Finland’s Playmysong said in a press release it raised a seed round, $350,000 according to a spokesman, led by startup accelerator Lifeline Ventures and opened a New York office this month. The company plans to also set up shop in San Francisco in February. Playmysong’s Apple iOS and Web app lets users request songs to play at participating bars, nightclubs, hotels, and cafés, and simultaneously checks in their locations via Facebook and Twitter. The venues let the app’s users connect over WiFi or 3G wireless with the in-house iTunes playlists to make their choices.

Playmysong charges venues for premium services, which include the option to send messages with discount deals to users of the app after they request songs. Playmysong says its New York office will handle business development and marketing in the region.

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There, sitting about 10 feet in front of me, was the ninth most powerful person in the world, according to Forbes.

Dressed in his signature t-shirt and jeans, you wouldn’t be able to tell Mark Zuckerberg apart from a random college student outside the lecture hall. As he took his seat and began speaking about the technical challenges he encountered at Facebook, the fun he had during his (short) time at Harvard, and his enthusiasm for recruiting people to join the company, I could tell he was at ease in front of this crowd of hand-picked computer science and engineering students. He even cracked programming jokes: “My roommate decided to learn how to program and bought a book about Perl. Who writes anything in Perl?” Mark laughed. The audience laughed. It was a truly inspiring homecoming for Harvard’s most recent entrepreneurial success.

His talk was infused with anecdotes about his time at Harvard. Mark originally thought he would be a Classics major before he decided to major in computer science. Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s technical co-founder, learned how to program on the fly, having only taken the introductory computer science course at Harvard. He even used to sit in the quintessential Harvard pizza place, Pinocchio’s, to discuss the technology world with his friends.

Harvard today has support for entrepreneurs that Mark could never have imagined as a student back in 2004. The new Harvard Innovation Lab is bound to be where the next Facebook prospers, and students today mentor each other and forge connections like never before. (My own mentors, Peter Boyce ’13 and Andrew Rosenthal HBS ’12 probably know all of the Boston tech ecosystem between them.) Students simply have the resources to start the companies they want. Add that to the burgeoning Boston startup community, and you have an environment that even Mark admits would have kept him in Boston.

The entire experience was surreal for everybody in the room. For many people, including myself, Mark Zuckerberg was the reason we came to Harvard. The promise of being the next Zuckerberg or Gates was often too alluring to turn down. Having heard from many of my friends who also attended the talk, the general feeling is that Harvard will now have a second uptick in startup fever, after an initial excitement following the release of The Social Network.

Hamed, Zuckerberg, and Tivli founders Nicholas Krasney and Ho Tuan at the Harvard Innovation Lab

The irony is that part of Mark’s motivation to drop out came from a visit that Bill Gates made to Harvard when Mark was still a student here. “The advice Bill gave me when he came to Harvard was to take time off and build something,” he said. While Mark’s talk was billed as a recruiting talk, there was an undercurrent of the same advice: join us at Facebook for an amazing career, but don’t be afraid to make something cool on your own and run with it.

At the end of his talk, Mark made his way to the Harvard Innovation Lab for a surprise visit. He walked around the building with i-Lab Director Gordon Jones and i-Lab coordinator Neal Doyle, observing the huge new space that will foster innovation across Harvard University and the Boston community as a whole. He watched as Tivli founders Nicholas Krasney and Ho Tuan demoed their live TV streaming startup, built completely at Harvard.

“Wow,” Mark said. “This is actually pretty cool.”

It was a unique moment of one generation of entrepreneurs fostering and encouraging the next generation of startup founders. Indeed, the next Mark Zuckerberg may very well have been in the room Monday. Let’s just hope they don’t code their idea in Perl.

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A Boston-area security tech company and the University of Michigan are involved in one of the most ambitious—and potentially controversial—transportation projects of our time. It could have major impact on federal legislation, and almost everyone you know.

Picture this: You’re driving in your car, approaching an intersection. Maybe you’re speeding a little, going 40 mph in a 35 zone, say. Unbeknownst to you, another driver is racing down the cross street and is about to run a red light (probably texting or something). This could spell disaster. But instead, your car picks up a wireless signal from the other vehicle. A beeping sound or flashing light on your dashboard alerts you to slow down, so you hit the brakes. Disaster averted.

Now let’s take it a step further. Maybe the alert is hooked into your car’s control system, so if you don’t put on the brakes, your car does it automatically. And maybe that’s fine with you. But you might be a little worried about giving up that kind of control in life-and-death situations. After all, computers get hacked and software crashes. Not to mention, you might not want your car broadcasting its speed and location out there for all to see (especially not the cops, since you were speeding).

This scenario isn’t the future. It’s happening already—at least the driver-alert part. In six cities around the U.S., trials of about 100 drivers each are underway to see how people react to in-car alerts (such as collision warnings, do not pass, and vehicle stopped ahead). But the next step is bigger. In Ann Arbor, MI, some 3,000 cars will be equipped with onboard wireless devices for communicating with each other and signaling to drivers when there’s an imminent hazard. This 12-month pilot study, which was announced recently and starts next August, is being led by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) through a $14.9 million contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The state of Michigan has been heavily involved as well.

The goal of the federal initiative is, ultimately, to save lives. In the U.S., auto accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34; more than 30,000 people are killed on the nation’s roadways each year. The hope is that with new early-warning systems in place, a sizable fraction of would-be victims could be saved—some say 80 percent of non-alcohol-related cases—especially when high speed is involved.

The idea of wirelessly connected cars isn’t new, of course. The field of vehicle telematics has been around for years, with applications in fleet management, tracking, and safety. But advances in GPS location technologies, wireless communications, sensors, hardware, and algorithms are enabling smarter, better-connected vehicles to be tested on a bigger scale. And recent breakthroughs such as autonomous road-racing vehicles and Google’s self-driving car are starting to propel the technology into the mainstream.

Nevertheless, the Michigan study raises some serious real-world concerns. “This is a massive system with tremendous security and privacy implications,” says Ed Adams, the chief executive of Security Innovation in Wilmington, MA. And that’s exactly where his software security firm comes in.

Security Innovation developed the mobile software being used in the U-M study to … Next Page »

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There’s something about Estonia. Maybe it’s the Skype phenomenon—the Estonian-born company (now part of Microsoft) certainly helped create a strong culture of engineering there. But the Baltic nation of 1.4 million seems to have a greater concentration of engineers and technical talent than almost anyplace else.

That’s probably an exaggeration, but at least one recent Boston-area company hails from there—GrabCAD, a nine-person startup that graduated from the TechStars Boston incubator program in June. If all goes well, the company, which splits its staff between Cambridge, MA, and Tallinn (the Estonian capital), will do its part to advance a traditional strength of the local tech scene. That would be computer-aided design, or CAD software, the means by which most technical components we take for granted are designed and built—and the basis of iconic companies like Parametric Technology (PTC), SolidWorks/Dassault Systèmes, and Autodesk.

GrabCAD has built an online community and marketplace that connects mechanical engineers with people and companies who need stuff built—everything from auto parts and motorcycles to custom furniture, toys, and mobile devices. The startup provides a Facebook-style feed where users can see other engineers coming online, uploading their designs, and looking for business. That also means the company is accumulating a large library of CAD models and tutorials that engineers and companies can use as a resource, says co-founder and CEO Hardi Meybaum.

Last week, GrabCAD unveiled a new dimension to its offerings. It is letting companies host their own design contests to take on specific engineering challenges, such as building a new ventilation system for a luxury yacht or designing a new kind of electrical “superbike.” Engineers upload their designs in response, and the companies choose the winners and award them cash prizes.

Meybaum, 29, and his co-founder Indrek Narusk—they went to Tallinn University of Technology together—started working on a product development company back in 2007. They got some customers, but they found running the business took too much of their creative time.

Around 2009, when GrabCAD started working on its current idea, the founders “didn’t meet anyone who said it’s going to work,” Meybaum says. People thought (and still think) the company would get besieged by orders for impossibly complex designs like rockets, for example. But in fact its first order … Next Page »

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Imagine a world where you can point your phone at the people you’re interested in talking to, and a message magically appears on their phones, regardless of whether you’ve ever spoken to them before or actually have their digits in your possession. (Heaven forbid you actually talk to them face to face.)

Now, imagine there’s an app for that. And it’s not just a flicker in some developer’s eye, but is live and approved on the Apple iTunes App Store. Thanks to Portsmouth, NH-based PoKos Communications.

