By Rodney Brown
Is it a return of a pre-burst tech bubble stalwart or the final true sign of a new tech apocalypse? The possible harbinger of doom in this case is the newly launched Tech Hub Foosball League.
According to their own PR, the league is a “multi-team collaboration, bringing together Boston’s best techies, strategists and innovators for the opportunity to prove their foosball mastery…” The league will begin to hold weekly tournaments this month, which founders say will feature prizes such as consulting workshops with “the biggest names in innovation.”
Responsible for this blast from the tech past is Chase Garbarino of Boston startup Pinyadda and BostInnovation, and Bonnie Shaw of Somerville’s EchoDitto. Each team will host the foosball games in their offices and will provide refreshments for the real value in this proposition — the pre- and post-game networking.
According to the league’s Facebook page, Game 1 in the tournament is already planned for March 11 at Pinyadda in Boston. While most of the rest of the games in the six-game season have yet to be sited, the finale will be held at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge on April 22, according to the Facebook page.
The league can be found here Right now, there are nine members on that Facebook page, and only time will tell if the league’s founders have picked the right game to draw techies and innovators together. Do you hear that? Is that a Rock Band league tuning up?


Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a
The patent was issued this week, based on a September 2006 patent application. I’m not a patent examiner, of course, but as I was reading, I couldn’t help but see similarities to what other companies have been doing for a long time. For example, one potential application cited in the patent would have the system make suggestions or recommendations “with respect to books to read, movies or plays to see and/or places to visit” based on “a user’s determined interests and correlations of other users’ interest.”


