By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

How secretive are the folks over at CargoMetrics?

When co-founder Scott Borgerson showed up at a VC mixer at Quincy Market last month, his name tag read just "Scott." No company affiliation. When I tried to confirm with him afterward that he'd been at the party, his response was: "Maybe."

His investors at the Boston office of Summerhill Venture Partners wouldn't tell me who made the investment in CargoMetrics, when it was made, or how much they invested. "It benefits the company to be in stealth mode right now," e-mailed Summerhill partner Will Kohler.

But the company has been hiring steadily in Boston, and LinkedIn currently lists a dozen employees, including co-founder Rockford Weitz. (Both Weitz and Borgerson are Fletcher School alums, and fellows at the Gloucester-based Institute for Global Maritime Studies.)

So what is the company up to? CargoMetrics is collecting data about the movement of commodities by ship, and selling that data to hedge funds. (Ships report on their location through tracking systems like AIS, but CargoMetrics seems to be combining that with information about what's on board.) According to a job posting, the company "has developed a groundbreaking analytics platform which offers comprehensive, dynamic information on the movement of the global supply of the world’s commodities." Useful if you're trying to make a profit buying or selling commodities futures.

Borgerson (pictured at right) is former Coast Guard officer, and was the founding director of the Coast Guard Academy's Institute for Leadership. He's also an expert on Arctic shipping.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

When a serial entrepreneur decides to join a venture capital firm, you can have one of two perspectives:

"Great. One more VC who actually understands what it's like to try to grow a business."

"Rats. One less entrepreneur building a business in the Boston ecosystem."

I mentioned those points of view to Nabeel Hyatt yesterday, when we spoke about his decision to leave the Harvard Square outpost of Zynga, the Internet games developer, and join Spark Capital as a venture partner. He'd previously been the chief operating officer at Ambient Devices, a pioneering maker of information displays, and Teamtalk, a sports media start-up.

"I do think it's important to ask yourself the question, 'Does the world need another VC?'" Hyatt said. "But in Boston these days, there are a lot more start-ups being founded, more angels, more VCs — and that's overall a positive thing. But I see a real problem in companies being successful at scaling. There are problems when things start to work, start to move, and you need to expand beyond just the founding team. I felt like joining Spark was the best way for me to influence that stage of things, to help entrepreneurs in making the transition from a nice good idea that might be starting to get a little traction, to astronomical growth, and something you can talk about becoming a billion-dollar company one day." (I should probably note here that Hyatt's last start-up, Conduit Labs, didn't manage to produce a hit game, and was acquired by Zynga for an undisclosed sum. The office grew from about ten people to 45 after it became Zynga Boston.)

Hyatt says he'll focus mostly on consumer-oriented companies. "I have a huge passion in mobile. It's still very much the wild, wild west there. Social and the web are also very interesting. Generally, the job is about looking for disruptive opportunities — something that changes in the market and allows a start-up to grow incredibly fast." He adds that he's also interested in the ecosystem of companies, like Zynga, that are using Facebook to reach an audience.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Robert DeLeo, the Speaker of the House in Massachusetts, gave his annual address this afternoon to set out his priorities for the year. And he had a few things to say about Facebook, economic growth, and STEM education.

DeLeo is a Democrat who represents Winthrop and Revere. An excerpt from his prepared remarks:

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Who are the most powerful women on Boston's technology scene? Here's the Innovation Economy list.

I considered three factors:

• Impact (how big of an organization do they oversee, how large of a fund do they manage, how much revenue does their company generate, etc.)
• Connectivity (how well-networked are they, and how much mentoring of younger executives/entrepreneurs do they do)
• Thought leadership (speaking, writing, and commenting in the media)

The top ten are followed by five rising stars. When individuals are active on Twitter, I've included their Twitter handles.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Nabeel Hyatt, the entrepreneur whose gaming start-up became the core of Zynga's Cambridge outpost, left the company Monday. Taking over as general manager for Cambridge is Fareed Behmaram-Mosavat, a Pixar Animation veteran who joined Zynga along with Hyatt when Zynga acquired their company, Conduit Labs, in 2010.

The Cambridge office of Zynga launched its first game, "Adventure World," last September, and has grown to about 40 employees. "The office is still strong and growing," Hyatt writes via e-mail, "with a solid success with 'Adventure World' and some other projects underway." (The game became "Indiana Jones Adventure World" a few months after its debut.)

