Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Future of Tech in New England

I hauled up to Bedford, NH this morning for a breakfast event put on by the NH High Tech Council and the NH College and University Council, part of their "Forum on the Future" series.

The message I took home: New Hampshire is thinking harder than the other New England states about how to remain competitive and retain the smart young people who grow up here, or come here to get an education.

UNH economist Ross Gittell kicked things off with a presentation: tech workers in NH earn an average of $75K a year... compared to $26K for people who work in retail...and $43K as an overall state-wide average.

But... NH tech employment seems to have peaked in 2000; today's level (48,756) is a bit lower than it was in the early 1990s.

Also, the entire New England region, Gittell said, is losing young people.

The current lock-down on credit will likely have a dramatic impact on high-tech, he predicted... financing will be in short supply for start-up companies (I suspect he was focused on non-venture capital backed start-ups)...and fewer businesses will be making investments in new hardware or software.

Gittell ended by pointing to two growth areas for the future:

    > Healthcare IT and defense (two "stable industries," as he termed them)

    > Green businesses (a growth industry)

We then had a panel discussion with a number of NH execs. I asked them what one issue we ought to focus on to ensure that tech continues to prosper in NH (and the wider New England region).

The two things we spent the most time talking about:

1. How do we create a stronger connection between students and the innovation economy (through internships, company visits, entrepreneurs and execs visiting campuses, etc.)?

2. How can we better spread the word outside of the region about all the innovative things that happen inside the region? That'd help attract both people and businesses.

(For once, no one was blaming VCs for being too timid and risk-averse, or complaining that no one in New England ever networks...)

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Tomorrow Night's Event in Waltham, and Others...


Just some shameless self-promotion here for a second...

My new book Inventing the Movies came out in August, and I'm just starting to do some live events on the east and west coasts to promote it.

I have a 45-minute talk, illustrated with lots of photos and movie clips, and peppered with movie trivia, that focuses on the past, present, and future of Hollywood. The main theme: why does Hollywood (and all established, successful industries) tend to resist every innovation that comes along?

I'll be giving the talk this Wednesday evening at the Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham...October 23rd at the Chelmsford Public Library...November 12th at the Museum of Science...and then in January and February at the Concord Free Library and the Boston Public Library.

The full schedule is here. The book's official Web site is here. Hope I'll see you at one of these events...

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Monday, September 29, 2008

News Tidbits to Start the Week: Authoria, SpaceClaim, Visible Measures

- Authoria, a SaaS survivor of the dot-com blow-out, is being acquired by a private equity firm for $63.1 million. Waltham-based Authoria sells "talent management solutions"; the buyer is Bedford Funding, which will agree to put in another $8 million in working capital.

Not sure, but this company seems to have undergone a recapitalization at some point...[ Update: they recapped in 2004 ] they raised $75 million in one round back in 2000, but none of those investors are still on the board. The most recent round was $22.5 million last fall. Amazingly, Tod Loofbourrow has stuck it out as the company's CEO for more than a decade.

- General Catalyst portfolio company Visible Measures announced a big deal today to provide video measurement services to all of MTV Networks' properties.

- SpaceClaim founder Mike Payne mentioned to me earlier this month that Chris Randles, formerly CEO at MathSoft, was taking over the CEO reins at the Concord-based maker of computer modeling software. Randles had been serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Borealis Ventures, one of the VC firms that has backed SpaceClaim. The official announcement, apparently, happens later this week. Payne had served as CEO until this spring.

3D CAD news reported back in January that there had been some lay-offs at the start-up... and that the COO had departed.

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The Future of Mobile: From the Emerging Technologies Conference

Here's some video I shot at last week's Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. It features two local executives (Google's Rich Miner and Motorola's Liz Altman) talking about where mobile is headed -- especially with regard to open and proprietary operating systems. (This took place a day or two after the official announcement of the first Google/Android phone.)



Some notes from the panel (not direct quotes):

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch: It's still too expensive to develop an application that runs across a broad range of phones.

Liz Altman: Low-end phones will use proprietary operating systems.

Rich Miner: Agrees with that, but says mid-range phones are getting more capable, and will be compatible with the Android operating system before long.

Miner: Google will try to avoid bloatware - aim for simplicity - even as phones get more capable.

