Back when Brian and I created midVentures, we always intended on becoming an ‘incubator’ in one sense or another. Though we do have ownership stakes in 5+ of our peripheral startups, trading services for equity tends to ‘over-leverage’ our own time.

Alex Wilhelm, Jon Pasky, and Nikhil Sethi have done a great job watching the national tech incubator scene, and we all resonated on this article

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/what-would-a-chicago-style-ycombinator-look-like/

What I find interesting about this article is the truth that we in Tech Chicago tend to forget- Chicago does not have the early stage capital, the tech media, or the web 2.0 jobs that other cities have. What we do have is corporations. Ironically, corporations might just be a startup’s future best friend.

Blue Cross recently put another $18m into Sandbox Industries’ seed stage tech startup fund. I see that as a shining example of how chicago corporations can benefit from our fledgling tech entrepreneurship scene. Web 2.0 talent stays in chicago, and big corps get to outsource (or crowd-source) their R&D to 24 year olds willing to work for $2-3k a month. Some of chicago’s lowest paying jobs might become a corporation’s highest long-term return on investment.

Two of my friends have came to me holding y-combinator applications for their own ideas. And Chicago cannot compete with Y-Combinator for social capital, technology resources, or entrepreneurial connections. But some startups just need a corporate partner or a corporate sponsor. The cost of one VP’s salary can fund 10 startups a year. Beyond Blue Cross, who else will take this initiative?

The “Semantic Web” is supposed to give meaning to information by identifying relationships between websites, media, news, events, outcomes, etc, and as such, deliver information that is more meaningful or relevant to us. What I find interesting about the Semantic Web or Web 3.0 is the concept of ‘me’ on the web, which is why I wanted to write about Identity 2.0.

It will soon be easier for an unrelated person to find your life history online. Between public records, social networks, professional experiences, and general website use: we leave fingerprints all over the internet. I am likely registered for 100 different websites and perhaps 5 of those accounts are ‘interoperable’ allowing me to log in using a single identity. But Identity 2.0 is about more than logging in with a single account, Identity 2.0 involves how the web gives meaning to our identity.

• Reviews: If we reviewed books, movies, colleges, jobs, restaurants, articles, consultants or investment opportunities with a single unique ID, the ‘weight’ attached to each review, its impact on the object, and its impact on ourselves would all be more contextual and meaningful. Imagine reading book reviews weighted by the set of person who like the same books as you. In the same light, “expert reviews” would be able to more quickly identify merit or fraud over large data sets of objects.
• News: I admittedly don’t read any news sites except TechCrunch, Facebook News Feed, and France24.com in french. Sometimes I leave BBC running on my TV, but not since I lived in India. If the internet ‘knew who I was’ it would both route me more meaningful news, and it would route my own user-generated news to relevant end users. In order to route me news, the internet needs to know more about me: perhaps my job, interests, travel plans, education, entertainment, or pressing concerns. The only news I receive based on who I am and what I am doing comes from other people within facebook or linkedin.
• Career: It is ridiculous that one employer should have a monopoly over the specialized skills of an expert employee. Identity 2.0 enables managers to hire specialists for short-term high-paid work based on who they are and what they know, without having to build in-house teams or core competencies. Likewise, 50% of the workforce would need to structurally change their jobs, because 50% of work performed is nothing else but the training, selection, filtering, and distribution of non-digital human information. The more human information is digital, the easier it is to find and reward, and the less redundant information will be between organizations.
• Government: The ability to connect people with shared problems or concerns is still an act of phone calls or facebook groups. The ability to connect people with shared concerns and translate those concerns into actions that affect the greatest number of people through legislation, collective action, policy reform, publicity pressures, or direct litigation is in its infancy because we only tie problems to our online identities when we are directly solicited. If we tied our critical issues to our identities in a way that the internet could meaningfully connect us: publicity would more quickly translate into reform.
• Health: Our health care system is a system of crisis response. Our health identity is consigned to our medical records in the filing cabinet of a hospital, and all subtleties of our lives that might clue in a physical or mental problem are lost to the digital world. Identity 2.0 will enable the digitalization, tracking, and analysis of passive health data from travel plans to family dynamics to financial situations. But more than just tracking us, health care should be talking to us. There will be red flags if a new diet disrupts my sleep schedule or new medications are causing excessive weight loss. Our concept of health insurance will change as we update our online identity, and it updates us.
• Social: The implications of identity 2.0 on the social sphere is a real blue ocean of possibility. Within 10 years, social networks allow us to ‘stay in touch’ with thousands of weak relationships, as opposed to the few dozen strong relationships we meet in person. The more identity we have online, the quicker we can establish trust, plan events, exchange media, and transfer our identity to mobile phones or GPS locations. If you move to a new city, within a month of joining a building, finding a job, joining a gym- you can connect to new like-minded groups in a low-risk environment. Online identity also implies online activity, where our reviews, comments, tweets, articles, and portfolios represent more of our social lives.

When we search Google, we are searching the same Google as a neighbor with a completely different identity. Personalized advertising aside, the internet itself is not personal. Ideally, searching the internet would weigh search results by your identity, social network, and professional network. If I’m a University of Chicago student and I search for apartments, results should be weighed by my location, by peer reviews of other students, perhaps even by independent review firms specializing in matching college students to apartments. If I search for “Brian Mayer” the search results should be weighted by network and context relevancy. But all of this depends not only on me searching the internet but on the internet searching me.

This website is overdue for a one year anniversary post. For our community, I want midVentures to become a Chicago Tech Startup Incubator. But on a more tangible level, midVentures helps you Rapid Prototype new web application ideas for your business.

I’m not personally a ninja programmer, though I know my way around C++, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, CSS, HTML, and Visual Basic. In fact, what midVentures does best is not necessarily the programming. We turn ideas into interactive online prototypes. I have been working with some product management consultants to hone our midVentures process of turning ideas into visual mockups and interactive online prototypes in under 30 days. And from the feedback of the market: that’s a lot faster than companies can attempt internally.

I declare our Rapid App Prototyping Service to be fully operational Monday September 6th.

1. We start with the Idea Workshop with you and your team, flushing out new ideas ranging from social networks, mobile apps, front-end or back-end software, marketplaces, mashups, online tools, news and media sites, games, promotions, etc.
2. Once we flush the ideas out, we write up a market analysis and Feasibility Summary of each idea’s impact on your company and your customers; as well as the goals for each prototype once it is interactive.
3. We Rapidly Design and Develop the online interactive prototypes of your site, app, or software. This takes about 2 weeks, and our goal is to give you and your customers something to ‘play with’ early. This is not your production app and you won’t make money off of it, but you will get critical feedback.
4. We Measure the Outcomes of each prototype app. What did your team think? What did your customers think? What is the feasibility for budget, timeline, market reaction, and technology for developing the prototype into a production app?

Cynical midVentures fans will be correct in assuming that Rapid Prototyping your venture is something that midVentures has been doing for the past year. But of all the many things we have attempted, Prototyping is a stage of development where we blow clients out of the water.