Jim Berbee, founder of Madison-based Berbee Information Networks Corp., will receive the 12th annual Ken Hendricks Memorial “Seize the Day” award at the 2015 Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference, organizers said Wednesday.
Noted: The business school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a course tied to a $1.5 million fund, which can be invested in companies started by students in the class. The fund has made 20 investments since 1998—less than half of the startups have shut down, while a handful have been sold. “But it’s not as good as it may sound,” said Dan Olszewski, the program’s instructor. “Some companies that are two years old are still alive, but they’re not on the right track.”
Noted: Wall has been interested in development since earning an economics degree from UW-Madison in 1987. He then completed a master’s degree in real estate appraisal/investment analysis where he studied under Professor James Graaskamp, considered a leader in the field of urban land economics and risk management.
Discovery to Product, an experimental accelerator launched on University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus last year, is starting to churn out its first few companies, organizers say.
Noted: Then, about two years ago, the Allmans’ 21-year-old son Nathan, a University of Wisconsin student, turned his family’s longing into a business. He entered the idea for Chefs for Seniors into the University’s Burrill Business Plan Competition.
Where some see a tech bubble, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Sam Jacobsen sees opportunity.
Want to keep track of how environmentally conscious you’re being? There’s an app for that. The MyEarth app launched this week in conjunction with Wednesday’s Earth Day holiday. The app, which was made available on the Apple and Android app stores on Monday, had already been downloaded by roughly 800 people as of Wednesday afternoon.
Nancy Wong, the app’s designer and professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said on the institution’s website that in many people what looked like a lack of concern for the environment was really “a failure to connect individual action to that bigger picture.”
A group of “hackers” are working hard for 24 hours straight in Madison at the first ever Madison Hack-A-Thon, to come up with new technology innovations.
Lee’s visit to Wisconsin — part of a Midwest tour that has included other patent hotspots — came at a time when Congress is again debating how to streamline the U.S. patent system … It also underscored why major research universities such as UW-Madison are vital to the innovation economy, not only nationally but in the states and communities they serve.
Noted: “We believe the deal flow in Wisconsin is more than sufficient,” said David Guinther, a founding member of WISC Partners, an early stage fund launched by UW-Madison graduates who made their mark in Californias Silicon Valley. “Ive seen amazing changes in our ecosystem in Wisconsin since I came back five years ago.”
A leader in the U.S. business world visited Madison on Wednesday in hopes of fostering more innovation. Michelle K. Lee, the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, toured the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
A leader in the U.S. business world visited Madison on Wednesday in hopes of fostering more innovation.
Michelle K. Lee, the director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, toured the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Lee said she wants to identify ways that her office can better serve the innovators and entrepreneurs in the Madison area.
For every taxpayer dollar spent on the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the university generates $24 for the state economy, according to a new consultant’s report.
The report from NorthStar Consulting said the number of jobs and the amount of tax revenue generated by UW increased since the last study in 2011. It includes UW Hospital and Clinics and the university’s affiliated organizations and startup companies.
Two UW grads are putting their degrees to good use. “When we tell people we sell sandals, and we’re from the Midwest, it’s a little bit contradictory,” says Matt McManus, owner and founder of Bokos Footwear Company. He and his brother, James, launched their staple rubber sandal two years ago this week.
Noted: A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and UW-Madison’s law school, she worked for the federal government before providing legal counsel to former governor Tony Earl. She has been an executive at Miller Brewing and Kraft Foods and also directed the Department of Employee Relations at the City of Milwaukee.
Last week, Cellular Dynamics International CEO Bob Palay described the $307 million acquisition of his company by Fujifilm as a union of two businesses that “share a common strategic vision for achieving leadership in the field of regenerative medicine.”
UW–Madison chemistry professor Samuel H. Gellman, engineering professor William L. Murphy and bacteriology professor Katrina T. Forest have created and tested amino acids that could serve as cheaper, longer-lasting substitutes for antibodies in drugs (like some cancer treatments) that target large proteins in the body.
Dan Thoma, who earned a Ph.D. in metallurgical engineering in 1992 from UW-Madison, will become director of the Grainger Institute in June, the university said Monday. The institute, funded in 2014 with $25 million from the Grainger Foundation in Illinois, is an incubator for transdisciplinary research in the UW-Madison College of Engineering.