Zynga went public in December (the picture at right is from Hyatt's blog). Hyatt tells me he plans to announce his next move soon.

Conduit was funded by Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks, and Hyatt helped start the weekly OpenCoffee meet-up in Cambridge with Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I don't know about you, but my dental care regimen goes something like this: thirty seconds with the anti-plaque rinse, brushing with my Sonicare electric toothbrush, and flossing.

The founders of a Lexington start-up, PhotOral, suggest adding one more step, in the morning and at night: sixty seconds chomping on a white mouthguard embedded with blue LEDs. The company is out raising $1 million to get the device ready for production, and founders Nikos Soukos and Stamatis Astra (pictured at right) invited me to their offices last week to see their just-finished working prototype.

Soukos, who directs the Applied Photomolecular Research Laboratory at the Forsyth Institute in Cambridge, explained to me that nothing I do in my daily routine deals with the bacteria that live underneath my gums. "There are 800 different bacteria in your dental plaque," Soukos told me. "It's a jungle in there. Some microbes are heavily involved in the development of periodontal disease." Others may cause halitosis.

Luckily, a huge percentage of those bad microbes are sensitive to light at a particular wavelength. And Soukos' lab at the Forsyth Institute — it's a non-profit Cambridge research group exclusively focused on oral health — has been studying the way light affects those microbes for a decade now. "We found that your teeth act like a mirror, delivering the light into the dental pocket," Soukos says, where it can zap those nasty bacteria. Bite down on the PhotOral device, and its blue lights turn on for sixty seconds. It beeps to let you know when the cycle is over.

They're hoping to sell the PhotOral device directly to consumers, and through dentists, for about $60. "One scenario we'd love is that when you finish getting your teeth cleaned, the hygienist would give you one to use for sixty seconds, and explain what it is doing," says Astra, the company's chief executive. A slightly more expensive version of the device might be marketed to maintain your teeth's whiteness after a whitening treatment, he says.

Astra is out in San Francisco this week, talking with investors and investment bankers. He says he hopes to have PhotOral's first product in the market in 12 to 18 months. The first million in funding will help the company conduct clinical trials to show the product is safe and effective at killing bacteria, and also to finalize the product's design. Astra estimates the company may need another $9 million or so to properly launch the device.

A big question, of course, is whether consumers will be willing to add another step to their morning-and-evening oral hygiene routines — and spend $60. Are preventing gum disease and perhaps neutralizing foul breath big enough motivators to help PhotOral take a bite out of the $10 billion oral care market in the U.S.?

(I mentioned the company briefly in this January column about capital efficient start-ups.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

What if you could put on a pair of headphones that would help increase your focus and performance?

And not just by playing Parliament Funkadelic really loud?

A Cambridge start-up called Axio is working on just such a device, leveraging an auditory phenomenon called binaural beats. Essentially, the theory is that playing two tones of different frequencies in each ear can have a beneficial effect on the listener's brainwaves.

Axio founder Arye Barnehama isn't saying too much about the start-up's product. But he says that "focus is a huge problem, for athletes, programmers, students, and business executives. Our goal is to be a consumer health product. We're looking at a couple different form factors, but one is a headset that would integrate with a smart phone and a PC." The headset would include an EEG sensor for monitoring brain activity. And similar to the Zeo sleep monitor, Axio would be able to chart the ups and downs of your concentration level over the course of a day or week on a phone or PC screen.

Barnehama says Axio's headset would work in tandem with "cognitive training feedback software" that would help users "train their brain to maintain that optimized state."

The company has already raised a seed round from local angels, including Bill Warner, and has also won admission into Haxlr8r, a brand-new accelerator program especially for start-ups working on hardware. The program runs for fifteen weeks in Shenzhen, China, where it focuses on designing and testing a prototype, and then wraps up with investor presentations in Silicon Valley. "The idea is that you're close to the manufacturers who are going to make your device," Barnehama says, "and that lets you do faster iterations because you're right there."

Barnehama and co-founder Laura Berman are both students at Pomona College in southern California; they're both studying cognitive science and computer science. Barnehama is originally from western Massachusetts. "I started the company last summer, and for our college winter break, I sort of came home and stayed," he says. Ben Rubin, co-founder and CTO of Zeo, has signed on as an advisor to Axio.

"It's one of those companies that could end up back in Boston after three months in China — or not," Rubin writes in an e-mail. If it boomerangs back to Boston after Haxlr8r, it would be "part of the cluster we are building around consumer health technology," he says. The start-up is currently working out of the Cambridge Co-working Center in Kendall Square. Barnehama and Berman head to China later this month.

"Everyone knows those days when they felt amazing, whether it was on the golf course or in the library studying," Barnehama says. "You don't have them every day. But we believe we can use technology to make that possible."

Who wouldn't love that? I'm eager to try it out...especially since it took me much longer than it should have to write this post.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Facebook is always going to be thought of in Boston as "the other one that got away."

Like Microsoft in the 1970s, Facebook was, in the first decade of the 2000s, gestated on the Harvard campus, and key moments of its early history took place in Harvard Square. Bill Gates and Paul Allen had been inspired by an issue of Popular Electronics they purchased at Out of Town News featuring an early personal computer, and Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin had their first meeting with a venture capitalist at Henrietta's Table.

Both companies, of course, left Massachusetts, creating jobs and enormous wealth in Seattle and Palo Alto, respectively.

As Facebook's long-anticipated IPO approaches, I've been thinking both about the company's Cambridge roots, and also some local people and institutions who will make bags of money from the public offering.

The money first...

A Boston-area VC firm, Greylock Partners, one of the grand-daddies of the venture capital industry, led Facebook's second major round of funding in April 2006. The round gave Facebook $27 million in funding, and valued the company — which at the time had just seven million users — at roughly $500 million. (As of January 2012, the site had about 800 million users.)

"That was a way out-on-a-limb investment — a very controversial deal," one local venture capitalist told me this morning. "There were arguments within Greylock about why it could be a bad investment."

While the Greylock investment in Facebook's 2006 round was led by David Sze, a partner in the firm's Silicon Valley office, another Boston VC told me that Bill Helman, a Greylock partner in Waltham, did some key analysis that showed "that Facebook had a reasonable amount of revenue, and was growing like a weed. His position was, 'I can guarantee you 100 percent that we aren't going to lose money.' Of course, no one would've thought the up-side was going to turn out to be what it was." Greylock's 1.5 percent stake in Facebook could be worth a billion dollars or more after the IPO. (Helman didn't want to comment on his involvement in the Facebook investment.)

Who'll get a share of Greylock's winnings? Harvard's endowment, for one, which has been an investor in Greylock since the firm's founding in 1965. (Ironically, Harvard could've made much more: the university's money managers had been consistent supporters of Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley firm that led Facebook's very first round of venture capital funding in 2005, but decided not to participate in the Accel fund that made the Facebook deal. Accel owns 11 percent of Facebook, compared to Greylock's one percent and change.) Amos Hostetter, the Continental Cablevision founder, is another who'll benefit. Bill Kaiser and Bill Helman, the two investing partners in Greylock's Massachusetts office, will pocket handsome sums, as will Henry McCance, Greylock's chairman emeritus. (Helman sits on the board of the Harvard Management Company, which oversees Harvard's endowment.) In 2009, three years after making the Facebook investment, Greylock moved its headquarters from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, and the firm's center of gravity is most definitely out west now.

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Sharing some audio from the MITX E-Commerce Summit last Friday, at which I had the chance to do an on-stage interview with Newbury Comics CEO and co-founder Mike Dreese. Our focus was how he'd built the company from a single comic book store on Newbury Street into a major New England retailer that sells music, movies, clothing, pop culture totems, and, of course, comic books. Online, Dreese oversees the flagship Newbury Comics web site as well as Punk.com, which focuses on edgy clothing and accessories.

As we chatted before the session, while scarfing down our box lunches, Dreese told me that he'd dropped out of MIT in 1978 to start Newbury Comics with his college roommate. They had just $2000 in start-up capital. Today, the company has about 480 employees, 30 stores, and $75 million in 2011 revenues. About $23 million of that 2011 total was generated online.

