Personal insights. Conversation starters. Gossip. Whatever the excuse, it’s high time for the second installment in Xconomy’s Who Knew? series, our wildly popular roundup of little-known, offbeat facts about the New England innovation community (and a few outside innovators with ties to the local scene).

In this installment, you’ll learn who runs his own indoor waterfall, who’s hit 40 straight Red Sox home openers, and who has a day named after him in the state of Kentucky. Then, of course, there’s the skinny on what family ties—real or not—to the Car Talk guys can get you. Obama’s Republican fundraiser? Yep, we’ve got that, too. Not to mention who can cough up Broadway tickets and seats at movie premiers.

The tip lines have been open—but we actually had to work harder to uncover these gems than we would have liked. We’d prefer much easier pickings next time, so please send us all the juicy details at editors@xconomy.com.

Meanwhile, here’s the second round:

MIT biologist David Housman tools around in a hard-to-come-by 2006 Volvo C70 convertible. How did he get the ride? Turns out that Josie and Annie, the aunts of Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi, ran kitchen support for the MIT Biology Department. In a ceremony whose details cannot be revealed here, gene hunter Housman was “officially” identified as Ray’s long lost half-brother. The Click and Clack family ties enabled the Prof to jump the queue for his wheels.

Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures still (apparently) has not gotten his Tacoda tattoo. The body work was originally slated for last fall. Afraid of needles, Rich?

By the way, Levandov’s partner in Avalon’s San Diego home office, Kevin Kinsella, is a producer of the musical Jersey Boys, winner of four 2006 Tony awards (including Best Musical) and a Grammy for Best Show Album.

We bring this up because producing isn’t just a West Coast thing, baby. Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital, co-produced the 2008 train thriller Transsiberian, starring Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, and Sir Ben Kingsley. The film, which will hit theaters in August, premiered at Sundance in January. Dagres also produced the 2005 teen comedy-drama Pretty Persuasion.

Speaking of moviedom, Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobot, had a speaking part as a Professor Hanes in 21, the movie about the MIT blackjack team. Xconomy had the scoop here.

Mark Levin, co-founder of Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Boston’s Third Rock Ventures, bought the most expensive house in Massachusetts in 2007, according to the Boston Globe and the Gloucester Daily Times. Last August, Levin and his wife, Becky, shelled out $11 million for Seahome, a 12,000-square-foot Manchester-by-the-Sea mansion that comes with its own deep-water dock, two kitchens, and an indoor waterfall. The property had been listed at $17.75 million.

Mark Fredrickson, vice president of Marketing Strategy & Communications for EMC, attended his 40th consecutive Boston Red Sox home opener in April. His mother started the tradition in 1969, when Frederickson was in the fifth grade. “My best Opening Day had to be 2005, when the championship banner was hoisted and rings were handed out at long last,” Fredrickson reports.

January 7 is Phillip A. Sharp Day in the state of Kentucky, and there is a Phillip Sharp Middle School, in Pendleton County, KY, where the MIT Nobel Laureate grew up.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, aka Woz, keeps a spare Segway human transporter at the Brookline condo …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Sure, they might be technological visionaries, multi-millionaire entrepreneurs, imposing CEOs, legendary venture capitalists, and the like. Everyone around them knows what they do professionally. But did you know one of them was also a Top Gun fighter pilot? Or that another accompanied Yo-Yo Ma on piano at the wedding of Bill Nye the Science Guy? And then there’s the wealthy investor who endowed not a classroom or a laboratory—but a men’s room.

Here at Xconomy, we’re all about telling the story of the Greater Boston innovation community—and let’s face it, we have a taste for the offbeat. So we’ve been hanging out at water coolers, listening in on the rumor mills, and pumping folks for information to get at those juicy details about the innovation elite that usually don’t show up on a company’s executive bio page.

So who endowed that men’s room? Read on to find out. And if you know something we don’t know about one of this area’s key tech players, by all means pass it along (self-disclosure welcome) by e-mailing us at editors@xconomy.com. We plan to share the information bounty at irregular intervals.

Here’s our inaugural installment:

David Aronoff, general partner of IDG Ventures Boston, was a ski jumper from age 5 through high school. He grew up in Lyndonville, VT, home of “Bag Balm,” a lubricant that helps cows avoid chapped teats.

