Google has recently announced their first marketing competition for undergraduate and graduate students.  Teams will receive $200 in ad credits and compete to drive traffic to a website of their choice.  Check out the website for more information: www.google.com/onlinechallenge

Case Question:

MIT-Sloan has a world-renowned entrepreneurship program, and as Sloan students, you probably know people who are a) thinking about starting their own company, b) ready to join a startup or c) trying to figure out how to spend the cash they made when they sold their company before school.

With this emphasis on entrepreneurship in hand, your team is responsible for creating key messaging and a marketing campaign to increase the use of Apple technologies in start-up businesses. You can focus on specific Apple hardware/software products, or create a solution suite-the choice is yours. Consider only existing Apple products and services and 3rd party products, please justify your choices.

Guidelines:

1. First round, due 10/10 Noon EST: 10 slide Keynote or Powerpoint presentation (send your entries to collegejobs AT apple dot com). Please include names/ program/year of each member with the first round submission. Teams of 3 maximum. Finalists will be announced 10/17.


2. Second round for finalists, 11/05: 15 minute live presentation to a panel of judges – can be slides, video, marketing materials, etc. In addition, please prepare at least (1) piece of collateral that demonstrates your marketing plan (could be a draft of a website, an advertisement, a video, an audio podcast, etc).


3. Please avoid discussing the case with other teams or members of the MBA community.


4. All case competition members must be current Sloan students and must submit an intellectual property agreement for submission to be considered.

Good luck, everyone!

The Financial Times is hosting an innovation conference on November 12th & 13th in London.  It looks like they have a pretty good line up of speakers including people from IDEO, AIG, Intel, Philips, and others.  Innovation Club members are eligible for discounted registration fee. 

Check out the website for more information.

 

Now you can subscribe to MIT’s Technology Review using your iPod and listen to the articles for free. Click here to download MP3s from TechnologyReview.com or search for “AudioDizer” in iTunes to subscribe.  

20 members of the MIT Sloan Innovation Club each recently received a Samsung NV3 device as a part of the current I-Club testbed.  The multi-purpose devices serve primarily as point-and-shoot digital cameras, but are also capable of playing MP3 and MPEG-4 files, recording spoken comments and verbal notes, and displaying simple text documents.  One of the camera’s cooler features is the integration of moderate-quality external speakers and a headphone jack that allows playback of videos shot using the camera, as well as playback of other videos placed on the phone’s SD card from your hard drive.  The lack of integration with a convenient desktop application for managing MP3s and MPEG4s is the only conspicuous omission, but this omissions is compensated for in excellent image quality, convenient features and appealing form factor.  See the Flickr image, taken at a temple in Japan last week, for an sample of the camera’s handiwork. 

The robotic therapy device was one of the first recipients of a grant from MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. The center funds novel early-stage research and connects MIT’s innovators with the resources needed to increase their commercial viability. The robotic therapy device received Deshpande grants in 2002 and 2003.

“We saw this as a novel technology with the potential to have a significant impact on the quality of life for people,” said Charles Cooney, faculty director of the Deshpande Center and a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “This study proves we were right.”

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/brace.html

For those of you in the Cambridge area please take a look at the Innovation Club Google calendar to find out about upcoming events.  We have a lot of things going on this semester and the calendar also lists events of our partner organizations. 

 This week check out talks on ”Building Brands in the work of New Media” and Payload Systems both being held on Wednesday.  More details are available on the calendar.

Our friends at Wharton are hosting a conference on February 23rd focusing on how companies monetize innovation. The keynote address will be given by the CIO of FedEx, Robert Carter.  Other speakers include people from eBay, Adobe, Lucent, IBM, and LinkedIn. 

Check out their website for more information:

http://www.whartontechconference.com

Innovation Club partner Research In Motion is set to launch their new BlackBerry 8800 on February 21^st.  The device will be available through the new AT&T and will be the first BlackBerry to have built-in GPS.  In addition, the 8800 incorporates trackball navigation, a multimedia player, and Push To Talk.  Check out the RIM website for all the specs.