By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Joe Marks, who last year helped set up a new R&D lab for the Walt Disney Company in Cambridge, has left the company to work on a new startup.

Marks tells me the East Cambridge facility will remain open. The Disney web site lists three employees and a consultant as working there (in addition to Marks, whose picture hasn't yet been removed.)

But one of those employees, Amber Brown, is joining Marks at his new venture, Upfront Analytics. The company will be based in Dublin, Ireland. It's in stealth mode, with no web site yet. (Marks, who ran a Mitsubishi R&D lab in Cambridge before joining Disney, grew up in Ireland, and he also set up a Disney research lab there.)

Among the projects Disney has been working on in Cambridge are 3-D printing of large objects; tracking mentions of Disney in the blogosphere; delivering "a Disney cinema experience to the developing world in a way that makes economic sense"; and supplying information via mobile devices to help theme park visitors steer clear of crowded areas.

I've contacted Disney by phone or e-mail to inquire about the future of the Cambridge facility, and whether a new chief has been chosen yet, but haven't heard back. When I visited the lab last Friday, no one answered the door.

Update: a Disney spokesperson informs me that Jessica Hodgins is now overseeing the Disney lab in Cambridge. Based in Pittsburgh, she also oversees Disney labs there and in California.

Update #2: Jonathan Yedidia informs me by e-mail that he's the only senior researcher currently working at the Cambridge lab, but that the staff includes "a junior researcher, three professor consultants who visit regularly, four post-docs (three hired and starting soon, one in the process of finishing the hire), and seven lab associates." (Lab associates are paid interns who usually stick around for anywhere from three months to a year. The professor consultants he mentions are Hanspeter Pfister of Harvard, Wojciech Matusik of MIT, and Marc Alexa of the Technical University of Berlin.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Dear Mayor Menino:

I know you've been meeting with entrepreneurs who've created mobile retail trucks, to consider establishing new parking spots in Boston where they could legally sell their wares. I'm all for that. A few well-chosen spots around the city could help fledgling retail concepts gain momentum — and potentially move into permanent storefronts if they're successful enough — without aggravating merchants who pay rent.

But mobile retail won't work for every business, since you can't fit very much merchandise or very many shoppers into a rehabbed FedEx truck. Already, I know of at least one business, bGreen, that tried and failed to sell eco-friendly home products out of a truck. (The founders are now trying to get rid of the truck, and instead focus on their web site.)

There's another model worth considering that could have even more of a positive impact, for the city and for entrepreneurs: encouraging landlords to make vacant stores available to entrepreneurs who want to run pop-up shops. These businesses would help invigorate neighborhoods that have too many empty storefronts (think Downtown Crossing or Dudley Square), and they could help entrepreneurs test retail ideas with fewer up-front expenditures than outfitting a truck.

The city could dangle some incentives for landlords in specific neighborhoods to give this a whirl — perhaps a break on real estate taxes. Or it could just invest some time and resources in helping to promote the idea and the shops themselves. For landlords, there are several benefits: pop-up shops using a storefront for a few months may become successful enough to turn into permanent tenants, but even if they don't, they can help increase foot traffic to their location, making it more appealing to other prospective renters.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

In the days before Siri, one of the most innovative speech startups around was Boston's SpeechWorks International. The company mainly focused on bringing speech recognition to the phone systems of customers like Amtrak, United Airlines, and FedEx, helping handle calls more efficiently. But the company was also working on "multi-modal" technologies for mobile devices way back in 2001, thinking about how we might speak commands as well as punch buttons on our phones. (This was before most phones had touchable screens, young readers.) SpeechWorks went public in an IPO that saw its shares triple on the first day of trading, and then was acquired in 2003 for $132 million by the Burlington company that grew into Nuance Communications.

Now, the former CEO of SpeechWorks, Stuart Patterson, is out talking to local venture capital firms to raise money for another speech-related business. Xtone, founded in Virginia in 2004, wants to help developers of mobile apps add a layer of "Siri-like" speech functionality to them. Patterson tells me that once he closes the company's next round, he'll be setting up shop in Boston and hiring staff up here; Xtone already has several consultants in the area — some of them former SpeechWorks employees.

"We're not in core speech technology," says Patterson, who became CEO of Xtone in January. "We're building a platform to help customers develop new services that use this new modality of speech with their mobile devices, which has been proven by the success of Siri." He says the Xtone platform will let app developers add speech functionality without having to develop it differently for different mobile operating systems, like Apple and Android: "It's a write once, run anywhere platform." (The simplicity of using Xtone's platform to script conversations that users can have with an app will make Xtone more appealing for developers, he asserts, than trying to work with different APIs to take advantage of the built-in speech recognition capabilities of different operating systems.)

