Dan Bricklin asked us to remind people of the upcoming event Tech Tuesday at The Skellig Irish Pub in Walltham. This regular event has been drawing good crowds for a long time. I will see you there as I have my sights on the XBox 360 the sponsor Microsoft is giving away.

Scott Kirsner the well respected chronicler of all that is Tech in Boston, recently published his “Cool Half-Hundred” Companies list. In the same spirit, we are putting together our own purely subjective, no logical reason or diligent analysis list of companies that we think are worthy of the “Even Cooler” tag.

Web Fun:

Doink.com - Online art and animation with a social component.

Viximo - Virtual Goods Market

Swaptree - Online trading of CDs, Games and Books, with 3-way trading algorithm.

Web Services:

Kayak - Huge and successful online comparison shopping for airline tickets.

SecondRotation - sell and recycle electronics at an agreed upon price.

Good2Gether - Online distributor of Non-Profit information and donation mechanism.

Web Media/Advertising:

Affine Systems - technology that analyzes the visual content of videos and images ,” not just the metadata “

Lookery (sorta Boston) - demographic advertising for Social Networks

Product Design / Web Design / Marketing

Bokardo.com - Social Web Design

Hunt & Gather - Interactive Media Agency

SimpleBits - world recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design

Research & Development

Arts Alliance Labs - build highly scalable, advanced technology products

Virosity (BetaHouse) - ruby on rails development for early stage startups

Hacker Homes (where senior hackers go to play)

Abinitio - massively paralell financial analysis applications

ITA Software - advanced algorithms and distributed computing techniques for airline industry

Software:

Acquia - value-added software products and services for the Drupal platform

Autovirt - state of the art solutions to the problems of Data Migration and File Server Consolidation

ClickArts - products that allow rapid development of reliable, high peformance applications for chip multiprocessors

Tokutek - accelerate key database operations by orders of magnitude

Vertica Systems - column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS)

Mobile:

Aylus Networks - MediaShare family of products and applications to enable a new class of real-time multimedia sharing solutions.

Envio Networks - mobile social networking?

Geezeo - Social on-line finance

Mobicious - best place to find anything for your phone

Communications:

Auraria Networks - products that are at the leading edge of content management and information identification and analysis

Recently there was an invitation only workshop at Boston University addressing the question, “Is Boston’s Venture Ecosystem Losing More Ground to Silicon Valley?“

At some point we might be privy to some of the discussions and conclusions reached during that confab, but for now, I would like to add an issue to the discussion.

Where are the active angel investors like Master of 500 Hats in the HUB? Silicon Valley is rife with successful entrepreneurs that have now turned to investing and advising the next generation of startups. Individuals such as Ron Conway, Reid Hoffman and the PayPal mafia, Paul Bucheit and several other xGooglers and the list goes on.

Maybe it is just a perception and there is a lot of activity in this area, just not publicly acknowledged. It might be attributed to adherence to that old Yankee adage that “your name should appear in the paper only three times: when you are born, when you marry, and when you die.” as mentioned on the eCoastAngels web site. Or, the reason may be the dearth of successful Web and SaaS companies in the area. But it seems that even in relative terms, the Boston area lacks this kind of angel/advisor/entrepreneur. Is our attitude here to keep our success to ourselves rather than pollinate our neighbors? Lets see if there are more of these individuals than we know about.

So, I am hoping to bring visibility to the angel/advisory activity here in theHub. Following are a few examples of the individuals we need more of. The list is only a start and not exhaustive, please send me your examples of these individual and I will add them to this post.

Who do we have here in Boston filling this much needed space in the investment ecosystem? Well, certainly the premier contributor would have to be Paul Graham of YCombinator. They have the seminal investor/advisor model, which is proving successful. Too bad most of their companies have to move to SV to find investors. A case could be made that based on YC’s track record, if someone started an angel fund, say Dart Angels, by throwing 5 darts into a Demo Day dartboard, and investing in those five companies, they could be successful. That is a shame that the YC companies can find no traction here in Boston.

One example of local individual angel/advisor here in Boston is Andrew Payne After successful stints founding Open Market and Revinio, he is actively investing in and creating new consumer Internet projects.

Dharmesh Shah is a driving force on the local startup scene, both as a founder and angel investor.

Now the call is out. Hey there VistaPrint, Bladelogic, Tripadvisor, Akamai, Upromise, Lycos, Open Market, Storage Networks, EMC, MQube …..etc. whats up?

Readers have nominated the following individuals for the list of Advisor/Angels

Don Dodge local Microsoft Exec and Angel/Advisor of local startups

Genotrope Record: Awareness

Company URL: http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/home/

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2005

Funding Status: First Round

Investors: Greylock, North Bridge Venture Partners

Founders or Execs past companies: Microsoft Canada, Sqa, Authentica

Industry: Enterprise Social Networks

Offering Description: At the core of the Awareness solution is an on-demand social media platform that combines the full range of Web 2.0 technologies—blogs, wikis, discussion groups, social networking, podcasts, RSS, tagging, photos, videos, mapping, etc.—with security, control, and content moderation.

Genotrope Record: Playhard

Company URL: http://www.playhard.net/w3/

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2008

Funding Status: Series A

Investors: NEA

Founders or Execs past companies: Turbine

Industry: Consumer Web, Online Sports Games

Offering Description: Play Hard Sports is the first sports network in North America focused exclusively on developing, publishing and distributing exceptional sports games and entertainment across the Internet.

A lot of bits have been generated regarding the recent swipe TechCrunch took at the departing Chief Architect of Twitter. The personal taunting and Tabloid aspect have ticked off a few people. Of course the article had the desired effect from the TechCrunch perspective and the page views and comments are flying.

The point I want to bring up is that this method of personal “dissing” seems to be directly influenced by the recent visit of Loren Feldman to the TechCrunch “compound”. Feldman has recently caused a bit of controversy on his own by singling out Shel Israel to personally ridicule and generally try to make his life miserable. He has gone to the lengths of registering the shelisrael domain where he hosts puppet show parodies of Shels FastCompanyTv show interviewing Web personalities. While I have to admit that some of the bits made me laugh, the unrelenting and apparent meaness can get old quickly. If you look in the background of some of the interviews which were shot at the Arrington enclave, you can see Mike Arrington in the background assuming the role of grip as the puppet works his magic. At that point I had an ah ha moment but didn’t know why. Now the latest controversy makes it obvious. Has TechCrunch taken a step closer to the ValleyWag approach. You be the judge. Next up a scathing animated feature starring Zuckerboig and a parody of the recent Facebook chat app.

So what is next? Loren is obviously taking a page out of the Howard Stern, start a beef, playbook. Even on this relatively tiny scale, it bumps up traffic. So how about an East Coast vs. West Coast beef or “Social Media is for Wussies” campaign led by Amanda Chapel.

Bottom line, there is not really a major point to this post, but I was hoping do my little part by fanning the flames to jack up the pageviews with a manufactured controversy and link bait headline.

For those of you that attended Techcocktail last September, you will remember the great event put on by Brian Balfour and Jay Meattle and Geezeo. Well they are at it again with POPSignal. http://popsignal.eventbrite.com/

If you missed it last year be sure to try to attend. Don’t wait to sign up. See you there.

Genotrope Record: Doink

Company URL: http://www.doink.com/

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Seed,  Alpha test, accepting new user registration

Investors: Self Funded

Founders or Execs past companies: Dome Imaging, Mindreef

Industry: Consumer Web, Animation and Web Graphics

Offering Description: DoInk is a place to enjoy art and animation, and make your own. Company is DK Pictures.

Buzz in theHub covered this company previously but they were in stealth mode. Now they are in Alpha and accepting new users. We usually refrain from making any comments on an application or review the capabilities, but in this case having been present during demos to users, I can say that the app is universally accepted and blows away any engineer familiar with what it takes to build such an app. I hope to see good things from Doink and a funding by a local Web VC.

Genotrope Record: Affine Systems

Company URL: http://www.affinesystems.com/

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: Series A

Investors: Highland Capital

Founders or Execs past companies: Microsoft, Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA)

Industry: Online Video, Online Advertising

Offering Description: Our technology analyzes the visual content of videos and images “not just the metadata” to provide superior contextual advertising and brand protection to our customers.

Genotrope Record: Aprigo

Company URL: http://www.aprigo.com/

Citation URL:

Formation Date: 2007

Funding Status: First Round

Investors: Cedar Fund

Founders or Execs past companies: EMC, NetApp

Industry: Storage, Data Management

Offering Description: aprigo is about data and the people that manage it on a daily business