A California biotech consulting firm that pledged to create at least 103 local jobs by 2017 will get a $1 million low-interest loan from the state to help it buy an under-used pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in University Research Park where it plans to make cancer-fighting and other types of drugs for other companies.
For decades, it has felt like Milwaukee and Madison are separated by much more than 80 miles of highway and fields. The divide between Wisconsin?s two biggest cities?economically, culturally, and psychologically?has at times felt impossible to bridge.
No. 3: Madison. Home of the University of Wisconsin and the state capital, Madison has a low unemployment rate that makes it attractive to job seekers. From being a government-centered economy, it has switched its sights to being a technology and health care hub.
The program is open to University of Wisconsin faculty, staff, students and Madison area entrepreneurs.
Consumers have become highly adept at avoiding television advertisements. We switch channels, divert attention to our tablets and phones, and of course fast-forward through ads on our DVRs. Partly in response to this loss of attention, marketers are increasingly focused on product placement as an alternative way of exposing us to their brands. After all, product placement is innately much harder to skip given its integration into the actual program content.
Noted: Ankit Agarwal, who founded Imbed in 2010 with five professors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the company?s chief executive officer. He developed the technology while doing postdoctoral research in the university?s chemical and biological engineering department.
Noted: Shine is not building a nuclear power plant to make mo-99, as the isotope is called. It has a novel accelerator-driven technology that involves fissioning low-enriched uranium. The technology, developed by Piefer and former University of Wisconsin-Madison medical physics professor Paul DeLuca, generates 3,000 times less radioactivity than a nuclear power plant, Piefer said.
SALINA, Kan. (AP) ? A new phone app is helping some central Kansas addicts stay sober and away from drugs.
Kurt Squire first recognized the learning potential of games in 1987 in his history class in high school. When his teacher asked the students if they knew the differences between English and Spanish colonization strategies in the Caribbean, he was the only one who knew the answer (the Spanish sailed galleons and held forts across the Caribbean for transporting gold, while the English sought to establish permanent settlements). But Squire hadn?t been reading ahead in the textbook: He had inadvertently learned the history of Caribbean colonization from spending countless hours playing a video game called Sid Meier?s Pirates! on his Commodore 64 computer.
Aaron Olver, who will take over as head of University Research Park next month, says he?ll be working over the next year on an updated strategic blueprint as URP?s new site gears up for business.
Noted: Silatronix, a Madison company making a key component for a new generation of lithium ion batteries, has closed on $2.8 million from investors led by the Madison venture capital firm Venture Investors and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
Noted: Seventeen projects have been chosen for the launch of the new Discovery to Product, or D2P, program. The partnership between UW-Madison and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation is aimed at taking promising campus inventions and helping to speed their entry into the marketplace.
We?ve only just begun to embrace the potential of cloud. As the so-called Internet of Things takes hold, cloud computing services will need to acquire a new depth and breadth to handle petabytes of data, demanding, complex applications, and millions of users. New, evolving architecture is needed.
Jignesh Patel, a University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science professor who sold his company to Twitter, will discuss how to attract West Coast funding to state start-ups next week at the Forward Technology Conference, part of an eight-day event that is among the states biggest gathering of entrepreneurs.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison said Thursday it will receive $2.3 million from the National Science Foundation related to a project called CloudLab, which is bringing together university and industry teams to develop new technlogies for computer networking, storage and security.
Noted: Cellectar earlier this yearmoved its headquarters back to Madison from Newton, Mass. It was founded in Madison in 2003 by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jamey Weichert. Following a 2011 merger with a public company, Novelos Therapeutics, the corporate headquarters was moved to Massachusetts.
Noted: The company is based on technology developed by chemists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., and Quallion LLC, a Palo Alto, Calif., battery maker.
The company was founded in Madison in 2003 by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jamey Weichert.
On Friday, the UW-Madison?s Discovery to Product program, which helps fund promising entrepreneurial projects in the hopes those ideas can later be marketed, announced a new batch of innovations to get that money.