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Just sharing some photos and audio from this month's Convergence Forum in Chatham, Mass. It's a conference that brings together executives, entrepreneurs and investors from the New England life sciences business. (I'm on the advisory board.) Some of the big speakers this year included Genzyme CEO David Meeker, Third Rock Ventures founder Mark Levin, OvaScience CEO Michelle Dipp, and Jose-Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos of Pfizer. You can see the Twitter traffic for the event here.

Genzyme CEO David Meeker being interviewed by Alison Taunton-Rigby, a long-time Boston biotech CEO (and former Genzyme executive.)

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I've been talking to people this morning about the most likely scenarios for 38 Studios, the Providence-based game development shop that seems to be running out of money after receiving a $75 million loan guarantee from Rhode Island. As of today, the company's CEO and senior VP of product development have updated their LinkedIn profiles to indicate they're no longer with the company.

I spoke with game industry executives and venture capitalists who've invested in other developers of massively-multiplayer games. Not everyone wanted to talk on the record, but here are some of the scenarios they sketched out for what happens next at 38. (I left a message today for 38 Studios seeking comment, but haven't heard back.)

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Boston startup TurningArt is announcing today that it has raised an additional $1.5 million in funding. The round includes NextView Ventures, a VC firm that happens to be based in the same Leather District building as TurningArt.

The company operates a subscription service, starting at $10 a month, that sends you new prints to hang in a company-supplied frame whenever you request them. TurningArt will also sell you a framed print that you especially like (for $100), or let you apply your monthly subscription fees toward the purchase of an original work.

The new funding, according to founder Jason Gracilieri, "will allow us to expand the team, the collection [of artwork], and the delivery options. We want to have the definitive catalogue of independent artwork, and help facilitate the in-home discovery and buying experience for art." The company has six employees, and is growing, Gracilieri says.

"We've now served thousands of customers, and we can say we have customers in all 48 continental U.S. states," he says. With the new funding round, Fouad ElNaggar, a senior vice president at CBS Interactive and ex-VC, will join TurningArt's board. TurningArt raised a seed round of $750,000 in March 2011.

Back in February, I wrote about my experience as a TurningArt customer. And last December, I mentioned the company in a Globe column about art-related startups in Boston.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Two brothers from New Hampshire are in New York today to introduce their new startup, About Last Night, at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference. Darren and Derek Dodge are notable entrepreneurs both because Darren spent a year-and-a-half working in new media for the Ashton Kutcher empire — and because their father is a high-profile Google executive, Don Dodge.

Their iPhone app, developed in collaboration with Cambridge-based Mobinett Interactive, is "a social network especially for nightlife," says Darren (he's on the right in the photo). "It's about the party last night, the concert, or the date. It's very photo-centric, and you can follow people or locations like a bar or nightclub." The app is intended to help guide users to where the best action is on a given evening — venues and events can be rated by users of the app — or show them what mischief their friends were up to the night before. (Yes, you can keep certain things private so that only you can see them.)

Businesses can use the app to send out special offers to the people who follow them, such as two-for-one appetizers. And the most active users of the app can earn bronze, silver, and gold medals, which make them more visible to other users of the app.

"We're raising money now," says Derek. "When the kids come back to school in the fall, we think that'll be a huge factor in getting people to spread it around."

Derek Dodge tells me that he dropped out of University of New Hampshire to start another company, 1Mind, aimed at "helping you find people who are really awesome and whom you should know." The About Last Night app sprang from that business, and took only about three months to create, he says.

Their father, Don, is a developer advocate at Google. Aside from being a supportive parent, he says he has no official role with the company — though he is serving as an unpaid PR consultant to the pair, and introducing them to friends like MC Hammer.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Kayak.com, the travel site with its headquarters in Connecticut but most of its employees at its technology office in Concord, Mass., is preparing for its IPO road show, the series of investor presentation that precede an initial public offering. Kayak first announced its plans to go public about 18 months ago. CNBC reported last week that Kayak was hoping to raise $150 million in the offering, and sources close to the company told me on Friday that the company was hoping to kick off its road show sometime in May, hitting cities like Boston, New York, Toronto, and San Francisco. The IPO could potentially value Kayak at $1 billion.

