Another year, another MassChallenge class. The sophomore edition of the startup accelerator and $1 million business plan competition did not disappoint. Nor did the final event of the program. Tonight was the big awards gala, held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in South Boston—a cavernous and sprawling, impersonal space—but it did the job.

I’ll have more on the ceremony tomorrow. But in the meantime, here’s the news from the evening:

Three of the MassChallenge finalist teams won $100,000 each. They are:

—Alkeus Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company working on new treatments for blindness

—Sanergy, a green tech company developing sanitation services for urban slums

—Tinfoil Security, a startup working on Web security software for small businesses

And 14 teams won $50,000 each:

—Artaic, a custom tile mosaic company

—ArtVenue, a marketplace that connects artists with local businesses

—Casa Couture, which makes shoes for pregnant women

—Cocomama Foods, a gluten-free food brand

—Drync, a wine search and ordering service

—EverTrue, a startup that connects schools and organizations with donors

—Her Campus Media, an online magazine and marketing firm targeting college women

—Invup, which makes a Web platform for managing volunteer and donation programs

—Lynx Sportswear, which makes better-fitting sports bras

—Resolute Marine Energy, a seawater desalination company

—SmarterShade, a window-darkening tech company

—SocMetrics, a Web startup that helps businesses engage key influencers

—Therapeutic Systems, a company developing a sensory vest for autistic kids

—UberSense, which makes video software to analyze sports techniques

Rounding out the field of 26 final startups:

—ARO Medical, which makes an implantable brace for back surgery patients

—Bioarray Therapeutics, a cancer diagnostics company

—Circumventive, a stealthy security tech startup

—Driveway, which connects drivers with auto insurance providers

—Finalta, a company specializing in software for institutional asset managers

—PK Clean, a plastic waste-to-energy company

—Privy, a Web marketing platform for local merchants

—Pintley, a beer website and app for brewers and consumers

—The Tap Lab, a mobile location-based game startup.

Congratulations to all the finalists and participants, whose journeys are really just beginning. All in all, this is becoming a pretty cool tradition for the Boston startup community. We’re looking forward to next year already…

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[Updated 10/14/11. See below] And then there were 26. Startup teams competing for $1 million in cash prizes, that is. Welcome to the final stage of MassChallenge 2011.

MassChallenge, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a Boston-based startup accelerator program now in its second year. It may very well be the world’s largest incubator of its kind. The nonprofit program and business competition kicked off in May with an announcement of the 125 finalist teams (out of 700-plus entrants). After a three-month mentorship program, it is now down to 26 teams who are giving their final pitches this week. The whole competition culminates in an awards ceremony on October 24.

The goal of MassChallenge is to spur Boston-area innovation by attracting entrepreneurs and connecting them with peers, mentors, funding, and other resources. It’s one of several big efforts to rally the local startup community and make it more competitive as an innovation hub. “We are on the verge of a renaissance,” MassChallenge CEO John Harthorne told me earlier this year.

If this year’s crop of finalists is any indication, the program has become more effective at engaging founders, connecting them with mentors, structuring their mentorship, and generally managing and communicating the logistics of such a huge (and hugely ambitious) program. Startup founders I talked to in recent weeks said the program was “really well organized” and that there was “nice camaraderie” amongst the teams. That seems to have helped them with the difficult work of early-stage company building.

“Technically I’m pretty strong, but I’ve never run a startup before,” says Bruce Robie, the founder and CEO of ARO Medical, one of the final 26 teams, based in North Andover, MA. ARO has developed an implantable device to help stabilize the spine of back-surgery patients.

Robie credits MassChallenge with improving his pitching skills and introducing him to key advisors. “Working with our mentors was a really positive thing,” he says, and “each brought a different perspective”—whether it was how to talk with potential partners or how to brand the product. “I’m an engineer by training, so my ability to name stuff is not going to set the world on fire,” he says.

Roy Rodenstein, the co-founder of Cambridge, MA-based SocMetrics, another finalist, says, “I’ve been very impressed this year. Last year was pretty good, but it was the first year. It’s progressing well as far as the level of support.” Rodenstein, who served as a mentor in the 2010 program, adds that “the quality of companies is up a bit,” similar to the recent trend for other incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars.

Several other finalist teams say the program helped provide the foundation and … Next Page »

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The Boston-area technology scene is known for several mini-clusters: companies in mobile software, music software, robotics, online video, data storage, e-commerce, and Internet marketing, to name a few. But “mass customization” might be the most broadly interesting sector in town. The term refers to online companies that offer consumers personalized, custom-made goods—everything from clothing and jewelry to art and books—at relatively low prices.

The trend toward mass customization isn’t new—you can read about related startups here and here—but a critical, um, mass of local companies has formed that should make things fun to watch for years to come. They include Blank Label (shirts), FashionPlaytes (girls’ clothing), Gemvara (jewelry), Tikatok (children’s books, acquired by Barnes & Noble), F. Rock (bags), Artaic (mosaics), CustomMade (artwork and furniture), Loom Decor (home decorating), Vistaprint (printed goods, U.S. headquarters in Boston area), and Zyrra (bras).

I happened to be talking about this cluster with micro-VC David Beisel from NextViewVentures this week. Beisel also organizes the quarterly Web Innovators Group, and was previously with Venrock (he still serves on the board of BlogHer) and Masthead Venture Partners. In a previous life, he co-founded Sombasa Media, an e-mail marketing startup that was acquired by About.com for $35 million in 2000.

Beisel had an interesting take as to why the Boston area seems to be putting the “Mass.” in mass customization. He views the sector as “another upspring of the e-commerce mini-cluster. We [in Boston] are good at assembling—taking raw components and building blocks, and then fashioning them into something whole greater than its parts,” he said. “Mass customization is a natural extension of our strength because it’s assembling something new and doing it both systematically and repeatedly.”

I took this to mean also that mass customization startups are a natural outcrop built on top of more traditional New England tech strengths—things like building physical products and developing e-commerce businesses (e.g., CSN Stores, Shoebuy, Next Jump).

You can learn more about this burgeoning group of startups next week. The MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge (Beisel is on the board) has organized a panel discussion and networking hour around the mass customization cluster on Feb. 16 (rescheduled after the snowstorm). Katie Rae from Project 11 and TechStars Boston will moderate a panel of startup founders including Ted Acworth, Sharon Kan, Matt Lauzon, Sarah McIlroy, Sung Park, and Michael Salguero.

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Mosaic has been a popular form of public art since Roman times, but the techniques behind it haven’t advanced much over the millennia. Assembling the glass, stone, or marble pieces of a mosaic, called tesserae, is still a manual process that takes even experienced craftspeople two to three hours per square foot. (If the artist is cutting her own tesserae, add another three to four hours to that.) At such painstaking rates, it’s a form of decoration few but the rich can afford.

But there’s an angel-funded startup in Boston that hopes to gradually change that, using a combination of custom graphics software, robotics, and classic assembly-line techniques. Ted Acworth, CEO of Artaic, says his company’s system will churn out mosaics at a rate of one square foot every six minutes, at a cost of around $150 per square foot—which is well below the $250 or more per square foot you’d have to shell out for a traditional mosaic.

That cost could drop over time as the robots get faster at placing tesserae. And because the process is software-driven, Artaic can make a mosaic from almost any image, such as a photograph, a painting, or even a historical work like the famous, 1,700-year-old Bikini Girls at Sicily’s Villa Romana del Casale (the subject one client has hired Artaic to reproduce in his bathroom).

“If you e-mail us a JPEG of your dog, we can make a mosaic out of it,” says Acworth. I’m crazy about my dog, so if I had the spare change I might actually consider it. But Artaic’s very first commission will depict a slightly more traditional subject: a sailboat. Based on a watercolor painting, the three-story-high, 500-square-foot mosaic will become the lobby centerpiece of a New York office building that was once a factory for fiberglass yachts. Acworth says production and installation could begin as early as July, depending on whether Artaic’s first robot is assembled and working by then.

Acworth says he first became interested in mosaic while traveling in Europe, and that he has been a student of the medium for a decade. It was when he considered installing mosaics in the bathrooms, kitchen, and patio of the new home he was building a few years ago that he was surprised to find out how complicated and expensive it could be. With a mechanical engineering PhD from Stanford and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School, he started thinking about creating a company to apply automation to the process.

Artaic wasn’t his first company launch. While at MIT, Acworth was part of a team that developed a 3-D imaging technology that won seed funding from the then-new Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and was a runner-up in MIT’s 2003 $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. The startup that he helped to create around the system—Brontes Technologies—won $10 million in venture funding from Bain Capital Group, Charles River Ventures, and IDG Ventures (now Flybridge Capital Partners) in 2004, and went on to be acquired by 3M two years later for $95 million.

With part of his proceeds from the sale, Acworth became one of his own angel investors at Artaic. The technology it’s developing has two main components: computer-aided design software that helps artists translate images into specifications for the placement of tesserae, and a high-speed robotic arm that takes over the manual labor of picking and placing tiles. The robot is designed to grab tiles as small as 3/8 of an inch across from up to 200 buffers, each one loaded with tiles of a different color, and lay them at the right spots at the rate of about two tiles per second. The one-square-foot tiles created by the robot are assembled on-site into a finished mosaic.

“Pick and place” robot arms are fairly common in industries such as food handling and packaging. But it’s a … Next Page »

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