You might think that all of the engineering brainpower in cities like Boston, San Diego, and Seattle is sucked up by high-voltage startups or by giant employers in the software, server, or semiconductor businesses. But proof that there’s plenty of surplus technological creativity in these regions is popping up in odd places like Willoughby & Baltic, a “hackerspace” I visited last month in Somerville, MA.

The group’s workshop—which was located until recently above a Subway sandwich shop in Davis Square and is in the process of moving to a former machine shop in Union Square—is essentially a clubhouse for geeks who like to build stuff in their off time. The “stuff” ranges from robots and other electronic toys to jewelry and interactive art installations—and to build it, members have collected a veritable museum of castoff equipment, from lathes, mills, kilns, and forges to soldering irons and spectrophotometers.

Like more than 50 other hackerspaces in the U.S., Willoughby & Baltic is built around the philosophy that it’s more fun to share tools, equipment, and ideas than to tinker alone in the garage or the basement. That makes it a living example of the “maker” epidemic, which got underway in the San Francisco Bay area roughly five years ago. The movement draws momentum from a burgeoning open-source hardware movement born in Europe, and is infecting new cities at a formidable rate. (Seattle is home to at least three hackerspaces—Hackerbot Labs, the 911 Media Arts Center, and Saturday House— and a group called Hackerspace SD is getting organized in San Diego as well.)

The founder of Willoughby & Baltic, who gave me a tour of the Davis Square workshop and gallery space back in April, is Meredith Garniss. Trained as an artist at Boston’s Northeastern University, Garniss long held various software engineering positions in the desktop publishing industry. But she left her job at digital font maker Bitstream in 2001 to paint, teach, and lately, hack hardware—a pastime she believes is best pursued in groups, where people can teach one another new skills. At any given Willoughby & Baltic gathering, a jewelry maker might end up sitting next to a hydraulics expert, leading to all sorts of crazy projects. “We were thinking about calling the group The Society for Soldering Things to Other Things,” Garniss jokes. “We don’t take any of this too seriously. We just like to have fun and build stuff.”

The hackerspace is actually the third or fourth incarnation of the Willoughby & Baltic brand, which started off as fanciful name for Garniss’s electronic typeface foundry in the mid-1990s, then went dormant for a while, and was then re-applied to the Davis Square garage space that Garniss turned into an art studio after leaving Bitstream. The studio evolved into a community puppet theater; the puppets went robotic; the theater group became the Boston chapter of the international hobbyist group Dorkbot (whose tagline is “People doing strange things with electricity”); and a group of Dorkbot members eventually decided to rent the second-floor space above the neighboring Subway and turn it into a hackerspace.

The Wikipedia definition of “hackerspace,” by the way, is “a real (as opposed to virtual) place where people with common interests, usually in science, technology, or digital or electronic art, can meet, socialize and collaborate.” The emphasis in hackerspaces is definitely not on the kinds of commercializable technologies that we usually cover here at Xconomy. At a recent interactive art exhibition hosted by Microsoft’s Startup Labs in Cambridge as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, for example, one Willoughby & Baltic member showed off a patch of artificial turf that responded to any touch with a growl or a rumble. The piece’s title: “Sod Off!” (You can read more about the Microsoft event in this Boston Globe article by D.C. Denison from May 18, and Wired‘s Dylan Tweney wrote a nice piece about hackerspaces for the magazine’s Gadget Lab blog back in March.)

As someone who long felt stifled by her various software jobs, Garniss has a theory about what attracts people to hackerspaces. “A lot of the people who come here at night or on the weekend went to work at high-tech companies thinking they were going to have a certain level of creativity, and they’ve come to feel over time that their creativity is being squashed,” she says. “But they still need a creative, collaborative environment—so they come here.”

