Videogame maker Majesco shuts down Foxborough studio, which had focused on mobile and Facebook games
The studio had developed three different mobile games, including Flea Symphony and Legends of Loot, as well as a Facebook game called Miniputt Park. Studio head Jeff Anderson confirmed the closure, which I tweeted about late on Friday, saying it was a surprise to the employees there, but that "we understand the challenges of the business" as game developers try to score big hits in the rapidly-evolving mobile and social landscape.
"Zynga's high-visibility drop in value has definitely had an impact," says Michael Dornbrook, a local angel investor and formerly an executive at Harmonix Music Systems. "There has been a sense that a bubble is bursting. I could easily imagine some...top execs at Majesco deciding it was time to cut back their investments in the area."
The Foxborough studio was created in 2011, when Majesco acquired the assets of Quick Hit, a venture-backed startup that had developed a web-based football game.
I called and e-mailed several Majesco representatives for comment, but haven't heard back.
This is the latest in a string of studio closures and layoffs in Boston's gaming scene, which I wrote about last month.
Ovuline raises $1.4 million for apps and services that promote procreation
And the company, which graduated from the TechStars Boston program last fall, has just raised $1.4 from a group of investors including Lightbank, Cambridge-based Launch Capital, LionBird, and TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen.
Today, Ovuline sells a mobile app ($9.99) and access to a website ($30) that help women monitor their fertility, and supply advice about "what to do every day to maximize it," Wallace says. "We are finding our early users are getting pregnant two times faster than the national average." (The company also sells supplies like ovulation tests, fertility supplements, and basal thermometers.) Going forward, Wallace says, Ovuline is expanding its focus to "use the same data analytics and clinical guidelines to help women have a healthier pregnancy." Wallace talks about collecting data with devices like home blood pressure cuffs, scales, and pedometers.
"Right now, the standard of care is 10 to 14 doctor visits over the course of a pregnancy. But taking your blood pressure daily can be a way to spot problems like preeclampsia, which can threaten the health of the mother and the fetus," he says. "You can catch things early."
He talks about pregnancy as "one of the times when women radically change their health behavior. We are trying to take quantified self technology and apply it to a very specific time when people are motivated to change, and willing to engage."
The company has five full-time employees, and "we're going to be growing with this financing," Wallace says. Ovuline will be moving into Launch Capital's Harvard Square offices sometime later this month.
Bounce Imaging prepares to roll into Consumer Electronics Show next week
Bounce is one of Boston's most promising hardware startups. The small company is developing a tossable, baseball-sized orb that's embedded with cameras and other sensors. Pitch it into a dangerous situation, and it sends back panoramic pictures and data about what's happening there without putting people at risk. Bounce won a $50,000 cash prize in last year's MassChallenge competition, and Time Magazine named it one of the best inventions of 2012. Bounce operates out of space at Harvard's Innovation Lab in Cambridge and the MassChallenge headquarters in Boston; the startup has also been a participant in the Haverhill Hardware Horizons Challenge.
Aguilar says that since the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and Aurora, Colorado, "unfortunately what we are doing is top-of-mind. The regular beat cop doesn't have access to the same kind of surveillance equipment a SWAT team would have, but they usually arrive at the scene first. Our device will be cheap enough to be in every squad car's trunk, so it can give them a view of what's going on before they have to go into an active-shooter type situation." Bounce's target price is around $500.
The company is building a handful of test units now, and plans to start working with New England law enforcement agencies this spring to see how the surveillance orb can be integrated into their work, and how it might be improved. At the Consumer Electronics Show, Aguilar says the main objectives are to talk with potential investors; meet prospective suppliers; and, of course, bask in a little media attention.
Aguilar's co-founder, David Young, won't be joining him in Vegas next week. The former Army Ranger, now an MBA student at MIT, will be heading north to Maine to attend a less glam — but probably more essential — gathering of SWAT teams.
A company-produced video is below:
FULL ENTRYResearch and data specialist The 451 Group buys Boston's Yankee Group
Yankee was first sold by founder Howard Anderson in 1996 ($34 million, to Primark). Then it turned over again in 2000 ($72.5 million, to Reuters), in 2004 (undisclosed, to the Cambridge private equity shop Monitor Clipper Partners), and finally one more time the following year (undisclosed, to the Boston private equity firm Alta Communications.) You almost needed an analyst firm to figure out what was going on with the storied Boston analyst firm, which got its start in 1970. That was back when the telecom industry basically began and ended with Ma Bell and her equipment suppliers.
Yankee's new owner says it plans to keep the brand and the Boston office intact — despite the fact that 451 Research already operates a small Boston office of its own just a few blocks away. As it has for the past few years, Yankee will continue to focus on the impact that mobile technologies are having on consumers and businesses.
For some reason, neither Yankee CEO Terry Waters or 451 Group CEO Martin McCarthy, right, wanted to tell me how many people work for Yankee today. LinkedIn shows the number at about 90, but one former employee tells me the actual number of full-timers is closer to 30 worldwide. At one point, Anderson recalls, the firm had more than 200 employees.
