Adobe starts to assemble R&D lab in Newton

Xconomy.com reports that Adobe is hiring some of the former researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge and setting up a research department at its Newton facility (which was once Macromedia/Allaire's home.) Wade Roush writes:

So far, Adobe executives are treating the MERL acquisitions without fanfare. “We have hired a few people from MERL…[and] started a small outpost in Newton,” remarked senior vice president and chief software architect Tom Malloy, who heads Adobe’s Advanced Technology Labs, in a recent conversation with Xconomy. Malloy said employing researchers in the Boston area will help cement ties with local research institutions. “We’re interested in sort of pairing up with our colleagues in our Newton development office and also being partners with some of the local universities out there,” Malloy said.

The Coughlin Incident: New Mass Biotech Chief Off to a Rocky Start

The new head of the Massachusetts Biotech Council, Robert Coughlin, is already in some pretty warm water, facing an ethics complaint filed by Republicans because he may not have notified the governor soon enough that he was talking to the Council about taking the gig.

Coughlin apparently met with the Mass Biotech Council's search committee on June 11th, according to the Globe, but didn't disclose to Gov. Patrick that he was in discussions until July 24th, when he recused himself from overseeing life sciences issues. The Council announced his appointment, somewhat abruptly, on August 13th, four days after the other candidate for the job, State Senator Jack Hart, dropped out of contention. Coughlin was on vacation in the wilds of Colorado and couldn't give the Globe an interview on the day of his announcement -- a strange stumble during what you'd expect would be a well-planned PR event.

Here are the stories:

- Patrick aide stayed mum on job talks
- Patrick aide faces ethics complaint
- Troubling beginnings for biotech chief

In that last piece, columnist Joan Vennochi writes:

...All it would have taken was for Coughlin to disclose his discussions at the outset. Under state law, that disclosure is supposed to trigger a review that would either reassign his state duties to another employee, or determine that reassignment wasn't necessary.
Now, the public has the right to wonder if Coughlin's job talks influenced his policy negotiations on the state's behalf.
And the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council has the right to wonder how much the controversy influences their access to the Patrick administration.

Coughlin's first day on the job is the Tuesday after Labor Day.

New CEO for Ambient Devices: Carl Yankowski, formerly CEO at Palm Computing

I've been a fan of Ambient Devices' well-designed info displays since founder David Rose first told me about the concept: liberating information from the PC screen. (I wrote about them in Wired in 2002 and the Globe earlier that year.)

But I was surprised to learn this afternoon that Carl Yankowski, formerly president of Sony Electronics and CEO of both Palm Computing and Reebok, has joined the small Cambridge start-up. (Yankowski had also been part of the interview process for the directorship of MIT's Media Lab; interestingly, Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte is a board member at Ambient.) He's got big goals for the company: a $200 million market cap within five years.

Carl's Wikipedia and LinkedIn profiles reflect his new gig, which he started earlier this month.

Ambient's newest product, the Ambient Umbrella, was featured on 'Good Morning America' last month. The handle lights up based on the weather forecast, to let you know when you should take the umbrella with you.

Update: ex-Ambient exec Nabeel Hyatt has some commentary on Yankowski's hiring on his blog. Nabeel writes:

An outside CEO is usually brought in for one of two reasons:

a) Holy shit, this startup is totally screwed, let's fire someone so we can blame it on him. You see this frequently, with the recent exit of Dave Sifry at Technorati as a good example.

b) Holy shit, this startup isn't a startup anymore, and the current challenges require someone entirely different. There are a host of examples here as well, such as Google.

He says that Ambient hiring Yankowski is "clearly Scenario B."

How Many of the Fastest-Growing Companies in America are in New England?

Here's a map that's fun to play with: it shows which of the 200 fastest-growing companies in the US are based here in New England, according to Inc. Magazine. (Thanks to Barb Heffner for the link.)

I didn't have time to count, but according to this blog post from the Globe, 24 of the top 500 Inc. companies are in Massachusetts.

Boston's mobile start-up ecosystem

Connecting mobile phones to the Internet creates opportunities for start-ups -- and erodes the totalitarian control your cell phone carrier has long exerted over what you do with your handset. That's the starting point of Carolyn Johnson's piece in the Globe this morning. She looks at Boston's mobile start-ups, writing:

Mobile media companies in New England attracted $33.5 million in investments in 2005, a number that tripled to $104.2 million last year, according to Dow Jones VentureOne. In the first half of 2007, mobile media companies have attracted $49.5 million in investments in Massachusetts.