On a typical weekend, a visitor to Willoughby & Baltic might find Garniss leading an “Arduino Bootcamp,” an introduction to the open-source Arduino electronics prototyping platform. A group of hardware hackers in Italy founded the Arduino project in 2005 as a way to … Next Page »

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A standing-room-only crowd gathered yesterday for Xconomy’s Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England, hosted by Microsoft at its gorgeous new New England Research and Development Center (or NERD, as Microsoft’s Reed Sturtevant called it). Google’s Rich Miner, MIT’s Sandy Pentland, and two panels’ worth of mobile entrepreneurs were on hand to share their latest thinking about the best ways for startups to gain and maintain a foothold in the mobile industry.

If there was a single takeaway message from the event, I’d say it was this: It’s a time of great ferment in the mobile industry, with carrier restrictions on the distribution of consumer-oriented mobile applications finally breaking down. But it’s very difficult to build a sustainable business around a single application or a single mobile platform—so companies need to think flexibly about the audiences and platforms they develop for, the amount of capital they really need (and the sources from which they’ll raise it), and the combinations of revenue opportunities they’ll pursue.

Next week we plan to post some video outtakes from the event, but today we’ll round up some of the highlights:

—Xconomist Mark Lowenstein, the managing director at consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem, set the scene with a few statistics and observations. Mobile companies raised $500 million from New England venture investors last year, and have raised $5 billion cumulatively, he noted. The traditional barriers to entry in the mobile industry—the wireless carriers’ traditional protectiveness about giving access to cell phone “decks” or top-level menus to third-party application developers, for example—are falling fast. New England companies, with their longtime focus on good user interface design, are well positioned to take advantage of this change, Lowenstein said.

—Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, said his company has just added the 100 millionth access point to its global database of Wi-Fi network locations, part of its WPS location finding system. He said getting WPS onto the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch platforms was the key moment in Skyhook’s progress—but that, ironically, he dismissed Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ first call about the deal back in 2007 as a prank.

—Jamie Hall, the president of MocoSpace, said the mobile social network has grown to 6 million members, who view 2 billion pages every month. The key to MocoSpace’s success in mobile social networking—a business in which several other companies have dabbled without much success—was circumventing the carriers by doing everything “off-deck,” creating room for constant innovation and upgrades.

—Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile, said that even though Microsoft is the mobile device provisioning company’s sole investor, “If it’s a debate between Microsoft and the customer, the customer wins.” While the company specializes in deploying Windows Mobile devices into enterprises, it also works with other platforms, because customers demand it. And while the fragmentation of mobile technology across dozens of major devices from several large carriers is a bugaboo for most mobile companies, it’s actually what Enterprise Mobile thrives on. “An enterprise does not want a free-for-all,” Rosenthal said. “We [give them] one throat to choke.”

—Dave Grannan, CEO of vlingo, said his company realized early on that the mobile ecosystem wasn’t yet open enough to get vlingo’s mobile speech recognition system out to lots of users without a major strategic partner with existing carrier relationships. That partner turned out to be Yahoo—and while Grannan called landing the deal to get vlingo’s voice-driven interface built into Yahoo’s mobile platform “luck,” he also said it took persistence. It wasn’t until the fourth meeting with Yahoo that vlingo was able to convince the company to take a look at its technology. (And then Yahoo suddenly wanted to buy vlingo—but the startup was “not for sale,” Grannan said.)

—Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper, said there have been 300,000 downloads of his startup’s RunKeeper GPS fitness application for the iPhone 3G, with a surprisingly high percentage of users (he intimated 4 or 5 percent or more) of the free app converting to the paid “RunKeeper Pro” app. That’s creating enough revenue to cover the company’s current burn rate—which is low, because many of the FitnessKeeper team members are being paid in equity and the only full-time employee is Jacobs himself. The trick for FitnessKeeper, Jacobs said, will be to … Next Page »

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Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE), the Woburn, MA-based maker of electronic fonts and text imaging software that went public last summer, announced last night that it’s planning a secondary public offering of 5 million shares of its common stock at $12.00 per share. The 170-employee company, the creator of famous fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial, competes with San Jose, CA-based Adobe Systems and Cambridge, MA-based Bitstream in the market for digital typefaces and software for text rendering on computers.