But eight years of private equity ownership certainly, uh, slimmed the place down. Various blogs reported on layoffs in 2008, 2009, and 2011.
"We had to right-size the business when I came in," says Waters, who arrived in 2010. He sold off a group that organized trade shows and conferences. Some of the firm's forecasting now comes from analysts who aren't full-timers, but rather "independent consultants affiliated with Yankee," Waters says. And Yankee's data modeling is now done by a partnership based in Bogota, Colombia, working under a Yankee executive in Boston.
McCarthy wouldn't divulge any of the financial details of this latest acquisition, including price. Waters will stay on as CEO.
"Mobility is just becoming more prominent and strategic, not just in our lives as consumers, but as enterprise executives," McCarthy says. Yankee will continue to focus on that theme, operating independently within 451 Group. McCarthy claims that Yankee now has more analysts focusing on mobile than any other analyst firm.
Microsoft NERD exec Walter Somol heads to social game developer Stomp Games
Somol will serve as director of marketing and business development at Stomp. "I’m really excited about this opportunity," Somol writes via e-mail. "I think the team is fantastic and has very deep experience in making high-quality games. We’re all excited to be in the online/free to play space. I think that’s where we will see the most growth and innovation in the near-term."
Somol's new colleagues at Stomp have worked on games like Age of Empires, NASCAR Racing, Titan Quest, Dawn of War, and Madden NFL.
Formed in 2012, Stomp is owned by Tencent Inc., one of China's most popular Internet portals. (The studio is also known as Tencent Boston.) Robot Rising, a futuristic role-playing game, is its first project. Stomp was one of several Boston-area game studios to lay off some of its staff last year.
Unclear at this point who will replace Somol at Microsoft NERD...
As Endeca exodus continues, trio of former employees start Salsify to help manufacturers distribute better product info
Co-founders Steve Papa and Pete Bell have both left Oracle as of this month. Former Endeca SVP Chris Comparato is now at Acquia, the Burlington company that peddles web content management software. Others have left for PayPal Boston, Silver Lining Systems, Sqrrl, Hopper, Internet advertising company DataXu, and Lookout Gaming, a new startup.
I wrote last week about Toast, a new mobile app developed by a trio of ex-Endecans.
And there's another local start-up, Salsify, founded by alumni of Endeca. Salsify is building a cloud-based system to help manufacturers distribute information about their products — like images, descriptions, ads, or suggested prices — to distributors and retailers. Founders Jason Purcell and Jeremy Redburn left Endeca in September; the third co-founder, Rob Gonzalez, had departed in 2010. Salsify hasn't yet raised outside funding.
Using the example of a Bento box manufacturer (we were having lunch at a Japanese place), Gonzalez says that "a lot of information about products like this are still stuck in PDFs and spreadsheets that get e-mailed around. And we think that a lot of the big makers of enterprise software are doing a crappy job of serving this space." Purcell explains that Salsify's product enables manufacturers (or perhaps their marketing or advertising firms) to upload the product data they have, and then retailers or distributors can access the content that they need. They can also subscribe to "feeds" to stay up to date about product changes, promotions, or perhaps new accessories.
"A brand might have 40 different distributors, and each needs product images in a different size," Purcell says. "We want to simplify that."
Salsify is already working with a pilot customer, and Purcell says they plan to open up a wider beta test over the next few months. While Purcell is Salsify's CEO, all three founders say they are writing code for the product. The company moves into its first "real" office in Chinatown this week. (The founders had previously been based at the Workbar shared space near South Station.)
As for choosing the name Salsify, Gonzalez explains in an e-mail:
A dandelion is a weed. It spreads like crazy. But it's a beautiful weed that you want to spread because doing so is a joy; who hasn't blown on dandelion seeds as a kid? Especially when thinking about the whole idea of a product content network where brands are pushing their product data out into the world, we thought it was a great analogy. So we liked that idea but the word dandelion is pretty long, and itself not very evocative. The Salsify plant is a cousin to the dandelion. It's served in high end restaurants, but it's still a weed...It felt appropriate, as we're trying to reinvent the way product data is distributed across the globe.
(In the photo are co-founders Jason Purcell, Jeremy Redburn, and Rob Gonzalez.)
New device from Harvard spin-out Bobo Analytics puts a workout monitor on your wrist
Based at Harvard’s Innovation Lab, Bobo is working on a wristwatch-like product that can monitor your heart rate and movement, and help you get the most from your workouts. As founder and CEO Will Ahmed puts it, “The chest strap that monitors heart rate is a 30-year old technology, and people don’t wear it all the time. We want to understand what’s happening on a daily basis.”
The current prototype, pictured at right, has two optical sensors that come in contact with your skin to collect data about your pulse, as well as an accelerometer to monitor motion (in part to know when the heart rate sensors are getting good data, and when you may be moving too vigorously for them to be accurate.) Ahmed says that the company is also testing sensors for skin temperature and perspiration. The Bobo device can send data via Bluetooth to a nearby phone, tablet, or laptop, letting users log their data over time.
