Mass High Tech Blog

Aggregating business news from the world of New England technology

The revolution will be invite-only

August 10th, 2011

Rodney BrownBy Rodney Brown

An article today in an online offshoot of Fast Company talks about how the creator of the TED conference has a new idea in mind, with this headline: “The Creator Of TED Aims To Reinvent Conferences Once Again.” How many errors can you put in a single headline?

The article states that Richard Saul Wurman “reinvented the standard business conference model” when he created the Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference in 1984. Not only is this incorrect hyperbole, it is an example of the worst kind of toadyism that is rampant in the specific part of the tech world focused on design.

Wurman’s “revolution” was to create an artificial sense of elitism within the design subsector of technology by making his conference an invitation-only event. What’s more, its presentations are not even close to the kind of expert panels or free-wheeling discussions one hopes to find at a typical conference. No, TED has “experts” stand on a stage solo and spout off about whatever random – and often not even closely related to tech or design – topic they want, while the Apple-toting elitist audience laps up each speech as though it was as mind-expanding as LSD.

Now, this “revolutionary” has this brilliant idea to turn the conference world on its head again: Two people on stage! Of course, still in front of an invitation-only audience. Oh, but that’s not all! Instead of after-the-fact videos posted on the TED site or YouTube, these “intellectual jazz” discussions will be disseminated (after the invitation-only audience has seen it live, of course) via an app! OMG, my chest is so swollen with excitement I can barely breathe through my black turtleneck!

To give the fastcodesign article author credit, he does cite some problems with the TED conference, one of which is that what Wurman apparently proposed as off-the-cuff talks have become slick presentations. It is Wurman’s hope that the two-person model will lead to more unrehearsed conversations. That would be great, but for two things. Making it invitation-only propagates a concept that is already endemic in design-heavy tech businesses like Apple Inc. – using a false sense of elitism as a marketing tool is OK. And calling a long-established “fireside chat” model of a conference presentation “revolutionary” is silly at best, and gross pandering to the creator of false elitism at worst.

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FIRST and will.i.am’s TV show could use some science star power

August 5th, 2011

Rodney BrownBy Rodney Brown

Dean Kamen has to be given credit for trying to make his science education nonprofit FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) more hip. He even recruited Black Eyed Peas frontman and all around supernerd will.i.am to help get the word out that loving science doesn’t mean you are a loser.

To that end, FIRST just announced it will be airing a one-hour TV special on ABC called “i.am.FIRST – Science is Rock and Roll” on Sunday, Aug. 14. In addition to Kamen and will.i.am (would our last-name-only style make that i.am or just .am?) appearing will be Willow Smith and CTO of the United States Aneesh Chopra, who has connections to the Bay State as a Harvard University grad. The star power of will.i.am will also draw “special appearances” by celebrities like Justin Bieber, Jack Black, Bono, Miranda Cosgrove, Miley Cyrus, Josh Duhamel, Britney Spears, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake and Steven Tyler.

The release announcing the special, however, doesn’t say whether or not those special appearance will be live or pre-taped “science is cool!” messages. The former would have much more impact than the latter, in my opinion – any kid out there smart enough to be interested in science is also smart enough to guess that half of the celebrities are just mouthing what they were told to say. No, we don’t need any more mouthpieces, but we could use some celebrities that really are nerds and/or scientists to step up to the plate like will.i.am has.

So I am calling you out, Natalie Portman. Anyone who has a psychology degree from Harvard University (with a 4.0 GPA no less) should be up there on stage with Kamen and will.i.am, spelling out to the kids everyone hopes will be watching why studying science is fun. You too, Vin Diesel – while you don’t have a science degree (an English major at Hunter College) you are known as one of the biggest Dungeons & Dragons fans out there. If someone who is cool enough to go toe-to-toe with The Rock in his latest movie can be a D&D nerd – to the extent it is rumored he has his D&D character’s name tattooed somewhere on his body – maybe all nerds are cool.

How about some neuroscientists? Everyone that is a fan of The Big Bang Theory knows that Mayim Bialik – once the irrepressible and inescapable Blossom – is a real-life neuroscientist who took a decade off from acting to get her Ph.D. Looking for someone more in tune with the young kids these days? What about Michele Boyd, who nerds know as Riley on the web series The Guild, but who kids may know as a new recurring cast member on iCarly. Boyd has a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from University of California, Davis, and before deciding on acting, worked as a researcher at Harvard Medical School.

In the musical world, let’s get on that show Queen guitarist Brian May, who has his doctorate in astrophysics. Or Greg Graffin of Bad Religion, who has a masters degree in geology from UCLA and a Ph.D. in zoology from Cornell University.

Of course, the real people who need to be on that stage are the scientists themselves, who can tell their real stories about what science has done for them in their lives. If any girl watching that show were to listen to Jill Becker talk about how she tried to be a great mom while launching a tech-heavy startup company based on nanotechnology – lulling her baby to sleep with the sound of drilling as she hand-assembled her company’s first machines for sale – that girl couldn’t help but get inspired.

And I defy anyone – boy or girl, young or old – to not feel real inspiration in the story of Hugh Herr, an MIT researcher who lost both of his legs to frostbite while climbing Mount Washington. He went on to develop the most advanced robotic prosthetic lower legs available, and founded the company iWalk Inc. to bring those devices to the market. Herr should be on that stage with will.i.am and Kamen showing that nerds and scientists can be active and athletic, and won’t let anything stand in their way. That’s how you really Recognize and Inspire kids about science and technology.

Posted in Education & Training | No Comments »

Gotta love federal researchers

July 19th, 2011

Jim ConnollyBy James Connolly

The good news for anyone who is an advocate of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) educational initiatives is that the U.S. Commerce Department says that high-salary, STEM-related jobs are likely to grow faster than non-STEM jobs in the coming years.

In particular, the department’s Economics and Statistics Administration projected that STEM occupations will grow by 17 percent from 2008 to 2018, compared with 9.8 percent growth for non-STEM occupations. That’s cool, because STEM workers command higher wages, earning 26 percent more than their non-STEM counterparts. In addition, the researchers said that over the past 10 years, growth in STEM jobs has been three times faster than in non-STEM jobs, and STEM workers are less likely to experience joblessness than their non-STEM peers.

All of this is good for the tech community that continues to struggle to find enough qualified candidates to fill their job openings.

The unfortunate part of all this is that someone on the research team couldn’t stop at just highlighting the hard STEM data. They had to ding their own credibility by highlighting what is at minimum common sense, and at worst the obvious. A summary of the report says, “In comparison to the average worker, STEM workers are highly educated.” No kidding? Isn’t that what STEM advocates have been saying right along, that these jobs require advanced education, so we need to get kids involved early and keep them engaged throughout college? It’s called belaboring the obvious. The researchers go on to state that STEM workers are more likely to have gone to college than non-STEM workers. Good luck getting that bio-engineering job with your GED.

But, then, what do you expect from the bureaucrats, attention to detail? There at the top of the press release announcing the results: “FOR IMMEDIARE RELEASE”. Immediare? We all are guilty of the occasional typo, but this one has been sitting in a prominent slot on the Commerce website for almost a week without anyone fixing it. When the battle over the debt limit wraps up, and federal employees start getting whacked, I think I see a few good candidates.

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Innovation bypassed U.S. manned space flight

July 8th, 2011

Rodney BrownBy Rodney Brown

In April of 1981, I was living in a hovel (OK it was an apartment, but it was a hovel to me) in South Lawrence, huddling over a 13” Sony Trinitron TV one morning, watching the launch of the very first space shuttle, Columbia, on the first mission, called STS-1.

This was long before the advent of anything like the Internet anywhere except in the minds of science fiction writers. Cable TV was just starting to become a popular way of getting entertainment, and even MTV was a few months away, about to launch in August of 1981 with a video of the song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. Yes, shuttle launches predate MTV.

The first cellular network in the United States was still two years away, and a portable phone (the unwieldy bag phones, with a battery/transceiver combo separate from the handset) were still almost a decade away. The home PC revolution was in its infancy. The Commodore Vic 20 had just come out and the Apple II was a scant four years old. The Apple Macintosh was still three years away, waiting to break through your TV screens with an Orwellian launch ad during the Super Bowl.

Fast forward to the launch of the shuttle Atlantis this morning on the last shuttle mission, STS-135. I watched it at work on a 21-inch Apple iMac, viewing it in full HD via an Internet stream though the site UStream, which was taking the HD NASA feed and redistributing it. In 30 years, I have a single device that is my cable box, my Internet access machine, and if I wanted to use Skype or a similar feature – I’m looking at you Google+ and the new Facebook chat – my phone. It could also be a gaming platform, although the corporate bigwigs would frown on that. Better leave that to the Xbox 360s and the like at home.

Speaking of the Xbox 360, Larry Hryb (AKA Major Nelson), the director of programming for XBox Live for Microsoft Corp., tweeted out this interesting factoid today – there is more computing power in an Xbox 360 than in the navigation computers on the elderly space shuttle Atlantis.

