By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The New England Venture Capital Association held its first-ever awards party tonight in Harvard Square. These were the winners.

Angel of the Year: Andy Palmer of Koa Labs

Rising Star VC (Tie): Rob Go of NextView Ventures and Stephen Kraus of Bessemer Venture Partners

Rising Star Entrepreneur: Sravish Sridhar of Kinvey

Deal of the Year (Tech): Actifio

Deal of the Year (Healthcare): Moderna Therapuetics

Entrepreneur of the Year (Tech): Andy Ory of Acme Packet

Entrepreneur of the Year (Healthcare): Katrine Bosley of Avila Therapeutics

VC of the Year (Tech) : Spark Capital

VC of the Year (Healthcare) : Third Rock Ventures

Exit of the Year (Tech) Acme Packet, acquired by Oracle

Exit of the Year (Healthcare): Avila Therapeutics, acquired by Celgene

Best New Startup: Jounce Therapeutics

Hottest Startup: Wayfair

Photos from the event are on NEVCA's Facebook page, and the complete list of nominees is here.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

At the DIY Days conference last Saturday in Manhattan, I ran into MIT Media Lab alum Alexander Reben and his little cardboard buddy, BlabDroid.

Reben was in town for the Tribeca Film Festival; he had deployed 20 BlabDroids there as robotic documentarians, asking questions of random people and recording their answers. (BlabDroid also won the Creative Sparks competition at DIY Days, earning Reben some free office space in New York and a "micro-grant" of $500. I served as a judge.)

The 'bot is designed to look cute and homemade, and it speaks in the voice of a 7-year old boy — all strategies to induce interviewees to let down their guard and start talking freely. Among the questions BlabDroid is prone to ask is, "What's the worst thing you've ever done to someone?"

BlabDroid garned quite a lot of publicity while in New York for Tribeca (here's the Wall Street Journal, Wired, and Gizmag). But Reben's Kickstarter campaign to raise $75,000 in order to put the 'bot into production hasn't yet caught fire. For $299, you get a fully-assembled BlabDroid that can move around under its own steam, and connect via Bluetooth with a smartphone; a less-expensive "Starter BlabDroid" is also available. With about a month left, Reben is still $70,000 short of his target.

Reben heads to the UK later this month to speak at the Thinking Digital conference. BlabDroid's predecessor was a Media Lab project called Boxie, The Story Gathering Robot. Below is a video that BlabDroid shot at a film festival in Amsterdam back in March, and a photo of BlabDroid's Arduino-based innards.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Sometime during the course of Lockdown Friday, I suggested that once Boylston Street was open again, we should all head over to hoist a few drinks...

To remember those killed and injured... To express our gratitude to the first responders and the healthcare professionals who helped the city get through a pretty horrific week... To reclaim one of our favorite neighborhoods, Back Bay...And to help the businesses there get back on their feet.

Katie Burke of HubSpot and Kate Castle of Flybridge Capital took that idea and ran with it, and Tuesday night (April 30th), there's a pub crawl they organized that starts at 6 PM. Eleven startups, tech giants, accelerators, and venture capital firms are hosting gatherings at seven Back Bay bars. They'll be buying a few rounds, and inviting attendees to donate generously to the city's OneFund, which helps victims of the bombings.

You don't need to work at the host companies to come, or even know anyone who works there. Everyone's invited, whether you work in the startup world or not. If you're planning to go, send out a tweet or Facebook update with the #BackToBackBay hashtag, to let your friends know what bar you'll be at, at what time, so they can join you.

Here's who is hosting at each venue.

• Globe Bar and Café – PromoBoxx and DataXu
• Lir – Wayfair
• Lolita Cocina – Flybridge and BzzAgent
• McGreevey’s – Digital Lumens, Flybridge and HubSpot
• Solas – Kibits and Plastiq
• Towne – HubSpot
• Whiskey's – Microsoft and MassChallenge

The map for the event is here.

I'm planning to hit Towne at 6:30 and Lolita around 7:30. Hope to see you there...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Can a bus trip to Boston help startups from the Providence-based Betaspring accelerator program raise money?

That was the hope this morning, when fifteen startup teams headed north to pitch a roomful of Boston-area angels at the Cambridge Innovation Center; previously, interested investors had to hop on 95 South and head to Providence to get a look at the latest cohort of Betaspring graduates. Today's presenters were looking to raise anywhere from $175,000 to $2 million. It'll be a few weeks, at least, before we see whether the Greyhound strategy has an impact on the amount the entrepreneurs are able to raise. (At right is ZoomTilt founder Anna Callahan.)

Here are a few new services worth checking out, and startups worth putting on your radar screen. Companies in that second category, I'm betting, have pretty decent odds of collecting some cash — even if they're not working on consumer-facing ideas.

Check out...

• RaftOut, a site that makes it easy to coordinate concert ticket purchases among friends. Want to see a show, but don't know who else in your social circle will pony up to join you? Just click the "Bring People" button before you make a purchase. You can try it out with some upcoming shows in Boston here. The company is in the process of integrating with ticket sellers like Brown Paper Tickets and TicketFly.