Ahmed isn’t yet talking about a target price for the device, but he says the company may initially market it through coaches and trainers. “They often have athletes or clients that are overtraining or undertraining,” he says. “They want to be able to monitor that, even when they’re not physically there for a workout. How intense was it? When are you recovered from it?”
Ahmed earned his undergrad degree from Harvard earlier this spring, and he also captained the squash team there. Product development engineer Aurelian Nicolae also graduated from Harvard this year, and chief technology officer John Capodilupo is taking time off from his studies there. (Ahmed and Nicolae are at left.)
Ahmed says the company has already raised about $300,000 in seed funding, and may look to raise more soon. The company name, Bobo, is intended to sound like a heartbeat.
Testing out Toast, new mobile app that helps diners keep an eye on the tab
Fredette left Endeca over the summer, and with another alumnus of the Cambridge business intelligence company, Jonathan Grimm, started Toast Inc. (At Endeca, Fredette had launched and led the mobile software development team. A third member of the Toast team remains at Oracle, the company that acquired Endeca last year.) Toast is currently operating out of the Kendall Square offices of Bessemer Venture Partners, the VC firm, but Fredette says he hasn’t yet accepted any outside funding for the venture.
The Toast iPhone app allows you to start a tab at a restaurant, linked to your credit card. You can see what’s on your tab and divide it exactly as you’d like among several diners. (Maybe you want to split it down the middle, or pay only for what you ordered — especially on those occasions when your companion downs a few cocktails and you’re sipping cola.) You can set an amount for the tip, and settle up whenever you’re ready. Toast eliminates all that back-and-forth with the check, your credit card, and multiple copies of the receipt.
On the restaurant’s end, Toast provides an iPad that is plugged in to the cash register. (Toast currently works only with POSitouch point-of-sale systems.) That enables wait staff to enter orders the way they usually do, and have them magically appear on the app that diners are using. Servers can also get background on customers by clicking on their profiles on the tablet: who comes in frequently, tips well, or often brings in big groups. “One problem that most restaurants have,” Fredette says, “is that as they hire new staff, their regulars aren’t recognized.”
Eventually, Fredette plans for Toast to do more. He sees it as an establishment’s “connection with their customers,” a way for them to ask you for feedback, or to share your experience on social media. There will also be a way for restaurants to send you special offers (of course.)
When we tried it last Thursday, a few things went awry, as is often the case with demos of technology that’s still in development. Our server, apparently new, had never heard of Toast. Fredette mentioned the name of another server who had used the system. A tab got started with Toast, but it only included Fredette, not me. So we asked again, and finally we were both included on it. (Servers see pictures of diners using Toast pop up on the tablet next to the cash register, and click them to add them to a tab.) Then, I could see the items we ordered on the screen of my iPhone, and Fredette and I could choose which ones we wanted to pay for. We also noticed that someone had added a mango iced tea to our order that we’d discussed with the server, but hadn’t ordered (or received.) We asked for that to be removed, the old-fashioned way, and it was. Despite the snafus, it was nice to have a way to split the bill in a very granular fashion (I paid just for my fish sandwich and side of polenta, which were $2 more expensive than what Fredette ordered), and also to pay and leave exactly when we were ready to do so. With large groups, Fredette pointed out, Toast deals fairly with that scoundrel who always dashes out fifteen minutes before everyone else, plunks down a $20, and then forces everyone else cover his overage.
FULL ENTRYFrom the MassTLC Unconference: Advice on getting media coverage for your startup [Audio]
I served as ringmaster, and the speakers included:
- Gemvara founder Matt LauzonFULL ENTRY
- Kate Castle, marketing VP at Flybridge Capital Partners
- Laura Fitton, inbound marketing evangelist at HubSpot
- David Meerman Scott, author of the books "Newsjacking" and "Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead"
- BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter
Junk Drawer app creates a place for your stuff, on your iPhone
"Everyone has had that experience where they forgot to get something minor fixed, and then the warranty ran out on them," says Cayer, an attorney who has worked for numerous local companies like Thermo Electron, Trellix, and Soapstone Networks. "Junk Drawer can give you a notification 60 days before it's up." You can attach info about the type of batteries, bulbs, or ink a device uses, so that it's always with you when you're shopping. And of course, you can brag about what you just bought — or received as a gift — on Facebook.
The first iteration of Junk Drawer "is a good inventory manager," Cayer says. But he has plans to eventually link products to their online user manuals; enable you to review them on popular sites; let you fill out the manufacturer's registration form on your phone; and automatically create an eBay listing when you're ready to deaccession the item.
Cayer says that the app was built with the help of an offshore development shop in Columbia, Koombea. He says he has raised just under $200,000 from angel investors to build and launch the app.
Junk Drawer is free, but Cayer says that at some point product manufacturers may be willing to pay to receive registration info via the app (fewer than 10 percent of people fill out those paper registration cards), and have an opportunity to communicate with customers about accessories, refills, and next-generation products. Companies that sell extended warranties may also be interested in communicating to users of the app.
But both of those revenue streams, of course, require that Junk Drawer finds lots of loyal users first...
Is Intrepid Labs becoming the new hub of Boston's gaming scene?
