By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Hey boss:

Hoping that I can take next week off for a much-needed blogging vacation. Since I brought this blog to Boston.com, exactly four years ago, I've written more than 1,000 posts. (With very few breaks.) I'm heading to Europe for some R&R... but also can't resist visiting a few spots that could supply material for future blog posts.

I should also let you know that the team at Boston.com's The Hive, under Michael Morisy, have been ramping up their coverage of the local innovation scene. You can follow them on Twitter: @HiveBoston.

I'll see you back here in the office soon... but not too soon. :)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

George Colony launched Forrester Research three decades ago, in the basement of a Cambridge triple-decker. In 1983, he was a former Yankee Group analyst writing about how the personal computer was going to change the business world, at a time when most tech watchers were focused on mainframes and minicomputers.

Today, Forrester (which happens to be Colony's middle name) is a publicly-held company with about 1200 employees. Six hundred of them work in a sparkling 190,000-square foot headquarters near the Alewife MBTA station, where all the conference rooms are named for bands like the Beatles and the Allman Brothers, and there are instruments for after-work jam sessions in the first-floor café. These days, the firm focuses not just on tech trends affecting big companies, but new dynamics that impact their sales forces and marketing teams, too. Forrester had $292 million in revenue last year.

Colony says the firm relishes challenging conventional wisdom and "popping bubbles." Lately, that means talking about the decline of the web and the rise of the "App Internet," or smart software running on tablets, phones and other "client" devices that connect to the Internet, but make better use of the computer power on the device.

I sat down recently with Colony to talk about what the tech world around these parts looked like in the 1980s and 1990s; the dot-com shake-out, which rattled Forrester and its clients; robotic telepresence systems; Google Glass versus wrist-based wearables; what he expects from Apple; and how future mobile devices might make better use of built-in sensors to help do things like guide us to a hotel room and open the door.

Audio of my conversation with Colony, recorded June 21st, is below. It runs about 35 minutes. The company has some low-key anniversary celebrations planned for early next month.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Can a massive multinational tap into two of today's hottest business trends, crowdsourcing product ideas and crowdfunding their development?

The Dutch lighting, electronics, and healthcare giant Philips NV is going to find out, with a new "Innovation Fellows" competition running through mid-August. The company is laying out $100,000 in prize money — plus mentorship from company executives — for the top five product ideas related to "Living Well, Being Healthy, and Enjoying Life," according to the program's site. Inventors and entrepreneurs will be asked to run crowdfunding campaigns for their ideas on the site Indiegogo, soliciting money from interested backers, presumably to show which ones can garner the most monetary momentum. But a six-member panel of judges will choose the ultimate winners.

The competition is being led from the company's North American headquarters in Andover. (Philips has nearly 4,000 employees who work in Massachusetts, mainly in its healthcare and lighting divisions.) "We think this is one of the first attempts by a large company to do open innovation, and not think that our 100,000 employees will think of everything," says Greg Sebasky, right, chairman of Philips North America. "All of the intellectual property of the ideas submitted will remain with the inventor," he adds, though Philips may decide to forge a partnership or make an investment in one or more of the winners.

Sebasky says the company is interested in the ways that new technologies like wearable sensors and mobile apps can be integrated into the existing healthcare system, as opposed to just delivering information to an individual consumer. "We see all this information ultimately needing to get back into a patient health record," he says. Among the Massachusetts businesses Philips owns are the Lifeline medical alert system ("I've fallen and I can't get up") and Color Kinetics, whose LED lights illuminate the Leonard P. Zakim Bridge on Route 93. Elements of Philips' Lightolier products are made in Fall River.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Elisabeth Carpenter was among the first handful of employees at Brightcove, the online video hosting company that is now publicly-traded, and it was a Brightcove connection that led her to her new gig: serving as chief operating officer at EverTrue, a Boston startup that has raised $6.5 million in funding so far... and happens to be based in the very same building as Brightcove, Atlantic Wharf.

Carpenter had helped build up the sales, customer support, and professional services teams over more than seven years at Brightcove, but she departed the company last June. She then took some time off, helping to organize her 25th Harvard College reunion and a 30th reunion for her high school. "With both of those, I was dealing with the reality of all the bad information and incomplete information that all of these institutions have on their alumni," she says. "They have a hard time getting alumni to show up at a reunion, much less donate, much less talk to each other."

That's exactly the problem that EverTrue is trying to address: helping schools (and their fundraising officers) keep better tabs on their alums, and helping alums stay in touch with one another.

Among EverTrue's early investors was Bob Mason, a co-founder and former chief technology officer at Brightcove (he left last July.) Mason introduced Carpenter to EverTrue founder Brent Grinna. She joined the company late last month. "I used to get off the elevator on the 4th floor, but now I stay on for another three floors," she quips.

