The showcase for the product track packed an auditorium with 50 next-big-thing prototypes, apps, and inventions. Offerings included geolocation apps, hotel and travel services, sanitation and energy products targeted at the developing world, assistive technologies, and big data approaches to property search, programming, and human resources. More than a few of the teams looked a bit sleep-deprived, telling me they had cobbled together their platforms in a few days or weeks. Besides the Bluetooth pepper spray device (Deimos Defense) we hope we will never need, here are a few startups that stood out from the crowd.

Energy

Dragonfly Systems has patent pending tech to boost the output of solar panels. Instead of the weakest panel in a linked installation bringing all the others down, Dragonfly’s module reroutes the energy that would otherwise be lost as heat back to the grid. Each of their modules costs about $9, and Dragonfly said it brings the best of a costly parallel circuit system into the standard serial way that panels are linked. Their tech recently earned them third place in the Department of Energy FLOW clean business challenge.

Cloudfridge, from a company called Visible Energy, does what the name implies: in place of the traditional thermostat, it takes refrigeration to the cloud. A large fraction of commercial energy use goes towards refrigeration (think walk-in meat lockers). Cloudfridge uses Wi-Fi and sensors to optimize commercial-grade cooling, and has just been awarded a grant by the California Energy Commission.

Defense

One of the developers of this mine-sniffing tech is a native of Sri Lanka who was inspired to name his company after a poem by Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. Red Lotus Technologies brings the beeping handheld metal detector into the digital age by visualizing buried hazards on a tablet. This visual feedback method could also improve training for human mine detectors. Red Lotus’ tech is being trialed by the Department of Defense later this year.

Engineering

The winner of the product showcase challenge was Alice, construction engineering software supercharged with artificial intelligence. In a matter of seconds, Alice churns out project management schedules optimized by equipment, manpower, and materials availability, to enable construction projects to proceed efficiently and on-time. Alice’s assembly-line-for-buildings tech earned its team $20,000 (below).

Medical devices

Awair won the $25,000 general entrepreneurial challenge with its patient ventilation system. The gag-inducing tubes used in intensive care units to deliver air are often accompanied by heavy sedation. Awair uses topical nerve numbing so reduced or no sedation is needed, leading to improved patient comfort and faster healing times.

Patient education

Anjna is a non-profit that harnesses the natural proclivity for texting in its low-income target demographic. Their system automates appointment and medical reminders via text, and also delivers tailored medical content. Anjna took home the grand prize of $25,000 in the social entrepreneurial track.

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But a new startup called NovoEd wants to build on the massive open online course (MOOC) phenomenon with a service that puts collaboration and team learning at the center of the student experience.

Starting Monday it will open up to the general public with seven courses and, going forward, it said it plans to partner with other universities. For the past year, the startup, which is backed by investors including Costanoa Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kapor Capital, Learn Capital, Maveron, and Ulu Ventures, has been used at Stanford University.

Like Coursera and Udacity – two of the startups leading the MOOC movement – NovoEd was also launched by Stanford professors. Co-founder and CEO Amin Saberi, an associate professor of management science and engineering, said he started creating the service last year, after a colleague said she wanted to put an entrepreneurship class online but couldn’t find a service that supported her pedagogical style.

While existing MOOC services may work for classes that focus on mastery learning, like computer science, Saberi said, many teachers want a better way to teach subjects like entrepreneurship and creativity online.

In those classes, it’s not just about watching a video of professor and then doing the work alone, he said, “It’s about peer learning, social learning – it’s collaborative and experiential. In the transition from brick and mortar to online, you shouldn’t strip away these aspects, you can use the social web to amplify them.”

Over four weekends, Saberi said he and a student came up with an approach that brings social networking techniques to online learning. When students first join the course, they’re automatically assigned to small groups (of less than 10) based on their experiences and locations. As the group works together, each team member is asked to rate their peers, which informs each person’s “Team Rank” score. Later in the course, students are asked to form groups organically and those scores can help students recruit and build teams.

Because the entire experience is more social and students feel accountable to their peers, Saberi said, NovoEd sees higher engagement rates than other MOOCs. For example, in its first class, of the 80,000 students who enrolled in the class, 37,000 said they would do the group project and 10,000 ultimately finished the project and the course. Most MOOCs have a 10 percent completion rate, but NovoEd says theirs is closer to 13 percent or higher.

More importantly, the startup says, students don’t sacrifice the chance to work on the group learning, leadership and critical thinking skills that develop in offline classes.

Schools that already partner with other MOOC startups, like Coursera, Udacity or edX, might not want to evaluate and work with yet another online course provider. But Saberi said that the online higher education space is very big and schools are still in the early days of experimenting.  While the startup is exploring different revenue models, he said that one possibility is charging students for certificates, a strategy already adopted by other MOOC providers.

