tr35

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

We at EQO received some fantastic news today! Our co-founder and Chief Software Architect Jeff LaPorte has been named to the Technology Review Top 35 Innovators under 35 list for 2007! I am of the opinion that this prestigious honor is well deserved by Jeff. In addition to being a Customer Evangelist, I also work for Jeff as a Solutions Architect here at EQO. I experience his brilliance first hand every day. He always has an innovative solution to any given problem that always fits the bill. His greatest accomplishment is in building the EQO Service and in delivering Mobile VoIP to regular everyday handsets, which we hope will leave a lasting impact on the wireless industry.

I am not just sucking up to the boss here, this is an amazing accomplishment that Jeff has earned. He joins many other illustrious winners on this years list, most notable of whom are Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Kevin Rose of Digg. We hope that Jeff joins them in changing the world. Jeff's EQO Service has amazing capabilities that EQO Mobile hasn't even touched yet, so stay tuned and you'll see Jeff's innovation firsthand.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist