Yo, is there a ballplayer in the house? Well, there is a House playing ball—professional basketball, that is.

At the age of 33, Adam House, a serial entrepreneur (and shooting guard) who has successfully built and sold three companies—his most recent startup, Velocitude, was acquired by Akamai in 2010—has at least temporarily put aside the tug of entrepreneurship for his love of hoops. More specifically, House has decided to uproot his family from Boston to upstate New York to join the Rochester Razorsharks, a professional basketball team in the Premier Basketball League. Here is his player page).

True, it isn’t the NBA—but House describes the league as very competitive, with most players having come from Division 1 college teams, and several going on to the NBA’s D-League (development league) or playing pro ball overseas. So it’s pretty cool. I caught up with House by phone when he was with the team in Michigan, where they had finished a two-game sweep of the Lake Michigan Admirals. Here is a quick overview of his version of Hoop Dreams…

House grew up in Birmingham, MI, about 25 miles northwest of Detroit. He played basketball for nearby Brother Rice High School, a well-known Catholic school attended by the offspring of many of the Detroit area’s business leaders or auto execs.

But House also had a passion for entrepreneurship. He worked at Rock Financial, a Quicken Loans company, and was able to learn from Dan Gilbert who is now the main owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. So, bitten by the business bug, he left college (Centre College, a small liberal arts school in Kentucky) after his freshman year at age 19 to work for a direct marketing firm in Florida. He quit that after one year, and in 1998 formed a startup to do direct marketing for financial services companies with $500 of his own money. He built that into a multi-million-dollar business (an Internet lead generation startup he also founded merged with the company) and sold it in May 2007. A few years later, House launched his third startup, Velocitude, a mobile services platform company that enabled delivery of video and other content to mobile devices. He built that up as well, and sold it to Akamai in mid-2010 for undisclosed terms.

But let’s get back to hoops. As part of the Akamai deal, House and his family—wife and now three sons—moved to the Boston area. Among other things, he joined CommonAngels, the angel investor group that is the lead investor in Xconomy. After leaving Akamai, House was not quite ready for the grind of another startup, so he decided to train for a triathlon. “I saw myself in bike pants and a helmet, and I just looked in a mirror and said, … Next Page »

Comments (6) | Reprints | Share:          

Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The idea behind CrowdOptic, a service that allows event organizers to figure out what a crowd is looking at by tapping their smartphones, came to CEO and co-founder Jon Fisher last year during a routine meeting. As he sat down to chat with an investor in one of his earlier companies, he caught sight of two “tombstones”—the glass sculptures that memorialize deals between companies. He noticed that his chair and the two tombstones formed the three points of a triangle, prompting him to think about triangulation, focus, and sightlines. “That’s really where the inspiration came from for triangulating between smartphone users to isolate action,” Fisher says. “And that really formed the basis of the core technology, the notion that we can record smartphone attributes in real time and compare them with other users in real time.”

With this geometrical insight in mind, Fisher (pictured above) and co-founders Jeff Broderick, Doug Van Blaricom, and Alex Malinovsky set out to build a service that would give event organizers a way to monitor a crowd’s focus at live events. It’s a kind of outdoor equivalent of the eye-tracking studies Web designers run to see what parts of a Web page are attracting attention.

CrowdOptic's software assesses where users' smartphones are pointed to determine where audience members' sight lines are converging.

It works like this: event organizers partner with San Francisco-based CrowdOptic on an event like a tennis match. Match attendees download an app—either CrowdOptic’s app or one specifically attached the event. As they take photos and videos, tweet, and share information, CrowdOptic can draw on data from the compass and accelerometer in each smartphone to determine where the person holding the phone is looking—at one player or another, at the scoreboard, or even at certain ads in the stadium.

“We’re simply tunneling in through an existing process,” Fisher says. “We’re not envisioning everyone in the stands having phones in the air. People are naturally taking pictures and video.” Taken together, the data can show event organizers where the crowd’s collective attention is focused. In an event like a tennis match, there might be two main clusters of focus, one on each player, whereas a baseball game could have far more. (There’s a cool animated version of the graphic above at CrowdOptic’s website.)

