Comcast's Seat-Fillers

This'll probably peeve you: your cable company paying people to save seats at an important FCC hearing in Cambridge earlier this week. From the piece on Portfolio.com:

Comcast spokeswoman Jennifer Khoury said that the company paid some people to arrive early and hold places in the queue for local Comcast employees who wanted to attend the hearing.

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

Kiva Systems, and the Region's Robotics Cluster

Yesterday's Boston Globe column focused on the warehouse automation solution developed by a start-up called Kiva Systems. It's being used by companies like Staples, Walgreens, and Zappos.com, and it relies on beefy orange robots -- about the site of ottomans -- to move around racks of merchandise. Interestingly, Kiva's founder came east to start the company, after working at Apple and WebVan in Silicon Valley.

Here's the video I shot at Kiva's 'demonstration warehouse' last week:



In doing the story, I discovered that the region's most significant robotics industry networking group seems to be the robotics cluster that the Mass Technology Leadership Council has created. While the MassTLC doesn't have a comprehensive list of all the robotics companies in the state, they have produced a
snazzy brochure (PDF) touting the benefits of being headquartered here.

Aside from Kiva, here's the list of the ten New England robotics companies I heard mentioned most often during my research (ranked in no particular order):

- iRobot: publicly-traded maker of bots for pool cleaning and bomb disposal. Co-founded by MIT prof Rodney Brooks, and Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, his former students.

- Foster-Miller: Waltham developer of robots for reconnaissance and hazmat disposal.

- Boston Dynamics: maker of walking, animal-like robots for the military. Founded by MIT "Leg Lab" legend Marc Raibert.

- Bluefin Robotics: Cambridge, Mass. designer of robots that aren't afraid to get wet.

- Hydroid: another manufacturer of underwater bots, in Pocasset, Mass.

- North End Technologies: stealthy NH robotics company funded by Castile Ventures. Founded by iRobot alums.

- Q Robotics: another quiet Mass. company founded by Paul Sandin and Joe Jones, creators of iRobot's Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner.

- Smart Robots: Dalton, Mass. maker of mobile robotic platforms for education and application development.

- MobileRobots, formerly ActivMedia Robotics: NH company focused on "research and university robots."

- Black i Robotics: Tyngsboro, Mass. maker of rugged six-wheeled robots.

Audio: TIE's VC Outlook Panel from Jan. 31st

TIE's annual "VC Outlook" dinner was packed to the rafters late last month.... Mike Gaiss from Highland Capital was kind enough to post an audio recording of the discussion.

I moderated, and my panelists included Paul Maeder from Highland; Ajay Agarwal from Bain Capital Ventures; Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst Partners; and Bob Hower from ATV.

We started by talking about the climate for VC investing (2007 was the best year since 2001 for VC firms raising money, and start-ups raking in investments)... the economic outlook... some new areas the panelists are learning about (and perhaps investing in)... some businesses they feel are over-hyped and over-invested (mobile advertising was mentioned)... the globalization of VC... and the impact that sovereign wealth funds may have on tech companies and VC firms.

Let's Stop New England from Going Gray

If we wanted to focus on one thing that would ensure New England's long-term competitiveness, I think it ought to be retaining young people. They're impatient ... creative ... and they challenge the status quo in ways that can be really revolutionary in start-ups and big companies alike.

Yesterday's column in the Globe focused on a disturbing trend, illustrated by this graphic:



Every company thinks about young people when they have an entry-level, low-paying job or internship position to fill. And that's OK. But entrepreneurs, executives, and investors need to come up with more creative ways to get onto campuses and explain what they do ... and bring students into their offices, even if they're not currently hiring or filling internships.

I've been nudging the New England Venture Capital Association to create an event that would connect students and recent grads with the VC community...and suggesting to our biggest companies that they should host "open houses" where students and others could come to their offices to learn about an issue that's important to the host company. (Like Google hosting MySQL camp and many other informal gatherings on its Mountain View campus.) What about a Boston Scientific open house focused on next-gen implantable devices, or an EMC open house on cloud computing?