Lynch says that "thought interfaces" will be a promising way to interact with mobile devices in the future. Miner is bullish on speech, and mentions Vlingo, a Cambridge start-up. The idea of scanning barcodes of products to get more info about a product also comes up.

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Friday, September 26, 2008

$1 million for Tipjoy's virtual tipjar

Sanjay Vakil e-mailed yesterday to point out that Tipjoy, a Y Combinator start-up, just raised $1 million.

We'd been talking earlier this week about the reluctance of Boston VC's to support the very early-stage start-ups that come through Paul Graham's Y Combinator program.

Tipjoy is an interesting case...none of its investors are from Boston. The company went through Y Combinator on the west coast, and seemed like it was going to settle out there, last time I talked to the founders. But Abby and Ivan Kirigin (veterans of Nokia and iRobot) also own a house in Arlington, MA -- and so perhaps the inability to sell it has brought them back East...(I'm just speculatin'...)

Update: Abby Kirigin writes via e-mail that since NYC-based Betaworks led the round, "They wanted us to be near, we wanted to be back in Boston. ...We are involved in the startup scene here in Boston. Betaworks has got us plugged into a great network in New York. And, we've got great investors on the West Coast (Chris Sacca, David Shen Ventures, Trilogy), and in Europe (TAG, Taavet Hinrikus)."

The other example worth mentioning is Iminlikewithyou, a New York Y Combinator alum that got $1.5 million over the summer from a group of investors that included Spark Capital of Boston.

I first wrote about Tipjoy back in March...

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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Secrets of the Serial Entrepreneurs

We had a great dinner gathering last night at Henrietta's Table... the discussion was titled "Secrets of the Serial Entrepreneurs," and it was a sort of warm-up to the annual Future Forward conference later this fall.

I asked each of the entrepreneurs to share the best piece of advice they'd ever gotten.

Sonia Khademi of Proxilliant Systems said, "Cash flow positive equals happiness." When you're cash flow positive, or even cash flow neutral, you don't get pressured into doing bad deals.

Don Bulens, most recently CEO of EqualLogic, said, "Don't love something that doesn't love you back." A lot of times salespeople, engineers, or CEOs get too enamored of a deal or a technology or a strategy that just isn't working out -- but they have a hard time letting go.

Hilmi Ozguc, most recently CEO of Maven Networks, said, "Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered." What he meant was that a lot of times when start-ups are negotiating to be acquired, they hold out for irrational terms -- and the deal winds up fizzling. Ozguc sold his latest start-up to Yahoo in January for $160 million cash. Just under $30 million went in. And the acquisition didn't require him to stick around for a year...in fact, he mentioned that he left Maven two weeks ago.

Cheng Wu, currently chairman of Azuki Systems, said, "A company is bought -- not sold."

(You can tell that we wound up talking a lot about M&A... Bulens mentioned that his company was getting ready to go public when they got a $1.4 billion all-cash offer from Dell last year. I asked him if there was much debate about what to do, and he said there was. They looked at the market cap of a competitor, Riverbed, that had recently gone public and was doing well. But ultimately the cash in hand was too alluring. Inevitably, that led to some discussions about why New England start-ups seem to sell rather than remaining independent. VCs and entrepreneurs got about equal blame from the folks I spoke with over dinner...)

Vinit Nijhawan offered up a nifty metaphor from the peanut gallery... finding the right business model for a start-up, he said, is like "hunting around for the radio station before you turn up the volume." You don't want to accelerate spending until you know that the business model works.

One nice story that Jay Batson shared.... at last year's pre-Future Forward dinner, people were griping (as usual) about how risk-averse VCs are. But Batson met an investor there from Sigma who ended up funding his company.

Invites for the 2008 Future Forward gathering, coming up on Nov. 19th, just went out by mail. If you're not already on the list, you can request one here. (As an FYI: the audience consists entirely of entrepreneurs, CIOs, CTOs, and investors.)

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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Is Nuance the Second Coming of Lernout & Houspie?

Over at the gethuman blog, speech industry analyst Walt Tetschner has a provocative piece asking whether Nuance Communications is starting to look like a rerun of Lernout & Houspie, the Belgian company that rolled up speech-recognition companies, but collapsed in 2001 due to an accounting scandal.