But Central has emptied out (only Harmonix remains), and it seems like a new gaming community is starting to take root at Intrepid Labs, a shared "teamspace" for young companies on the top floor of the American Twine Building in East Cambridge.
Proletariat Inc., a tablet-focused games company founded by five former Zynga Boston employees is there, right next to The Tap Lab, a TechStars Boston alumnus that is working on a new location-based game, Tiny Tycoons. Owlchemy Labs, which makes iPhone and iPad games like Jack Lumber and Snuggle Truck, is a few steps away. (Dave Bisceglia, co-founder of The Tap Lab, is at right. The Proletariat team is at left.)
Proletariat has three iPad games in the works, and is starting to talk with prospective distribution partners, according to co-founder Seth Sivak. The crew is also doing some contract development work to bring in additional revenue. At The Tap Lab, Bisceglia says that Tiny Tycoons will be out in Q1; it is the second game from the eight-person studio, following Tap City, which didn't exactly catch fire. The Tap Lab also plans to invite other developers to use a new location-based games engine it has developed.
Mark Kasdorf, who set up the Intrepid Labs space in late 2011, tells me that six more indie game developers will be moving in next month; most had previously been working out of the Space With a Soul shared office in Fort Point Channel. He's planning to create an area within Intrepid especially for the game companies, called Intrepid Arcade. (And yes, there's already a cool stand-up arcade machine in the Intrepid kitchen that can serve up a zillion different classic videogames.)
Oh, and some other news from Intrepid this morning: founder Mark Kasdorf tells me that he has raised $360,000 for an iPhone app that he created, Timbre. Timbre helps you find great live music happening near you. The money comes from Atlas Venture and Boston Seed Capital, along with angel investors Joe Caruso and Marco Buchbinder. I asked Kasdorf how he'll use the funding:
Stage one is get what we have into more hands than just the 8 percent of global smartphone users that are US iOS users.Beyond that, we've got a pretty good roadmap that involves doing more of what the app does best without messing up the UX with feature bloat.
(I wrote on Sunday about the New England videogame cluster, which had a rough year in 2012.)
Boston VC firm .406 Ventures puts together new $175 million investment fund
The Boston firm is announcing this morning that it has raised $175 million, a new pool of capital that it will invest in startups that build enterprise technology, largely along the East Coast. Partner Liam Donohue says that the firm isn't changing its line-up for the new fund, or the types of companies it will back. "We've done a lot in health IT, security, web infrastructure, and big data, and we're not planning to do much new off that core," he says. "We're seeing more data analytics deals, like everyone else, and we'll probably do more healthcare IT in the new fund." The original investment fund at .406, which it finished raising in 2008, was just a bit smaller than this new one, at $167 million.
.406 typically likes to be the first VC firm to put money into a start-up company, participating in the A round. As far as making seed investments, Donohue says, "We do it selectively, but we're not running a seed program."
.406 was founded in 2006 by Donohue, Maria Cirino, and Larry Begley. Among its more successful investments so far are Adtuitive (acquired by Etsy), ChosenSecurity (acquired by PGP Corp), and Veracode, an information security company occasionally mentioned as a 2013 IPO candidate. Its offices on Atlantic Avenue are decorated with Ted Williams memorabilia like the signed bat above.
First Look: Inside Staples' new Velocity Lab in Cambridge, focused on advancing the multi-channel retail experience
"We decided to get radically more aggressive about strengthening our e-commerce and digital capabilities," Staples e-commerce SVP Brian Tilzer told me, sitting in a conference room in the first-floor space, just across the street from the Kendall Square Cinema. "Digital is the glue between our different channels — our call centers, our stores, and our web site." By setting up an outpost in Cambridge, he explained, "we can diversify the talent we were bringing to Staples. Some people don't want to do a reverse commute out to Framingham." And some of the partners that Staples works with, like Endeca, Akamai, and Google, are located just a short walk from the new Velocity Lab. (Staples PR manager Mark Cautela tells me that there was some discussion last year about planting the new lab in California.)
The new facility can accommodate about 75 people, and there are more than 40 in it already, explained Prat Vemana, the lab's director. About one-third of the people working at the lab today are Staples veterans, and two-thirds are new hires, says Vemana, who also oversees Staples' mobile strategy. That's an intentional mix, to blend fresh thinking with Staples' existing corporate culture. (Tilzer is on the left in the photo, Vemana on the right.)
"The vision for this center is to create a place where we can test, learn and iterate as rapidly as possible around new technologies," says Tilzer. As examples, he cited "thinking about how to leverage big data to deliver personalized experiences" and "helping consumers understand what services are available related to a particular product, like a laptop." But there will also be some blue-sky brainstorming, too, to "produce really cool stuff that's meaningful to our customers."
Vemana says that Staples' entire mobile team is based at the Velocity Lab, and that they're hoping to continue hiring people in Cambridge. "We have a mobile site, a mobile app, and a tablet-oriented site," he says. "But we're still thinking about other on-the-go pain points." Over the Black Friday shopping weekend in November, Vemana says, Staples ran time-limited "mobile flash sales," with certain deals that could only be unlocked by showing up in a store. There's also a "rapid prototyping team" based in Cambridge that works on Staples' web site, thinking about new functionality, like making it easier to re-order frequently-used products.
