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.)

By Kyle Alspach

Owning a car is among the great symbols of what it means to be a middle-class American. In a culture that loves individualism, mobility and, of course, buying stuff, this makes perfect sense.

So that’s part of what makes the growing carsharing trend — and the successful Zipcar IPO, which seems to affirm its market acceptance — so interesting. In 2002, two years after Zipcar was founded, 11,500 Americans were members of carsharing organizations. It’s grown to 45 times that amount since then; 518,520 people were carsharing members as of January, according to Innovative Mobility Research (IMR).

Many of those people are members of Zipcar, easily the largest carsharing company in the U.S. But competitors such as RelayRides (formerly of Cambridge, now of San Francisco) and Mint of New York have also sped onto the scene. The number of carsharing companies in the U.S. has grown to 27, from 14 in 2002, IMR reports.

Half a million people sharing vehicles is still a small fraction of the U.S. population. And most of the members (and cars) are located in cities or on college campuses.
Whether the services could expand into the suburbs remains to be seen.

Yet for members, the benefits are significant: many save money and stress by not having to maintain and insure their own vehicles.

Ditching your car for a carsharing program can also make a decent dent in your environmental impact. IMR reports that the switch often leads to “more careful consideration of the necessity, duration and distance of automobile trips” — leading to less car use (and air pollution) than if you had your own vehicle.

Citing estimates in European studies, IMR said the average car-sharer was able to cut their carbon dioxide emissions by between 39 to 54 percent.

Earth2Tech writer Katie Fehrenbacher called the Zipcar IPO an indicator that “the year of people embracing the car as a service — vs ownership — has arrived.” And just in time, she writes.

“There will be an estimated 9 billion people on the planet in 2050 — more than 2 billion than there are today — and that population growth will largely happen in cities. … If every single person owned a car in these mega cities of the future, it would be unsustainable.”

Are we headed for days where it’s un-American to own a car, rather than un-American to spurn one? Probably not. But it’s no doubt smarter — both for drivers and for the planet — to have more options for how we get around at a time like this.

By Kyle Alspach

I  just got back from a few days spent in Seattle. If you haven’t heard, here’s what you need to know: it’s no longer filled with guys who want to be Kurt Cobain, but instead, guys who want to be Bill Gates.

I didn’t do anything in the way of checking out Microsoft or Amazon first-hand, but I did grab the issue of “Seattle” magazine on the newsstands. The cover photo depicts a 20-something white man wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a shirt that says GEEK POWER.

Aside from the T-shirt, this guy is everywhere in Seattle.

Inside, the accompanying article refers to Seattle as “Nerd City, USA”, and starts out mentioning Microsoft, Boeing and Amazon. But, the article says, “Our city’s geekiness goes much deeper, evidenced by a wealth of book nerds, comics junkies, film fanatics and chic geeks. And that’s why we love it here.”

I wouldn’t want to give a magazine too much credit in reflecting or speaking for a whole city. But visiting Seattle, you can’t miss the large number of bookstores and independent movie theaters (and, of course, the coffee shops on every corner packed with people on laptops.)

All of this matters because Seattle is exactly the type of place that’s vying with Greater Boston for tech companies — and the self-professed nerds who work for them.

Image is a factor in that competition. And right now, Boston’s popular image seems pretty different from Seattle’s. Sure we’ve got the great colleges, but when people outside New England think about Massachusetts, perhaps a more dominant image is the obnoxious Red Sox fan holding a beer.

Or think of the slew of recent Boston-centric films — “The Fighter,” “The Departed” or “The Town.” Gritty and blue collar, not nerdy and white collar.

But that’s right, I’ve forgotten to include “The Social Network,” which shows a local nerd founding one of the biggest IT companies in history, Facebook. Before promptly taking the startup to the west coast.

By 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

By James M. Connolly

As with so many office conversations, this one started off with a legit question and went downhill fast, concluding with, “No, you can’t use a flamethrower on your driveway.”

The legitimate question was along the lines of this: Why haven’t we used technology to come up with a better means of snow removal? Yes, the trees looked pretty on Sunday, but by Tuesday we had piles of greying, slushy, icy junk all through the city, not to mention having Boston area residents planting lawn furniture into parking spaces the way Columbus stuck flags into Caribbean beaches.

Here’s my theory: A few thousand years back some guy named Igor — Russia gets lots of snow, so we know it was an Igor — was sick of slogging through drifts to get to and from his mud and straw hut, so he picked up a board and started clearing a path. Thus was born the snow shovel. At the consumer end of things, we’ve improved on that only marginally, designing back-saver handles. At the city level, we’ve bolted huge metal shovels to the fronts of trucks and payloaders belching black diesel fumes. But it’s still a shovel, moving snow from right here to right over there. Even the suburban wonder that we call a snow blower just does the same thing a bit faster, using petroleum power to send snow from here to right there, at least until the wind shifts and blows it right back into the homeowner’s face.

