Future Forward 05

Shayne Gilbert and her excellent crew put on the fifth annual Future Forward retreat.  This year it was at the newly renovated Tupper Hall at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts.

The first speaker was Michael Ruettgers , Chairman of EMC.  He talked about how it was important to keep a cool head during times of irrational exuberance.  During the recent bubble many of EMC's competitors invested their (at the time) abundant cash in various speculative ventures.  EMC did not, and as a result when the bubble burst they had $1B to see them through the difficult times.  This allowed them to continue to invest in product developlement and be ready when customers started buying again.

Next up was a panel of CIOs:
Rick Broughton, Dunkin' Brands
Steve Brigham, Timberland
Mary Finlay, Partners Healthcare
Ian Campbell, Nucleus Research was the moderator.
Kevin Roden, Iron Mountain
Dave Rudzinsky, Hologic
Ian Campbell, Nucleus Research was the moderator.

Their budget increases for next year ranged from flat to 8%.  An interesting fact was that 65-75% of the budget was for recurring costs just to "keep the lights on," leaving the remainder for new intitiatives.  There was a lot of interest in RFID, mobile and wireless applications, security, and business intelligence.  Most of them said they rely quite heavily on analysts such as Gartner, but that the best evidence came from case studies and experiences of their peers and business partners.

The most entertaining talk of the day was by David Weinberger on "What Blogging Isn't: And What It Means for Businesses, Media, and Bloggers."  Blogging is not:

• Cats


• Jouranlism


• Mass Media


• About individual bloggers

But it is about

• Forgiveness


• Multi-subjectivity


• Mult-dispute-ism

David made an interesting observation that blogs are different from real life in that flame wars eventually burn out on their own.  He also mentioned a scary article in Forbes that advocated various ways to deal with critical bloggers, including invoking the DMCA to get their hosting service to shut them down.

After lunch, Ray Kurzwell gave his by now familiar speech about how we will all live to be 200 if we can only survive the next decade.  He covered a wide range of predictions about computation and health care.  The slides are here.

Next, John Landry conducted a panel of four entrepreneurs turned venture capitalist:

• Jeffrey Beir, North Bridge Venture Partners


• Jeffrey Bussgang, IDG Ventures


• Elliot Katzman, Kodiak Venture Partners


• Jonathan Seelig, Globespan Capital Partners

A key topic was the trade-off between the excitement of running a company vs. the more distant role of investor or board member.  John led off the discussion by asking "How did you like having your soul removed, Eliot?" but as it developed John has done plenty of investing and board seats himself.  John recommends Bill Burnham's blog.

The final session, conducted by Liz Altman, consisted of pitches by several new companies:

• Gregg Favalora, Actuality Systems - 3D display


• Tom Gerace, Gather - blog rating system


• Mitch Sanders, ECI Biotech - diagnostic sensors


• Greg Schmergel,  Nantero - nanotube-based non-volatile memory system