CrunchGear dropped by Lemelson-MIT’s EurekaFest last week, where one of the projects exhibited was a hybrid car developed by students at Merrimack High School in New Hampshire.
Archive for June, 2009
High school student-built hybrid car at EurekaFest
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009MHT July 4th extravaganza: Middlesex CC makes RFID, MagicFire does fireworks
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Middlesex Community College is helping supply an electronic credentials system for security at the Fourth of July concert at the Esplanade this weekend.
The school’s Radio Frequency Identification Lab and Program on Homeland Security developed the RFID system for the concert’s Unified Command Center, which is run by the Massachusetts State Police. The system is intended to allow quick access to the UCC for authorized security personnel. The UCC is located far away from the Hatch Shell, obviously, or RFID access would be the least of the Staties’ worries — they’d be stuck in a sea of fireworks-watching humanity.
From the print edition this week, staff writer Galen Moore talked to fireworks company MagicFire, which choreographs the display:
This July 4, like many before, fireworks technicians aboard barges anchored in the Charles River will sit over four firing panels — industrial computers built to run a fireworks display. (“It won’t run Microsoft Windows,” McKinley quipped.) If all goes well, the technicians have little to do during most of the show. Digital signals govern the timing of each barrage, transmitted from a riverside production booth in standard time code developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Kamen’s new scooter runs on anything flammable
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009Dean Kamen has developed another coo-coo bananas vehicle — this time a scooter that can burn anything that burns as fuel.
Gizmag reports about the scooter and has renderings:
Built around a fairly conventional battery and electric motor combination to provide the drive to the wheel, something Kamen’s experience with the much-hyped Segway makes relatively easy, the radical part of the design is the inclusion of a Stirling engine to recharge the bike’s battery pack. Based on technology that pre-dates the internal combustion engine by nearly a century, the Stirling engine is closer in concept to a steam engine, using external combustion, and without the need for a fuel that can be injected and burned incredibly fast inside a normal engine’s combustion chamber, it can run on virtually anything that burns – opening the door to easily renewable fuels rather than relying on dwindling fossil fuel supplies.
Although the prototype bike has yet to be shown in public, unlike Kamen’s Stirling-engined car which has been demonstrated several times, Kamen himself is understood to have been using the prototype to zip around his own estate.
In April, Kamen partnered with GM on the PUMA, a a two-wheeled, electric-powered urban transportation vehicle. And of course, Kamen unveiled the Segway Human Transporter in 2001.
Separated at birth?: Bing Travel and Kayak.com
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009GigaOm picks up on something the Berkman Center’s David Weinberger noticed awhile back: Microsoft Bing’s travel service looks a lot like Kayak.com. GigaOm includes comments from a lawyer:
When I showed the two to Stephen J. Roe, a patent and software copyright attorney in Madison, Wis., he was similarly taken aback. “If you debrand it, and remove anything that mentions Microsoft or Kayak,” Roe said, “it would be really tough to decide if you were seeing Kayak or Bing.”
BBJ: Local hotels partner on biodiesel
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009The Boston Business Journal reports a group of local hotels, including the Seaport and the Lenox are working together to convert their waste oil to biofuel. Staff writer Jackie Noblett reports:
Seaport Boston joined the Saunders Hotel Group and the Ramada Inn Boston to work with Wachusett BIO-MASS to convert the oil into biodiesel. The use of pure biodiesel instead of oil from fossil fuels can reduce carbon emissions by 74 percent. Seaport has already purchased a laundry truck that operates on biodiesel.
Hacking–but not the fun, MIT kind
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009Matthew “L’il Hacker” Weigman got 11 years for, among other things, hacking phone carriers, and arranging for a SWAT team to visit his landlord’s house. Universal Hub has the details about the 19-year-old hacker from Revere:
Weigman was sentenced in federal district court in Dallas, where he’d been tried because a key part of the charges against him involved his cracking of a Verizon data center in Texas, which let him obtain numerous fake phone numbers and IDs, listen in on phone calls and cancel the phone service of his enemies. The government began investigating Weigman when he was 15 – he was formally charged when he turned 18.
