Posts filed under 'Editorial'
First Round Office Hours in Cambridge
Make sure to mark July 6th, 2009 on your calendar if you are a viable start-up and want a chance to speak with one of the premier web investment firms.
First Round Capital is holding an Office Hours session in Cambridge at Toscanini’s Ice Cream in Central Square.
If you are not familiar with First Round Capital, you should be. They are well known as one of the most savvy and successful early stage investors with a team that has earned their cred in the trenches as entrepreneurs themselves. Their current portfolio includes Mint.com, Xobni, Get Satisfaction as well as a few Boston area start-ups.
If you don’t have a warm introduction to First Round through your network, this is the next best thing. Take advantage of their open invitation to introduce yourself and your company.
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Add comment June 30, 2009
TechFellow Awards Disappoints
- Image via Wikipedia
Is it just me or do you think the TechFellow Awards was pretty lame and sort of seemed tossed off?
The TechFellow Awards presented itself as being all about disruptive innovation and making innovation happen. They had a huge list of prominent judges and my expectations were high. I was looking forward to learning about the newest disruptive innovations coming out of the crucible of cutting edgeness, the hotbed of invention, the bleeding fringe type stuff.
What we got was Social Networking, Virtual Goods, Instant Message integration, an audience vote for your favorite artist site, web email, chat and spam protection.
All good stuff but not really innovative in 2009. This is not meant as a cut to the award winners, they all deserve recognition, especially Eric Reis who is currently carrying the mantle of “geek idol” and spreading much valuable knowledge and experience to the startupsphere.
My point is that the expectations were set for disruptive innovation and what was delivered was 2005 technology.
Where were the things changing our life currently? Surely the founders and executives at the following companies can be considered equally or more disruptive and innovative.
Presence based mobile applications enabled by Wi-Fi Positioning System: Skyhook Wireless
Speech recogition: Vlingo
Video analytics and search technology: Visible Measures, ScanScout
Immersive gaming: Harmonix Music
Electronic Ink: E-Ink
New business category and marketing tools: Hubspot
Dev Tools: jQuery
Power Innovation: A123
And that is just the Boston list.
What about cloud computing, ever hear of Rails or Django? Real time search, micro sharing, new advertising platforms and so on.
There has to be more going on there, it is Silicon Valley for gosh sake. The idea is a great one and the companies that receive the geek grants of $ 50 will make good use of it.
Again, this is all about the expectation of savoring the freshness of disruptive innovation and getting served day old bread.
Am I off base here? Let me know what you think and feel free to add deserving innovators.
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4 comments June 12, 2009
Angels and Seed Funding in Boston
First, let’s get this out of the way. The Boston start-up scene kicks ass. Although there is always the inevitable comparison to silicon valley, the only deficiency we have is in the amount of Web Start-up successes.
Excluding the Web, Boston is very strong; in wireless and mobile technology, bio-tech, robotics, gaming, storage, data-center infrastructure, database and cleantech.
The need for improvement is clearly in the consumer internet, which is also where start-up companies can take the most advantage of Angel Investment.
We attended the MIT Innovation Series on Seed Capital panel last night and it is now evident that available capital is not the issue for web start-ups.
Up to now, the Boston angel community has been comprised of successful individuals that made their money in the mini computer, workstation, data communications, instrumentation and enterprise software. This is the world of defensible IP, direct sales and business customers. It makes sense that web companies with no invention risk seeking large consumer distribution may be outside their comfort zone.
Yes, Boston missed the first wave of Web wealth which created the rich angel community in SV such as the PayPal mafia, xGooglers, eBay and Super Angels like Ron Conway. So be it. We are now correcting that.
Start-ups can take heart that just the three investors on the panel last night have enough willingness and money to fund most every viable web start-up in Boston.
Other local angel groups that are backing companies in the consumer web space are:
Bantam Group Savvy and entrepreneur friendly.
eCoast Angels Even though their web site contains this quote about it’s members “the 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.” which is the antithesis of the web culture of transparency, Don Dodge is doing his part to back local consumer web companies.
With these organizations leading the way, the local angel associations are sure to follow.
Now the money is there. What else can we do?
Shawn Broderick from TechStars commented on the fact that Boston could improve on becoming less insular and open up as a community.
That is one of our hot buttons, to see more meetups and groups where there is a practical exchange of ideas, advice and experience. Let’s move beyond the superficial schmoozefests we know and love, and start more intimate and useful splinter meetups. A rising tide lifts all boats. The more community knowledge, experience and success we share, the stronger our start-ups will become.