Among the topics we covered:

> How Newbury Comics got its start
> The company's late 1990s web strategy, compared to today's
> Mobile price comparison apps
> Why highly-trafficked malls are still important to the company
> The importance of sourcing unique merchandise, and selling it through multiple online channels
> Who should be allowed to speak for a company in social media channels like Facebook
> What Newbury Comics will sell when most movies and music are purchased in digital form
> The coming collapse of brick and mortar stores

Here's the audio. You can click play, or click "mp3" to download the file for later listening.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Cory Bolotsky, a student at Northeastern University, is working on a worthy new project: Startup Summer, which wants to place 100 college students in internships at Boston-area companies this year.

"The student population is by far the most valuable resource we have in Massachusetts, but we really need more good ways to integrate them into the start-up ecosystem," says Bolotsky, who worked briefly for the MassChallenge start-up competition before becoming the first director of Startup Massachusetts in December. (Startup Massachusetts is part of the national Startup America Partnership, which seeks to promote entrepreneurship and is marking its one-year anniversary today.)

Startup Summer will be a major project of Startup Massachusetts, he says. (Bolotsky is overseeing both on a pro bono basis, as his Northeastern co-op project.) One element will be collecting internship opportunities from local companies and then promoting them to students. "We'll do outreach to students and pre-screening of their applications, so we can send only the top of the top to companies," Bolotsky says. "But in addition to the internship matching, we'll also do events and workshops for the students this summer, so they can get to be comfortable in the ecosystem and build relationships."

He's hoping to do a pilot test with 100 internships this summer, and eventually scale up to 500 internships each year. Bolotsky is working right now to try to scare up some state or philanthropic funding for the program, so the interns' stipends would be subsidized. "The ideal would be that we'd have a subsidy that would cover $3600, for instance, and the company would pay $3600 per intern," he says. The program will primarily focus on internships for software developers, designers, and general businesspeople.

Students will be able to send in their internship applications next week, and Startup Summer is looking for more companies to participate in this summer's pilot test.

"The end goal," he says, "is fixing this brain drain problem."

That's a pretty important problem to work on...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

What do you do if you're two recent MIT grads with a killer idea for a new wireless device, and you want to get it into the hands of consumers within a few months? In Boston, venture capitalists and angel investors are notoriously reluctant to invest in hardware. And moreso when it's hardware that will be pitched to consumers.

For John Kestner and David Carr, who'd started a company called Supermechanical together, the answer turned out to be Kickstarter. The crowd-funding site enables anyone from filmmakers to artists to would-be entrepreneurs to raise money from individual supporters. But few have used it as effectively as Kestner and Carr.

They set out to raise about $35,000 so they could produce a few hundred of their Twine devices (pictured at right). Twine was designed to be what Kestner calls "a minimal Twittering object" — essentially, a wireless node that could send information via e-mail, texts, or Tweets about what was going on in its environs. Was there water seeping into a basement, a heating system failure, or a door being opened? Twine would report on it. And the two-inch square device could be programmed over the Web, using a simple, menu-based interface.

As students at the MIT Media Lab, and later as founders of Supermechanical, Kestner and Carr had been thinking about embedding intelligence and communications capability in everyday objects, like wallets and tables. But they realized that one key component needed to be created: "We found we were spending 80 percent of our time implementing the wireless technology that would make all these things work," Kestner says.

They narrowed down the features to the point where they thought they could sell the Twine devices for about $100. Then they created a video (see below) that encapsulated the concept.

They launched their Kickstarter campaign last November, early in the week of Thanksgiving. "We weren't expecting to raise a lot of money," Kestner says. "We just wanted market validation and enough momentum so that once we started making [the devices], we'd be able to sell them." A $99 pledge on Kickstarter promised you a single Twine device — batteries and shipping included — from the first production batch. For $125, you'd get Twine plus an external moisture sensor or magnetic switch. (Twine users can also plug in their own sensors to the device.) They promised delivery in March.

A post on the blog ReadWriteWeb called the project "amazing," and two days later Engadget noted that "Twine connects your whole world to the internet." "The blog coverage gave the project some initial rocket fuel," Kestner says.

Later that week, as Kestner and Carr were preparing their respective Thanksgiving dinners in Somerville and Cambridge, the project had blown past their $35,000 goal: "We were at $100,000, and it was like, 'Oh, boy.' We're ambitious people, but we weren't expecting this."

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

CasePick Systems is a company I've been tracking since I had my first meeting with its founder, John Lert, on a Friday afternoon in the fall of 2007. Lert didn't want me to write about the company at the time, but he showed me some nifty animations of how an army of robots might be able to move merchandise more efficiently around warehouses.