"When we started Brightcove, we didn't even have the clay yet," Carpenter says. "Here, Brent has the clay and it's already formed into a bust of somebody, but we don't know who it is yet. They've been able to do a massive amount in the last two-and-a-half years, but I feel like I can leave my fingerprints in a positive way on the company, and help take it to the next level." Carpenter says she believes that EverTrue's market — helping educational institutions and other non-profits cultivate relationships with prospective donors — "is a surprisingly massive market, even larger than what we had at Brightcove. This is a product that can make money and do good."

Carpenter says her top priorities at the new job are "bringing customers in, and making sure they're happy." EverTrue has 23 employees, and it participated in the TechStars Boston program in 2011.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Add a few more things to the list of things you can procure with a mobile app: a case of Sam Adams Summer, a bottle of red, or a fifth of Jack Daniels.

A startup called Drizly launched an app last month that promises to put booze on your doorstep in 20 minutes to an hour, seven days a week, with a $20 order minimum. (The delivery fee is $5.) And yes, they can even deliver to towns like Wellesley that don't have liquor stores.

So far, Drizly is getting about 50 orders a week, according to co-founder and CEO Nicholas Rellas. And he says that the app's average order size is more than three times larger than the average in-store purchase.

Drizly plans to sell delivery territories to liquor stores, some of which already do delivery. The app acts simply as an order-forwarding service. Drivers use an app produced by Drizly's sister company, Mident, to check IDs or purchases. Drizly's initial delivery partner is Gordon's Wine and Spirits in Watertown; Medway-based Advanced ID Detection is an equal partner in the Mident venture. (Rellas says the company will be adding two new liquor stores in the Boston suburbs as delivery partners over the next few weeks.)

Rellas envisions that advertising will eventually play a role in generating revenue for his business, encouraging customers to try new brands. "The $5 delivery fee could be discounted by watching ads, or trying a new product," he says.

As for when you can use Drizly... it won't help you get booze after the neighborhood packie has closed. "We make sure, by law, the items are in the hands of the customers before the liquor store closes," Rellas explains. "As much as we'd love to be able to have stores make late-night deliveries, the sale has to be finalized, with items in hand, before the store that's delivering it closes."

The company is just now starting to look for financing. "We wanted to make our startup recession-proof, so that's why we're in the alcohol business," Rellas says.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

A Somerville startup is cultivating an interesting concept: could Facebook friends help one another find their next apartment — and avoid paying broker fees?

Jumpshell plans to roll out its first beta test tomorrow, which will help people find or advertise apartment sublets through their social networks on Facebook. The initial app will enable people to start conversations about sublets with friends who live in a particular area, or who might be in the process of moving. Over time, though, Jumpshell intends to enlist tenants in renting out their apartment at the end of a lease, providing the landlord or building manager with a new renter from their network of friends — or friends of friends.

"Those kinds of interactions are already happening informally, where people go to see a friend's apartment, or a friend's neighbor's apartment, and they may decide to rent it," says Jumpshell co-founder Matt Boyes-Watson, who helps manage a building that his family owns in Cambridge.

But Jumpshell wants to bring that process online, helping landlords keep their apartments rented while helping the new tenants avoid paying a fee to a broker, which is typically one month's rent. Jumpshell hopes to handle the rental application online for a much smaller fee — around $125, says co-founder and chief marketing officer Raleigh Werner. (But the startup is still in discussions with a state regulatory agency, the Division of Professional Licensure for Real Estate Salespersons, which could prove...interesting.) Landlords might provide rewards to tenants who helped supply the next renter for their place, for instance discounting the last month's rent.

So far, the startup has been boot-strapped, though Werner says they will focus on raising money this summer. And Jumpshell's three founders don't just work together... they're also roommates. (In the photo from left to right are Boyes Watson, CTO Parker Woodworth, and Werner.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

How do you find a software developer to fill an open job at your company in 2013?

TripAdvisor, the Newton-based network of travel sites, posits that the answer may be by offering him or her more than one job.

The company's Web Engineering Program offers new hires — many of them recent graduates — a series of three or four month stints in a range of different departments in the company. The program has been "in beta" for the past two years, says SVP of engineering and operations Andy Gelfond, but is officially launching this summer. About 30 recent TripAdvisor hires are participating or have participated in it, and the company hopes to recruit about 100 more this year.

"We now offer it to all the people coming out of college," Gelfond says, "and most other people coming in." New employees in the Web Engineering Program might hop from one team to another for up to two years. "But for about one-third of them, after a couple rotations, they find a team that they like and they stay," he says. The teams at the company focus on areas like mobile apps, Facebook integration, e-commerce, and search engine optimization. Gelfond says the program is designed to appeal not just to those who'd like to sample a number of different flavors of software development work, but also those who may eventually want to start a company of their own.

The program has already helped TripAdvisor attract employees from other local tech biggies, including Google, Oracle, and Microsoft, says spokesperson Alison Croyle. In addition to Newton, TripAdvisor has software development groups in Ottawa, Palo Alto, and Los Angeles.

