Matthew Engel

In the New York Times on Monday, there was a very important article on young entrepreneurs entitled: No Jobs? Young Graduates Make Their Own. With the lack of traditional jobs on the market, young people are blazing a path to success by creating their own companies. These organic businesses, started from the ground up are what the U.S. needs to revitalize it’s economy. One must never forget about the roots of companies such as Facebook and Google, which of both started in a college dorm room or one bedroom apartment. And in 2010 you could look to Groupon, for example, which started in 2008 and recently refused a $6 billion bid by Google. Granted, most of us will not be forming the next multinational enterprise, but with a vision, tenacity, and good business acumen there are always possibilities available to the budding entrepreneur.

The NYT article describes the failures and success of a NYU film student, Scott Gerber, who used nothing but his passion and the last $700 in his pocket to start an internet company. While there are many opportunities for forming novel businesses online, I think the biggest game changers will be in the energy sector. Since starting his business, Gerber has also founded the Young Entrepreneur Council which mentors early stage entrepreneurs primarily through web forums, Q&A articles and video conferences. Scott also writes prolifically for several websites, such as this article on how to raise capital for your business based on first hand experience from various new entrepreneurs on youngentrepreneur.com.

While there is still room for virtual businesses to grow, a truly sustainable company should focus on solving unmet needs. In the U.S., the primary unmet needs are in the energy sector. Therefore, many investors and serial entrepreneurs are moving into this arena trying to bring new products to market and bridge the cap between new technologies that are challenged by consumer adaptation and habit.

By now, most of us who use the internet daily have had some interaction with cloud computing. Cloud computing allows users to write documents, create presentations, spreadsheets or store data on a virtual server accessible via the web. The most well known example is Google Docs which allows users to create and collaborate on articles in real time, online. This way, you and I could be working on the same document simultaneously without having to email it back and forth. It allows for many users to be working on the same project at any one instant and automatically backs up the most updated version. It also allows you to store an almost limitless number of documents on the internet for free, thereby allowing one access to files from any computer in the world at any time, without having to lug around the data yourself. This is a tremendous convenience at no cost (for now).

I have been using Google Docs for several years, and it has never inspired me to write a blog post. However, most recently I encountered a new piece of software/service which I found so convenient and useful, that I am rushing to spread the word. I would highly recommend making an account with the service Dropbox which gives you 2GB of webspace for free. So what’s the big deal you say? Dropbox features one of the most user friendly drag-and-drop interfaces I have ever seen. It allows you to toss files directly up onto the cloud from any computer – that has the dropbox application installed. And then download them from any computer. The only drawback of this process is that it requires you to download and install a program on each machine, however it is lightweight, relatively non-intrusive and worth the convenience of being able to store large quantities of files on the fly. What’s really cool, and a great marketing strategy, is that you gain additional storage space when you successfully invite users to sign up for the service.

Dropbox Wiki

When I discovered the service, I was curious as to how they make money. What is their business model? How does a company which provides services for free make any profit? I believe this is a common catch-22 on the web. Everyone wants information, services, and conveniences for free and we are so used to this almost no one is willing to pay for web content or storage space. Dropbox offers additional storage options beyond the 2GB for a fee – 50GB for $9.99/mo or 100GB for $19.99/mo. I questioned why anyone would pay for this or keep that much data on the web? The answer I got from a friend, was that once customers become accustomed to the conveniences of keeping their files on the web, they may eventually reached their storage limit and decide to splurge for an upgraded their account. I am curious how many paying vs. non-paying custiomers Dropbox has and how they plan to increase their paying user base.

On Oct. 25, 2009 the Fundamentals of the Bioscience Program Alumni Organization launched its official alumni website: fobip.org/alumni. The Fundamentals of the Bioscience Industry Program is a semester long collaborative course covering information critical for students to prevail in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and business worlds. Graduate students are able to hear and watch seasoned professionals from both start-up and established companies describe their career paths and discuss their business models. The program has an excellent reputation for producing bright, motivated students who have been extremely successful in their careers.

