We are all excited to see that the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI) launched its 2011 summer program in its new location earlier this week!

YEI is an incubator for entrepreneurs in the Yale student body and helps them overcome some of the challenges they face starting their new ventures. YouRenew was started out of YEI and we owe a debt of gratitude to the organization for all it has done to help us launch and grow. It has done a terrific job of fostering an entrepreneurial environmental in Yale and New Haven, and gave us the opportunity to work alongside smart and innovative entrepreneurs.

We are proud to say that one of the new ventures is being co-founded by former YouRenew employee Chris Murphy. Chris, and co-founder Greg Hausheer, are launching a website called BookSavr.com, which provides a convenient way for college students to save money when buying textbooks and other class materials.

Other notable ventures that have launched out of YEI include Paper G and TutorTrove. Paper G is a technology company that automates local ad creation, sales and management for online publishers. It was started by an incredibly smart group of guys who have proven themselves as true innovators in the online advertising space.

TutorTrove provides a convenient web platform to assist tutors and educators. Their new product, Desmos, is an online community for interactive teaching. With the large variety of hardware and software in classrooms, teachers face increasing difficulty trying to transition course material from one device to another. Desmos is designed to bridge this gap and become a unifying standard for interactive lessons, letting teachers seamlessly present their material via their computer, tablet, whiteboard etc.

This only represents a small sampling of the companies coming out of YEI. I would suggest visiting the site to see some of the new ventures launching this summer.

We wish the best of luck to the YEI entrepreneurs starting their challenging journeys this summer!

One of my new favorite ideas is the ‘$300 House’, a concept first presented in the Harvard Business Review blog by Vijay Govindarajan with Christian Sakar. In creating this idea, the authors sought to find a way to build livable, sustainable and well engineered slum housing that cost no more than $300 per unit.

Slum homes are often built on dirt floors with cheaply available materials such as cardboard, mud or clay, and other scraps. Their poor designs make them susceptible to disease, fire and rapid deterioration. These homes can become money pits for the owners who are stuck spending their already limited resources on expensive upkeep. The authors’ new design will include cheap and effective solutions to improve sanitation, ventilation and overall durability. They also propose the use of solar panels to reduce the home owner’s future energy costs (as well as the world’s overall GHG emissions). This idea has since taken hold and generated a large following.

The Economist calls it frugal innovation or reverse innovation – “the art of radically reducing the cost of products while also delivering first-class value”. This often involves simplifying a product, making it more durable, or adapting it to the needs of the developing world. We have seen frugal innovation at play in the second hand electronics market, which has provided affordable technological products and helped developing countries overcome their lack of telecommunications and PC infrastructures.

If the homes are produced in large enough quantities, the scale could economically justify the mass production of durable materials and world class designs. The authors are hoping that an economically feasible plan will help attract for-profit companies such as GE, IDEO and Siemens. GE in particular has already adopted frugal innovation for medical devices they market to developing countries, so hopefully this product will be a good fit!

If you’re interested, you can check out their website at www.300house.com to follow their progress.

Last week the McKinsey Quarterly released an interesting report discussing the future of Web-centricity. The authors believe there will be a migration to HTML 5 that will create a more seamless integration of devices, thereby increasing the prevalence of smartphones. This topic sounds dry and uninteresting, but if this change happens it could have a critical effect on the types of devices we use and the way we consume media.

I use a BlackBerry Tour, an iPad and a MacBook laptop. Each serves a different role and each has a different capacity for web access through a browser. The least portable, the Macbook, is the most powerful and can access almost any website through Safari. The iPad is also fast and can access most websites, but none that run on Adobe Flash. And my BlackBerry, although portable and convenient, has difficulty supporting almost any website that offers video and multimedia content.

These limitations with smartphone and tablet browsers led most web based services to offer applications for mobile devices and tablets. Apps provide you with a faster and more enhanced product on your smartphone or tablet than you would typically receive through the device’s browser. Because the browsers on my BlackBerry and iPad are so limited, my use of these devices is almost exclusively through my apps.

The McKinsey authors, Kormaz, Lee and Park, predict that most web services will begin building their applications on HTML 5; a browser platform that can deliver the same speed and usability that an app can. HTML 5, they argue, increases the processing power of tablets and smartphones, and narrows the gap between these devices and laptops/PCs. They estimate HTML 5 will be used for more than 50% of mobile apps within the next three to five years. According to Kormaz, Lee and Park, this shift will result in the browser becoming the “universal computing platform” and more seamless integration between your smartphone, tablet and PC.

So what does this mean for you? That depends on who you are. Consumers will benefit from seamless integration across their multiple devices and will find the smartphone playing a larger role in their life. Software developers will no longer have to build specialized apps and will no longer pay distribution fees to Apple and Google for the use of that app. If you provide a web service that involves video and multimedia, this will make your product easier to access and better integrated across your users’ devices.

The article goes into further detail regarding the effects of this change. I would highly suggest you give it a read.

If you are curious to see the other side of the debate, read The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff in Wired Magazine. I won’t go into what they say in this post, but Anderson is one of my favorite writers and it is definitely worth checking out.

It was recently announced that Walter Isaacson, who has written biographies on Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, will be releasing a biography on Steve Jobs in early 2012. The biography will be based upon three years of interviews with family, colleagues, competitors and, most notably, Jobs himself.

The title: “iSteve: The Book of Jobs”

I could not think of a more appropriate title. Like a Randian protagonist, Jobs’ phenomenal success in business has inspired a cult-like following. He has revolutionized the markets for personal computers, mobile devices, music consumption, animated movies and brought to life a new category of consumer electronics with the iPad (a category that Apple now dominates beyond question). Apple, which he co-founded when he was 21 years old, is now the third largest company in the world.

And his personal hills and valleys should also add a fascinating element to the biography. For instance, his inability to graduate from college, his controversial termination from Apple and his more recent health issues. For a fascinating glimpse into his life I would recommend watching his legendary 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech (I personally like the famous calligraphy story).

There are a lot of Jobs fans at YouRenew so I can assure you that many of us will be reading this biography next year – on iPads.

The Marine Corps is a group known for its resourcefulness and it has once again demonstrated how it has earned the right to boast that ‘Marines make do’.

The Marines have recently re-purposed an inactive landfill to serve as the site for a 1.4 megawatt solar panel installation that will power Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego, CA. It will produce 2,400 megawatt hours each year, or enough energy to power 400 US homes.

The total cost of the project was $9.4 million and is expected to reduce annual energy costs by $336,000 (savings will offset construction costs after 28 years of use).