Engineers at TripAdvisor get one week a year of "Hacker Time," which they can devote to any project they choose, including helping a non-profit with technology, Gelfond says. Other local employers have been tinkering with their own strategies for recruiting software developers; HubSpot recently increased its referral bonus from $10,000 to $30,000. (Pictured above is a TripAdvisor-branded Rubik's Cube that the company often hands out at recruiting events.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Nudging your way through a sea of bodies on the dance floor is soooooooo 20th century. These days, to ask the DJ to play a song, you're better off using your mobile phone.

At least that's the vision of RequestNow, a new startup from two Boston University undergrads. When you send a text message to a special phone number, RequestNow figures out what song you're probably talking about, and adds it to the DJ's queue. Songs requested by more than one person float to the top of the list. The founders are Matthew Auerbach and Guy Aridor, who met in a computer science course; Auerbach has some DJing experience.

I tried it this afternoon, and it was pretty good at figuring out what songs I was talking about. Texting "Heroes" put the David Bowie song on the play list. The first time I asked for "Crazy," it assumed I meant the Gnarls Barkley song, but a second text for "Crazy by Seal" set it straight.

RequestNow hopes that DJs will pay a monthly fee for access to the app, starting at $9.99 per month. A higher-priced version will let them send out marketing messages to people who requested songs, presumably promoting future gigs.

"It gives them the ability to market themselves and develop a relationship with audiences," says Peter Boyce of Rough Draft, a seed stage investment group that is putting $10,000 into RequestNow. "It's almost like a marketing platform."

Aridor is working on the startup from Brookline this summer; Auerbach is out in Silicon Valley, where he has a summer internship at Facebook.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Sharing some audio and photos here from last week's Nantucket Conference, which featured speakers like Talko founder Ray Ozzie, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Scott Eckert of Rethink Robotics, Niraj Shah of Wayfair, and Diane Hessan of CommuniSpace. This year, for the first time, in addition to the mainstage sessions, there were also "unconference"-style sessions suggested and run by conference participants, on topics like "personal productivity hacks," building company culture, and "PR 3.0."

The event also included a kind of "exit interview" that I moderated with former Zipcar chief executive Scott Griffith, who departed after selling the company to Avis earlier this year for $500 million.

Cory von Wallenstein, CTO, and Gray Chynoweth, COO, of Manchester, NH-based Dyn.

CommuniSpace CEO Diane Hessan runs an unconference session on "Company Leadership Beyond the Startup Phase."

Former Lotus Development Corp. colleagues Ray Ozzie and John Landry.

More pics and audio below:

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Atlas Venture is making its first investment out of a new $265 million investment fund that it raised earlier this year. And there are at least three things that are notable about the deal:

• It's a bet on old-school, Yankee-style craftsmanship.

• It's in a startup, CustomMade, that is located not quite two blocks from Atlas' office in East Cambridge.

• While Atlas usually makes early seed or first-round investments in companies, this is a second round of funding for CustomMade. (The company had raised $8 million previously, from investors including Google Ventures, NextView Ventures, Launch Capital, and First Round Capital.)

CustomMade is a marketplace site somewhat similar to Etsy, but focused entirely on products that are made to order. The site helps customers communicate with a number of "makers" around the country, find one they like, and manage the design process. The two most popular items that customers want made, according to CEO Mike Salguero: tables and necklaces. (I profiled the company and some of the challenges it faced in generating enough work for makers, in 2011.)

Salguero says that CustomMade has 40 employees, and that "the majority of this money will be used for hiring," primarily in engineering and marketing. Over 12,000 makers bid on jobs through the site, and CustomMade pockets 10 percent of every successful transaction (with a cap of $1000 on the company's fee.)

"Our next challenge," says Salguero, "is getting average customers to experience custom for the first time — making it easier, more predictable, and more delightful. And that obviously is something that involves everyone here, from marketing to service to user experience and engineering." (In the photo, Salguero is on the right, with president Seth Rosen on the left.)

In a blog post about the deal, Atlas Venture partner Fred Destin predicts that "custom is the new frontier in luxury and 'affordable luxury.' There is a huge pull away from mindless consumption towards more meaningful, one-off purchases."

The company brought on a new SVP of engineering last December, Jim Haughwout, and a new VP of product starts next month. Maggie McCanner joins CustomMade after working at Amazon.com and AllRecipes.com in Seattle. "We're now importing people to Boston from other places," says Salguero.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

A former Endeca exec told me the story last month about what had happened to the company's mascot, Puffer, after their Cambridge software company was acquired by Oracle Corp. for $1.1 billion. Basically, the pufferfish was laid off, the victim not of an inflated salary or a redundant role, but of a no-animals-in-the-office policy at Oracle.

