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Atlanta native, academic capitalist, technology professional, spaceflight amateur. Stephen Fleming's blog is at home at http://academicvc.blogspot.com/
May 2008
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Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 8:42AM EST on May 28, 2008
Yeah, a self-referential blog post about... blogging. Yeah, I hate them, too. But, hey, it was a year ago today that Jeff Haynie (with a nudge from Lance Weatherby and a few others) nudged me into starting this blog. I'm not the most prolific of bloggers (although MarsEdit helps immeasurably; highly recommended!), but I get a lot of positive comments... occasionally from people I don't even know! So I'll keep going as long as people see value in it. As noted earlier, I've moved the Georgia Tech-specific posts to our new GT VentureLab blog. Suggestions are always welcome, either via email or through the Skribit box to your right.
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Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 8:27AM EST on May 22, 2008
 What are you doing Sunday night? If you're in Atlanta, and not spending the Memorial Day weekend on the beach, I'd like to invite you to the first-ever Tech High School graduation.
The official history: Tech High was born out of the determination of respected, successful business, community and educational leaders in the metropolitan Atlanta area to deal with the student performance needs of Atlanta and the shortage of highly skilled workers in Georgia. Seed capital came from a generous donation from the partners at Noro-Moseley, then TAG adopted Tech High as a target for donations. Don Chapman, a Georgia Tech graduate, Atlanta native and successful entrepreneur, took the early leadership of the Tech High Foundation, raising several million dollars to establish THS as a charter school within the Atlanta Public School system to deal with the student performance needs of Atlanta and the shortage of highly skilled workers in Georgia.
The unofficial history: The Atlanta Public School system is a expensive disgrace. It's too big to fix, but it's not too big to humiliate. By taking the same students as APS (charter schools, unlike magnet schools, don't get the luxury of admissions tests and admissions standards), but without the soul-killing bureaucracy that dominates APS, we could demonstrate in microcosm that the problem isn't the students... it's the system.
We initially thought that applying technology would be the solution, hence the name Tech High. "Laptops! Eight o'clock! Day One!" It turned out that we were getting ninth-grade students scoring at the third-grade level in reading and math. So some of the more ambitious technology projects were put on hold in favor of some old-fashioned fundamentals. Yes, you have to do your homework. Yes, you have to wear a uniform (nothing exotic: khaki pants, and any solid-colored shirt with a collar and no words on it). Yes, you have to shut up when the teacher is talking. Yes, we're going to hire teachers who actually give a damn about the students.
It makes a difference.
We started with a ninth-grade class of 100 students in the 2004-2005 school year. About half of those students are still with us, and we've added one class every year... so, this year, THS was a full four-year high school with our first-ever senior class. We've survived an eviction by the city of Atlanta (after we spent $600,000 to renovate the SciTrek building, they kicked us out, but have left the space vacant for three years). We survived a boiler explosion in the 1920s-vintage school building we're now occupying on Memorial Drive. We even survived the recent tornado, which made a direct hit on the school. And the reason is the students.
These kids are awesome. We don't dwell on their backgrounds but, as one parent described her son "He's not just the first person in our family to go to college, he's the first in our entire church!" They've busted their tails on their schoolwork, and it shows.
There are years when the entire dinosaur herd of the Atlanta Public School system (50,000 students) sends one graduate to Georgia Tech. In our first senior class of 43 students, Tech High School is sending three.
We have another graduate with a full ride to Emory. We have other graduates going to Mercer, to the University of Georgia... these kids are embarked on productive, fulfilling lives that wouldn't have been possible had they been warehoused in the APS "schools" immersed in crime, violence, and despair.
Our first graduation ceremony is Sunday afternoon, at 5:00, at the Ferst Center (Georgia Tech campus). It's free and open to the public. If you live in Atlanta—or if your company hires employees in Atlanta—come see a demonstration of hope. Come see the future.
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Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 10:56PM EST on May 19, 2008
 So I spent the day today at StartupRiot. First off, hats off to Sanjay Parekh for pulling this all together. It was better organized and better run than a lot of "mature" events run by professional conference organizers. And I don't know what he used to threaten the speakers with, but people actually stayed within their three minute slots!