FULL ENTRYFirst day at work: Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil signs on with Google as director of engineering
Kurzweil officially starts at Google today. I asked him over the weekend whether he would be working at Google's Cambridge office or its California headquarters; he said he'll be a full-time employee at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley. Kurzweil wrote:
The focus of the position is on new technology development, however I will be continuing my role as a thought leader through lectures, speaking with the press, and such initiatives as my recent book. That, by the way, has done very well -- #5 on the New York Times bestseller list, came out at #1 among all books on the Barnes & Noble bestseller list, went into its seventh printing within four weeks of publication.A good portion of my Massachusetts-based activity is on these communication activities. Another project – K-NFB Reading Technology – has some important developments and those will be announced in the next month or so.
I'm guessing that Kurzweil won't have to introduce himself to too many of his new co-workers at Google...
(I profiled Kurzweil for the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine in 2004. And last year, my fellow Globe columnist Alex Beam wrote a piece about two recent Kurzweil-related movies released in 2010 and 2011.)
December 21st: Coffee for No Reason in Kendall Square
Details: Friday, December 21st, 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM. Voltage Coffee, 295 Third Street, Cambridge.
Each time, we invite a few special guests, just to ensure that the schmoozing is top notch.
Joining us this time are:
• Leland Cheung, Cambridge City Council
• Nicole Fichera, Innovation District manager at Boston Redevelopment Authority
• Abby Fichtner, Hacker Chick
• Matt Lauzon, Gemvara
• Tim Loew, Massachusetts Digital Games Institute
• Marissa Lowman, LearnLaunch
• Lucy McQuilken, Intel Capital
• Rich Miner, Google Ventures
• Rudina Seseri, Fairhaven Capital
• Sravish Sridhar, Kinvey
• Reed Sturtevant, Project 11 Ventures & TechStars Boston
• Allan Tear and Melissa Withers, Betaspring
• C.A. Webb, New England Venture Capital Association
If you can make it, there's no RSVPing. Just tweet (or mention in a Facebook or LinkedIn status update) that you'll be there. Use the hash tag #cfnr, and link to this post. Feel free to bring something to demo, or schwag to give away.
Here are some pics from the last Coffee for No Reason, back in August.
Launch Academy program plans to churn out web developers in just ten weeks, starting next May
The goal of the 10-week long program is to "take people with little-to-no experience, graduate them as junior web developers, and then place them in positions at supportive tech companies, where they can continue their learning," says co-founder Evan Charles, who previously ran a speech pathology practice in Newton and worked at Bain Capital. His co-founder, Dan Pickett, was most recently the technical co-founder at Textaurant, which helps restaurants manage their waitlists. Launch Academy will focus on the Ruby on Rails, a popular framework for creating web applications. It's used by sites like LinkedIn, Gazelle, and Hulu. "The starting salary for Ruby developers right now is between $60,000 and $90,000," says Pickett. The program will also introduce students to technologies like Javascript and CSS, as well as familiarizing them with software code reviews and getting them comfortable working with various APIs, or application programming interfaces.
Charles and Pickett say that the program will be self-funding, since students will pay tuition of about $11,000. The program will run 14-plus hours a day, according to Charles, with a mix of classroom instruction and hands-on "challenges" that will require students to work collaboratively. Launch Academy will culminate with a "hiring day," when companies will be invited in to meet the graduates — and ideally, make offers.
"When graduates get a job at a hiring company that we present at hiring day, we receive a recruiting fee from the hiring company," Charles says. "And we'll pass that along to the students, up to $5000, which helps reduce the cost of their tuition."
They hope to run the initial Launch Academy program in Kendall Square starting in May, perhaps at Cambridge Innovation Center. The class will consist of 25 students, and Charles says they've been conducting interviews for the last month or so. "The class is about 35 percent filled, and our acceptance rate is about 30 percent," he says.
Charles says that he and Pickett "got together because we both recognized the technical talent gap everyone is suffering from in Boston and abroad. We believe our non-traditional model for training web developers can help to heal that pain." The pair are considering New York as a second location for Launch Academy.
Venture firm Matrix Partners leases additional space in Kendall, will move HQ there
In the mid-1990s, Matrix had moved from downtown Boston to Waltham, in an effort to be closer to many of the telecom and enterprise software entrepreneurs the firm was backing at the time. But more recent Matrix investments include Cambridge- and Somerville-based startups like HubSpot, GrabCAD, The Echo Nest, and TalkTo. "We've known for a long time that the ecosystem had really moved down here," says partner David Skok. "We were seeing entrepreneurs that we wanted to visit us [in Waltham] saying, 'Hey, I don't have a car, I'm going to have to take a Zipcar...and we don't want to inconvenience entrepreneurs." The firm's lease in Waltham lasts another two years, but Skok says the people at that office will be moving into Cambridge sometime in mid-2013.
Matrix has been using its Kendall Square digs to host events for entrepreneurs, and also to offer temporary space to entrepreneurs and startup teams. Among those that have used it are GrabCAD, Sqrrl, TalkTo, Alignable, and Aquto.