I've written about the company throughout the years, like when it was acquired by C&S Wholesale Grocers, a privately-held New Hampshire company, and when it named Jim Baum, formerly chief executive of the data warehousing firm Netezza, as its new leader. (Lert, the founder, moved on last year.)

But I didn't get a chance to see the bots in action until last Friday afternoon, when Baum (pictured at right) invited me over to the company's Wilmington headquarters to see a demo. He wanted to talk about the company's new name — it'll be known starting today as Symbotic — and also the hiring spree its on. (Baum mentioned they're about to outgrow the Wilmington facility, and are hunting for new space.)

Baum had just returned from a company event in Newburgh, New York, where Symbotic's first production system is deployed at a massive grocery warehouse owned by C&S. The warehouse assembles cases of merchandise onto wooden pallets, which are then trucked to Stop & Shop stores around New York. The Symbotic system only operates a portion of that warehouse, but it consists of 168 bots that move boxes at up to 25 miles per hour.

Symbotic's proposition is that bots are not only more efficient at moving product onto and off of warehouse shelves as needed, but that companies that purchase its technology can store more product in less warehouse space.

Baum didn't want me shooting any video of the bots in action — "we're still slightly paranoid," he said — but I did get to see them moving merch around a test track. (See the image below.) The bots followed white tape on the floor, and used finger-like metal rods that extended horizontally to pull boxes off of a shelf. They communicated wirelessly with a central computer that told them where to pick up and drop off the items, and also ensured that they'd avoid collisions which each other. They can also ride elevators to get from one level of a warehouse to another.

While C&S remains the majority owner of Symbotic, Baum says that he hopes the company will do its first non-C&S deployment sometime in 2012. "One reason we haven't had to talk much about what we're doing is we have an amazing pipeline of business," he says. "The connection to C&S has give us an opportunity to talk to very big, very risk-averse buyers."

How is Symbotic different from Kiva Systems, the better-known warehouse robotics company located just a few miles away in North Reading? Kiva's short, squat bots typically move big racks of open boxes to an order-picker who removes individual items and then packs them into a box that'll be sent to a customer. One example would be filling a box with three different pairs of shoes for a Zappos.com order. Symbotic, on the other hand, builds short, squat bots that grab closed boxes of merchandise and bring them to another robot (made by a third-party vendor) that puts them onto wooden pallets, at which point they're loaded onto a truck and sent to a retail store. Kiva's bots help to fill boxes full of items, and Symbotics' bots build pallets stacked with boxes.

Baum says the company will probably double in size this year, to 200 employees. As he has been setting up Symbotic as an independent company, he has also created a board of directors that includes Tony Affuso, chairman of Siemens PLM Software, and Jit Saxena, the founder of Netezza.

One last note: Baum tells me the robots are built primarily from locally-sourced components, and assembled in Wilmington.

Photo: Two Symbotic robots move boxes around a simulated warehouse; they navigate by following the white tape on the ground.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

It isn't often that a seven-person company gets drafted to help with a Super Bowl advertising campaign. But the opportunity presented itself to Boston-based Promoboxx last fall.

Promoboxx founder Ben Carcio tells me that it was one of those phone calls he wasn't sure would be worth making. "Whenever you talk with mentors and investors, they're always trying to introduce you to other people in their networks, and you always wonder if the call will be worth the time," Carcio says. Dave Balter, founder of BzzAgent, suggested that Carcio get in touch with a media analyst and occasional investor in New York named Richard Greenfield, who in turn introduced Carcio to Avi Savar, a founder of the social media agency Big Fuel. The agency was working with Chevrolet on its Super Bowl XLVI campaign, and "they'd always tried to have a program that would better involve Chevrolet's dealers, but they could never execute it right," Carcio says. During their first meeting, Savar "was finishing my sentences."

So Big Fuel signed up Promoboxx to create co-branded pages for 3,000 Chevy dealers, who in turn help share the Super Bowl-related content (like the TV ad below) to their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels. Carcio adds, "We also created a dealer scorecard, so each dealership can see how they rank among other dealers" in terms of generating Bowl-related buzz for Chevy.

Carcio says that the Big Fuel collaboration turned into the start-up's biggest project thus far; Promoboxx was founded in 2010, and participated in the TechStars Boston program last year. The company raised $565,000 in funding last month. Promoboxx's primary focus is helping brands customize promotional campaigns with their retailers or distributors.

