The New Product and Venture Development track is having a reception at the Hotel@MIT (the former University Park Hotel in Cambridge) and I'm blogging this from a new iMac at the reception desk. I'm done. :)

The MIT $50K competition held its award ceremony last night. Congratulations are in order to my classmate Jeremy Bender and his team, Ancora Pharmaceuticals, who won the grand prize. $50K may not be a lot as far as seed money goes, but it’s a spectacular win for Jeremy and his team. For the record, their team “specializes in the development of complex carbohydrate drugs,” according to the summary posted here.

New version of my iTunes2Manila script out today. This little script, which posts the currently playing track in iTunes to your Manila weblog as a news item, now uses proper typography (curly quotes!) and includes an automatic wrapper for a Google search on the artist name.

Future to do: have a way to update a playlist message automatically, so that “currently playing track” can easily be included in your site template.

Currently playing song: “Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)” by Wilco on Summerteeth.

Currently playing song: "Kid A" by Radiohead on Kid A.

Slashdot: Atari Announces Official Portable 2600. “Portable” is an exaggeration; the unit has no screen or batteries. It’s just a joystick that plugs into your TV and plays 10 classic Atari games. It’s also an exaggeration to say that Atari is making the thing; they’ve licensed the rights to JAKKS Pacific, a company that have already made a similar product. Press release here; get it before it succumbs to Yahoo bit-rot.

Personally, I would only consider such a monster if it had the entire Atari library in it (considering that each game was only a maximum of 4K in size, that should be feasible) and if the “joystick” were identical to the old Atari 2600 joystick. Super retro kid stuff…