The Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch talks to Flybridge’s Michael Greeley about the growing, stimulus-fueled health care IT sector:
New efforts to overhaul the health care system is creating opportunity for a new generation of health care-IT hybrids. The federal stimulus law, which allocates $19 billion to health care-IT, combined with Congress’s efforts to provide health insurance to the uninsured, is enticing entrepreneurs and investors alike. “I have seen a marked increase in deal flow to capture the $19 billion in stimulus spending,” said Michael Greeley, general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners.
At TechTarget’s IT Knowledge Exchange, Michael Morisy summarizes the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s contributions to the IT sector:
•May 1994: Senator Kennedy becomes first U.S. senator with an official web site.
Click here for a screenshot, which illustrates nicely how far the Tubes have come. The site was hosted by MIT’s Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project, which was doing research on organizing the web’s info.
The number of Massachusetts residents working in the biotech industry has reached an all-time high, according to new data compiled by the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. The number of biotech workers in 2008 was 45,905, up just slightly from the year before, but up 42.6 percent over the past seven years.
And when politicos talk about bringing good-paying jobs to the state, this is what they mean: the average biotech salary is $89,829, a huge raise from the average salary across all sectors in Massachusetts, which is $51,151.
Massachusetts got a slightly smaller slice of the venture capital pie for the first half of 2009, winning about 18 percent of all biotech VC funding across the country, down from 20 percent last year. But Massachusetts remains the second-best funded state, after California, when it comes to VC investment in biotech. (more…)
The Army unveiled a blimp-based missile detection system developed by Raytheon yesterday. The Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Sensor (JLENS) system covers a wider area than sensors not attached to a blimp, and can detect low-flying cruise missiles, Raytheon said.
The Melrose Free Press reports Nexi, the MIT Media Lab’s emotion-displaying robot, visited the Milano Senior Center earlier this week. Media lab researchers tagged along to do research on how the robot –a white plastic, emotive head perched atop DigitRobotics UBot — interacted with the elderly.
One woman, who declined to give her name but said she’s a regular at the Milano Senior Center, said Nexi is “interesting” and that other seniors were “intrigued, like I am.”
Asked if she thought Nexi could be used as a senior’s assistant, helping out around the house, the woman said it made her think more of technologies such as artificial appendages and the robots that now do much of the work in car factories.
“To me it’s almost like something I never would have anticipated, but now I would take it very much for granted. Why not?” she said.
Hours of fun for data geeks and a potentially useful service to see how your neighborhood is doing (you can overlay wards and city-council districts), and any implications this went online only so the mayor could “wifi” his opponents who’ve been calling for something similar is, of course, completely reprehensible.
Robotic fish are not new: In 1994, MIT ocean engineers demonstrated Robotuna, a four-foot-long robotic fish. But while Robotuna had 2,843 parts controlled by six motors, the new robotic fish, each less than a foot long, are powered by a single motor and are made of fewer than 10 individual components, including a flexible, compliant body that houses all components and protects them from the environment. The motor, placed in the fish’s midsection, initiates a wave that travels along the fish’s flexible body, propelling it forward.
TipJoy and Lookery won’t be down for breakfast. TipJoy shut down last week, and its founder has since decamped for Facebook. Online advertising startup Lookery was based in San Francisco, but kept an office in Cambridge.
Vecna has developed a search and rescue robot that can lift about 500 lbs., according to CNET. The Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (BEAR) has a humanoid upper body, foldable tank treads for legs and Yogi Bear-style ears, but no hat or necktie.
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