Finance Roundup: VigLink gets Google money, R.I. issues tech bonds
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
In today’s Finance Roundup, Google Ventures makes its third investment in a MIT$100K startup, Rhode Island issues tech bonds, and Raytheon gets more Patriot missile money.
• Stealthy VigLink lands Google Ventures funds
A company filing, posted yesterday by the SEC, lists Google Ventures managing partner Rich Miner as a director of the company.
• R.I. bond sale aids state education, energy tech
The state sold about $12.4 million in 2009 Series A bonds to fund IT upgrades to outdated systems. Rhode Island also sold about $11.8 million in Series B bonds to fund energy conservation projects at the University of Rhode Island, including replacing energy equipment such as boilers, heating systems, air conditioning systems and lighting systems.
• Five-year Raytheon defense deal nets nearly $6M
Under the deal, Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) IDS will perform engineering services on the Waltham-based defense giant’s Patriot missile systems.
Breaking News: Fluent Mobile launches iPhone app, Semilab restructures, Yahoo shuts down Maven
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009Staff writer Galen Moore breaks the news that Post Office Square-based Fluent Mobile, founded by a former UMass professor, has launched its news aggregating iPhone app.
The application is a news search engine and aggregator designed to find only news content that is optimized for reading on mobile devices …
Adler said he started Fluent to apply some of the search capabilities developers discovered while building CourseAdvisor, an online course catalog tool for students. Adverplex, a second company Adler helped found, is still a going concern, he said.
Meanwhile, one cube over, staff writer Rodney Brown breaks the news that Hungarian chip-maker Semilab has merged its three US subsidiaries into one company called Semilab USA.
Semilab USA has 57 employees, with about 21 in Massachusetts, according to [CEO Chris] Moore. Semilab, founded in 1990, makes technology used to measure primarily materials used in the manufacturing of chips. It serves three major customer areas — academic and institutional research, semiconductor manufacturers and photovoltaic and solar cell manufacturers.
TechCrunch, citing an unnamed customer, has the news that Yahoo has shut down Maven Networks, which it acquired less than a year and a half ago.
BBJ: Boston man is 2nd H1N1 death in Mass.
Monday, June 29th, 2009An 84-year-old man is the second Massachusetts resident to die from H1N1, also known as the swine flu, according to the Boston Business Journal. Staff writer Julie Donnelly reports:
The patient was hospitalized June 12 and died six days later, on June 18. On Monday, his tests results came back positive for H1N1. The patient had several serious underlying health conditions that placed him at high risk of complications from the flu, according to public health officials.
The BBJ’s Mass Roundup blog also notes the Springfield Republican’s piece on H1N1’s effect on pig farming in the Pioneer Valley:
“Due to the overreaction, the pork market took quite a dive for several days after it hit the press. And, it hasn’t come back yet,” said Matthew J. Parsons, a partner with his cousin Earle in the [Earle M. Parsons & Sons farm in Hadley], which sells about 2,500 pigs a year.
After the jump, watch the Republican’s video on the economic effects of H1N1.
NewsFlash Roundup: Aura Biosciences, Biogen, CloudSwitch
Monday, June 29th, 2009Shares drop, lawsuits grow and personnel move in today’s NewsFlash Roundup:
• Bhatia, Best, Kivel join Aura Biosciences advisory boards
Aura Biosciences, a Cambridge-based biotechnology company focused on new drug delivery methods, has added three Boston-area advisors to its leadership team.
• Biogen shares drop on 10th Tysabri PML case
Shares of Biogen Idec Inc. sank Monday after the biotechnology giant confirmed that another patient taking the multiple sclerosis drug Tysabri has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML.
• New funding, CEO and HQ for CloudSwitch
Former SolidWorks Corp. CEO John McEleney will join the company along with the round of funding, which was led by new investors Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and increase the total amount invested in Cloudswitch to $15.4 million. (more…)
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