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The Web has been around for long enough that many online businesses that once seemed revolutionary have begun to look routine, tired, even fundamentally flawed. In many industries, there is an emerging second generation of Web businesses that hope to supplant their pioneering predecessors. Look at online comparison shopping in the financial industry, for example. It’s a sector that has long been dominated by advertising- and commission-driven banking sites like LendingTree. But as we reported on Monday, there’s a new site called MoneyAisle that’s completely ad-free; its founders are out to replace the old regime with a reverse auction system where banks actively bid against one another for customers’ business.

Rather than “Web 2.0″—a term that has acquired a specific meaning having to do with hosted services, browser-based interaction, user-generated content, and social networking—you could call this phenomenon “the Web, Take Two.” And now it’s spreading to job boards. Waltham, MA-based PeopleAhead, which launched to the public yesterday, is taking on Monster.com (NASDAQ: MNST), Yahoo’s HotJobs, Dice, and the other traditional employment websites with a new mix of features that emphasize job seekers’ talents and aspirations over their raw résumé data.

There’s a big whiff of Web 2.0 to the PeopleAhead website, where the main activities involve creating personal profiles, soliciting endorsements, and networking with other job seekers. But more than anything, the site amounts to a repudiation of the Monster.com model, where job seekers toss their résumés in with millions of others, and where employers wind up sifting through hundreds of potential employees who may be technically qualified but aren’t good matches, for a host of reasons that aren’t captured by traditional database searches.

“First and foremost, it’s a career advancement website, not a job board like what you might have come to expect, although we do match people to the right career opportunities,” says PeopleAhead co-founder Tom Chevalier, a recent Babson College MBA graduate. As Chevalier and fellow co-founder and Babson graduate Carlos Laracilla explain it, PeopleAhead’s system is built around the concept of competencies. Members start off by picking the areas where they believe their own skills are most evident: problem-solving, for example, or persistence, enthusiasm, or team-building. Each member can then invite peers, supervisors, teachers, or other mentors to visit their profiles and leave their own input about the areas where they excel (a feature that will be familiar to users of the professional networking site LinkedIn). Potential employers can screen job seekers based on these competencies, and see the external evaluations alongside traditional résumé information such as a person’s educational and work background.

“Without knowing that sort of information, you may find somebody who has the requisite number of years of experience, but maybe they wouldn’t fit what your team requires personality-wise,” says Chevalier. “That’s one aspect of how our matching goes beyond what you’d find in a résumé. It goes into who a professional really is rather than what they’ve written down on paper.” To find out who a person really is, of course, an employer will probably want to meet them in person. But PeopleAhead’s process may at least help companies be more efficient about deciding whom to bring in for interviews.

Laracilla and Chevalier founded PeopleAhead in 2006, raised funding from Boston-area angel investors, and spent the last year and a half designing the website, writing and testing the site’s proprietary matching algorithms, and forming partnerships with New England-area MBA programs. Students from these programs have been helping to beta-test the site, and Laracilla and Chevalier expect they’ll now be one of the main sources feeding new members into the system. With today’s public launch, however, anybody can join the network, and employers can set up their own profiles and start screening job candidates.

It’s the PeopleAhead matching process, called “TrueMatch,” that Laracilla and Chevalier say they’re proudest of. It doesn’t work like the typical searches that employers can run against the databases at Monster.com and other job sites; it’s more reminiscent of what mathematicians call fuzzy logic. “Companies define the profile of an ideal candidate for a certain position—for example, the industries they would like that person to have experience with, the type of education they’ve had, the types of activities they’re involved with, the competencies relevant to the company and the position,” Laracilla explains. “Then we … Next Page »

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