"People say that it's just a novelty now. But when the PC connected to the Internet, it transformed a word processor to a communication platform, to a media platform," said John Puterbaugh, founder and chief strategist at Nellymoser in Arlington, which takes content from places like Comedy Central and VH1 and mashes it up into cellphone-sized bits of video, audio, and visuals.

There's also a related piece about a contest sponsored by Boston-based Ulocate that'll try to motivate developers to create new location-aware applications.

Two lists worth a look: Promising life sciences start-ups and powerful VC firms

Back in the springtime, I was involved with assembling the second edition of "The Convergence Guide," a book that looks at life sciences activity in New England. We put together two lists that have just shown up online...one profiles the top ten venture firms doing life sciences deals in New England (compiled by Dan Primack, who writes for PE Week and Venture Capital Journal)... and one examines the ten most promising life sciences startups (put together by Steven Dickman, a biotech consultant who used to write for Nature, Science, and The Economist.) It was distributed at the BIO International Convention in May, and Gov. Deval Patrick wrote the foreword.

The VC list is here, in PDF form. The run-down:

1 Polaris Venture Partners
2 Atlas Venture
3 MPM Capital
4 Novartis Corp.
5 SV Life Sciences Advisers
6 Flagship Ventures
7 TVM Capital
8 Boston University Community Technology Fund
9 Oxford Bioscience Partners
10 HealthCare Ventures

And the list of companies is here, in PDF form. The first company on the list, Adnexus Therapeutics, just filed for an IPO today. That list, in alphabetical order:

Adnexus Therapeutics (MA, just filed to go public)
Aveo Pharmaceuticals (MA)
Codon Devices (MA)
Helicos BioSciences (MA, now public)
Microbia (MA)
Neurotech (RI)
Radius Health (MA)
Sirtris Pharmaceuticals (MA, now public)
Targanta Therapeutics (MA)
Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals (MA)

Plus three companies Dickman dubbed worthy of being "on the radar": Acceleron Pharma, GI Dynamics, and Tempo Pharmaceuticals.

Where Web 2.0 Start-Ups Go Wrong with PR

Lots of Web 2.0 start-ups try to avoid hiring a public relations firm as long as possible, to keep a tight grip on costs. That’s a decision I totally get.

But why do they make it so hard for journalists to contact them?

Over the past five years, a number of things have happened which have been counter-productive when it comes to getting free publicity in mainstream newspapers, magazines, and Web sites.

In the olden days of the Web, every site had a prominent “Contact” page, which listed the company’s address, phone number, a general e-mail address, and perhaps the names of the founders or senior executives.

From a journalist’s perspective, that was great.

If you were writing for a newspaper in Minneapolis and were looking for a particular type of start-up in that city, Google would help you out, leading you directly to a company you might’ve never heard of before...because they let you know that their headquarters were in the Twin Cities.

If you needed a quick quote at 5:30 PM (for most newspaper journalists, this is usually in the last hour before their deadline) about a particular news event that happened that day (Microsoft buys Your Main Competitor), you could easily find a start-ups phone number, dial it, and ask for the CEO. If that person wasn’t in, you’d often get their cell phone number from their voice mail, and get a comment from them that you could include in your story.

But what has happened in the wonderful new era of Web 2.0 is that companies have suddenly gotten coy about where they are, and how to reach them. Most sites, if they have a contact page, tell you nothing about where they’d headquartered, and if they give you a way to contact them, it’s a generic e-mail address (pr@company.com) or a “Contact” form (“Just fill in these seventeen fields, click submit, and someone from our PR team will get back to you.”)

And when Web 2.0 companies put out press releases, there’s often no contact info at the bottom.

I suspect that’s happening for two reasons: a lot of Web 2.0 companies have no office (they’re based in a dorm room, a Starbuck’s branch, or another company’s borrowed conference room), and they have very few employees. Why make it easy for every user who has forgotten his password to dial you up and waste your time?

Unfortunately, you’re also making it harder for journalists to get in touch when they’re working on stories. I almost never send e-mail to pr@company.com addresses, or fill out contact forms – usually because you never get a response, or if you do, it comes three days later, when a story has already been wrapped and published. Instead, if a company doesn’t offer a phone number and I really want to talk with them, I search Google for a few minutes to see if I can get their phone number, call 411 if I happen to know where they’re based – and then usually give up after about four or five minutes of trying. I just move on to another prospective interviewee.