Why didn’t NASA keep up a pace of innovation even remotely close to that of general consumer technology? If it had, we wouldn’t be looking at the possible end (or at least a long hiatus) of manned space flight from the U.S. – we would be celebrating the next platform that would take us into space to replace the shuttle. Where is my space plane, my heavy lifting body rocket, my linear accelerator rail launch system or any of the ideas that have been teased over the decades as a way to reduce the cost of getting into orbit?

I know, it is all about the federal budget, and there is no political will to spend even a dime on developing new technologies solely for exploration and science, particularly during and just after a severe recession. But really the groundwork for a shuttle replacement would have needed to start long before the recent economic troubles. The will to fund space exploration petered out more than a decade ago, and the war on terror (don’t get me wrong, I am not an anti-war-on-terror liberal) stripped away any money that could have gone into a new space vehicle program even if there had been the will to develop one.

And clearly the pace of consumer and corporate innovation has been as rapid as it was over the past 30 years because of the market forces driving it. That is the current plan by the Obama administration – make the moving of goods and materials into orbit a commercial play, and the competition to get there first, then to do it better, will speed up innovation in that area. But that doesn’t address the idea of man in space. All U.S. astronauts will only go to the International Space Station from now on to do any research, and all of them will get there on Russian rockets.

Innovation happens when an existing need is met with a new way of doing things. While most of that can be done in the corporate and consumer worlds, some things are just too big, and too important, to be left to market-driven innovation. Manned space flight and the new technologies it should be employing right now, was one of those things. Sadly, as often happens, politics got in the way.

I would like to think that some day my son can watch the launch of a new U.S. manned space vehicle. Since he is 19 now, it won’t be when he is 21, as it was for me. I only pray it is before he is 51 as I am now.

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The Nantucket (Conference) paradox: Community trumps elitism

June 17th, 2011

Every bone in my wise-ass body aches to make snarky fun of the recently held Nantucket Conference.

After all, it seems to be the epitome of the elitism that I love to hate. The tech entrepreneurial conference, now in its 12th year, is invitation only – elitist. It is held on one of the most elite locales on the East Coast, Nantucket. Hell, most of the activity went on at the Nantucket Yacht Club. Somebody cue the Judge Smails quotes.

But I can’t bring myself to do so. Believe me, I did some serious soul searching to determine if my reluctance to get out the daggers was simply a matter of the thrill of being included in that rarified environment. I don’t think so, mainly because I already knew more than half of the people at the conference, and talked to them regularly at other events throughout the year, or have interviewed them for stories at least once in the past few years.

Maybe I was bowled over by the locale. Not likely – I live in Marblehead, the yachting capital of the world, and grew up near the coast in Maine, where the type of cedar-shingled, closely built cobblestone street communities are just the way things are, not some Disneyland-like “old New England” vacation destination. (Poke. Sorry – how’d that dagger get in my hand?)

No, what kept me from ripping on the conference – despite its trappings of elitism – was best expressed by a tweet from the event from Phil Beauregard of Objective Logistics. Phil pointed out the value of the Nantucket Conference has always been “lots of signal, little noise.”

That means that, aside from those few of us in the media that were invited – or organized and co-founded the conference like Scott Kirsner, who did and does so with Shayne Gilbert – there was nobody in attendance but entrepreneurs both experienced and new and the industries needed to support them – academics, lawyers, mentors, incubator directors, angels and VCs. No PR, no marketing, no filters. Because of that, those execs who might be reticent to bring up the personal details of their work problems felt comfortable enough to do so, knowing they can get a handful of answers.

Now, from this point on I should, by our style and AP style, refer to Phil as “Beauregard” – or “Mr. Beauregard” if this was the Wall Street Journal. But that flies in the face of one of the best takeaways from the conference – these are people, often with problems that the other attendees can help with. Too often the person can get lost in the story of their business or of their history. Even serial entrepreneurs run the risk of being seen as nothing more than the string that ties together a strand of one startup after another.

That sense of entrepreneurs as people is also reinforced because the conference encourages invitees to bring their families. Nothing humanizes someone like Mass High Tech All-Star Tim Healy (who our style says should be described as “co-founder and CEO of EnerNOC Inc.”) than watching him joke with his seven-month pregnant wife Jaimee about the challenges she faces getting into a mini-van taxi.

