Boston startups should be focusing more on creating strategic partnerships with big companies.

An “if we build it, they will come” mindset appears to dominate the Boston startup scene. Too many startups also rely mostly on a pricing and plans revenue model combined with implementing the latest inside sales and marketing 2.0 tools to “get found” while driving demand. A complementary and proactive approach in targeting big companies for strategic partnerships is needed.

Wake up… Most big companies have realized that their current set of technology providers lack the innovation and speed to deliver new competitive solutions. There are new sets of problems that need to be solved that may not have existed even a few years ago. As a result, new innovation programs and budgets have been established, led by senior executives. Their motivation is to fund pilots with emerging technology providers that most times lead to a much larger transaction and partnership strategy. Interesting areas include mobility, social, analytics, and cloud computing.

Take advantage of these customer-funded opportunities as these dollars may also complement your angel and VC funding efforts. Plus, for those leveraging lean startup principles, incorporating a big company “voice” to validate your product development roadmap may commit them to buy additional products and enhancements in the future.

If big companies are approached correctly, senior executives leading innovation programs will make swift decisions. Unfortunately, there are major challenges I see within the startup community to take advantage of these budgets. These include:

• Little focus on proactively targeting big companies. Also, the startup team and their mentors may not possess the sales skills or experience to effectively connect with and relate to big-company senior executives.

• Boston startups are too focused on the product and technology. Big companies are also evaluating their ability to work and collaborate with the startup team. Chemistry is important to these executives.

• You are not the center of the universe. There may be additional value in extending and leveraging existing ecosystem investments.

What I am describing here is not an outdated sales process where the cost to acquire a customer is high and the sales cycles are very long.

Keep in mind that big companies would rather … Next Page »

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A dark day in Boston is a little darker now. Jerome Rubin, the publishing executive and inventor who co-founded the display company E Ink and helped commercialize the online database that became LexisNexis, died from a stroke on Monday in New York City, according to a report by the Associated Press. He was 86.

Rubin worked at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s, where he helped spin out Massachusetts-based E Ink, the electronic-paper company that makes the display in the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Before that, Rubin, a Harvard University alum trained in physics and law, helped launch an Ohio-based research database for lawyers in 1973. The database search and retrieval system eventually became LexisNexis, specializing in news, legal, and public records information. Harvard Magazine wrote about some of Rubin’s achievements back in 2000.

Rubin lived in Manhattan and is survived by his children, Richard Rubin and Alicia Yamin, according to the AP report.

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A mini-invasion of tech companies hits Boston today. The clock is counting down for 6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas, Xconomy’s forum this afternoon that features one cool tech company from each of the six cities in our network. The legendary computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, kicks things off with the opening keynote.

We have just five tickets left, and if you act before noon, you can avoid the at-the-door premium. The event starts at 1:30 today at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston, right next to South Station, making for an easy commute. So get those last five tickets here.

The great lineup of people and tech companies presenting today includes: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (New York); Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk (San Francisco); Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (Detroit); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego); and Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston).

We also have a few bonus features—a special demo from MIT Media Lab professor Rosalind Picard of some of the technology behind Affectiva, her company that enables computers to understand your emotions. Finally, we’ll have a handful of quick presentations from up-and-coming area startups, and a lot of great networking.

So act quickly—and get those tickets. See you soon.

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Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and behold…the eighth wonder of the world. No, not King Kong, I’m afraid. But how about a computer that can read and interpret human emotions and mental states?

That would be from Affectiva, a Boston-area startup co-founded by Roz Picard, a 20-year veteran of the MIT Media Lab. Picard (see photo, right) is the founder and director of the Media Lab’s Affective Computing research group, and she has done extensive work in computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interfaces, with applications in autism communication, health and wellness, education, marketing, advertising, and other areas.

Picard is speaking at this Thursday’s Xconomy “6×6” event (Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas) in Boston. In advance of her appearance there, I sat down with Picard at Affectiva’s offices this week to get a demo of the company’s technology and to talk a little about the future of emotional and gestural interfaces.

One of the demos involved a computer tracking my facial expressions via webcam (and also my heart rate via blood flow to my face) while I watched a series of TV commercials. Based on indicators like raised eyebrows, smiles, or a furrowed brow (see example, below), the software tried to figure out how engaged, interested, amused, or disturbed I was during the course of each ad. It’s hard not to be self-conscious during all this, but I’m pretty sure the computer concluded: this guy hates all commercials. (And since I haven’t smiled since 1995, we’ll enlist my fellow editor Erin Kutz for the live demo on Thursday.)

Affectiva also will be rolling out a new product on Thursday—one that has applications in finance and healthcare, among other industries—but I’ll let Picard speak for that when the time comes.

Meanwhile, I asked Picard whether the field of affective computing would continue to advance incrementally (like speech recognition, say) or whether it would undergo a breakthrough of some kind. “I think it’s going to make some leaps,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot more happening by indirect measurement—nonverbal [cues] that people don’t really think machines can do. That’s going to really progress.”

To me, Picard’s work exemplifies what truly big ideas are about—for the first 20 years or so, they might be more interesting scientifically than commercially. But once the technology and marketplace gets to a certain point, a viable business can be built around them, even as the science continues to advance. And then who knows what will happen?

