3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films…..
= a trip of a lifetime.

move, eat, learn

Rick Mereki : Director, producer, additional camera and editing
Tim White : DOP, producer, primary editing, sound
Andrew Lees : Actor, mover, groover

Join us 19 July 2011, 11:00am EDT for a Webinar on ZetrOZ.

Register here for the webinar: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/812392706

ZetrOZ™ is revolutionizing the ultrasound industry by introducing proprietary generator technology that is more efficient, more portable, and more economically viable than any ultrasound generator presently available. ZetrOZ’s first product is the world’s smallest ultrasound pain therapy device. This device (currently in clinical trials) addresses the demand for non-pharmaceutical alternatives to current pain treatments in the approximately $50 billion global pain management market.

ZetrOZ Management Team

The technology pioneered by ZetrOZ represents the single largest advance in ultrasound generation technology in the past three decades. It has implications in nearly every current ultrasound application and opens up entirely new possibilities for ultrasound use. For example, because of its portability, the ZetrOZ system can apply ultrasound therapy anywhere, not just in a physician’s office, and can apply that therapy more frequently and for longer periods of time because it is not dependent on office-bound equipment.

Read the ZetrOZ ultrasound TechPak here: http://www.yet2.com/app/list/techpak?id=63992&sid=20&abc=0

Register here for the webinar: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/812392706

A few key learnings?:

1. There is a lot less money chasing fewer consumer product start ups.  The West Coast VC bubble has not hit Philly yet
2. The VC’s have a high regard for sector knowledge/Rolodex, and basic ‘blocking and tackling’
3. Entrepreneurs are still not taking advantage of the Open Innovation offices in most major companies (these are your internal evangelists)

Here is a edited summary:

In total, we had executives from 3 Continents, with a large group from Japan.  Some of the companies  participating included; Canon, P&G, Agfa, AirProducts, Applied Materials, AveryDennison, Baxter, Bayer, Clorox, Colgate,  DuPont, Ecolab, GSK, Kimberly-Clark, J&J, Kisco, Mellon, Nissan, Panasonic, Parker Hannifin, P&G, Ricoh, Sony, DSM, Invista and NASA!   Add to this, we had 2 dozen selected small companies, with breakthrough technologies.

     I liked the robust Q&A after each presentation.  When Canon’s CTO, Dr. Ikoma-san, presented, 4 other CTOs asked questions.  You cant beat that.  Some themes that emerged

1. Be ready for disruptive innovation from the bottom of the pyramid
2. Regional R&D, with Global Sourcing
3. Squash the immune response – accept ‘fuzzy data’
4. Enable personal risk taking
5. Engage ‘Renewal Searches’ – at the middle and the end of R&D

We spent a lot of time discussing how to optimize deals between large and small companies.  This has been a reoccurring theme are our events.  Even when there is a great technology fit, deals take more time than both parties would like.

We also spend alot of time talking about a new Open Innovation tool – capital.  We got to hear how several large companies are employing clever strategies to create a ‘farm team’ of technology partners.  I also got to talk about how yet2ventures is growingrapidly in this area (we have 41 portfolio companies).

Panel on Deal-Making w/ P&G, Colgate, Monteco, & Newell Rubbermaid

One of my favorite presentations was a joint talk between Mike Londo, head of OI for MeadWestvaco, and John Lettow, CEO of Vorbeck.  Vorbeck is a yet2ventures portfolio company and is the global leader in graphene.  They co-presented an interesting deal, that is common through yet2.com – a Fortune 1,000 firm, with a start-up, working together to commercialize a new consumer packaging technology.  Some key learnings from their presentation:

1. Send time on the ‘want’.  This keeps interest aligned and focused.
2. Be reliable and prepared to partner
3. Spend time on ‘how the dominoes will likely fall’, be ready for scale up.

We had a lot of informal conversations.

Introducing Canon with Mobeam

Lobster

I think she is correct, when she implies that the secret to success is a higher tolerance for failure and low tolerance for not trying again…and for not achieving ultimate success.

I spent some time poking around the Delaware Division of Corporations website.  What I did not expect to find is leading indicators of economic recovery in the Annual Report.  LLC filings are up to 82,000, from 70,000 in ’09 and 81,923 in ’08.  This has good to be good news for economic recovery?

The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising.

The agency is considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise funding by tapping thousands of investors for small amounts of money, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The move is part of a larger review by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether to ease decades-old constraints on how companies can issue new shares to the public. The new funding techniques, known as “ crowd funding,” could usher in a new era of capital abundance for Silicon Valley’s startups.

The technique has spread from artists looking to fund their creative works to entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap companies without giving up control to venture capitalists. Typically, a company might raise $100,000 from an internet site where users could sign up to buy $100 worth of shares.

Crowd funding could be a cheap source of cash, competing with angel investors who specialize in giving seed rounds to start-ups. Since the amounts of money are small, the downside risk isn’t too bad for investors. But the trick will be in protecting the public from scammers who have no intention of following through on promises.

Crowd funding could also be appealing to larger companies that are popular with consumers. Those companies wouldn’t have to go through all of the onerous legal disclosures required under securities laws. Mary Schapiro, chairman of the SEC, said in a letter to a law maker on Wednesday that the agency has been discussing crowd funding with small businesses and state regulators. A petition allowing crowd funding up to $100,000 has been backed by 150 organizations and individuals.

In 1992, the SEC allowed small companies to issue shares valued as much as $1 million to ordinary investors without full disclosure of financial information and other legal limits. That effort was abandoned in 1999 because of fraud concerns.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman presented his vision today for “Web 3.0” at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin.

Hoffman, who is now a partner at Greylock Partners, sounded dismissive of most of the buzzwords that have been tied to Web 3.0 — bandwidth, “appification”, video, location, real-time, and mobile. (He said mobile is probably the most significant trend of the bunch, but it’s “kind of boring”.) Instead, he said that the next big trend in the evolution of the Web, and the next big opportunity for entrepreneurs, is data.

Specifically, he said that if Web 1.0 involved “go search, get data” and some limited interactivity; and if Web 2.0 involves “real identities” and “real relationships”, then Web 3.0 will be “real identities generating massive amounts of data.”

Of course, there are risks associated with you sharing data tied to your personal identity. (Two of the conference’s keynote speakers, 4chan founder Christopher Poole and Web video star Felicia Day, both made arguments for the benefits of anonymity.) But Hoffman said startups should just follow two important rules about data. First, “never ambush your users.” Second, “not all data is created equal.” A lot of the data that people provide online isn’t harmful, he said — what companies and users need to be really careful about is “data that is essentially equivalent to a password,” which includes things like credit card numbers.

Hoffman offered several examples of companies that are already doing interesting and useful things with social data: LinkedIn offers a new feature called Skills, where users can find people, companies, and jobs related to each skill. There’s Waze, a mobile application that uses data about your location and speed during your commute to deliver traffic advice. And there’s Redfin, an online real estate broker (which Greylock invested in) that gives homebuyers more information about their prospective homes and the housing market.

In what Hoffman acknowledged was a rather self-referential move, he proposed collecting social data about the interesting apps that can be built with social data — audience members are supposed to post their ideas on Twitter with the hashtag #web3, and his team will try to create an infographic showing off the ideas.

This was a 25% increase in the number of dollars invested over the same period last year. The money was spread of 738 deal, which is approximately the same as last year.

This represents a return to the pre-recession levels. The CB Insights “left it to others to decide whether that represents a return to normalcy or an untenable VC investment bubble.”