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Friday, August 21, 2009
Net Gains
Technology taking hospitality to the next level
MHT's Galen Moore: Charity reseller takes sting out of overpriced tickets
MHT's Galen Moore: Hiring trends and opportunities
MHT's Galen Moore: Two differing web-based news business models
Boston entrepreneurs are hospitable by nature. At least, that’s how it appears from the number of tech startups trying to break into the hospitality industry.
After I reported earlier this month (Aug. 7 issue) on the menu of technology startups serving the restaurant business, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, angel investor and Boston University professor Vinit Nijhawan contacted me about a heretofore-stealthy startup he’s invested in that wants to change the way dining establishments hand out gift certificates and special offers.
Waltham-based Payment Transaction Services Inc., dba CaptureCode, has software designed to let diners buy bar-coded gift certificates on a restaurant’s website, and send them via email, text message or card. At the restaurant, the bar code can be scanned from the screen of a smart phone using a scanner provided by CaptureCode.
“The issue with the traditional coupon or gift certificate is you really don’t know your customer,” said company founder Tony Padam.
The product is also designed to work with special offers and loyalty campaigns, which restaurants can send out to customers who have opted in, and monitor results in real-time, Padam said.
CaptureCode boasts a list of Boston restaurants among its early customers, including Big Papi’s Grille, the Framingham steak house opened last month by Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz.
Nijhawan, who founded Kinetic Computer Corp. in 1992, is more interested in wireless payment technology than restaurants, per se. With the advent of application development for smart phones, the mobile space today looks to him a lot like the client-server software market that emerged in the early 1990s, replacing the dumb terminal model.
However, he is also a board advisor with New York-based Payfone Inc., which makes a mobile payment system serving those who do not have bank accounts, let alone smart phones. The system works with the most basic prepaid wireless phones, allowing users to convert prepaid minutes into currency for buying goods online. Long-time Boston entrepreneur Rodger Desai — who founded Vettro Corp. and Rave Wireless Inc. — co-founded Payfone last year in New York.
While CaptureCode banks on more people owning the sophisticated devices, there’s a global limit, Nijhawan said. He predicted both ends of the market will continue to grow: smart phones on the high end, and the cheapest phones with bare text and voice function on the low end. The middle — feature phones that offer some smart phone capabilities at a mid-range cost — will be squeezed out, he suggested.
Prevent Toxic blob
This August, Boston entered its first heat wave of the summer, and the newspaper-reading public became aware of the potential costs of Internet-related energy consumption. The problem of data-center cooling appeared in the Sunday funnies.
In the Aug. 9 edition of Dilbert, the eponymous protagonist warns that without an adequate power supply, the company’s data center will overheat, and its servers will melt into a toxic blob.
“Let’s go with the toxic blob, but we need to call it something else,” says his pointy-haired boss.
Izuh Obinelo thinks he has an alternate solution. Obinelo’s company, Nashua, N.H.-based Senergy Thermal LLC, provides computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software designed to monitor in real time the temperature and humidity of every point inside a data center.
Since about 2002, engineers have focused on how best to lay out a roomful of servers for the most cooling efficiency and the fewest ‘hot spots,’ Obinelo said. He’s been working on the CFD software and monitors used to design computing equipment since 1994, when he started at Maya Heat Transfer Technologies in Montreal.
However, with equipment needs and network loads constantly shifting in the data center, it’s hard to maximize efficiency in real time. Senergy’s CFD product is designed to extrapolate conditions across an entire facility, using a handful of temperature and power-use data points. It is now undergoing beta testing with a handful of West Coast server farms, including the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
With a limited number of sensors, “There could be a scenario where you’re not monitoring a critical point.” That could result in a hot spot-related equipment failure — or, in the worst case, a toxic blob.
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