Xconomist Bill Aulet, Entrepreneur in Residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, played professional basketball for the Colchester (UK) Moels (it was the 1980-81 season, so anyone can take him now) and was player-coach for the second half of the season.

Many people know that Jonathan Bush, Jr., chairman and CEO of Athenahealth, is related to the President, but did you know just how cheeky he is about that fact? “The President is my cousin, and he lobbied hard for the role and succeeded in the end. We took him. Sometimes we think about putting him back,” says Bush.

John Chory, WilmerHale partner and chair of the firm’s Venture Group in Waltham, graduated as a distinguished cadet from West Point (top 5 percent of his class). He served five years as an active duty intelligence officer, including time in Korea’s DMZ, achieved the rank of major, and is Airborne qualified.

MIT grad and venture capitalist Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital in Colorado, recently paid $25,000 to endow a men’s room at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Feld blogs that despite having bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT, that school rejected his offer to do the same. “No such challenge at CU Boulder,” he writes. …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Am interested to hear what people think about this website (www.thefunded.com) where entrepreneurs rank venture funds. I like the concept of shifting the power dynamic and keeping venture funds on their toes but I have a few issues with the execution. My biggest problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any objective quality-control mechanism. There’s an anonymous individual who runs it and there’s no way to check if he has issues with specific funds or if the thousands of entrepreneur-members even exist. He could also choose to selectively post comments/scores or delete others and nobody would be the wiser.

On the other hand, assuming that these are all real individual entrepreneurs and that this guy is above board, the concept is intriguing and has the potential to be powerful. I found it interesting to read some of the comments while others were so biased (to one side or the other) that their value was limited. There’s a clear delineation between the endorsements that are coming from funded companies at the urging of their backers and the comments from disgruntled entrepreneurs who were poorly treated (mostly during the pitch/diligence process). The most interesting potential comments would be those that can serve as due diligence for entrepreneurs. For example the post-term-sheet and post-funding interactions with specific funds. I didn’t see too many of those yet.

Comments (12) | Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

First there was fantasy baseball: competitions where participants buy rosters of athletes at the beginning of the season and watch their imaginary teams rise and fall in the “standings” based on the real players’ statistics. Then came fantasy football, fantasy basketball, fantasy name-your-sport, fantasy investing (e.g. The UpDown) and even Fantasy Congress—in short, a fantasy league for almost every public activity that generates a continuous stream of data. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that someone would figure out how to score the shenanigans of our beloved celebrities, from Britney to Brangelina, and make them fodder for a fantasy celebrity league.

The honor for achieving that feat goes to Fafarazzi, a creation of Somerville, MA-based Web startup Eastland Media. The name is a combination of “fantasy” and “paparazzi,” and the site itself is a gloriously wicked combination of celebrity gossip and serious mathematics.

Co-founder Todd Galloway, who gave a brief presentation about the site at Monday night’s Web Innovators Group event in Cambridge, says the site grew out of the dual realizations that existing fantasy-sports fans might enjoy applying the fantasy-league model to realms outside sports and that celebrity hounds can be just as intense about their obsession as fantasy-league addicts. “All of my guy friends were playing in five or six different fantasy football leagues, and as far as I could tell that was the only thing they did at work all day,” says Galloway. “At the same time, my sister Megan had just started a new job, and she said it seemed like the only thing her friends did all day was read the gossip blogs. Some friends and I had been talking about why there isn’t a fantasy league for real-world stuff, and so we started talking about scoring celebrity gossip.”

Great idea—but how it would it work? Celebrities don’t score home runs and touchdowns, after all. The answer, it turned out, was blowing in the blogosphere. For the first six months after the site was born in mid-2006, Galloway and his sister would monitor a set of celebrity gossip blogs manually, alotting points for every event in a celebrity’s life. “In fantasy football, a touchdown earns a certain number of points. In celebrity gossip, a dating rumor might be worth a point or two, but if you get married or have a baby it would be like eight points,” Galloway recounts.

The original scoring method was “fun,” but it was also both highly subjective and time-consuming, Galloway says. “So we started an experiment where we monitored the blogs automatically and based the scores on the number of mentions per celebrity. It turned out that it pretty much jived with the manual scoring we were doing.” So Todd and Megan (who run the site together) turned the work over to their software, which continuously analyzes the RSS feeds of about 40 celebrity blogs and news sites such as CNN Entertainment, E! Online, Star Pulse, and TMZ, and PerezHilton.com, tracking about 500 celebrities and awarding one point to a celebrity for each mention of his or her full name.