It seemed like a pretty good symbol of the way big acquirers sometimes stomp on the culture of what they have acquired, to the point where the talent starts walking out the door. (At this point, I know far more ex-Endeca employees than I do people who've stuck around. And I've written about some of the new startups they've been forming.) When I heard the story, I knew I had to write about Puffer.

Here's the opening of Sunday's column about Endeca, Oracle, and Puffer. Afterward is the farewell e-mail that Puffer "wrote" to her colleagues at Endeca on her last day, along with a video of Puffer in her saltwater tank.

This is the story of Puffer, a sprightly little pufferfish who lived in an office building in Cambridge. Puffer was the mascot of a company called Endeca. Every day, when the software developers would show up for work on the 15th floor, the first thing they would see when they got off the elevator was Puffer, swimming happily in her tank.

All the employees loved Puffer. They put her picture on posters that promoted companywide parties. And when she puffed up — which was not very often — people took pictures and e-mailed them to their co-workers. The employees who helped take care of Puffer, feeding her krill and algae, loved her even more. She would follow them whenever they walked past her tank, sometimes bonking into the glass.

But one day in 2011, one of the richest men in the world decided to buy Endeca. He paid more than $1 billion for the company, which created software to help businesses analyze their operations or organize the products sold on their websites. And that’s when things changed for Puffer and her friends.

This is the story of Puffer, but it’s also the story of those thousand tiny changes that big companies often make when they acquire smaller ones. And about how those changes often lead to the loss of the very same talent the big company hoped to bring on as part of the deal.

(Photo courtesy of Jeffrey Lin, a former Endecan who helped take care of Puffer.)

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Everyone has been mocking Google's Glass eyewear for its dweeby aesthetic. But would the teasing subside if Glass, which connects wirelessly to the Internet and can respond to spoken commands, was used to save lives?

A Scituate entrepreneur, John Rodley, is working on a Glass app for use in hospitals. "I think Glass is a game-changer, and I kind of enjoy seeing people diss it," he says. Rodley paid $1500 to get his hands on the developer's version of the Glass device, and start crafting software for it. He showed off his progress so far in Cambridge last weekend at AngelHack, a competition for entrepreneurs and web developers.

"We built a system for rapid response teams at hospitals," he says. "In some cases, they are coordinating care with people who might be in other locations on a campus or inside a big building." Rather than wait until those people arrive at a patient's bedside, a nurse who is wearing Glass and using Rodley's app would be able to livestream video, along with vital signs, to the doctor or specialist who is on the way over. "It gives them the first-person view of what's happening at the bedside, along with data like heart rate and blood pressure. If they can't see it, they're not going to venture an opinion about the appropriate treatment until they get there," he says. The doctor can also use Glass to ask questions or communicate with the caregiver who is in the patient's room.

Rodley's startup is called Farlo (Italian for "do it"), and the product is currently known as ArrtGlass. (The RRT in there stands for "rapid response team.") He was formerly a manager at Sonos, which makes a digital music systems, and Roam Data, an electronic payments company.

Rodley says he's continuing to develop the product, and hopes to get a pilot version into the field for testing later this year.

Below is some EKG data that the responding doctor could see on her Glass display, and also an image of what the "base station" view of all the video and data being sent through the ArrtGlass system would look like on a desktop machine. (The "patient" is an ArrtGlass collaborator, Griffin Mahoney, playing sick at AngelHack over the weekend.)

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Exponential Techspace isn't listed on the directory of the Park Square Building in Back Bay, the furniture isn't all assembled yet, and there isn't much on its website, but I dropped by yesterday to check out the new communal office geared to entrepreneurs working on education technology ventures. Exponential, the brainchild of parallel entrepreneur Hakan Satiroglu, is already home to a handful of startups, and as of next week, it'll house another seven businesses participating in the edtech-focused LearnLaunch accelerator program. LearnLaunch co-founder Marissa Lowman is also working out of Exponential.

"Nobody has really come out and done something like this for education before," says Satiroglu, right.

Exponential's office looks out across Berkeley Street at the headquarters of publisher Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, and a few blocks away is the Boston office of Pearson, another major player in educational publishing. Several of Satiroglu's startups, including news site EdTech Times and Xlibrio, an online textbook store for schools, are now operating out of Exponential. So is Good Harbor Partners, a small merchant bank that works with publishers and edtech businesses. Not all the early tenants are connected to edtech, though: there's ZappRx, an e-health startup that connects doctors, patients, and pharmacists, and Wellable, which designs incentive programs to promote wellness.

Satiroglu says he hopes to attract visiting execs from the nearby textbook publishers, as well as educators from local schools and universities, for meetings and events at Exponential. The first one will likely be an open house planned for June 27th.

A dedicated desk for one person costs $350 a month; a cubicle that fits two people goes for $600 a month. The ninth floor space was formerly the Boston office of NAVTEQ, a provider of digital maps for GPS systems.

A few pics below:

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Here's an amazing app that I hope you never need to use...