Kayak CTO and co-founder Paul English told me that he couldn't comment on the company's IPO plans because of the "quiet period" mandated by the Securities & Exchange Commission. Interestingly, English owns a bigger percentage of Kayak than the company's CEO, Steve Hafner: 8.9 percent of the company, versus 6.9 percent for Hafner, formerly an executive at Orbitz. (And English recently also acquired the title "president," as of an SEC filing on May 8th.) General Catalyst, the Cambridge VC firm that incubated Kayak in its earliest days in 2004, owns the largest chunk of the company (30 percent). Kayak brought in $224 million in revenue last year.

Kayak's IPO has been delayed because of stock market "choppiness," says Boston investment banker Peter Falvey, but also because of the emergence of a potential new rival: Google Flights, the product of Google's 2010 acquisition of ITA Software, a Cambridge company.

Now, Kayak's IPO fortunes could hinge on the aftermath of the Facebook IPO last Friday. Falvey says that the social network's offering "has been the most anticipated IPO ever, and now its stock is trading down 11 percent from the offering price. We may all be reading too much into the Facebook tea leaves right now, but I suspect that will be deemed a negative" for other tech IPOs in the pipeline, like Kayak.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The team that organizes the annual Together electronic music festival in Boston is in the process of raising money and scouting locations for a new school that would offer courses in DJing and producing dance music. It'll be called The MMMMaven Project, and founders David Day and Alex Maniatis hope to have a location nailed down next month, and begin teaching some pilot courses in July. (Day is on the left in the picture, Maniatis on the right.)

Electronic dance music, or EDM, "has just blown up," says Day. "Kids today aren't picking up guitars — they're picking up laptops. We wanted to start an educational institution for aspiring fans of EDM," an umbrella term that encompasses genres like dubstep, trance, house, and hardstep. It's music made primarily to get people out on the dance floor.

The school will teach students how to use music-making software from companies like iZotope (based in Cambridge) and Ableton (based in Germany), but Maniatis adds, "We'll also teach methodology and history, not just the software. Everyone will have their own turntable and workstation with a mixer — you won't have to bring your own laptop to school." Among the instructors at the MMMMaven Project will be DJ Baltimoroder.

And for a little history lesson, Maniatis noted that Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" from 1977 is generally regarded as the song that helped spawn the genre of EDM. Day explained that EDM has been gaining in popularity during the recent recession: "It's kind of like jazz was during the Great Depression — a way for people to escape the headlines of the day. And now, like jazz, it's finding mainstream acceptance."

There's no web site yet for The MMMMaven Project, but they do have a profile on AngelList and a Twitter feed.

(Photo above courtesy Mick Murray.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Now that everyone has concluded that Facebook is going to be the most successful IPO since the invention of stock exchanges, I thought it'd be fun to look back at some early Facebook history.

So here are five links from (or about) Facebook's early days. Would you have bet on Facebook becoming the planet's dominant social network, back in 2004 or 2005? If you were a VC who met with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, then a Harvard sophomore, in 2004, would you have invested — especially when he insisted that he was perfectly suited to keep on running the company?

- February 2004: "Hundreds register for new Facebook website," from the Harvard Crimson.

- April 2004: "Are we a match?", the first New York Times coverage of Facebook.

- September 2004: "Online adversaries: Rivalry between college-networking websites spawns lawsuit," from the Boston Globe (the paper's first coverage of Thefacebook.com.)

- September 2007: "Why Facebook went west," my column on Facebook's decision to leave Cambridge for Palo Alto.

- June 2009: "Where in the world is Eduardo Saverin?" from Boston venture capitalist Larry Cheng, who introduced Facebook's founders to the VC firm where he worked at the time, Battery Ventures.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Not even two months after announcing his intention to become an active angel in the "big data" sector, former Vertica CEO Chris Lynch is joining Atlas Venture, the Cambridge VC firm.

What gives?

Lynch told me yesterday that he felt compelled to sign on with a VC firm because he'd been swamped by a tidal wave of prospective deals. "I totally underestimated the amount of action I'd get based on my commitment to invest in big data startups," Lynch said. "I was getting more than 20 inquiries a week, primarily from Boston companies, but also from places like Austin and San Diego. There were just more quality deals than I could handle on my own. The numbers were just overwhelming, in terms of how many good deals there are to do — and to support over time."