The target audience for the alumni website is professionals working in the biotech and pharma industries. I wanted to create a resource that would feature useful articles from alumni and guest authors with experience relevant to program graduates. One of my goals was to put a spotlight on the alumni and draw attention to the high caliber of its course instructors, graduates, and applicants. We hope to feature articles covering the the financial industry, venture capital, intellectual property, technology transfer, recruiting, and academia in relation to biotechnology. We want to provide information that will be useful to the start-up entrepreneur, industry veteran, and job seeker. Without any advertising we have had already 1,000′s of page views and hundreds of unique visitors. I am hoping that the content we generate will be a useful resource and we are aiming to add interviews and new articles approximately every 2 weeks.

I dreamed up this concept in early Summer 2009 and discussed it with Kate Posnanski, Manager of Programs at the Center for Biotechnology. With the help of many program alumni such as Jenne Relucio and Banke Fagbemi, we were able to bring the project to fruition and launch the website this Fall. I decided to use my experience creating websites use WordPress to generate the blog format with some additional features. We have an alumni page we are trying to build on every day featuring over a dozen of our graduates.

On the techie side, I used WordPress as my publishing platform with the Red Evo News Blue theme from Red Evolution installed. This theme evens offers a modest support forum which was able to answer some of my questions about theme customizations about controlling the length of the except. The except is the text displayed on the homepage describing the content of an article in brief. Also, I took advantage of using custom fields for the first time. Before creating this site, custom fields were a complete mystery to me. I found this video tutorial EXTREMELY helpful, and now I use the custom field to display images on the homepage for each post. There are both thumbnail and featured image custom fields available, built into the Red Evo News Blue theme. This was also the first time I embedded a Google Calendar into a website. That part was extremely simple, and if you want to know how to do that check here.

In summary, I hope to continue building this special website, which I hold dear to my heart and hope it will bring alot of benefit to the Fundamentals Program and its graduates. Cheers!

It has been some time since I wrote a post on here, and it is for a good reason. A lot of great and interesting things have been happening, and I still plan on sharing them. I have to say the one thing about writing a blo, and that is the longer you wait to post something, the tougher it becomes. I have alot of great ideas floating around my head, and several of them already have legs. I often see or hear something in the news and think “Gee. That would be really great to write about on my website”. Alas, it hasn’t been happening as frequently as I would like. However, the topics I have in the pipeline are going to grab your attention and capture the current trends in energy, technology, and financial investments in these fields. They include a report on biofuel start up companies, the mass production and marketing of electric vehicles, a new 37 Megawatt solar panel plant being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the launch of a new website I have created and a note on my passing of the Ph.D. qualifying exam in biomedical engineering at Stony Brook University. This is alot of stuff to write about! For now, I just wanted to mention that I’ve linked this blog with my LinkedIn profile using their WordPress application. To see this, you have to be signed into LinkedIn and able to view my full profile. Check it out, it’s really neat! I’m wondering if it’s possible to link multiple blogs there, since I actually manage almost half a dozen websites by this point. Hope to keep you posted and have a great week!

Everyone know’s Google is still growing. Backed by their powerful webmail client, Gmail, Google is adding universities to their ever growing list of clients, according to Time magazine. Both Microsoft and Google are offering webmail services to colleges all over the US for free! This can save a school millions of dollars a year in server storage space, security management, and network maintenance. It has allowed major universities to streamline IT staffing or much better yet, refocus their efforts on actually helping students learn and teachers communicate via technology. Traditional university email accounts are capped at 100mb with very little space for attachments. Many users treat gmail as a free data storage dump emailing themselves hudreds of pictures, documents or pdf’s as a back up so they can be downloaded on the fly. The amazing search capabilities and add-on features for gmail such as color coded labels, multiple inboxes, viedo chat, and collaborative document editing place the service in high demand for tech savy students. When Gmail shed its beta test icon just this July after 2 years of ‘trial’ use, major universities such as Notre Dame, Brown, Cornell and Georgetown have all begun implementing their service. Personally, I am confused by Google’s business plan here. How can this be a profitable enterprise when they are giving services away for free to major clients? Their is no advertising, so that revenue source is gone. The real value I see here, is that 1) Google could start charging users for this service at any time – though they probably never will, and more importantly 2) Google has access too all your data. As much as we would like to think our information is completely secure, we all know that any information written in an email can be used as evidence and is not considered private. Email providers make no promises about the security of our emails, and the vast sums of information now on Goggle’s network is priceless. This itself is an interesting topic and worth exploring more in the future.