Print
Email
Print Edition Stories
Friday, May 29, 2009
Net Gains
Entrepreneurship busy at TechStars Boston; Apple rejects hot dog iPhone game
By Galen Moore
MHT Emerging Technologies Forum: Robotics
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: Tech companies may have to wait for stimulus funds
Interactive map of Greater Boston tech layoffs in 2009
AccelGolf has posted its number, and it’s in the TechStars clubhouse with its geodata-based golf application for smartphones.
The company, launched last year and profiled in February in Mass High Tech as mCaddie Inc., has joined the nine companies that will take funding, mentoring and office space from TechStars Boston for three months, starting this week. (About six are from the Boston area, TechStars investor and mentor Bijan Sabet said last week. AccelGolf was founded in Maine.)
As a policy, TechStars doesn’t release the names of participating companies. But I was able to track down two more of the companies on my own: social media consultant Laura Fitton (better known by her Twitter handle @Pistachio), has a stealthy Twitter-based startup, Oneforty, in the program. And two guys from Chicago are coming to Boston with a site called HaveMyShift.com, providing an online community for workers in the same company to swap shifts.
AccelGolf co-founder William Sulinski said Techstars offers a chance to take his nose off the grindstone and look around. “We’ve been plugging away at the path we’ve laid out for ourselves. Now we’re being kind of exposed to other people that are doing similar things and people that have been successful at other ventures,” he said.
Desperate times call for entrepreneurship
The mood was optimistic at the Always On Venture Summit East conference in Boston last week. But you didn’t need me to tell you that. These VCs could be bleeding in their socks (and some are), and you’d hear the same lines: “we’re still doing early-stage investing,” and “the best companies start in a downturn.”
So when Battery Ventures partner Sunil Dhaliwal said 2009 is actually better for Boston than 2006, I pricked up my ears. Three years ago, people were asking where all the Boston venture investors had gone, he said. They were flying to Atlanta and other East Coast cities. Not anymore.
“Maybe there was a post-bubble hangover that was slowing people down,” Dhaliwal said. “I cannot tell you from where I’m sitting how opposite it looks in 2009.” The entrepreneurially minded have “one foot out of their current jobs” and are meeting three or four evenings a week to plot out business plans, he said.
James Andrus is not one of those entrepreneurs. His Netro City Design & Information Systems Inc. has been flying under the radar, developing a news analysis software called News Patterns, nurtured by high-profile customers such as Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM), Siemens AG (NYSE: ADR), BP PLC (NYSE: BP) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign for president.
The Manchester, N.H., company’s software crawls the web, gathers thousands of articles, then maps them by category and inter-relationship on a kind of radar screen. It has never taken a dime of venture capital.
“We were never at the stage of saying let’s shoot the moon and then collapse,” he quipped. That said, the 10-employee company is looking for a $1 million to
$2 million investment to hire sales and support staff to attract new customers.
Hot Doggin’
All Northeastern University instructor Jay Laird wanted to do was let more people play “Hot Dog Down a Hallway.” But Apple Inc. got in the way of his plans.
The company rejected the iPhone game with the salacious title, the content of which is anything but. (Players are invited to fling a hot dog down a hallway, avoiding traps and pitfalls by tilting the phone back and forth to steer the sausage.)
Apple told Laird’s company, Metaversal Studios Inc., the content was offensive — even though it had approved two earlier versions of the game, which have sold on the App Store without complaint. “The whole joke of this game has been it’s so innocent that we’ve been straight-faced about it the whole time,” Laird said.
Metaversal makes serious games for companies and educators — but formed a division called Burning Village to exercise the staff’s yen for humor.
“We take this stuff very seriously,” he said — building in real aerodynamics and other capabilities. “If you deliberately drive the hot dog down into the ground, you can make it bounce on its head.”
Laird intends to appeal Apple’s decision.
Comments
If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
RSS Feeds