Here’s an experiment you might try for a few months, to see if it produces any results. (I’m certainly open to the possibility that it could generate scads of unwanted phone calls.) Put the name of a person who is responsible for PR on your Web site, and their e-mail address, and their phone number. If you really want to make yourself accessible to journos, put a cell phone number there, too.

This person could be one of your team members, or, if you have a PR firm, the person there who handles your account. (Just be sure you keep the name of this person updated, since the cast of characters at PR firms sometimes seems to change weekly.) When you send press releases over the wires or just post them on your site, put this same contact info at the bottom of them.

If this experiment doesn’t work, just go back to the old way: pr@company.com.

Yes, you can try to prove to journalists how cool you are: "We don’t use phones anymore… instead, Skype us, IM us, leave your question as a comment on our blog, or post a message on our Facebook profiles."

But unfortunately, I’d estimate that about 80 percent of professional magazine/newspaper/Web journos working on deadline don’t have time to do that. (Bloggers may be a different story, since I think they tend to be more averse to picking up the phone.)

There may be a time when journalists up against a deadline no longer want or need to call sources on the phone for a quick five or ten minute chat. I just don’t think that time has arrived yet.

So why are you making it so hard for journos to get in touch?

'Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days'

Just finished reading Jessica Livingston's 'Founders at Work' over the weekend. It's a compilation of interviews with enterpreneurs -- many of them from the Boston area.

So few books are published that deal with building companies here...and Jessica gets into the nitty-gritty: relationships with co-founders, negotiations with VCs, competing with bigger players.

The Boston entrepreneurs interviewed in the book include:

- Dan Bricklin, Software Arts (VisiCalc spreadsheet)
- Mitchell Kapor, Lotus Development Corp.
- Ray Ozzie, Groove Networks (Ray is now chief software architect of Microsoft)
- Paul Graham, Viaweb (Graham went on to start Y Combinator, the early stage venture firm in Cambridge, where Livingston works)
- Philip Greenspun, ArsDigita (now a blogger and flight instructor)
- Stephen Kaufer, TripAdvisor
- Ron Gruner, Alliant Computer Systems and Shareholder.com
- James Currier, Tickle (Tickle was founded in Boston as Emode, and then moved out to San Francisco before being acquired by Monster.com)
- Bob Davis, Lycos (now a VC at Highland Capital Partners in Lexington)

Amazingly, there's a blurb on the back cover from Bill Kaiser of the venture firm Greylock Partners, which was involved in a very public battle with ArsDigita founder Philip Greenspun (it's recounted in Greenspun's chapter, in piquant detail)

New-and-Improved MIT Museum will Open in Late Sept.

I'm really excited about the MIT Museum's $3 million renovation project. This is a place that has too long been hidden away, when it deserves to be a big part of Boston's tech and cultural communities. From Felicia Mello's piece in the Globe today:

The new gallery will eschew historical exhibits to focus on cutting-edge projects including a stackable electric car, new-generation robots that explore the ocean floor, and tropical fish that are helping scientists in the search for a cancer cure. It is the brainchild of museum director John Durant, who arrived two years ago from a British science museum with frenetic energy and what he calls a bullish outlook about the ability to engage the average Joe or Jane in learning about science.

...Durant has pushed to raise the museum's public image, helping start a citywide science festival earlier this year. He is one of many science museum directors looking to dust off their collections and update them to reflect recent discoveries.

Today's Globe column: 'Why biotech CEOs need to think like Steve Jobs'

Today's Globe column deals with the importance of being able to sell a big vision in life sciences -- especially when a start-up is trying to pioneer a new area of science.

Among the CEOs I mention as "poster child" communicators are several alumni of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, including John Maraganore of Alnylam, Steve Holtzman of Infinity, and Alan Crane of Tempo Pharmaceuticals. Then you've got Christoph Westphal of Sirtris, and Josh Boger of Vertex. All these guys have elements of Steve Jobs' ability to communicate something ambitious and exciting -- something that is sorely missing among tech companies in New England right now.

The video clip features Alan Crane explaining how Tempo is using nanotechnology to engineer a new kind of cancer drug.



Finally, a few quotes that didn't make it into the edited piece....

“Someone who is a great storyteller can win people over with relatively little substance,” says Michael Gilman, formerly executive vice president of research at Biogen Idec. “But other people tend to be rubbed the wrong way by it.”

