Tech `negativity bubble' begins to deflate
Things are percolating once again in the tech sector -- though it doesn't yet feel like a fully caffeinated recovery. For the last few years, there was widespread skepticism that innovative technology would ever again have much of an impact on business and in society at large. Some questioned whether start-ups could hope to challenge entrenched tech giants, and whether venture capitalists and other investors would ever see a return on their capital.
Those doubts -- which created a kind of "negativity bubble" that followed the overly optimistic dot-com bubble of the late '90s -- are starting to subside.
Here's a quick look at who's doing what this month:
Mike Turillo, formerly the chief knowledge officer at KPMG, is opening a Boston branch of the New York investment firm Spencer Trask. Turillo is also serving as interim CEO of one of Spencer Trask's portfolio companies, Cylant.
The company focuses on security software for the Linux operating system, developing an understanding of what constitutes normal activity and then looking for abnormalities that might indicate a hacker attack.
Over the holidays, Turillo began to move Cylant's 25 employees from Moscow, Idaho, to the Boston area. The group making the move includes John Munson, the University of Idaho professor who founded the company.
Understatement of the year: "Massachusetts is a more expensive place to live than Idaho," Turillo says. Salaries will be adjusted accordingly.
The supremely tech-savvy presidential campaign of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has attracted far more Boston-area digerati than that of US Senator John Kerry.
Jim Moore, a senior fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and former CEO of GeoPartners Research, just moved to Burlington to take a position as director of the Internet and Information Services Department for the Dean for America campaign.
RoweCom founder Richard Rowe, who recently vacated that same post, is trying to devise a way to distribute the software tools used by the Dean campaign for fund-raising and organizing to other Democratic campaigns.
CulliNet Software founder John Cullinane is backing Dean, as is Paul Sagan, president and COO of Akamai. David Weinberger, author and Web philosopher, is a senior Internet adviser to the campaign.
Allaire Corp. cofounder Jeremy Allaire, International Data Group chairman Pat McGovern, and Brandeis computer science prof Jordan Pollack have also lent a hand. But will all that tech support help Dean's showing in next week's Iowa caucuses?
Paul English is on the verge of launching a new company, using the Waltham offices of Greylock as a springboard. English was previously the founder of Boston Light Software, a firm acquired by Intuit Inc. in 1999.
Since leaving Intuit, English has helped develop an antispam product for InterMute, the Braintree company run by his brother Ed. No word on what English's new start-up will do, but it's likely to be backed by Greylock and General Catalyst Partners.
After a three-year leave, Firefly Networks cofounder Patti Maes is back at MIT's Media Lab, where she's helping launch a research initiative called the Interactive Experience Group.
One of the group's projects, Ether Threads, would allow people to leave digital messages or participate in discussions tied to a particular place -- for example, you might leave a virtual message outside the door to a restaurant where you'd received bad service. Before going inside, future patrons might access the message using a handheld computer or cellphone.
Andres Rodriguez, cofounder of Abuzz Technologies (sold to The New York Times in 1999) and Memora (a now-defunct start-up that sold digital media servers to consumers), has a new company -- this one dedicated to helping maintain large archives of static information over the decades.
The idea, he says, is to keep an archive online using an array of standard Web servers, rather than committing the archive to a particular storage medium like tape or CDs, which eventually become obsolete. Originally called Reference Information Systems, the Waltham company is changing its name to Archivas. Funding came from North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Ventures.
ATG cofounder and chief technology officer Joe Chung became a multimillionaire when the Cambridge company went public in 1999. He left ATG in 2002, to focus on angel investing -- though he concedes he hasn't been doing a whole lot of that.
"I'm not a real gung-ho angel investor," Chung says. "Right now, the capital markets are essentially deflationary. There's an expectation that the next round will be lower than the first round."
In the meantime, Chung has started writing a bimonthly column for Technology Review in which he analyzes tech start-ups whose pitches he's recently heard.
"The writing thing is something I've always wanted to do," Chung says, "and Bob Metcalfe was my inspiration. He was an entrepreneur with 3Com, and then a columnist with InfoWorld."
Metcalfe, who serves on the board of directors of Technology Review, helped Chung get the gig.
Pito Salas was the chief technology officer at eRoom, an online collaboration company acquired last year by Documentum, which in turn was bought by EMC. Salas has spent the past few months developing BlogBridge, software that allows users to easily keep tabs on multiple weblogs -- kind of a "Reader's Digest" for the blog world. (You can try out an early version at www.blogbridge.com.)
But now it seems like Salas, a onetime Lotus exec, has put the project on hold temporarily, and is turning his energies to consulting.
Get your hands on a ticket to next month's Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston, and you'll no doubt be glowing. This year, the ticket will be, too.
The NFL is purchasing a new kind of photoluminescent paper for the tickets from a Wellesley company called Brightec. (Oddly, Brightec has just four employees but is somehow a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq over-the-counter market.)
Images printed on Brightec's chemically treated paper look normal in daylight, but cast a radiant glow when the lights are out. This will be the first commercial application for Brightec's paper; the NFL expects it to help combat ticket counterfeiting
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Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Fast Company. He can be reached at skirsner@verizon.net.