Timo Platt, CEO and founder of PoKos, touts the mobile technology as less invasive and exhibitionist than the check-ins we’ve all become so accustomed to from providers like Foursquare and Facebook Places. He says the app could actually help deter creepy men from approaching women in bars, rather than the opposite, which is an initial concern from many when they first hear about the PoKos Chat app’s Point-and-Chat feature.

“You can make an overture without going up and saying hello in person,” he says. “If she’s going to block and ignore you, that’s going to deter you from going up to talk to her in person.”

Once recipients have been designated (using a phone’s camera), the app sends them a message saying the user name of the sender would like to talk to them. (Senders can choose to remain private, or identify themselves with a picture or short description.) Those who have been targeted can choose to engage the messaging, or ignore it and even block future contact. And the message sender doesn’t actually get your number unless you opt to give it to them. “We’re on the side of privacy for the recipient at all times,” says Platt, a telecom and mobile industry veteran who worked for ConTel, the firm that Verizon Wireless sprang from through a series of mergers and acquisitions.

For now, the recipient has to have the PoKos Chat app installed on his or her phone to receive the Point-and-Chat message and engage in other group chat features (more on those later), but Platt sees that changing in later versions of the software. He hopes that PoKos will eventually become firmware, where the technology comes preloaded on devices under the branding of a particular phone or carrier. (Platt also hopes the newly created word PoKos will become synonymous with mobile messaging.)

Platt is keeping pretty quiet on how exactly the PoKos technology picks up the phone of the person you want to point and chat with, saying that it relies on “about five component capabilities to discern” it’s the person you actually want to speak with, and that PoKos has invented and developed the processes and methods for making it work. A forerunner to this person-to-person style of communication is the technology Palm Pilot devices had in the late ’90s for exchanging contact info via a wireless beaming action between devices, he says.

“Some of our methods bundle a combination of current and historic signal capabilities and technologies, and we utilize IP, wireless, cellular, telephony and other networks to transmit our messages,” he says. PoKos has filed for U.S. and international patents protecting the Point-and-Chat feature it developed with these components, Platt says.

To backtrack, the PoKos Chat app has actually been available since November on the iTunes store, but the edgy Point-and-Chat feature was approved just two weeks ago. It started out by offering a feature called Zoom, which gives the ability to engage in public or private chats with PoKos users nearby, using just PoKos user names and without having to give away contact details like their actual phone number, e-mail address, or social network profile (unless users want to). Consumers can also use PoKos to text each other within the app, without having to chip away at the text messaging limits within their cell phone plans, and can text groups of people at once. “We tried to mirror a texting application that everybody uses and blend new features into a pure text app,” he says.

In Platt’s mind, the PoKos Chat app isn’t a high-tech stalking tool, but a platform for enhancing communications between users and helping brand sponsors better connect with consumers. Both the Zoom and Point-and-Chat features enable … Next Page »

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Providence, RI-based Swipely is announcing today that it’s making a move in how its technology enables consumers to interact with their credit cards. Last summer the startup launched a service that allowed consumers to tell their social networks about and review the purchases they made on their credit and debit cards, but CEO and founder Angus Davis says it found that “reviewing alone just isn’t compelling enough.”

The startup is now enabling consumers to get specialized savings and loyalty points just by paying with their credit or debit card at participating merchants—75 of which have already been enlisted in the Rhode Island area. Swipely plans to push out this new service nationwide this year, starting with the rest of the Northeast, Davis says. The changes have been in the works for a few months at Swipely, which last May raised $7.5 million in Series A money.

The new service, which goes live today, is still free to customers. The way it will charge merchant clients varies from business to business, but Davis says the cost of Swipely is entirely tied to its performance, so the more consumers its technology attracts and keeps sending back to businesses, the more the startup makes. Swipely will also provide insight on customer shopping trends to merchant clients.

Reviews are still going to be a part of the business under the new model, but are much more peripheral, with customers opting in to discuss the savings they nabbed with Swipely, Davis says. Swipely is also using its existing integration with Facebook and Twitter to give consumers a “shopping news feed” of what’s going on at their favorite businesses, he says.

