Many people know Dr. Rob A. Lowe as the technology transfer expert -- the Carnegie Mellon University economics professor who seems to know everything about how patenting and licensing inventions can yield new companies and jobs in the Pittsburgh area. He's been a featured speaker twice at the Pittsburgh Venture Capital Association luncheon and you may have seen him earlier this year on Bill Flanagan's show on WPXI, "Our Region's Business."

Whenever there's a discussion on how to pepper Pittsburgh with more start-ups, Dr. Lowe -- a walking encyclopedia of tech transfer facts and statistics -- is there. Now Dr. Lowe is tackling a new task -- that of president and chief executive officer of his own CMU spinoff. Strip District-based Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, or "PittPatt, has developed a software that can track and identify objects -- even faces on video and photographs.

Dr. Lowe likes to use 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta as an example. On its Web site, www.pittpatt.com, Atta is pictured on a video screen with a violet square around his face, implying that with PittPatt's software and the appropriate security database, Atta might have marked by airport security. Dr. Lowe co-founded the firm with fellow CMU-ite Dr. Henry Schneiderman, whose decade-long research spawned the technology, and Dr. Michael Nechyba. All three are Pittsburgh transplants -- researchers who moved here to for work and opted to stay.

So far, PittPatt has several customers, most of which are hush-hush. But not the Strip District-based coffee and cigar house Leaf & Bean. Owner Jim Robinson said he's using PittPatt's services to track his customer's buying patterns.

Speaking of the Pittsburgh Venture Capital Association, a dining room at the Duquesne Club was jam-packed Tuesday to hear the "How do we grow the tech industry?" observations of Dr. Lowe, Allegheny Conference on Community Development CEO Michael Langley, the state Department of Community and Economic Development's Rebecca Bagley and CMU and Pitt economic development vice president Don Smith. But it was panel member and BirchmereVenture principal Chuck Dietrick who left the crowd buzzing. Mr. Dietrick articulated a point that everyone knows but rarely speaks of -- the need for the private sector to become more involved in capturing, investing and sprouting new university-bred technologies. "We have a major commercialization problem in this area, and we haven't done enough to catalyze the private sector to do something about it," Mr. Dietrick said. Also on the new company front is Myfuturenet.com, a Pine-based real estate Web site launched on Dec. 1 by Pittsburgh native real estate-agent-turned-Internet-entrepreneur Jen Katzfey. The site, Ms. Katzfey said, allows buyers and sellers to conduct real estate transactions online without paying commissions or fees -- and without real estate agent middlemen. Ms. Katzfey, who has four full-time employees and a host of contractors, also has an office in Phoenix. A Pittsburgh native, Ms. Katzfey said she always intended to keep her company, which has been financed so far by friends and family, here. "There's a lot of technological resources here,. The environments has been very good and I wanted to keep the base of my company here and expand here," she said. Powerhouse tech publicist Karen Master (formerly Kovatch) is shuttering her firm, Kovatch Communications, to join Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Ariba Inc. as its senior public relations manager. Ms. Masters, who was once a reporter for the Pittsburgh Business Times, was an executive at FreeMarkets for several years before exiting after the firm was sold to Ariba in early 2004, to launch her own PR company. She will remain in the region. Robbin Steif's Mt. Lebanon-based Web analytics and e-marketing firm, LunaMetrics has signed another customer, Pegasus Associates ... Black Box Corp., the Lawrence-based networking equipment maker, said yesterday that it bought Communication is World Interactive Networking Inc. a five-year-old privately held company for an undisclosed amount. Known as "C=WIN," Black Box officials said revenues for the Chamblee, Ga.-based firm were about $24 million in 2004 ... Squirrel Hill-based Search engine firm Vivisimo CEO Raul Valdes-Perez has been selected as Inc. magazine's top 10 reader's pick for America's most impressive entrepreneurs of the year. Venture capitalist Sean Sebastian has been what is known in the political world as "stumping" or campaigning for gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann, via the Internet. Sebastian, a principal at North Side-based private equity firm Birchmere Ventures, sent out an e-mail this week to alert an undisclosed e-mail roster of Pennsylvanians that a recent poll shows Swann is "widening his lead over Bill Scranton 31% to 23% in the Republic primary race for governor, and narrowing his gap vs. Ed Rendell 35% to 48%."