We’re looking forward to a fantastic 6×6 program and some great networking this Thursday (you can register here). Hope to see you there.

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This is life’s big question: what should you spend your time on?

If you’re starting a company, you probably want to do something fun that lets you be your own boss and maybe, just maybe, gives you a good shot to strike it rich. If you’re an investor, you want to make money and be part of something that could be really big. But what about building something that will change the world? How do you decide what the right idea is—and then how do you make it work as a business?

Here at Xconomy we’re gearing up for a special forum in Boston on Thursday, Dec. 1, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas.” This is a chance to interact with some of the most sensational and ambitious tech companies in our national network—and to see how they are trying to change the world. We’ve just posted the agenda for the day here, and you can check out the registration details here.

Stephen Wolfram, the software entrepreneur and big-science mind-bender, will set the table with a keynote on what constitutes a breakthrough idea, and how to execute on the business side of things. Wolfram has plenty of world-changing experience as the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. And if he shares with us the few lines of code that underlie the workings of the known universe, I will consider that a bonus.

Then we’ll have featured presentations on specific ideas, businesses, and challenges from six companies across our network: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (representing New York); Nathaniel Borenstein from Mimecast (Detroit); Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston); Adam Goldstein of Hipmunk (San Francisco); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); and Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego).

In between these talks, and a networking break, we’ll have three-minute “burst” presentations from some of the most exciting startups in the Boston area: Nathan Eagle of Jana, Gina Ashe from Krush, Jeff Seibert from Crashlytics, and Karl Wirth from Apptegic.

We’ll also have a special demo from Rosalind Picard of the MIT Media Lab, who will show you technology from her startup, Affectiva, that will be sure to get your attention. The big vision for Affectiva, and Professor Picard’s research, is to develop computers that can recognize and interpret human emotions from cues like facial expressions, blood flow, and other biometrics.

We’re looking forward to an amazing afternoon of big ideas, companies, and personalities. There are still a few tickets left, but they won’t last for long. Hope to see you at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology on Dec. 1.

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New England’s tech and life sciences companies have been inking deals all over the place this past week. First up, the big surprise…

—Cambridge, MA-based Endeca Technologies, an enterprise search and e-commerce company that was founded in 1999, agreed to be acquired by Silicon Valley database and business software giant Oracle. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

—Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures joined a Series A financing round for Cambridge-based Foundation Medicine. The startup, which is developing personalized cancer diagnostics, has now collected a total of $33.5 million in the round.

—Ginger.io, a spinoff of the MIT Media Lab that’s developing software to enable monitoring of patients via their mobile phones, raised $1.7 million in an initial financing round. Silicon Valley-based True Ventures led the deal, which was joined by Kapor Capital, Romulus Capital, and angel investors such as Bill Warner, Walt Winshall, James Joaquin, and Ty Curry.

—Worcester, MA-based energy management firm World Energy Solutions (NASDAQ: XWES) acquired Cromwell, CT-based Northeast Energy Solutions, an energy efficiency firm, for some $4.75 million in cash, stock, a promissory note, and potential earn-outs.

—Natick, MA-based TwinStrata, a data storage and backup company, closed a Series B round worth $8 million. Avalon Ventures led the deal.

—Open source development firm Black Duck Software of Waltham, MA, raised $12 million in a round led by new investor Split Rock Partners.

—Another Waltham firm, Care.com, raised $25 million from New Enterprise Associates, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and others. Care.com is an online portal for finding family caregivers.

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First of all, the name is Ginger.io, not Gingerd. The latter is how the company was incorporated; but the former is its real name.

And real is what Ginger.io is becoming. Since graduating with the most recent class of TechStars Boston startups, the MIT Media Lab spinoff (from professor Sandy Pentland’s research group) has been heads-down working on its product—software that helps healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies monitor the behavior of patients via their mobile phones.

The startup has been busy fundraising too—and it is naming its investors today. Ginger has closed $1.7 million in first-round financing led by Silicon Valley-based True Ventures. Also participating were Kapor Capital (Mitch Kapor’s VC fund), Romulus Capital, and a number of angel investors, including Bill Warner, Walt Winshall, James Joaquin, and Ty Curry. All together, Ginger’s investors and advisors represent a pretty interesting mix of people with experience in big data, healthcare, and mobile software.

Here’s the idea. A mobile phone can provide crucial information about its owner’s activity level, location, and communication patterns—all in real time, more or less (assuming the person opts in). That information could be valuable to drug makers and hospitals looking to track the results of clinical trials, market medications to certain types of patients, or design new therapies for things like diabetes, obesity, or brain disorders. The data alternatives—behavioral self-reports, surveys, and the like—are famously unreliable by themselves. With this in mind, Ginger is not one of the dozens of startups developing consumer apps for tracking one’s own health and wellness (though that’s sort of where the company started). No, this is a business-to-business play.

But here’s the bigger idea. What’s really valuable is not so much the data as the insights and patterns that can be gleaned from that data. If Ginger’s software knows how you behave on a “normal” day, for example, it can figure out when your behavior changes—maybe you’re stuck in bed, or not calling your usual friends—and correlate that with indicators of problems such as doctor visits. If the software tracks a population of patients taking a drug, and some respond in an expected way but others don’t, the pattern might suggest a way to target the drug more effectively.