Boston Children's Hospital has been pilot-testing an iPad app this spring called MyPassport. It's designed to give patients and their families more information about what's going on during their stay, from the doctors and nurses assigned to them to the results of their lab tests. It also lets them submit questions they have, and get them answered quickly by their docs.

Hiep Nguyen, right, a urologist at the hospital, led the development of the app, relying on software development resources from the Fasttrack Innovation in Technology team at Children's. When the hospital fielded surveys and conducted focus groups, Nguyen explains, some families of patients reported that they "felt disconnected from their providers," especially when English wasn't their first language. "In some cases, they didn't know who some of their doctors were." Among the goals for the app were to provide a "better awareness of tests being done, who their providers are, and what the discharge criteria are" — in other words, what needs to happen in order for them to be released. The app also "helps them organize questions they might have, and get answers before that day's rounds at 3 p.m.," Nguyen adds.

Test results show up not as abstract numbers, but along a spectrum of blue, green, or red. (Red being worrisome.)

The app interfaces with two different electronic medical records systems used at Children's, as well as the hospital's security database, which supplies photos of all of the docs and nurses. The app also includes pictures of the patient and his or her family, which can be helpful as a reference for harried docs trying to keep their patients straight, Nguyen says. The app replaces a binder full of paper that patients ordinarily receive, which is quite labor-intensive to assemble and maintain.

The initial version of the app was loaded onto a loaner iPad, and tested by about 30 patients. A version rolling out now can be used on a patient's own iPhone or Android device. That will enable patients to see their discharge instructions on the app, as well as information about future appointments.

Nguyen says the next steps for the project are to create foreign language versions of MyPassport — most likely in Spanish and Creole — since the families that report the lowest satisfaction with their experience at Children's tend to be non-English speakers, according to hospital surveys.

And MyPassport could also develop into a company funded by investors, Nguyen says. Though he doesn't have time to commercialize the product himself, "My greatest happiness would be to see this being used by many, many patients."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

LinkedIn and Twitter have both attained a pretty vast audience over the past half decade. But the co-founders of a Cambridge startup, Industry Inc., believe they've identified a gap between the two social networks. Neither one, says co-founder Raj Bala, lets you easily join a conversation and share relevant content with a group of peers from the industry you work in — regardless of whether know them in real life.

As Bala, right, puts it, “Most people don’t see Twitter as being a professional social network. When you first join, the service is always suggesting celebrities or sports stars to follow. And LinkedIn is designed to prevent you from connecting to people you don’t know. There, if someone tries to communicate with you and they don’t have some relationship to you, LinkedIn sees that as spam.”

Industry, so far, is entirely focused on its iOS and Android mobile apps. And at launch, the company is only targeting people who work in tech, life sciences, and K-12 education. To start, you enter your work e-mail address and add contacts from your address book who work in your industry. (Eventually, the app will suggest people to follow, Bala says.) You can also add people from the public stream of messages, which shows everything being shared in your industry, or click on a company name to see everyone who is an Industry member from that company. Unlike Twitter, there's no limit on the length of your posts. "You could use it to ask a question, share a link, or organize something in the offline world, like a meetup of Boston area storage startups," Bala says. "People might use it to build their reputations, or to find their next job."

Bala and his co-founder, Subra Aswathanarayanan, worked together at EMC before starting Industry back in February. They’ve been self-funding the startup so far. “We want to get to the point where we’ve done enough iterations where we know this is going to work before we raise money,” Bala says. “We want to get to the point where we have traction.” Bala had raised venture money for his last startup, BigSwerve, which built a search engine for blog comments. With that venture, Bala says, “We didn’t find product-market fit early enough. That’s what we’re trying to do here before we take money.”

Starting a new social network ain't easy: you have to persuade people to sign up, get their friends to sign up, and then share stuff regularly. It'll be interesting to see whether Industry can somehow beat the odds.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Tracking the Vlingo diaspora...

A year ago this week, speech recognition giant Nuance closed on its acquisition of the Harvard Square startup, which made a virtual assistant app for smartphones similar to Siri — but launched well before the Apple feature — that attracted about 13 million users.

One Vlingo founder, local speech guru Michael Phillips, is working on a startup called Sage Devices that has raised some seed funding from Izhar Armony at Charles River Ventures, one of the VC firms that backed Vlingo and an earlier Phillips startup called SpeechWorks. (It, too, was gobbled up by Nuance.) Former Vlingo product manager Chris Micali is also on board, according to a corporate filing. Phillips didn't want to be too specific about Sage, but he did say that he's interested in home automation, and technologies for monitoring and managing consumers' home energy usage. (He's pictured at right.)

Another Vlingo co-founder, John Nguyen, says that his last day working at Nuance is this coming Monday. He writes via e-mail, "I'm taking the summer off and will probably start my own thing afterwards, assuming it gets funded!" Nguyen had served as Vlingo's EVP of product and business development.

