Noted: Silatronix got its start in Venture Investors’ Venture Igniter program, which was formed to encourage and support academic and student-led start-ups from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The company is based on technology developed by chemists at UW-Madison, Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., and Quallion LLC, a Palo Alto, Calif., battery maker.
Katie Brenner knows how exasperating it can be for women who are struggling to get pregnant.
Mackie, a UW-Madison professor emeritus of medical physics and engineering physics and director emeritus of medical engineering at the Morgridge Institute for Research, is co-founder of two of the finalists in this year’s contest, Asto CT and Linectra, as well as one of last year’s finalists, OnLume.
Schools like Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin are already piloting VR technology in specific majors to measure student experience outcomes, and while some experts believe the industry for “immersive experiences” will grow to be as big as the mobile revolution, cost and pairing between technology and mission may settle VR to be an enhanced professional training resource for students in STEM and military disciplines.
When a man drowned during a triathlon that Pat Hughes was also competing in several years ago, it was a life-changing moment for the shaken Hughes.“It seemed like a very preventable tragedy,” said Hughes, a 2012 Wisconsin School of Business graduate.
Lynx Biosciences, a business aiming to refine treatment decisions for multiple myeloma, took the life science prize at the Governor’s Business Plan Contest during the 14th annual Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference in Madison.
Alex Kubicek, a UW-Madison grad, moved Understory back to Madison weeks ago after developing it with his team in Boston. The company’s hardware tracks weather events to provide better data for companies, and it’s returned after closing a $7.5 million fundraising round that included Monsanto’s venture capital arm. The lead investor, Wisconsin fund 4490 Ventures, had asked Kubicek whether they’d be willing to come back to Madison.
“The extent to which parents are tied up with these devices in ways that disrupt the interactions with the child has potential for a far bigger impact,” says Heather Kirkorian, who heads up the Cognitive Development & Media Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If I’m on the floor with a child but checking my phone every five minutes, what message does that send?”
Fuzzing’s method of using random data tweaks to dig up bugs was itself an accident. In 1987, University of Wisconsin at Madison professor Barton Miller was trying to use the desktop VAX computer in his office via a terminal in his home. But he was connecting to that UNIX machine over a phone line using an old-fashioned modem without error correction, and a thunderstorm kept introducing noise into the commands he was typing.
What if the power of the wind could help villagers in rural India stay in touch via cellphone?
In a purple building on the UW-Madison campus that once housed Luther’s Blues night club, innovative ideas get a push forward toward the marketplace.
Noted: After graduating from Monroe High School in 2002, and later UW-Madison, Jeremy Beach took a job as a statistician with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Portland, Oregon, a region of the country bursting with craft beer. In 2009 he returned to UW-Madison for a master’s degree in rural sociology and then in 2011 returned to the USDA but at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. where he was a survey methodologist.
Noted: One might not expect to see an innovative gaming company in Wisconsin, but that’s exactly where you can find PerBlue. It grew from its roots on the UW-Madison campus to become the first mobile gamer to use GPS technology for a location-based, role-playing game.
Area farmers didn’t have to replant corn fields that were touched by frost just after the plants emerged from the soil earlier this month, but their ability to fully recover is dependent on getting timely rain at least through the early summer, a UW-Extension crops and soils specialist said.
Noted: The company already has scored two significant cash awards on the UW-Madison campus. WeightUp won the Perkins Coie Innovative Minds Challenge, with an $11,000 prize, beating out seven contenders.
world’s fastest stretchable, wearable circuit that could become the foundation for the next generation of wearable gadgets.This ‘smart skin’ could do everything from monitor your vitals, control your music, track your runs or even let you control your own home – all wirelessly.
Noted: It was through Games+Learning+Society and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory — a University of Wisconsin online learning research group — that Norton, a young developer and designer, ended up meeting the computer scientists Dan White and Alex Stone. And it was thanks to their exposure to the growing body of learning games scholarship that the three decided to start a for-profit gaming company.
Make no mistake, today’s wearables are clever pieces of kit. But they can be bulky and restricted by the devices they must be tethered to. This has led engineers to create thinner and more powerful pieces of wearable technology that can be applied directly to the skin. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma, have developed “the world’s fastest stretchable, wearable integrated circuits,” that could let hospitals apply a temporary tattoo and remove the need for wires and clips.
In the age of the Internet, you can do almost anything wirelessly. This is especially intriguing in the health care field where professionals can monitor the data of patients without having to be in the room.
Expanding its research collaboration with the University of Wisconsin, Johnson Controls Inc. is funding projects in Madison that will research improving fuel efficiency for both start-stop and battery-electric vehicles.
