Apparently what happened was that the WSJ interview was
coordinated by their most-talented PR firm, NYPR. Ms.
Dockser Marcus -- not Mucus, Rohit -- decided to position
the article from the "academia vs. enterprise" angle and
sought to find someone, anyone, who could fulfill her
vision. Unbeknown to the folks at Akamai, she apparently
pushed on some students to see if there was any conflict.
Koffel's experience surfaced and the hook was established.
According to Lewin, MIT/LCS *management* was furious, and
wanted to sue [for _what_ exactly is unknown]...the ideal
circumstance to be a fly on the wall.
Also news on Akamai is that they have outgrown their offices
at 2 Broadway in Kendall Square, and have leased the *whole*
of former Polaroid headquarters at 575 Tech Square. The
building is being gutted and overhauled to accommodate their
"140 strong, and growing" team. And yes, they are thinking
of having ZOT Group help get them there.
- S
=== ==== ===
Quoth Rohit Khare (rohit@uci.edu) on Thu, 24 Jun 1999
17:19:45 -0700:
> [Jim, *this* is what good departmental PR gets you.
> For all the whining and moaning, this piece is
> *incredible*
> publicity for Akamai, and LCS generally. I love how the
> PR firm had them so hornswaggled, there wasn't even
> an *attempt* to contact any other schools; just a lazy
> mention of Stanford and Caltech (one EE lab T/A there
> took a term off and graduated with $50m of eToys stock,
> btfw)..
> machine-readable copy would be appreciated; Acrobat
> Capture 4.0 froze my Mac four times trying to get the
> second half OCR'd. DO read the original PDF...
> http://www.xent.com/Akamai.pdf ...]
>
> CLASS STRUGGLE
> MIT Students, Lured
> To New Tech Firms,
> Get Caught in a Bind
> They Work for Professors
> Who May Also Oversee
> Their Academic Careers
> Homework ~~ondisclosure'
> By AMY DOCKSER Mucus
> StaffI3eporterof THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
> CAMESRIDGE, Mass. - William Koffel,
> a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology, was among the brightest stu-dents
> in his 6.033 Computer System Engi-neering
> course last spring. But he couldn't
>handle one of the homework assignments
> from Prof. M. Frans Kaashoek.
[...]