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That’s exactly what Alex Greene did, which I think is brilliant and gives new meaning to the phrase, “There’s an app for that.” Greene’s software isn’t something that anyone else would use, as it’s very specific. Basically, in a fun way, it explains who he is and why he wants to attend Stanford after high school.

Have a look:

Is the app glitzy and full of features? No, not at all. But in building the app, Greene would have my attention if I were on the admissions committee. Greene spent the time to add something extra to his application package while at the same time demonstrating that he’s got a passion for his intended course of study. Apparently, there really is an app for everything.

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That can’t feel good — though I’d wager those salaries are still pretty robust to begin with. But there is growing skepticism about whether a masters degree in business administration pays off the way it once did. This decline in pay hikes comes at a time when students pay 7 percent more per year for their degrees. In 2012, the fees for MBA programs were up 44 percent in real terms compared to 2005.

Whether an MBA is worth the effort and expense is a recurring debate especially among startups that value technology expertise above all else. Some of these companies (Facebook for example) are led by geeks that didn’t stick around for their undergraduate diploma, let alone a graduate degree. The topic cropped up several times at Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium 2012, in November where several startup panelists were asked whether they were hiring MBAs. (One exec with a big data startup said no, and recommended that students pursue tech skills instead. That went over like a lead balloon.)

Harvard Business School was the priciest school — costing $126,000 over two years — but its graduates command the highest pay three years after finishing at about $190,000 per year. Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business was number two. The London Business School was tops in Europe and fourth overall while the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology came in first among Asian schools.

The top ten schools are below but check out the full FT Global MBA survey.

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In a recently released report on unlicensed spectrum, wireless consultant and former Ofcom economist Richard Thanki argues that the wireless industry and its regulators have their priorities all wrong. If the idea is to build ubiquitous networks offering plentiful and cheap data, then carriers and governments should pursue the cheapest and most efficient technologies, which in most cases isn’t cellular infrastructure. That report will be one of the key topics of Center for Internet and Society conference held Wednesday at Stanford University (Our own Stacey Higginbotham will be moderating one of the panels). You can watch the live stream here.

Thanki argues that the ‘spectrum crunch’ is a misnomer. Carriers can support far more capacity if they deploy smaller cells, reusing the spectrum it already has to nth degree. What the mobile industry faces, Thanki says, is an “infrastructure crunch”: It hasn’t built out the density of cells necessary to support the demands for mobile data.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

This isn’t a new concept by any means – operators like AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint are now planning their first small cell deployments with an aim of implementing multitechnology heterogeneous networks in the future. But while their plans include Wi-Fi to varying degrees, those operators are still leaning heavily on small cells built over licensed spectrum they own and control, which to Thanki makes absolutely no sense.

“For example a cellular picocell costs from $7,500 to $15,000 whereas a much higher capacity carrier-grade Wi-Fi access point costs around $2,000,” Thanki wrote. “The cost of a Wi-Fi chipset for a consumer device is around $5, whereas 3G cellular chipsets costs around $30.

Thanki said that the insistence on licensed airwaves isn’t a function of efficiency or utility, rather it’s one of control:

Cellular operators are calling for ever more exclusive-use spectrum, in some cases up to 1,000MHz of additional bandwidth. Fulfilling these requests will lead to a substantial concentration in the ownership of the most valuable spectrum, risking both decreased competition and innovation. As part  of a balanced approach to meeting the growing demands for data, policy makers should also enable more dynamic spectrum sharing and licence-exempt access  across the spectrum.  As shown in this report, licence-exemption promotes methods of broadband delivery that are overwhelmingly more efficient in their use of spectrum than their licensed counterparts. In addition, the licence-exempt ecosystem has been notable for creating contestable and competitive markets, characterised by disruptive innovation.

Standards like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and emerging “super Wi-Fi” technologies can not only support more capacity at a much lower cost, they will be key to connecting rural and underserved areas as well as creating the Internet of Things, in which not just our phones, tablets and laptops are connected but also our homes, cars and appliances. The high costs of mobile data carriage and cellular hardware have already made Wi-Fi a much preferable alternative to mobile broadband, according to Thanki:

Another way of understanding the scale of global Wi-Fi deployments is to compare the aggregate capacity of Wi-Fi networks to global cellular networks. The aggregate capacity of the world’s Wi-Fi networks can be conservatively estimated to be well over 16,500 terabits per second. In comparison, the total capacity of the world’s 3G and 4G radio networks is probably no more 600 terabits per second.

Unlicensed spectrum is already the way the world is heading. Instead of trying to overcome their dependence on Wi-Fi and other unlicensed technologies, Thanki said, carriers and regulators need to embrace them. In his report he doesn’t say that the industry should do away with spectrum ownership completely, but he does recommend that regulators quash their bias for carrier-owned frequencies and strike a balance between licensed and unlicensed. Specifically Thanki recommends that regulators throw open TV white spaces spectrum for unlicensed use, which would trigger the next wave of wireless broadband innovation.