Quoted: James Ver Hoeve, a scientist with University of Wisconsin’s ophthalmology department put it more bluntly in an email: “administering drops is not a particularly effective way to get drugs to the retina.”
Quoted, in a story on the importance of engineering jobs and education, John Archambault, assistant dean for engineering student development at the UW-Madison College of Engineering: “It’s really about wanting to help people. It’s a helping profession.”
In an effort to better understand its entrepreneurial graduates, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has sent a survey to nearly 300,000 alumni.
Noted: The company was co-founded in 2004 by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist James Thomson, who is viewed as one of the most influential stem cell scientists in the world. It became a publicly traded company in 2013 and is at the forefront of an area known as regenerative medicine, which uses our own cells, tissues and organs to promote healing.
Noted: Cellular Dynamics was founded by UW-Madison stem cell pioneer James Thomson in 2004.
Just a few years ago, Claus Moberg and Jami Morton were graduate students studying air pollution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cellular Dynamics International Inc. said Monday it has agreed to be acquired by Fujifilm Holdings Corp., Tokyo, for $16.50 a share or about $307 million. Madison-based CDI uses the cell-reprogramming techniques of University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist James Thomson to manufacture large quantities of human cells.
A native of New Berlin and a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad, Bown came up with the idea for Unplugged Events last summer during an outdoor-based leadership training session in California’s redwood forest.
Noted: The student teams arrived in Milwaukee on Tuesday and presented their proposals to Kohls executives at the corporate headquarters in Menomonee Falls on Wednesday. Besides Indiana, students came from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Penn State University, Texas State University, the University of Arizona, Florida State University, Iowa State University, Michigan State University, Northern Illinois University, San Diego State University, Virginia Tech and Washington State University.
Nate Moll has the capability to reach thousands, perhaps millions, all over the world. All it takes is less than 140 characters and the click of a button. He’s the social media specialist at University Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: This type of merger is not a big surprise, said Hart Posen, associate professor of management at the UW-Madison School of Business. “It reflects, in part, the need for bigger scale in this industry,” he said.
As Assay Depot is proving that virtual internships aren’t just for PR companies looking for someone to run their social media, Professor David Williamson Shaffer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is preparing to launch the next generation of virtual internship. Shaffer, the director of the Games and Professional Simulations research group in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, is working on creating simulated internships that will allow companies to train would-be interns in the exact skills they’re looking for before they ever start a real internship, and to track the skill acquisition of interns as they progress through the program.
At the UW-Madison College of Engineering, the state’s largest engineering school, the past few years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of engineering students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. There were about 4,850 students enrolled in the fall of 2014, which exceeded what the college predicted for the fall of 2015.
Noted: Marc Cayles educational background is hardly one youd associate with tech start-ups. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he majored in rural sociology.
Quoted: an Robertson, dean of UW-Madison’s College of Engineering, supported the bill in a letter to Baldwin’s office. “We at UW-Madison, College of Engineering, have remained international leaders in advanced manufacturing research and have recently launched initiatives in this research area,” Robertson wrote. “This bill provides important new incentives that could allow us to expand and strengthen those initiatives for our students and industry partners.”
What is the Internet of Things? If you have a “smart” thermostat made by Nest, you’re already part of it. The Internet of Things IoT connects uniquely identifiable devices to the Internet. A networked smart appliance can text you if things are out of the ordinary, track usage and accept programming changes sent from a smartphone. Leveraging new tools that live on the Internet, objects that had seemed fixed in form are being reimagined all around us.
Noted: Fetch was founded in 2013 by Wes Schroll, who was a University of Wisconsin-Madison student at the time. The company says its app provides benefits to three parties: Shoppers gets coupons, award points and expedited check-out; grocers get greater shopper loyalty and engagement; and consumer brands get the ability to deliver coupons to shoppers in the aisle at the point of decision.
Noted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison is among 20 universities on record as supporting the bill. Being listed as a supporter doesn’t mean UW-Madison automatically would be among the 25 manufacturing universities, according to Baldwin.
From t-shirt sellers, to bakers, to local drink makers, businesses are cashing in on March Madness.
MVI-816 is aimed at men who have been treated for prostate cancer and show a high risk that it will spread. The trial is underway at UW-Madison; now, The Johns Hopkins University and the University of California-San Francisco will participate, too.
