Welsh said academics spend their careers working on prototypes that never see the light of day. “I sure never built anything real until I moved to Google, after nearly ten years of college and grad school, and seven years as a faculty member,” he wrote. That, in his view, is a huge waste. Others agree.

In an interview with GigaOM, Gautam Shroff, VP of Tata Consultancy Services and head of the TCS Innovation Lab in Delhi, said one of tech’s top priorities should be to accelerate commercial adoption of key academic research. “Innovation is not coming from enterprise IT, it’s coming from the consumer sector and academia. Companies need to better exploit that resource,” Shroff said.

The university as VC?

Here’s Welsh’s proposal toward that end:

What I’d like to see is a university with a startup incubator attached to it, taking all of the best ideas and turning them into companies, with a large chunk of the money from successful companies feeding back into the university to fund the next round of great ideas. This could be a perpetual motion machine to drive research. Some universities have experimented with an incubator model, but I’m not aware of any cases where this resulted in a string of successful startups that funded the next round of research projects at that university.

Stanford University’s StartX program probably comes closest to what he has in mind, but he’d go further to build a university around an incubator model, where faculty members are expected to transfer technology and the “whole structure of the curriculum and research programs are centered around the idea of spinning out spinning out companies,” Welsh said via email.

For example, for all the startups coming out of MIT, that school has no formal incubator program. Instead, it licenses technologies developed there to outside companies.

In email, Welsh acknowledged the need for a firewall between pure research and projects explicitly spun out to companies. In his vision, the university acts as the venture capitalist. “But, instead of using the funds to make individuals rich, you put the money back into a pool used to fund the research activities. Only when something spins out as a company will its IP be transferred to the company.”

“My argument is not that this would replace traditional universities,” he said, “but I could see this model being very attractive to students and faculty and of course makes it possible to to make a boatload of money.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Hugo Pardo Kuklinski

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What do tech luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim, Sky Dayton, Joi Ito and Brad Garlinghouse have in common? They’re all backing Diffbot, the startup that’s building visual robot technology that parses web site content to make it easier to reuse.

Diffbot, the first company funded out of Stanford’s StartX accelerator program, makes its APIs available to users wanting to extract the components of web pages in a way that makes that content reusable and easier to mash up into apps, Diffbot founder and CEO Michael Tung told me this week. It’s identified 18 web page types and the API handles two of them — front page and article — to date and is building support for the others.  GigaOM’s Ryan Kim covered the launch of Diffbot’s first APIs last fall.

Unlocking web content

“We’ve got this great thing, the Internet, full of web pages, the problem is they’re made for human beings to read and understand, particularly people in front of a browser … but that’s inaccessible to software applications, hundreds of thousands of apps like Siri, that only work with a handful of APIs that they’re hard-coded for,” Tung said.

“Yelp is great for searching places, Flipboard is great for discovering news. Our main insight is the web can be broken down into 18 types of pages, news, people,places, photos, etc. and our goal is to teach a machine to understand all that,” Tung said. The company is working on more APIs to bring all that content into its reach.

At a recent hackathon, one participant built a web reader for his blind father using Diffbot’s APIs. “For a blind person, using the web is miserable. [Today's] screen readers read all the text starting at the top, including the nav bar and scroll down. Diffbot analyses that page, determines the title, author, text and can read it in a more natural way,” Tung said.

Diffbot can look at web pages created for human beings and analyze them visually  so the app can treat the web as a big data base. It is now processing more 100 million API calls monthly for software developers using the service for Web site mobilization, tag generation and other functions.

A-list backers

Bechtolsheim, the founder of Sun Microsystems; Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink and Boingo; Joi Ito,  director of the MIT Media Lab: Brad Garlinghouse, a former Yahoo exec and now CEO of YouSendIt (see disclosure)  all invested in this $2 million seed round as did Jonathan Heiliger, the Facebook vet now at North Bridge Venture Capital Partners.

The company is using a freemium model, encouraging developers and others to submit URLs to the system for content extraction. The service is free up to a certain number of API calls.  ”We want to apply Diffbot to the entire web, but it’s expensive to build a web crawler; we only analyze the URLs that people send us,” Tung said.

John Davi, Diffbot’s VP of product and a Cisco veteran, said the submissions in themselves will be valuable. “Our long-term vision is to avail ourselves of the cream of the content that comes out. We’ll be able to see the important pages — the articles and recipes that people submit — and we think there’s value in knowing that.”

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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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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