Posts Tagged ‘entrepreneurship’
Yap, Inc., Brings Us the Speech Cloud
Friday, November 5, 2010, 8:37 am 1 Comment | Post a CommentTechnology and language are strange and occasionally wonderful bedfellows. The same field that gave us 802.11b to describe a common household wireless standard is also capable of whimsical and clever trademarks. (Quick: when I say “blackberry,” do you envision a smart phone or an old-fashioned fruit?)
One of the best flights of fancy that has come from the wireless revolution is the Cloud. Loosely speaking, the cloud is the Internet—all of those computers out there that connect us in the world wide web. But cloud computing also refers to applications and sometimes data that reside “out there” rather than on your own computer. It’s rather soothing to think about all of those bits of code bouncing around the stratosphere on a cumulus mattress rather than residing in earthbound bunkers of supercomputers.
I was charmed, therefore, when reading up on Yap, Inc., to learn about the Speech Cloud. Yap provides software-processed (rather than human-processed) speech recognition services, largely via partners like Microsoft and Sprint and other phone carriers. Voice mails, conference calls, and other bits of dictation are transported to Yap’s Speech Cloud and rendered into text by software and returned to the customer’s computer or device.
The Speech Cloud is a "stone soup" of voices from all over, that cumulatively contribute to Yap's speech recognition accuracy.
On the cutting edge: Three women in translational research
Wednesday, October 27, 2010, 9:16 pm 1 Comment | Post a CommentLarge pharmaceutical companies already leave much of the translational research to biotech companies and startups. But now, turning an idea into a potential product is gaining importance at U.S. medical schools as more and more university scientists are taking on the development of disease treatments and preventions.
In North Carolina, researchers at Wake Forest University are about to test a novel vaccine booster in healthy volunteers. The New England Journal of Medicine this month published the results of the first clinical trial of a therapy developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to replace a defective gene that causes Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. And Duke University researchers have come up with treatments for two rare diseases, Krabbe disease and Pompe disease, and are working on three more.
Dr. Priya Kishnani
The three scientists that the Raleigh-based Carolinas Chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs invited to its life science panel discussion Tuesday at Brier Creek Country Club reflected not only this research & development shift, but as women they also succeeded in a male-dominated field.
One of the panel members was Dr. Priya Kishnani, a Duke pediatrician and geneticist, who was instrumental in developing Myozyme, a Pompe disease treatment that was approved in 2006 and is marketed by Genzyme.
Prabhavathi Fernandes
Kishnani was joined by Prabhavathi Fernandes, chief executive of Cempra Pharmaceuticals, and Christy Shaffer, former chief executive of Inspire Pharmaceuticals.
Christy Shaffer
Research Triangle Park was established to bring together academia and industry and develop research-based products. In that respect, Cempra, a 4-year-old Chapel Hill startup that has raised $60 million in venture capital to develop new antibiotics, and Inspire, a publicly traded Durham company with about $100 million in annual revenue, are driving forces in the home-grown life cycle of drug development.
The trio talked about what inspires them, whether they believe in an entrepreneurial gene and what’s unique about translational research in RTP. They also fielded questions from the audience, including one from Leslie Alexandre, former chief executive of the N.C. Biotechnology Center, on pricing of new medicines in the face of rising health care costs. Read more…
‘Companies to Watch’ Honors 25 Job-Creating, Revenue-Producing Firms in N.C.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010, 1:03 pm 3 Comments | Post a CommentStartup companies make for good storytelling. Entrepreneurial lore is filled with tales involving a couple of college dropouts, a garage, and a Big Idea. Some of them fail, and some of them morph into industry giants.
But along the way from startup to giant, those companies go through a second stage of growth, during which they add employees and revenue but are still growing fairly quickly. It’s these second-stage companies that are the unsung heroes of North Carolina’s economy, according to Penny Lewandowski of the Edward Lowe Foundation. In 2008, the last year for which figures are available, 9.7 percent of the resident companies in the state were second stage, but they accounted for almost 35 percent of the state’s jobs.
Building entrepreneurial networks in the Internet age
Monday, August 16, 2010, 10:51 pm 1 Comment | Post a CommentTed Zoller has taken the educational adage about the village that raises the child and adapted it to entrepreneurship.
As Zoller, the executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business in Chapel Hill, sees it, it takes dealmaker networks to build companies based on research and technology.
One of the U.S. technopolies where these networks have developed is North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, ranked the brainiest area in the U.S. by the Daily Beast, an online publication that started the contest last year.
So, why isn’t the research Triangle Park area also the most entrepreneurial?
Zoller, an entrepreneur himself who teaches executives, scientists and budding entrepreneurs at UNC, attempts to answer that question in an interview with Science in the Triangle. He also addresses how the Internet is changing network building.
The video of the interview is interspersed with footage of Zoller teaching an executive MBA class at UNC:
Turning brainpower into companies
Monday, August 2, 2010, 7:45 pm 1 Comment | Post a Comment
Ted Zoller
North Carolina’s Research Triangle last year scored as the brainiest U.S. region, ahead of San Francisco’s Bay Area, which is home to Silicon Valley. Universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and Research Triangle Park, a research and development hub of world renown and state economic engine, had a lot to do with the winning score.
But brainiest doesn’t mean most entrepreneurial as Ted Zoller, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and director of UNC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, found out. Read more…
RTP Weekahead 12/14
Monday, December 14, 2009, 12:04 am No Comments | Post a CommentEvents taking place the week of Dec. 14 in the Research Triangle area that are open to the public: Read more…
Grassroots business support and a free meal
Thursday, August 13, 2009, 7:21 am No Comments | Post a CommentNorth Carolina’s Research Triangle area is known as a research and development hub where several large companies have operations, including IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, Biogen Idec and Quintiles Transnational. But the area’s true strength lies in its many small companies, startups and mid-size businesses, where discoveries are turned into tomorrow’s products.