“The scientist in me is never going to make assertions that I don’t think I can back up with data,” says Gilman. “That’s just the way I’m wired. If you promise too much and disappoint, it’s not good for you in the long run.” Gilman founded Stromedix, Inc. of Cambridge in 2005, licensing a product that Biogen Idec had started to develop. It’ll begin trials later this year.

“Companies undergo a brutal and challenging transition when they’re forced to be evaluated on the merits of their products,” says Steven Dickman, CEO of the consultancy CBT Advisors. Dickman worked with Alnylam in its early days...

That transition hasn't quite happened yet for all of the companies I mention in the piece; while they've got drugs in clinical trials, none are yet on the market.

TheFunded.com: Scuttlebut on New England VCs

I'm just getting a chance to spend some time reading TheFunded.com, a site where entrepreneurs discuss the venture capital firms they've dealt with. They present Zagat-like ratings of each firm (on criteria like "track record" and "favorable deal terms"), along with short reviews from entrepreneurs.

There are ratings for most of the major New England VC firms, including Highland Capital, Polaris, Longworth, General Catalyst, Greylock, IDG Ventures, Spark Capital, and Fidelity Ventures.

Some of the common complaints: VC firms that blow off scheduled meetings; firms that invite start-ups in, only to collect intelligence for another company in the same space that they're funding (or planning to fund); schizophrenic, hot-and-cold feedback; and, of course, firms that fire the founders and bring in new CEOs.

(Jeff Bussgang of IDG has a post about TheFunded, which touches on the issue of VC arrogance.)

Zipcar chases college students

From yesterday's Wall Street Journal: Zipcar goes to college. Darren Everson writes:

Traditional rental-car companies largely avoid the student market because of concerns about liability. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the crash rate per mile driven for 16-19-year-olds is four times that of drivers 20 and older. Companies seek to mitigate risk through surcharges and higher minimum age requirements. Hertz's minimum age is 21 in all states except Michigan and New York, where it's 18; Hertz renters under the age of 25 are also subject to an age differential charge. Avis Budget has a minimum age of 21 in most locations and has a $110 per day surcharge in New York state for renters 18 to 24.

The car-sharing companies, by contrast, are aiming to manage their risk by requiring that 18-to-20-year-old applicants have two years' driving experience and a clean record, and that they be a student at a participating school. There are no additional fees or deposits, although Flexcar also requires parental consent and a copy of the student's current auto-insurance policy showing the policy's limits. Flexcar requires that 18-20-year-olds have $300,000 of additional liability coverage. But otherwise, insurance works the same way for 18-year-old car sharers as it does for older ones: In an accident, the car-sharing company's insurance covers the cost except for a $500 deductible, which applies if the member is at fault.

The car-sharing companies believe they can tap into the younger market safely because of their business model, which allows them to screen customers by their driving record, and because of the clientele. "The reason we see a difference is because we're a membership-driven system," says Scott Griffith, president and chief executive of Zipcar.

Zipcar's main competitor on campus is Flexcar.

Dan Bricklin visits Eclipse

Dan Bricklin, Boston area software guru, once worked with Vern Raburn, the founder of Eclipse Aviation, at Slate Corp. - a pioneer of pen-based computing that never took off. Dan has a great post, with video and photos, about his recent visit to Eclipse in Albuquerque. It's a great companion to my Sunday column about Linear Air, which has a bunch of Eclipses on order.

The Five Most Common Conflicts Among Founders

Dharmesh Shah of the software company HubSpot has a great blog post about the five most common conflicts that occur among founders of start-ups:

1. The "Who Gets What?" Conflict

2. The "I Work Harder Than You!" Conflict

3. The "Who Gets To Decide?" Conflict

4. The "I Can't Stand Jill, One Of Us Has To Leave!" Conflict

5. The "We're Going Down In Burning Flames…" Conflict

Boston's bustling vid-game scene

Watha has a nice piece in the Globe today about the increasingly happening vid-game scene here in Boston, along with a side-bar that looks at some of the hottest developers and their games. He writes:

Three of the year's most anticipated new video games -- Rock Band, BioShock, and Lord of the Rings Online -- are products of Boston-area studios, and for the first time in two decades the world is looking to the Boston area for some of the coolest new computer games.

Companies like Turbine Inc. of Westwood, Blue Fang Games LLC in Waltham, and 2K Boston in Quincy, formerly known as Irrational Games, are making their mark in the $7 billion market for video game software, producing titles that attract critical acclaim and millions of players. GamerMetrics, which tracks discussions of games on blogs and websites, ranks 2K Boston's BioShock -- which goes on sale today -- as the 10th most anticipated game of the year. Turbine's Lord of the Rings was the best-selling game for desktop computers in April, the month of its premiere, and remained among the top 10 sellers in May and June, according to market research firm NPD Group.

