77 Mass Ave

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By Technology Review

June 2003

Technology TV

On the bare-bones set of High-Tech Fever, a Cambridge Community Television open-access program, Joost Bonsen '90 is preparing to interview a local business founder. Bonsen, a graduate student at the Sloan School, hosts the show, which seeks to inspire entrepreneurial activity among viewers. Through live interviews with company founders, he explores such details of entrepreneurship as obtaining funding, building research teams, and forming business plans.

"Everybody interviewed on the show shares the creator ethos' in his or her own way," says Bonsen. This evening's guest is Yonald Chery '88, SM '88, CEO of MIT spinoff mok3, a graphics software company that converts 2-D images into 3-D environments. Chery describes the obstacles and rewards of creating a business from scratch.

Bonsen began hosting High-Tech Fever in 1999, after appearing as a guest multiple times. "Apparently I was a good enough guest that [former host James Currier] invited me to take over the show when he got busy starting his own company," says Bonsen, lead organizer of the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition and leader of the MIT Founders Project published as "MIT: The Impact of Innovation." Bonsen has expanded the program's coverage beyond its original focus on software companies to include all of the key players in the technology venture zone, from lab researchers to venture capitalists.