Archive for January, 2011

An open letter to Pres. Obama, RE: the “founder visa”

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

GalenMoore_blogBy Galen Moore

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

First let me say I enjoyed your State of the Union address last night. With an oratorical talent like yours on the podium, and a bingo-card seating chart on the floor, the political theater was even better than usual. I know Joe Biden agrees with me. You couldn’t see from where you were standing, but I could tell: he looked like he was hoping someone would start heckling.

But the highlight for me came when you started talking about immigration. You said: “Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens…As soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.”

Mr. President, I have good news for you. The venture capitalists, angel investors and entrepreneurs in Boston and San Francisco have solved your problem for you. It’s called a founder visa. The idea is simple: any foreign student who starts a company, and successfully raises venture capital, gets a visa stapled to his or her term sheet.

To tell the truth, I’d be surprised if you hadn’t heard of this already. The founder visa has been on the lips of tech entrepreneurs and investors since Paul Graham wrote a blog post about it in April 2009. A little background on Graham: he is co-founder of the wildly successful and widely imitated Y Combinator startup incubator.  He helped establish it here, in Cambridge, Mass., in 2005. Since then Y Combinator has launched over 200 technology startups here, and in its new, permanent home in San Francisco.

California and Massachusetts have a lot in common. We’re the number-one and number-two hubs for venture capital investment on Earth. We’re also the number-one and number-four hubs for foreign students who come to the U.S. for an education. According to the Institute of International Education, California in 2010 hosted 94,279 foreign students; Massachusetts, 35,313.

There’s no mystery why they’re coming here. MIT and Stanford are turning out great technologists, but so is Tsinghua University in China. What Tsinghua is not doing – and what nobody in the world does like MIT and Stanford – is turn out technological entrepreneurs.

Brilliant science is a rare achievement – but rarer still is the mind that can turn science into enterprise. We’ve built our global leadership position on our ability to produce that kind of person. And, as you pointed out, we’re sending them back home to compete against us.

Sincerely,

Galen Moore
Staff Writer
Mass High Tech

Posted in Entrepreneurship | No Comments »

HubSpot declares tech talent war in Boston

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

GalenMoore_blogBy Galen Moore

If you’re a software engineer, walk down Kendall Square’s Main Street at your peril: there’s a target on your back. The demand for tech talent has turned Boston into the wild East.

HubSpot Inc. CTO and co-founder Dharmesh Shah today declared it has “fire(d) the first shot” in a Boston battle for tech talent. HubSpot, a venture-backed marketing software company of about 180 souls, has been on a hiring tear. In a blog post this afternoon, Shah put up a $10,000 bounty poster on all “brilliant” software developers. In other words, HubSpot will pay you ten grand for referring a geek they hire.

Shah is hoping his swagger will have bigger companies shaking in their boots. In an email interview today (he abhors the telephone), Shah told me he has his sights lined up on developers inside large enterprises. In an as-yet unannounced program he calls “prison break,” he hopes to bait engineers out of cube farms using the allure of startup “hacker” culture.

“Come interview at HubSpot,” Shah said. “If you really are awesome (enough to make it to the final interview), we’ll give you $500 to have a nice tech dinner with a few local hackepreneurs….They can then explain to you why life is so much better in the startup world than in the big, dark, boring company you’re in. We can help plan your ‘break out’.”

HubSpot has “millions of dollars of cash in the bank,” Shah said. He declined to comment on a report last week that the company is raising a $200 million late-stage round with Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital,  but confirmed the company has seen some new interest from VCs.

“We don’t need the cash, but some additional investment from some great firms would further fuel our growth – so we’re considering it,” he said.

HubSpot hasn’t raised money since a $16 million Series C round in October 2009, led by Venture Scale Partners of California, who joined previous investors General Catalyst Partners of Cambridge and Matrix Partners of Waltham.  That brought the company’s funding to about $33 million.

High-tech job board Dice.com last week reported the average Boston IT salary rose 2 percent in 2010, to $86,782. It’s not a huge increase, but it beat the national average (0.7 percent). However, Boston still lags behind Silicon Valley ($99,028), according to Dice.

Shah said Boston is in good shape as long as its salaries are “fair” and top recruits get rewarded. HubSpot is also looking to hire away talent from smaller markets, he said. First on its list of towns to pillage is Minneapolis, Minn. Shah’s tag line: ‘It’s freezing cold here too, but at least you’d be in a vibrant startup ecosystem. Upgrade your life – join a startup in Boston.”

Posted in Software | No Comments »

Time to shut down Facebook?

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

Rodney BrownBy Rodney Brown

Seriously, people, how many more red flags do we need to pop up over Facebook before we realize it could be a real-life Nigerian/Kenyan/Indonesian barrister? The company whose founder states that we all should be living in an open, transparent world, operates like a scam artist so slimy we wouldn’t believe it if it were a film character.

Over the weekend, Facebook killed its latest unannounced attempt at getting you to give up your private information. Apparently, the site had added two new info items to the things you “opt-in” to share when you agree to running some Facebook applications — your main contact phone number and home address. You may have seen the controversy over this bubbling over on Facebook and Twitter, but maybe not – it didn’t seem to get the same level of outrage as Facebook’s change of its profile pages.

What is more disturbing is that, in its statement on a developer blog saying they were suspending the “feature,” Facebook also said, “We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.”

That’s right, they plan to tweak it and bring it back.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, an AdAge article about Facebook’s advertising revenue — $1.86 billion in 2010 is the estimate — let out that the third largest advertiser on the site behind AT&T and Match.com is an unknown website called Make-My-Baby.com. (Warning, don’t go there.) The folks at ReadWriteWeb tracked down this stealthy high-spender and discovered it is an old-fashioned bait-and-switch site that, under the guise of a cute application that allows you to put mustaches and glasses on baby pics, actually changes your homepage and your default search to Bing. According to RWW, Make-My-Baby.com then makes a small amount of money every time you do a Bing search.

All of this is happening while Facebook has figured out a way to use the ever-so-trustworthy Goldman Sachs to get IPO level money — estimated at up to $1.5 billion — without ever having to reveal any financial data as required by a real IPO. To help keep the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from investigating this idea of Goldman Sachs buying a ton of Facebook stock and then reselling to private investors, the firm has said it will only sell the stock to “foreign investors.” Since it only sells any of its investment products to high net worth (i.e. rich) individuals, this move will have almost zero effect on who gets to buy the stock. Show me a Goldman Sachs customer that doesn’t have a Swiss or Cayman Islands financial operation that can buy the Facebook stock, and I will show you someone that won’t be a Goldman Sachs customer for long.

To sum up, Facebook says, we want to raise billions, but we won’t tell you anything about even a single dollar we bring in. And we will bring in those dollars by selling ads to scam artists and delivering your private information to our customers without telling you that we are going to do it.

When is the SEC finally going to investigate this incredibly shady operation? When RealNetworks was installing spam applications with every download of RealPlayer back in the wild West 1990s, the government could not care less because the number of people affected and the dollar amount was negligible. Facebook has one-twelfth the entire population of the planet as users, and it is valued at $50 billion. Now is the time to get them to stop their insidious practices or shut them down.

Posted in Internet | No Comments »

Questions linger around Evergreen Solar’s Devens decision

Friday, January 14th, 2011

By Kyle Alspach

A final thought or two for the week on Evergreen Solar (Nasdaq: ESLRD) and the Devens doomsday announcement. Or rather, some questions: How hard did Evergreen really try to keep jobs here in Massachusetts? And how long were they planning this?

I haven’t found definitive answers, but I do know what the company’s CEO was saying as recently as November.

“Devens continues to improve its cost structure,” CEO Michael El-Hillow said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Nov. 2, adding “we’re generating cash in the United States.”

He then made this statement: “We’re trying to keep jobs here, so we’re not going to push things over there (to China) as long as we continue to generate cash in the United States.”

That was not even three months ago. I’m not sure what has changed for the company since then, forcing Evergreen to decide to close the Devens factory by the end of March and cut 800 of the company’s 925 workers in Massachusetts.