Two other early employees have attracted seed funding for a startup called Pencil Labs, from Antonio Rodriguez at Matrix Partners and Jon Auerbach at Charles River Ventures, along with Dave Grannan, Vlingo's former CEO. They're trying to create an intelligent calendar that can reduce the amount of human effort involved in scheduling, say, a 90-minute meeting that involves 15 people. The founders are Han Shu and Joe Cerra. Carla Pellicano, a former exec at Fiksu and Marginize, is also working with them.

"Supposedly, it will learn and make scheduling 100 percent seamless," explains an individual with knowledge of Pencil's plans. "The problem that they are solving is that people spend too much time scheduling things, and not enough time actually doing the things they are trying to schedule."

Doron Gan, who managed the server team at Vlingo, has a new startup called UserAtlas, focused on helping companies increase the lifetime value of their customers. His cofounder is Melyssa Plunkett-Gomez, a former exec at Crimson Hexagon and Unica.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Before the month is out, I wanted to share a few photos and audio recordings from the annual Convergence Forum, a life sciences industry gathering held on Cape Cod on May 16th and 17th. This was the tenth year for the event, which explores what's happening as the businesses of biotech, big pharma, medical devices, consumer electronics, and healthcare start to collide and collaborate more, and develop interdependent products.

Speakers came from MIT, BiogenIdec, Johnson & Johnson, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Jeff Walsh represented Bluebird Bio, a Cambridge company focused on gene therapy that had filed for an IPO a few days earlier, and Deborah Dunsire, CEO of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, had recently resigned from her job at the Japanese-owned developer of cancer drugs.

Daphne Zohar of PureTech Ventures, Benjamin Heywood of PatientsLikeMe, and Katherine Bowdish of Sanofi.

Radio producer Rachel Gotbaum and David Ewing Duncan, author of "When I'm 164: The New Science of Radical Life Extension."

Michael Gilman of BiogenIdec and Arthur Tzianabos of Shire HGT.

Audio recordings of several sessions are below. Click "Play," or click the session title for more info.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Growing up in a Connecticut household that mostly spoke Polish, Olenka Polak and her brother Adam had first-hand experience in how language can be a barrier to participating in the culture. And that led the siblings, years later, to start a company that would help make a key part of American culture — the movies — more welcoming to those who don't speak English.

The Polaks are co-founders of myLINGO, a still-stealthy startup based at Harvard's Innovation Lab. myLINGO is developing a mobile app that would make it easy to rent, for 99 cents, a movie's audio track in a wide variety of languages. And it'd be useful not just for theatrical releases, but also for on-demand or DVD viewing at home. "You can imagine a scenario where the kids are fine watching a cartoon in English, but Abuela and Abuelo would want to listen to the audio in Spanish," says Olenka Polak, right, who just wrapped up her sophomore year at Harvard. (Her brother is a 2012 graduate of Johns Hopkins.)

For a demo, Polak started playing the Spanish version of "Toy Story 2" on her laptop. The prototype app on her iPhone listened to the soundtrack for 20 seconds or so to figure out what part of the movie was playing, and when I put the earbuds in, I could hear Buzz Lightyear speaking in English, perfectly synchronized. The app checks in every few minutes with the soundtrack on the film or DVD, just to make sure it is still in the right spot. (Audio processing expert Dan Ellis of Columbia University is an advisor to myLINGO.)

Polak says that Hollywood studios record the dialogue of blockbuster releases in as many as 25 different languages, for both theatrical and DVD releases, so the alternate versions are already being produced. Smaller films are typically recorded in French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The myLINGO app would let users search for movies available in their preferred language, and then rent the audio file for 24 hours.

MyLINGO won $10,000 in last month's Harvard College Innovation Challenge.

Polak's hope is that the studios would see myLINGO as something that helps them expand the audience for their theatrical releases and DVDs. "We think that today, there are a lot of immigrants who are not in seats," Polak says. But she's just now discussing myLINGO's technology with several top executives at Hollywood studios, so we'll have to see how they react. Seems to me like an idea with big potential...

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Massachusetts is home to a closet full of big-name shoe brands, from New Balance to Reebok to Converse to Rockport. One of the state's newest shoe startups, Category 5 Boat Shoes, is still trying to achieve that kind of name recognition. So over the holiday weekend, the founders were schmoozing with the entrants in the annual Figawai sailing race from Hyannis to Nantucket. And the Framingham company presented a special-edition pair of boat shoes, pictured at right, to the winning skippers.

The shoes are made in the Dominican Republic, explains CEO and co-founder Jason Shuman. They can be embossed on the side (what footwear insiders call the "eye row") with logos of various college fraternities; outlines of islands like Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard; or an image the buyer uploads. They're priced at about $80, though customization adds $10 to the price.

Category 5 won the grand prize in this year's business plan competition at the University of Miami, where Shuman was a student. The startup's five founders all grew up together in Sudbury and Wayland.