(Nuance, then known as ScanSoft, bought up many of the L&H assets.)

Tetschner, who runs the firm Voice Information Associates, writes:

    Nuance continues to be a house-of-cards that is likely to come crashing down. The only question is when. Nuance does not generate GAAP profits. It shows proforma profits by excluding a huge amount of stock compensation. Naive investors buy the stock based on distorted information from top management, but knowledgable management keeps selling the stock. The growth rate is inflated through acquisitions that are enormously over-priced. A lack of transparency and distortion of the truth by Nuance top management continues to make it a challenge to figure out just what Nuance is really doing.

    The activities of Nuance Communications bear a striking resemblance to what L&H was doing prior to imploding in early 2000.

    Belgian-based L&H was once the world's leading maker of speech technology software. In early 2000, reports of accounting irregularities surfaced that prompted arrest of the company's founders. It sought reorganization under bankruptcy laws in the United States and Belgium. The situation led in October to the firm being declared insolvent and its assets being put up for sale.

    A few of the more obvious similarities are 1) a highly aggressive M&A program that was attempting to eliminate competitition and 2) constant distortion of reality by the corporate management.

    The two companies routinely grossly overpaid for acquisitions that were being made. They then attempted to distort this. For example: Nuance is paying $160 million for SnapOn and is then attempting to distort this by measuring with speculative future revenue contributions.


It's a fiery piece worth a read if you're in the speech rec space...

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Monday, September 22, 2008

What's Next for Parametric Technology?

Sunday's column explores the question of where PTC, the design software company in Needham, went astray, and what's next for the company. (It's reportedly up for sale.)

Here's the opening:

    Here is one safe prediction you can make about technology: It will eventually be democratized.

    Computers were once tools used by almost exclusively by PhDs. Videocassette recorders were developed initially for television broadcasters. Cellphones? GPS? The Internet? Photo-editing software? Developed first for professionals and academics - and used today by just about everybody.

    Unfortunately, one of the region's biggest software companies, Needham's Parametric Technology Corp., has spent much of its history betting against democratization. PTC's flagship product is a sophisticated - and expensive - software package for engineers and product designers whose work involves the creation of three-dimensional objects.

It feels like a clear "innovator's dilemma" case study to me.

Here's the video that goes with the column:



Update: Got a call from Nicole Rowe on Monday, who heads corp. comm. at PTC, explaining to me that the company does, in fact, believe in democratization -- just not in a consumer market for 3-D modeling software. (I said that I didn't really understand the distinction between those two things.) Rowe pointed out that PTC does offer a free, downloadable limited-functionality "personal edition" of its CoCreate software.

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Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Boston Fed reports on "The Supply of Recent College Graduates"

I haven't had time yet to look closely at this report (PDF format), released today by the Federal Reserve Bank's New England Public Policy Center, but it explores an issue I care about a lot: how can we hold onto a larger share of the smart young people who get educated here.

One take-away: connecting college students with internships and job opportunities here, before graduation day, would be a great strategy.

In the introduction, NEPPC director Robert Tannenwald writes:

    ...Better matching of recent graduates from New England institutions with jobs and employers around the region could be a promising strategy. Stronger partnerships between universities and industry groups, as well as statewide or regional job clearinghouses may provide an opportunity to reach this new generation of workers.

    In a global economy where workers and jobs are mobile, New England will face increasing com-
    petition for the college graduates its institutions produce.


And from Alicia Sasser's report:

    Contrary to the usual litany of reasons offered to explain why individuals leave New England — cold winters, high costs of living — recent college graduates do so primarily for job-related reasons, or to attend or leave college, with very few citing housing as the motivation for their move.

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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Career Opps in Cleantech, and the Most Significant Cleantech VC Firms in Boston

Today's Globe column deals with people moving into cleantech from other fields. From the opening:

    In the late 1990s, everyone wanted to be part of the Internet revolution. Now, there's a similar level of enthusiasm building around companies tackling the world's energy challenges. And many people from the biotech, software, and hardware fields are seeking out - and finding - opportunities to make a career switch.


In the video, Peter Rothstein and Jim Matheson of Flagship Ventures talk about how to navigate that switch:



While working on the piece, I asked everyone I spoke with who the most significant cleantech VC firms in the Boston area are. Here's the list (in alphabetical order, not in order of significance), and who the point person is where there's one primary energy-oriented partner.