“If you’re a pharmaceutical company, to know a segment is behaving differently and doing better on that drug, that can help you market that medication,” says Anmol Madan, co-founder of Ginger.io and a Media Lab PhD.

What’s more, the company is harnessing its tools in computer science, machine learning, and data analytics for a much deeper purpose. “It’s about understanding people,” says Frank Moss, the former Media Lab director and software technologist who serves as an advisor to Ginger (he’s also an Xconomist). “I think it’s going to be revolutionary.”

Moss is talking about Ginger’s potential to “discover the principles behind … Next Page »

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As you may or may not know, it’s not just Xconomy’s staff editors who are powering our website with thoughtful reflections on the happenings in each of our city’s high-tech and innovation communities. We have more or less a dream team of innovators in each city who write for our Xconomist Forum, submitting posts on subjects plaguing their fields or assembling around a big news event (for example, the death of a tech icon like Steve Jobs). Once a year in each city, we get together to celebrate that group of inventors, entrepreneurs, (seed, angel, and venture) investors, academics, lawyers, and more.

This year’s Boston-area Xconomist reception, sponsored by Goodwin Procter and BDO (thank you!), was held at the hot new Kendall Square restaurant Catalyst, a great venue for our high-caliber guest list. Among the attendees? Mathematica inventor Stephen Wolfram, Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, Harvard geneticist George Church, retired Vertex Pharmaceuticals CEO Josh Boger, venture capitalist Rich Levandov, and iRobot founders Rod Brooks and Helen Greiner. I could tell you more, but that’d be ruining the fun of flipping through these snapshots.

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	Young guns – Left to right: Rob Go from NextView Ventures; Phil Beauregard and Matt Grace from Objective Logistics.
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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One of the Boston area’s most intriguing tech startups—because of its global reach—has emerged from a fairly quiet period with a new name and a refined mission.

Boston- and San Francisco-based Txteagle, a mobile research and marketing startup focused on developing countries, has rebranded itself as Jana (pronounced “Jah-nuh”). The name is Sanskrit for “people,” and as co-founder and CEO Nathan Eagle explains, it highlights the focus of the young company. It also fits the aesthetic profile of what the team wanted in a name: “It’s short, has two consonants and two vowels, and is easy to recognize and spell,” he says.

Yes, Eagle is a precise kind of guy. Precisely crazy enough to think his startup can change the world by enabling companies to do market research and mobile marketing in nearly 100 developing nations (and counting) via mobile phones. All by compensating consumers for participating by rewarding them with airtime on their mobile subscriber accounts.

This is interesting because, first of all, most brands and ad agencies don’t have good access to detailed data about consumers in emerging economies. “We want to generate data that simply doesn’t exist,” Eagle says. And, second, Jana has a way of reaching a lot of people with what sounds like a pretty compelling offer. “As far as I know, there’s no other company on Earth that has the capability to instantly compensate 2 billion people,” he says.

Where did this company come from? Ten years ago, Eagle (see photo, below) was a graduate student in the wearable computing group at the MIT Media Lab. He convinced his advisor to let him program a Nokia phone to collect data about his behavior and surroundings, instead of strapping on bulky equipment like other students. “So I wouldn’t have to dress up as a computer for the rest of my graduate career,” he quips. “I’ve been hacking on phones ever since.”

He finished his PhD in 2005, and wanted to make an impact on people’s lives through mobile devices. Mobile phone adoption was taking off fast in Africa, so Eagle took a faculty position at MIT but arranged to live in Kenya, where he taught mobile-app development at the University of Nairobi.

That led to a number of interesting projects. One was an app to enable rural nurses to send text messages about the local blood supply levels in their hospitals, so that centralized blood banks could see where blood was needed. (Previously this was done by having people drive from hospital to hospital, with long delays in information flow.) The first week of the release went well, but in the second week, about half the nurses stopped texting. By the end of the month, all the texting had stopped.

“It failed simply because of lack of insight on my part,” Eagle says. “We were asking these rural nurses to send a text message every day with the data. That was like asking them to take a pay cut. The price of a text message was a surprising fraction of their day’s wage.”

So he went back to the drawing board. Eagle’s work was around mobile phones, but it was also around “big data,” he says. “I was working with dozens of mobile operators in East Africa, … Next Page »

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Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Ahem.

[A giant “6x6” fills the screen.]

Macho narrator voice:
Star Wars had The Empire Strikes Back (Vader: “I am your father”)
The Godfather had The Godfather Part II (Pacino: “You broke my heart”)
Mad Max had The Road Warrior…well, you get the idea.

Now Xconomy presents 6×6, the long-awaited sequel to its riveting, change-the-world program from last December, 5×5. (It was “5×5” because we weren’t in New York City yet. Now we are.)

Yes, for the second straight year, Xconomy has canvassed its national network to find the most original, sensational, and transformative tech ideas out there—across software, hardware, digital media, social technologies, robotics, and more. We are inviting a select few speakers to Boston for an afternoon of mind-bending presentations and business networking.