(I want to bottle some of that and use in our TAG Top 10 auditions next year, since the "three minute pitches" there tend to run five or six minutes...)
Second, the deals. Fifty-five deals in a little more than three hours. Some of them, to put it politely, needed a little more work. (Okay, some of them need to be ritually defenestrated while chanting "Hope is not a strategy!") Some of them were quite compelling. Most, unsurprisingly, were somewhere in between. But, for the investors in the audience, there were enough worth looking at to justify the day away from the office.
Third, the format. Okay, some of the presentations were painful. But the pace was fast enough to keep me from getting bored... an occupational risk of most investment conferences. I think this proves that Sanjay was right on with the three-minute target. Truly awful presentations are obviously awful within the first 30 seconds. For six- or eight-minute presentations, I have time to wander out to the lobby and get a ginger ale and probably get caught up in a conversation with somebody. When it's three minutes... heck, by the time I've made a snarky comment on Twitter and caught up with the Backnoise channel, it's almost time for the next presenter! No reason to leave my seat.
Fourth, the community at large. I'm not sure Atlanta could have supported an event like this two years ago... I'm darned sure we couldn't have supported it five years ago! I think today underlines the fact that Atlanta's technology community is finally, finally past the post-Bubble hangover, and a new expansion is well underway. There's a new generation of entrepreneurs building everything from Web 2.0 apps to RFID-enabled teddy bears. I love this community, and it's great to feel the buzz generated by more than four dozen entrepreneurs in one room!
Again, my congratulations to Sanjay, and my thanks to the various sponsors for helping make this happen. My only question is... who's going to step forward to run this event next year?
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Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 1:39PM EST on May 12, 2008
The MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta is hosting a “Run It By The Pros” member only workshop. This event is typically attended by 50-55 students, entrepreneurs, services providers and investors. There is a panel of experts from the area of funding early stage companies. The panel will give constructive feedback to the presenters. The main benefit of this event for the companies presenting is for them gain critical experience and impartial feedback so they are more effective in delivering their message when present to a full audience of investors. Members attend to learn more about the process of presenting effective investor presentations and to learn about new exciting companies. There is no cost to participate as a presenter. If you know of an early stage company (technology preferred but not necessary) that needs experience in making investor presentations, then please have them send in their business plan and investor presentation to be reviewed and possibly selected to present. The next workshop is scheduled for June 12, 2008 and will be held at the law offices of Miller & Martin located at 1170 Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta. Deadline for submission is Friday, May 30, 2008. Send your executive summary and/or business plan to Virginia@mitforumatlanta.org. You may also contact Virginia Martin at 404-422-0330.
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Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 10:16PM EST on May 8, 2008
I know that I promised to keep the Georgia Tech stuff on the other blog, but since I have a number of readers here who may not have subscribed over there yet: The annual ATDC/VentureLab showcase is next week, and it's going to be our best ever! Check it out, and RSVP soon!
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Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 10:48PM EST on May 7, 2008
Now it's time for descent into geekery as a distraction from other things... I have a lot of quotations collected, and I'm always harvesting more. I've collected them in various databases over time, from hand-rolled FileMaker to things like EagleFiler and Yojimbo. The problem was that, if I wanted to share them with anyone, I had to somehow export them and reformat them as HTML, then post that on the Web somewhere, and then update that HTML whenever I found new quotes, and... ugh. I wanted a way to generate a single random quote, and to do it on this blog (which is hosted by Google Blogger/Blogspot). For the attention-deficit crowd, here's the punchline: In Blogger, go to "Customize > Layout > Page Elements" and click on "Add a Page Element". Select "HTML/ JavaScript" and paste in the following <iframe> code.
<iframe frameborder="0" height="175" src="http://www.stephen.fleming.name-a.googlepages.com/random_quote_id.html" id="SRF_quote" style="overflow:visible;" scrolling="yes" width="100%" name="SRF_quote"></iframe>
That's it; you should see a widget similar to the one on this page. If you want to know how it works—perhaps you dislike my raving-libertarian streak and want to use your own selection of quotes—read on.