So go forth and prosper, the ball is in the entrepreneur’s court to make use of the resources now available. And whatever you do, don’t be shy.
1 comment June 11, 2009
June is Innovation Month in New England
There is a lot of activity focused on startups and innovation around Boston this month. In fact, June has been officially declared Innovation Month. http://NEinnovation.com/
Rob Go of Spark Capital has a post up about his Three Reasons to be Optimistic About Entrepreneurship in New England He did a good job of summarizing what fuels the Boston areas innovation and pointing out that the community is growing and increasingly coming together.
His third point about Increasing Activity resonates the most with us. The more we can do to foster collaboration and openness among local entrepreneurs, the better chance we all have of becoming successful.
We are ready to take the next step beyond the basic demo/networking events and innovate the actual networking events themselves so they contribute practical information and advice to take away and use in our own contexts.
That was the thinking behind TestCase Boston which was successful enough to have requests for a follow up event at a larger venue. We hope to host the next one at the end of August.
We encourage you all to come up with ideas for meetups and networking events that contribute back to the community. Feel free to bounce any ideas off of us or make comments on this post. We will try to find sponsors or whatever makes sense to help out.
See you at one of the events.
1 comment June 3, 2009
When will They Launch?
“If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.” — Reid Hoffman
We try to keep an eye out for the next new companies to appear on the scene.
Over the past few months we have found a pretty long list of new web or mobile companies waiting in the wings to go live.
http://www.elevenlearning.com/
http://www.calisto100.com/coming_soon
In the spirit of Continuous Deployment and Customer Development, we encourage these sites to open the gates and let us in. We are here to help, really!
1 comment May 29, 2009
Whats next in Tech for Boston?
- Image via Wikipedia
As a precusor to an event on June 25th called “What’s Next in Tech: Exploring the Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond.” that he organized and will be moderating, Scott Kirsner challenged a few of the local tech bloggers to come up with some ideas on what will be the next trends for the coming wave of new technology companies.
I’m sure that Boston will make significant future contributions in both Bio Tech and Clean Tech, however I will let the knowledgeable experts provide further details for those domains.
In Communications, Computing, Software and the Web, the obvious current trends in new tech companies cluster around cloud computing and storage, green data centers , mobile applications, social networking, search engine marketing, gaming and virtual goods.
I suspect that Boston will continue with one of it’s tried and true approaches to building successful business within the next wave of technology. The same method was used by Levi Strauss during the California gold rush, sell the picks and shovels. I think this fits in well with the more conservative New England ways, less risky than going for the gold, but you can still build very successful businesses.
Translated to the world of technology, the strategy is to build the tools, infrastructure and marketplaces that create an even larger swell in whatever current wave of innovation is building momentum.
Without going back too far into the early days of the internet and the rise of distributed computing and client server applications, we only need to look at some of the successful companies spawned here during the web 1.0 period to see the pattern.
Booklink the 3rd Browser
Vermeer html editor
Open Market first commercially available Web (HTTP) servers
ViaWeb online store builder
Akamai web content servers
you get the idea
So lets see what some local companies are doing within the previously identified trends.
cloud computing and storage: see Cloud Crowd
green data centers: Viridity infrastructure to balance power, cooling and utilization.
mobile applications: Skyhook Wireless infrastructure for mobile positioning
social networking: Mzinga enterprise infrastructure for social media. Tipjoy social commerce infrastructure
search engine marketing: Wordstream, Hubspot tools to optimize SEM and Inbound Marketing
gaming and virtual goods: GamerDNA virtual bazaar for gamers , Viximo marketplace and tools for virtual goods commerce.
As the list clearly shows, the course of providing the tools, infrastructure and markets for the emerging technologies is still a mainstay of Boston’s approach to building businesses.
Scott’s question to us is “Whats next in Tech for Boston?” If we apply the picks and shovels template to the trends, we can determine where there may still be opportunities. One category, marketplace plays, may be promising.
One obvious vacuum is in the mobile space.
So you heard it here first, one of the next local companies will be building an “App Store“ for the Android Platform. Rich Miner, if you are listening, I can pull a team together in a month, and with the imprimatur of Google Ventures, we should have a pretty good shot.
What do you think? We should all be going through this exercise so that we can position Boston and our companies as the economy returns to health.