With this information, organizers can rethink their ad sales strategy. In online advertising, sales offices can use eye-tracking studies and other forms of analytics to inform their pricing structure and explain it to potential customers. In live events, it’s hard to say which ads are viewed most. It may be a safe bet that most people in a given stadium are going to see ads on the Jumbotron, but how many fans will see an ad in right field or above a stadium box? “If one asset is being viewed five times more, you can charge five times more. You might think banner behind home plate is the best asset, but what’s the third best asset? We’ll be able to prove that data,” Fisher says. “It’s a whole new advertising form.”

Organizers can also hyper-target advertising or discounts directly to users’ smart phones. If a fan at a racetrack is focusing his attention on a given car, the driver’s sponsor might want him to see ads for their products, as a kind of augmented-reality overlay. Or they can choose to build in added benefits for fans, like providing up to the minute stats when someone focuses his phone on a given player. “If you’re watching a baseball game, you can get all info about a batter on the Jumbotron. But if he’s in right field, you can get the whole Jumbotron experience right on your phone,” says Fisher. Organizers can also use the information to retool their TV broadcasts, giving viewers at home an experience closer to what they’d get in the stadium.

The technology has security applications as well. Though CrowdOptic can’t use its apps to pinpoint where a given person is sitting in a stadium or who that person is—they can determine only the sightline of a given phone—the system can detect changes in … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

High school and youth sports teams may lack the deep pockets of the pros, but they can still take advantage of technology for tracking game stats thanks to a New York startup. Angel investor-backed GameChanger Media offers coaches of young athletes a mobile platform that evolves record keeping from pen and paper to smartphones and tablets. “Coaches and scorekeepers of youth and high school teams have incredibly archaic tools for managing what is the most painful and time-consuming part of their job,” says GameChanger Media CEO Ted Sullivan.

His company offers youth teams a free app that lets them log game information, which they can then share in real-time with local news outlets and the public. Rather than jotting down notes on a clipboard, the teams punch in the numbers with their mobile devices. Initially designed for use by baseball and softball teams, the app is available for Android phones, iPhones and the iPad. Sullivan says another version of GameChanger Media’s platform is under development for basketball teams and is due out in beta by midyear 2012 with the full release expected by next winter.

Thanks in part to $1 million raised in November from angel investors, Sullivan says he expects to grow his staff of sixteen by 30 percent by the end of 2012. GameChanger Media has raised $3.5 million to date in total from private investors.

Founded in 2009, GameChanger Media released its app to the public in January 2010. Sullivan says in 2011, some 30,000 youth and high school teams across country and around the world adopted his company’s tools to record game stats. Amateur baseball governing body USA Baseball, youth sports program Little League International, and high school baseball team tournament host Perfect Game USA all use the platform, Sullivan says. The app is also catching on internationally, Sullivan says. “Our product is only in English, but we have teams from Korea to Germany using it,” he says.

While GameChanger Media’s platform is free for teams to use, the company also … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Let me state this right off the top: I’m a huge New England Patriots fan. Even though I’m now based on the West Coast, I make it a point to watch every Patriots game and I attend several games each season, making the cross-country trek to cheer on my team.

It was on one of the recent trips that my worlds as an investor in technology and a passionate sports fan began to collide. If you have never been to a Patriots game at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, let me give you a quick overview of the scene. Gillette is a state of the art stadium co-located on the same parcel as the Patriots Hall of Fame and Patriot Place, a large outdoor shopping complex complete with hotel, movie theatre, etc. And perhaps most astonishing, all of this is located in an area where there is only one road in and out of the complex.

I was sitting in a 10-mile back-up on my way to one recent game when the epiphany struck. It’s all about infrastructure. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles or shiny boxes are on the other end; if you can’t get there in a timely and relatively painless manner it becomes frustrating and counterproductive. While you still may get the diehards like me to show up to a football stadium a few times a year, I think it’s safe to assume that you’d lose nearly all of the traffic to your site or service if they had to endure a fraction of the obstacles it takes to drive down Route 1 on game day.

Imagine for a moment, however, that on game days you could simply roll out another 10 to 12 lanes in either direction and alleviate the backup in one fell swoop, creating a much more pleasant and productive experience for your customers. Sound farfetched? Not in the online world. We just experienced the biggest online shopping day in United States history on Cyber Monday this year. While the deals may have served as the incentive to get people online, it was the ability of retailers to increase their infrastructure through the cloud and other services that kept shoppers spending money and making the transactions a reality.

