More »
Thanks to the rating systems in place on such popular websites as Yelp, Amazon and eBay, many people are comfortable evaluating things in absolute terms: a two-star restaurant, a B movie and so on. But new MIT research says this approach is fundamentally flawed. Read More »
The Knight Foundation says it wants to help reinvent local and community-level media through the Center for Civic Media at MIT — the non-profit entity just announced new funding for the center, and a new director in online media pioneer and long-time Harvard University fellow Ethan … Read More »
The “uncanny valley”– the quality of an animation or robot looking close to, but not exactly like, real life — may be set to get even smaller. MIT researchers have developed new computing techniques for reproducing the slight natural blur of moving objects in animation. Read More »
MIT’s Media Lab is a hothouse of talent that helped usher in the digital revolution of the 1990s — but as the Internet has become dominated by large companies, its influence has waned. Now incoming director Joi Ito must help it regain its momentum. Read More »
People are complicated organisms that have evolved systems of feedback and governance to ensure our minds and out bodies perform well. As computers gain more cores, MIT scientists are building an operating system to create a similar system of feedback to ensure the machine performs well. … Read More »
MIT’s Technology Review magazine has released its annual list of the top young innovators under 35, a group that includes sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd, Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, telecom scientist Gabriel Charlet and David Kobia, co-founder of web-based emergency services network Ushahidi. Read More »
While the web is moving to video from text and is increasingly becoming more personal, we’re still viewing it on a flat screen — sometimes two or three flat screens. What if we could also interact with what we’re looking at, and in 3-D? Read More »
MIT’s Media Lab today showed off a thin LCD screen that can respond to both touch and gestures. They call it a bidirectional screen, or BiDiScreen for short. The tech on display uses LCDs with built-in optics and new algorithms to allow for gesture control. Read More »
For many people, it’d be difficult to find a relationship between farmers in Zacatecas, Mexico and mobile technology. But students at MIT’s NextLab found a way to help farmers there price their crops by connecting them with current market rates using mobile technology. NextLab … Read More »
When it comes to all the gadget-y things that now fill up our world — from computers to mobile phones — we should thank Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, the inventors of the integrated circuit. Fifty years ago today, while all of his colleagues were … Read More »
All tech startups need just a few ingredients to germinate: sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to encourage founders to get off their duffs. Contrary to current wisdom, these ingredients exist in many communities … Read More »
In honor of Earth Day, we’re borrowing from our friends over at Earth2Tech in order to celebrate the infrastructure, gadgets and web sites that can help GigaOMers go green. Whether it’s chips that make your servers run cooler or web sites that will help … Read More »
Boeing, the big airplane maker is rethinking its in-flight WiFi access service, Connexion. According to The Wall Street Journal, the service is unprofitable and as a result has been on the block, but has no takers. The company is said to have spent close to a … Read More »
Verizon is doing its very best to roll out IPTV services on its spanking new FIOS network. Its mega-billion dollar investment could come cropper, if the company fails to get franchisee licenses from various different municipalities. So far, local governments have not played ball, but Verizon … Read More »
Mark Evans hopes Vonage’s marketing campaign is going to kickstart the VoIP business in Canada, but is not that optimistic. Local calls are really cheap he says. NRI/Michael Sohn Associates expects there will be 1.1 million residential households using an Internet telephony service by 2007. … Read More »
We have all seen Mirra, the connected storage drive, and some of us have liked it as well. And that despite the fact that it works only with Windows. I complained about this to the company’s senior executives recently. Actually badgered them about why … Read More »
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