If you're interested in the local gaming community, the monthly event to know about is Post Mortem, usually held at The Skellig in Waltham.

Today's Globe Column: Private Air Travel for the Rest of Us?

This morning's Boston Globe column covers Linear Air, a company that hopes to make private air travel more accessible to a wide range of travelers. And they're flying the brand-new Eclipse 500, a plane certified by the FAA only last year.

In the companion video report, Bill Herp talks about the strategy behind Linear, some of the projected costs for passengers, and the Eclipse 500 jet. You'll also get to see the exterior and interior of the plane, and some shots of the Eclipse taxiing around Hanscom and then taking off.



Two Massachusetts-related details I didn't touch on in the column: the interior of the Eclipse was designed by the Boston office of the design firm IDEO, and its flat-panel displays come from Bedford-based Avidyne (though Eclipse later this year will be abandoning the Avidyne displays).

Aside from Linear, there's one other "air taxi" company that will start flying the Eclipse this fall: DayJet. DayJet is extremely well-funded compared with Linear, having raised about $68 million in equity compared to Linear’s $6 million. But the company’s model is different; customers will pay a $250 annual fee, and have the option of purchasing individual seats on routes within Florida; Linear customers will need to book the entire plane. DayJet's initial focus will be the southeastern U.S.

I asked Philip Greenspun, one of my favorite local aviation bloggers, what he thinks of the Eclipse and Linear Air's chances, and while his response arrived too late for the column (he's currently traveling in Africa), here's a snippet of what he said:

Our training helicopters at East Coast Aero Club share a hangar with the Linear Air guys, so I see them operate every day and I'm cautiously optimistic about the company. They have a staff of great pilots who enjoy their work and, I'm sure, communicate their joy in flying to the customers. Linear Air shouldn't have any trouble hiring more pilots, though, sadly there aren't too many 110 lb. women who want to be professional pilots and that is what they're going to need to operate the Eclipse.

Going by the numbers, the Eclipse sounds useless as an air taxi. I'm 6' tall and have sat in the front seats and they are quite
comfortable. Unfortunately for the passengers, the rear of the aircraft is pretty cramped. If you remove two seats, you've now got a reasonably spacious cabin for two passengers. With two beefy pilots in the front seats and two beefy business guys in the back seats, the real-world range might be limited to about 700 miles. You aren't going to escape to the Bahamas in the depths of a Boston winter in a Linear Air Eclipse, at least not non-stop.

The real air taxi market should be friendlier to Linear Air and the Eclipse than the fantasy market. We dream of escaping to a tiny island in the Bahamas with our six best friends, but most business travel from the Boston area ends up somewhere else within the Northeast and the typical passenger load on a business jet is only 1.3 people. There isn't a lot of romance in a trip to Allentown, Pennsylvania with the assistant vice president of sales, but the Eclipse will make the trip quietly, comfortably, and quickly.

Conference tech start-up nTAG grabs $8.3 million

nTAG started out as a cool demo at the MIT Media Lab -- intelligent nametags that could exchange information with one another. Researcher Rick Borovoy decided to turn the demo into a company.

Some of the earliest deployments were kind of sketchy; at PopTech in 2003, attendees seemed more interested in talking about what was wrong with the tags, which were supposed to help identify like-minded folks, than what was right with them.

But now nTAG has developed into more of a full-fledged "event technology" company, offering conference organizers technology for surveys, personalized agendas, and cell phone audience polling.

Today, the Boston-based company announced an $8.3 million second round of VC from Sevin Rosen and Pilot House Ventures. An earlier jolt of funding was $6 million last January, from the same funds. Company has raised a total of $23 million, according to VentureBeat.

Intruders.tv Videoblog

The US edition of the videoblog Intruders.tv launched in July; part of their goal is covering Web start-ups in the Northeast. (The name Intruders, editor Bruno Langlais explained to me, refers to the fact that they consider themselves outsiders -- not part of the "old boys network" here.)

They've already posted video interviews with Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, David Beisel of Venrock, and -- their first big mistake -- me. We talked about the differences between the tech scene on the East and West coasts, and why it sometimes seems that Web 2.0 start-ups like Twitter, which are headquartered in SiliValley, get more attention and momentum than similar start-ups like Going, headquartered in Boston.