The company is working on retail distribution for its shoes; they're sold at several outlets in Georgia and at Country Club Prep, an online retailer of all things preppy, but Shuman hopes to expand that to the Cape and Islands this summer.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

One of Boston's highest-profile energy entrepreneurs, Christina Lampe-Onnerud, is moving to Connecticut to join one of the world's biggest hedge fund managers, Bridgewater Associates. Lampe-Onnerud is a former Arthur D. Little scientist who in 2004 founded Boston-Power, a maker of lithium ion batteries for laptops and electric vehicles. The company attracted customers like HP and Saab. But Lampe-Onnerud dialed down her involvement with the company in 2012, after it raised a big new funding round and shifted much of its operations to China.

"The thing I love [about Bridgewater] is it's a really high caliber team," she says. "I have every intention of giving everything I can and learning everything I can."

But Lampe-Onnerud says that she and her husband, Per, have also formed a new energy startup called Cloteam. The company won a $40,000 grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center in February. In the press release, Cloteam was said to be working on "a lower cost and higher safety energy storage systems using battery technology. ...With improved performance, in combination with greater safety and cost reductions in battery storage, cloteam’s innovations will enable electric drive and energy storage globally." Per Onnerud had previously been the chief technology officer at Boston-Power.

Christina tells me that the job with Bridgewater is very much full-time, and that the family is in the midst of closing on a house in Westport, Connecticut, where the firm is headquartered. As for Cloteam, "Per is running it. Some of the people working with him are new people, and some were at Boston-Power. It's really a technical team right now. It will take a couple years to demonstrate if this idea is a good one." She says the company has team members spread across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. "We can angel finance it ourselves," she says, but adds that "we are in discussions with other sources of funding."

Lampe-Onnerud has one of the more optimistic personalities you'll ever encounter, and so it isn't a surprise when she says, "I am very sure that the energy space will come back."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The spring "demo day" for the TechStars Boston accelerator program took place this morning at House of Blues on Landsdowne Street. Founders of 14 startups from the U.S. and Europe delivered short pitches for an invited audience of investors, TechStars mentors, and community members. The founders spoke about the opportunities they're addressing; early customers; and the amount they're hoping to raise (including any funding commitments they've received prior to demo day). There's also an after-party Thursday evening at Storyville, but looks like that is sold out. (Update: Try using the code TS to get a seat.)

One of the startups, Worcester-bred Freight Farms, will be the first local company to try out a new funding platform called WeFunder as part of its fundraising process. WeFunder was started in Cambridge by Nick Tommarello and Mike Norman, but is now based in Silicon Valley. (Tommarello participated in TechStars Boston several years back with an earlier venture, Sparkcloud, and more recently went through the Y Combinator program in Mountain View.) Another, Fancred, got David Ortiz of the Red Sox to show up to help plug its mobile app for sports fans. In the photo above are CEO Hossein Kash Razzaghi, a Brightcove alum, with Big Papi, who asked Razzaghi how he could get the Yankees off his phone.

If you'd like to see tweets about the event, the hash tag was #tsdemoday.

Descriptions in quotes below come from TechStars managing director Katie Rae's original post announcing the current class of companies. My comments follow that. When the companies hail from somewhere other than Massachusetts, I've listed that.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Big new round of funding being announced today by a Franklin-based startup, Interactions Corp. And it’s being led by Steve Murray, a venture capitalist based in the Newton office of Softbank Capital.

Interactions Corp. helps about 22 big customers, including Hyatt and Humana, handle incoming phone calls more efficiently, without requiring callers to press 2 for billing, 3 for sales, or * to go back to the previous menu. But it also doesn’t rely entirely on speech recognition, which can often run into trouble, especially when interpreting phrases or full sentences. Instead, Interactions layers human assistance on top of automated speech recognition when necessary. If there's a lot of background noise, or the caller has a thick accent, a human listens to that fragment of the conversation and routes the caller to the right place. The company calls its solution the "Virtual Assistant"; you can listen to some examples here.

Interactions has about 80 employees at its headquarters in Franklin, and it plans to open up a second local office on Lincoln Street in downtown Boston next month. “There’s a certain group of employees that we’ll have greater access to in that location,” says CEO Mike Iacobucci, right. With the new funding, Iacobucci says he’ll be hiring across pretty much every function, including engineering, sales, marketing, and client services. The company also has offices in Indianapolis and Austin.

Iacobucci says that Interactions has “done really well” penetrating the hospitality market, where clients include Hyatt and Best Western, and that other customers come from industries like telecom, retail, and healthcare. As for this new round of funding, he says, the investors "felt we had sufficient traction," and Iacobucci felt "it was time to expand the businesses." The other VC firms participating in this round are Sigma Partners and Sigma Prime Ventures of Boston; Updata Partners; North Hill Venture Partners of Boston; Cross Atlantic Capital Partners; and RED LLC.