I’d hoped to ask El-Hillow, but Evergreen said he wasn’t available. I did get to talk with investor relations VP Michael McCarthy and company spokesman Chris Lawson yesterday for nearly an hour. However, they wouldn’t say how long ago Evergreen made the decision to pull out of Devens.

They also didn’t offer any hints on what makes circumstances now so different from those in November, when Evergreen was already in the thick of its stiff competition with Chinese solar manufacturers.

Among those most stunned by Tuesday’s announcement were the people on the ground — the workers at the Devens factory, who had been encouraged to feel confident about their jobs by statements like the one I just cited from El-Hillow. One employee told me she thought her job was secure because she worked in solar wafer fabrication, which the company had never hinted would be sent to China.

Another worker, who I connected with on Facebook, lamented that he has no idea how he’ll pay his bills once he joins the already large pool of job seekers in Massachusetts.

Yet corporate decisions like this one — while devastating for low-on-the-totem-pole working people and local economies — are often well-received by shareholders, impatient to see some profits. And Evergreen is unquestionably looking to please its shareholders these days.

Along with the obvious goal of keeping the share price afloat (the stock was in de-listing danger until a recent reverse split), Evergreen also needs shareholder approval on Jan. 31 for a major recapitalization plan. The plan would cut the company’s debt and interest costs, but it would also be very dilutive for shareholders.

McCarthy and Lawson, however, said there are plenty of reasons why shareholders might want to approve this plan regardless of any other factors — namely the lack of other good alternatives for cutting company debt.

Clearly, a lot is coming up in coming months for the struggling Evergreen, which could succeed or fail based on what happens in that time.

But after this week, at least one other thing is clear: Massachusetts will have little at stake in the outcome either way.

Posted in Energy, Manufacturing, Massachusetts | No Comments »

Evergreen Solar layoffs surprise Devens, Marlborough employees

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

By Kyle Alspach

“Nobody was expecting it.”

That’s what I heard today from a 45-year-old employee of Evergreen Solar, one of the 800 who will lose their jobs by the end of March as Evergreen shutters its factory at Devens.

Sure, Evergreen (Nasdaq:ESLRD) had announced it would outsource its solar panel assembly to China by the end of this year. But this employee — who declined to have her name published, saying she didn’t want to put her remaining time at the job at risk — doesn’t do solar panel assembly. For nearly three years she’s worked in Devens as a fabrication operator for solar wafers, the building block for panels.

“That was the part that was supposed to be staying,” she said. “We thought we were all set…Now we’re sinking.”

High on the list of her reasons for worrying: her job provides the health insurance for her husband and two sons, ages 18 and 20, who live at the family’s Central Massachusetts home. She also just bought a new car, and her husband, a machinist, recently took a 10 percent pay cut due to weak economic conditions.

Not to mention the poor prospects for getting another job.

“There’s nothing out there that pays what I’m making,” she said.

She admits that she did suspect that Evergreen might pull out of Devens eventually, with the company struggling to compete with solar manufacturing in lower-cost regions such as China.
But not this soon.

“We figured we had at least couple more years in there,” she said.

It’s not just the Evergreen employees at Devens that were likely taken by surprise on Tuesday. The company’s headquarters, in Marlborough, will also experience layoffs, said Evergreen spokesman Chris Lawson. “Some of the cuts will come from Marlborough but beyond that I don’t have any finite numbers yet. That will all be determined in the coming weeks,” Lawson said in an e-mail.

Evergreen says the move is necessary to preserve cash and put the company on more solid ground in the highly-competitive solar industry. The plan is for the company to evolve into a producer of standard-sized solar wafers, which can be sold to solar panel manufacturers. The company so far has been forced to make its own panels because its wafers aren’t the industry standard size and aren’t in demand.

As a reporter following Evergreen Solar, however, what’s struck me most about this plan is the severity of the job cuts.

In 2007, when the company struck a deal with the state to receive $58 million in connection with the new Devens plant, the grant agreements show that Evergreen employed 310 people in Massachusetts.

