I have a favorite application that I use on an almost daily basis, Rivalmap. I first started talking with Andrew Holt last year when their unfortunately named product called Competitious came out (btw they admit the naming mistake) and have stayed in touch with Andrew and co-founder Kris Rasmussen as the evolved the product.

First and foremost, I am a big fan of market awareness and competitive intelligence applications. It’s a category that is primed for a kick ass app based on social bookmarking to make some significant inroads but obstacles are many. The segment is dominated by service providers such as PR agencies who already have relationships with clients that they use to sell in clipping services, and for big companies they charge big dollars. Service sectors are big targets for hosted app providers.

There are dedicated applications, like Attain, and vertical specific apps are aplenty given the nature of CI being highly specialized to vertical markets. There are also quite a few apps showing up in Appexchange that claim CI capabilities. Lastly, there is a really complicated dynamic of marketing organizations, traditional home to CI apps, believing they need security with an on-premise app but at the same time having little prioritization with IT, so selling a hosted CI app to marketing groups is not always a downhill race.

I, simply put, love the functionality that Rivalmap gives me along with a pleasing user experience that is drop dead easy. I can bookmark away, build profiles and comparisons, and encourage discussion through online commenting. The daily email digest is a great way to stay in front of your internal audience and build participation. Getting people involved and active in an app like this is the single biggest challenge you will face… we’re still working on it

An important point to make is that I use this for a lot more than tracking competitors, I build workspaces for topics I want to track. The ability to clip anything with the aide of a simple bookmarketlet makes this a super streamlined app to use on a regular basis, it works like I do instead of having to go through a time consuming multi-step process just to bookmark pages.

Once clipped, a link can have it’s own comment thread and be assigned to workspaces, categories, competitors, and tagged. The integrated search makes finding items very easy, and at every opportunity there are tag clouds, indexes, and suggested keywords to make things easy.

For workgroups there is multi-user with a smart role-based security model makes the app very agreeable for group usage, and includes reporting to reveal the most active users. Integration with existing identity systems, or an OpenID approach would be a nice addition but for small workgroups this isn’t a big deal.

Rivalmap isn’t perfect but Andrew and Kris are rapidly iterating it to improve the functionality and add entirely new functions. From my point of view the important thing is that the application is highly functional, easily accessible, and leaves only small gaps in functionality. There are some functions, like the Comparison stuff, that I’ve only played around with but believe to have really good potential so we’ll grow into it.

It's no secret that food prices are rising drastically, and for the foreseeable future, worldwide.  According to CNN,

However, consumers still face at least 10 years of more expensive food, according to preliminary FAO projections.

Among the driving forces are petroleum prices, which increase the cost of everything from fertilizers to transport to food processing. Rising demand for meat and dairy in rapidly developing countries such as China and India is sending up the cost of grain, used for cattle feed, as is the demand for raw materials to make biofuels.

What's rare is that the spikes are hitting all major foods in most countries at once. Food prices rose 4 percent in the U.S. last year, the highest rise since 1990, and are expected to climb as much again this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As of December, 37 countries faced food crises, and 20 had imposed some sort of food-price controls.

Affluent Silicon Valley consumers probably don't feel the pinch, and probably never will, because they spend such a tiny fraction of their income on food.  But for the world's poor, food is usually their second largest expense, after shelter, and a 10% increase in food prices could well push them from subsistence to starvation. 

The Christian Science Monitor examines the role of biofuel crops in raising food prices.  Predictably, the biofuels industry, supported by farm-state driven legislation and buoyed by subsidies, has produced studies that minimize their impact on commodity prices.  Says the Monitor,

In a counterpoint study last month by corn growers and the biofuels industry, higher corn prices were found to be only a small element in rising food costs overall – although higher energy costs for fuel to transport crops and grow them were a larger factor.

There is still much doubt about the sustainability of biofuels, i.e. whether they are a net positive in terms of energy production vs. consumption, and in terms of carbon emissions.  With so much uncertainty about the cost-benefit ratio of biofuels, and the very real need for more arable land for food crops, shouldn't policy makers and land stewards be focusing on increasing food production and not artificially subsidizing biofuel production?

“Like all VCs,” Amir Nashat is saying, “we come late to the story.”

Nashat is talking about the formation of Fate Therapeutics, and in one sense what he’s saying is true. Venture capitalists bankroll, advise, strengthen, and help grow companies built around other people’s innovations—and so the story of even a very early stage startup has often begun well before they get involved. But in some cases—as in this case—VCs slip into the earlier chapters of a company’s history by spotting emerging trends and assembling the cast of characters (scientists, engineers, executives) necessary to capitalize on those trends.

Fate’s formation was announced last November 29, to some of the greatest fanfare (some have said hype) received by any new biotech in recent memory. At the company’s core was a dream team of five leading stem cell scientists—from Harvard, Children’s Hospital in Boston, the University of Washington, Stanford, and the Scripps Research Institute. And they were banding together across geographic and institutional boundaries to solve one of the biggest challenges imaginable in medicine, one with untold commercial potential: to control the destiny of cells. Hence the name, Fate.

The venture kicked off with a $12 million funding round led by Nashat’s firm, Polaris Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, and Seattle-based Arch Venture Partners—an initial installment on the more than $100 million Nashat says Fate’s backers expect will be invested in the firm over the next few years. What’s attracting all that cash, and all the attention, are Fate’s rather novel approaches to capitalizing on the science of both adult and embryonic stem cells.

Instead of trying to find ways to isolate adult stem cells, grow them in the lab, and then inject them into the body to repair specific tissues, for example, Fate’s plan is to develop drugs that spur already-present adult stem cells to action right in the body. And instead of turning to ever-controversial embryonic stem cells as the raw material for custom-made organs and tissues for transplant, Fate is developing molecules to reprogram mature cells taken from the patient to behave like embryonic stem cells. As part of the launch press blitz, Ben Shapiro, retired executive vice president of Worldwide Basic Research for Merck and a member of Fate’s scientific advisory board, went so far as to proclaim, “Fate’s approach is the dawn of a new day in medicine.”

Over-hyped or not, Fate is definitely a big idea. And it’s intriguing not just for its scale and approach, but for the way it came about—in large part through the convergence of two venture capitalists, Nashat and a young Arch associate named Alex Rives, who were separately following different paths to commercializing stem-cell research.

“It’s a story of networking,” Nashat begins, in what might be considered an understatement. For the Polaris partner, who holds a PhD from MIT in chemical engineering and studied under renowned researcher (and Xconomist) Robert Langer, it began in early 2006. At that point, he says, a small group of scientists had been working for a decade or two to study the basic biology of stem cells, assembling clues about how to modulate their behavior. There was still so much to be learned, but as Nashat read the scientific literature, he realized that those researchers had made more progress than he had previously thought. “They were filling in a lot of the gaps. The science around the papers was looking really interesting,” he says. This got him thinking of the commercial ramifications of the work—the idea that you could develop drugs to turn particular cells on or off, and thereby rally the body’s built-in resources for repair or block the actions of harmful cells. “It looked like you could start to make drugs based on this biology,” is the way he puts it.

Not long after that, Nashat was invited to a meeting called by a deputy of then Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney who was working to help the governor understand stem cells and craft his position on the controversial topic. Some 15 scientists and policy leaders had also been invited, and one who particularly stood out in Nashat’s mind was David Scadden, …Next Page »