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Gather, a Boston-headquartered social networking site aimed at users over 30, announced today that it has raised $5.3 million in equity financing. Major investors in the round include Allen & Company, American Public Media, Jim Manzi (former CEO of the Lotus Development Corporation), Jack Connors (former CEO of Hill Holiday), Kevin McClatchy, Andrew Tobias, and the Gerace family. They join previous investors Hearst, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and Southern California Public Radio. Gather also reported that bookings in the first quarter of 2009 were up 49 percent over the first quarter of 2008; the company expects to reach profitability in early 2010.

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One thing leads to another, especially for reporters. After we published our Boston Health 2.0 Cluster story in June, I started getting a lot of invitations to attend and/or moderate local events relating the Web’s influence on the healthcare market. One such event was a weekend brunch hosted by IC Sciences executive vice president Steve Wardell, where the guest of honor was Amir Lewkowicz, co-founder and vice president of partnerships at Inspire (known until this February as Clinica Health).

Often held up as one of the standard-bearers of the Health 2.0 movement, Inspire hosts Web-based communities for disease sufferers and their caregivers, and earns money by arranging for pharmaceutical and device companies to recruit community members as volunteers for clinical trials. Lewkowicz runs the Newton, MA, offices of Inspire, which is headquartered in Princeton, NJ. A couple of weeks after the brunch, I met him for coffee in Coolidge Corner and got a chance to interview him at length about Inspire’s business model, which is a synthesis of social-networking ideas Lewkowicz picked up while earning an MBA at Wellesley’s Babson College several years ago and knowledge of the clinical-trials process brought by his co-founder, Brian Loew.

The 10-person startup’s focus, Lewkowicz explained, is on the kind of crowdsourcing now classic in the Web 2.0 world. Specifically, the company helps existing health- and disease-oriented organizations, such as the ALS Foundation or the National Infertility Association, create online communities where members can share their own experiences and knowledge. It’s an itch that apparently needed scratching: more than 80,000 people have joined Inspire’s 40-plus communities since its first social network was launched in 2006. But along the way, Inspire has also been able to fill a second need—for qualified participants in trials of new drugs, a scarce resource that pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars each year seeking out. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: How did the idea for Inspire come together?

Amir Lewkowicz: Brian Loew and I have known each other for many years. We went to undergraduate school together. The idea came about in 2004-2005, along two different paths. Brian was looking at the clinical trials area and found that the biggest issue people were talking about was finding the right people for clinical trials. The number-one reason for delays with trials and bringing drugs to market was that researchers couldn’t find enough people.

At the same time, I was doing my MBA at Babson, and had just taken one of those classes that changes your whole view of things. It was called “Extended Enterprise Management” and was taught by Marty Anderson. I thought it would be about operations and supply chains, but he introduced the whole concept of social networks. This was in 2003, when social networking was not really mainstream. He blew me away. The way he positioned it was that if you build your company around direct input from the consumer, it changes your whole way of looking at things.

Well, at Babson it’s kind of like a religion to start your own company. They really push you—but in a structured, good way. I was in touch with Brian, and we started talking. At the same time, I had a personal thing—my sister and I suspected that one of our parents had a specific condition. We went online looking for authoritative content and had a very frustrating time. The online groups weren’t structured very well. But I was using LinkedIn and was getting a lot of benefit out of it. I wondered why this couldn’t be done for healthcare also.

Brian had started a company in the 1990s called WorldWeb, a content-management company kind of like Vignette, and had sold the company and then joined the Washington Post, where he was helping with technology strategy and social media. So the idea germinated—why not create a place for people with health conditions to support each other, but at the same time use it to recruit for clinical trials. It was a perfect-storm scenario.

X: But isn’t it pretty difficult to create a social network from scratch and get to critical mass where you have people generating useful content?

AL: We always believed we would partner with health organizations. We went to hundreds of websites to see what kinds of tools they had, and at the time about 25 percent of patient advocacy groups, hospitals, medical groups, and disease-oriented organizations had some sort of social media, mostly discussion boards. We saw an opportunity to partner with these groups.

The first few months was doing the market research, seeing what the potential partners needed, and working on a prototype. We didn’t raise any money; our wives were our first investors, essentially.

After a few months, we raised some angel money, in early 2006. That gave us enough money to hire four developers and finish the prototype. While those guys were doing that, Brian and I went out and talked to potential partners. We had to educate the market. A lot of people in healthcare had no idea what social networks were. There was a lot of fear around them. “You’re going to let patients talk to each other? What about the liability?” All they really knew about were the horror stories about … Next Page »

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