Yesterday, the Founder conference 2010 gathered two hundred enthusiastic entrepreneurs looking for advice and cofounders to start their new business.

First speaker was Aaron Patzer, well-known CEO of Mint.com which has been bought by Intuit for $170M in 2009. According to Aaron, the entrepreneur path is a long journey. “In the early days of Mint.com, I was living in Sunnyvale, most boring place in the Bay Area and had no sex life for a year” Confessed Aaron, “but self-doubt is okay as soon as you know what you’re aiming at”. Aaron stated that people recruitment is critical and that you need to “solve every people needs and problems if you want to have wonderful workers”. For example, Aaron found a girlfriend to his cofounder (who happened to be now his wife) and he became very dedicated to his work. Down the path, Mint.com has been rejected by more than 50 VCs before being successful. At this time, Aaron was just thinking about how to sell it to Microsoft (Microsoft Money) or Intuit… which he finally succeeded in!

From the very beginning, Mint.com was all about classified transactions to better categorize what money was dedicated to which budget (food, leisure…). It aimed at a personal finance management tool after the market research confirmed there was a great opportunity there. For Aaron, One of the key success factors was Mint marketing. While Mint competitors were launched previously, Mint had more traffic on their website thanks to their original content on their Blog with special weekly rendez-vous on Tuesday among others. It allowed Mint to collect more than 20000 email addresses of people willing to be part of Mint beta. Last but not least, they created a very nice buzz before their launch: they would give you a special access to the Mint beta if you put a badge “I want Mint” on your blogs or Facebook badge. Few weeks after, more than 600 blogs have put the badge and gave Mint.com tremendous free advertising.

First day of the Singularity Summit 2010 and first round-up of the last innovations and cutting-edge projects in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The conferences focused more on demos and concrete applications, less on Theory. L’Atelier US was there.

Human health and body improvement was a highly discussed subject today. Ben Goertzel, CEO of bioinformatics firm Biomind, talked about AI for increasing Human Health. He explained how the human body can be thought of as a very complex machine and remains very difficult to understand for our human mind. Longevity research has shown that everything in the body is interrelated. There isn’t a magic cocktail for longevity. In a near future, AI and AGI could help biology and pharma. What we need is an AI Biologist.

Steve Mann, an eccentric inventor and professor at the University of Toronto, gave the most entertaining show. He arrived wearing cam glasses and a blue machine that plays music with water. He also filmed the audience while he was talking. His concept of “sousveillance” or “undersight”, presented as the opposite of “surveillance” could be a deep understanding of how cam technologies can change society for the good or not. He thinks that a society based on the concept of “sousveillance” is the best way to decrease criminality because in this case surveillance comes from a human level, from “under”. It’s the contrary of a Big Brother society based surveillance from the above.

Another inspiring idea shared by Steve Mann and his music team was his idea about addiction. Human Computer Interfaces seem to work better if there is a real human desire to have an interaction with them. Better is the pleasure to play with machines, better humans and machines are interrelated. The best way to create this addiction is to create machines that are also provide sensitive experiences (playing music with water for example). Science engineering and art have to fuse to create Human Computer Machines of the future.

Mandayam A. Srinivasan, Director of MIT’s TouchLab, explained the latest innovations in haptic (touch) technologies: TADOMA, a system that aids deaf people, remote human interactions, brain machine control. He gave his vision of the future human brain: superhuman capacities (high speed and accurate vision, for example), directly integrated software (music), data management, new capacities to evolve in an abstract space.

Everyone remembers Andy Pausch’s famous “Last Lecture,” which the computer science professor gave a couple months before he died of cancer, and which  became hugely popular in the U.S. Andy was the co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University.

In the Last Lecture, Pausch refers to the “Tornado” he founded the ETC with. This Tornado happened to be one of the keynote speakers at this year’s SIGGRAPH: Don Marinelli, Executive Producer of the Entertainment Technology Center.

What is it about these two professors and their Center that made them so influential?