It’s all taking place on the afternoon of Thursday, December 1, from 1:30-5:30 pm, at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston. One featured speaker will be on hand from each of our six cities: Boston, New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego. We hope “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” will be a rallying point for the Boston tech community to get together and discuss the future of their fields with our out-of-town guests.

The concept is to highlight some of the BIGGEST tech ideas out there—as well as the nuts and bolts of how founders are building successful businesses around these ideas. This event is about truly changing the world, so we’ve asked everyone to please check their daily deals, social network plug-ins, and run-of-the-mill mobile apps at the door.

Who better to set the table than Stephen Wolfram? We’ve invited the renowned scientist, inventor, and business leader to give the opening keynote. Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. So he knows a little bit about changing the world from a software, computing, and business perspective. Oh, and he also spent 10-plus years working to reinvent the entire landscape of modern scientific thought with his book project, A New Kind of Science. I’ll stop there, but you can read an interview I did with Wolfram around the beginning of last year. (As for what he’ll talk about on Dec. 1, it’s safe to say I have no freaking idea—but I’ll keep you posted.)

Here’s a quick rundown on who’s representing our six cities at 6×6:

—From the hometown of Boston, we have Dave Icke, the CEO of Cambridge-based MC10, a pioneer in developing flexible electronics and sensors for consumer, healthcare, and energy markets.

—New York City is sending Jason Baptiste, the CEO of OnSwipe, a scrappy young startup that is trying to invent the future of media through a new tablet publishing platform.

—Representing Detroit is Nathaniel Borenstein, the Chief Scientist of Mimecast, an e-mail management company headquartered in the U.K. Borenstein, who’s based in Michigan, is one of the fathers of modern e-mail systems, and will talk about the future of communication in the cloud.

—From San Francisco comes Adam Goldstein, the CEO of Hipmunk, an online travel search company that’s been making waves with its novel visual interface for finding flights and hotels.

—Seattle will be repped by Kabir Shahani, the CEO of Appature, a fast-growing startup specializing in social and relationship marketing technologies for the healthcare industry.

—And from the sunny climes of San Diego comes Bill Walker, Chief of Global Hawk Business Development at Northrop Grumman, the aerospace and defense tech giant. Walker will talk about high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

We also have a few intriguing “burst” bonus talks to highlight, from some of the most exciting startups around Boston. They will include Affectiva (CEO Dave Berman), an MIT Media Lab spinout that’s commercializing software to make your computer or smartphone understand your emotional state (talk about a big idea); Krush (CEO Gina Ashe), an ambitious startup focused on social commerce and marketing for apparel and lifestyle brands; and GrabCAD (CEO Hardi Meybaum), a company that’s connecting engineers with people who need stuff built, via an online community and marketplace.

We are really looking forward to 6×6, and we hope to see you there on Dec. 1. You can register at the special super saver rate here.

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A Boston-area tech startup with a pretty bold vision is announcing its expansion to Silicon Valley today. Waltham, MA-based Affectiva, an MIT Media Lab spinout, is opening an office in Santa Clara, CA, where its CEO Dave Berman is based, along with other key members of the team.

Affectiva, which has about 25 employees (most of them in Waltham), is looking to hire 15 people in Santa Clara, mostly in sales, marketing, and business development, Berman says. He’s a former WebEx veteran, and in fact Affectiva’s new office sits right across from his former company, which is now part of Cisco Systems.

“I’ve been commuting [to Boston] for two years,” Berman says.

Affectiva, which started in 2009, uses computer vision and machine learning software to interpret people’s facial expressions, gestures, heart rate, and other physiological responses. The idea is to be able to track and understand consumers’ emotions as they do things like watch video ads, play computer games, or interact with Web or mobile content. The software works in conjunction with a webcam and/or biometric sensors, like a wristband that monitors temperature, motion, and sweat—and consumers have to opt in to all of that, of course.

The company’s technology comes from the Media Lab’s “affective computing” research group, led by professor Roz Picard. Picard and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby are founders of the startup, which most recently raised $5.7 million in a Series B funding round led by Kantar (part of communications firm WPP) and Myrian Capital. “I wanted something that was next-gen, a software-as-a-service model, a huge opportunity. And something pretty early,” says Berman about what attracted him to work at Affectiva. “I met Roz and Rana and they blew me away. This is going to be everywhere.”

Talking to Berman, I still felt like I was in a sci-fi movie, though. I’ve followed Picard’s research over the years—including recent work with el Kaliouby on autism-related technologies—but I don’t have an intuitive feel for how well a computer can classify a person’s emotions based on their expressions. (I would guess not all that well, though it’s improving.)

Berman walked me through a demo that was eye-opening. The company had volunteers watch a series of TV commercials—standard baby-product stuff, for instance—while a webcam captured their facial expressions. Affectiva’s software identifies key movements and facial markers—regions around the eyes, lips, and more—and infers positive and negative reactions during the course of each ad. What’s more, it tries to distinguish between different mental states, such as frustration, confusion, excitement, contentment, concentrating, interested, disagreement, and unsure. (Another Affectiva technology that is in the early stages of development involves monitoring heart rate based on webcam images that can be analyzed to track the blood flow to a person’s face.)