As each day goes by, real life and technology become more unified than ever before. And in those areas where they aren?t, it feels kinda weird. For example, did you ever drive by a billboard or some notable sight on a highway but your passenger missed it? For a split second, do you think, ?Oh, just rewind it for her,? as if real life were a DVR?
Seventeen University of Wisconsin – Madison research projects have been chosen from a field of 170 ideas to participate in a new program designed to develop university research with the most commercial promise.
Seventeen projects have been chosen from 172 proposals to fast-track toward the market through a University of Wisconsin-Madison program.
Publicly traded Exact Sciences has 300 employees, about 200 of them in Madison, with headquarters in University Research Park, at 441 Charmany Drive, and a new lab in the Novation Campus, off Rimrock Road.
In Madison earlier this summer, the UW-Madison College of Engineering announced creation of a $25 million Grainger Institute for Engineering to attract clusters of top engineering faculty to define new research directions.
Teresa Adams, a UW-Madison professor of civil and environmental engineering, recently finished a three-year stint on a U.S. Department of Transportation committee that advises the secretary of transportation on ?intelligent transportation systems,? a broad field of inquiry that includes driverless cars.
Massive open online courses will return to the University of Wisconsin at Madison next year — or something that looks like them will, anyway. Having reviewed the results from its first round of MOOCs, the institution will offer new courses that are shorter, cover fewer topics and target Wisconsinites.
American Family Insurance has gifted $675,000 to the UW-Madison School of Business to create a distinguished chair in risk management.
Noted: The firm was founded by Timur Yarnall, co-founder of Clickability, and Paul Barford, a computer sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will benefit from a $675,000 contribution from American Family Insurance, the Madison-based insurance giant said Tuesday.
BrightStar Wisconsin Foundation is creating a fund within its investment portfolio that will let donors specify that their money will go to companies directly tied to the UW-Madison.
“People love it when you ask them questions about themselves,” Christine Whelan, sociologist in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, told NBC News. “It makes us feel good that the quiz is interested in us.”
By conventional education standards, UW-Madison?s first round of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, had an extremely rough start.
Protein Foundry LLC, a start-up formed by four Medical College of Wisconsin scientists, may be the first in a string of spinoffs to be incubated at the school under a new program aimed at helping move more companies out the door.
Noted: The organization will be run by Constance Steinkuehler, a former senior policy analyst from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Steinkuehler is also an associate professor in digital media at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a co-director of the Games+Learning+Society center at the university?s Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery.
Rebecca Blank, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has joined the Council on Competitiveness, a nonpartisan organization that works on public policy solutions meant to drive the United State?s economic growth in world markets. The council was founded in 1986.
Blackshades, we?re not talking about sunglasses. In fact, the total opposite. Its a type of malware that has made national headlines, and is making some people think twice about what they do in front of their computer.
Rutgers Business School has picked University of Wisconsin professor Morris Davis to be the top academic official at its new real estate program, the university announced.
Morris Davis, a real estate and urban land economics professor at Wisconsin Business School, has been chosen to hold the Paul V. Profeta Chair in Real Estate at Rutgers Business School and help build Rutgers into a leading center for real estate studies and research.
Aaron Olver, who has led the city of Madison?s economic development office for the past three years, will be managing director of University Research Park (URP), starting Sept. 8.
Noted: UW-Madison students tend to be more predisposed to starting companies than their counterparts at other big universities, said Jeff Carter, co-founder of Hyde Park Angels, a Chicago angel investing group.
Noted: Baylor University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have also created special housing options to help student entrepreneurs collaborate. Schools are ?marketing the housing inventory to attract and keep students. They?re doing it in a number of different ways, including adding academic space to the housing,? says Arthur Lidsky, president of the college campus planning firm Dober Lidsky Mathey.
Noted: But various researchers and tech companies?including Google?have been playing around with large asynchronous systems for years now, and inside Adam, Microsoft is taking advantage of this work using a technology developed at the University of Wisconsin called, of all things, ?HOGWILD!?