We accept that to err is human. Not so with machines. When our electronic counterparts fail us—whether its baggage screening software or the latest artificial intelligence—we are quick to shun their advice in the future. That has big implications as machines infiltrate the workplace, offering services once provided by human colleagues.University of Wisconsin researchers recently sought to test how we might get along with our future AI coworkers.
Noted: Retailers are attempting to reverse the trend of showrooming and brick and mortar companies have fought back by offering to match prices, said Neeraj Arora, a marketing professor at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Twenty years after UW-Madison scientist Jamie Thomson began work to isolate human embryonic stems, research has advanced so far that the field is now poised to boom and create Wisconsin companies that could rival Epic, the Verona-based electronic healthcare records company with more than 9,000 employees.
A powerful and inexpensive technique for rewriting snippets of DNA — known as CRISPR-Cas9 — has two research institutions locked in a bitter patent battle. On one side is UC Berkeley, where faculty first reported using the gene-editing technology in 2012, on the other, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where faculty won a special expedited patent for the technique in 2014.
A modern-day “Romeo and Juliet”- romance blossomed on the University of Wisconsin campus when an unsuspecting guy wearing a Vikings jersey caught the eye of a female student on the university’s Snapchat story.
Noted: He also co-founded Sharendipity, a programming environment for non-programmers that failed in the recession in 2009; UltraVisual Medical Systems, a radiology imaging system maker that merged with another start-up and had a $400 million public offering in 2005; and Geometrics, which commercialized radiation treatment planning software Gehring developed at UW-Madison and is now owned by Philips.
Noted: The company is among a growing number of start-ups bringing technological innovations to the grocery industry. Fetch was founded in 2013 by Wes Schroll, who was a University of Wisconsin-Madison student at the time.
It would be a mistake to believe higher education’s financial woes in Wisconsin began the day Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011.
MADISON — Wisconsin scientists have launched an ambitious new plan to catalog wild animals using thousands of trail cameras, a project that could help answer just how many deer and other creatures roam the state.
Noted: At the level of state government alone, the nonpartisan Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau found that nearly 2,000 employees would be affected by the changes, increasing costs for state taxpayers by as much as $13.7 million per year. That estimate didn’t include potential costs for local governments or schools, the UW System, the Legislature or the state courts system.
In a letter to U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, UW System President Ray Cross said the rules would affect more than 5,000 UW employees in jobs such as student life, development, administration and academic affairs.
Wisconsin is home to numerous species of wild animals, although getting a handle on just how many can often prove quite difficult. A joint effort between University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and the state Department of Natural Resources could take some of the guesswork out of that process, with members of the public also lending a hand.
Noted: Silatronix was founded by two UW-Madison chemistry professors, Robert Hamers and Robert West, after a hallway conversation in which the “two Bobs” sought to literally change the world.
“The safety issues are very real,” Hamers said recently in an interview in the company’s laboratory on the city’s east side, near the Madison College campus. “Our goal is to make lithium ion batteries perform better and be safer, and the way we did that is by inventing a new liquid called an electrolyte. It’s one of the three major components of the lithium ion battery.”
Continuing to cut higher education funding will hurt Wisconsin’s economy by reducing research and innovation on college campuses, according to a new report from the state organization that advises lawmakers on science and technology.
Noted: Insulete was founded and is headed by Hans Solinger, a well-known transplant surgeon and University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who has helped bring pharmaceutical drugs to market. Sollinger and Tausif Alam, Insulete’s chief financial officer, discovered and patented a DNA sequence that is glucose responsive and promotes the activation of the human insulin gene.
Weber-Stephen Products LLC, the suburban Chicago-based grill manufacturer, said Tuesday it is introducing a line of customized Wisconsin Badger grills designed for the tailgating market.
Noted: SmartUQ was founded by Peter Qian, a statistics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, after he was contacted by several large companies looking for a tool to help them accelerate simulations.
Noted: Walker also is set to participate in the 2016 CIGAL Dairy Trade Show, which focuses on the dairy production sector and draws exhibitors from throughout Mexico and the United States, the governor’s office said. The Dairy Trade Show will be held in Guadalajara June 15-17, and Walker will be joined by a delegation that includes Wisconsin businesses, University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-River Falls and DATCP.
The Small Business Development Center at the UW-Madison Wisconsin School of Business is accepting nominations for the 2016 Dane County Small Business Awards.
Erik Iverson, who takes the helm July 1 at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, will make his first public appearance in the state at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference in June.
The way you manage your money could be affected by your ability to find a partner.
The feat of correcting vision with a tiny, permeable, and tear-friendly contact lens is impressive enough, but soon that will be only the beginning. Scientists are thinking bigger about what can fit in a small lens — and contacts are about to get a whole lot smarter.