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Friday, September 12, 2008

Entrepreneurs: Need Some Expert Advice for Your Start-Up?

Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technology, called this morning with some disappointing news.

Bill asked me to be an "expert" at next month's Innovation UnConference, being organized by MassTLC. He told me that I would be the smartest expert there by far, offering entrepreneurs sage advice about how to work with the media. That was flattering.

But now, Bill has lined up a lot of much smarter people to consult with the entrepreneurs who attend the event. People like Howard Anderson, George Hatsopoulos, Rich Miner from Google, VisiCalc co-founder Dan Bricklin, Vanu Bose, 3Com founder Bob Metcalfe, Russ Wilcox from E Ink, Reed Sturtevant from Microsoft, and James Geshwiler from CommonAngels.

I'm humbled. Looks like it'll be a cool event.

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Thursday, September 11, 2008

September Family Activities in Waltham and Cambridge

If you've got kids, why not bring them to Saturday's "Innovations of Yesteryear" festival in Waltham?

    This hands-on event will feature an eclectic, interactive assortment of innovations prior to 1950. Ride on a miniature train, check out a gigantic camera, fire a Viking catapult, and type a letter to your Nana on a vintage 1920s typewriter. We’ve got noisy steam engines, putt-putt autos, high-wheel bikes, musical instruments (ever hear of a Sarrusaphone?), spinners and weavers, blacksmiths, antique sports & games, watches & clocks, and more.

More info is on this PDF flyer.

And later in September ( 9.26-9.28), the MIT Museum hosts Innovation Weekend.

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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Last Night's Event with Ed Roberts of MIT

There was a nice crowd last night at the Vilna Shul for the Fireside Chat with Ed Roberts. Ed is one of the gurus of entrepreneurship at MIT.

What we discovered during the conversation is that I tend to think locally, while Ed thinks globally.

I wanted to focus in on what more we can do to encourage the creation and cultivation of big, important, innovative companies here. Ed wanted to talk about the growth of China, and how Tsinghua University aims to become the MIT of China.

I started by asking Ed about the most successful companies he has been involved with. In Massachusetts, he was a founder of the hospital IT company MediTech, with 2700 employees and $400 million in revenue. But an even bigger hit has been Sohu.com, the Chinese Web portal.

I asked Ed about his biggest concern for the Boston/Massachusetts economy. His answer: our entrepreneurs and VCs sell companies too soon. Ed said that his friend, the late Alex d'Arbeloff (co-founder of Teradyne) would always encourage the companies he counseled to "fight the fight" and ignore the VCs encouraging them to sell.

But Ed said his bigger worry was one related to how a single federal policy position will affect the future competitiveness of our country. Since 2001, it has gotten harder and harder for smart people (like MIT grads) to stick around in the US after they graduate, and either get experience working at a company here -- or start a company of their own. MIT alums who hail from foreign countries, he observed, have a higher rate of entrepreneurship than U.S.-born alums, and we're now essentially telling them, "Go back to India, China, or Africa."

Someone from the audience said he is starting a consumer tech company, and has been having trouble getting funded by Boston area VCs. Ed said that even on the West Coast VCs can be reluctant to back consumer-oriented companies. (Perhaps, but I'd say they're less reluctant there than here.) He talked a bit about how slow established VCs can be to expand the scope of their investing. "VCs have as much of a problem as large corporations do in shifting their focus to new areas" like nanotech or cleantech, he said.

Ed mentioned he is working on a new study, to be released in the coming months, about the economic impact that MIT entrepreneurs have had on the world. (It's an update of an old study conducted by BankBoston.) Basically, it's huge.

I suggested that our next challenge in the Hub is helping our other great academic institutions -- not just MIT -- get better at spinning out companies.

And I also noted that if our region is already the center of the universe for life sciences innovation (it clearly is), and is becoming an important hub for cleantech, why don't we do a better job of communicating that to the rest of the world, to attract more people, money, big companies?

Doug Levin, the organizer of this event, mentioned that the next two guests will be Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte, dates TBD. Info here.