I know there are a million even better ideas for integrating young people into our region's innovation economy -- making New England act more like Velcro, and less like a revolving door for the hundreds of thousands of students who come here to get educated.

(Note: the original article that inspired this column, "Demographic Demise" by University of New Hampshire economist Ross Gittell, is here in PDF form.)

Display Demo Night at Cambridge Innovation Center

Two interesting news tidbits emerged at this past Wednesday's "Entrepreneurs on the Edge" demo night at Cambridge Innovation Center.

We brought together five representatives of companies working on new kinds of display technologies. I was least familiar with QD Vision, a Watertown company working on "quantum dot" based LED screens, so it was nice to hear more about their technology. (Their backers include Highland Capital and North Bridge.)

Dan Bricklin was there, and he recorded a podcast of the panel discussion part of the evening.

Two of the companies there shared some interesting news, both related to spin-outs.

Adam Bogue, formerly vp of bizdev at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, is spinning out a new company called Circle Twelve, Inc. Circle Twelve will commercialize the DiamondTouch table developed at MERL over the past seven years, which turns a tabletop into an interface, allowing four users to sit around and interact with data by touching it. Bogue says that Mitsubishi will have a stake in the new company, and earn royalty payments from every sale. He's looking to raise about $1 million to get the company off the ground.

The system sells for $10,000, which doesn't include the LCD projector it uses to project images onto the table, or the laptop or PC that serves as a CPU. (A Computerworld article mentioning DiamondTouch is here.) Bogue was getting a lot of questions last night about how the table is different from Microsoft's Surface technology, and also the Perceptive Pixel technology used on CNN during election nights. For one, DiamondTouch is available now...

Here's a video of Bogue's demo that I shot:



And David Rose, founder of Ambient Devices, said he's helping to launch a new company called Vitality, to bring to market smart pill bottle tops called GlowCaps. (Rose stepped away from day-to-day responsibilities at Ambient earlier this year.) GlowCaps will not only remind you when to take important medications (and perhaps e-mail your doctor to let her know you're sticking to the regime), but could send a reorder request to the pharmacy when your stock of pills dwindles. (More from Engadget. Rose said he has raised some seed funding already to do some consumer trials from a West Coast angel investor.

Last night's MITX panel on Internet video

Last night's sold-out MITX panel, 'Internet Video: What's Next?', was a lot of fun... and a full house despite dire warnings of impending precipitation. (Which always get people in Boston agitated.)

In the audience was a big contingent of video folks from the Globe, at least one exec from Visible Measures, video analyst Will Richmond, blogger and consultant Cesar Brea, and lots of folks from PermissionTV, one of the event's sponsors.

I won't try for a comprehensive re-cap here, but we talked about three areas: how is viewing behavior changing on the Web; how are videos made and distributed, and how are they monetized and measured.

No one has yet solved the problem for the mainstream consumer of getting Internet video onto a TV. Mike Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners said that it could wind up being the player who can most successfully do deals with cable companies -- a risky prospect for venture capitalists to bet on. He said he'd earlier invested in a company, Ucentric Systems, that tried to built a next-gen set-top box, but was about eight years too early.

The panel seemed to agree that story and content trump production values. Denise DiIanni of WGBH recalled that several years back, filmmakers working with 'Nova' resisted shooting on video and tried to stick with 16 millimeter film. But the audience didn't see the difference, and didn't care.

Hirshland said that pre-roll advertising is already dead, and that the ad formats that will win will be highly targeted, and allow the viewer to choose to engage with them, rather than forcing a viewer to sit through them.

Someone from the audience asked a great question about how Internet video will evolve. Right now, he said, we're treating it like TV -- but it'll likely turn into something different. Denise DiIanni of WGBH had a great reply, which is that Internet video allows for conversations between the creator of media and the consumer -- putting both on a level playing field.

Videoblogger Steve Garfield, sitting in the audience, showed us how he does liveblogging with his Nokia N95 cell phone. Using QIK, he streamed video while he was talking.