Two men, two opposite backgrounds: Randy the geek, Don the crazy theater professor. They each represent one side of the binary system our society has established between Arts and Sciences/Technology: right and left brain, the creative versus the rational. Why do we have to set the arts and sciences in opposition?

This socially constructed binary is one of the “brick walls” Randy and Don’s ETC is meant to tear down.

The Entertainment Technology Center is a professional graduate program that reconciles arts and technology in many different ways. Students come from extremely diverse backgrounds - there are engineers, architects, musicians, dramatists, computer graphics students, and so on. The goal is to have them build projects together and use their diverse backgrounds for challenging team projects.

Because innovation happens, according to Don and Andy, at the convergence of arts and technology.

During his keynote, Marinelli explained how similar theater and animation are. There’s a storyline, a plot, characters, a virtual world, a structure, and an architecture. They’e both about experience.

“There is a science to art, and an art to sciences,” he says. To him the rehearsals for a theater play are like algorithms for math.

If you consider an innovator, here is the question Don Marinelli would want you to ask yourself: are you ready to paint your office walls?

This question might seem a little overstated, but it is interesting when you think about it. If you want to think out of the box, the first thing you should be able to do is paint your office walls: first, in order to build a more creative environment, and second, because an innovator should be able to transgress the codes and act out of the box.

And that’s exactly what Don and Andy did with the ETC. The building looks like Disneyland.

Not only are their walls painted, but the entire curriculum of ETC is based on this original vision the founders had about connecting arts and technology. The students go rafting to experience risk, they learn Aristotle, try improvisational acting to work on creating a narrative with a team, build virtual worlds and learn game design. What a program! As well, the ETC has official agreements with some of the best actors in the industry – such as EA and Pixar – for them to hire ETC students upon graduation.

So … can you paint your walls?

(Photo: Carnegie Mellon University)

Since launching in November 2008, Groupon has seen insane growth.

“A year ago at this time, we were in 5 or 6 cities,” the social-coupon site’s CEO Andrew Mason said this morning at TechCrunch’s Social Currency Crunchup. “Now we’re in 170 cities and have about 5000 users,” Mason said. “Now we have 12 million users, and are adding 50 employees in the U.S. every month.”

Groupon started in a completely different space: as an organizing and action space.

“It started as a way for one person to get several people to help do something, for example, we had a group raising funds to build a dome over Chicago for winters,” Mason said. “But people were also using the site for buying things, so we introduced coupons for revenue.”

“The success took us by surprise, too,” Mason said.

The first few things Groupon tried to sell didn’t work.

“We had these slippers with flashlights,” Mason said. “About half of the people who bought them sent them back.”

Flashforward from that failure to this figure: 97 percent of businesses who are now featured by Groupon want to be featured again.

“Businesses see it as the most important form of local advertising there is,” Mason said. “They’re not handing over a check, but only paying when a customer walks in the door. For merchants with a low marketing budget, it’s great. “

Groupon sees its role as larger than that of just a coupon provider.

“We’re like a city guide, but we have this deal to nudge people to do things,” Mason said.

Mason wants Groupon to promote local hidden gems. You can think of it as a carrotmob at a glacial scale.

Chances are, Groupon won’t be around forever, seeing as its success is dependent upon social tools that will soon become vestiges. But it’s perfect for the content-sharing Web 2 moment.

Another part of Groupon’s success is that the majority of people who purchase a groupon, use it.

“We don’t build ourselves around breakage, because we think that’s a bad business model,” Mason said. “About 10 percent of customers don’t redeem coupons. Businesses don’t want breakage. “

“The stuff that we’re selling is inherently social,” Mason said. “There’s a natural incentive to share it with people, and Facebook and Twitter make it frictionless model to share.”

Even though Groupon is less than two years old, there are already more than 500 Groupon clones. But Mason doesn’t mind this, and actually thinks there is a place for them.

“The reason a business turns to the clones is because we’ve turned away that business,” Mason said.

