{"id":418120,"date":"2010-03-11T19:29:08","date_gmt":"2010-03-12T00:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xconomy.com\/?p=68065"},"modified":"2010-03-11T19:29:08","modified_gmt":"2010-03-12T00:29:08","slug":"how-seattle-companies-and-innovators-can-change-the-world-come-find-out-on-march-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/418120","title":{"rendered":"How Seattle Companies and Innovators Can Change the World: Come Find Out on March 29"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
ideas<\/a>, people<\/a>, startups<\/a><\/div>\n

\t\t\"What's<\/a>
\n\t\tGregory T. Huang wrote:<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s no crying in baseball—or in innovation. Yet I\u2019ve been hearing a fair bit of lamenting around town about how Seattle startups or venture capitalists are not making the top-whatever lists (Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Technology Review<\/em>, you name it) of most innovative companies or investors around the country.<\/p>\n

Who cares? The city that brought the world Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, McCaw Cellular, RealNetworks, Starbucks, and any number of other game-changing companies, should not be too worried. It should, however, be motivated. And it is.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why we\u2019re gathering an elite group of technology and life sciences leaders to talk about how to spot the biggest, most promising ideas in their fields, and how these ideas could really change the world, at our half-day Xconomy Forum, \u201cWhat\u2019s Your Breakthrough Idea?\u201d on March 29 at the University of Washington. (Tickets are going fast, but there are still a few left at our special saver rate—you can register here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

This is about thinking big as a community. But it\u2019s also about the realities around making the biggest ideas work—building the right teams for the right companies, understanding who the customers are, handling competition, and so forth. And although the focus will be mostly on Seattle-area companies and leaders, the impact that we\u2019re talking about here is decidedly global.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a little more about the program and speakers for March 29 (topics are subject to change):<\/p>\n

—Nick Hanauer of Second Avenue Partners<\/a> will open with a keynote about the mental calculus behind identifying a true breakthrough idea, versus a really, really good idea that probably won’t get traction. Nick doesn\u2019t think of himself as a technology guy, yet some of his blockbuster investments happen to be in tech—Amazon, aQuantive, Insitu. (There\u2019s a lesson already: don\u2019t think in terms of your specialty area, think about an aspect of society that could be radically changed.)<\/p>\n

—Christina Lomasney of Modumetal<\/a> will talk about how growing the right kinds of \u201cnanomaterials\u201d could help reinvent the steel industry—and how this will impact energy efficiency, transportation, and defense. She might also tell us a thing or two about what she learned from her time at Boeing.<\/p>\n

—Mick Mountz of Kiva Systems<\/a> (from the Boston area) will discuss how mobile robots are transforming the logistics and operations of warehouses, especially in the e-retail business. Kiva\u2019s robots move shelves of inventory around automatically and are able to help staff distribution centers for companies like Staples and Zappos (now part of Amazon).<\/p>\n

—Steve Seitz of the UW\u2019s Department of Computer Science and Engineering<\/a> will talk about a breakthrough idea from computer vision (and maybe about creating 3-D virtual worlds …Next Page »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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ideas, people, startups Gregory T. Huang wrote: There\u2019s no crying in baseball—or in innovation. Yet I\u2019ve been hearing a fair bit of lamenting around town about how Seattle startups or venture capitalists are not making the top-whatever lists (Wall Street Journal, Technology Review, you name it) of most innovative companies or investors around the country. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}