After the panel, I had an interesting chat with Cesar Brea, who said that an impending recession will likely force advertisers to get serious about Internet video, emphasizing solid measurement and accountability. IE, it may shift things more to a pay-per-click model, as opposed to pay-per-impression.

Finally, here are some of the clips that we showed and talked about at the start of the panel....

- Boston.com 'Office Invasion': Harmonix Music Systems

- WGBH: War Games

- Mike Hirshland's interview with Scott Kurnit

- Boston Celtics, from Boston.tv

- TMZ video of Tara Reid, hosted by Brightcove

- Dean Whitney from Digitas showed these videos, one in HD and hosted by BitGravity

Same Story, Ten Years Later?

Some historical parallelism struck me this morning as I was thinking about yesterday's acquisition of Maven Networks by Yahoo, for $160 million.

Almost ten years ago, Maven founder and CEO Hilmi Ozguc sold an earlier company, Narrative Communications, to @home Corp. Narrative harnessed new technologies, like animated and interactive banners, to make ads more compelling; Maven focuses on delivering video, and integrating advertising into it.

The purchase price of Narrative was $89 million (in stock).

Around that time, the Web portal Excite was in play, and the two suitors were Yahoo and @home. (Running Excite at the time was George Bell, now a partner with General Catalyst, the Cambridge venture capital firm that originally backed Maven.) @home, which had just bought Narrative, prevailed, and the merger took place in early 1999. It's now widely considered one of the worst combinations of the dot-com era. The newly-renamed Excite@Home saw its stock plummet, and declared bankruptcy in October 2001.

Kind of interesting, don't you think, that the latest acquirer of a Hilmi Ozguc start-up, Yahoo, is also in the thick of some merger discussions of it's own...

Behind Yahoo's $160M Acquisition of Maven: Maven CEO and Board Member Discuss

What do you ask for in February 2008, when you sell a company to Yahoo?

Cash, baby.

Yahoo paid $160 million for Cambridge-based Maven Networks -- almost all of it in greenbacks, not Yahoo stock. (Here's the AP story...and the official press release.)

"There's no way to arbitrage Yahoo's stock price when Microsoft may be buying them, or may not be buying them," says Woody Benson, managing general partner at Prism VentureWorks, which invested in Maven's most recent round of financing. (Yahoo rebuffed Microsoft's $44 billion purchase attempt on Saturday.)

Benson told me this morning that there was more than one company interested in owning Maven, but acknowledged that he was a bit anxious about whether the deal would go ahead once Microsoft started to make a run at Yahoo: "Anxious would be one word for it," he said.

Benson said that Maven and Yahoo signed a letter of intent around Thanksgiving, and that due diligence proceeded until Microsoft made its unsolicited offer to acquire Yahoo on February 1st. Benson says that the Microsoft offer didn't necessarily cause Yahoo execs to slow down or speed up the final negotiations in the Maven deal; I'd earlier speculated that it could hang in the air for a while. The final papers were signed on Sunday.

"There's a reason why they're buying us," Maven CEO Hilmi Ozquc said, when I suggested that Yahoo (and Microsoft) had missed the boat on the online video explosion. "The tech innovation has been happening at start-ups to date. But as the giants jump in, the fastest way to get there is through acquisition."

Ozguc and Benson both say that Yahoo's big advertising salesforce will help Maven vault ahead of other video players, like Brightcove (and perhaps even put it on an even footing with YouTube, which has been slow to integrate ads with videos.)

My last question for Ozguc was whether he'd be surprised if Microsoft now bought Brightcove: "I would not be surprised," he said. "But if they're going to buy Yahoo and get Maven for free, why?"

Update: Will Richmond has a longer Q&A with Ozguc on his site, Videonuze.

The NY Times Bits blog offers a critical take on the purchase...and here's the Globe coverage of the deal.

Why Maeda Matters

Sunday's column in the Globe focused on John Maeda, a long-time Media Lab professor (and globally-renowned artist) who was picked in December to run the Rhode Island School of Design. Maeda is funny, thoughtful, wise and challenging -- the perfect personality for an artist pushing boundaries, and a professor nudging students in interesting new directions. He's also all over the Web in video form.