"What I learned," Carcio says, "is that you've got to make every phone call, because you can never be sure what could happen."

Here's what the Promoboxx-created Facebook page looks like for one local Chevy dealer, Herb Chambers Chevrolet of Danvers:

And here's the ad Chevy will be running during next Sunday's Super Bowl. It's pretty funny:

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Scott Savitz and Emily Nagle Green are out to take your child's lunch money.

Their Charlestown-based start-up, Smart Lunches, is already delivering lunches at about $4 or $5 a pop to eleven Boston-area schools and daycare centers, and Green talks about building Smart Lunches into a nationally-known brand: "There's a national market available here, and you can't think of a brand that has national awareness around providing nutritious food to kids when they're away from home." The target market, as she sees it, is about 30 million kids between the ages of two and eighteen who don't participate in school lunch programs.

Savitz left Shoebuy.com, the online footwear retailer owned by InterActive Corp., last summer. He was introduced to the two founders of Smart Lunches, Cathy Goldman and Susan Frigoletto, as a prospective advisor. (Savitz's wife had served on the board of the Charlestown Mothers Association with Frigoletto.) Though the pair had only begun delivering lunch to schools in the Boston area last September, Savitz decided to make an offer to acquire the company just before the end of 2011. He knew Green (pictured at right) from serving alongside her on the MITX board; she had vacated the CEO's office at Yankee Group, a Boston tech research firm, at the end of 2010, and was thinking about next steps. She signed on to run the business around the same time that Savitz was wrapping up the acquisition.

Green says, "I was really captivated, partly because it's so different" -- she'd earlier run Cambridge Energy Research Associates and been a top executive at Forrester Research -- "and partly because the mission is so compelling. The company is doing something worthwhile, and there is a huge scale opportunity."

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By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The launch party doesn't take place until early February, but the Russian Venture Company has had an office open in Boston for several months. And beyond just strengthening ties between the start-up and venture capital communities in the U.S. and Russia, the Back Bay outpost of the Russian government's investing arm could soon start putting money into Boston-area companies.

The three-person office is headed by Axel Tillmann, who'll also oversee a new Silicon Valley office of the Russian Venture Company. Here's what Tillmann said when I asked him via e-mail about his goals for RVC's first year in Boston:

RVC-USA plans to establish the necessary contacts in the U.S. business, academic, and political community to strengthen the economic relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Moving forward, RVC-USA aims to become a primary resource for U.S. companies that are interested in exploring opportunities in Russia. Our goal is two-fold. We?re trying to help U.S. start-ups and venture capital firms enter the Russian market, and at the same time showcase the value that Russian engineers can deliver to U.S. entrepreneurs.

RVC hasn't yet made any investments in local companies, but Rusnano, a nanotechnology-focused investment fund created by the Russian government, has. Last October, Rusnano put $50 million into two Massachusetts biotech companies, BIND and Selecta BioSciences. RVC, however, has been a sponsor of the MassChallenge start-up competition.

Tillmann says that RVC "fully intends to" make investments in Boston companies that will do business or establish a presence in Russia. RVC "was established in late 2011 and intends to start making direct investments later this year when our own fund is established," he says.

The official launch party for the Boston office happens next month at the Four Seasons.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

After more than a decade of existence and just over $10 million in funding, Ambient Devices is still one of those companies that has generated more media buzz than jobs or revenues. The consumer electronics company built umbrellas with handles that glowed blue when it was going to rain, frosted glass orbs that changed color in tandem with major stock market moves, and desktop sports scoreboards. Ambient pioneered the idea that all kinds of devices — not just laptops and phones — would communicate with wireless networks to bring you information.

Two of Ambient's three founders have gone on to other ventures — David Rose now runs Vitality, which makes intelligent prescription pill bottles, and Ben Resner was developing a new kind of information display for cars when I caught up with him last January. Former Ambient product development chief Nabeel Hyatt runs the Harvard Square office of Zynga, the social gaming company that went public last year. Carl Yankowski, the former Palm and Reebok CEO brought in in 2007 to lead the company, only stuck around for two years.