In April, Interactions announced a partnership with AT&T to use the company’s Watson speech technology as part of its offering. I last covered the company in 2010.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

CoachUp founder Jordan Fliegel has been on a pretty hot signing streak when it comes to adding advisors and directors. Ex-U.S. Senator Scott Brown and Boston Bruins president Cam Neely are already involved with the Boston startup, which helps connect aspiring athletes with private coaches. And now Fliegel has persuaded Scott Griffith, the long-time Zipcar CEO, to join his board. (Zipcar went public before being acquired by Avis back in January.)

"There's a real mission orientation to this business, which is part of what attracted me," says Griffith, adding that he has been meeting with five or six companies a week as he starts to craft his post-Zipcar life. "Also, I have a 14-year old son who plays soccer, basketball, and baseball, so I understand the marketplace CoachUp is trying to create. Coaching right now is a cottage industry. There are concerns about safety, and competence, and who these people are, and that's what they're addressing." The site offers detailed profiles and reviews of each coach, and covers the lesson packages it sells with a $100,000 liability insurance policy. Fliegel says that over 7000 coaches are offering lessons through the site, and that California is the company's biggest market, followed by states like Texas, Florida, New York, and Georgia. The company has 15 employees, and has been hiring quickly. CoachUp launched last May, and was part of the TechStars Boston fall class in 2012.

Griffith tells me that his post-Zipcar plan isn't simply to jump on a bunch of startup boards and do some angel investing. "I've got another run with a company in me here," he says. But he's also interested in playing a role in the startup scene. "One thing I'm focused on is what can I do to make a more robust ecosystem here in Boston. We've come a good distance, but there's still lots of work that can be done."

Also advising CoachUp are Sheila Marcelo, CEO of Care.com, and Jumptap's chief product officer, Adam Soroca. "I look at Airbnb and Care.com and Zipcar as models," says Fliegel. "We want to be the next great consumer company in the U.S. We're going big."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

If something new is being built in your neighborhood, the chances are pretty good that you don't get sufficient information about how it will affect you — or a chance to voice your opinion about it. Unless, that is, you have enough time on your hands to attend community meetings and hearings regularly.

A new startup out of the TechStars Boston accelerator, CoUrbanize, is trying to tackle that problem, and this week the company is announcing its first partnership, with the bike rental network Hubway. Co-founder Karin Brandt, right, an MIT-educated city planner, says that other partnerships with commercial real estate developers could be announced as soon as next week, when this latest crop of TechStars Boston startups present to investors.

CoUrbanize's web-based software allows developers to "explain their projects, and the impacts they can have on the surrounding areas, like shadows and traffic and parking," Brandt says. "They can also get feedback from passive proponents" — who may not have the same opinions as people attending hearings and community meetings. "We're trying to reduce the barriers to involvement for people." The software allows developers to publish a timeline of meetings; detail a project's upside, like job creation, new retail stores, or tax revenue; and invite comments in an online forum, with posters using their real names rather than pseudonyms. The interesting balancing act here, of course, will be ensuring that CoUrbanize's sites feel like a neutral forum, rather than anything controlled by developers, cities, or residents.

But Brandt says that the company sees its "sweet spot" as helping developers and governments communicate issues that are hard to understand and visualize, and notifying people about what's happening in a way that's more sophisticated than going door-to-door with printed flyers." CoUrbanize aspires to help residents voice their opinions, but also to help developers stop misinformation from being circulated — which can often happen in anonymous forums.

With Hubway, Brandt says CoUrbanize will help the bike-sharing network "get feedback about future stations, and where they should be located" as it expands in neighborhoods like Charlestown, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and the Innovation District in South Boston. Her co-founders are Daniel Weismann and David Quinn.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

One of Cambridge's fastest-growing companies just inked a deal to keep its headquarters located in a one-time furniture factory built in 1860.

HubSpot, which sells software to help clients manage their digital marketing efforts, will more than double in size at the Davenport Building on First Street in East Cambridge, leasing about 117,000 square feet there as other tenants like Zipcar move out. Most of the new space won't be available until later in 2013. (Zipcar, now part of Avis, is heading to the Fort Point Channel neighborhood in Boston.)

With about 450 employees in Cambridge and a new European office in Dublin, HubSpot is typically listed as one of a half-dozen tech companies most likely to go public in the next 12 months. Its current digs at the Davenport fill about 50,000 square feet.

HubSpot chief operating officer JD Sherman writes via e-mail, "HubSpot's deal with the Davenport should allow us to stay in the same location for the next three to four years, which we are really excited about. We've always believed in creating an office and a culture that employees truly love, and the space, access to public transportation, and proximity to top-tier universities and tech companies make East Cambridge an ideal fit for a rapidly growing company like ours."

The building's owner is DIVCO West, which paid $79 million for the Davenport last year. T3 Advisors represented HubSpot on the deal. Here's a piece from 2010 on the design of HubSpot's HQ.