Top Innovators Under 35: From Technology Review

Technology Review, MIT's alumni newsletter, put out its annual list of the most interesting innovators under 35 today.

Who's on the list from New England?

- David Berry is their "Innovator of the Year." Berry is a partner at Flagship Ventures in Cambridge who earned an MD from Harvard and a PhD from MIT; his most recent work was on engineering molecules to produce biofuels, work which serves as the foundation for the California start-up LS9.

- Chris Loose from Stericoat, which won MIT's 100K business plan competition in 2006.

- Mehmet Yanik of MIT

- Kristala Jones Prather of MIT

- Ali Khademhosseini of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology

- Adam Cohen of Harvard

- Ivan Kristic of One Laptop Per Child, who develops anti-virus software

- Roboticist Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont

- Anna Lysyanskaya of Brown, who works in online privacy

VMware Delivers 2007's Best First-Day IPO Performance

VMware, based in Palo Alto but owned by EMC of Hopkinton, went public today. The IPO price was $29, and the stock closed at $51, according to The Wall Street Journal. From the piece:

"Considering their light competition and extreme growth continuing, this may still be a reasonable valuation," said Scott Sweet, managing director of IPOBoutique.com, an IPO-research service in Tampa, Fla., of the company's first-day's gains. Mr. Sweet received shares in the offering for his personal account, but sold them in early trading Tuesday.

Rachel Chalmers, an analyst at technology-research firm the 451 Group, says VMware's virtualization software can reduce office space dedicated to hardware, cut down on the amount of air-conditioning needed to keep servers cool and run upgrades and do maintenance without having to shut down machines. VMware began shipping a new product last year that targets desktop computers, which she says is the next market frontier for virtualization. The company estimates that only 1% of the world's business desktops are currently using virtualization software.

Since its founding in 1998, "VMware has grown faster than any other software company we have come across," says Ms. Chalmers, whose husband is employed by another virtualization-software firm, XenSource.

The Journal also offers a primer on what VMware does, calling it "an unsexy technology with a sexy stock price."

Cruise on Over to See Hull's Wind Turbine

Not a lot of tech networking events take place in the dog days of August ... but this one put on by TiE (the Indus Entrepreneurs association) looks like a winner: a cruise to Hull's wind turbine from Quincy, followed by a tour and seminar on the science of wind power.

Interestingly, the tour takes you to Hull's smaller turbine (660 kilowatts), out on the tip of the peninsula, rather than their newer, more powerful 1.8 megawatt turbine, which was put into service last June. That one sits on a decommissioned landfill. I haven't been to the site of the newer turbine -- but it sounds less-picturesque (and possibly smellier).

Here's the Hull Wind site; they have some cool video clips from the dedication of Hull Wind 2, the newer turbine.

IBM creating new 'campus' in Westford/Littleton

IBM will bring together 3400 of its 5000 Massachusetts employees, most of whom work on software, at a new campus off Route 495 in Westford and Littleton, saith the Globe.

I'm not sure that two office complexes separated by three miles exactly constitutes a "campus," but...OK.

From Rob Weisman's piece:

The changes are intended to foster more collaboration between Massachusetts software companies IBM has acquired since 1995, including Lotus Development Corp., Rational Software Corp., Ascential Software Corp., and, most recently, Watchfire Corp.

The real estate shuffle is expected to be done by the end of the decade.

Mass Biotech Council Picks Another Pol

The Mass Biotech Council has picked former Massachusetts State Rep Robert Coughlin as its new president. Coughlin has been serving as undersecretary of business development in the Deval Patrick administration.

Here's a quick roundup on Coughlin:

- "Ex-legislator to lead biotech council, from the Globe
- News brief by the Globe's Jeff Krasner
- The official press release from MBC
- Letter from MBC to its members (PDF file)
- AP bulletin
- Boston Herald: State Sen. Jack Hart drops out; search may be over
- Norwood Transcript story on Coughlin seeking the gig
- The Globe on Coughlin's lobbying efforts during this year's BIO International Conference in Boston
- "Many on mission to lure biotech business away," from the Globe
- Coughlin's bio from MassDevelopment

Coughlin starts in October. No word whether Mass Biotech is paying him Tom Finneran's old salary, which was $416,000.

(Photo of Coughlin courtesy of Mass Biotech Council.)

Bringing Together Web 2.0ers in Boston

I'm really glad that Carolyn Johnson wrote this great piece in Saturday's Globe. It makes note of just how many different efforts there are to bring together the Web 2.0 community in Boston: communal workspaces like Betahouse in Central Square, as well as regular gatherings like TastyBytes, OpenCoffee, Web Innovators Grouip, and Tech Cocktail, which is taking place for the first time on September 6th.