Lynch had been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlas before he joined Vertica, which sold database software, and which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $350 million last year. (Atlas wasn't among the firms that invested in Vertica.) His résumé includes stints at many of the biggest players in telecom and IT, including Cisco, ArrowPoint, Acopia Networks, Lucent, Bay Networks, Wellfleet Communications, and Digital Equipment Corp.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Last Saturday was the second annual edition of RamenCamp, a conference that focuses on boot-strapping techniques, mainly for software, mobile, and Internet businesses. One of the best sessions that I caught — and I was only there for a few hours — was a fireside chat featuring RunKeeper founder Jason Jacobs. (He was interviewed by Jeff Seibert, another entrepreneur. Jeff is on the left in the photo, Jacobs on the right.)

A snippet of audio is below. Among the things Jacobs discusses:

- Starting a company as an MBA who doesn't write code.

- Hiring people at different stages in a startup's evolution.

- Some of the biggest lessons he has learned in starting his first company.

- Building a nimble culture where employees can make fast decisions, even without having perfect information.

- Scaling at the right pace after you've raised funding.

- His biggest regret: "Not having the confidence to get going earlier. I was 30 or 31 when I started my first company."

- Jacobs: "Figure out what are you really passionate about. If you could solve any problem, what would it be? Once you find it, don't wait."

- Is location important? (IE, doing a startup in Boston vs. Silicon Valley)

The audio runs for about 12 minutes. Hit play below, or the "mp3" link to download it for later listening.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Sunday's Globe column focused on whether we're seeing enough new angel investors come out of recent IPOs and acquisitions.

From the piece:

This month’s initial public offering of Facebook will mint a lot of new multimillionaires. No doubt they will spend some of their wealth on fast cars, private jets, jumbo-size boats, and stunning vacation spreads in Hawaii.

But as is the Silicon Valley tradition, they’ll also put some of it into a new generation of start-ups. Hundreds of Facebook employees will have enough money to become “accredited investors’’ in private companies - aka angels. The Valley already has so-called mafias of rich alumni from companies like Google and PayPal supporting new ventures. (The very first investors in Facebook, in fact, were members of the PayPal mafia.) And the money invested by Facebook employees and veterans over the coming years will be another energizing espresso drip into the Valley’s economy.

So where does that leave Boston? ...I wanted to understand whether our region is keeping pace, since it often seems to me that the bulk of Boston’s angels made their money in the 1980s and 1990s, at companies like Lotus Development Corp. and Avid Technology.

Here are some responses to the column, and bonus material:

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

If you have kids, you've probably gotten used to handing them your phone so they can play games or watch videos.

So what about handing them your phone so they can insert it into a Nerf-like ball and toss it around?

That's the idea behind a new product from Physical Apps in Hollis, New Hampshire. The TheO Ball is a foam sphere with a pocket in its center that keeps the phone safe while allowing players to see its screen. Some of the initial games will be bowling, hot potato, and a question-and-answer game called Interrogo, but the company also plans a software development kit that will enable others to create games for TheO. The ball will sell for $24.95, and include several free apps. Additional apps will be sold through the Android and iTunes online marketplaces.

Popular Science dubbed TheO the best toy at this year's Toy Fair trade show in New York, and Physical Apps chairman Bob Houvener tells me the TheO will start shipping this summer. It'll be available through the company's web site and Amazon store, as well as a number of independent toy retailers.

Houvener writes via e-mail, "We see a very significant opportunity to get folks up and moving, while leveraging their smart devices with our innovative and proprietary physical enablers such as TheO, combined with fun and enjoyable apps. This essentially lowers the price point for 'console' type game experiences by an order of magnitude, while expanding the market to an even greater degree globally."

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Just about two years after I wrote about the creation of a new game development shop, Disruptor Beam, co-founder Jon Radoff tells me the firm raised its first outside capital this week. The money comes from a trio of angels with ties to Harmonix Music Systems, the Cambridge company that created "Rock Band" and "Dance Central," as well as former E Ink chief executive Russ Wilcox.

Radoff didn't want to be specific about how much Disruptor Beam had raised in this seed round, but he did confirm it was less than $1 million.

"We're spending a lot of time thinking about the convergence of tablets, TV, and social gaming," Radoff says, adding that the company has plans to announce its first licensing deal with a television show in the next few weeks.

It sounds like the new funding will allow Disruptor Beam to go from a small firm building games for outside clients to one that creates products of its own. (Disruptor Beam worked with Waltham-based GSN Digital to build "50 Cent's Blackjack" recently, and had built another game for Ayeah Games, a startup that called it quits last year.) Radoff talks about making "story-oriented" games linked to popular TV shows and books, which will allow players to "interact with characters they know and like, and really live in those worlds."