Some of the new space that Matrix is now taking over at 101 Main used to be occupied by Edhance, a startup that operated a student discount program. It was acquired in 2011 by BuyWithMe, a Matrix portfolio company, but the company's Cambridge presence seems to have vanished.
Matrix is only the latest VC firm to trade the 'burbs for the city; others have included Bessemer Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, and Highland Capital Partners, all now in Cambridge. (I wrote back in August about efforts to rehab the Bay Colony Center in Waltham, once the roost of many of the suburban VC firms.) Here's a video conversation with Skok that I shot in Matrix's Cambridge offices in October. In it, he first mentioned Matrix's plans to shut down the Waltham location.
New startup space Koa Labs is up and running in Harvard Square
Desks cost $450 a month, and Palmer says his focus is on "young, first-time folks who want to be on the Red Line." Already working from the space are the Cambridge employees of Recorded Future, a predictive search engine; the Harvard-focused Experiment Fund, run by Patrick Chung and Hugo Van Vuuren; and an energy-oriented hedge fund. Koa is a Maori word that means "happiness," Palmer explains. While Harvard Square has been home to startups like Vlingo and venture capital firms like General Catalyst, this is the first shared workspace for entrepreneurs I've heard of.
Palmer has been involved with startups like Vertica, CloudSwitch, and Infinity Pharmaceuticals, in addition to a long-standing relationship with Novartis's Cambridge R&D facility as its head of software. He's also an active seed investor, having done 15 deals in the last nine months. Palmer says he's working on two more projects these days: another collaboration with database guru Michael Stonebraker of MIT, and a spin-out from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Palmer also writes a blog called The Fundable.
Here's a pic of the top-floor Koa Labs space, conveniently located right next-door to Otto Pizza. There are several offices overlooking Harvard Square, and a conference room at the end of the open area you see below.
Hitting the Series A wall: One Boston founder explains how it happened
I was hunting for examples of local companies that have already hit the wall, and in the article I mention a few. But this morning, my inbox provided another example: Tasted Menu, a "social dining" site and mobile app that encouraged users to take pictures and post reviews of individual menu items they'd tried at restaurants. The e-mail went out to everyone who'd registered as a user of Tasted Menu, notifying them that it will shut down as of the end of this month. (I covered the Brookline company last year, when founder Alex Rosenfeld told me it had collected about $350,000 in capital. At that point, the company had five employees.) Like many startups, it was trying to attract a large base of users so that it could spool up a business model, like selling advertising or promoting restaurant special offers. And like many startups, it was trying to raise additional funding to stay alive — about $1 million.
I asked Rosenfeld what had transpired since we spoke. Here's what he said:
We came very close to raising our first institutional round this past summer, with a lead investor and term sheet in place, and a majority of the round raised. Unfortunately, the rest of the raise stalled out as consumer funding slowed with the fallout from the Facebook IPO. Out of cash, I had to part with the remaining team at the end of the summer, and have known since then that winding things down was a real possibility. It was nevertheless a tough decision. I'm very proud of what our team accomplished and really believe that, with a fraction of the funding of our competitors, we built as good a product as any in the restaurant dish recommendation space. It would have been great to have a shot at expanding nationally.As I know you aim to cover things from a Boston angle, I will say that the challenge of fundraising in Boston as an early stage and particularly an early stage consumer/content start-up remained an obstacle for us. (Most of our angel money came from New York and the west coast, and of the committed capital for our Series Seed, not a dollar was out of Boston.) The irony is that Boston is actually a *great* place to launch consumer products, with its young, social, tech savvy population. It was also an excellent area to recruit consumer talent, especially for non-technical roles, which as a media guy I'm sure you appreciate as essential for content-driven businesses. I hope this incongruence lessens, but having been on the ground for the past three years, I saw a lot of promising talk but not enough progress.
New firm IoT Works will look for investments and acquisitions related to 'Internet of Things'
Well, it's still on the verge of going mainstream, and now there is an investment firm setting up shop in Needham to try to accelerate the arrival of what it calls "the next explosive wave of the internet … the Internet of Things." The founders of IoT Works are Woody Benson, formerly the managing director of Prism VentureWorks, and Philip DesAutels, who had helped Microsoft develop its education business.
They're not saying much yet about the new firm — or whether they've actually raised money so that it can make investments or acquisitions. (Their description of IoT Works is below.) "Investments and advising will be happening for sure," Benson says via e-mail, adding, "We are working on a big play with a global partner." IoT Works publishes a blog and e-mail newsletter newsletter focused on topics like sensors, connected lightbulbs, autonomous cars, and healthcare applications.
I asked Benson about Prism, the Needham-based VC firm he has run for more than eight years; it was unable to raise additional money from its backers, despite backing a few winners like LogMeIn, m:metrics, and Maven Networks. "Prism is not making new investments," he explained. "We have plenty of [capital] reserves to support our companies. I will remain a [general partner] and do everything I can to get value from our investments."