The pair now devote their time to business development and cultivating the community features of the site, which has “tens of thousands” of registered users, according to Galloway. Banner ads generate revenue for the company (although Galloway isn’t saying how much), along with the fees paid by the “commissioners” of invitation-only “VIP leagues.”

Players earn “trophy points” if they finish a season in first, second, or third place in their league. Members of VIP leagues can convert trophy points into Amazon gift cards, but everyone else plays simply for bragging rights and a position atop the site’s leaderboard.

Among the site’s other attractions are graphical tools that allow users to compare celebrities’ blog scores over time. I will admit to making a graph pitting “Grey’s Anatomy” star Isaiah Washington, now infamous for his allegedly homophobic remarks about fellow star T.R. Knight, against Patrick “McDreamy” Dempsey, who allegedly came to Knight’s defense in a near-fistfight. (Washington’s numbers have sadly overshadowed Dempsey’s for more than six months.)

In August, Eastland Media launched a companion site for Fafarazzi called Dirtlocker, managed by Marc Hedegore from the company’s Cleveland office. The new site completes the fantasy-league circle by giving users the chance to trade on gossip about sports celebrities.

“It’s exactly the same model as Fafarazzi, except that our database is a lot bigger, with about 7,500 athletes tracked on 46 blogs,” says Hedegore, who also tends bar at an undisclosed location near Browns Stadium. “Fantasy sports has a pretty fanatical following—people spend a lot of time researching and analyzing their teams. For the people who are really into that, it’s easy for them to join one of our leagues, because they’ve already got all this sports information at the top of their heads.”

Eastland Media is a highly distributed company, with Todd and Megan Galloway and co-founder Chris Keller in Somerville, Hedegore in Cleveland, and Dirtlocker community manager Jon Sistowicz in Philadelphia. It’s useful to have the company’s center of gravity in a sports-crazy region like Greater Boston, says Galloway. “We’ve met a ton of people, and it’s very beneficial for us to be here.”

So, how long before Eastland launches a fantasy business league, with users bidding against each other for draft picks like Steve Jobs and robots scoring blog mentions on TechCrunch and Xconomy? For now, Galloway is staying coy. “Believe me,” he says, “we’ve thought about all the different ways we could apply this.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The Muddy Charles Pub is MIT’s legendary watering hole. Perched in a corner of the Walker Memorial building looking out over Memorial Drive, it’s bare bones to say the least. Think plain wooden tables, industrial carpet, and a spartan bar off to one side. But the place buzzes with campus news and the entrepreneurial spirit, as students, former students, and outsiders (including folks from Harvard) pop in and out through its doors—as well as through the big windows that run down to the floor. Many an area company or deal has been hatched over pitchers of beer at the Muddy.

Last Friday night was no different. I went there to meet with Dave Danielson, now our newest Xconomist. Dave is a minor Muddy legend. Just finishing his PhD in materials science, he served last year as chair of the Muddy board, on which he still sits. He’s also known around town as Mr. Energy. Four years ago, Dave founded the MIT Energy Club, which has quickly become a powerful catalyst for energy awareness and deal-making. Outgoing with a quick laugh, he pretty much knows anybody and everybody connected with the local energy scene—not just on campus but around the state. As we drank Sam Adams Summer Ale on a warm night, Dave was especially effusive, because he had just been signed to become a senior associate at General Catalyst once he completes his doctorate in November.

It’s a shrewd move by GC, which is known best for its IT deals. These include the travel site Kayak.com and Eons, the portal for the over-50 crowd created by Jeff Taylor of Monster.com fame, where General Catalyst is a partner with Sequoia. GC has recently invested in a handful of energy deals as well—among them Mascoma and Stion. But these have been few and far between—and usually in the B round. Danielson is being tapped to look into earlier-stage opportunities, in both energy and nanotechnology, which relates to his materials science expertise. He is stoked, and the Muddy might be a great place for him to get started. “I think I could do a half-dozen deals right here at the Muddy in the next six months,” he laughs.

Comments | Reprints | Share: