The Globe takes a look at Joule Biotechnologies’ helioculture, a process intended to generate ethanol from millions of photosynthetic organisms. MHT talked to Joule in July.
Archive for August, 2009
Take a peek inside Joule Biotechnologies
Monday, August 24th, 2009Oh, snap: Scott Kirsner calls Waltham VCs irrelevant
Monday, August 24th, 2009Scott Kirsner, who has been detailing the differences between the future and the past of the local VC scene, puts Mount Money in the latter camp. Kirsner says Cambridge and Boston VCs have been quicker to embrace blogging, social networking, collaboration and a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Kirsner illustrates his point with an analogy you’re not likely to see elsewhere, and one which could make an entrepreneur think twice about being “invested in” by a Waltham VC inspired but confused by Kirsner’s advice:
I won’t be surprised if the old-school VCs of Waltham follow the same path of the Shakers, the religious sect that was most active in the 18th and 19th centuries. Shakers were celibate — they didn’t, you might say, invest in the continuance of their community — and so a group that once had 6000 or so very devoted members eventually died out. Today, their communities exist only as museums and historic sites.
Boston Engineering’s Ghost Swimmer AUV spotted in the wild
Monday, August 24th, 2009Boston Engineering has posted video on the company’s YouTube page of its Ghost Swimmer autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) swimming in a pool, looking like a tuna.
The biomimetic Ghost Swimmer, which imitates the motion of a bluefin tuna, first appeared in MHT as the RoboTuna. The Ghost Swimmer was developed with about $100,000 in STTR grants.
The Waltham-based R&D engineering firm has been busy lately — in June, Boston Engineering won a $100,000 SBIR grant to develop a version of the AUV to inspect the hulls of oil tankers. Around the same time, the company brought in $70,000 in a Phase 1 SBIR grant to work on giving landlocked reconnaissance robots the ability to open doors.
At the end of July, the company got a $70,000 SBIR grant to develop a robotic platform to catch, service, refuel and relaunch unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Incidentally, whoever came up with the UAV and AUV acronyms either didn’t see the kind-of-similar-but-totally-opposite technologies gaining steam at about the same time, or hates me.
Tipjoy founder Kirigin goes to Facebook
Monday, August 24th, 2009Controversy swirled over the weekend around the close of the Arlington-based micropayments startup TipJoy Inc., which announced its shutdown late Thursday night, a few weeks after its husband-and-wife founding team moved to California.
On Saturday, TechCrunch reported co-founder Ivan Kirigin had landed a job at Facebook – presumably to work on Facebook Payments. No controversy there, except that it appears Facebook had sought to buy Tipjoy for $5 million, then walked away. The company’s investors, including the UK-based Accelerator Group, New York-based BetaWorks, ex-Googler Chris Sacca and Y Combinator, had put about $1 million in to TipJoy since its founding in 2008. Citing unnamed sources, TechCrunch reports some of those investors were not happy to learn of Kirigin’s new gig, saying the co-founder’s departure killed merger discussions that were still under way with Twitter and PayPal.
At least one investor, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, has come to the Kirigins’ defense. “They’d been talking to several potential acquirers, including Facebook, but those deals all fell through,” he wrote Sunday in a post to Hacker News. “So the Tipjoys were going to have to get jobs somewhere.”
Others were less than chuffed with Ivan Kirigin’s decision. “Not the way to go about things in my book,” grumbled Accelerator Group partner Robin Klein in a post to his Twitter feed yesterday.
It’s impossible to know whether there’s any truth behind TechCrunch’s anonymously sourced report. But anyone could have guessed the flak would fly when he went to Facebook so soon after trying to negotiate an M&A. On the other hand, I’m sure Ivan and Abby Kirigin have more important things to think about, like paying the mortgage.
The most important problem in all this, which TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld rightly mentioned, is for investors and founders in all small and nimble web companies: what about the startup that gets traction while it’s still just the fabled two people in a garage? Why would a company like Facebook buy that startup when they can hire the founders much more cheaply?
20% chance Forbes’ Boost Your Business winner will be Massachusetts tech startup
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
i-Nalysis president Drew Hession-Kunz
Four of the 20 semifinalists in the Forbes.com Boost your Business Competition are local tech startups: tour guide podcast-maker Audissey Guides Media, online SAT tutor I Need A Pencil, chemical analyzer-maker i-Nalysis, and rebootless computer software updater Ksplice made it to the second round. Charlestown-based yoga apparel-maker Plank Design also made the cut, but you don’t care about that, do you?
At the contest’s website, you can watch video profiles of the contestants and vote for a winner.
MHT covered i-Nalysis and its handheld material analyzer in February. Ksplice won the MIT$100K in May, and was also a favorite of our informal panel of judges who weighed in on the prospects of this year’s $100K crop, which you can check out after the jump.
Cambridge artists design solar-powered public art in Austin, Texas
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009Cambridge-based public artists Mags Harries and Lajos Héder are the brains behind a solar-powered art installation in Austin, Texas. The flower-like solar panels soak up the sun’s rays by day, and give off colored LED light by night, according to Popular Science.
“Designed by Massachusetts art duo Harries/Heder, the SunFlowers are an art exhibit at heart, and stand over 30 feet tall. They collect power from the sun by day, and use that energy to power their blue LEDs at night. Up to 15 kilowatts of surplus power is sent back to the grid as payment for any maintenance fees the SunFlowers incur.”
The art duo also designed 300 Summer St., an artists building, and the Man from City Hall, a First Night exhibit from 1989 I’m not sure I believe really happened.
Semyon Dukach talks Global Cycle Solutions
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Entrepreneur and MIT blackjack guy Semyon Dukach talks to the AFP about Global Cycle Solutions, the MIT$100K finalist and development-track winner that developed a bicycle-powered corn-sheller for use in developing countries.
Dukach told MHT in January that he was looking for a nonprofit to join to help others as he worked on StartupHive.org.
You’ll have to click here to watch the AFP’s video — the news wire disabled the embed option.
Via Joost Bonsen.
MHT on NECN: Biotechs launch despite recession
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Staff writer Julie Donnelly talked to New England Business Day about a few startups that have launched despite the sorry state of the economy for life sciences firms.
MIT, Akamai, Carnegie Mellon working on energy-saving Internet traffic algorithm
Monday, August 17th, 2009Directing Internet traffic to parts of the grid where electricity happens to be cheapest could save companies with huge data-warehousing needs, like Google, 40 percent, according to researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Akamai, Technology Review reports.
Asfandyar Qureshi, a PhD student at MIT, first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm that would track electricity prices to reduce costs in a paper presented in October 2008. This year, Qureshi and colleagues approached researchers at Akamai to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the idea. Akamai’s distributed servers cache information on behalf of many large Web sites across the US and abroad, and process some 275 billion requests per day; while the company does not require many large datacenters itself, its traffic data provides a way to model the demand placed on large Internet companies.
Nanotech not mainstream yet, but may be getting there
Monday, August 17th, 2009The Globe talks to startup machine Robert Langer and fellow MIT researcher Angela Belcher as part of a look at the somewhat underwhelming creep of nanotechnology into everyday products like pants and sunscreen. We may not have cancer fighting robots in our bloodstream yet, but:
But analysts and scientists say extraordinary new devices and techniques are not far off, especially in the realms of medical treatment, power sources, and consumer electronics. Picture cellphones so thin and flexible they can be worn as neck scarves. Imagine assembly lines “staffed’’ by viruses. Think of concrete produced with just a fraction of today’s pollutants (concrete production is a major emitter of greenhouse gases), but able to endure for thousands of years.
So long as newspapers can’t be staffed by viruses, I approve.
MHT talked to Belcher about her flexible virus battery technology in May. Langer has also been known to turn up from time to time.
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