Here's their description of the opportunity:
FULL ENTRYThe Zynga Boston diaspora: An update from former studio head Fareed Mosavat
Even more surprising: Zynga provided absolutely no outplacement support to help the 48 employees there find new jobs, according to Fareed Mosavat, who'd been the general manager there. (I've e-mailed and called Zynga to confirm that, but haven't yet heard back.)
Despite that, Mosavat tells me that more than 60 percent of Zynga Boston's team has found new jobs so far, at local startups like Abine, Rue La La, LevelUp/SCVNGR, Fiksu, TapJoy, Harmonix, Lucky Labs, Jana, and Boundless Learning. Mosavat himself wound up as VP of product at RunKeeper, the Boston-based fitness data startup.
And five former members of Zynga Boston's leadership team are working on a new tablet and mobile games startup, Proletariat Inc., led by Seth Sivak. (Sivak was the lead designer for the one Zynga game that the Boston studio released, Adventure World.) Proletariat is currently based at the Intrepid Labs shared office space in East Cambridge.
"All of the product managers from Zynga Boston have been hired, and all but two of the engineers have, and that's by their own design," Mosavat says. "It has been a little tougher for the artists and game designers."
Despite the lack of outplacement help from Zynga HQ — "we were on our own," Mosavat says — Mosavat and former Zynga Boston chief Nabeel Hyatt received lots of offers of help via Twitter, LinkedIn, and e-mail. (Hyatt is now a partner at Spark Capital, the Newbury Street VC firm.) "Nabeel was super-helpful and super-involved in connecting people to Spark portfolio companies like Jana and RunKeeper," Mosavat says.
Two Zynga Boston folks wound up relocating to San Francisco, for jobs at Zynga's main office.
One more interesting factoid about the Zynga Boston diaspora: Zynga had hired two employees who'd lost their jobs when 38 Studios, the Curt Schilling gaming startup in Providence, closed its doors in May. But after going through two shut-downs in one year, Mosavat tells me both of them have new jobs, at Lucky Labs and Fire Hose Games.
(The pic above is from Zynga's Central Square office, before the team moved to Harvard Square.)
Ex-SolidWorks execs reunite to take another swing at product design software, with $9 million in funding
Fifteen years after the acquisition, Dassault still maintains a substantial campus in Massachusetts, with more than 800 employees, and SolidWorks' products generate almost half a billion in annual revenue for its parent company.
Now the founder of SolidWorks, Jon Hirschtick, right, has assembled a team of former colleagues, including long-time SolidWorks CEO John McEleney, to develop a fresh take on product design in the era of cloud computing. The place-holder name for the new venture is Belmont Technology Inc., and they've raised $9 million from two local venture capital firms, North Bridge Venture Partners and Commonwealth Capital. And whaddaya know... the investor at Commonwealth who did the deal, Eliot Katzman, was the CFO at SolidWorks at the time of its acquisition by Dassault.
McEleney, Belmont's chief executive, isn't saying much about what the company is up to, beyond that the team is "building enterprise product design software using modern software tools and platforms." He tells me that there are currently nine employees in Waltham (not Belmont), and that the company will adopt a new name when it has a product to market.
Just last August, McEleney sold another startup, CloudSwitch, to Verizon. And Hirschtick only left SolidWorks last October.
Venture capitalist Fred Destin, whose firm was an investor in CloudSwitch but isn't involved in Belmont, said he believed Belmont is developing sophisticated CAD software that can run in the cloud and allow designs to be easily accessed by teams spread across the world. "CAD files are huge, and that is a non-trivial issue," Destin said. "You don't want to be moving gigabytes of data around."
But when asked about "CAD in the cloud," McEleney responded, "That's probably a bit too narrow of a view." A few CAD industry blogs, including GraphicSpeak and CAD Insider, have written about Belmont, but the funding hadn't previously been reported.
One last note: Interesting that Matrix Partners, which had also put money into CloudSwitch, isn't involved in Belmont; that VC firm has an investment in GrabCAD, which has lately been working on its own cloud-based CAD software.
Two planned 'EdTech' accelerators may be on the verge of a merger
One group has been calling its project Exponential Boston, and raising money to launch an inaugural program in mid-2013, aimed at helping education-focused entrepreneurs turn concepts into companies. The core team at Exponential includes EdTech entrepreneur Hakan Satiroglu; Boston University entrepreneurship czar Vinit Nijhawan; and Mark Miller, a banker who often works with EdTech companies.
The other group, LearnLaunch, just unveiled a new non-profit this week seeking to bring together EdTech entrepreneurs for conferences, demo nights, and networking. The accelerator program it has been cultivating seems somewhat more nascent than Exponential's, but it has been dubbed LearnLaunch Labs. The trio behind LearnLaunch are angel investor Jean Hammond; Marissa Lowman, right, founder of the monthly EdTechUp gatherings and formerly an executive at AisleBuyer, a mobile commerce startup; and Eileen Rudden, who served as a Chicago Public Schools official, and before that an executive at companies like Lotus and Avaya.
"Accelerators take funding and real estate," Hammond told me yesterday, "and it takes time to pull that together. We're also working on building the team that would run it."