There are a lot of random-quote widgets out there on the Web, but the ones I found had a common architecture: they'd invisibly load all of the quotes in the background, then selectively turn on visibility for one random entry. That works for 12 quotes; it won't scale to 1000 without unacceptable impact on page-load times.
The first step was to get the quotes into the "cloud". I chose to use DabbleDB since they offer free service for data that will be released under a Creative Commons license.
So I set up a simple-stupid database with only two fields: "Quote" and "Author." I thought of getting fancy with dates and sources and stuff, but simplicity won out. Now I had to figure out a way to extract a single quote (and author) from that database.
DabbleDB has a JavaScript API documented here. Actually, their documentation is lousy, but their tech support is great. And if you inspect enough examples from their forum, you can see what's going on.
After a bit of trial-and-error, I wound up with the following code:
<!-- aggregated, debugged, and © 2008 by Stephen Fleming -->
<!-- http://www.stephen.fleming.name -->
<!-- quotes hosted by DabbleDB: http://stephenfleming.dabbledb.com -->
<script src="http://dabbledb.com/scripts/api.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://stephenfleming.dabbledb.com/schema/quotationdatabase/65730579" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://stephenfleming.dabbledb.com/publish/quotationdatabase/6d376a72-5e76-41b2-a175-637f75296336/allentries.json" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var entries = Dabble.view('All entries').entries;
var fields = Dabble.view('All entries').fields;
var i=Math.floor(Math.random()*(entries.length+1));
<!-- print the quotation -->
document.write("<p><span style='font-family:Georgia; font-size:11pt;'>");
entries[i].writeValue(0);
document.write("</span><br /><br />\n");
<!-- print the author if not blank-->
if(entries[i].values[1].length>0)
{
document.write("<span style='font-family:Georgia; font-size: 9pt; font-style:italic;text-align:right;'>--\n");
entries[i].writeValue(1);
document.write("</p></span>\n");
}
scroll(0,0)
</script>
<span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:8pt;color:#333333;">
See my complete collection of quotes <a target="_blank" href="http://www.stephen.fleming.name/quotes.html">here</a>.
</span>
The DabbleDB bits are eye-watering but their site gives you a good walkthrough on how to configure them. After that, it's just simple JavaScript to pick a random entry, display the quotation and (if an author is identified) its author. Miscellaneous formatting and prettification, of course.
I saved this file as 'random_quote_id.html'; I used my Google Apps space, but any Web-accessible server should do. You're welcome to link to it.
Blogger/Blogspot is a bit particular about what it will accept in its widgets, so again, after some trial and error, I established that this will work (same as for the ADHD crowd a couple of screens above):
<iframe frameborder="0" height="175" src="http://www.stephen.fleming.name-a.googlepages.com/random_quote_id.html" id="SRF_quote" style="overflow:visible;" scrolling="yes" width="100%" name="SRF_quote"></iframe>
In Blogger, go to Customize > Layout > Page Elements and click on "Add a Page Element". Select "HTML/JavaScript" and paste in the <iframe> code.
You can see the results to the right of this page. I'm irritated that it's apparently difficult/impossible to create an iframe that dynamically resizes itself to its content. I spent a couple of hours following various threads on the Internet and trying code snippets, but I couldn't reproduce the desired behavior inside Blogger.
I settled for a medium-sized iframe (175 pixels) set to display a scrollbar if the random quote is too long to fit. That doesn't make me happy, and if anyone knows a better solution, please email me.
This isn't the cure for cancer, but it solves a problem that I haven't seen solved this way anywhere on the Web. If you use it, I wouldn't mind a link from your site back here. Let me know if you find bugs or make improvements!
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Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 10:14PM EST on May 4, 2008
Since this blog is approaching its first anniversary and--if my mailbox is any indication!--is actually attracting an audience, I've decided to mess with a good thing. Basically, I'm going to split it in two. Personal rants, opinions, and space-related stuff will stay here. Posts that are specifically related to Georgia Tech and/or technology commercialization will go to our new GT VentureLab blog. The entire VentureLab staff has the ability to post over there, so you'll be hearing several different editorial voices. That's a feature, not a bug. #include standard_disclaimer, etc.
You can subscribe to the new blog's RSS feed here. Comments, as always, are welcome, either via email or in the Skribit box to the right of this page.
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