So while it may be unreasonable to suggest that infrastructure be created in the physical world simply to allow us to drive up to the stadium without delay, that is exactly what the expectation is in the technology sector. Delays or obstacles to products and services, no matter how minuscule they may seem, will translate into lost revenue.

It’s understandable that more sexy technologies such as apps get the bulk of the attention and ink these days, but in the end, infrastructure will continue to be the engine that makes everything possible.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

As the gridiron gladiators of the National Football League continue their march toward the Super Bowl, PlayUp USA in New York has put its mobile social network in the hands of sports fans in the United States. Parent company PlayUp in Australia developed the free iPhone and iPad app for sports fans with the help of $50 million raised in the first quarter of the year, and released it in the States and around the world on Oct. 20. Jonathan Press, CEO of PlayUp USA, says the company raised that funding round—its third—from a collection of undisclosed private investors around the world and is eager to build its ranks of users with U.S. sports fans.

PlayUp is a social app that fosters connections between sports fans who are interested in the same teams and games. Those fans can text message each other directly, as well as create chat rooms to discuss a game or particular subject. Users can search for live games, see upcoming events, or browse by sports type to find other users who share their passions for certain teams. The app also shows current scores and stats, such as players’ positions on the field. Press says the U.S. development team of 12 is creating mobile sports games that users will be able to play within the app. ”People talk about sports 24-7 and have devices in their hands 24-7,” he says. “We’re looking for ways to marry the two.”

PlayUp also offers data from live games around the world that is updated by Stats Inc., he says, to give users a chance to react in real time to the games. PlayUp is building on the already robust amount of sports … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Professional athletes marketing their mugs in endorsements is nothing new. But the explosion of digital goods and micro-entrepreneurs has opened up a ton of new ways for sports stars to make their mark, such as the mobile apps and games from the likes of Chad Ochocinco and Mike Tyson.

Seattle startup Playmark is hoping to be a broker for even more innovation in the sector by setting up an easy-to-use online marketplace for licensing rights. The startup’s first major licensing partner is a big one: the NFL Players Association, which is also a strategic investor in the company.

“We think it’s a really tough thing to crack, and we feel we have arrived maybe at a way to crack the code by partnering with the Players Association,” says Playmark co-founder and CEO George Aposporos, a former early VP of business development at Amazon.com.

What makes the sports-licensing game so tough, Aposporos explains, are all the overlapping rights held by different entities over different parts of the overall sports experience. Playmark’s deal with the players’ union, for example, allows it to license the name, number, likeness, and autograph of some 2,000 NFL players. The rights to the games themselves are held by the league, and the individual owners control all the assets associated with their teams.

Playmark says it can help make navigating that thicket seamless for entrepreneurs who want to make sports-related products. The company wants to add leagues, teams, and other sports as time goes on—and its technology can sort out all of the various rights-holders on the back end, figuring out each rights-holder’s share of any given collection of material.

The players’ union also continues to have the final say on uses of its member’s likenesses. Playmark’s guidelines lay out some of the cases that are unlikely to be approved, such as “demeaning portrayal of athletes,” “distasteful humor and language,” or “adult content and illegal gambling.” Interestingly, the union also apparently only wants games that pit a user against one athlete, not multiple players at once.

“Maybe it’s my Amazon days, but one of my favorite quotations is ‘Making something easy is hard,’” Aposporos says. “You have to democratize access across different kinds of situations and essentially unify a lot of fragmentation.”

One early example of a licensing customer is ESPN’s Sports Bar Facebook game. That game already had some licensing rights, Aposporos says, but Playmark’s broader access to the players allowed ESPN’s game to offer even more digital goods. “Now, they’re adding autograph graphics from our system to build customizable social jerseys within the game,” he says.

Another interesting case involves Electronic Arts games, which owns the Madden NFL video game franchise. Part of making that game inclues digital 3D head scans of all the players—but that asset was locked up for use in the game until now. With Playmark brokering the rights, those head scans could be used in any number of applications, including physical goods like bobblehead dolls, for instance.

The market for licensed sports merchandise is huge—Aposporos says some estimates show it at around $18 billion worldwide. At those levels, “even a high single-digit share would be not insignificant,” he says.