Today's Globe Column: The Amazing Story Behind EnerNOC

If you're running a start-up and you need some motivation, today's column is especially for you. It's the story of EnerNOC, a company founded in the midst of the dot-com aftermath, in which the main lessons are about persistence and unshakable belief in one's ideas.

Here's the opening:

The first time I met Tim Healy, at a cocktail party in 1999, he was an associate at Commonwealth Capital, a Waltham venture capital firm.

The next time I bumped into Healy, at a cocktail party last month, the 38-year-old entrepreneur had taken his company, EnerNOC Inc., public on Nasdaq, and he was on his way to Manhattan to ring the stock market's closing bell.

What happened in the intervening eight years is an entrepreneurial fairy tale.

(That makes it sound like all I do as a reporter is go to cocktail parties. Close to the truth..)

The video is below, in which Healy talks about the challenges he faced raising VC money, and how he tried to tilt the odds in his favor. There's also an e-mail message from Healy, when I asked him about a rumor that he funded the company, pre-VC, with credit cards.



During the process of working on today's column, I asked Healy how much credit card debt he accumulated. He responded via e-mail:

For a variety of reasons, I don't give out how much debt we accumulated but I can tell you that at the time EnerNOC raised its Series A, I had approximately 17 different credit cards open by that point and I am pretty sure almost all of them had a balance. I can only imagine what David's personal situation looked like [David Brewster, Healy's co-founder] but we tried not to talk about the debt since talking about personal debt wasn't a whole lot of fun and we always believed it would be worth it in the long run. For a little while after we first got funded I couldn't really afford a place to live in Boston so I actually slept in my car and in my office for a month before a friend's place opened up and he graciously let me stay there for a while. I remember that I also bunked at another friend's place -- John Pepper's. The only reason I mention it is that John is the CEO and founder of the Boloco chain of restaurants in town (formerly The Wrap) and also a Tuck and Dartmouth grad so we shared a lot of early startup stories back then, keeping each other motivated and convincing one another we weren't crazy. After I allocated some friend and family stock to him in May, I feel as though I finally repaid him for those free nights and the great dinners his wife made me....needless to say, he's very happy now, since our stock is up and we just finished telling Wall Street about the great growth we see ahead. [EnerNOC's first quarterly conference call was this past week.]

Friday Morning at Matrix Partners

I had a chance to sit down with David Skok and Nick Beim this morning at Matrix Partners in Waltham. We covered a lot of ground...but I was especially interested in some of the higher-level perspectives that David and Nick served up.

David says that when people think about disruption, they often think about technology disruption: cell phones replacing land-lines, or minicomputers replacing mainframes. "But what's more often happening now," he says, "are business model disruptions." He mentioned two in particular: companies offering software as a service are gnawing into the revenues of companies that sell software by-the-seat, and companies built on open source technology are taking share from companies with proprietary technology. David, of course, is investing in open source, and he says he has investments in two new SaaS companies that are still in stealth mode.

Nick, whom I bumped into yesterday at the Y Combinator Demo Day, is an investor in TheLadders.com, based in NYC, and Care.com in Waltham.

"There has been lots of attention given to viral sites that work, like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr," Nick says. But how many sites are out there with plans to "go viral" that no one has ever heard of?

If you look at who's actually making money, Nick says, some of the more interesting businesses are being built around lead-gen, product comparison sites, and online subscriptions. (He's especially a fan of TripAdvisor, the Needham site that is basically a lead-gen engine for online travel agencies.) As examples of the last category, he mentioned a few companies I hadn't heard of...like Bag Borrow or Steal and Steve Case's Revolution Places, as well as a few I had, like Zipcar, Netflix, and MyFamily.com.

Before I left, I tweaked Matrix a bit for not having a partner who blogs. There's a disruption happening here, too: not a technology or business model disruption, but a networking disruption.

I think the old model of venture capitalist, which I'm sure can still be successful, waits for the entrepreneur to figure out how to network her way to them: who can introduce me, how do I make the connection and get that meeting? The new model was on display Thursday at Y Combinator: VCs like David Hornik and Fred Wilson (of CA and NY, respectively), whose blogging helps weave them into the entrepreneurial community and makes them more accessible. People know what they're thinking about because they blog it -- and that gives them an opening to say, 'I know you've been blogging about X, and we're building a company in that space.'

