Day trip to Boston

I love Boston! And I got to go there for work this weekend.  I love it's oldness, and how pretty it is there... the buildings aren't too tall, there is so much to do, so much culture.  I guess these aspects are what I love about DC too, so it's similar... but different :) 

I got off to a bad start by missing my plane but caught the next one and went straight to MIT.  MIT hosts the 100K Challenge, a contest where entrepreneurs and engineers showcase and develop their new ideas in a competition made up of three parts: the Elevator Pitch, the Executive Summary, and the Business Plan.  Each of the three parts has it's own separate contest, and yesterday was the Elevator Pitch Competition.  Since the DOE sponsors their Clean Energy Prize, I got to volunteer as one of the three judges in the Energy Track. 

So here's how it works: each person has 60 seconds to "pitch" his/her idea to the audience and the judge.  No props or visual aids are allowed.  After the pitch, the judges have 30 seconds for questions before they quickly score the contestant and on it goes to the next pitch.  It all hapens VERY rapidly, especially as I was trying to understand what their brilliant (and quite technical) ideas are all about and then trying to ask concise, substantial questions after the pitch in order to score them fairly.  There were about 20 entries for the energy track ranging from a device that makes spare parts for oil rigs on the fly to a "green" way to produce silicon for solar cells. 

The winner of each track goes on to the Final Round later that night, where the ten best ideas are pitched again in front of three new judges and a packed auditorium.  No one knows who has been chosen for the final round until their names are called.  If it's called, they run down and just GO.  It was great.  

The second winner for the energy section was the last person to be called in the final round.  He gave a phenomenal pitch that earned him a huge round of applause from the crowd, plus the $5,000 prize.  His idea was a design for an ultra-capacitor (similar to a battery) that sores energy so that stop-and-go electricity sources, such as wind turbines, can provide a steadier flow of electricity.  Since one of the major disadvantages of wind turbines is that they are intermittent, his design could revolutionize the industry and a lot of other applications. 

So many of the students had brilliant ideas that really could work.  But not only were the ideas good, the people were wonderful.  I got to talk about ultra wide band radio waves, people developing solar panels in Africa, and RSS feeds I can use to gather more energy news - it was awesome.  I can't tell you how many energetic and motivated entrepreneurs and scientists talked to me about their passion for clean energy and asking how they can get involved.  There is already so much going on at MIT that I think they're on the right track, but I'd love to find more ways to interact with them.  I made some great contacts on the education side, and I'm hoping to come back in a few months and judge the Executive Summary and Business Plan sections.  It will be great to see how many of these ideas evolve and take form.  

It was a gorgeous, sunny, cool fall day in Boston but unfortunately I spent the day indoors and didn't have much time to walk around the city.  I did however get an added bonus to meet up with my cousin Matt, a talented aspiring actor just starting his freshman year at Boston University.  The rest of his family was in town and happened to be staying at the same hotel!! We went out to a restaurant where I had my first ever bowl of New England Clam Chowder (delicious...) and watched the Boston Red Sox win.  Good stuff.