When I spoke with him two years ago, Radoff mentioned that the studio was working on a social game called "Gods of Rock" that would invite players into the world of music superstars. That game never launched. "We never found good partners in the music industry," Radoff says.

Radoff co-founded Disruptor Beam with his wife, Angela. Investors in the seed round include CommonAngels; Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopoulos, CTO Eran Egozy, former COO Mike Dornbrook; and Wilcox. The company operates out of the WorkBar shared space in Boston's Leather District.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

A Cambridge native who played professional hoops in Israel is getting ready to launch a new online marketplace for private coaches. CoachUp founder Jordan Fliegel took the wraps off a test version of the site recently — and among more than 100 golf, squash and baseball coaches on CoachUp, you'll also find Fliegel himself, offering his advice on "attacking the rim with limited dribbles" for $69 an hour.

Fliegel grew up in Cambridge, and played varsity basketball at Bowdoin College before spending two years on the rosters of pro teams in Israel and Europe. A broken foot led to the end of his playing career, but while based in Israel, he also started taking business school courses at Tel Aviv University. (He finished his MBA locally, at Brandeis.)

As Fliegel worked in business development for Waltham-based Zintro, he also did some private coaching in town, and the idea for CoachUp started to take shape. The site targets middle- to upper-income parents who have kids in middle school or high school playing a sport competitively, and who naturally want to see their kids improve.

Coaches who offer their services through the site name an hourly price, and CoachUp adds a small mark-up. "We're never going to take a penny from a coach," Fliegel says. The site will encourage users to purchase five or ten coaching sessions at once, with discounted pricing on those packages. Fliegel says that CoachUp will interview coaches before allowing them to list on the site, and will check references. "We'll also be collecting data on how many clients come back to purchase more lessons, and getting community feedback," Fliegel says. "Over time, the best coaches will rise to the top, and the worst will sink to the bottom."

Fliegel says he's trying to wrap up a $100,000 fund-raising round before the site's official launch; angels already involved include Mike Dornbrook, formerly chief operating officer at Harmonix Music Systems, and Scott Heller of CoFlow Investing. Fliegel says that Sheila Marcelo, CEO of the personal services marketplace Care.com, has been an advisor.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

One of the stealthiest Boston companies I've been obsessed with for a couple years now is Heartland Robotics.

Why?

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was the company's first investor. Rodney Brooks, founder of Heartland and previously a co-founder of iRobot, left a tenured faculty position at MIT to dedicate more time to the company. The team includes a CEO with experience at Dell, and other employees from Bose, NASA, 3M, and Dean Kamen's DEKA Research.

And the company has a big vision: "Robots will change the way we work," Heartland's web site proclaims. "They will have intelligence and awareness. They will be teachable, safe and affordable. They will make us productive in ways we never imagined."

Brooks has apparently told people that Heartland is working on the robotics industry's version of the iPhone — an affordable-enough device (their target price is about $5000) that will be intuitive to use, and that will spawn a community of app developers who write software for it. It'll be designed to perform a variety of packaging or light manufacturing tasks, sources have told me. The robot may also be capable of being "trained" to perform a certain repetitive task just by moving its arm and gripper. Heartland's product, according to those who've seen it demoed, could potentially put robots in lots of small and medium-sized business. (Here's my 2010 background report on what the company is up to.)

Now, it looks like Heartland is laying the groundwork for a launch, perhaps at the 2013 Automate trade show in Chicago, put on by the Association for Advancing Automation. Heartland CEO Scott Eckert (pictured at right) confirmed that the company will be an exhibitor at the show, but wouldn't say much else.

Heartland also recently hired Mitch Rosenberg to run marketing; he'd previously headed up marketing and product management at Kiva Systems, a maker of warehouse robots recently acquired by Amazon.

That makes it seem like the company could have something to announce fairly soon — perhaps even before next January.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Your tech education options will expand in June, when New York-based General Assembly starts holding classes in Kendall Square.

That's just a month after the launch of Intelligent.ly's first classes in the South End. Both entities aim to offer evening sessions, taught by professionals working at startups, on topics like technology, web design, and marketing. And both primarily focus on one-off courses, as opposed to those that meet multiple times, with price points starting around $30. General Assembly's classes will be held in conference rooms and event spaces at the Cambridge Innovation Center.

