UConn ‘wired’ for growth

Organizers behind a $5 million work-force development grant are considering creating a business incubator at or near the University of Connecticut”™s Stamford campus to focus on emerging Web technologies.
Last month Talent for Growth, made up of 70 executives and planners from Fairfield County and Westchester County, N.Y., received $5 million from the U.S. Department of Labor”™s Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) program.
Amid other priorities, the organization hopes to foster the creation of innovative startups that will in turn attract talented workers to the region.
One of 26 WIRED regions throughout the country, Talent for Growth would not be the first to use the funding to create an incubator. The Technology Alliance of Appalachian Ohio is using some of its WIRED funds to establish an incubator and other support programs for interactive digital technologies. Another WIRED program called the Mid-Michigan Innovation Alliance is making technology incubators a focal point of its approach.
Those regions lack Stamford”™s proximity to Manhattan, one of the foremost clusters of Web media companies in the East, particularly at the junction of online media and advertising. Just last week, Fairfield-based General Electric Co. made its first investment from its new Peacock Equity Fund, investing in a New York City company called Adify whose automated technology is used to serve ads online.
In addition, Stamford is located between Verizon Communications Inc.”™s White Plains, N.Y., laboratory that develops Internet and interactive television technologies, and Yale University, which has a limited number of researchers applying emerging multimedia techniques.
With so-called Web 2.0 technologies now proliferating in which data is continuously trickled onto Web pages, creating a truly interactive feel, software developers are now using the term Web 3.0 to describe the next evolution of Internet technology ”“ though they have yet to assign the term a concrete definition.
Some see Web 2.0 as an intermediate passage into a new Internet in which monolithic Web pages no longer are the foundation of the World Wide Web, instead evolving into a continuously changing entity fed by massive, nimble, lightning-fast databases.
Ted Stout, a Talent for Growth board member who consults on telecommunications and economic development, supports the idea of a technology incubator to recruit and develop Internet entrepreneurs.
“I have always argued that the university (and) research community needs to take a more proactive role in both the research and, more importantly, the deployment of alternative ”˜last mile”™ architectures,” Stout said. “Here in Stamford, the ”¦ Web 3.0 development proposed for the UConn campus would play a significant role in supporting the financial, health services, IT (information technology) and global logistics industry clusters.”
The question becomes whether it is too late to get into the game in a meaningful way. Besides the massive Internet2 effort to re-conceive the Web under way at myriad universities, labs and companies, think tanks already exist that attract top researchers, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; which runs both the famed MIT Media Lab and the Center for Bits and Atoms which addresses core Internet technologies. The MIT Media Lab continues to spin out startups applying new Web technologies to various problems.
UConn has an existing technology incubator program at its flagship Storrs campus and at its medical campus in Farmington. Almost all of the startups are working on life-science technologies, however.