My Globe video is below...with more links after that.



Here's a talk he gave last year at TED.

Here's his video hello to the RISD community.

And here's Maeda in conversation with another young designer, Joshua Davis.

The End of an Era: No More Polaroid Film or Cameras

The Globe's Hiawatha Bray reports that Polaroid is closing all its film-manufacturing plants this year, including two in Massachusetts. Hiawatha writes:

In the years following World War II, Polaroid's instant photography products established the company as one of Massachusetts' leading industrial concerns, and made its brand name famous worldwide. But in the late 1980s the company went deeply into debt to fend off a hostile takeover. It invested heavily in products that failed and was unprepared for the surging popularity of digital cameras. By 2001, Polaroid was forced into bankruptcy; privately held Petters Group Worldwide of Minnetonka, Minn., bought the company's remaining assets in 2005.

...The company will retain about 150 executive and administrative employees at its headquarters in Concord and a smaller office in Waltham. "We'll continue to have a strong presence in Massachusetts for the next 30 or 40 years," said [Polaroid COO Tom] Beaudoin. But Polaroid will now focus on flat-panel TVs and digital photography gear.

Here's another Globe piece, from 2006, about Polaroid's history. And FundingUniverse offers more history on the once-great company.

From the 'No Mitt is Good Mitt' department...

I had a mostly off-the-record lunch chat with Cape Wind president Jim Gordon today, but one thing that was on the record (I think): Gordon's elated reaction when I mentioned that Mitt Romney had just dropped out of the Presidential race.

Romney had been a steadfast opponent of the wind farm in Nantucket Sound, and Gordon's odds of getting it built surely improve now that there's no chance of Romney ending up in the Oval Office.

(From the Globe earlier this month: "...former governor Mitt Romney maneuvered to kill the project on several occasions because of fears that the turbines would be unsightly, hurting tourism and property values.")

Does Facebook's Revenue Matter?

The Power, Drugs & Money conference at the Seaport Hotel has brought together an interesting mix of people ... Jim Gordon of Cape Wind is speaking now, and I just bumped into someone from the Boston Redevelopment Authority and Noubar Afeyan from Flagship Ventures in the hall.

The first morning panel focused on innovation in New England, and was moderated by Chris Gabrieli of Bessemer Venture Partners and the Massachusetts 20/20 Foundation. Panelists included Bob Buderi from Xconomy, Doug Banks from Mass High Tech, Bob Krim from the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative, and me.

Krim said that Boston has a good track record of gravitating to new ideas once old ones lose steam. (For a long time we fished for cod... then we focused on the telegraph and telephone... later, we invented minicomputers and e-mail.) Krim also has a nice term for the interactions that happen here between investors, entrepreneurs, tech users, and academic researchers. He calls it the "bump and connect."

Doug Banks had a nice turn of phrase when he said that developing technologies that produce cleaner power is "the noble pursuit of the day." I agree, even if some worry about it becoming a bubble.

We bashed Harvard a bit, which Gabrieli suggested looks down upon the process of commercializing new ideas. I mentioned Facebook at one point ... if Harvard had more VCs prowling the hall, or had more of an entrepreneurship infrastructure forging connections with the local innovation economy, would more than one local investor have seen the Facebook deal before the founder moved to California?

Banks said that Facebook doesn't have impressive revenues, and is probably overvalued. He mentioned that the #2 e-commerce vendor, after Amazon, is Staples.com, headquartered right here in Massachusetts. I said to Doug afterwards, that's great, but how many smart young people are moving from Kansas to Massachusetts because they want a job with Staples.com? And how many smart young people are moving from Kansas to California because they want a job with Facebook, or one of the zillions of Facebook app developers out there?

Someone in the audience complained that as venture firms raise larger funds, they tend to be less interested in backing early-stage companies started by wet-behind-the-ears founders. I mentioned some of the new early-stage, smaller venture funds that have started up in the last year or two.