Adam Pritzker, a co-founder of General Assembly, tells me that his company's classes focus on "skills you need to thrive in the workforce," and that about 6000 students have taken classes at GA since it launched last year. The class roster for Cambridge hasn't yet been announced, but Pritzker says some of the more popular classes offered in New York have included "Programming for Non-Programmers," "Front-End Web Development," and "Introduction to Startup Law." One of GA's producers in New York is putting together the first few classes for Cambridge, but Pritzker says, "I think we'll hire someone locally in relatively short order."

"All of our offerings take place in a social environment," says Pritzker. "Everybody is building a project. They're very goal-oriented. People are looking to start a company, or level up at work."

In New York, in addition to offering classes, General Assembly is a bit like a mini Cambridge Innovation Center, in that it provides workspace to early-stage startups. GA raised $4.5 million last year from Jeff Bezos, Maveron, and Yuri Milner, among others.

John Harthorne of MassChallenge, a startup competition based in Boston's Innovation District, tells me that his facility could also host General Assembly classes in the future, though there aren't yet definitive plans. "It is possible and being discussed, but isn't certain," he writes via e-mail.

It'll be interesting to see how much demand there is in Boston from learners — and also, how General Assembly's Kendall Square location performs compared with Intelligent.ly's South End location, which is far from the T.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

My comprehensive report on this spring's TechStars demo day is here... but as is my habit, I also wanted to single out a few individuals and teams for Innovation Economy awards. They receive no monetary prize, crystal paperweight, or certificate suitable for framing — just the warm glow of being mentioned on this blog.

Boston's Most Impressive New CEO
Yifan Zhang of Pact, which has developed a mobile app that uses behavioral economics to motivate people to go to the gym. Not just for a masterful presentation today, but Zhang has built strong momentum for the company leading up to today.

Team on a Mission
The French fellows building Psykosoft want to make it easier for anyone to create digital artwork, animation, and music. In today's presentation, they playfully tweaked tech giant Adobe for offering pricey software (like Photoshop) that's hard to learn; their mission is to make it enjoyable and fast for anyone to start creating cool stuff online. The team has a great attitude and a fun marketing message: "We believe everybody is a bit crazy, but not everyone accepts it." (That's the Psykosoft team hard at work in the photo at right.)

The Making Cities More Liveable award
Zagster, a company founded in Philadelphia that relocated to Cambridge earlier this year. The startup wants to make it easy for colleges, hotels, and corporate campuses to offer fleets of bikes for hourly or daily use. And more bike riders is an excellent thing for any city.

Most Compelling Presentation
Chris Howard of Libboo, who's out to reinvent the publishing business for the digital age. He talked about his company's mission of finding more readers for e-books by poets like Marshall "Soulful" Jones... and had Jones recite one of his electrifying poems to begin the presentation.

The Gotta Download It Now award
UberSense chief executive Krishna Ramchandran made me want to buy one of the company's mobile apps on the spot. They allow you to shoot video of your golf, tennis, or baseball swing, for instance, and then pay $10 to have a coach analyze what you could improve. You can also watch your video side-by-side with that of a pro to observe the differences.

The Biggest Surprise award
Laveem, which started out the TechStars program focusing on building an online community to help teachers share lesson plans and classroom resources. Now, they're working on the Food Genome Project, a vast database of nutritional information that could help site builders and mobile app developers create useful new tools for cooks and diners. Great concept.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Russ Wilcox has been busy, both personally and professionally, since he left the Cambridge display-maker E Ink in 2010. E Ink had helped to pioneer the market for e-books with paper-like displays that consumed very little power. It was acquired by a Taiwanese company, Prime View, in 2009.

First, Wilcox took his family on a year-long trip around the world, which ended last July.

Now, Wilcox, who helped start E Ink back in 1997, is once again getting plugged in to Boston's startup scene. Harvest Automation is announcing today that Wilcox will join its board; Harvest makes robots that move potted plants around at nurseries. (I last wrote about the company in November, when Harvest raised $7.8 million from investors.) Harvest is "poised for an exciting product launch and sales growth," Wilcox writes via e-mail. "As a director I hope to actively share the operating lessons we learned at E Ink."