The business idea is to “send real-time insights back to the marketer,” Berman says, and to provide a sample pool of “thousands of [consumers] in seconds.” On the advertising front, the company is already making money. Its customers include Disney Media, Millward Brown, IPG, and some 150 universities and nonprofits on the research side. But you can also imagine a much wider range of applications, if enough people opt in to the technology—which Berman says could help make “content more relevant to them.”

Imagine retail kiosks that react to customers’ expressions as they browse products by trying to show them things they like, he says. Or websites and smartphones that react to people in real time as they interact with content, play video games, take online education courses, or watch presidential debates. It’s all part of the big vision of computers that understand their users’ emotional states—something that’s been talked about for decades, but is only starting to see the commercial light of day now.

“It’s a big business if we do this right,” Berman says.

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Deb Roy doesn’t strike me as a Jersey Shore kind of guy. Yet he can tell me exactly what viewers are saying about the estimable Deena Cortese during any episode, or how many people are annoyed by Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and are tweeting about him (no, I haven’t been—too busy getting my GTL).

I’ll spare you the sordid details, but Bluefin Labs won’t. The Cambridge, MA-based tech company, which Roy co-founded in 2008, is all about understanding social-media conversations around TV programs and ads. Not just what’s being said and the sentiment behind it—as many other companies are tracking in various fields—but also the precise demographics of who’s saying it, what else they’re saying (and watching), and how their profile and comments are correlated with other people and programs, in an aggregate sense.

Bluefin Labs has gotten its share of press for its technology approach. But the company seems to be coming into its own as a business, and it has been garnering interest from TV network executives and big brand marketers as of late. So I sat down with Roy, Bluefin’s CEO, to learn more about the company’s history and approach.

Roy is a professor on leave from the MIT Media Lab. He’s an expert in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining, among other things. His company, which now has north of 30 employees, has deep computer-science research in its DNA (for better or worse). Based largely on its technology and team, it has raised more than $7 million from Redpoint Ventures, Acacia Woods Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and other investors.

My first order of business: where did the name come from? Well, the story of Bluefin Labs (not to be confused with Bluefin Robotics, another MIT startup) goes back to Roy’s research at the Media Lab, where he has been a faculty member since 2000.

As he puts it, his research program was “built on understanding the relationship between words and context.” (Roy is known for having recorded a quarter-million hours of video of his young son’s early life, in part to understand how a computer might learn human language.) Around 2007, a PhD student of Roy’s, Michael Fleischman, was working on a project to analyze video footage of baseball games and audio of announcers talking about the games—a convenient (and fun) database for associating words and context. Conceptually, the goal was to teach a machine to understand what a “fly ball” or “home run” looks like, for applications such as video search.

A program director at the National Science Foundation happened to see an article about the baseball research. He called Roy and suggested he apply for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. Roy had no business experience—it was a “part of my brain I didn’t know existed,” he says—but he and Fleischman (who “has entrepreneurial blood running through his veins,” Roy says) wrote up a proposal. And in 2008, they were awarded a $100,000 SBIR grant. They had 48 hours to pick a name for their company, so they named it after a sushi bar in Porter Square (Blue Fin) where they had dinner. The name stuck.

Bluefin Labs started out by analyzing other types of sports programs, like football. Social media was taking off, so Roy and company ran a test with the National Football League to track what people … Next Page »

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Here in Boston, September 1st brings about quite a bit of change: students migrating back into town, moving trucks and furniture in the streets, and street cleaners around my office (all cutting down on parking options, sorry to say).

We’ve weathered Tropical Storm Irene and a roller-coaster stock market, felt the mild rumblings of an East Coast earthquake (OK, most of us here didn’t), and are waiting to see how the Red Sox-Yankees series plays out tonight. And football season. Did I mention football season?

It’s also a time of change and opportunity in the tech-business community, as we look forward to a high season of events and news. Here are some quick hits:

—Joi Ito has officially started as the new director of the MIT Media Lab (he succeeds Frank Moss). In a blog post, Ito writes, “The awesome space that the Lab lives in, and the somewhat tricky issues around IP and confidentiality, have kept a lot of the great things going on at the Lab out of the public view. I’d really like to have the Media Lab be more involved in the conversation that is the global Internet, and to invite everyone to participate in what we do.”

—CSN Stores is now officially Wayfair.com. No surprise there, as the Boston e-retailer (think Amazon for the home) has rebranded its 200-plus sites under a unified name. Wayfair, which has long been profitable, recently raised its first round of outside funding, and it was a doozy: $165 million from Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capital. It sounds like a lot of the money will go towards marketing and building the new brand.

—A number of Boston-area companies are hiring up a storm in a seriously competitive job market. HubSpot is among the usual suspects, coming off its recent acquisitions of Performable and Oneforty. The company is 285 employees going on 2,085. (We’ll be keeping an eye on how it manages its growth and integrations.) Other firms looking to hire include Gemvara, PeerTransfer, and a bunch of TechStars Boston companies—plus giants like Verizon and Pfizer (both are setting up R&D beachheads in the Boston area). I’m guessing Google and ITA Software aren’t exactly sitting still in Kendall Square either.

