A list like this is probably biased against the tech community, and almost certainly biased against the non-Silicon Valley tech – only one New England startup made it into Inc. magazine’s “30 under 30: America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs.”
IdeaPaint — the only cool kid amongst you slovenly nerds — is the brainchild of three Babson alumni: John Goscha, Jeff Avallon and Morgan Newman. The startup, founded in 2002, makes paint that turns any wall surface into a whiteboard. The three started working on the company in Babson’s entrepreneurship program.
Among the other winners are a handmade belt company whose key innovation seems to be cheap, Vietnamese labor; and an email newsletter that tells guys what stuff to buy. That last one is preparing to launch “brief restaurant video tours aimed at helping guys familiarize themselves with a restaurant so they can act like they’ve been there before, and, in turn, impress a date.”
So for those of you trying to build robots or revolutionize transportation or cure diseases, it’s possible you’re working too hard.
Don’t get too excited, fans of bizarre cosmetic treatments — that lady at the salon with the crazy shades isn’t getting the whites of her eyes whitened. She’s watching TV.
The Herald reports Mizu, a hair salon in the Back Bay, is offering similarly named but entirely different MyVu personal video displays to its customers to use while they’re getting their hair done. The MyVu display looks like a pair of futuristic sunglasses, but hooks up to an iPod to play video.
The Web Innovators Group last night showed a welcome change from the high-tech meetup’s earlier sessions this year. This winter’s WebInno meetings were deluged with job seekers – but last night’s group of about 300 seemed to include more people wearing the event’s trademark “I’m hiring…” name badges, or pitching their own companies in informal networking sessions.
Out of the event’s featured “main dish” presenters, three-year-old Book of Odds Enterprises Inc. was the fan favorite. The company is developing a semantic search site that parses probability statistics from the web and presents them in a format designed for consumers. With a beta invite key, you can find out, for example, that if you live in a city, the odds you average less than six hours’ sleep a night are 1 in 3.5.
The beta site’s search engine seemed to be having trouble this morning: searches for common odds queries – like car accidents, business failures and plane crashes – yield no results.
But the audience at WebInno liked the idea. They voted it tops in a text-message vote, over Batch Book, a Providence-based small business CRM software, and Epernicus, a social network for scientists.
From the windows of Mass High Tech’s newsroom, I can’t count construction cranes on the Manhattan skyline. Other folkloric indicators of economic activity, such as men’s underwear sales, are also closed to my view. However, as I chew over the good news that our recession is over, I’ve had my eye on another trend that may not augur well for our region: Business is booming on Craigslist’s Boston site. As of August, listings in the Boston site’s “business” category — where business owners go to sell unneeded furniture and equipment — have doubled over the past two years.
Similar listings quadrupled nationwide, according to a Craigslist spokeswoman. The listings include everything from officesupplies to entire businesses — such as La Bella’s Fine Foods, a catering and café business in Medford that the owner says needs a capital investment to get profitable again.
Craigslist’s overall traffic has grown steadily through the recession. In August 2009, the San Francisco-based online classified marketplace saw 11.6 million more visitors than it saw in August 2008. The site’s 25.6 percent growth, compared with its traffic a year ago, vastly outstripped the Internet at large, where the number of monthly users grew by 4 percent in the same time frame.
“Things are really slow,” said Tony La Bella, the eight-year owner of La Bella’s Fine Foods. “From where I am, it’s probably best to let somebody take it and see what they can do with it.” (more…)
Mashable catches up with Emo Labs, the Waltham-based company making invisible speaker technology for flat screen TVs that, detailed explanations aside, makes no sense beyond “sound comes out of the screen.”
The company was a hit at the recent DEMOfall09 emerging tech conference in San Diego. After the jump, watch Carlson demonstrate his technology with the bizarre choice of the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo.”
At the risk of editorializing, the ice cream was delicious. But whatever, it’s ice cream — if the technology involved a guy in a hollowed-out refrigerator handing out Hoodsies through a mail slot, I’d say the same thing.
Easy there, entrepreneurial community — I’ve already patented that one, though the MooBella exhibition did put into sharp relief the shortcomings of my old startup, hoodZboxx®’s, 2006 demo on the most dangerous street corner in America.
MHT broke the news of MooBella’s existence in 2006, and last week, the BBJ reported the company had landed $18 million in funding from Geneva-based Inventages Venture Capital that will go toward manufacturing its first 100 machines.
MIT economist Esther Duflo, Harvard researchers Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and Peter Huybers, Yale researchers Richard Prum and Mary Tinetti, and Project HEALTH founder Rebecca Onie each received $500,000 to further their research.
Mahadevan, above tries to answer everyday questions with applied mathematics — how cloth falls, or how skin wrinkles.
After the jump, watch video of the remaining New England grant recipients. (more…)
The National Venture Capital Association has released its report on VCs’ impact on the U.S. economy. The report says in 2008, VC-backed companies generated about $3 trillion in revenue and employed about 12 million people in the United States. The report also says VC backed companies have out-performed non-VC-backed companies, and that VCs create whole industries more or less out of thin air.
That all sounds good, but Vivek Wadhwa, a researcher at Harvard, Duke and UC-Berkeley (a hat trick I would have thought to be physically impossible) calls B.S. at TechCrunch, saying the NVCA is trying to justify tax breaks and bailout dough for VCs:
How’d they come up with these numbers? They added up all the revenue generated in 2008 by any company a venture capitalist ever invested a dime in. So if John Doerr bought Bill a lunch in 1985, they’d count Microsoft as part of their empire. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But seriously, the NVCA numbers aren’t even remotely credible.
(grating veneration of entrepreneurs as immaculate purists, forced to suffer the indignity of investment)
On his Startable blog, former Atlas VC Healy Jones splits the difference and calls Wadhwa thoughtful but takes exception with his claim that VCs “go where they smell blood,” rather than funding innovation. Jones says VCs are looking to duck capital gains taxes, but aren’t looking for a bailout.
FastIgnite CEO Sim Simeonov calls the NVCA’s claims “outlandish,” but strikes a different chord than Wadwha:
My two cents are that if VCs are guilty of claiming or receiving too much credit when things go well, they certainly get too much blame when things go poorly. And I certainly think it’s foolish to only blame VCs for investing too much money in companies. It takes two to tango.
BBJ staff writer Lisa van Der Pool talks to NECN about Boston-based Tauntr, a social network where users can mock and berate friends with different sports-team allegiances, and which landed $1.1 million in angel funding last week. The service, thankfully for Pats-loving nerds, doesn’t launch until next month. The Globe’s wince-inducing video caption “Brady: Lack of touchdowns ‘unacceptable,’” seems like it was made for something like Tauntr, if not the Onion.
This fall/winter should be a good time to launch a sports-themed invective technology, at least locally, with the Sox closing in on the wild card, the Bruins playing at Fenway, and Rasheed Wallace playing for the Celtics.
“We never officially dissolved the fund, but we stopped making investments and everyone’s moved on to other things,” said Palfrey, who now teaches law at Harvard and is a venture executive with Highland Capital Partners. “The only active investment we have left is StyleFeeder, here in Cambridge.”
In February 2008, StyleFeeder, a Cambridge company spun out of a holding company, Top Ten Media, formed by Palfrey, landed a $2 million Series A round of venture capital from Highland Capital Partners.
RSS investors might be gone, but Palfrey has plenty to keep himself busy — he’s an author, and a venture executive at Highland, as well as a law professor, vice dean for library and information resources, and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
Don’t get too excited, fans of bizarre cosmetic treatments — that lady at the salon with the crazy shades isn’t getting the whites of her eyes whitened. She’s watching TV.
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