Last week I was at the EmTech conference at MIT to be recognized among this year’s TR35 recipients. I had the pleasure of meeting a number of recipients doing truly amazing work in a variety of fields – biofuels was a particular hotspot this year.

Overall: Fantastic sessions, good connection value, very poor exhibitors.

Conference highlights: Charles Simonyi’s session with big claims for progress on the fundamental bottleneck in software engineering, Ann Winblad’s fireside chat with Jason Pontin, and a pair of great panels by TR35 recipients in the synthietic biology and biofuels area.

Ann Winblad was fantastic. Enough to make an entrepreneur love VCs, not just their money (I kid, I kid). Very smart, very insightful. Watch the video, it’s worth it.

Despite the overall poor exhibitors in the showcase part of the conference, the highlight was MIT Sloan MBA student Eric Silverberg’s Numberpedia.org. The idea is to aggregate openly available statistics on everything under the sun (but most interestingly market data). Could be quite useful if executed well.

Jeff
Chief Software Architect, EQO