It’s certainly a forward-looking deal for the players’ union to cut. But they surely understand better than anyone how short-lived a pro career can be, no matter how big those paychecks look at the time. “Our players can’t wait to see what today’s creative designers and developers can dream up,” said Keith Gordon, president of the union’s for-profit licensing arm.

Playmark currently has nine people on its team and is backed by angels from the Seattle area and beyond, along with the NFL players’ union investment, Aposporos says.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Are we trying to sell jeans here or are we trying to win baseball games?—Billy Beane, Oakland A’s General Manager

Baseball scouts used to judge players on looks.

Moneyball, as a method, revolutionized the evaluation of baseball talent. It correlates, connects and coagulates all performance metrics (aka stats) to determine offensive or defensive production per player. In short, it made picking players more science and less art. There is a science to offensive productivity based on the “on base percentage,” and there is a a science to defensive productivity.

It turns out that VCs pick entrepreneurs using a highly parallel method.

VCs are big fan boys of Moneyball. I learned of the Michael Lewis book via Roelof Botha at Sequoia Capital. He was on a VC panel I was hosting at the Monte Jade American Association meeting in 2007. (It’s a mountain in Taiwan.)

This is how VCs use Moneyball against entrepreneurs:

1. The Hardship Interview

I studied engineering. Investment banks would set up interviews on engineering campuses. Some firms haze and cause you direct stress during an interview. It’s the hardship interview and the technique is old school.

Now, VCs test you via the mediocre intro. I wrote about it in a previous post, “How to Charm A VC Into Mentoring You“. It is a test to see if you execute, take crap, and follow up. Giving you a dog bullocks intro is the VC’s version of a hardship interview.

2. Kill You With Kindness

Baseball GMs have all sorts of ways to character compass a player. Character compassing is reading the person’s current talent and projected vector. Vectors give extra dimension to reading a person because they have direction and momentum.

VCs like to ‘open field interrogate’ an entrepreneur. It’s the opposite of a stressful, closed-room, interrogation that is infinite. Open field interrogation is kind. Relaxed. Finite.

Similarly, baseball GMs will treat a player they’re on the fence about with extreme kindness to evaluate them. The kindness itself is a test.

You see, VCs have a fraction of the domain expertise that your average Stanford CS Major intern has. They know this. But they are expert pattern recognizers.

How you handle the VIP treatment from the VC or the GM is going to impact how they evaluate you in the “kill ‘em with kindness” maneuver. When you experience a private car picking you up, act like it’s your first limo ride. When you experience your first ride on a private charter flight, act like its the first time and BE THANKFUL. Pass the test and do not act entitled because you are getting a gift you have not yet earned.

3. Lead Generate

VCs are like baseball GMs in that they have scouts.

These bird-dogs get them deal flow. A bird dog is a hunting term where your Shih-Tzu Baxter points his paw or his snout at a talented CS major pre-preneur. Or your retriever points at employee #5 from Mint and says, “Go hunt that deal.” Deal flow is the parade of talent that wants to partner with you and these leads are brought to the VC via a referral.

4. Farm System and Training Table

There are organic methods to generate your own leads to augment your deal flow. Farm system and training table are terms from baseball, football, and many sports. But VCs use both methods to source entrepreneur deal flow.

Running a farm system in the venture world consists of hosting a hackathon, or buying or starting a conference like AppNation, ReverseVCPitch, Summit at Stanford, TechCrunch Disrupt, or Stanford Startup Academy. DISCLOSURE: I crash these and financially benefit from attending with 12-20 CS majors as my +1s.

“Training Table” is like a VC hosted dinner. Smash Summit dinner at Clift Hotel by 500 Startups’ Dave McClure (also a Moneyball fan) is an example. Smash is all about social media marketing best practices. Facebook and Google used to do them but stopped. Twilio, Evernote, Yodlee still do. FoundersFund, August Capital, NorthBridge, Morgenthaler, and Y Combinator still do.

5. Pitchers and Catchers Report in February

Pitchers and catchers have the easiest path to the pros. Or so it seems—but these two positions have to work the hardest.

In baseball, it seems like there’s a lot of standing around. Well, VCs are notoriously tan, healthy looking, relaxed, and levitate towards a boondoggle. If you’re an agent and you wanna romance a pitcher or a catcher to sign, you’ll have to crash their 6:00 am workout in Scottsdale Arizona.