—While on the topic of Kendall Square tech icons, I should mention that Akamai has formed a partnership with fellow Cambridge startup Happy Cloud to speed up software downloads via Akamai’s content delivery network—in particular, downloads of high-quality PC games. Happy Cloud came out of beta with its on-demand game store in July.

—In the “dead” category, consider U.S. solar panel startups. This week’s news about Solyndra, the Fremont, CA-based company that said it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, is another nail in the coffin. Solyndra raised nearly $1 billion in private equity financing (and borrowed $500 million-plus from the U.S. Department of Energy), making it one of the largest failures in venture capital history. Solyndra was backed in part by Boston and Silicon Valley-based RockPort Capital and a number of other firms, including Madrone Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.

The news comes on the heels of Evergreen Solar’s bankruptcy—which Black Coral Capital’s Rob Day says isn’t the end of the story for the Marlboro, MA-based firm. And last week’s bankruptcy filing by Intel-backed SpectraWatt, in upstate New York. The broader consensus seems to be that U.S. solar investors didn’t look out far enough on the cost curve and didn’t have deep enough pockets to keep supporting companies trying to compete with cheaper solar overseas. There are still big opportunities to innovate in solar, of course, but the investor climate is looking pretty dour.

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MIT is looking to throw a party this September, but it’s not just all fun and games (more on that later). The innovation community has already been buzzing a bit about this one, called t=0.

The idea for the festival is “to encourage students to start something that is big and world changing,” says Dharmishta Rood, the festival co-director.

Now, I was never under the impression that MIT students had much trouble doing that as it is, but the aim is to get students plugged into the opportunities for entrepreneurship at MIT as early as possible in their academic careers, say Rood and festival co-director Elliot Cohen.

There’s really no shortage of different industry conferences and startup-focused events throughout MIT and Cambridge, but t=0—which starts the evening of Friday, September 16, and concludes the evening of Sunday, September 18—is looking to break the mold.

“We’re definitely going for a real true festival feel,” says Rood.

For one thing, rather than using the businessy term “keynoters” to describe Lotus Development and Electronic Frontier Foundation founder Mitch Kapor (who is kicking off the event) and TechStars and Foundry Group co-founder Brad Feld (who’s wrapping it up via Skype on Sunday), t=0 is just referring to them as opening and closing “artists.” There’s also going to be a bouncy house—yes, like what you see at carnivals. And you can expect to see “a lot more hands-on doing and making than at other types of events like conferences,” says Rood.

T=0 is largely targeted at students and is free for the MIT student body. MIT students can each invite a person of their choice to get a $20 ticket and some non-MIT students can also attend for $20 tickets each. There will also be a limited number of tickets available for companies to purchase (e-mail conference organizers for those). The aim is to have between 1,000 and 1,200 attendees floating in and out over the weekend and to attract students from across different schools within the university. T=0—an engineering term usually used to signify the time at the beginning of experiment—is used as the event name to encourage students to get involved in entrepreneurship at the beginning of their MIT careers—or at least the beginning of 2011.

” We want to create opportunities for students of different disciplines to interact with each other in different ways,” says Cohen. “We want to make it an event with something genuinely interesting and unique for everyone.”

The three main elements of the festival are the “artists”(speakers like Kapor, Feld, and a couple dozen more artists, a “maker space” for rapid prototyping workshops (in areas from software to physical products), and a weekend-long hackathon across different disciplines. Saturday night will also feature demos by MIT companies that are already underway.

Other speakers include Locately co-founder and CTO Drew Volpe, Frederic Lalonde (an Expedia veteran now CEO of travel startup Hopper), Apricot Capital founding partner Jennifer Lum, Catharine Havasi of the MIT Media Lab, Box.net engineering manager Jeff Seibert, HubSpot CEO and founder Brian Halligan, and Eric Paley of Founder Collective. An exact schedule of formats and talks isn’t yet available, but speakers have been given two requirements for their talks: it has to be “extremely energetic and exactly what they would want to communicate to the students,” says Cohen.

Most of the festivities will take place on campus at MIT’s Zesiger Center, whose auditorium will be “radically transformed,” Cohen says. Organizations like the MIT $100K, Artisan’s Asylum, Sprout, Skillshare, the Deshpande Center, and Venture Café are partnering with the MIT students in putting together and promoting the event.

T=0 is being held in September in order to get students excited early on in the academic year. But there’s a bit more to it. Greg mentioned in his first piece on t=0 that Kendall’s Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame is slated to launch that weekend. Cohen tells me there was an aim to coordinate the two events.

“We wanted to be able to create a collection of entrepreneurially related events at the same time,” he says.

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Waltham, MA-based Affectiva, an MIT Media Lab spinout, said today it has raised $5.7 million in Series B financing led by Kantar (WPP) and Myrian Capital. The company says it will use the money to develop and market its various software products for emotion recognition. Its technology includes computer vision and machine learning algorithms that estimate emotional states based on facial expressions (via webcam), as well as biometric sensors and software that track things like excitement, engagement, and anxiety. Affectiva was founded in 2009 by MIT scientists Roz Picard and Rana el Kaliouby; the company is led by CEO Dave Berman.

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Xconomy editor Gregory Huang declared official recess for the heavy events season in Boston’s technology and startup communities. After a week that included WebInno, TechStars Demo Day, Angel Bootcamp, and an awesome all-day innovation forum, I’m not objecting.