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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Good Management or Bad Management? EMC's Firing of VMware's CEO

Ashlee Vance has a great story in this morning's NY Times, dealing with Joe Tucci's firing of Diane Greene, the CEO of the virtualization pioneer VMware (publicly-traded, but majority-owned by EMC.)

Here's the opening:

    In the summer of 2007, Diane Greene was lauded as a business hero for leading VMware, a maker of business software, to the hottest stock debut since Google. But in the ensuing year, despite her popularity with employees and on Wall Street, her relationship with her directors, and especially VMware’s chairman, Joseph M. Tucci, grew increasingly chilly.

    On July 7, she found out just how cold it had become. After Ms. Greene made a special presentation to VMware’s board, Mr. Tucci, who heads VMware’s parent company, EMC, pulled her aside, according to people familiar with the events, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal company decisions.

    Inviting Mendel Rosenblum, Ms. Greene’s husband and the co-founder of VMware, into the room, Mr. Tucci told Ms. Greene she was fired, effective immediately. And he said the board wanted Mr. Rosenblum, VMware’s chief scientist, to take her seat on the board. Mr. Rosenblum declined the offer.

    When Ms. Greene’s firing was announced to investors the next morning, VMware’s shares plunged 24 percent, and the high-flying company was thrown into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover.


Check out this press release noting that VMware (before Greene's firing) had been named one of the Top 100 IT companies of 2008. EMC was also on the list, but much lower than VMware.

You could view this situation in one of three ways: either Greene was better-suited to leading an independent, fast-growth tech company, and wasn't working well with her corporate overlords...or EMC is not great at managing entrepreneurial folks who may sometimes have strategic disagreements (or personality clashes) with top leadership...or a little bit of both.

Either way, EMC (and Paul Maritz, the EMC exec who took over Greene's post) has a lot to do to prove that Greene's firing isn't a major setback for VMware. VMware's stock has been sagging since the firing, and its chief scientist, Mendel Rosenblum (yes, Greene's hubby), just quit to go back to academia. The head of product also left recently, too.

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Monday, September 8, 2008

How Many Mass. Companies in TechCrunch 50?

The TechCrunch 50 starts today out in San Francisco. In its second year, this has become one of the hottest platforms for launching new companies.

How many are from Massachusetts?

Two, by my count: EmergInvest, a Cambridge start-up that aims to help investors put money to work in emerging markets (here's their entry in CrunchBase); and HangOut Industries, the Pano Anthos company that's developing virtual "rooms" for hanging out (and helping advertisers build brand awareness). It's funded by Highland Capital and Polaris, and based in downtown Boston.

Here's a bit more on HangOut from their press release:

    Launched today, at the prestigious TechCrunch50 conference, Hangout gives teens the ability to connect and truly interact with their friends online. On Hangout, teens interact with their friends as they do in the offline world- whether it be watching favorite videos on YouTube, listening to music, sharing Facebook photos, engaging with popular brands and products that they love, playing games or making music, or just chatting “in person”. Kids can now create their own personal 3D rooms leveraging real goods and clothes and hang out with their friends in their own spaces. Hangout combines the immersive nature of the Sims with the personalization of MySpace and the security and privacy of Facebook.


There may be more companies from Massachusetts who'll be appearing in the conference's Demo Pit, but none that I recognize.

Update: Givvy founder John Treadway, a start-up geared to increasing charitable giving, just e-mailed to let me know his company is part of the Pit action.

Update #2: David Beisel of Venrock e-mails to let me know that RaizLabs, Snipd, and Magic & Miracle Ventures (three more Demo Pit companies) also have some Boston roots. Snipd, as far as I know, is a Y Combinator company that was in Boston this summer, but will likely end up elsewhere. (Its founder is from Austin, TX.) Beisel also mentions that you'll be able to see Givvy at the September 15th WebInno meeting, which he organizes.

New Hampshire's own Don Dodge is on the panel of judges that will offer feedback on each of the fifty company presentations. Perhaps he'll post about any other Boston companies he encounters....

What do you think - is there a West Coast selection bias in this group ... or does Massachusetts just not have very many Web 2.0 companies?

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Sunday, September 7, 2008

Figure Friendly: 3-D Printing Goes Consumer

Today's Globe column talks about an interesting deal between two local companies, Z Corp. and Harmonix, to print out avatars from Harmonix's game 'Rock Band.'