But subtracting 800 jobs from the company’s 2010 headcount — 925 — would leave Evergreen with just 125 jobs in Massachusetts after the plant closure, not even half of the 2007 staffing levels.

That means that this move isn’t just about Evergreen leaving Devens. Arguably, it’s about Evergreen pulling up stakes in Massachusetts altogether, as the company’s presence in the state reverts to what it was well before all of this began — when Evergreen was just a promising startup.

Posted in Energy | 1 Comment »

AT&T plays fast and loose with 4G

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Rodney BrownBy Rodney H. Brown

AT&T has not only given up complaining about T-Mobile’s claims that its HSPA+ broadband cell network is “real 4G,” it has jumped right into the pit with T-Mobile, announcing a slew of new HSPA+ based “4G” phones today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Not to be outdone, AT&T is touting that its “100 percent” coverage throughout its entire cell network for this HSPA+ technology. What it doesn’t say in the releases is that only three markets – Chicago, Houston and Charlotte, N.C. – have the fiber or Ethernet connection off the cell tower to allow for 4G-like speeds of up to 6 Mbps. Boston, not so fast.

At this rate, pretty soon we will be calling my old pre-paid Virgin Mobile phone’s web browsing speeds as “4G.” Seriously, just one year ago, both AT&T and T-Mobile were touting the rollout of HSPA+ that would be happening throughout 2010 as a faster 3G.  Now it is somehow right up there with the WiMax 4G offering from Sprint, Clearwire and partners like Comcast? Or the LTE flavor of 4G offered right here in Boston by Verizon and MetroPCS?

To be fair, the speeds achieved over HSPA+, even without the faster backhaul, blow away 3G cell data speeds. But none of the 4G flavors out there right now are even close to what the International Telecommunications Union defined in October as a true 4G broadband speed – 100 Mbps up to 1 Gbps.

None of that is slowing done AT&T in its race to be seen as part of the 4G “in” crowd. While announcing its interpretation of a 4G network today, it also revealed some pretty amazing devices, including the powerful dual-core Motorola Atrix 4G, which will be available in the first half of this year, and the gorgeous Samsung Infuse 4G, available in the second half.

AT&T is also working on a rollout of an LTE 4G network to compete with Verizon’s, which will start by the middle of this year and is slated for completion by the end of 2013. But that will give it two supposed 4G networks, and it will have to carry separate devices for each. Customers may drown in 4G confusion by the end of the year.

Two questions remain. When will Boston get the faster HSPA+ speeds? And just how low can a broadband connection over the air get and still be called 4G by some carrier’s marketing department? Somebody cue the carrier pigeons.

Posted in Networks | No Comments »

MIT goes nerdcore on gambling with new competition

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

lynette_cornellBy Lynette F. Cornell

Chances are, you didn’t win the Mega Millions. (But if you did, hello, new friend!)  Even after taxes, winning any chunk of the $355 million up for stake is not a bad way to start off the new year. But gambling is no sure means to a stable financial future, unless, of course, you can heavily improve your odds. Barring an all-power good luck charm, gambling is mostly odds and humans aren’t terribly good at working them, but perhaps robots might be a good sit-in. Leave it up to MIT to find out.

Beginning this week, MIT students in the independent learning course 6.912 MIT Pokerbots Competition have one month to program a completely autonomous robot to compete in a computerized poker tournament. Python is the official language for the competition, but the organizers are considering the possibility of allowing other languages as well. No word yet on what type of poker the bots will be playing, although the competition website indicates that it will be announced.

In comparison to the Mega Millions kitty, the $20,000 prize for the competition winner seems rather paltry, but the intangible yet very real bragging rights more than compensate for the difference. A fair number of MIT students seem to think so. Registration closed Monday with 73 teams, ranging from one to four  members, throwing their chips in the ring. If the competition was based on name, the winner would likely be team #45, also known as “ultraviolet catastrophe.” But since it isn’t, I guess we’ll just have to wait until the tournament, which will be open to the public on January 27. Better slip an ace up your sleeve if you want to stand a chance against these new players, because I don’t think robots bluff.

Posted in robotics | No Comments »

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