Hammond also said that she was in conversations with Satiroglu and his group about combining efforts: "I don't know if there's room for two." But she and Satiroglu both said that they hadn't reached a decision yet. "Everybody is urging us to work together," Satiroglu said.
Satiroglu describes a six-month accelerator program that would provide $25,000 in seed funding, free office space, and in-kind services in return for a six percent chunk of each startup's equity. He says he has been scouting locations in the Back Bay; along with housing the accelerator participants, an Exponential office would also include a co-working area for other EdTech entrepreneurs and early-stage companies. Satiroglu already has some funding commitments to support Exponential Boston, but says that he'll focus more explicitly on raising money in January. He says his goal is to collect $2 million to $3 million to run an accelerator program for two or three years. The first cycle of the program could start in May or June, he says, and the Exponential site is already accepting applications.
Both groups talk about bringing in textbook publishers and online learning companies as partners, especially those with big Boston operations like Houghton-Mifflin and Cengage Learning. "One question for us is how close do you want to involve industry players as sponsors and mentors," Hammond says.
Satiroglu and Hammond both say that their objective is to create a stronger support system for EdTech entrepreneurs, helping them learn from one another and connect to universities, school systems, and teachers.
"My main goal is to establish Boston as the EdTech capital of the world," Satiroglu says. "I think we can own that domain."
FULL ENTRYPlayrific, Adelphic Mobile and Promoboxx nail down new funding
• Playrific built a web site and mobile app that collect digital content that's appropriate for children, and customize it to what an individual kid actually likes. (There's also a version designed for schools, focusing on content that matches a teacher's educational goals.) The Billerica-based company is announcing a new $1.7 million round today, from a collection of angel investing groups including Golden Seeds, Launchpad Venture Group, and Walnut Angels. The Boston company, founded by tech industry veteran Beth Marcus, right, has now raised $2.8 million in total funding.
• Google Ventures and Matrix Partners are putting $10 million into Waltham-based Adelphic Mobile, which delivers targeted ads to mobile devices. Adelphic says that its technology can deliver ads not just based on the phone and network you're using, but as many as 30 other parameters, including time, place, age, and gender. Co-founders Jennifer Lum and Changfeng Wang previously worked at the ad startup Quattro Wireless, which was acquired by Apple to help that company build its mobile ad product, iAds. Rich Miner, a partner at Google Ventures and the co-founder of Android, is joining Adelphic's board. (That's a nice mix of Apple & Android experience there.) The company raised $2 million from Matrix earlier this year.
• Promoboxx, a company that graduated from the TechStars Boston accelerator program last year, is announcing a seed round of $1.3 million today. The Boston startup helps big brands like Reebok, Trek, and Volkswagen manage promotional campaigns across their hundreds of retailers. The money comes from investors like Launch Capital, Boston Seed Capital, Common Angels, Stage 1 Ventures and more than 30 angels. I wrote about Promoboxx back in January, when it helped support Chevy's Super Bowl advertising campaign. "Our business model doesn't jump off the Keynote for most investors," admits CEO Ben Carcio in a blog post about the funding. "Without understanding the difficulties that manufacturing brands face in helping their retailers with local online marketing, our market opportunity doesn't seem obvious. So, our initial investors were a brave group that understood enough of the pain, while believing in our team's ability to make it work."
CyPhy Works, startup from iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, unveils two hover-drones
One of the most interesting elements of CyPhy's product design is that its UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are tethered to a hand-held control system on the ground, rather than free-flying. The company's "microfilament" technology sends power to the UAV, meaning that its flight time is unlimited. It also transmits high-def video back down to the control system, and the company says that unlike wireless links, it cannot be jammed by an enemy.
CyPhy says that its two vehicles, EASE and PARC, may be used for tasks like helping military or police units investigate the interior of buildings without sending people in; search for survivors of natural or man-made disasters; or inspect bridges, buildings, or other infrastructure. PARC is also designed to serve as a communications relay, staying aloft for long periods without human intervention. (The acronym stands for Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance & Communications.) EASE, which stands for Extreme Access System for Entry, is pictured above, and PARC is at left. Both are designed for hovering between three feet and 1000 feet, as opposed to long-range horizontal flight.
According to my math, CyPhy Works has so far raised about $3 million in equity funding, much of it from Cambridge-based VC firm General Catalyst. But several million more has come in the form of federal research grants. The company hasn't yet announced any customers who have purchased its UAVs.
Here's a piece about the company that just appeared today on the website of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
And company-produced video is below, featuring one of its UAVs being flight-tested at Fort Benning in Georgia:
FULL ENTRY
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About Scott Kirsner Scott Kirsner was part of the team that launched Boston.com in 1995, and has been writing a column for the Globe since 2000. His work has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek, and Variety. Scott is also the author of the books "Fans, Friends & Followers" and "Inventing the Movies," was the editor of "The Convergence Guide: Life Sciences in New England," and was a contributor to "The Good City: Writers Explore 21st Century Boston." Scott also helps organize several local events on entrepreneurship, including the Nantucket Conference and Future Forward. Here's some background on how Scott decides what to cover, and how to pitch him a story idea.
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