As an entrepreneur, it means showing up early and staying late. It means getting ROI for the last day of a conference and trying to close deals after other booths are starting to pack up. Remember, after pitchers pitch on game day, they run 2-3 miles for recovery day.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

—HootSuite, the Vancouver, B.C.-based social media company best known for its power-user Twitter interface, has raised $3 million in what it calls “debt bridge financing.” Millennium Technology Ventures is on board as a new investor in the round, which included return investments from Hearst Interactive Media, Blumberg Capital, and ubiquitous Seattle angel Geoff Entress.

In announcing the fundraising, HootSuite also disclosed that it has acquired TwapperKeeper.com, a Twitter data analytics company. More acquisitions are in the cards with the new financing round, HootSuite said, along with hiring, advertising, and product growth.

—Seattle cloud-storage provider Symform has raised another $1 million, which president and co-founder Praerit Garg says is an extension of the company’s previous Series A round of financing “based on exceeding business milestones.”

The money will help Symform keep up with what Garg says is rapid growth. “In fact, we are hiring and moving into a new building this week,” Garg writes in a statement. The new offices will be down on Western Ave., near the waterfront.

Symform’s also offering a new discount for customer referrals, with up to 200 gigabytes of free storage. Symform’s system is based around storage distributed among a large number of small nodes in a network, rather than in a big data center.

The company, founded by Garg and fellow Microsoft veteran Bassam Tabbara, had previously raised about $5.5 million in two rounds from OVP Venture Partners and Boston-area Longworth Venture Partners.

—Bainbridge Island, WA-based Avalara, a maker of sales tax software, has filled out a $21 million round of financing that the company first filed regulatory paperwork on in May. I couldn’t reach Avalara for comment, but CEO Scott McFarlane tells GeekWire that the new paperwork reflects an additional $7 million raised from Sageview Capital to cash out early investors.

—X2Impact, a maker of impact-sensing mouthpieces for football players, has added $350,000 in an equity round that could reach 10 times that size.

The Seattle company, whose existing investors include former NFL coach Jim Mora Jr., uses embedded electronics to measure the force of collisions on the heads of football players—a very hot topic among pros and amateurs alike, with new focus on the long-term effects of concussions.

USA Today recently covered X2 Impact’s participation in research tests of next-generation football headgear, and the site Ubergizmo says the mouthpieces will be tested in some college football games.

—Bellevue, WA digital-book startup Osprit has raised a total of $600,000 out of a potential $750,000 round. The company makes an interactive book technology that allows readers to share notes and highlights across platforms and with other readers.

The company’s first product is the ooBible (read: infinite Bible), which is the definition of a bestseller. The company is headed by CEO Colin Wong, an early Google employee, who says in an email that the company’s angel investors include Andy Liu, James Wong, Edward Yim and John Cunningham. The ooBible’s official rollout is expected before year’s end.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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 »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Hundreds of people packed the Bell Harbor Conference Center on Seattle’s waterfront yesterday for the University of Washington’s annual Business Plan Competition. Now in its 14th year, the competition is a great showcase of energy and ideas from student entrepreneurs and some of their more experienced collaborators.

Last night, the group of 37 teams was whittled down to the “sweet 16″ semifinal round. You can learn more about the particulars of the competition at the Foster Business School website, and check out the list of the 16 semifinalists.

I wasn’t there as a judge, but decided to compile a few capsules of the proto-companies that caught my eye—even though some of them didn’t make the next round, or even have websites yet, we could be hearing more from these folks in the future.

Yoi! Gaming
Massively multiplayer video games are not exactly mainstream, but the people who are into them are really passionate—there are mini-celebrity players who make a living in competitive gaming, John Madden-esque online commentators, and big tournaments with serious prizes.

But Yoi! Gaming CEO C.J. Wong says there’s a gap between those big tournaments, which can be difficult to qualify for, and the smaller, local competitions that rely on having everyone in the same place. “We feel like we’re in 1918 before the NFL started—there’s a bunch of small leagues out there,” Wong says.

The idea behind Yoi! is to set up online matchmaking that can sort people into quick groups for competing against each other, with buy-ins and prizes—something that should sound familiar to anyone who’s seen online poker sites explode in the past decade.

Wong says, however, that online video gaming competitions have avoided the heat that regulators have applied to poker companies because the games are seen as more skill-based, and not related to gambling. Yoi! already has a license from Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of hugely popular game StarCraft—which, I am not making this up, is so popular in South Korea that tournaments are shown live on TV.

ZeroBrane
These guys are developing a small, cheap robot that uses a smartphone as its brain. The little machine, which looks like an iPhone riding a miniature pair of Segway wheels, is intended mostly for entertainment purposes on the consumer side right now—tooling around the house or “chasing your cat,” … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Entrepreneurs get younger every day.

Jeremy Levine was born one month after the ball rolled through Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner’s legs on that fateful night in Shea Stadium, 1986. Levine probably doesn’t remember the painful 1-15 Patriots of 1990 either. He says his first sports memory was watching the great Larry Bird with his dad. And his best memory was Adam Vinatieri kicking the Raiders out of the Snow Bowl in January 2002.

If you’re a Boston sports fan, you know that kick (actually there were two, a 45-yarder to force overtime, and a short kick to win it) changed sports history in these parts. In the decade that followed, the Patriots won three Super Bowls, the Red Sox won two World Series, and the Celtics returned to prominence with a championship of their own.

Why am I telling you this in a publication about tech innovation? Because Levine, 24, has turned his passion for all things sports into an innovative company. It’s what drives him and his startup, Cambridge, MA-based StarStreet, an online market for sports fans to buy and sell “shares” of their favorite players. StarStreet graduated from the TechStars Boston mentorship program last year, and has raised an undisclosed amount of financing from SV Angel, Jarr Capital, and angel investors including Don McLagan, Andrew Blachman, and Ben Littauer.

StarStreet has gotten its share of national press, so I won’t rehash its story or why it’s different from previous attempts at alternative stock markets. Suffice to say the company is still small (two full-timers), but it has more than 400 traders as customers and is looking to ramp up for the upcoming NFL football season (assuming there is a season—tricky because of the potential lockout). StarStreet’s markets, where people invest real money, are currently active in March Madness basketball teams, NBA players, and major league baseball players. The company takes a 4 percent cut of every stock sale.

What might be more interesting is Levine’s personal story, and what he embodies. He is one of a new breed of young tech guns around Boston. Fan Bi of Blank Label, Michael Raybman of WaySavvy, and Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR also come to mind; all are in their early 20s. Sure, these guys are distressingly young to be running companies (40 feels like the new 50 to me), but it’s refreshing to see a new generation of Web entrepreneurs coming into their own and trying to change the world.

OK, that’s a long windup to tell you about some simple takeaways from Levine. First of all, like most entrepreneurs, he’s just wired differently. From a young age, he dreamed of being … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

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 »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

San Francisco-based Bleacher Report, which publishes and syndicates fan-generated sports news online, said yesterday that it has completed a $10.5 million Series C financing round. Crosslink Capital led the round. Bleacher Report previously raised $7.3 million, in a June 2009 round led by Hillsven Capital. The site claims to be the Web’s fifth largest sports media destination, with more than 16 million monthly unique visitors.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Foxborough, MA-based Quick Hit, a maker of online football role-playing games, has closed $2.5 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. The investors weren’t disclosed, but the company raised an $8 million Series B round in early 2009 from Valhalla Partners, TriplePoint Capital, and New Enterprise Associates. Xconomy first profiled Quick Hit in May 2009, when the startup was in beta-testing mode. Since then, it has struck a deal with the National Football League to use official team names, logos, and uniforms (cracking EA’s exclusive license), and has added a number of other features (including virtual currency) to its football strategy game.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Bruce D’Ambrosio wants to make online content sharing easy. Eager to bridge the gap between content owners, and publishers, the 63-year-old serial entrepreneur and computer science professor at Oregon State University founded DigitalScirocco in 2009, and rolled the startup out of stealth mode in March. Since then D’Ambrosio, who serves as the company’s CEO, says the venture has only been growing. Fast.

The Seattle-based startup jumped into the digital content marketplace, positioning itself as a middleman between website owners, and media organizations. The idea is to make mainstream content published online more readily—and affordably—available for website owners, bloggers, and publishers who would like to repost the content on a secondary site. For example, if a local chef wants to publish a related article or photo from, say, The New York Times food section, on their blog or website, they would have to first contact either the Times, or a third-party media organization like the Associated Press or Getty Images, to negotiate a deal and buy the rights to republish the content.

This can be not only a long and difficult process, but an expensive one as well. That’s where DigitalScirocco comes in, providing an automated marketplace for website owners and content owners to connect. Using an online auction platform, websites can search for and purchase rights to content they want, at cheaper prices, while DigitalScirocco earns a cut of the sale for facilitating the transaction.

After being online for a few months under stealthy cover, DigitalScirocco tipped its hand, making its services publicly available five months ago. At the time “We were then in the ‘I know there is a market somewhere’ mode, and, I have to admit, a bit stuck looking under the streetlight,” D’Ambrosio told Xconomy via e-mail. But after carving out their first three partnerships—with global news organization Thomson Reuters, San Francisco-based technology and business news site VentureBeat, and city-specific entertainment information site BeDynamic, DigitalScirocco found new areas for expansion.

“We’ve now found several markets we can reach at a viable cost of sales and are ramping up sales efforts,” D’Ambrosio says.

And as of today, the growing company has teamed up with Atlanta, GA-based sports newswire service US Presswire, to build a sports photo news service targeted at small-market news organizations, bloggers, and personal websites. Through the service, DigitalScirocco and US Presswire will be able to automate and track delivery of recent and historical photos and edited captions to purchasing websites that have limited or no in-house editing resources. Conversely, these sites will have access to all of US Presswire’s new and archived photos almost immediately, with no first-use wait times that many media organizations employ.

“We are building an end-to-end workflow such that images can appear on our client websites within minutes after photographer submission of the image from the venue,” D’Ambrosio says.

The service was scheduled to go live on September 1, but has seen some last minute delays. It will allow website owners to select photo feeds to match individualized topics based on a variety … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

All in all, I’d say the first Xconomy H-O-R-S-E basketball tournament, held last Friday afternoon, was an unqualified success. Not for my Xconomy team (Xconomy I), which flamed out in the first round—some guy with the initials GH couldn’t buy a bucket—but rather for the couple dozen folks who showed up from the local startup and innovation community. They represented Dogpatch Labs, MITER, MIT, and various companies and organizations around Kendall Square.

I didn’t get everyone’s last name (and in some cases I might have the first name wrong), but thanks to all the teams who participated: Matt and Julia (We Thought We Were Old Until We Got Here), Laura and Paul (Plummelo), Sergio and Erdin (MITER), Mitch and John (Animal Cracker), Harry and Peter (Evil Doctor Loss), Shobin and Colin (Uncreative), Pedro and Raj (Praj), Richard and Larry (Rarry), Nate and Wes (Neuroscientists), Nir and Matt (Redemption), and Mara and Erin (Xconomy II).

The Final Four were Neuroscientists (who knocked my team out), Redemption, Rarry, and Phoenix. Those of you paying super-close attention will notice that Phoenix was not one of the teams previously listed above. That’s because they were a late entrant, composed of Chris Pirie (another representative of MITER) and our very own Bob Buderi, Xconomy’s CEO, who got himself a real partner when it counted.

(* Bob was my original partner on Xconomy I. After Chris showed up, we drew names to set up a new team because of the way the bracket worked out. After several attempts to recruit other players, Bob took the open slot as Chris’s partner. Some would argue that any achievements by Phoenix must be accompanied by an asterisk. Let’s move on.)

The riveting final pitted Rarry against—you guessed it—Phoenix. A battle of old friends. Of colleagues. Of former colleagues. It came down to the final shot, as we knew it would. I can’t remember exactly what happened (I was eating ice cream), but in the end, Phoenix (*) won the title.

Let’s do it again sometime soon. In the meantime, here are some photos from that afternoon, snapped by the Xconomy crew (click on them for larger versions):

Chris Pirie’s arrival:

No dunking allowed:

The official tournament bracket:

More photos on the next page, including the winner of the “most innovative shot” award… … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Mercer Island, WA-based Korrio (formerly known as iPlaySportz) has raised $3.3 million in equity, according to a regulatory filing. The company is run by Steve Goldman, formerly the CEO of Isilon Systems and a senior executive at F5 Networks, and Brad Hefta-Gaub, of Sweat365.com, Revenue Science, and Real Networks, according to a preliminary version of the company’s website. Goldman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Korrio’s official website is currently under development. However, based on the information on this page, the company says it is using web technology to organize and automate youth sports information and registration. Its target market: an estimated 45 million kids (and their families and coaches) who participate in organized youth sports every year nationwide. Through Korrio’s software platform, called Playflow, families, fans, players, and coaches will be able to check sports schedules, post pictures, send messages, check weather reports,  arrange carpools, get driving directions, register players, and utilize team web hosting, all in one place from any computer or smartphone mobile device.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Calling all basketball players and fans… Want to hang out and shoot some hoops on a summer afternoon?