Wilcox tells me he's hoping to start a new venture in the energy sector, and he has also been making a string of angel investments. (You can find him on AngelList.) They include:

• PowerInbox, trying to make the inbox more interactive (I wrote about them here recently)
• Calimmune, working to "engineer immunity" to patients with HIV
• DriveFactor, collecting data about how you actually drive.
• Imprint Energy, working on flexible, low-cost, rechargeable "zinc poly" batteries.
• AmberWave, a materials company working on new solar cells, LEDs, and semiconductors.
• Gen9, building the first "fab" for synthetic biology, enabling low-cost production of custom genes.

That last one was co-founded by Joe Jacobson, an MIT Media Lab prof who was also a co-founder of E Ink with Wilcox.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Thursday was the spring "demo day" presentation for this year's crop of startups participating in the TechStars Boston accelerator program. Thirteen fledgling companies presented in front of an audience of investors, press, and tech community members at the Wilbur Theater.

According to my math, this year's crop of startups announced today that they've already raised more than $5.5 million in aggregate. That's significantly more than was announced last year, when the companies had commitments of about $4 million by demo day.

Here's my scorecard of the companies, what they do, who's involved, and how much money they've raised or are seeking.

I've listed the companies in order of who had the most buzz heading into the event, according to the mentors and investors with whom I've spoken over the past few weeks (as well as media coverage.)

Psykosoft (team pictured above, in TechStars' Kendall Square HQ)

"You are an amazing artist! You just never had the right tools to express yourself yet." An easy way for the non-artistic to turn photos into paintings, or create and share animated GIFs. Company's mission is to make it easy to be creative, and its next project is a web-based music composition app called PsykoDio.

"Adobe PhotoShop is amazing: it only costs $522," Gosselin said during his demo. "Then you can buy a book like 'Photoshop Made Easy.' And the interface hasn't changed in twenty years. Photoshop is vintage, it's a lot of fun to learn, and it only costs you a kidney. What happens if you're lazy and you want to have fun in your life?" Psykosoft lets you instantly paint like Monet or Van Gogh or "Picasso 2.0," he said. The free site is already getting 60,000 visits per day.

- Participated in the European Seedcamp accelerator program in 2011.
- French team led by CEO Matthieu Gosselin
- Mentors: Former Harmonix COO and angel investor Mike Dornbrook, Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, Dave Balter of BzzAgent/Intelligent.ly.
- Raising $500,000, with Destin already committed to invest.

Murfie

Imagine if all your music — CDs or digital downloads — could live in one place. Murfie says it's building a "bank for your music," with the ability to legally buy, sell, and trade the tunes you own. One service the company offers is the ability to send in your CD collection, have it digitized, and stream it to mobile devices, computers, and Sonos music systems. (We'll see what the record labels think about your ability to sell a digital track that you may have already ripped to your hard drive from the CD.) CEO Matt Yunkle notes that even in the age of iTunes, the number of Americans buying CDs actually grew last year. He says current Murfie subscribers are already spending $200 on the site.

- The Madison, Wisconsin startup came into TechStars with $1.4 million in funding. It sounds like they eventually plan to raise more — but not imminently.
- They've been having partnership discussions with major record labels, but haven't announced any deals yet.
- Mentors: Rudina Seseri of Fairhaven Capital Partners, Shawn Broderick of Oomba/Play140, Eric Paley of Founder Collective.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Could a skin-tight shirt festooned with sensors improve the quality of your work-out?

A team of Northeastern students and profs have built a prototype that could point the way to the future of coaching and personal training for some elite athletes — and perhaps eventually hard-core gym rats, too. The Squid shirt is a tricked-out short-sleeve shirt from Under Armour that monitors how your delts, pecs, and lats are performing. (It also tracks your heart rate.) The shirt knows if you're hitting your exercise goals, and also if both sides of your body are doing equal amounts of work. It can relay that information via Bluetooth to a mobile phone or laptop, which would allow a coach or personal trainer to keep tabs on how you're doing. The shirt can also give you feedback via vibration if you're slacking off.

"It's a way for a trainer or coach to sign up an athlete for a workout, and collect data on how they do with it," says Adam Morgan, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering. "They can target different muscle areas that they might want to develop with an individual or a group of team members."

Trevor Lorden (pictured here) showed me how it worked, using a seated row machine. He said that it only takes him about two minutes to don the Squid shirt and affix the dozen disposable sensors. (The shirt can be washed in a machine, as long as it's dried on low heat.) Since the team is still developing the Bluetooth connection, he was connected to a laptop by a cable. Ali Aas, who helped develop the mobile app and web site, showed how the information about Lorden's workout could be viewed. You could see a calendar showing which days he'd worked out, and how his average intensity compared to the goal he'd set on various exercises. It also showed on a spectrum whether the exerciser is favoring one arm versus the other, or working out in perfect symmetry.