But we don’t want you to forget about this year’s installment of XSITE: The Xconomy Summit on Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship, (the aforementioned forum) held at Babson College last week. Lucky for you, we have a three-and-a-half minute long video that should be able to hold you over until our next big event, which you can expect once the temperatures start cooling off. This video comes on top of the photo gallery we put out Tuesday.

As a refresher,  XSITE 2011 looked at what we’ve dubbed The Entrepreneurship Era, through the lens of speakers like Sycamore Networks founder and A123 Systems chairman Desh Deshpande, Intellectual Ventures’ Edward Jung, Pattie Maes of the MIT Media Lab, Gilt Groupe’s Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, and TripAdvisor founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer. There were also crops of executives of IT, healthtech, and cleantech companies, entrepreneurs who’ve graduated from incubator programs, venture capitalists, and a smattering of people with suggestions or complaints for the innovation ecosystem.

Sounds great, right? Bummed if you weren’t there? Well, lucky for you, this video offers snippets of the talks by Deshpande, Wilkis Wilson, Maes, Jung, and a ranter (can you guess which one he is?), as well as some off-stage interviews.

The video also gives a great snapshot of the diverse audience we drew, of investors, academics, students, consultants, accountants, and entrepreneurs working on startups in the Web, IT, mobile, biotech, and education spaces and more.

Speaking of startups, this video was put together by Pixability. The Cambridge, MA-based company helps businesses without video-editing staffers (Xconomy, for example), put together quality promotional videos. They send you the Flip cameras, you gather the clips and send it back to them, and voila! OK, it might be a little more work than that on their end. Either way, check out the resulting product below or here.

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Ladies and gentlemen, after last week I hereby declare the end of high season for tech events in Boston. We’ve had our celebrations, drunk our grain, and talked our heads off. Now, before we start getting some things done around here, let’s reflect just a little more.

The following took place during a 24-hour period last week:

—Coolio performed at the DartBoston/TechStars Demo Day party.

—The Boston Bruins beat the favored Vancouver Canucks in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals for their first title since 1972.

—Fashion guru Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt Groupe, shared the stage with me at our XSITE 2011 conference at Babson College (photo gallery here).

I’m not sure which of these pairings was least likely—fashion and I have rarely shared the same sentence—but the fact that all three happened in the span of a day suggests Armageddon is upon us. And, given the collective lack of sleep in this region (or at least this office) during that time, I will refer to it as Hell Week—after the Navy SEAL training where candidates are pushed to their limit, sleep less than four hours over 5.5 days, and emerge on the other side stronger than they thought they could be. I mean it in a good way, really.

All of this calls for a retrospective of highlights I’m able to remember through the haze of last week. Let’s get right to it:

1. I remember TechStars Demo Day kicking off with “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys blasting from the speakers of the Royale nightclub—and all the startup teams joining managing director Katie Rae on stage, clapping, wearing a mix of company T-shirts, camouflage tuxedo suits, and other hipster items.

2. I remember a lot of raucous whooping and cheering for the startups (before, after, and sometimes during their pitches), and intro music for each speaker. A bit over the top, but I understand the need to build excitement. One investor called the format distracting, but he was in the minority.

3. I remember a mix of presentation styles, which was nice—from “here’s my life story” to “let’s get right to the business,” from laid-back to in-your-face. Also I remember Walt Doyle from Where (now PayPal) looking like a veteran stand-up comic as he introduced the first TechStars startup, EverTrue.

4. I remember angel investor Bill Warner introducing Ginger.io’s Anmol Madan by saying he was “fearless.” Case in point: some of Madan’s research work at the MIT Media Lab was on “trying to understand women with a computer.”

5. I remember lots more financing being announced by lots more companies than usual over the past couple of years (see this updated list of TechStars Boston financings for the current class). Perhaps Y Combinator’s $150K guaranteed investment for graduates of the program is not so big an advantage anymore.

6. I remember Hardi Meybaum of GrabCAD saying he likes Boston because … Next Page »

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Incubator, schmincubator. The innovation community has had its fill of incubators and accelerators, hasn’t it? Well, this one is a little different.

As echoes of Commencement speeches die down around town, it’s fitting that the 12-week startup bootcamp known as TechStars Boston is graduating its newest class of companies tomorrow. What’s interesting about this group—compared with the two previous Boston classes, and indeed, other TechStars classes from Boulder, Seattle, and New York—might be its diversity across industry and geography, and its potential to bring fresh talent to the area.

The 12 companies presenting to investors and media at tomorrow’s Demo Day in Boston range in sector from mobile/social gaming (The Tap Lab), online promotions (Promoboxx), and alumni networking (EverTrue), to health and wellness (Ginger.io) and medical devices (Strohl Medical). Their founders come from Israel (Senexx), England (Memrise), and Estonia (GrabCAD, which just announced a seed-financing round); as well as Wisconsin (Student Spill), Tennessee (Help Scout), Texas (Kinvey), and the Boston area (the rest). I’m hearing that several of the teams from outside are planning to stay local, which should help Boston’s talent pool.

The group’s diversity is notable because tech incubators tend to draw most of their talent from founders who are already based locally—and they tend to focus on Web and social/mobile software to the exclusion of other fields like healthcare or hardware. There is still plenty of Web and mobile in this year’s crop, but its variety of startups stands out for a small incubator.

As does the group’s camaraderie, if you listen to the program’s leader. “The amount of support and help they’ve given each other, that’s really been fun for me to watch,” says Katie Rae, managing director of TechStars Boston. She calls the group “stunningly close.”

The narrative arc of a TechStars company is a classic hero’s journey—complete with a call to action, meetings with mentors, a series of tests and conflicts, and a resolution and reward. Yet this year’s companies did not enter the program as a wide-eyed or naïve bunch.

“We were skeptical about incubator programs. There’s a ton of them popping up everywhere,” says Karan Singh, co-founder of Ginger.io, which develops software for tracking people’s health and wellness by interpreting communication and movement patterns gleaned from their mobile phones. The algorithms are based on research done at the MIT Media Lab. While Ginger was already in Boston prior to TechStars (at Dogpatch Labs), Singh, an MIT Sloan MBA, is another example of imported talent—he came from the Bay Area after graduating from UC Berkeley.

Partly through TechStars, Singh says, he has learned that the key to building a business … Next Page »

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We are getting more and more excited about XSITE 2011—the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, our annual full-day innovation conference set to take place on June 16 at Babson College.

We began announcing keynoters and other featured speakers several weeks ago, and the list has been building—to more than 40 speakers. They run from legendary serial entrepreneur and super angel Desh Deshpande to Gilt Groupe co-founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson to Edward Jung, former software architect of Microsoft and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures—to participants in featured sessions such as our annual Startup Xpo, where 12 young startups vie for audience votes.

Now, although we have a few small holes to fill in, we are releasing the full agenda, so you can see how the day will play out, and begin to consider what breakouts you will attend, and maybe where you will come out on our highly interactive session, Do You Really Need an Incubator?, where a quintet of entrepreneurs will debate this key question under the humorous and insightful moderation of Lead Dog Ventures’ John Landry.

The theme of this year’s XSITE is The Entrepreneurship Era, paying tribute to the newfound attention entrepreneurship is getting from the White House to college campuses. Who better to kick this off than serial entrepreneur and super angel Desh Deshpande, who has not only been a prime driver of innovation here in New England, but in his native India as well. Desh recently sent in the title of his talk: Entrepreneurship Driven by Technological and Social Innovation.

You can peruse the lineup yourself. We have one additional keynoter we hope to announce soon, and we will also be revealing the identities of the 12 Xpo companies next week. But here is the rest of the agenda, including the breakouts.

Get your tickets now—and take advantage of our saver registration rate.

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It was high society meets tech entrepreneurship last night. The setting: Bob Metcalfe’s townhouse in the Back Bay. The occasion: an annual reception and dinner before the finale of the MIT $100K Business Plan Contest, which takes place tonight at Kresge Auditorium. The players: all the finalists and event organizers, plus a few venture capitalists from Polaris Venture Partners, and other guests.

This year’s gathering marked the end of an era. That’s because, as you probably know, Metcalfe the VC and inventor—that’s Professor Metcalfe now—has moved to Texas as a faculty member at UT Austin and will probably sell his Beacon Street home. Which raises the question of where this stellar event will take place in future years. But let’s not worry about that just yet.

Metcalfe, dressed fashionably in a jacket, tie, and sneakers, greeted each guest at the door, and posed for pictures with $100K finalists and organizers (including Kourosh Kaghazian) throughout the evening. As an aside, one finalist said to me, “How do you ‘invent’ the Ethernet? Do you just decide one day you’re going to do it?” (I had to admit it was a good question.)

Each of the six teams gave a quick pitch from the staircase above the first-floor landing. As usual, it was an impressive array of businesses spanning high-tech, social tech, life sciences, cleantech, and energy.

William Sanchez from CoolChip Technologies (which won the $200K MIT Clean Energy Prize earlier this week) talked about developing more efficient heat sinks to save energy in data centers. David Jia from Upkast described his company’s virtual file system for managing your data from Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, work drives, laptop, and personal devices, all on a unified Web interface. Lindsay Stradley and David Auerbach told the story of Sanergy, which is building low-cost toilets and sanitation systems, starting in Kenya, to collect waste and convert it to fertilizer and electricity.

Auerbach had the sound bite of the night: “Join us as we turn shit into gold.”

Next up, Anand Dass talked about Green Logistics (winner of the MIT Elevator Pitch Contest last fall), which plans to make special air-shipping containers that are lighter than conventional containers and collapsible, so as to save a bundle on jet fuel. Matt Hirsch and Vikram Anreddy introduced Sensactive, which is designing a 3-D gesture interface for mobile devices. (Best application: pulling the slingshot out of the screen in Angry Birds.) And Heather Kline from Zinaura Pharmaceuticals talked about her company’s drug candidate for epilepsy and pain treatment, which she says targets new seizure pathways without causing toxicity, addiction, sedation, or cognitive impairment.

Whew, that’s a very wide-ranging set of ideas. But over drinks and dinner, I got to know … Next Page »

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