Come hear what some of the brightest minds in Boston innovation think will be the next tech opportunities. Early registration ends today.
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1 comment May 15, 2009
What’s Next in Tech in Boston
Sometimes it makes sense to change directions in your career to stay relevant or improve your market value.
The best time to do this is when a new tool or technology is just catching on. The simple reason that this is possible is that the technology has not been around long enough for anyone to have significant experience and therefore a company cannot expect to find candidates with a shipped product under their belt, let alone 5 years of experience.
For example, an embedded control software engineer could learn the android platform and transition into the growing field of mobile applications. Or, an enterprise software developer can learn Ruby on Rails and greatly increase the amount of opportunities available.
To successfully pull off this type of change, you need to be able to spot what trends and technology will be the next wave.
An upcoming event on June 25th will help you spot those trends. What’s Next in Tech, organized by Scot Kirsner will be held Thursday, June 25th at Boston University’s School of Management auditorium, from 6 PM to 8:30.
What’s Next in Tech will feature networking among people who really care about this question — perhaps they’re in the process of starting a new venture, or simply looking for their next career move. Plus, there will be speakers who’ve really helped spark the creation of new clusters here recently… people like Helen Greiner (a founder of iRobot, and now The Droid Works), Mike Dornbrook (COO of Harmonix Music Systems, the creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band), Ellen Rubin (founder of cloud computing start-up CloudSwitch), and Brian Halligan (CEO of social media leaders HubSpot). We’re also including some forward-thinking investors like Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and John Simon from General Catalyst.
Registration is limited. It is shaping up to be an interesting event.
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2 comments April 30, 2009
Webheads, Free Pizza+Beer and a bit of Testing April 30th 6:30-9:30 pm at betahouse
TestCase is a cool event happening @ betahouse this Thursday. While the giant schmoozefest meetups are valuable, we think there is room for a smaller meetup with a more practical approach.
Webheads, free pizza+beer and a bit of testing. Register Here attendance is Limited.
Josh Porter owner of Bokardo Design and author of Designing for the Social Web, will be conducting a Lightning Usability/Comprehension test with the participating start-ups. Three of them may be new to you.
Come out and have some fun and learn something too. Genotrope is one of the sponsors.
Thanks to our Sponsor of TestCase I
Participating Companies
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Add comment April 27, 2009
Nominate Boston for TechFellow Awards
The TechFellow Awards 2009 has been announced by Founders Fund to honor innovators for excellence in high-tech entrepreneurship. Together with TechCrunch, they have pooled influence and finances to produce an excellent program to stimulate the pro-entrepreneur economy.
An impressive list of Internet luminaries will judge the contest and they will choose twelve Fellows to receive the Genius Grants for Geeks. Each winner will receive $50K to invest in a new start-up of their choice.
What we need to do is make sure that Boston has strong participation and a bevy of candidates nominated.
It would be great to see if we can marshal forces on Twitter and other means to nominate some of our best and brightest.
For example, now would be a good time to see the Hubspot fans in action to garner a nomination for a certain founder and OnStartups blogger.
The four fields of nomination are:
Engineering Leadership
Product Design and Marketing
General Management
Disruptive Innovation
Nominate your choice now as voting ends midnight pst Friday, May 8. Help make sure that Boston is represented and recognized in the internet community.
If you have any nominees you would like to share and maybe gain them some support, leave a comment below.
1 comment April 23, 2009
Boston’s @biz Twitter Fit
- Image via CrunchBase
Been watching the dialog about a “tweetup” held in honor of Biz Stone put together by HubSpot, between @hybernaut and a slew of @’s from Hubspot.
The controversy arose when Hubspot announced a “tweetup” at their regular Friday night web video program Hubspot.tv where they hoped to get Twitter’s founder to appear.
Hubspot had good luck with this type of Twitter onslaught when MCHammer was in town.
So the issues are
1. whether a company should promote a Tweetup mentioning the “stars” name, when he actually hasn’t said they would attend, thereby harnessing the “stars” juice without permission.
2. is a Tweetup a community entity and should not be appropriated by a corporate entity to use as a marketing vehicle.
If you want to view the whole shebang search the twitter hashtag #bizinboston
If I was Twitter I would revel in all this attention, not to mention that @biz has been compared to Bono and Prince. It can’t be all bad when your passionate users defend your platform in the name of the community.
Stay tuned as it keeps getting better. The word communist has entered the dialog. Could Nazi be far behind?
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Add comment April 17, 2009
