Recent posts and comments

• SiOnyx Brings “Black Silicon” into the Light; Material Could Upend Solar, Imaging Industries

  Silicon is a wonderfully cooperative element. It takes relatively little energy to promote the electrons in a silicon crystal from their usual, docile orbits around the atomic nuclei into wild, free... Read more »

• Playful vs. Preachy: Sizing Up TV’s New Science Dramas

  Crime shows generally turn me off, but for years I’ve enjoyed CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, because (as I’ve written before) the heroes are scientists. They catch crooks not by outgunning... Read more »

• Challenging Microsoft, Startup AutoVirt Fixes Windows Data Migration Nightmares

  If you’ve ever had to replace your home computer, you know what a hassle it can be to copy your most important software and data from the old computer’s hard drive... Read more »

• Sprint’s WiMax Network Operative in Boston, Mobile Computing Site Confirms

  On Monday I blogged about a report that the XOHM WiMax network, Sprint Nextel’s venture into broadband wireless service, is up and running in Boston and several other cities, even though... Read more »

• Acronis Names Donahue CEO

  Acronis, a Burlington, MA, company that makes storage management and disaster recovery software, said today that it has appointed veteran West Coast tech CEO Jason Donahue as its new chief... Read more »

• Nuance, Nokia in Partnership

  Nuance Communications, the Burlington, MA-based maker of speech recognition software, said today it has struck a multi-year agreement with Finnish mobile giant Nokia to provide speech and predictive-text technologies for... Read more »

• Michigan Ups Mascoma Grant

  By shifting a $26 million Department of Energy grant originally intended for a Tennessee biofuels plant to another project in the upper peninsula of Michigan, Cambridge-MA based Mascoma has persuaded the... Read more »

• Mozilla Adapts Skyhook’s Loki Location-Finding System for Firefox

  When you open the Google Maps application on the Apple iPhone and click the “target” button, the device pulls up a local map and shows your current position as a blue... Read more »

• At Pixily, Cloud Computing Quenches the Downpour of Paper

  I am not a David Allen disciple, but the one practice I did adopt after reading his time-management bible Getting Things Done many years ago was to start a filing system... Read more »

• MyPunchbowl Reinvents Online Party Invitations

  Everyone has a neighbor or a relative who loves to throw parties—you know, the people who make their Halloween or Christmas extravaganza bigger every year, with more lights, lawn ornaments, costumes,... Read more »

• CollegeWikis Funded by Two New England Groups

  The eCoast Angel Network of Portsmouth, NH, and Boston Harbor Angels of Boston are among the participants in a $2 million funding round announced today for CollegeWikis. The New York-based... Read more »

• BSX Appeal Denied by U.S. Supreme Court

  It appears that Natick, MA-based Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) will be forced to pay medical products giant Johnson & Johnson the full $703 million patent-infringement award finalized last week by... Read more »

• Mozy Launches Business Version of Mac Backup Service

  Back in May I wrote about the release of MozyHome for Mac, an Apple-compatible version of the Mozy online backup service that Berkeley Data Systems launched for Windows users in 2006.... Read more »

• Novell Launches Mono 2.0

  Waltham, MA-based Novell said today that Mono 2.0, an updated version of the company’s open-source platform for building and running applications based on the Microsoft .NET framework, is now available to... Read more »

• Sprint’s XOHM WiMax Network Working in Boston?

  Sprint Nextel, which is spending billions to blanket major U.S. cities with super-high-speed wireless networks based on the new WiMax standard, turned on its first city—Baltimore—last week. Now there’s a... Read more »

• Atlas Leads €10M Round for Inspirational Stores

  Atlas Venture of Waltham, MA, has taken the lead in a €10 million venture round for Inspirational Stores, the Paris-based online marketing firm said today. Inspirational Stores creates and manages e-commerce... Read more »

• Y Combinator Recombined: Talking with Philadelphia Startup Incubator DreamIt Ventures

  Everything is moving faster in the Internet age, it seems—including startup incubators. At incubators that follow the traditional model, like Idealab or Biogen Idec’s Innovation Incubator, young companies get to... Read more »

• Polaris Re-ups with BlackArrow

  Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners has joined a $20 million Series B financing round for BlackArrow, a San Mateo, CA, startup that specializes in advertising placement and management for Internet-delivered... Read more »

• Four Ways Amazon Could Make Kindle 2.0 a Best Seller

  [Addendum, 10/4/08: Boy Genius Report has published pictures from a reader who obtained a Kindle 2. It's unclear so far which, if any, of the features described in... Read more »

• Forma Buys SolMap Assets

  Mercury Computing Systems of Chelmsford, MA, a maker of embedded imaging, sensing, and signal processing hardware and software, said today that it has sold the assets of its biotech venture, SolMap... Read more »