The opening:

    Starting with the release of the game Rock Band 2 this month, players will have the option of purchasing a collectible plaster figurine of the character they create - whether it's a lead guitarist with a Mohawk or a screeching lead singer sporting a skimpy bikini top. (The game is produced by Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems, a division of Viacom Inc.) The $75 figures will be produced at Z Corp.'s Burlington headquarters and shipped to players about a week after an order is placed through the Rock Band website.


Here's the video, which shows how the 3-D avatars are produced:

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How Can You Tell if Your VC is Jewish?

...I'll leave it to you to invent the punch-line to that joke. ("Serves bagels and lox at your celebratory closing brunch," maybe?)

The fall speakers series at the Vilna Shul is starting up this week, on Tuesday.

I'll be chatting with Ed Roberts, founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, and one of our region's top experts on investing, innovation, and entrepreneurship. His most recent book is "Innovation Matters." We'll take audience questions about raising money, starting and growing companies, and the challenges of entrepreneurship.

The event is free...and you definitely don't have to be Jewish to attend, though the venue is a Jewish cultural center on Beacon Hill (who knew?) There are snacks and networking before and after the program. Event runs from 6 to 8 PM.

This series is organized by Doug Levin, founder (and until recently, CEO) of Black Duck Software.

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Thursday, September 4, 2008

Good Things *Can* Happen (Occasionally) When Local Companies Get Bought

Yes, I tend to view the glass as half-empty whenever Massachusetts companies are acquired by out-of-state sugar daddies.

But I acknowledge that sometimes, the companies stick around, grow here, and remain leaders in their sectors.

That seems to be the case with TripAdvisor, as Rob Weisman writes in today's Globe.

From the piece:

    Where other buyers have snatched the brands and shifted management control out of state, starving the local office of resources, Expedia, based in Bellevue, Wash., has provided financial support but allowed TripAdvisor to operate autonomously from Massachusetts - a practice that TripAdvisor, in turn, has extended to its own acquisitions, such as VirtualTourist, Cruise Critic, SmarterTravel, and SeatGuru.

    TripAdvisor makes the bulk of its money through advertising from travel destinations and booking sites such as Expedia, as well as its rivals Orbitz and Travelocity, to which visitors can link from TripAdvisor's site. The company posted profits of $129 million on $260 million in revenue for the 12 months ended June 30, parent Expedia reported.

    "We're absolutely committed to growing TripAdvisor as fast as we can and, frankly, to throwing as much capital at TripAdvisor as we can," said Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive of Expedia. "Very early on, when we invested in the company, they beat everything they told us they were going to do, in terms of finance and operating goals."


Here's an interview I did about a year ago with TripAdvisor co-founder Stephen Kaufer:



And last month, I bumped into Langley Steinert, the other co-founder of TripAdvisor. He's now running the automotive community site CarGurus.com, based in Cambridge. And Kaufer serves on his board.

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Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Three iRobot Spin-Offs: Harvest, Heartland, North End

Sunday's column focused on the robotics cluster in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, including new companies like Harvest Automation, North End Technologies, and Rod Brooks' new venture, Heartland Robotics. All of them involve former iRobot employees and execs as founders, so I consider them the spawn of iRobot.

Here's the video - a demo of Harvest Automation's prototype greenhouse robots, with Harvest CEO Charles Grinnell.



Two days after the column ran, Rod Brooks -- one of iRobot's three founders -- officially announced he was stepping away from his role as iRobot's CTO to focus entirely on getting Heartland off the ground; he'll still head a technical advisory board at iRobot and remain on the board of directors.

Xconomy has another piece about Heartland, which deftly doesn't mention that my Globe column broke the news of the company's formation two days earlier...but that's the blogosphere for ya.

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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

ProteoStasis Therapeutics: $45 million first round, video interview with CEO

In late August, the Globe was the first to cover a new Cambridge biotech company, ProteoStasis Therapeutics, as it emerged from stealth mode and announced a first round of financing of $45 million, from firms like HealthCare Ventures, NEA, Fidelity BioSciences, Genzyme and Novartis.

Here's the video... an interview with ProteoStasis CEO David Pendergast:



And here's the official press release, and some coverage of the company from BioWorld.

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