The University of Wisconsin-Madison is returning to Coursera for seconds next year when it undertakes delivery of six new massive open online courses on the MOOC platform during 2015-2016. Whereas the institution?s original experiment involved four disparate classes, this time the theme will be relationships: among people, among communities and between humans and the natural world. The original four-course pilot drew 135,600 registrants from every state and 141 countries.
A major shift is underway in UW-Madison?s approach to pushing innovations from its campus into the private sector. With its new Discovery to Product Program, or D2P, UW-Madison will incubate about 10 projects until they?re fully prepared to become a startup or be licensed to others. Helping them with funding and mentoring, D2P will be a ?finishing school [for the projects], hopefully trying to get them dressed up and ready to go out the door,? said D2P Director John Biondi. D2P marks a much different approach to technology transfer from the university, actively seeking innovations across campus and commercializing them, said UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank.
Noted: A former DRS Power executive, Alan Perlstein, is the executive director of the Mid-West Energy Research Consortium, a nonprofit group that includes energy, power and control companies and research institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, the Milwaukee School of Engineering and Marquette University.
Noted: Meanwhile, start-up ventures have arisen to provide online-ordering software – among them EatStreet Inc., a rapidly growing Madison company. Launched by three UW-Madison students, EatStreet has raised $8.65 million from outside investors, and recently increased the number of restaurants using its system to 10,000.
Alzheimer?s disease research is one of the first projects supported by a fund created to commercialize medical technology developed by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The efforts to preserve digital humanities research are as numerous as the definitions of the catchall term, according to a report that urges institutions to develop their own strategies to preserve resources that can?t simply be bound and stored in a library. UW-Madison is included.
The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) system will get a performance upgrade as UW-Madison becomes one of the few institutions in the world to have an Intel Parallel Computing Center.
Noted: Philosophos and Great Oaks managing partner Andrew Boszhardt are UW-Madison graduates.
When Atif Hashmi was planning a startup a few years ago, he sought out others who?d been down the same road.
When Atif Hashmi was planning a startup a few years ago, he sought out others who?d been down the same road. Hashmi, a native of Pakistan who earned his doctorate in in computer engineering from UW-Madison, ended up connecting with Merlin Mentors, a group of volunteer serial entrepreneurs who operate out of the university?s Office of Corporate Relations.
This summer, Colorado State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison will each receive four electric vehicles for a variety of sustainable research projects, including reducing the campus?s carbon footprint; using vehicle sensor data; and broadening the understanding of the Internet of Things. As part of a project debuted at the Internet2 Global Summit this past April, the participating universities were selected by Internet2 and electric vehicle manufacturer Innova UEV from a pool of 11 applicants.
Brian Hellmer, director of the UW-Madison School of Business? Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis, said novice investors should be cautious about these opportunities . ? You should not confuse investing for retirement with providing yourself with entertainment,? he said.
Wisconsin manufacturers are hustling to stay ahead of global competition. This week?s $25 million grant to the UW-Madison College of Engineering will help the cause.
Wisconsin?s reputation as America?s Dairyland was further solidified globally with last week?s announcement that UW-Madison has been selected to develop the curriculum for a new $400 million dairy training center in China.
Many experts believe the once thriving manufacturing industry is starting to make a comeback in America. The state of Wisconsin is well known as a leader in manufacturing largely due to the successful College of Engineering on the UW-Madison campus. University officials are hoping that the biggest donation ever to the college will take that notoriety to the next level.
University of Wisconsin-Madison alumna Becky Splitt joined StudyBlue as its CEO in 2009, when the online study service incorporated. Founded in 2007 by UW-Madison graduates Chris Klundt and Dave Sergeant, the service now has 5.5 million users.
Noted: While the mascot part of the business generates about 10% of revenue for Olympus, Adam has a special place in his heart for it. A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate in marketing and accounting, Adam said he was a Bucky Badger mascot for four years of college.
Madworks at Campus, a summer accelerator program that is being launched at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Friday it has chosen 11 start-ups to participate from a field of nearly 70 companies.
