By 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.”

By Rodney Brown

Now that Microsoft Corp. has done a 180 and now supports people hacking its new Kinect full-body motion control system, real-world applications beyond dance games are coming fast and furious. The latest is from the MIT Media Lab and is eerily reminiscent of the movie “Minority Report.”

Researchers at the Media Lab created an open-source extension for the Chrome browser from Google Inc. that allows the browser to be controlled using hand gestures detected by a hacked Kinect system. Using gestures like a grab, or an up or down swipe can do things like click on links or scroll up or down in web pages. The software is called DepthJS and apparently is just a Javascript program that connects to the hacked code that runs the Kinect. A video posted on ReadWriteWeb shows the young researchers demonstrating the web browsing and it looks smooth and responsive.

An article on the New Scientist magazine website explains how Microsoft came around to seeing the value in encouraging the hacking of the Kinect for uses other than games – essentially it had no choice. When a New York-based producer of DIY electronics kits, Adafruit Industries, offered a $1,000 reward to the first person to show they had hacked the Kinect to run on a PC, and posted their code to an open-source forum, Microsoft responded with bluster and lawyers. Apparently Adafruit immediately upped its offer to $2,000, and within a couple of days the Kinect was hacked by a young coder in Spain.

Once the genie was out of the bottle, Microsoft announced it was actually fine with open-source hacks of the Kinect.  In fact, it said that was the plan all along, that the system was left open by design.

The conspiracy theorist in me says that perhaps Microsoft at first threatened and bloviated about the hacking attempts just to make it look like they were upset, so that the hacker community would move even more quickly to hack the Kinect and find cool uses for it. Once they do, and once the first spinout business rolls out of MIT or Carnegie Mellon or Stanford, you can bet Microsoft will be there with licensing documents in hand, saying open-source is fine, but a commercial use requires payments.

Now, where’s my gesture interface for World of Warcraft? What application would you like to see get “Kinected”? (Trademark pending)

By Rodney Brown

Microsoft Corp.’s Project Natal may face competition from a pair of crazy-quilted rubber cleaning gloves and a webcam, according to MIT.

Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Jovan Popović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, have created software that allows any webcam to see the gestures performed by a user wearing their colorful Lycra gloves in three dimensions, and interpret the gestures as commands to a computer.

Picture Tony Stark disassembling his armor CAD images on his computer simply using gestures. That is what the MIT researchers show off in the video posted on MIT’s website.

Photo credit: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL

While the industrial and academic applications are obvious, Wang specifically calls out the videogame market in the MIT article. So, while Microsoft probably dumped many millions into developing Natal – a system that can interpret very broad physical gestures into on-screen actions – these MIT upstarts have a system that allows for fine control, using gloves that would likely cost a couple of bucks, a cheap webcam, and about a 300 megabyte to 500 megabyte software install.

In fact, in keeping with the on-the-cheap philosophy behind the system, Wang and his partners have developed a way to calibrate the system by simply putting the glove on an 8.5 by 11-inch sheet of paper.

So, how long before Microsoft licenses the technology from MIT?