Friday, July 17, 2009

BBN, birthplace of 100 startups, focuses on game tech

By Galen Moore

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Boston-area universities are fond of tallying their contribution to the national economy in revenue dollars earned by startups their graduates have founded. It’s a pity BBN Technologies Inc. has never done the same: Since its founding in 1948, the Cambridge-based government contractor has been a birthing ground for at least 100 companies, based on an informal count provided by current and former employees.

Most recently, innovators who formerly walked the halls of BBN are now staffing startups in the fast-emerging video game development cluster, working on cutting-edge applications for an eclectic set of technologies pioneered in government-sponsored research.

“In some ways, (BBN) provides a better Internet incubator than some Internet incubators do,” said Steve An, CTO at Cambridge-based LocaModa Inc., which makes casual games and chat applications for global participants. At BBN, in the 1980s, he worked on the routing protocols that connected Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet. Applying those technologies to let millions play games and chat is “not as far a stretch as you might think,” he said.

An isn’t the only former BBNer repurposing technology for new industries. While at BBN for 11 years, Daben Liu developed speech-recognition technology. Now, he’s applying similar technology to teach native Chinese speakers conversational English in a language-learning virtual world produced by Woburn-based 8D World Inc. Games are new to Liu, but he believes he can see speech-based innovations across the video game industry.

“One area we’re thinking of is very simple — just speak everything, even for the command,” he said. “You don’t have to use the mouse, you just speak it. It’s a very aggressive goal.”

Elizabeth Hinkelman worked briefly on natural language processing at BBN in 1986. Now, after working at Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc., she’s on the development team of Galactic Village, a forthcoming game designed by Galactic Village Games Inc. to allow players to direct artificially intelligent characters through casual interaction, via speech or text.

BBN itself recently hired game developer Kerry Moffitt, a veteran of Cyclone Studios and Impressions Games, to work on a game for teaching basic protocol to U.S. Navy recruits. Moving away from the video-game industry’s focus on better graphics has been liberating, Moffitt said. He and chief scientist Talib Hussain are working on a methodology that entertainment game developers could use to keep games challenging as players learn and improve, he said.

“In the entertainment games industry, there is typically no rigorous, formal methodology for how to make that kind of thing happen. Typically it’s just kind of one-off after one-off,” Moffitt said. “I feel like these two sides of the fence have so much to learn from each other.”

BBN is great at innovations like that, but historically not so great at turning out profitable products, said Warren Katz, who in 1990 left BBN to found MÄK Technologies, making middleware for massively multiplayer, battle-realistic simulations used by military organizations. Katz had worked on the SIMNET project, which created the protocol the government used to implement such simulations.

“At that point, my partner (John Morrison) and I realized that BBN wasn’t going to do much commercially with the technology,” Katz said. In 1992, MÄK, now a subsidiary of Virginia-based VT Systems, delivered its first product, a networking toolkit called VR-Link, to contractors looking to develop such simulations. “We could sell like hotcakes the secret sauce of distributed simulation throughout the industry,” he said, reflecting on his company launch.

The culture is changing at BBN, said General Catalyst Partners managing director David Fialkow, who led General Catalyst’s purchase of BBN, with Accel Partners, from Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) for undisclosed terms in 2004, preserving incumbent executives, including president Tad Elmer.

“The management team turned a smart but stagnant DARPA business into a brilliant government-innovation business,” Fialkow said.

Since then, the company has diversified its roster of government customers, commercialized its gunshot-detector system, Boomerang, and spun off the speech-to-text technology that Liu helped develop into EveryZing Inc., a video search company first launched as PodZinger that is now based in Woburn. Two more spinoffs are in the pipeline, Fialkow said.

“You have kind of a lucky and brilliant confluence of a fantastic management team with unbelievable technological capability,” Fialkow said. “The focus of the business is to really be able to be on the cutting edge of innovation. If we can spin out new businesses, absolutely.”

Born of BBN
A partial list of New England companies launched with BBN employees, technology or both

Know of others? Send us their names at newsroom@masshightech.com.