Of course, we’ve come up with some reasonably half-witted solutions over the years. You may remember the electric driveway, where heating coils melted snow. That worked great until the snowmelt sought out the low point in the driveway or the road beyond, and when the homeowner turned off the power that snowmelt became a skating rink.

Here’s the challenge: How can we do snow removal better? Think snow removal that is faster, that is more environmentally friendly than tons of salt, that doesn’t involve massive stuff movers operated by drivers who see megabucks in every cloud.

In our office banter, once we got past the flamethrower idea, ideas ranged from melting snow mountains to create hydropower to — memories of science lab — spreading magnesium flakes on snow to create mini-explosions and heat. Creative, nice imagery, but probably not highly efficient.

There have to be some cool (sorry for the pun) ideas out there at MIT, WPI, Wentworth or elsewhere. Save a shovel, kill a snowflake.

By Galen Moore

Zipcar announced today it’s raised $21 million in a late, late round of equity financing. Some of the folks I talk to regularly are scratching their heads. Having raised nearly $40 million from VCs, the Cambridge car-sharing company registered in June to raise $75 million in an IPO. Why dilute with more equity? Maybe the IPO is off the table – perhaps due to the high cost of scaling a capital-intensive business. I think the IPO is probably on – with a $21 million post-holiday display of window-dressing.

What seems certain is Zipcar will not be going public immediately. They’ll spend the new cash on two things, they say: capital needs and fleet expansion. I’m into the second one of these, and here’s why: Zipcar doesn’t have any cars in Roxbury.

Roxbury’s tonier neighbors, the South End and Jamaica Plain, appear on the list of the company’s Boston car locations. But Roxbury is conspicuously absent. On Zipcar’s map of Boston, Roxbury makes up about half of a big doughnut hole at Boston’s urban core. Downtown? Check. Back Bay? Check. Southie? Check. Coastal Dorchester? Check. But Roxbury and the central neighborhoods of Dorchester are a big blank.

Boston Zipcar sites

It’s no secret Roxbury and Dorchester contain some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Zipcar tells visitors to its website one of the top reasons for subscribing is, “I want to save money.” Another of the top three is, “I don’t want to own a car.” A 2002 Boston Foundation report based on census data found these neighborhoods have among the lowest car ownership rates in Boston.  Doubtless, Zipcar is studying other demographics. Whatever they are, the company is keeping out of Roxbury and Dorchester.

I have some first-hand experience with this: I’m on the board of Egleston Square Main Street, a business association on the border of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. This year, we worked with Zipcar, trying to get a car or two in the business district. We scouted two suitable locations: clean, well-lit parking lots on the eastern side of Washington Street. The property owner was eager to participate. But Zipcar said no. Cross Washington on foot, and you’ll walk more than two miles across the heart of the city, before you hit Dorchester Avenue, and see another Zipcar.

It’s not the first time Egleston has been red-lined. When some of my neighbors bought their homes, in the 1980s, they had to do it without a bank loan.  In the 1960s, the state razed a JP neighborhood and later tore down the elevated Orange Line, which used to run through Dudley Square to Egleston. If it weren’t for some tough-minded neighborhood activists, they would have put in a highway. Instead, we got the new Orange Line, and Southwest Corridor Park.  Down by the park is becoming a gentrified neighborhood, and there are Zipcars a plenty.

Meanwhile, just up the hill is a growing immigrant business district with 14 nations represented among its entrepreneurs. Four families on my block (including mine) recently bought homes and welcomed their first kid into the world. But there are no Zipcars for weekend trips to grandma’s.

Zipcar declined my requests to comment for this article, citing silence requirements imposed by its IPO registration. Since I can’t ask them, all I can do is wonder aloud: If Zipcar can’t find its way to Roxbury and Dorchester, the company’s own backyard, how can they hope to navigate Wall Street?

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of the Orange Line demolition. That took place in the 1980s.

By Rodney Brown

Cambridge Consultants just announced a new bit of technology they will be showing off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January – a water bottle filled with sensors that can tell you when you actually need to be hydrated.

Aside from the obvious question of “Can’t I tell myself because I am thirsty?” there is the disturbing fact that the “i-dration” bottle – sadly, no, I am not making that up – tells you to hydrate by a pulsing blue light. What I want to know is, who decided blue is the color of choice for tech-based alerts?

This is confusing – now, how can I tell if my beer is cold enough, my body needs hydration or I am having a boy or a girl? They are all blue – how can I tell which applies to me? (OK, that last one probably doesn’t apply to me.)

Personally, I think this whole trend can be laid right at our own feet. After all, it was the old John Hancock building right in downtown Boston that got the whole ball rolling with its light-up tower. Since 1950, area residents could see the tower lit up blue and know “steady blue, clear view” or “flashing blue, clouds due.”

That may have started us down this path of using technology to know things we already know. With the exception of the helpful knowledge of your impending child’s gender, all of the other vital questions can be answered pretty simply in other ways. Do you need hydration? If you are thirsty, yes. Is your beer cold enough to drink. If it feels cold when you grab it, yes. Is it clear outside? When you look up and see blue skies, yes.