University of Wisconsin students hoping to develop entrepreneurial skills can look to a center on campus that seeks to boost innovations from students.
Amid a statewide decline of dairy farms, the University of Wisconsin is aiming to provide programs to assist young and aspiring farmers.
Established in early 2013, several of HealthMyne’s cofounders are serial entrepreneurs, well-known in Madison. Thomas “Rock” Mackie is director of medical engineering at the UW-Madison’s Morgridge Institute for Research. He was a cofounder of TomoTherapy, whose radiation machines are used to treat cancer and are now part of California-based Accuray.
Career Corner is a monthly column written by staff members of the UW-Madison Division of Continuing Studies.
When it comes to entrepreneurship at the UW-Madison, John Surdyk is smack-dab in the middle of the action, right where the ideas start.
An amber lager, created by a trio of UW-Madison students on a pilot brewing system in the Department of Food Science and the Center for Dairy Research, was selected Thursday as the winning brew in a competition to have a beer from the university commercially produced and distributed statewide by Wisconsin Brewing Co. in Verona.
In an about-face from his first term, Gov. Scott Walker wants to eliminate funding for a University of Wisconsin-Madison renewable energy research center that has played a key role in helping land one of its biggest government grants ever.
Noted: Taffora made his comments during a panel discussion about entrepreneurship sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madisons business school. They were part of a free-ranging discussion of the state of entrepreneurship in Wisconsin.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison UW-Madison, the university has become a part of a National Science Foundation program, called CloudLab, to create three testbeds for SDDCs.
Noted: Conroy said about 50 percent of Exact’s scientists and lab workers are graduates of UW-Madison.
Quoted: “In some ways its the end of a very long decline of the strength of unions and a weakening of protections both at the federal and state level for unions,” said William P. Jones, a University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor.
In the few weeks since it became public, Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System budget has produced three schools of thought within the state’s business community.
When a small group of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and staff launched a campus lab for developing connected devices just over a year ago, they weren’t sure what kind of response they’d get.
There are games for just about everyone nowadays, but according to the International Game Developers Association, less than a quarter of game developers are women.
Saying that the university’s mission should be to serve Wisconsin’s workforce isn’t needed — the university already serves the state’s workforce. Anything less means crippling Wisconsin’s economy. To survive, Wisconsin manufacturers have to compete successfully in the global economy.
As an engineering graduate student at the UW-Madison College of Engineering, I saw firsthand the depth and reach of university research. As a member of a high-tech startup responsible for recruiting talent, I hired a number of excellent UW graduates, attracted back from high-tech companies on the coasts, to the economic benefit of Wisconsin.
For years, experts have predicted that the Internet of Things IoT will transform the way we live our lives. At CES 2015 President and CEO of Samsung Electronics, BK Yoon, declared that IoT is now a reality: “It’s not science fiction anymore. It is science fact.” And the classroom is one area where this new reality is taking shape. Take a look at how The University of Wisconsin-Madison is pioneering IoT in education with their Internet of Things Lab.
UW-Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank has not been shy making an argument about the university’s professional schools that boils down to this: they offer too much bang for too little tuition buck. A new report suggests that the basic storyline holds true at the business school. Among masters of business administration graduates, Wisconsin students come out making an average of about $109,000 annually, a similar but slightly lower haul as peers at more fancy schools.
Wisconsin is in a fight to create good-paying jobs for the 21st century economy. Wisconsin’s trend of declining household incomes only will be offset if we can generate new, good-paying jobs and stop the exodus of college graduates to other states. The recent proposal to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System’s budget, in the absence of a concrete plan to ensure that our standards of excellence remain intact, will strike a blow to a key source of potential economic growth and undercut a major opportunity to translate the system’s scientific research into new, high-growth companies and jobs.
Wisconsin is in a fight to create good-paying jobs for the 21st century economy. Wisconsin’s trend of declining household incomes only will be offset if we can generate new, good-paying jobs and stop the exodus of college graduates to other states. The recent proposal to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin System’s budget, in the absence of a concrete plan to ensure that our standards of excellence remain intact, will strike a blow to a key source of potential economic growth and undercut a major opportunity to translate the system’s scientific research into new, high-growth companies and jobs.