Faculty advisor Mark Sivak told me that they'll be testing the shirt with Northeastern athletes this summer. They see the initial market as college and professional sports teams. The Squiddoos may soon add additional sensors to monitor the biceps and abdominal muscles, and Constantinos Mavroidis, another faculty advisor to the project, said they've had some early conversations with a medical device company interested in the Squid shirt about tracking blood pressure and breathing.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Just how expensive has Kendall Square office space become?

So expensive that some startups are finding it easier and cheaper to rent a luxury apartment in the neighborhood than compete for commercial space alongside Amazon, Staples, Google, and a zillion small biotechs.

I went to visit Yesware last week at Archstone Kendall Square to see what it looks like when an eight-person company moves into a two-bedroom apartment. Yesware helps salespeople manage their e-mail communications with prospective customers; the company raised $1 million last year from Google Ventures and Foundry Group.

When I visited, the lobby and halls of the building were completely empty. Chief executive Matthew Bellows greeted me at the door of their fourth floor apartment. "No one else is around during the day," he explained, "and we blow out of here at 6 or 7 PM, when all of the other people come home from work." Bellows (pictured at left in the kitchen) said he'd been "totally up front about what we were using the space for" with the building's leasing office.

Bellows said that the company is up to eight employees, but two or three contractors or interns sometimes show up to work, too. (When I visited, I counted a half-dozen employees working in what would've ordinarily been the living room.) Thanks to walls of windows facing east, the apartment gets better natural light than most offices.

All of the furniture, Bellows explained, had come from IKEA: "We rented a U-Haul, drove down there, and then we hired a Task Rabbit guy to put it together." Everything else came from Amazon, including computers, monitors, an LCD projector, and some nifty adhesive material that turned the wall of one bedroom into a whiteboard. That bedroom, with the whiteboard wall, had become a conference room. The other was still a bedroom (pictured at right); co-founder Cashman Andrus lives in Brazil, but he sleeps there when he's in town.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I zipped down to Providence this afternoon to watch sixteen entrepreneurs present brief demos of what they've been developing as part of the spring 2012 Betaspring startup accelerator program.

All of the teams had impressive pitches, and several had already raised $100,000 or more from investors before their official "coming out" presos today. Here are my very subjective, somewhat tongue-in-cheek Innovation Economy awards for Betaspring's latest crop...

Rooting for Them to Take Over the World award

Next time you're in the hospital, you'll probably wish the doctors, nurses, and lab techs were using CareThread. It's a mobile app that lets a doctor going home for the night update the next doctor coming on duty about your status. That next doctor can also get an instant alert once your latest lab tests come in. The founders of CareThread say that patient hand-offs — typically done with a quick hallway conversation or some scribbled notes today — are responsible for 80 percent of all medical errors.

Seems Like the Next 'Guitar Hero' award

Betaspring clearly saved Movable Code for the last slot of the day for a reason: the startup had a wacky, fun demo of a new game, Incantor, that combines a mobile phone strapped to your arm with a magic wand. (See the pic at right.) You can cast spells and do battle alone or with other players — and the company will of course sell you special spells after you've gotten hooked. Now if they can only get 10 percent of all Harry Potter fans to buy one...

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

On Tuesday, I was in Kendall Square with a group of about 35 entrepreneurs at an event organized by Matrix Partners. The focus of the free event was on how entrepreneurs can work effectively with bloggers and traditional media to generate coverage of their companies. Joining me was Kel Kelly, who runs the Boston PR and social media firm Kel & Partners. Her firm has worked with clients like Zappos, Staples, Rue La La, and Reebok. Audio from the session is below.

Among the things we discussed:

- Why companies get left out of big "round up" or trend stories that include five or six different companies.

- Trade-offs between handling PR yourself, and hiring an agency

- Coming up with a comprehensible "cocktail party" explanation of what your company does, and the problem you're trying to solve

- Being helpful to journalists even when you're not pitching a story on your company

- How and whether to offer an exclusive

- Getting covered by influential bloggers and Tweeters

- PR Newswire, Business Wire, and social media releases

The audio runs for just over an hour. Click "mp3" to download it for later listening.

I'll be doing a similar discussion at Ramen Camp on May 12th, during lunch. Admission to that day-long event is, unfortunately, not free. It costs $15, but it includes lunch, a t-shirt, and the first beer free at the after-party.