I’m just now getting around to posting about the NSF SBIR Phase II Grantees meeting that I attended last month, in Baltimore.   Our SBIR grant requires that we attend this meeting each year. The meeting is designed to help grantee businesses “share their technical and commercial achievements with the NSF program staff, potential investors and strategic partners, as well as having an opportunity to network with other small businesses for possible collaborations to grow their businesses.”   Lots of information to help techies make their good ideas become reality.

Of course, with hundreds of companies in a wide range of technical areas, the meeting can be overwhelming.   For example, I went to a talk on “New Synthetic Approaches to Higher Performance, Lower Cost CO2/CH4 Gas Separation Membranes” — good stuff, but a little far from Modular Robotics’s core business.   Still, it was good to meet the other  SBIR II education grantees, which include our friends Alex Repenning (Agentsheets), Chris Hancock and Ricky Carter from Tertl Studios, and robotics company Road Narrows, Agile Mind (co-founded by Adele Goldberg), and many more.   I don’t have any pictures from the meeting (big hotel ballroom with lots of people), but  above you can see our dazzling entry for the poster session, where I also gave impromptu demos of our old prototype.