Savvy Avi

IDEO.org , IDEO’s branch for social venture work, has chosen Evotech for a 5 week project. We have a talented team: a mechanical engineer, a designer and a management consultant, working to improve EvoCam’s design and market strategy. It’s a great show of confidence for Evotech, and will no doubt improve our readiness to go to market. Read more in IDEO’s blog post . Working on Evotech part-time, progress comes slow. For every grant, business opportunity or competition won, we’ve lost at least two. However, so far, every achievement is several times bigger than the one before it, and that means we are moving in the right direction.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I built a website for Evolving Technologies. Check it out. www.evotechmed.com . At Evolving Technologies, an early stage venture, we were debating whether it makes sense to have a web presence at such an early stage. After all, we are not looking for customers just yet. Some of us argued that we should be focused on a short list of strategic tasks that doesn’t include maintaining a website. However, we found out that, contacts you talk to expect to be referred to a url. It is also useful in email introductions. What’s more, today with good content management solutions it only takes a day to build a reasonable website, it’s fun and it allows you to show case the things you’ve been working on. So we got one, hope you’ll enjoy it!

A small office, off the infinite corridor, hosts MIT’s International Development Initiative program (IDI). IDI’s mission is to help ideas, worked on at MIT, become products and reach people in developing economies creating a social benefit. Most ideas never make it into products. The gap between good ideas to good implementation is even wider when the intended user is many miles away from the inventor. IDI helps to bridge the gap, many times by flying the entrepreneurs to the destination markets where they refine and test their ideas. This summer IDI granted its Technology Dissemination Fellowship to Evotech , the affordable endoscopy venture I am part of. We are using the grant to develop a medical light source to work with our endoscope. With the grant we hired an intern from MIT who works on prototyping and especially on the light’s electric board. We also used the fellowship to purchase components needed for the device and its development: a refurbished scope, LEDs, circuit bo...

I have been working on EVOCAM a low cost endoscopy system with my partners at Evolving Technologies. Using frugal innovation techniques we developed a light, portable endoscopy prototype for a fraction of the price of existing solutions. Recently Medicine for Humanity physicians used our system to operate in Uganda. To allow training to continue from afar, after volunteer physicians returned home, we are planning to add a tele-medical feature to our device. I joined the team after they already had a working prototype and focused on market research, creating a concise massage and preparing a parametric engineering evaluation that exemplifies how EVOTECH is positioned in the market place. Basically everything it takes to turn a good idea into a good business plan. I am currently working rendering another EVOCAM out of MIT’s hobby machine shop. Together we took EVOTECH into MIT’s $100K business plan semi-finals (still competing) and to a bunch of other competitions in MIT and out...

A Product Manager’s key responsibility is focusing the product direction. It is always the case that there is more work than resources especially in startups. Hence a good way to prioritize work can really be useful. Using SaaS, software typically resides on vendors’ servers, it is easier for vendors to release updates at more frequent intervals, and with agile development practices, applications are updated almost continuously without traditional version control. Software hosting also allows vendors to collect valuable information about customers’ usage patterns. The available information is unprecedented in scope and immediate in availability. With a continuous deployment model and immediate customer response, the feedback loop between development and customers has never been faster. However, in order to fully leverage the fast feedback loop, companies must use the right performance metrics. This is what my research is about and I’ll speak about it in CE2011 conference this Jul...

When HubSpot’s development team started working it was clear to them that they are going to work agile. It was equally clear to Raytheon’s air traffic control development team that they should use traditional methods like waterfall (and CMMI). And if Raytheon would have decided on agile I would never fly again. However, these projects are in two ends of the spectrum for many in the middle the answer isn’t obvious. I recently went on a business trip to San-Jose California to help establish MIT’s product realization lab. I met with managers in Cisco software and E-bay and learned that this is an important issue. In fact, E-bay uses both methodologies depending on the project. To come at the right conclusions development teams should consider organizational, product and industry characteristics. I developed this questionnaire with 8 questions. By filling it out and summing the points, one can arrive at the most suitable method for a given project. Questionnaire Rank each question ...

Is Quora going to make it? They have got a good chance. Many Silicon Valley executives think they will. Is Quora going to contribute to the body of global knowledge? I am doubtful. Like Wikipedia, Quora is a crowd sourcing platform that leverages users to do the work. Unlike Wikipedia, Quora is for profit. Its users work, not for the benefit of human knowledge but for the benefit of Benchmark Capital . It has a smart business model. Users answer questions to promote their online reputation as experts on a topic (guilty as charged, I do it too). Users also write questions because it is an easier way to show online presence than answering, it only takes a sentence or two. People write questions to join the online clatter; usually they are not looking for answers. Also, in other search and answer websites like Answer.com or ehow.com the questions are simple, like “What is the best way to get from Philadelphia to NY?” Google “How”, “Philadelphia”, “NY”, and “travel” and you are likel...