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mOasis is developing something called a hydrogel, which generally refers to a type of polymer that is super absorbent because it’s able to form a tight bond with water molecules. Hyrdogels are used in everything from diapers to insulation for underground cables to materials for retaining water in soil in farming.

mOasis’ hydrogel can reduce the amount and cost of water use for farming by 30 percent while increasing the biomass – or size and weight – of a crop by 30 percent, said Susanna Kass, CEO of the Mountain View-based mOasis.

The startup, founded in 2010, announced this week that it has raised a series A round from investors with the Roda Group, though Kass declined to disclose the amount. mOasis plans to use the new funding to complete the designs of its hydrogel so that it can launch its first commercial product by the end of this year.

The company’s tech development began at Stanford University with its founder and CTO, Nai Hong Li. Kass, who was the chief operation officer at smart grid company Trilliant Network and headed eBay’s international operation, joined mOasis last year.

mOasis will target California as its primary market first, before expanding to the rest of the country. California is a good proving ground for agricultural technology because the state leads the country in agricultural production and export. Water also accounts for a heavy use of the energy consumed within California. A 2005 report by the California Energy Commission found that 19 percent of the state’s electricity and about 30 percent of the natural gas went to producing, transporting and treating water for all kinds of customers, not just farmers.

A new kind of hydrogel

mOasis’s goal is to use non-toxic chemicals to create a hydrogel that is a more environmentally friendly and a more long-lasting alternative to the starch-based hydrogels that are currently available on the market for growers, Kass said. What, exactly, are those non-toxic chemicals and how they are able to be more durable – and less likely to be washed away or eaten by microbes in the soil – form the core of the company’s intellectual property and Kass wasn’t willing to divulge them.

mOasis is engineering its hydrogel to not only be able to form a tight bond with water but also with nutrients such as nitrate and potassium to promote plant growth, Kass said. So the startup could offer a hydrogel that is only for retaining water during irrigation and releasing it over time, or packing a fertilizer from another company into its hydrogel, or a third type of hydrogel that contains just  nitrate, she added.

The hydrogel could come in round, oval or other shapes, and when it’s filled with water, hydrogel particles look like the “pearls” in a bubble tea, Kass said. Farmers would put the hydrogel particles in the soil when they tilt the soil to prepare for planting. But to maximize its use – using hydrogel does add costs after all – farmers need to figure out, for example, where in the field and how deep into the soil they should place the hydrogel, Kass said. The goal is to deliver the water and nutrients for the most important growing period of a crop during each season.

The hydrogel particles “provide the moistures throughout the entire life cycle of the growth and when (a crop) needs the moisture the most to have a productive growth,” Kass said. “It’s not like we just spread them out and see how they go.”

The company is working with researchers at UC Davis, California State University at Fresno and farmers to field-test its hydrogel. Crops that the company is experimenting with include broccoli, lettuce and tomatoes. mOasis plans to outsource the production of hydrogel when it’s ready to launch it and market it to farm equipment suppliers and directly to growers.

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One of the biggest issues in healthcare is the proliferation of patient data that is kept siloed in multiple systems. If there were a way to bring that information together so it could be searched, filtered and viewed securely, there is value to insurance companies, medical researchers and potentially to patients. AgeTak’s web site sums up the problem and the opportunity:

We asked ourselves why aren’t researchers using data being collected already on 254M Americans who receive healthcare to improve human health and reduce the $2.6T a year healthcare spending? It’s because this data is spread out over many different organizations and there are concerns about privacy when you combine it to create Big Data for healthcare.

AgeTak, headquartered in Hopkins, Minn., with an office in Indore, India and a new facility in Menlo Park, Calif.,  may be a startup, but it already has software addressing this issue and has logged $3 million in sales. It also has a blue-chip partner: UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest health insurer. AgeTak is helping UnitedHealthcare combine data from multiple carriers for comparative effectiveness research.

One application that takes advantage of AgeTak’s backend service is OptumHealth’s TrendView which collects the data from multiple repositories, and aggregates it into a graphical display that lets customers see where costs are out of hand, as well as other key datapoints. Employers can run their own reports, pulling information about the most common conditions covered for employees, for example. Or they can highlight key factors in employee prescription drug costs.  Or they can cut the data to show most commonly used outpatient services used by employees and how much was paid out by which service type.

“You pull the proprietary data into one repository [an IBM Netezza appliance] — our part of the puzzle is the technology that lets you combine databases from multiple places while implementing privacy protection — that’s the big problem,” Verma said in an interview Wednesday.