Jit Saxena, a 2007 Mass High Tech All-Star, founder of Applix Inc. and co-founder of Netezza Inc., in his Saturday morning fireside chat with Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners, exhorted the media present – essentially Scott, me and WBUR’s Curt Nickisch – to stop focusing on the story of a company as its value in either a fundraise or an exit, and tell the personal story of the entrepreneur. Now, clearly we can’t eschew the former in favor of the latter – the hard news of a deal is just that – news. But I know I can do more to put more of a human face on their tales.

Who knew that a trip to Nantucket could reinforce one’s sense of humanity and community? Because nothing screams togetherness like Nantucket, where multimillion-dollar homes fence off access to the shore from tourists in clear violation of Massachusetts law. (OK, I couldn’t help but poke a little. After all, the daggers get rusty if not drawn and used regularly.)

Posted in Entrepreneurship | No Comments »

Gas tax increase pits economists against politicians

June 10th, 2011

kyle_alspachBy Kyle Alspach

It’s a proposal that’s had plenty of test drives in the public sphere before, though not necessarily because of someone like General Motors CEO Dan Akerson: Raise the gas tax to cut our country’s oil consumption.

This week Akerson told the Detroit News that the federal government ought to raise the gas tax by up to $1 a gallon. The move would lead to a cut in carbon emissions and air pollution, not to mention helping the U.S. with its foreign-oil dependency problems. It could also stimulate demand for electric-powered cars (not coincidentally, Akerson’s statement comes as one of the early mass market options hits the market — GM’s plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt.)

With gas prices already in the $4 range (though currently falling), the statement resurrected a major debate. Interestingly, it’s not a left-wing vs. right-wing debate at all. It’s more like, economists vs. politicians.

In 2007, a study in the Journal of Economic Literature found that the ideal average gas tax for the U.S. would be $2.10 a gallon. At the time, the average tax was 40 cents a gallon — 18.4 cents for federal and 22 cents for state (it’s currently 23.5 cents in Massachusetts).

The $2.10 figure takes into account greenhouse gas emissions, local pollution and oil dependency, along with the costs of congestion and accidents.

To make the tax palatable, economists say the government could cut taxes in other areas — say, the income tax for consumers or corporate taxes for businesses.

The common sense of it is this: Instead of taxing things that are good (business profits or hard-earned income, for instance), why don’t we tax things that are bad (like burning fossil fuel)?

However, according to the Harvard Political Review, the issue quickly moves from the realm of economics to the realm of politics. And “since 1993, no prominent American politician has seriously supported a major increase in the gas tax. Virtually everyone agrees that supporting the gas tax is political suicide.”

And yet:

Economists from across the political spectrum — Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and even the chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, N. Gregory Mankiw — have come out in support of raising the gas tax.

Still, Americans love to drive a lot more than they love economic theory, and the psychological barrier is formidable. Working out an equitable tax-swap would be no easy task either.

But I for one would rather be taxed for a luxury (driving) than for a necessity (working.) Especially if I know our environment and security are getting important benefits too.

Posted in Energy | No Comments »

Google to the rescue: MBTA live bus updates coming

June 8th, 2011

kyle_alspachBy Kyle Alspach

For whatever reason, the MBTA Orange Line doesn’t extend to the Boston neighborhood of Roslindale, where I lived for two years.

To get to the subway at Forest Hills, you have to take a bus. And that means waiting for unpredictable amounts of time.

Actually, I could usually predict the amount of time pretty well: a long time. Lack of an easy way to get to the subway is part of what made moving to Jamaica Plain attractive for me.

But if the MBTA and Google are right, residents of Roslindale and the thousands of others who use the bus system should have a much easier time of things starting today (as long as they have web access).

That’s because Google has made Boston one of the first four U.S. cities to get live online updates for when the bus is going to arrive. You can get the updates by accessing Google maps on your desktop or mobile device (Google’s blog post can walk you through how it works.)

Bus riders probably won’t be the only ones to benefit. If it catches on, the tool could also be good for landlords and business owners in neighborhoods like Roslindale — with the technology helping to close their public transit gap with other neighborhoods.

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Chevy’s Volt is charged up with geeky goodness

June 1st, 2011

Rodney BrownBy Rodney Brown

Even in the hustle and bustle of a busy Boston financial district at the beginning of lunch hour, the Chevy Volt electric car prompted some rubbernecking. And while it has a slick hatchback styling, most of the attention came from people who saw the Volt nameplate and got a chance to see one for the first time.

For the drivers, however — myself included — the attention-grabber was just how high tech everything about the car is, from the well-publicized electric drive train to the 7-inch touchscreen display.

