They morphed their high end concept stuff into smart meeting room and team collaboration tool platform called Mezzanine (- see http://www.oblong.com/) which is sold into large enterprise class customers e.g IBM, SAP, Accenture, NASA, GE etc.
Been very lucky to work with great teams on a bunch of stuff as dev and prod manager including:
- distributed simulation platforms
-3D/VR authoring tools used by likes of Boeing and Airbus(amongst others)
- Search engine for non-proprietary(ie generic) drugs used by intergovernmental, governmental, NGO and pharma companies
- 3D Minimal invasive surgical training platform (used to train 10,000+ surgeons todate)
- Road Traffic simulations
- Real time autonomous mobile robots
- VR data gloves and a variety of sensors for all sorts of things. A lot of fun stuff.
There are long term studies of unemployed in multiple countries that have social safety nets that would be worth reviewing (for example: http://amzn.to/1nosUtx Cultures of Unemployment: A Comparative Look at Long-Term Unemployment and Urban Poverty published by Amsterdam University press in 2006) For many the impact of unemployment (for instance following closure of UK coal mining and steel industries) its not just the loss of job in the economic sense, but the disconnect from the workplace, community, changes in sense of self-worth for individuals and long term cultural and regional impact. There are proven strategies that work and lots of examples that failed. Learning from these and seeing which opportunities map to actions that start-ups can effect through mobile, social and learning technologies might be a useful starting point.
Be interesting to see if there are plans to integrate with BioKepler(http://www.biokepler.org/) or similar existing bioinformatics and lifescience workflow systems.