My last announcement is unfortunately going to be a delayed a day or two because I spent the entire weekend attending the Rice University Business Plan Competition!

My new website for the annoucement is done and online, I’m just having a few folks test it out and make sure nothing major is broken before posting it to the blog. Everyone will definitely get a chance to check it out soon though. I promise!

I the mean time, I will leave you with a few AWESOME finalists from the competition that I saw over the weekend. These are some great examples of innovation happening all around us in a down economy. These finalists raised about $800,000 in funding over the weekend (possibly more in the next few weeks depending on if the VC’s in the audience decide to invest).

80Legs

I wrote about these guys back when I attended the Web 2.0 venture forum when they were called Plura Processing. It’s the same concept – distributed computing power across the internet somewhat like SETI at home, but they’ve decided to focus specifically on companies who need to crawl the web and have renamed themselves. There were concerns about privacy which I think are largely unfounded, but these guys are going to be super successful. Check out their site to read more.

Dynamics

This team has no website and is operating in stealth mode, but their product is brilliant. It is a credit card that can CHANGE the data on the magnetic stripe at any time and has a digital display on it. It still works with existing credit card swipers so that infrastructure doesn’t need to be changed. With this technology the card could change the credit card number once per day to eliminate fraud, use a pin entry right on the card, or allow you to store ALL your credit cards in just one card, and use a button to cycle through them – the number would update on the visual display as you cycle through them. The battery would last 4 years and the demo seemed durable enough. I’m pretty sure you will start seeing these in the next 3 years or so showing up in your mailbox. I feel like I glimpsed a piece of the future.

TENDIX Development

These guys built a new engine design that could (potentially) improve on the internal combustion engine by about 50% in efficiency. Here is a rough demo of how it works. They had a cool looking physical model at the competition that made it more clear but that should give you a rough idea. It definitely turned some heads.

There were also some very impressive new XRay technologies, sound technologies, rubber manufacturing techniques, surgery tools and many more. These were a bit outside my field so I didn’t understand enough of the technology underneath to really know if it would work, but very impressive none the less.

It was incredibly inspiring to be at the conference and around so many great minds. I had to get home immediately and back to work!

I’ll have that announcement of my new project for you ASAP, promise!

Brian Armstrong

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