The folks from General Motors Co. had four of the new extended range electric vehicle Volts on India Street at the offices of its advertising agency Mullen, offering local media types test drives in exchange for the marketing spiel while we drove. For me, at least, the marketing spiel got lost in a wave of questions like “is the dash capacitive or resistive?” (capacitive) and “where is the lithium-ion battery manufactured?” (LG Chemical in South Korea).

Yes, I said capacitive dash. Below the 7-inch touchscreen at the top of the center area of the dash between the driver and passenger, and above the slick recessed shifter post at the bottom of the area, are the controls for aspects of the touchscreen, the climate control and the radio. While some of these are low-profile buttons, many are simply labels over an area of the smooth dash. That is because the entire part of the dash around the climate knob and radio volume knob is a capacitive touch area.

But wait, it gets even geekier. One of these touch-dash (can’t call it a touch-screen, can we?) areas for adjusting control options is labeled “Config.” The old-school DOS-using nerd in me just loved that.

The specs are available all over the web , so there is no point in spelling them out here. Some things to note from a test drive however include the fact that the acceleration and handling are zippy and smooth – unlike reports about some all-electric vehicles – as is the braking. The car has three driving modes — Normal, Sport and Mountain. Sport gives you a bit more boost to the motors for quicker acceleration at the cost of faster battery depletion. Mountain, however, sets the car so the gas engine which drives a generator to recharge the battery kicks in more quickly, slowing down the battery drain.

All of this is displayed on the videogame-bright instrument screen and the dash-topping touchscreen. In fact, the indicator which shows when you are speeding up too fast or braking too hard — by the relative size and position of a little leaf-filled green ball in a scaled track on the instrument screen — could be as distracting in stop and go traffic as a cell phone playing Angry Birds. But it looks real cool.

At $41,000 for a four-seat vehicle, the Volt is pricey. Let’s hope that mass production and a reduction in parts costs brings that down soon, because the concept and the execution seems to make it the winner of the electric car race so far.

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Posted in Envirotech | 1 Comment »

Facebook’s many sides revealed by users

May 31st, 2011

kyle_alspachBy Kyle Alspach

Facebook has sure accomplished a lot in its short existence, hasn’t it? For instance, the site has allowed millions of young people to spy on the activities of their ex-boyfriends/girlfriends.

But over the last few months we’ve learned of what is likely Facebook’s most important achievement yet — helping to organize peaceful demonstrations in the Middle East that have toppled dictators.

In the already-free world, however, there’s apparently an inverse use for the social-networking site. In recent days, a series of “unruly gatherings” on Carson Beach in South Boston have been planned and carried out using Facebook and other sites, according to the Boston Globe’s report today.

About 1,000 youths have been involved in all, the Globe says; and on Monday, fights involving gang members began on the beach and spilled to other parts of the city.

There’s a lot of irony here. In the volatile Middle East, Facebook is used to demonstrate for peaceful change; and just across the Charles from where Facebook was invented, it’s behind a more violent type of public demonstration.

Too bad these youths can’t just stick to spying on their exes on Facebook like everyone else.

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Posted in Internet | No Comments »

What does the inflated LinkedIn IPO tell us?

May 20th, 2011

kyle_alspachBy Kyle Alspach

It’s LinkedIn mania, and, with good reason, everyone’s trying to figure out what exactly is going on. Shares closed at $94 today, more than doubling the IPO price of $45 — which many thought was inflated enough for a company with slowing revenue and little profitability.

Some familiar questions arise: “Is it a bubble? A sign that the social networking thing is out-of-control?”

But what if it’s not exactly the social networking aspect that’s enthralling investors? Because LinkedIn isn’t technically “social” networking at all; more accurately, it’s a “professional” networking site. And people in a position to buy shares in LinkedIn are, of course, mostly professional types.

And they’re all on LinkedIn.

Facebook and Twitter are great but still maintain a younger-generation flavor. LinkedIn is just for grown-ups; grown-ups think it’s cool. Could this be part of the explanation behind the investment fervor?

I put my theory to venture capitalist Bilal Zuberi at General Catalyst Partners in Cambridge, and he didn’t totally buy it. The investors that grabbed the IPO shares are more savvy than that, he said; they read up on the business and weren’t likely to be persuaded by that type of bias.

But once the shares started trading hands today, yeah — maybe the widespread familiarity with LinkedIn is helping, Zuberi said.

“It’s well understood, well known,” he said of LinkedIn. “People know about it, and that’s making more people want to buy it.”

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