Now, when Cambridge Consultants makes a cookie jar that turns blue when I am actually hungry and not just eating because cookies taste good, call me.

By Bettina Hein, founder/CEO of Pixability Inc.
Trust the wisdom of your elders. That doesn’t sound like something you’d hear often in tech circles. It’s always about the newest and greatest. As much as I’ve learned in the last 10 years of being a tech entrepreneur, I believe I learned more from my grandparents about how to run a successful business.

Given, all four of my grandparents were entrepreneurs, so maybe I didn’t have your typical set of grandparents. But honestly, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about the simple business lessons they taught me.

Here are some of the most important ones:

1.    Start With The Basics
It’s normal for entrepreneurs to be impatient but most ventures are not an overnight success. It takes tedious grunt work to get there. My maternal grandfather Karl was 15 when he had to leave school in the middle of the Depression to work in the coal mine just as his father and grandfather had before him. He learned the craft of being a miner from the ground up and later became a mining engineer. His mind was like a sponge for details, like where you could find the best coal or what determined whether it burned with efficiency. Some 30 years later he would use that knowledge to earn millions of dollars. He taught me that knowledge and data are the entrepreneur’s weapon of choice. Soak it up where you can get it and don’t be too proud to do the dirty work while you’re accumulating it.

2.    Do It In Your Head
Being quick on your feet is good, but to win as an entrepreneur you have to be even quicker in your head. Grandpa Karl would spend hours doing simple math with me. He was a whiz at multiplying and dividing in his head. We practiced estimating figures such as the surface area of a country, the volume of a lake or the size of the German social security system. But we also figured out how businesses worked; how you could make money if you bought something for $X and sold it for $Y. Grandpa’s legendary stories were always about how he successfully negotiated deals by doing the math in his head before anybody had whipped out a calculator. I’m still far from achieving his level of mastery but I do calculations in my head all the time for fun, and I’ve profited enormously from the better and quicker business decisions I make because of it.

Bettina Hein's maternal grandmother Maria Neverling

3.    Building It Takes Time
I meet young (and not so young) founders all the time who want to build a company and ‘flip’ it within two years. When I started my first tech company I had a similar mindset, but my maternal grandmother Maria told me: “Starting out is hard, it will take your company three to four years to really get off the ground.” I was in my twenties and thought to myself, “What does she know? This is a high-tech software company, and she had a corner grocery store.” It then took my company three years to land the first million-dollar deal and five years to profitability. So much for building and flipping it. It was a real lesson in humility.

4.    Something Out of Nothing
Being resourceful is a key quality in entrepreneurs. But what does that mean in practice? Grandpa Karl taught me how to make something out of nothing: listen to your customer’s needs and dig deep. He realized in the early 1970s that the electricity plants buying millions of tons of coal had huge trouble getting the low-sulphur content coal they needed for their cyclone furnaces. Their emissions needed to be lower to conform to beginning environmental legislation. So he did something others hadn’t thought of, something that was almost free. He mixed different types of coal together and he used water to improve the mix. His customers were happy to pay a 25-percent premium per ton and that went straight to his bottom line.

5.    The Power of Rituals
A strong company culture can make the difference between a good and a great company. I learned how to do this from my paternal grandmother Charlotte who ran her own pharmacy. She was one of the few women of her time to enter into this male-dominated field. She had fought a chauvinistic bureaucracy for years to get a concession, but in 1958 a liberalization of the law allowed her finally to go into business for herself. She immediately began building a great team around her and had one sacred rule: ‘Bubbly after lock-up’. Every night after she closed the doors and they had counted the cash, she and her team would get together in the back room. They’d open up a small bottle of bubbly and smoke cigarettes. (Yes, those were the days when health professionals smoked!). They’d wind down for the day and debrief informally. She almost never had anyone leave her team, because she knew the power of ritual.

6.    Sex Sells
Finding inexpensive ways to kick-start distribution are essential to building a profitable venture. My paternal Grandpa Hans (who died before I was born) knew this and used his knowledge of human nature to do an early form of guerilla marketing. He was a chemist and invented a new beverage that we call wine coolers today. He mixed Mosel wine with lemonade to create a sweet and intoxicating concoction. But how could he bring this to market with very little money? He tried a few things before finding a winning formula: he gave away free samples. But not just to anyone. He gave them just to important influencers of the time – the madams of the local bordellos (this was in the Roaring Twenties in Berlin). The madams were happy to serve the free supply to the waiting customers in their saloons because it made them more likely to spend money on more services. Those customers, in turn, loved the drink and began requesting it at their local stores and restaurants. Within a few short months he had generated huge demand in the whole metro area of Berlin – because he had leveraged a small group of influencers.

Do you come from an entrepreneurial family? I’d love to hear what you learned from your family that helps you in high tech today.

Bettina Hein is a repeat entrepreneur based in Cambridge and Founder/CEO of Pixability Inc. Pixability helps small and medium-sized companies market themselves with video. Bettina is passionate about entrepreneurship – probably thanks to all those entrepreneurial genes.