I wonder if, over time, that may give them access to more deals of the Facebook type, where a founder is in college or just out, has no connections to the Waltham VC community, may not know any entrepreneurs who can make introductions, but happens to bump into one of these blogging VCs at an event.

BBQ for Entrepreneurs

There was an informal gathering of about 35 entrepreneurs last night at Bill Warner's Collaboration Space in Cambridge, which I helped organize.

There were founders from just about every corner of the tech world, from air taxi start-ups like Linear Air to gaming companies like Conduit Labs to printer companies like AirPrint. (Perhaps enterprise software was under-represented.) There was no panel discussion, no speeches -- just some informal introductions, schmoozing, food from Blue Ribbon Barbecue in Arlington, and beer from Pabst Blue Ribbon in Milwaukeee. Bill had an LCD projector that people could hook up to to show demos. I was especially impressed with what Actuality Systems and Veveo were showing... I'd seen LocaModa's demo before, but it was fun having a game up on the screen that people could sent text messages to to play.

Some people talked a bit about the differences between the tech scenes Boston and California (I didn't bring it up - I swear). But mostly, it was just a really interesting group of people talking about what they're up to. Amazingly, when asked for a show of hands, about 90 percent were working on some sort of consumer-oriented technology or site.

In the photo at right is Yonald Chery, new father, who brought some supplemental barbecue, turning the event into a kind of barbecue taste-off. Yonald's Memphis-style dry rub brisket is pretty incredible; he has won the catering contract for my next party.

Update: Here are Halley Suitt's Flickr photos from the event.

Demo Day at Y Combinator

I'd heard lots of great things about Y Combinator, a seed funding firm that operates a kind of summer camp for start-ups. And their Cambridge office is right down the street from me, near Huron Village. (Here's a Newsweek story and a USA Today piece about them.)

Today was their "demo day," when the start-ups they help cultivate show off what they've built. Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston was kind enough to extend an invitation, though some of the event was off-the-record. (Jessica is the author of 'Founders at Work,' a really wonderful collection of entrepreneur interviews.)

So this was my first chance to see what Y Combinator actually does.

The good news first.

The audience was amazing: VCs from Matrix, General Catalyst, Atlas Venture, North Bridge, Fidelity Ventures, and Venrock. VC bloggers Fred Wilson and David Hornik. Execs from Microsoft and Google. Avid Technology founder Bill Warner was in the front row.

The start-ups were equally amazing: nineteen of them, all with working demos, all with really great presentation skills. Many of the demos were funny; Fauxto's demo involved turning Steve Ballmer's eyes green, and superimposing the Google logo on his forehead. Dropbox, which hasn't yet launched, made subtle and snarky references to dot-com flame-outs from the late 1990s (like GovWorks, Flooz.com, and Kozmo) during its demo of an online storage service.

Now the bad news... several of the enterpreneurs I talked to who have connections to the Boston area are planning to move their companies out west. The Y Combinator network is perceived to be stronger out in the Valley (the firm does a winter program in Mountain View). The VCs more adventurous. The partnership opportunities more plentiful. The potential for generating buzz better.

Is it hopeless to think about trying to change some of these dynamics?

(Here's Don Dodge's post about the event.)

Cape Wind on The Daily Show

Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" aired a hilarious segment on Cape Wind this Tuesday.

Today, Cape Wind's marketing folks are sending it out in an e-mail, and there's a link to it on their home page. (No link on the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound's page...watch the clip and you'll see why.)

Here's the video (illegally posted to YouTube):



Here's a Globe item on the segment.

The Globe's new biotech reporter

Steve Heuser, who I thought picked up the biotech beat amazingly quickly at the Globe, is moving over to the paper's Sunday Ideas section.

Taking over biotech duties, as of August 20th, will be Todd Wallack.

I've known Todd since he was a business reporter for the Boston Herald in the late 90s. He then moved West to work for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked on an important series of stories about high pay and secret perks being doled out to the University of California's Board of Regents, as tuition costs were skyrocketing at the universities they governed. At the Chronicle, he developed into one of the country's foremost "computer-assisted reporters," using databases to uncover stories no one else was telling.

Todd came back to Boston last year, and has been covering tech for the Boston Business Journal. He also has a blog. I'm really glad the Globe got him to cover one of the most active business sectors in the region...a sector with national and global relevance.

Seattle's F5 Networks Buys Lowell-based Acopia Networks

Acopia Networks has cashed out. Though the company was