Three is enough.

Startups with teams of four or more don’t tend to succeed,Y Combinator partner Paul Graham said this morning at TechCrunch’s Social Currency CrunchUp.

Any more than three founders shows a lack of confidence.

“It’s like they weren’t really sure their idea would work, so they got all their friends to come along with them,” said Graham, also a noted essayist and 2008 Time Magazine top 25 most influential people on the web.

“It’s like how college freshmen always go around in clumps. By they time you’re ready to graduate,those clumps don’t look right,” Graham said.

“Two or three-person teams are optimal,” Graham said.

Carrying on the triad theme, Paul was part of a panel with fellow investor Ron Conway, moderated by Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington.

Conway thinks that entrepreneurship is still misunderstood in the Valley.

“The idea that a Google comes only once every 10 years is wrong,” Conway said, noting that today’s VCs and entrepreneurs are smarter in the past.

“During the bubble, 77 percent of entrepreneurs failed,” Conway said. “Now it’s 40 percent.”

While Valley entrepreneurs are traditionally young, the average age is around 26. Conway says that his favorite kind of entrepreneur is the 18-year-old kid.

“I love when we invest in a company run by an 18 year old, because it will be incredible,” Conway said. “Anything is possible in their minds. They’re the best entrepreneurs.”

Conway gives an example one company he has invested in: Facebook.

“Every six months when I talk to Mark Zuckerberg, it’s like I’m talking to a different person,” Conway said. “He’s growing algorithmically as an entrepreneur.”

Conway and Graham also talked about some weaknesses they’re seeing in today’s crop of entrepreneurs.

“I’ve noticed that entrepreneurs aren’t as decisive as they should be,” Conway said. “Right now I’m on a decisiveness kick.”

“Entrepreneurs need to be tough,” Graham said. “It doesn’t matter what their idea is, as long as they’re tough.”

“You don’t want middle-of-the-road corporate drones,” Graham said. “You want people who are manic. Mania is good.”

Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier started his Summit at Stanford keynote with something you never hear at a conference here in the Valley.

“Don’t tweet this, don’t blog,” Lanier said to lead off his keynote. “Just listen to what I say and think about what you hear; don’t just be a relay node. “

Lanier is one of the pioneers of virtual reality – in fact, it was he who coined the term. He was the main face of the cyberpunk era. As this was the time before the majority of people owned personal computers, Lanier’s televised demos of 3D environments controlled by a glove was the convergence of technology and the unknown that Arthur C. Clark labeled “indistinguishable from magic.”

3D environments are now common, and haptic devices are hitting the mainstream, so much of what Lanier was describing 20 years ago – things that seemed perhaps possible, but improbable — is still just coming into fruition. The Peregrine glove is a direct descendent of the glove Lanier famously used in the 80’s to manipulate objects in his virtual environments.

But he’s not particularly impressed with where technology has gone, as the title of his keynote – like the title of his manifesto – You Are Not a Gadget, might lead you to guess.

“If someone had said to me 30 years ago that one day everything we were working for would lead to a new encyclopedia and a UNIX update . . . it’s like Groundhog’s Day,” Lanier said, arguing that contemporary internet culture is not leading to freedom, but its opposite.

“We think that we’re more decentralized, but we’re not,” Lanier said. “This is an age of increased centralization. The ethic of this openness thing is that the internet is just a giant copying machine. If content is more free between people who are getting poorer and poorer while advertising is profiting off it, it’s really not free.”

During the last year, during which Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people, Lanier has become known for critiquing a priori Web 2.0 ideas like the wisdom of the crowd.

”The wisdom of the crowd works for setting markets and elections. It’s good for setting prices, but if you ask a crowd to invent something, to do something creative, you’re going to come up with mediocrity,” Lanier said. “John Lennon or Bob Dylan wouldn’t succeed on American Idol.” A statement a Frank Zappa fan might not agree with, but at least be sympathetic to.

