The Globe reports developer/environmental activist John Rosenthal is building the biggest private solar installation across the street from Fenway Park in Kenmore Square.
Twelve hundred solar panels will sit on the rooftops of the $500 million Fenway Center that Rosenthal’s Meredith Management is developing. He’s also starting Here Comes the Sun LLC, a company that will sell electricity to the complex’s occupants: Apartments, offices, retail stores and a garage. Here Comes the Sun will also power the Yawkey Commuter Rail station, which will be renovated from a break in a fence in a parking lot to an actual structure of some kind.
Gulak told Popular Science the Uno now has the ability to transform from a Segway-like configuration with two side-by-side wheels to a more recognizable motorcycle mode. The changes were made to make the self-balancing bike a safer ride.
Fake newspaper The Onion reports MIT’s Mad Science Research Center’s previous estimates on the debut of its corpse-reanimation technology were about 10 years off.
No. 2: “eCommons.” This one also has nothing to do with killing anybody, and is also a college student service web site — Harvard Medical School’s this time. We might have too many college kids around here.
At No. 3: “Gloucester Daily Times,” which I’ll bet shocked even the Gloucester Daily Times. This is the year after the 2008 Time Magazine story about the “pregnancy pact” that either happened or didn’t, and its interminable fallout.
“Restaurant Week” and “BHCC” at Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, seem reasonable enough, with the recession making expensive restaurants less, and community colleges more popular. “UMB.edu” follows at No. 6, which seems a little like calling someone to ask for their phone number.
A first for criminal courts in the commonwealth could open up a new revenue stream for makers of thermal imagers: Massachusetts police departments. Universal Hub reports Boston Municipal Court has convicted a man of gun possession based on thermal imaging evidence.
After a foot chase through Dorchester, cops used a thermal imaging scanner to show a gun found on the chase route had been recently held. During the trial, prosecutors brought in MIT mechanical engineering student Priam Pillai as an expert on thermal imaging.
Business plan competiton season is in full swing — the MIT 100K’s Elevator Pitch Competition, and the Executive Summary Contest is getting started. Researcher/entrepreneur/business plan competition judge Vivek Wadhwa weighs in at TechCrunch, suggesting that losing business plan competitions may be better for startups than winning. Wadhwa calls the competitions a relic of the dot-com era, and compares winners to children whose parents praise them too much.
A quick scan of past winners backs up Wadhwa’s argument — the winners haven’t gone on to become huge successes, while Akamai, Harmonix and Brontes all lost.
Meanwhile, investor/entrepreneur/business plan competition judge Sim Simeonov says he disagrees with Wadhwa but adds his own criticism, saying the competitions move the target from creating a successful business to winning the competiton, and force judges to decide a winner without any kind of VC-style due diligence.
So what does all that mean for Rouzbeh Shahsavari, who recently won five grand for his nano-engineered concrete startup? Who knows? Above, watch Shahsavari possibly doom his startup by winning, and the other contestants ensure wild success by losing the $100k Elevator Pitch Contest last month.
Former UMass Lowell researcher Erin Rapacki has developed a robotic hand to help people in wheelchairs open doors. Rapacki designed the hand with an eye toward simplicity — it cost less $2,000 to make — but it can open 14 different types of doors.
Rapacki presented the project, which she worked on while at UMass, at the IEEE Robotics Conference in Woburn last week. In July, Rapacki left UMass for Mountain View, Calif.-based Anybots Inc., which is developing telepresence robots.
Is there an e-reader on your gift list this year? It wouldn’t be a surprise—the technology press touts that the 2009 holiday shopping season (actually, all of 2010) will see the ascent of the e-reader as the ultimate mobile accessory, delivering novels and newspapers to a public clamoring for convenience
Once a boutique, almost novelty device, the e-reader market is steadily filling up. According to an August report from the Association of American Publishers, electronic-book sales increased 177 percent, to $96.6 million, over 2008 numbers.
Industry pioneer Sony and its upstart rival Amazon, with its Kindle series of devices (this year, the company is believed to have sold three million units), must now battle for market share against iRex Technologies’ iRex DR800SG, the soon-to-be released Alex from Spring Design, and offerings from Barnes & Noble. (more…)
The MIT Media Lab’s Pranav Mistry recounted the history of his SixthSense project at TED India this week. SixthSense started when Mistry took the rollers out of two computer mice (mouses?), attached some pulleys, and made a glove-like hand-gesture interface. Moving through SixthSense’s evolution, Mistry talks about some Internet-synced sticky notes, pens that draw in three dimensions, Google maps that interact with physical objects, and other things that, if said by anyone else, would just be crazy talk.
From there, he explains how he inverted the process, in an effort to “paint the physical world with that digital information.” He started with a projector mounted on his bike helmet that would project pixels onto the physical world. He added a camera and the system eventually shrank down to the pendant we recognize as the current incarnation of SixthSense.
In the video, Mistry demonstrates the system by casually doing things that shouldn’t make any sense: Digitally painting on a physical wall, taking a photo of the Boston skyline by framing it with his index fingers and thumbs, dialing a phone number on numbers projected on his palm, watching video of President Obama’s MIT speech on a print newspaper; reading a tag cloud — “comedian,” “geek,” etc. — that appears on comedian/blogger Baratunde Thurston’s shirt when Mistry meets him; playing a video game on a piece of paper; and copying text and charts from the regular kind of paper and pasting them to his crazy, digital paper, just by picking it up and moving it.
The New York Times reports on the trend of vertical gardening, and other methods of growing your own food in the confines of Manhattan.
One of the companies the times talks to is Needham-based Sky Vegetables. Sky Vegetables sells systems for growing vegetables on urban rooftops. The full system includes wind turbines, solar panels, rainwater harvesters, greenhouses and composting bins. The Times story says the company wants to build rooftop farms on hospitals, schools and food banks.
Closer to home, Sky Vegetables is working on what it calls the state’s first commercial rooftop hydroponics farm in Brockton. The company won zoning approval last week to build the farm on the roof of an abandoned shoe factory in Brockton (above).
Sky Vegetables was founded by Keith Agoada, a University of Wisconsin Madison alum and a former marketing intern for the Patriots.
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