“United has 36 million people’s data  – what we do is help fold that together so they can use that information to gain additional insight,” Verma said. The company works deep in the database protocols to create what he calls “cross-border middleware technology” that combines multiple the databases.

The original data stays just where it is — in those multiple systems — which is what health organizations want. AgeTak provides capabilities similar to Informatica’s ETL products with an added security component, he said. Other customers include one of the nation’s biggest retailers and a state in the northeast.

AgeTak has a poignant back-story. The company was founded in 2005 by the Verma family and has grown organically since then to 20 employees. Pratik’s father, Rakesh Verma, passed away in 2010. Quickly finishing his Ph.D. in computational chemistry at Stanford, Pratik returned to AgeTak.

Of course, AgeTak is not alone attacking this problem. Astrazenica and WellPointare also taking on this issue. There’s a lot of money at stake and competition will be fierce, but it looks like AgeTak is well on its way to building a sustainable business.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user StartAgain.

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Piazza founder and CEO Pooja Sankar

Piazza, the social network that lets college students and instructors discuss material online, has closed on $6 million in new funding.

The funding round, which serves as the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup’s Series A, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with the participation of previous investors Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures. This brings Piazza’s total outside investment to approximately $7.5 million.

Growing beyond Q&A and STEM studies

Piazza will use the money to expand its service to more schools and add more features beyond its existing Q&A format, said founder and CEO Pooja Sankar in an interview this week. Such growth initiatives mean hiring more people: Piazza currently has around 10 full-time employees, and the company expects to double its staff by the end of 2012, Sankar said.

Another priority in the months ahead will be making Piazza friendlier to disciplines beyond science, technology, engineering and math (also referred to as STEM fields.) “There’s a different structure in [humanities] majors such as the arts, literature, and history. A lot of our focus going forward will be in understanding their needs,” Sankar said.

Taking on study group snobbery

Piazza aims to provide a single place where students can ask each other and their instructors questions about their studies and homework assignments. Students can opt to post to Piazza under their real names, or anonymously — which is meant to eliminate fears of asking “a stupid question.” Professors and teaching assistants, meanwhile, can help guide the Piazza discussions and access workflow and stats on the service.

Sankar says she was inspired to create Piazza after feeling excluded from study groups while she was earning degrees in computer science from IIT Kanpur and the University of Maryland, College Park. “I noticed all my classmates were in the computer lab working together, but I was too shy to ask to be included,” Sankar said. “They would all be done with an assignment by 2 a.m., and I would be working on it until 6 a.m…. Google and other search engines on the open Internet would have been too general for my purposes and the questions I had.”

Screenshot of Piazza questions and dashboard

Once Sankar joined the working world — before founding Piazza, she held developer positions at Kosmix, Oracle, and Facebook — she discovered that many other people had similar feelings of exclusion while studying engineering. “Sheryl Sandberg held an interesting event while I was at Facebook for women in technology, and I found that many of the people there said the exact same thing: They didn’t feel they had a support group in their studies.” In mid-2009, while pursuing her MBA at Stanford University, Sankar developed a working prototype of Piazza to help solve this problem.

Big growth, but no revenue yet

During its first few months, Piazza kept a low profile, operating only at Stanford in private beta. But in December 2010, the company opened its service to all universities, and 2011 brought fairly explosive growth: Piazza started the year with 4,000 student users and ended it with more than 100,000, Sankar said. Today, Piazza counts such schools as Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas and Virginia Tech among the hundreds of schools worldwide that utilize the service.

For all that growth, however, Piazza doesn’t make any money. It doesn’t charge universities or students for access to its service, nor does it serve advertisements. Sankar tells me revenue generation will probably not be on the agenda until mid-2013. “For the next 1.5 years, our focus will probably be to continue to grow our user base and expand the product,” she said.

Piazza is by no means the only company vying to be the social network of choice for college study services. Blackboard is hugely successful with its educational software; college textbooks now often come with their own social and online components; and many universities have their own white-label services to help students keep up on coursework. But Piazza’s growth over the past year shows there are still big needs that haven’t been fulfilled by these existing offerings, and instructors and students are willing to try out a free new service. Its challenge now is proving it has staying power as a truly must-have tool for professors and universities for many semesters ahead.

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In the nearly six-minute video, Bloom outlines the three main benefits of telecommuting for both companies and employees, including reduced need for real estate, improved retention and reduced or eliminated commutes. He also addresses concerns that the study, which was conducted in China, wouldn’t apply in the US, and also discusses what sort of workers get the biggest boost from working from home. Check it out below.

Looking for more information of not only the whys of telecommuting but also the hows? on December 8th in San Francisco GigaOm’s Net:Work conference will host discussions on the rise in remote work and the benefits and challenges it brings.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ishane.

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