The opening keynote speaker was John Kao, author of 'Innovation Nation.' He offered a picture of what other countries, like Singapore and Finland, are doing to try to build hubs of innovation.

I see countries like those, and states like North Carolina and Michigan, playing offense: trying to attract smart people and fast-growing companies. Our job here (in the US, and in Massachusetts) is to play both offense and defense.

IDG's Jeff Bussgang on the Exit Window

I was wondering back in November about some of the things that could make the Web 2.0 investing bubble go 'pop.'

Jeff Bussgang at IDG Ventures looks at that question again, in light of a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo. What'll be the impact on venture-backed start-ups, which are more often bought than taken public?

(I have to wonder whether the Microsoft take-over offer is already stalling one possible Web 2.0 deal -- Yahoo's rumored acquisition of Maven Networks.)

Two Events on the Radar Screen...

Next Tuesday is an evening dedicated to Internet video, organized by MITX and featuring panelists from WGBH, Brightcove, Boston.tv, Polaris Ventures, and Digitas.

And next Wednesday is a "demo night" at Cambridge Innovation Center, focused on companies creating new kinds of information display technology. More info here, but you'll need to e-mail me for the top secret code to register. (As of yesterday, there are five spots left.)

Microsoft's New Research Lab in Cambridge

Microsoft is adding a basic research group to its growing Cambridge, MA outpost, led by long-time company researcher Jennifer Tour Chayes, who will move out here from Redmond. Dr. Chayes' husband, Christian Borgs, will serve as deputy managing director of the new lab.

This lab is Microsoft's sixth; it's the first on the East Coast, and the first led by a woman. (Others are in Cambridge, England; Bangalore; Beijing; Mountain View, CA; and Redmond, WA.)

From the NY Times coverage:

“Essentially every other industrial lab I know is shrinking, with the exception of Google,” Dr. Chayes said. Since she joined the company in 1997, she said, Microsoft Research has grown eightfold to 800 researchers who hold doctorates.

...Microsoft is adamant about retaining a pure research department reminiscent of the old Bell Laboratories, whose scientists were awarded six Nobel Prizes over the years.

"Microsoft is probably the sole remaining corporate research lab that still values basic research," said Maria Klawe, a mathematician who is president of Harvey Mudd College.

The Globe says that the lab will open in July 2008 with 10 to 15 researchers from Redmond, and will grow "to at least 50 people." Reporter Rob Weisman says that "Microsoft soon will have nearly 800 employees in Massachusetts."

Microsoft offers a company-produced Q&A with Chayes and Borges:

Chayes: If you look at where the computing experience is headed, where the online experience is headed, and where Microsoft’s business is headed, we should be developing expertise in economics so that we understand how people value things, in sociology so that we understand how people interact with one another, in psychology so that we understand what makes people do what they do, and all of this in the online context. If we’re going to help build the social networks of tomorrow, if we’re going to come up with new business models so that we can monetize them, if we are going to help to come up with productivity software so that people can collaborate online, we need to understand more about people: who they are, how they value things, and how they interact with each other.

Here's an article about Chayes and her work at Microsoft from 1998; she joined the company the prior year.

Finally, the official press release is here.

Ray Ozzie's role in Microsoft's Yahoo offer

Bloomberg has a good piece explaining the role Ray Ozzie is playing in Microsoft's bid for Yahoo.

Ozzie, you'll remember, was running Groove Networks up in Beverly until 2005, when Microsoft bought him (whoops, his company) and made him one of its CTOs. He now fills Bill Gates' shoes as Microsoft's chief software architect.

From Crayton Harrison's piece:

Ozzie, 52, plans to use the Internet to complement Microsoft's software for consumers and businesses, marrying programs with information available online. When Microsoft held a video conference for employees today about the Yahoo bid, it was Ozzie who explained how the companies' technologies would fit together, spokesman Bill Cox said.

``He really understands technology and where it's going,'' said Ken Allen, a portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. in Baltimore, the fifth-biggest institutional holder of Microsoft shares.

Ozzie blogs (he was one of the first Boston tech execs to do so), but not very regularly.