Yes, Lanier tends to side with older (re: classical 1960’s counterculture) ideas, for example the need of authority to dictate taste. If the wisdom of the crowd promotes mediocrity, it also pushes back the gatekeepers who have always defined culture, making innovative art and thought much easier to create and distribute, even if it never goes viral.

And he forgets that Lennon and Dylan were also mediocre.

But no matter what, Lanier’s suggestion that the audience understand information before retransmitting it, and his argument that transparency must be free of ideology, are examples of the heady discussion Lanier prompted — the commonsensical become heady in these days when marketing determines the Good and individuals internalize advertising concepts into psyche, transmuting themselves into brands.

“People wonder what Steve Jobs did when he was in India,” Lanier said. “I don’t think he went to study with a guru — I think he studied how to become one, to learn how to get people to pay you a lot of money to tell them what to believe.”

One of the panels at this morning’s Summit At Stanford 2010 was “Mobile Monetization - Billions for the Taking.” Speakers were Sunil Verma from Mobclix (ad exchange system on mobile), Anderson Thees from Apontador (LBS leader in Brazil) and Bill Diotte from BroadHop (“air traffic controller for networks”).

Here are our takeaways from the session…

First postulate: it’s a good time to enter the mobile industry because there are a lot of changes in the ecosystem, and, consequently, opportunities. The carriers and service providers lost the first smartphone battle, as Apple and Google are playing by their own rules on their platforms. The good thing is that carriers need to monetize their assets and need partners to optimize them: smart startups are welcome. Also, there is a gap between mobile app and carrier that a startup can fit into: better integration means better user experience, and so, better monetization.

On the developer side, little money is needed to build an app and deliver it to the world: innovation will soon follow as more and more developers are able to launch their apps. Developers need to think about cross-platform development (Blackberry is still number one in the U.S. smartphone segment) as the incremental cost is affordable and can bring nice surprises.

The mobile world is discovering more and more revenue-stream possibilities: freemium and virtual goods, for example. Furthermore, transaction costs are becoming lower (still high though; think about the 30% on the App Store), and micro transactions are now possible. Still, the utility base per use model is missing — it is not yet technically possible because of the network infrastructure.

Anderson Thees from Apontador gave a quick international overview: Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) erosion is huge in emerging countries, but the cost for acquiring customers is still high, so free apps and content is very important for a service provider to attract new users.

Regarding Brazil: mobile data there is still very expensive, so paying for mobile apps is not common — you have to provide a real added value. Anderson noted that Apple’s model is a closed garden, but it’s an alternative to something that is not working in Brazil. As soon as emerging countries have relevant 3G/4G networks, the competition will intensify regarding international competition, both from and to developed countries.

There are two types of augmented reality, explained Matt Grob, Sr. VP of Engineering and Head of Corporate Research and Development at Qualcomm, this morning at the Summit at Stanford.

The most common form of augmented reality is compass-based AR. It’s pretty effective, but subject to errors. For example, the compass can be off in its measurements. While a phone’s compass makes augmented reality applications possible, there are fundamental limitations with this model.

The better model is vision-based AR. To give an example of what Qualcomm is working on, Grob showed a video of a Rock ‘Em-Sock ‘Em Robots app developed in partnership with Mattel.

Vision-based augmented reality uses a smartphone’s camera as sensor. “Vision is the key enabler,” Grob said. “You start with real-world view with virtual content on top. This enables a more immersive experience.”

“We’re seeing the transition from looking at things on your phone to with phone,” Grob said. “Your phone is portal to magical world where there’s incredible stuff.”

There are several parts to the process. First, scanning with camera and determining an object’s natural features, and determining patterns. After that, comparing with database of known images; if the image matches, then using computing vision techniques to match the object’s XYZ coordinates.

After this, the application renders graphical overlays, with computations at 30X second. The tool needs to be low-power and needs to be offered at reasonable cost.

“We’re looking at making this scale,” Grob said. “This is very important. We want this to work at very large scale.”

