News Archive

The University of Maryland and Northrop Grumman will jointly announce the launch of the Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students (ACES), the nation’s first cybersecurity honors program for undergraduates, at a special event on Wednesday, September 25, 2013, from 10:30-11:30 a.m. in the Stamp Student Union Atrium on the University of Maryland College Park Campus.

The ACES program is designed to educate future leaders in the field of cybersecurity through rigorous, hands-on learning experiences, an intensive interdisciplinary curriculum, collaborative projects, and professional insight from industry and business leaders. The four-year honors program offers students a living-learning experience, giving them the opportunity to collaborate and work closely together as they pursue their advanced program of study in cybersecurity. The inaugural ACES cohort is comprised of 57 students. The ACES program is supported by a major grant from Northrop Grumman. For more information about the program, visit aces.umd.edu.

The INNo program trains research scientists in the entrepreneurial skills needed to bring technology inventions and services to the healthcare market.

Participants in the INNo program learn to:

• Identify and evaluate the commercial potential of intellectual property
• Understand the business fundamentals related to technology start-ups
• Create a value proposition and business concept for a new product, platform, or service
• Articulate investment opportunities persuasively to potential investors and partners
• Develop a network of resources in the Maryland entrepreneurial community

Roche’s move to skip over Inovio’s (NYSE: INO) late stage drugs for cervical cancer and Hepatitis C and make a beeline for its preclinical DNA vaccines for prostate cancer and Hep B was initially a little puzzling. Investors have preferred to park their money further upstream when products are in the clinic and they’ve been derisked. Big pharma is always looking for ways to take costs out of research and development. But the prospect of utilizing new technology with the potential to improve treatment is appealing for drug developers that want to build up and strengthen their drug pipeline.

Two Washington region tech companies — Clarabridge Inc. and Virtustream Inc. — rolled out a combined $120 million in funding on Tuesday, another sign of an improving venture ecosystem. Both rank among the Top 10 biggest D.C. Tech investments thus far in 2013

Not all of the fundings on this list qualify as “venture,” of course. Some of the larger ones could just as easily be called private equity, or at least the hybrid term “growth.” Like we see with Clarabridge’s $80 million, big-ticket financings like these often go partly toward cashing out earlier investors. And not all came from traditional VC. In Virtustream’s case, the entire $40 million Series D round came from a single corporate source: SAP AG.

The Abell Foundation underwrote a comparison of Baltimore’s innovation ecosystem with that of Boston. Sean Pool and Matt Van Itallie, of Canterbury Road Partners, undertook the work and their report is telling of the challenges in front of us, but also reveals great promise of the resources we already have and what Baltimore’s innovation ecosystem can become. The full report can be found on the Abell Foundation website.

This video is the first in a series about Startup Shell, the first student-founded, student-run venture incubator at the University of Maryland.

The Startup Shell is a vibrant co-working space at UMD where talented students guide their colleagues through ideation, research and development, product prototyping, business model creation and more.

Startup Shell is located in the Technology Advancement Program (TAP) incubator, an initiative of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech) in the A. James Clark School of Engineering.

Target has joined one of the growing trends in healthcare: innovation challenges. It announced on Monday two contests: one will seek a solution that helps people make positive lifestyle and prevention choices, while the other will gather ways to help people live well with a chronic condition.

The Target Simplicity Challenge will reward the creators of the winning ideas $25,000 apiece, their own Target-branded flip camera, and a chance to partner with Target to develop the concepts. The deadline for ideas is Oct. 24 and winners will be announced by January.

Maryland entrepreneurs are getting the chance to bring their small business plans directly to a panel of angel investors who could bring those ideas to life.

“The one thing we want to do is bring your story back with us,” said Mike Binko, founder and co-chair of Startup Maryland. “We want to put a big spotlight and a big megaphone in your hands to tell your story in your words.”

Harvard University has partnered with several venture capital firms to launch The Experiment Fund.  The Experiment Fund is starting with $10 million and was co-founded by Harvard alumni Patrick Chung (New Enterprise Associates) and Hugo Van Vuuren.  Accel Partners and Polaris Ventures is also associated with The Experiment Fund.

Two of the world’s most prolific technology entrepreneurs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are known for being Harvard University dropouts.  Why did they drop out?  Possibly due to lack of resources at the University.  Mark Zuckerberg moved to Silicon Valley from Harvard University to raise VC funding for Facebook in May 2004 and never looked back.

University System of Maryland increased the number of new companies formed out of university technology by 29 percent in fiscal 2013 and is aiming to keep up the pace this year.

The university system credits the growth in new businesses in part to its heightened focus on entrepreneurship and transforming university research to commercial technology. Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technology Suresh Balakrishnan said the university system will look to continue adding new companies by looking for new ways to support startups, such as an investment fund.