• ShutterCal, which prompts you to pick the best picture you've taken each day. The company places these images onto an online calendar, which you can share with family or friends. You can try the service for free; purchase an ad-free, $3-a-month digital subscription; or buy a $14.99-a-month membership that sends you a packet of printed photos each month. You also get a nicely-designed shoebox (below) that holds a full year's worth of photos.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Could reality TV's next big star be an Olin College-educated robotics engineer who lives in Davis Square? Here's hoping...

Snooki's potential successor is Gui Cavalcanti, one of ten contestants on the new show "The Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius," which debuts May 1st at 10 p.m. on the Discovery Channel. Cavalcanti, right, is best-known locally as the co-founder of Artisan's Asylum, a "maker space" in Somerville that provides artists and entrepreneurs with access to a wood shop, metal shop, 3-D printers, and other tools, as well as classes in how to use them. Cavalcanti also led a successful effort last year to raise money online to build a giant, rideable six-legged robot named Stompy, pulling in almost $100,000. (I wrote about the Asylum last May, and included Cavalcanti on my 2012 list of "Innovation Amplifiers.")

"Big Brain Theory" challenges its contestants each week to come up with a solution to "a seemingly impossible engineering challenge," according to its website. Contestants on the losing team are subject to elimination. The eventual winner gets $50,000, and a one-year contract to work at WET, a Los Angeles design firm best known for the fountain show outside the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. (I guess every talented engineer dreams of one day designing water features for hotels?)

Cavalcanti says he spent about seven weeks shooting the show, in and around Los Angeles. In the first episode, airing Wednesday, he plays a major role as the teams try to stop an explosives-laden package in the bed of a pickup truck from exploding. "Big Brain Theory" feels like a blend of "Mythbusters" and "Project Runway," and it's a lot of fun to watch if you're at all interested in how design, math, and engineering can be applied in real-world scenarios.

What inspired Cavalcanti to audition for the show? He explains via e-mail, "I was an avid fan of 'Battlebots' and 'Junkyard Wars' growing up, and watching the shows got me even more interested in engineering than I was before. When I heard there was a new kind of design/build show coming up that was looking to feature real design and engineering skills (as opposed to the hacking skills that were prominent in 'Junkyard Wars'), I really wanted to participate, if only to inspire a new generation of kids to get interested in engineering like I had been. On top of that, it was an opportunity to just get away and make stuff for once, which I ironically hadn't been able to do nearly as much as I wanted while running Artisan's Asylum."

Last spring, he says, the show's producer put out a call for contestants. "After seeing it the second or third time, I decided to apply, and got a call back within a half-hour or so," Cavalcanti says. As a result of being chosen for the show, Cavalcanti handed over the reins at Artisan's Asylum to Molly Rubenstein, who had been the director of operations. He says he is now "doing half-time development work at the Asylum," and Rubenstein is serving as the new executive director.

A teaser video for the show is below:

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Corporate innovation executives from companies like Covidien, Chubb Group, and the Mayo Clinic got together earlier this week at the Harvard Club. The occasion was the 2013 Innovation Leaders Forum, organized by Imaginatik, a British software and consulting firm that has its main U.S. office in Boston.

The overarching theme: promoting new ideas inside a large, established organization can be pretty darn hard. Resources are often scarce. Business unit leaders can be hostile. Top executives may want to talk about innovation during earnings calls, but often don't make enough of a commitment to actually rolling out the best ideas. And innovation leaders constantly worry that if they can't move the needle on revenues or costs, they may find themselves looking for their next job.

Amidst that anxiety, there were some interesting insights about how large companies approach innovation. Here are ten comments that stood out. The last one is my favorite.

• "You need to create a sense of urgency [around innovation] at a gut level, not just a PR level." — Jim Euchner, vice president of global innovation at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. (He's pictured on the left, with Moises Norena of Whirlpool.)

• Phil Swisher, chief innovation officer at the private bank Brown Brothers Harriman, said that often, HIPPOs tend to dominate discussions about innovation (HIPPO being an initialism for the "highest-paid person with an opinion.") Running experiments is much better than simply taking direction from a HIPPO, as politically difficult as that may be. "Hypothesis testing is better than hunches," Swisher said.

• "Visuals are really powerful. We try to make the invisible visible," said Lorna Ross of the Mayo Clinic's Center for Innovation. That could mean studying and mapping communication patterns in the operating room during bypass surgery. "When you can show somebody where the problems are, it can be easier to get people to change," she said.

• Whirlpool Corp. chief innovation officer Moises Norena talked about "growing the core" (the company's major appliance business), "extending the core" (offering new products and services related to that core business), and "expanding beyond the core" (new, high-margin stand-alone businesses).

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Most people haven't yet heard of Ingress, an augmented reality game currently being beta-tested by Google. But think of it as a digital version of capture-the-flag, in which players from a blue team and a green team use their mobile phones as they move around the real world, trying to find and claim ownership of "portals" to another dimension.

Not surprisingly, a lot of squabbling over portals happens around Cambridge, and on the MIT campus.

Over the past few days, in the wake of Friday's shooting of MIT campus police officer Sean Collier, Ingress players made two decisions. They called a temporary ceasefire on the MIT campus, turning it into a neutral zone. And they created a memorial to Collier near where he was killed at the Stata Center.

Last Saturday, Christopher Davis, an Ingress player and Google employee, posted a message suggesting that two portals be placed side by side, one from each faction, near the Stata Center on Vassar Street, and also at Copley Square. "Nothing could be a stronger statement that 'We are Boston. We are united,'" Davis wrote in a posting to the local Ingress forum. The two teams worked in partnership to set up the memorial; it was completed around midnight last night.

The Copley Square memorial hasn't yet appeared. "There hasn't explicitly been anything set up in the game around Copley or Boylston Street," explains Ingress player Stephen Lewin-Berlin, a managing director at Quanta Research in Cambridge. "You have to be within 40 meters of a location to do anything, and all that area has been a crime scene." Until the past day or two, at least...

Lewin-Berlin tells me that the idea of making the MIT campus a neutral zone, and setting up the memorials, wasn't exactly uncontroversial within the Ingress community. "For some people, this is an important symbol," he says. "But for others, Ingress is a way to play and get away from real life. There were some interesting dynamics in the discussion group and the in-game chats." Lewis-Berlin says he hopes the ceasefire and memorial will endure for a week.

The screen-capture above is from the Ingress Boston community on Google+, which has 196 members. A memorial service for Collier is scheduled to take place today at noon on the MIT campus; Vice President Joe Biden will be among the speakers.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Just posting a nifty graphic that Dave Bisceglia shared last night at the "Mothers of Invention" show focused on gaming...

Bisceglia is co-founder of The Tap Lab, a Cambridge startup that last month released Tiny Tycoons, its second location-based game. While we haven't yet seen a breakout hit in the realm of games that depend on your standing in a particular spot to play or take some action (and Tiny Tycoons moves away from that idea), this is a pretty cool visual history of the attempts we've seen thus far. It mentions Boston-based SCVNGR, and also some of the enabling technologies that have made location-based games possible, like wifi positioning data from Skyhook, also in Boston.

Click the image to enlarge it.

(The illustration is by Carrie Witt. I mentioned Bisceglia and The Tap Lab back in December, in this post.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

An Israeli company founded in 2007, Gizmox, is getting new funding from Cambridge venture capital firm Atlas Venture. Atlas is leading a $7.5 million funding round for Gizmox, and local tech executive Eugene Kuznetsov is joining as chief executive. Kuznetsov had previously been the founder and president of DataPower, a maker of networking equipment that was acquired by IBM for about $100 million; it was also backed by Atlas. More recently, he'd been co-founder of Abine, a startup focused on online privacy, also part of the Atlas portfolio.

Gizmox makes it easier for big companies to get their existing software applications running on the web and mobile devices, using the HTML5 standard, without having to rewrite them from scratch. Gizmox customers can either then run the applications from their own data centers, or in the cloud using Gizmox’s servers.

"Enterprises are far behind where the consumer web is at, with respect to HTML5," Kuznetsov says. "But their employees want to use the same applications they use on their desktops on their mobile devices."

Atlas Venture partner Jeff Fagnan adds, "There are billions of dollars that big enterprises have invested in ERP, CRM, .NET, and Java applications, and it's hard to mobilize those and extend them out into the cloud." Kuznetsov says that Gizmox has developed "transposition" technology that can take those existing enterprise apps and deliver them in HTML5, without rewriting them by hand. "You can adjust and modify the output if you want," he says. About 40,000 applications have already been converted using the platform, according to Kuznetsov.

The company has about 40 employees in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Kuznetsov says it is now starting to hire locally. “We’ll be at least 15 people in the short-term, and more from there,” he says, adding that the focus is on sales and marketing employees, along with a few "technical folks and engineers." The company doesn't yet have office space — it's still working out of Atlas' office across from the CambridgeSide Galleria — but Kuznetsov says he's looking only in Cambridge. Fagnan and Chris Lynch of Atlas are joining Gizmox's board.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

If this had been an ordinary week in Boston, the workers who hustle down the hallways of our city's hospitals would've been doing all the things they ordinarily do: drawing blood, tending to patients, performing heart bypasses, delivering babies, running MRIs.

This was nothing like an ordinary week.

On Monday, our city's medical professionals tried to save as many victims of the Marathon blasts as they could. A resident at Boston Medical Center who had been running the race, Natalie Stavas, offered aid to victims on the scene. One trauma surgeon, Dr. David King, reported to work at Mass General not long after he himself crossed the finish line. Employees of Boston Children's Hospital who had been manning a medical tent on the marathon route in Wellesley hurried to the hospital to see how they could help. Hundreds of others whose names we don't know took care of the wounded as they were transported to the city's hospitals, and once they arrived. (Worth a read is this piece in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande, who is a surgeon at Brigham & Women's: "Why Boston's Hospitals Were Ready.")

By Thursday night, after some patients had been released, and others were on the road to recovery, there were new victims on their way to the hospitals: an MIT campus police officer, Sean Collier, who died, and an MBTA transit police officer, who was wounded in a firefight and brought to Mount Auburn Hospital. Then, Beth Israel staffers tried to revive one of the bombing suspects, who showed up in their emergency room at 1:10 a.m. this morning with gunshot and blast injuries. One Beth Israel doctor, David Schoenfeld, happens to live in Watertown. When he started hearing gunshots and sirens in his neighborhood last night, he did the obvious thing: he drove to work.

"You give the best care you can to every patient that comes to you, regardless of what may or may not be," he said at a press conference earlier this morning. "Whether it was a suspect, an innocent, a police officer, you have no idea who it is when they arrive. You give them the best care you can."

If this had been an ordinary week, doctors, nurses, technicians, and admin staffers would have simply been delivering their best care all around town, without getting much appreciation from those not wearing one of those plastic hospital bracelets. A few of them would have run the marathon on Monday to raise a few million for research initiatives and patient care, gone home, and maybe recuperated a bit.

This has been a far from ordinary week, and we owe tremendous gratitude to all those green-gowned workers who show up for work at our city's hospitals on normal days and the rest, ready to help all of us.

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama visited several local hospitals yesterday to say thanks. I'm adding mine here...

Thank you.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

As I said last night on Twitter, Boston is a city that fights injustice, promotes enlightenment, and celebrates athletic achievement. Yesterday's attack on the innocent people who stood cheering on the runners of the 117th Boston Marathon changes none of that.

We've all been looking at pictures and videos of what happened. It's hard to avoid. It's hard to believe this happened in our city, full of students, educators, healers, scientists, and entrepreneurs.

But there are also photos of the race that show it for what it has been for more than a century, and what it will continue to be in the future: one of our city's rites of spring, a celebration of life and endurance, a race that so many run to raise money for a cause, or in honor of someone else.

Next year, I hope that the entire city will find a way to run, walk, or bike the course... or cheer as spectators... because the marathon is now a bigger part of our city's soul than it ever was before.

The non-profit Technology Underwriting Greater Good started to raise money online yesterday for those injured and killed in the two Back Bay blasts. You can donate here.

(The picture above was taken by the Boston Globe's Dina Rudick.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

British online printing business Moo.com — think VistaPrint, but with a hipper aesthetic — is hunting for office space in Boston to serve as its U.S. headquarters. And Moo has already hired a former Zipcar executive, Stephanie Shore, to run marketing in North America.

Moo is probably best-known for its full-color business cards that can sport a different picture on the back of each one, and it already operates a U.S. printing facility in Providence, Rhode Island. CEO Richard Moross describes Moo as "a design and technology business currently focused on printed stationery, but ultimately we deal in professional identity products for small businesses." Last week, Moo, which was born in 2004, sold to its one millionth customer.

"We have roughly 50 people in Providence, over 100 people in London, and we foresee at least ten people in Boston focused on marketing initiatives," he says. "Today, 75 to 80 percent of our revenue is outside the U.K., and about 60 percent of that is in North America. So the gravitational pull is toward the U.S." Over time, he says, "it may make sense to locate other roles here, or increase certain functions in the U.S."

Moross, who was in town last week, says that Moo had been looking at various cities on the Eastern Seaboard for its U.S. office, "but we picked Boston as a by-product of the person we hired." Shore, right, spent a little over five years at Zipcar, eventually becoming vice president of global brand; before that, she'd worked in the marketing departments of Boston.com and Lawyers Weekly.

Moross says that Moo hasn't yet found office space in Boston, but that it has been focused on the Innovation District and the Leather District, near South Station. With both VistaPrint and Staples based in Massachusetts, Moross observes, "There's a fantastic group of companies in the neighborhood catering to small businesses. We're all in the same kind of industry."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Gazelle CEO Israel Ganot made two pretty dramatic decisions last year.

His Boston startup, which helps consumers resell their old electronic gadgets after they've upgraded, had grown to about $35 million in sales for 2011. But it was accepting 22 different categories of products for resale, including videogames, GPS devices, and even computer monitors. And it was spending a huge amount of energy working with retail partners like Wal-Mart and Staples to try to persuade consumers to part with their old devices at the moment they bought a new one.

Those partnerships, Ganot now says, "weren't working out the way we envisioned. They required a lot of resources from our side, but where it really failed was their ability to embrace and market the program. It became sort of a 'check the box' sustainability initiative for them."

Last February, Ganot told his staff that Gazelle would no longer market its "re-commerce" service through those retail partners, and that it would radically reduce the range of products it accepted. The company would focus on Apple products, and higher-end mobile phones from brands like Samsung, HTC, and Blackberry. "We went from working with hundreds of thousands of SKUs," Ganot says, referring to individual product models, "to about 1000 SKUs." Roughly $9 million of Gazelle's $35 million in 2011 revenue, he says, came from its retail partnerships and all those products it was no longer accepting.

But the streamlining didn't set Gazelle back. Revenues for 2012 were $58 million, Ganot says, and "we should do over $100 million this year. Our growth isn't slowing." (One thing that will likely help Gazelle in 2013: last month, eBay shut down its own competing service, Instant Sale.) Ganot says that 30 percent of Gazelle's customers have used the service more than once.

Ganot estimates that the re-commerce business will generate $5 billion annually by 2015. "The number one challenge for us is still building awareness for the concept of re-commerce, as opposed to just putting an old phone into a desk drawer and forgetting about it," he says. Another customer concern, he says, is getting rid of the data on the device; Gazelle performs a complete data wipe before re-selling it. About 80 percent of the products it receives are sold to wholesalers, who frequently ship them to foreign countries where they will command higher prices. The rest are resold through eBay and Amazon.com.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The New England Venture Capital Association will unveil a new awards ceremony on May 1st in Cambridge: The NEVYs. Executive director C.A. Webb just sent over the list of finalists, adding, that the NEVY "academy" of several dozen investors and entrepreneurs will be choosing the winners over the next couple weeks.

Angel of the Year

Andy Palmer- Koa Labs
Dharmesh Shah- Hubspot
Will Herman- Techstars
Nicole Stata- Boston Seed Capital
Ty Danco- BuySideFX
David Chang- PayPal Boston
Joe Caruso- Bantam Group

Rising Star: VC

Rob Go- NextView Ventures
Stephen Kraus- Bessemer Venture Partners
Kent Bennett- Bessemer Venture Partners

Rising Star: Entrepreneur

Sravish Sridhar- Kinvey
Eliot Buchanan- Plastiq
John Harthorne- MassChallenge
Fred Shilmover- InsightSquared
Andrew Paradise- Lookout Gaming
Justin Borgman- Hadapt

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I tweeted Angela Schipano, the co-founder of the Sneakerbox retail truck, recently to see when I might check it out somewhere around Boston. There aren't very many entrepreneurs using trucks to incubate new retail concepts, but I like to keep tabs on those who are.

"Actually, we are going to be relocating to California," replied Schipano. "Boston still does not have permits that allow us to sell."

The City of Boston, and city agencies like the Boston Redevelopment Authority, have been aware of and in discussions with retail truck entrepreneurs for more than a year. There have even been some small tests, like allowing trucks to sell their merchandise on City Hall Plaza around the holidays. But Schipano says that there's still no permitting process or pathway for retail truck entrepreneurs to find legal locations in the city to operate on a daily basis, unlike their food-peddling counterparts. And she asserts that police in Boston and surrounding cities often follow retail trucks' postings on Twitter as a way of finding out where they're operating, and then asking them to move or handing out expensive citations.

Schipano and her co-founder, Tiffany Crews, both went to college in Boston. They worked together at the Nike store on Newbury Street. Schipano lives in the North End. And they tried to start a business here.

"The thing that's great about a retail truck is that there's not a lot of overhead," she says. "You can open your own business — and that hasn't been easy for a lot of young people, given the recession we've been through." The eventual goal, Schipano adds, is to be successful enough to open a brick-and-mortar location, where they can showcase much more merchandise. (We've already seen that happen with food trucks like Clover Food Lab, which has two fixed locations, and another two set to open this spring.)

But Schipano says that she and Crews (pictured at left inside the truck) are planning to move to southern California next month. "There are maybe ten locations where you can sell street-side and it's legal, in places like Santa Monica and West Hollywood," she says. Permits vary in price — but they exist. (Sneakerbox's founders sampled the California scene earlier this year as part of a cross-country tour.)

I'd love to see Boston generating more revenue, supporting new entrepreneurs, and potentially cultivating future brick-and-mortar shops, by making retail trucks legal in designated spots around the city.

And at least some in city government are supportive of the idea. "We have to figure out how and where it can happen," Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson told me earlier this week. "I don't want innovation to be stunted based on regulation."

But that, right now, is where we're at.

"It really is a bummer," says Schipano. "Boston has so much potential. I wish it would've worked."

Update: Melina Schuler, a spokesperson for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, sent me this comment via e-mail:

We’ve developed several models for launching a retail truck program in Boston that are being currently vetted across city departments. Retail trucks are a new business model on the streets of Boston and any new policy that supports its presence on the public way must be carefully and thoughtfully crafted.

We’ve stayed in close contact with retail truck owners to keep the dialogue open and have held meetings with business leaders to understand potential impacts on existing retail.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

A real estate advisory firm that helps tech companies find office space is planning a move of its own, trading the 'burbs for the big city. Waltham-based T3 Advisors will move its twenty employees into One Marina Park Drive (a/k/a the MassChallenge building) this summer. And T3 CEO Roy Hirshland has some interesting plans for the new space, including setting up an "Innovation Studio" that will offer transitory space for entrepreneurs, lawyers, consultants and other tech ecosystem workers. The new space is about 5,000 square feet, and overlooks the Boston Innovation Center, currently under construction just across Northern Avenue.

Hirshland tells me that T3's Innovation Studio will have space for "five to ten people," who might be patent attorneys visiting for two or three hours, or entrepreneurs working on a new venture for two or three months. "It's not an incubator or a co-working space," he explains. "It's really just a place where some of our firm's friends and people who work in the ecosystem can connect."

Hirshland says that the new office, on the building's third floor, will also be a kind of showcase for new approaches to workspace design. "We're planning to have interesting furniture and lighting and other elements that will show how different work styles can be supported," Hirshland says. None of the T3 employees, he adds, will have a dedicated desk; they'll use meeting rooms and desks on an on-demand basis.

Two of T3's clients, Battery Ventures and EnerNOC, have also leased space at One Marina Park Drive. A third client, LogMeIn, which had previously been based in Woburn, just moved to its new headquarters at 320 Summer Street this week, in the Fort Point Channel area.

Hirshland says the new office's proximity to Logan Airport was a big draw; T3 opened a Palo Alto outpost last year, and so he and other employees are hopping planes more often.

But he doesn't think the suburbs are over as a location for innovation-oriented companies: "We have a ton of clients who still want to be on Route 128."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

An entrepreneur who initially sought to simplify the trip planning experience with a site called WaySavvy has a new strategy: serving up ads that could help travel-oriented websites generate more revenue.

WaySavvy, founded in 2010 by Brandeis alum Michael Raybman, didn't take flight. The new startup, TripReactor, wants to serve up a blend of editorial and advertising content: pop-out guides that offer information about things to do, places to eat, and hotels you might book in a given destination. (A sample is below.) "The goal," explains Raybman, "is to seamlessly blend editorial and commercial lifestyle content in a way valuable to the user. As a crude analogy, we're making every travel publisher into a TripAdvisor." If TripReactor's guide persuades you to book one of those hotels, that would increase the commission revenue generated, both for TripReactor and the travel site where the ads appear. (In the old world of publishing, this line-blurring approach would've been called an advertorial. The updated term is "native advertising".)

Among TripReactor's early publishing partners is Boston.com, where TripReactor-powered ads started appearing last week. Raybman says he'll be working with the travel blog Vagabondish and several other sites starting later this month.

Raybman participated in the MassChallenge competition last year. Angel investors David Chang of PayPal, Scott Heller, Mario Ricciardelli, and former Harmonix exec Mike Dornbrook put money into TripReactor last September; Raybman didn't want to be specific about the amount, but said it was sub-$100,000. "Eventually," Raybman says, "we'll extend this native advertising approach beyond travel."

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

There's a lot of action these days around same-day delivery of online purchases: start-ups are raising money to build networks of urban couriers, and big players like Google are conducting tests. An Arlington company, HappySpeedy, has been delivering convenience store merchandise since December, for a $2.95 charge. Even the U.S. Postal Service is dipping a toe into the waters of same-day delivery.

I dedicated a recent Boston Globe column to covering this new wave of experimentation, and the impact that it could have on retailers.

And if you are old enough, you may remember Kozmo.com, which promised not just same-day delivery of ice cream, razors, and DVDs — they promised delivery within an hour. (Delivery was free for most of Kozmo's existence.) I happened to visit Kozmo's Allston warehouse on the day in 2000 that the company filed to go public.

Here's the piece I wrote for the Globe.

Return to Sender

— May 1, 2000

Note the time and put the body on ice. The “Sell-a-Dollar’s-Worth-of-Merchandise-for-Fifty-Cents-and-Make-It-Up-On-Volume.com” business model is dead.

Which makes this a pretty unfortunate time for Kozmo.com, the New York-based urban delivery service, to be going public.

You’ve probably heard the raves about Kozmo, which operates in six cities, including Boston. Place your order for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, a copy of People magazine, or a home pregnancy test on their Web site, and a Kozmo courier will bring it to your door within an hour – no delivery charge. It’s truly wonderful – a Kozmo cyclist brought me two DVDs (no rental charge, thanks to a Kozmo marketing postcard I was handed on a street corner) just an hour before I had to head to Logan so that I could keep myself entertained on a long flight.

Trouble is, Kozmo loses money on just about every delivery run they make, even when they’re not acquiring new customers like me with postcards. And the plan is to increase delivery hours (they’re currently 10 a.m. to 1 a.m.) and expand to ten more cities by the end of the year, so that they can lose money even faster.

Guys: Nasdaq don’t play that no more.

I happened to visit Kozmo’s Boston operation on the day in March that they filed to raise $150 million in an initial offering. Inside the 10,000 square foot warehouse, a handful of couriers are lounging around on couches, watching TV and waiting to be dispatched. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Kozmo is busiest on weekends, when demand spikes for Cheetos and Cameron Diaz movies. In one corner, employees are unpacking new videos from cardboard boxes. In another, printers are spitting out order sheets, which are then filled from rows of tall metal shelves packed with books, video games, deodorant, and Nutter Butter Bites.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Know a high school student with an interest in technology — or just learning how to build stuff?

Startup Institute, the Cambridge-based organization that up until now has trained recent college grads to fill jobs at startups, will offer its first educational program for high schoolers later this month. The free High School RampUp series will run two Saturdays, April 27 and May 4th. But there's only space for 30 students.

Startup Institute CEO Aaron O'Hearn cites estimates that by 2020, the U.S. will have about one million more programming jobs than it has computer science students. High School RampUp targets "folks who have had zero exposure to coding — let's call them the non-nerdy students," he says. They'll spend two Saturdays getting comfortable with the Python programming language, and building simple web applications that pull in and manipulate data from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. (For instance, how many times do their friends talk about various bands or baseball teams?)

O'Hearn says there isn't a near-term goal for the initiative, like funneling the program's graduates into summer internships at startup companies: "We want these people to learn for the pure sake of learning, and expose them to coding early on." He cites the non-profit Code.org as the inspiration for High School RampUp; it promotes the teaching of programming in schools.

Olin College student Juliana Nazaré has been working with Startup Institute to develop the curriculum for the new course, which will be held in Kendall Square. Expect it to fill up fast...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

A once-promising drug delivery startup that sprang from the labs of two high-profile MIT professors has run out of money without actually delivering a product. SpringLeaf Therapeutics raised more than $20 million from local VC firms Flybridge Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Excel Venture Management to develop a new kind of wearable pump system that would infuse drugs into patients subcutaneously, without requiring visits to a clinic or hospital. But the Boston company ceased to exist last month, according to a filing with Delaware's Division of Corporations. SpringLeaf spent most of its lifespan trying to perfect its complex battery-powered delivery system, but never got to the point of conducting a clinical trial.

That may not be the end of the SpringLeaf story, however. Pieter Mundendam, right, the former BG Medicine chief executive who was brought on last September to lead SpringLeaf, has acquired some of the company's assets. He has formed a new entity, scPharmaceuticals, to continue work on a wearable pump. Working alongside Muntendam are three other veterans of SpringLeaf, including chief scientific officer Glenn Larsen.

scPharma's website says it will focus on using the pump to deliver a diuretic to heart failure patients, helping to control the fluid buildup that often sends the patient back to the hospital; SpringLeaf had focused, at least for a time, on delivering the blood product immunoglobulin to patients with compromised immune systems, according to one former SpringLeaf employee. But the company encountered problems getting prospective partners interested in its technology, and also in reducing the size of the device, according to this ex-employee, who requested anonymity.

Muntendam told me this morning that he wasn't ready to share specifics about the funding he is raising for scPharma, but he said it will rely on a different delivery technology that he expects will be less expensive to produce, deliver drugs more precisely, and face "a lower regulatory hurdle" than what SpringLeaf had been working on. (Muntendam did say in a later e-mail that several of SpringLeaf's investors "are considering participating in scPharmaceuticals.") The new delivery technology comes from Switzerland, he says, and scPharma won't be relying on the original intellectual property out of MIT.

In the final months of SpringLeaf's existence, he says, "We were changing the path of the company," turning it into a pharmaceutical company that would develop its own formulation of drugs that could be delivered with its device, in an effort to attain higher profit margins. But there wasn't sufficient financial support — or patience — from SpringLeaf's backers. He calls scPharma "a Phoenix company rising out of that," adding that developing a device capable of keeping patients out of the hospital is "a great opportunity."

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

That was fast: A Cambridge startup crafting software for the people who create new products has raised $25 million in additional funding, just a few months after collecting its first round of $9 million.

I wrote last December about Belmont Technology, which reunites a team of veterans from SolidWorks, a successful 1990s-era developer of computer-aided design (CAD) software that is now part of Dassault Systèmes; at that point, Belmont had backing from two local VC firms, North Bridge Venture Partners and Commonwealth Capital.

The new funding infusion was a "pre-emptive offer," according to Belmont CEO John McEleney, who says he wasn't planning to raise more money in 2013. "We'll use the money to ramp the hiring and continue the development process," he says. The company has just 13 employees near the Red Line's Alewife stop. (McEleney is in the center of the photo, wearing the vest and pink shirt.)

"We're building product design software," McEleney says. "The process of how people design products has changed." He notes that most of the major players in CAD software still sell products that run on Windows-based machines, even as engineers and designers regularly use tablets, mobile phones, and the web to modify and access content. "This new generation of engineers expect data to be more shareable, not locked down and 'in the vault.'" And the way products are actually designed, manufactured, and assembled is much more distributed, he adds: "It used to happen under one roof, or on a corporate campus, and now it is spread across facilities around the globe." (It's clear that the cloud will play a major part in Belmont's product strategy, and McEleney's last startup, acquired by Verizon, was called CloudSwitch.)

McEleney says that Belmont has started conducting some early usability tests of its product, and will be doing more private betas later this year. The company's website is still pretty sparse, aside from listing a few skills the company is hunting for in new hires, like experience with "distributed cloud based architecture" and "rich web application development."

This second funding round was led by NEA, a Maryland-based VC firm. McEleney says that Belmont is probably just a place-holder name, but the company hasn't yet settled on a new one.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The second class of the Healthbox accelerator program in Kendall Square gets underway this week. Geared to entrepreneurs developing new software, services and devices for the healthcare industry, the local offshoot of the Chicago-based accelerator has Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts as its major backer. Entrepreneurs who participate cough up seven percent of their company's equity to Healthbox, in return for free office space, mentorship, and $50,000 in seed funding.

The program, which operates in Cambridge, London, and Chicago, has expanded from 14 weeks to 16 weeks, and now opens with an introductory two-week bootcamp, focused on immersing teams in the realities of the healthcare industry and helping them hone their value propositions. (I wrote about the inaugural Healthbox cycle in Boston last August.)

These are the ten teams; descriptions were supplied by Healthbox:

· 3Derm Systems offers a low-cost skin monitoring solution allowing patients to take two-and three-dimensional images of concerning lesions at home before being digitally reviewed by a dermatologists.

· Caring in Place is a platform that allows users to coordinate care of an individual among family and friends while also discovering and utilizing local services.

· Casagem provides a tablet-based data collection and data-processing tools for the homecare industry. These tools will allow underutilized homecare nurses and support workers to complete mandatory on-site homecare forms via tablet, thus improving the precision of data collection and optimizing provider involvement.

· Cellanyx is developing a biomarker-based diagnostic urine test to determine oncogenic and metastatic potential for prostate tumors.

· Epion delivers a cloud-based, device-agnostic tablet solution that transforms the expensive and inefficient paper-based intake and discharge processes to a far less expensive, more accurate mobile digital solution.

· Hospitalytics is an analytical software to improve operating room (OR) efficiency by predicting booking trends and enabling OR managers to delegate surgery appointments and staffing accordingly.

· LeanWagon provides a wellness coaching program that includes interactive on-line workshops offered to the employees of participating companies.

· MyProxy is developing a web-based platform that enables patients to create, update, and share healthcare proxies and advance directives for end-of-life care.

· Sensing Strip is a device that integrates thin film sensing electronics with kinesiology tape. This "electronic sensing tape" can be placed anywhere on the patient’s body, where it will sense and wirelessly transmit real-time ambulatory, cardiac, respiratory, or a variety of other data to a smart phone or tablet.

· Theravid is a customizable web-application geared towards improving physical therapy adherence in the home.

Only three of the teams come from outside of Massachusetts: Casagem (Toronto), Epion (New Jersey), and Caring in Place (Colorado).

The teams will present to investors and community members at a demo day in June; the exact date hasn't been set yet. Last time around, the company that attracted the most audience votes for its "creative solution" received an additional $25,000 award.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Koa Labs is barely five months old, and already the shared workspace for entrepreneurs is adding a second location, just a block away from the first. The expansion will more than double the space Koa operates, says founder Andy Palmer, himself a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. In total, Koa will now be able to rent out more than fifty desks to entrepreneurs and investors. Desks cost $450 per month at Koa, which is the only co-working space currently operating in Harvard Square.

The new location, which just opened today, is at 66 Church Street, not far from the Brattle Theatre. Palmer is getting an assist with the expansion from the Experiment Fund, a Harvard-affiliated venture capital firm run by Hugo Van Vuuren. "We're both providing funding for the [new] space," says Palmer, who adds that the "goal of Koa is to just cover the costs of running the space with minimal overhead."

Among the tenants already based Koa are Data Tamer; Matter.io, focused on distributing content to 3D printers; and PushPage, which publishes a kind of Playboy interview updated for the social media age.

(Photo of the PushPage team at work provided by Koa.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

This week's Boston Globe column suggests that we need to think differently about identifying high-potential entrepreneurs while they're in college. What if we created a Massachusetts Founders League that inducted 100 new students each year, and helped them in all kinds of ways, from funding to office space to visas to mentorship? (Thanks to Quintin Adamis for the playful logo at right.)

There are a number of great programs in this vein already (such as RoughDraft.vc and MassDigi's Summer Innovation Program), but nothing that acts as a comprehensive scouting program across all industries, covering the entire state.

The opening:

With the National Football League’s draft ­approaching next month, you can bet that every team has carefully constructed its list of the most promising college players they hope to add to their rosters.

What if Massachusetts devoted the same resources to scouting the next generation of entrepreneurs as NFL teams devote to finding their next great wide receiver? (The Patriots alone have 21 employees focused solely on identifying and cultivating future players.) Entrepreneurs, after all, can have a far bigger impact on the local economy than football stars, no matter how many seats they fill or jerseys they sell.

I’ve been brainstorming lately about how a scouting program might operate, soliciting input from entrepreneurs who got their educations here, as well as start-up coaches like Katie Rae of TechStars Boston and Jeffrey Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners. Here’s how we might identify high-potential future founders, and also what we’d do once we identified them.

Here's some of the Twitter conversation that the column sparked. I'm also interested in your comments below. How would you try to identify the top future entrepreneurs? What should we do for them?

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

It won't open until early 2014, but there's a fascinating new project percolating in Kendall Square: The Lab Cambridge, a gallery and workspace intended to be a supercollider for artists, scientists, students, and entrepreneurs. It's a project of Harvard professor and entrepreneur David Edwards, with financial backing from two local venture capitalists, and it'll be located in the ground floor of 650 East Kendall Street, near Kendall Square's skating rink and the Genzyme tower.

The Lab Cambridge will include work space, an exhibition space, a small auditorium, a store and a café, Edwards says. It's the American incarnation of Le Laboratoire in Paris, which Edwards opened in 2007.

In Paris, Le Laboratoire "has a lot of open space," says Terry McGuire of Polaris Venture Partners, one of the backers of The Lab Cambridge. "It can sometimes feel like a gallery, but there's also the lab component, where people are trying new things. There's a store, so people off the street come in to try things, and give real-time feedback. It's this very open, experimental site." Students come from around the world to work on transforming ideas into prototype products, and Edwards regularly invites artists, performers, and scientists to collaborate on exhibitions. (One recent show used high-speed cameras to capture dancers in action, a 21st century update on the work of Doc Edgerton.) Flagship Ventures' Noubar Afeyan, another supporter of the new Lab in Cambridge, says Edwards is interested in "creating a social face for an innovation lab that is making things intended for consumers."

The Arlington architecture firm Brown Fenollosa is designing the new space, with involvement from French designer Mathieu Lehanneur, a frequent Edwards collaborator.

According to a promotional brochure for the project, "The Lab Store will sell innovative designs facilitating environmental sustainability and better human living." Inside the store will be the "WikiBar," where visitors will be able to sample foods wrapped in edible skins and shells, made by Edwards' Cambridge startup Wikicell. The Lab also will host "educational experiments" for Boston Public School students.

Clearly, The Lab is going to be an interesting addition to Kendall Square, where not much culture happens outside of petri dishes, and where all of the innovative work takes place behind locked doors, an elevator ride away from the street.

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