Hello Readers! Adam D’Augelli from True Ventures, an early-stage venture fund based in the Bay Area has contacted me…They are excited by the entrepreneurial efforts here and are looking for “Hardworking, entrepreneurially minded students in the class of 2011 or 2012″ to participate in their TEC program. “Any major or educational interest may apply”

See the complete listing:
Want to work for a startup this summer? True Ventures is hiring.

True Ventures is a seed and very early stage venture capital firm with offices in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Northern Virginia. We partner with talented entrepreneurs to help them build businesses in software and services, Internet, new media, gaming, mobile, and infrastructure. These are rapidly growing young companies that we think will shape or transform their target markets. You can help.

This summer, we are inviting a group of students to take part in the second True Entrepreneur Corps (TEC) program and join our portfolio companies in the San Francisco Bay area and across the country. As a member of TEC, you will be paired with one of our companies and spend eight weeks working on a variety of projects both appropriate to your background and skill set and of value to the company. For example, you could help design a new user interface for an e-commerce marketplace. You could help write code for a new Facebook game or a mobile sweepstakes. You could do market research to support the editors of one of the leading technology blog platforms.

Who are we looking for:

Hardworking, entrepreneurially minded students in the class of 2011 or 2012. Any major or educational interest may apply.

What makes us different:

We partner with promising entrepreneurs at the earliest stages in the highest-growth segments of the technology market, where history demonstrates the best rates of return. Along the way, we provide hands-on management support to guide our portfolio companies through the challenges of early growth. Then, in subsequent financing rounds, we work with trusted colleagues at other top-tier funds to build valuable syndicates for your company, but we have the financial strength to participate for the long term. Our team has directly founded over half a dozen startups and has over seventy years of combined venture capital experience. We like to put that experience to work for our entrepreneurs.

If you’re interested and want to learn more, visit:

http://www.trueventures.com/tec/

Digital Entrepreneurship

The list includes Ad-based content sites, Online retail, Amazon affiliates and others. This is very impressive work for just 10 weeks of class time. Our Digital Business minor supports students in learning about how new technologies like those deployed in this class are transforming traditional business practice!

Next up: the Digital Entrepreneurship class with students from around RIT’s campus. Last night’s team formation yielded 10 project teams creating business plans for new ideas that leverage these new technologies. Stop in at: http://digent.rit.edu to learn more.

As expected, I learned a lot on my recent trip to the AMCIS conference in San Francisco. One striking thing is the incredibly high quality of new Ph.D.s in MIS. I met so many talented people, and interviewed as many as I could for our faculty position at RIT (http://bitly.com/ritmis). While advantageous for RIT, the true shame is that there are not enough faculty jobs for these talented people- not by a long shot. The fact that there are so few positions creates a dangerous situation where a whole generation of educators/researchers could be lost (thanks SWH for this idea). At this moment, there is not a lot that we can do about it.

However, longer term there is one obvious thing to do-increase the enrollments in MIS. I believe there are two paths to that: better communication about the discipline, and recentering the discipline on the knowledge areas of its faculty. As an example of communication, the chart above (thanks Chuck Wood) shows clearly that MIS starting salaries have been the highest in the business schools for some time. Employers REALLY want the combination of technology and business and are willing to pay for it. MIS people end up doing a wide variety of things in organizations, but their tech/business/communications skills make them the key players in a lot of what happens. My friend Richard DeMartino comments how well MIS students do in entrepreneurial teams, and I am proud of what this group accomplishes.

A second important approach to reviving the discipline is to find ways to capture the intellectual curiosity and new knowledge developed by its faculty. While for some researchers this is already happening, for many of us the curriculum is a standard that is far away from our interests. At AMCIS, I learned that MANY people are researching things that will never be taught in the standard curriculum. I feel that this is a shame, and possibly a detriment to the discipline.

The MIS discipline has room for lots of different subjects in its conferences. We should find the way to bring them back to our students, because that natural energy that comes from doing what you like does not have a substitute. Students feel it, and become interested themselves. Take the now-500 strong DigEnt social network.

Along the way, we have received local and national media attention, benefitted from the wisdom of individuals throughout the world, and created connections that are today advancing new business ideas, while creating great educational experiences for students.

The article includes some tech that is specific to corporations (such as Green Grid computing), but it also demonstrates the now constant interplay of social and work technologies (Twitter, Yammer, Blackberry, iPhones…). Many knowledge workers do not want the redundancy of multiple devices, accounts, or passwords when the social computing technology admirably supports both work and personal communication.

Digital Entrepreneurship

Our initial discussion on the true definition of digital entrepreneurship was thought provoking. Even definitions become more malleable in the digital age. At least one of the students remarked about how exciting it was to be part of the emergence of a new area, and I can only agree.

I look forward to seeing where this crew takes us!

http://www.sfasu.edu/pubaffairs/pressreleases/august2008/29-texas_institute_creativity.asp

http://feedroom.businessweek.com/linking/index.jsp?skin=oneclip&fr_story=4ff1e4b3a9adab1fad937c0f767acc92c93cf3ae&rf=ev&hl=true

Visualization from NYT

Seems the thoughts of the nation have turned forward to the future after a clear change in the electorate. The visualization to the left shows how a perfect storm moved the voting of the country more democratic than 2004.

I had the pleasure of attending a talk by mayor Bob Duffy at President Destler’s Liberty Hill home EARLY Wednesday morning.  The President and I shared a quick word admiring how impressive it is that a country can turn around nimbly and try a different direction. This is certainly impressive to the rest of the world. Take for example, Lab for Social Computing board member, Joichi Ito’s remarks from the Washington Post. (As an aside, Bob Duffy, my colleague Neil Hair and I generally keep our politics close to the vest)

For those of us in Rochester, there is a lot to improve. We have more crime than we should. We have an uneven track record with large scale public projects…AND the Mayor repeated a statistic that is particularly challenging: New York State ranks 49th (only NJ is worse) in our Tax Climate for Business.

As Business educators (and our many stakeholders), we should begin to unravel how to move that statistic. The group explains their approach thus:

“Good state tax systems levy low, flat rates on the broadest bases possible, and they treat all taxpayers the same. Variation in the tax treatment of different industries favors one economic activity or decision over another. The more riddled a tax system is with politically motivated preferences the less likely it is that business decisions will be made in response to market forces. The SBTCI rewards those states that apply these principles in five important areas of taxation: major business taxes, individual income taxes, sales taxes, unemployment insurance taxes and property taxes.”

At a time of great change, we have the flexibility to do novel things. Let’s come up with something new that moves us up. Who’s in?