The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 13 | Bean Town from Andrew on Vimeo.
TechStars web series “The Founders” drops in on the “Bean Town.” You would never know they’re not from around here.
Archive for the ‘Startups’ Category
TechStars Boulder video series drops into Boston
Monday, October 12th, 2009TechCrunch picks Whiz Kid Mark Bao as entrepreneur to watch
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Mark Bao
TechCrunch has named 10 entrepreneurs to watch, and among them is Mark Bao, the 17-year-old entrepreneur MHT talked to in May.
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
Good luck getting anything done tomorrow, tech community: Red Sox-Angels at 9:37
Thursday, October 8th, 2009Tonight 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…)
That was quick: Twitter, Oneforty talking acquisition?
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009TechCrunch 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.
That would mean a pretty quick exit for media consultant Laura Fitton who founded OneForty earlier this year.
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.
IdeaPaint: New England’s only cool entrepreneurs
Thursday, October 1st, 2009A 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.
WebInno’s Book of Odds: your chances of getting a job increase
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009The 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.
NVCA report starts VC/entrepreneur slapfight
Monday, September 21st, 2009The 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.
At PEHub, Dan Primack issued a 14-word, parenthetical reaction:
(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.
Tauntr would have made yesterday’s Patriots game even worse
Monday, September 21st, 2009BBJ 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.
Tauntr shares the local sports social networking niche with Boston-based Trumedia Networks, which recently expanded beyond its Sawxheads, Patsheads, Celtsheads and Blackandgoldheads to target a national sports audience. Trumedia has developed an embeddable applet called Slugfest, which lets sports fans argue via widget on sites like Boston.com.
Intuitive Automata shows off new diet-coaching robot
Friday, September 4th, 2009Intuitive Automata has posted video of its Autom weight-loss coach robot. The company is an MIT Media Lab spinout making robots for the health care industry.
Intuitive Automata CEO Cory Kidd has turned up in MHT before, talking about the then-unnamed Autom and robotics in general. The company has since moved to Hong Kong.
Kidd worked in the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, also home to Nexi, the emotion-mimicking robot. Autom itself has slimmed down a bit since its Media Lab days — it’s also lost the molded plastic hair and added a mouth. After the jump, watch video of Kidd presenting an earlier version of the robot.
Via Joost Bonsen. (more…)
MIT Media Lab spins out two startups
Monday, August 31st, 2009Scott Kirsner writes about two spinouts from the MIT Media Lab — Waltham-based Affectiva, which makes an emotion-sensing wristband to help study autism, and an unnamed robotics startup founded by Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, which developed emotion-imitating robot Nexi.
Much more nascent is Cynthia Breazeal’s new company. I’ve been told that it’s going to develop some remotely-operated robotic toys, but Breazeal will only say via e-mail that she’s “doing something innovative in the transmedia space.” It’s not yet incorporated, and she hasn’t yet started pitching investors (though one VC I spoke to last week had already heard about it through the grapevine.) “We’re still working through the concept,” she writes, adding that the company doesn’t yet have a name.
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