We at Xconomy—OK, at least Bob and I—are excited to invite our readers and members of the startup and innovation community to an informal H-O-R-S-E tourney tomorrow. Come one, come all. It will take place from 1:00-2:30 pm this Friday, August 6, at the Anthony Costa Playground, which is on Charles Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets, near Kendall Square and the Cambridge Galleria Mall.

We’ll probably set up a bracket of two-person teams. Again this is a non-contact, shoot-around competition for fun—and it’s for any and all comers, not just gym rats. Plus, anyone who can beat Bob and me might get, um, special mention in Xconomy. Not that we’re competitive or anything.

I will say that Bob played basketball for his college team (sometime last century), and once hit a 35-footer over a tree to beat me on the very court we will be at tomorrow. As for me, well, I’ve fouled a lot of people in my pickup days, as my Seattle colleague Luke can attest. No fouls tomorrow, though.

Everyone is welcome to meet us for lunch in the park beforehand, and to warm up those creaky jump shots, starting around 12:30. (Shaq, you might need a little extra time so get there early.)

If you’re interested, please leave a comment below, or e-mail us at editors@xconomy.com, so we know how much ice cream to bring. See you there.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Earlier this week on ESPN radio, the announcers introduced news about the dramatic U.S. victory over Algeria in the World Cup soccer tournament by saying (approximately): And now, for the four or five Americans who are soccer fans…

Ouch. Ironic too, considering that ESPN invested $100 million for the broadcasting rights to the 2010 World Cup tournament now playing in South Africa, and for the 2014 tournament in Brazil. As I recently reported, the World Cup ranks as the biggest sporting event in the world—except in the United States—with a total cumulative audience of 26.3 billion, with a ‘B,’ during the last World Cup in 2006.

Meanwhile, The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Nielsen ratings released after the U.S.-Algeria match (which the U.S. won in overtime, 1-0) show that San Diego ranks as the No. 1 U.S. market for the three televised U.S. matches. Roughly double the percentage of homes in San Diego were tuned into the soccer games, compared to the national average. The U.S.-Algeria match was the highest-rated TV show in San Diego County Wednesday, with an 8.9 Nielsen rating (each point represents 10,730 households)—and ranks even higher if you include the 1.7 rating from Spanish-language Univision.

So who are these soccer fans in San Diego who are following the clash of nations in the World Cup? At least 75 were scientists and employees of the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, who gathered in the cafeteria at lunchtime Monday to watch England play Algeria. The fateful game ended in a tie that left the overtly British fans harrumphing and the Americans happily applauding (since England’s tie was America’s gain). I also found uh, four or five CEOs from San Diego’s life sciences and technology companies who are avid fans:

—Claudio Canive, founding CEO of Platformic, a website development provider, tells me he’s a lifelong soccer fan who has played since he was a kid. He even played soccer for his fraternity while attending San Diego State University and in an adult league. “I’m following Spain, but obviously our hearts are with the U.S. as well,” Canive says. “It will be interesting to see what happens if the U.S. plays Spain.” Canive says his wife Leyla also is a fan, and they held a World Cup party at their house Wednesday for the U.S.-Algeria game. “We all went bananas when Landon Donovan scored in overtime the other day,” Canive says. “That never-say-die U.S. attitude is great to watch.”

—Christophe Schilling, CEO of Genomatica, which is genetically engineering microbes to produce industrial chemicals that otherwise are made from fossil fuels in petrochemical plants, responded to my query by e-mail from South Africa: “Just left the Spain-Honduras game (game #3 of 9). Fantastic scene here in SA.” When I asked Schilling why he’s a fan, he answered: “My father is 100 percent German and my mother 100 percent French, so I have always been cheering those … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Comments (2) | Reprints | Share: