My name is Trond Wuellner, and I’m one of the Vice Presidents in the MIT Innovation Club. As a feature on our recently updated website, many of us involved in the club will be contributing our thoughts on innovative topics of interest through this blog. I begin today with my first contribution and look forward to establishing lines of communication on just about any new innovative topic. My personal agenda is to get the word out about the new things going on at MIT that may otherwise fall under the radar. If you have suggestions or just want to start a dialog, drop me a line at: trondw(at)mit.edu. I’m kicking this off with a little self-promotion for the club — I think what we’re trying is pretty interesting, shout if you disagree!

For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of being involved with the MIT Innovation Club is the opportunity to participate in Tech Testbeds. Right now, we’re in the process of rolling out a trial-use test of the newest RIM Blackberry, and I’ve been lucky (or unlucky rather) enough to get my hands on one of the first ones that showed up. I’ve been using the device for just over two weeks now and have started forming a good impression of it. I’m going to save my specific comments for another time, instead I’ll focus on a few features that I would love to see added:

• I’m a Mac user and really don’t care for Exchange - forward through Gmail is good by me - but I can’t really do calendar or contacts sync very well this way
• That said, I would love to be able to subscribe to iCal or Google Calendar XML feeds from the calendar tool
• On a similar topic, Plaxo for Contacts?
• Google Talk is awesome on the Blackberry — how much more bandwidth would I need for voice? Skype?
• Bluetooth sync and file transfer? I’d love to eliminate another cable from my desk
• I’m not one to take advantage of the 9,000 bookmarks that Firefox comes pre-installed with, but give me more than 6 by default! Can I grab my del.icio.us links? Those tagged with “BlackBerry?”
• Can I have a physical switch for the keyboard lock? Like on my iPod?

Anyone out there who can get a way to pull iCal feeds from the web down to the BB would make my day!

Next time, I’m going to talk a little about BioFuels and a project going on here at MIT that I think has some real potential. I’ll even see if I can get a moment with Vinod Khosla at the MIT Energy Conference next week to corroborate!