BUToday notes the arrival of BigBelly Solar’s fancy garbage can today, with an animated feature explaining how they work. The school is adding 20 of the solar-powered trash compactors to the three already on its campus.
As many as 400 tech-minded students, bankers, lawyers, investors and entrepreneurs took to Boston’s streets in the drizzle last Friday afternoon in the Quest for Innovation.
The fundraiser and community-building exercise sent just over 100 teams scrambling through the city on a technology-themed scavenger hunt powered by Boston-based Scvngr Inc.
The event’s beneficiaries include four youth-focused entrepreneurial non-profits: NECINA Youth Entrepreneurship Service, TiE Young Entrepreneurs, the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s New England chapter, and Youth CITIES. A fifth beneficiary will be chosen by the winning team, which hailed from the DartBoston young entrepreneurs’ group.
“You had entrepreneurs, VCs and lawyers competing against each other — and then you had entrepreneurs, VCs and lawyers on the same team,” said Seth Priebatsch, the founder and CEO of Scvngr. “On a rainy afternoon, you might have expected a low turnout from a different group.”
Priebatsch said Scvngr’s metrics showed an unusually high rate of participation in the activity. The company develops mobile-phone-powered scavenger hunts for events. All the teams did well on the questions, and the top 10 were all within 10 points of one another — a metric that shows all the teams got involved, he said. “Numerically speaking, everyone had a great time.”
Highland Capital Partners’ Michael Gaiss initiated the planning for the sold-out event. Sponsors included Deloitte, Foley Hoag LLP, Mass High Tech, Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center, the Museum of Science, Polachi Access Executive Search, Silicon Valley Bank, the UMass Venture Development Center, Wilmer Hale and Xconomy.
In August, Bao sold his first startup, Avecora, and launched a new company called AtomPlan, which makes a business contact management application. He has also co-founded Ramamia, a photo-sharing service for families.
Bao told MHT about his goals in May: A personal net worth of more than $5 billion, to help people who can’t help him, to enjoy life without boundaries and to change the world. For more proof he’s not messing around, check out his enjoyably profane Twitter stream. From the Startup Bootcamp @ MIT:
Chatting with a speaker afterwards? Keep your f______ chat to < 3 min and < 3 questions. G__ damn. #sb
Tonight is Game 1 of the Red Sox’ five-game divisional series against the Angels, which creates two near-certainties: Another Sox/Yankees ALCS; and “worker productivity” becoming an oxymoron at offices throughout New England tomorrow. This thing doesn’t start till 9:37 p.m., for Hendu’s sake, and postseason baseball tends to go well with alcohol.
But what baseball taketh away, it can also giveth, or whatever. The sport has inspired some nifty innovations in analytics, robotics and … let’s call it life sciences.
MIT News Office photo
• In spring training, the Sox, who even give their IT guy World Series rings, supplemented hitting coach Dave Magadan with the MIT Media Lab, naturally. For the last few years, researchers from the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group, has been strapping sensors to minor leagers while they’re batting at the Sox camp at Fort Myers. The info from accelerometers and gyroscopes could provide insight on differences in swing mechanics during a hot streak or a slump.
• Using an arm developed at MIT, University of Tokyo researchers have developed baseball-playing robots that could make the Fall Classic either more interesting, or entirely pointless, to watch. Think of all the time and money the Sox would save on scouting, not to mention free agency. And J.D. Drew would presumably be injured far less often if he were a robot. (more…)
TechCrunch posts an uncomfirmed, “PURELY speculative” — note the all caps, that’s seriously speculative — rumor that Twitter is talking to Cambridge-based Oneforty about buying it.
The blog lists a few reasons: Twitter’s recent funding, and the obvious overlap. Buying Oneforty would save Twitter the effort of building its own app store.
Maybe most importantly TechCrunch notes that by acquiring Oneforty, Twitter would be buying itself a business plan, or at least part of one.
In a four-minute-old tweet, Fitton seems to be giving an Oscar speech — thanking people like Chris Brogan who believed in her early on, etc. Clearly she sold the company, or happened to feel like expressing spontaneous gratitude for no reason. It could be anything, really.
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.
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.
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.
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BUToday notes the arrival of BigBelly Solar’s fancy garbage can today, with an animated feature explaining how they work. The school is adding 20 of the solar-powered trash compactors to the three already on its campus. 
As many as 400 tech-minded students, bankers, lawyers, investors and entrepreneurs took to Boston’s streets in the drizzle last Friday afternoon in the 
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