“The trend is towards an architecture that is so flexible so you can support all the modes you have to support,” Grob said.

“Mobile and Geolocalization are the third chapter of the Internet revolution, after Search and Social,” Robert Scoble said during his keynote at Geo-Loco 2010 in San Francisco this Wednesday. Location-Based Services (LBS) are at the peak of the hype cycle, especially with Foursquare, and we are still in the industry’s infancy.

The emergence of dozens of LBS startups has been enabled by great progress on the infrastructure side in the last few years. But according to the event’s speakers, pure geodata applications will not be relevant soon and still have to add real value: context. Real time geodata is not just a feature but something which could be tremendous when combined with information: for example, friends with location or buses with location.

In fact, the LBS landscape will soon split: the services which add really compelling experiences (Booyah with Mytown for example) and those who will provide nice back office white-label databases like Simplegeo.

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures identified privacy as the biggest issue for the LBS startups. There is a total lack of comprehension of people’s needs in term of privacy, but we want to be very careful about what we are sharing with whom. A question from the audience illustrated this: “Can you be fired if your employer knows you go to bars four times in a week?”

As always from the VC point of view, there are plenty of business opportunities for startups in this area as we will need more and more capabilities for filtering our sharing with our communities and the web.

Context and privacy are definitely the new keywords for LBS industry, as well as plenty of web and mobile businesses (ask Facebook). The question for the LBS industry is: will companies have time to develop their business before Facebook launches its own check-in feature?

What is the future of geolocation? A Geo-Loco 2010 panel this morning responded to predictions collected by moderator Dr. Phil Hendrix, which attempt to predict what the ecosystem will look like 2014.

Here’s the second half of the predictions. Read the first part here.

Prediction 6. Mobile devices scanning QR and bar codes will revolutionize how consumers access information.

Not as much agreement on this one. Ron noted that getting business owners to use QR codes will be painful. “Any model that requires a business owner to take an action is difficult,” he said. “Things like Google Goggles that require no intervention by business owner will be much more scalable.”

Liebhold worried that the physical world will create digital noise. “Codes are physical spam,” he said. “We don’t want to pollute the environment with a bunch of gross data.”

7. LBS will be integrated with social networks.

The panelists agreed on this, as it has pretty much already happened. What was surprising is the amount of concern the panelists expressed about the potential dangers of this union.

“We need to educate people and make sure they want to have control over their location info,” Eisnor said.

“There are going to be really horrible stories about stalking,” Liebhold said. “Politicians will go crazy and legislate something. Facial recognition is probably the most dangerous technology — you can’t opt out of having your face scanned.”

8. Location will enable and foster better relationships. The equivalent of a local web will emerge.

Another mixed reaction.

“This is one of the best things that can happen with location,” Gannes said. “The incentives are aligned.”

“I’m very excited about local commerce,” Eisnor said. “Even twitter allows me to have a commercial p2p transaction. I can trade my bamboo for your lettuce over Twitter.”

“Location and geo-info foster existing communities; they don’t create new ones,” Ron said.

9. Users will be reluctant to pay for LBS.

One thing’s for sure: people will pay for games. “Location-based games will explode,” Liebhold said. “Video games will jump out of console into real world.”

Paid models are needed for evolution, Eisnor said. “Subscription and payment models will force us to create more value,” she said. “Static information that doesn’t change will get commodified.”

Gannes kind of put the good and evil into a single phrase: “Despite awful spam, this will be great for advertising,” she said.

And of course, as with everything, there’s the business-model problem.

“How to make money is a challenge,” Ron said. “We don’t have a scalable business model that will flow the money.”

10. What are the panelists’ own predictions?

Eisnor: We’ll navigate more based on time, not location. “We need a search engine based on location,” Ron said.

Gannes: I’m really excited about real-world gaming.

Liebhold: We’ll have the 1st gen AR glasses by 2014, but they’ll be bad. Will create mini boom

Scoble: A lot of these silos will stitch together.