BELOIT, Wis. — Three sophomore students at Beloit Memorial High School will receive full-tuition scholarships to the UW Madison Business School upon graduation as part of the Business Emerging Leaders Program.
Noted: Soon after that, with support from fellow students and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Polynice created an initiative that still is helping families become self-sufficient in Haiti more than six years later.
Wollersheim Winery will be releasing a new wine Wednesday in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison fermentation sciences program, according to a release.
UW-Madison startup company Silatronix recently invented a safer electrolyte that will be used for phone, laptop and tablet batteries. Silatronix is planning on moving into pilot production with a major Japanese battery manufacturer, which still has not been identified.
The company, at 3571 Anderson St., has 37 employees. It was founded in 2002 based on UW-Madison research and has forged partnerships with several major companies including Cargill, Shell, Coca-Cola and Honda.
Drones may soon have the capability to save thousands of lives each year by detecting terrorists’ improvised explosive devices and active land mines from long-ago wars thanks to innovative technology developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The proven detection technology that also can detect chemical and nuclear weapons and drugs was successfully miniaturized and designed to fly on small unmanned aircraft by Fusion Technology Lab graduate students about five months ago, according to Jerry Kulcinski, an emeritus professor of nuclear engineering and the lab’s director.
Do you text while watching TV, or listen to music while reading? Media multitasking is known to distract people not only when they are doing it, but when they aren’t consuming media – which is detrimental to performance at school or work, for maintaining relationships and for general well-being. A new study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States shows that a short meditation exercise involving counting one’s breath – inhaling and exhaling nine times – can sharpen one’s focus, and especially so for heavy media multitaskers.
Noted: Recent work by Tessa Conroy and Steven Deller of the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed that start-ups here accounted for a smaller share of job creation than in all but three states.
Want to know how to do Twitter or Facebook right at your institution? You might want to study the practices used by the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the first and Baylor University for the second. Those two institutions have been deemed the “top users” of the those social media sites by Engagement Labs, which develops technology for measuring online social engagement.
Noted: Other workplace charging challenge partners in Wisconsin include University of Wisconsin campuses in Madison, Whitewater and Oshkosh, ABB Inc. in Wauwatosa, Evolution Marketing in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin Public Service Corp. of Green Bay, Xcel Energy Inc. of Minnesota (the parent company of Northern States Power), GE Healthcare and Organic Valley Cooperative in Lafarge.
Three items related to UW-Madison — Three UW-Madison spinoffs, using technology patented by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), participated in gener8tor’s gBETA spring class. Another was formed by a team of UW-Madison MBA students … One of the gBETA startups, Linectra, is already a contender in a prestigious statewide competition, the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest … Fourteen UW-Madison research projects will each get about $300,000 over the next two years as part of the UW2020: WARF Discovery Initiative.
Noted: The gBETA program provides free coaching and connections to selected start-ups with ties to any Wisconsin college or university. It is run by gener8tor, which operates start-up accelerators in Madison and Milwaukee, and is supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and American Family Insurance
Noted: University of Wisconsin-Madison finance professor Jim Johannes, who testified in favor of the bill, said it standardizes courts’ interpretation of what is required in order to sue.
“It puts a fork in what you need as evidence when you approach the courts in the pleading stage of a case,” he said. “It provides clarity for the courts. Previously, before this the courts could interpret it any way they wanted to.”
Noted: In 1998, Burrill donated funds to start the UW School of Business’s G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition, a contest whose winners have included Madison biofuels company Virent Energy Systems and Madison online and mobile restaurant food ordering company EatStreet.
The Burrill contest held its final event in 2015.
Several colleges across the country are investigating after a rash of anti-Semitic fliers began printing from their network-connected printers or fax machines.
The Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition had an iconic aura on the University of Wisconsin campus. Some of Madison’s most prominent millennial entrepreneurs competed in the contest: Jon Hardin, Matt Howard, Chris Meyer, Nathan Lustig, Troy Vosseller, and Forrest Woolworth. From 2007 to 2013, Burrill Business Plan entrepreneurs raised at least 117M and create at least 290 jobs.
A team of students in the College of Engineering at University of Wisconsin took first place and won $2,000 at a regional competition to develop clean energy snowmobiles last week.
The challenge asked students to redesign the powertrain of a conventional snowmobile to be as clean and quiet as possible, while maintaining power and affordability.
Noted: Both University of Wisconsin-Madison students, Terry was a junior majoring in computer science; Cowdrey, a sophomore in business and marketing. Cowdrey’s father, for one, was taken aback, but came to understand why his son did it.