But the third founder, Pritesh Gandhi, is still there, running a slimmed-down Ambient that he says turned profitable last year. (The company has eight employees.) And this week, he's heading to San Antonio to announce a new focus for the company: digital displays for homes and businesses that will show how much energy they're using, and ideally encourage them to conserve. He'll be showing off new Ambient prototypes as part of the Distributech conference and tradeshow, which brings together utilities and vendors working on "smart grid" technology.

Here's how the new devices work: some utilities now charge consumers more at moments of peak energy demand — like a hot day in August — than days when there's less demand. It's called "time-of-use billing." Gandhi says that no major Massachusetts utilities have started doing it, but "utilities in states like California have realized that the most effective way to alleviate some of the stress on the grid and educate their customers about energy consumption is with variable pricing." When consumers have a display (see below) that shows them how much energy they're using and how much it costs, Gandhi says it can reduce their energy consumption by about 25 percent. And like previous Ambient products, the Energy Joule changes colors to get your attention. When prices are average, it's green. When they're above average, it's yellow. And when prices are at their highest, it's red.

"We think utilities would buy the devices and give them out to their users, or they'd be available at retail locations with a subsidy, not unlike what you see with compact flourescent bulbs today," Gandhi says.

The company has been working for about four years to deploy devices with Pacific Gas & Electric's business customers, Gandhi says, but the new push is about getting the devices into homes. The company has done some pilot consumer testing with Baltimore Gas & Electric, but is hoping to land a large-scale commitment this year.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Does the number of text messages you send, or the time of day you make your first phone call, say something important about how credit-worthy you are?

Cignifi, a small Cambridge start-up with roots in the UK, believes it does. The company is out raising $2 million in funding to commercialize its technology this year, after a pilot test in Brazil in 2011.

"There's a vast market of consumers in countries like Brazil, China, India, and the Phillipines who want access to financial services like credit cards, loans, or insurance," says Jonathan Hakim, Cignifi's chief executive. "But while they may have jobs, and some have bank accounts, there really is no credit history for them." One thing they do have? Mobile phones.

Cignifi has developed sophisticated modeling software that can look at usage data from consumers' mobile phones and make predictions about who that person is and how they live. There's no single data point — like making lots of short calls between 2 and 5 a.m. every morning — that suggests that someone is a bad credit risk. But Hakim says, "The way you use your phone is a proxy for your lifestyle. It's not random. So we're looking at things like the length of calls, the time of day, and the location you make them from. Also things like whether you top up [a pre-paid SIM card] regularly. We want to see how stable the patterns are. When you look at that, you can create these behavioral clusters that give you information about users' appetite for new [financial] products, and their ability to repay a debt."

Cignifi plans to pitch the technology to financial services firms in Brazil first, and perhaps Mexico next. (The firms would obviously need to hash out a partnership with mobile operators to get access to usage data.) Last year's test in Brazil ran data for three million cell phone users through Cignifi's software, and produced a behavior-based score that resembles the FICO credit score many U.S. consumers are familiar with, which runs from 300 to 850 points. Then, the company compared its predictions about their credit-worthiness against actual credit card debt information for that same group.

"After that big lab experiment in Brazil, the next phase is to go and commercialize it," Hakim says. He describes the start-up as an "arms merchant," providing software that enables financial services companies to sell products profitably to consumers they couldn't previously reach.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The acquisition talks between Constant Contact chief executive Gail Goodman and Andy Miller, founder of the mobile app start-up CardStar, began to get serious last summer.

First, Goodman had a drink with Miller at the MITX Innovation Awards last June. (She was there to pick up an "Innovation Hall of Fame" award for building the Waltham company into a major force in digital marketing for small businesses, with 900 employees; CardStar took home two awards, too.) Then, she was on a panel with Miller as part of FutureM week in September. What started out as vague discussions about how Constant Contact might partner with CardStar,  which makes an app that lets consumers store their frequent-shopper card info on mobile phones, turned into conversations about how Constant Contact might acquire the small Boston start-up.

"The two teams started to get really excited about the potential as the weather got colder," says Goodman. By early December, they'd agreed on the terms — which aren't being disclosed. The purchase is being announced this morning. It is Constant Contact's third acquisition since 2010, as the company seeks to diversify beyond its core business of helping its customers conduct e-mail marketing campaigns.

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I moderated a panel of venture capitalists last night at the historic Vilna Shul on Beacon Hill, talking about what mattered most in tech and VC last year, and what they expect to see in 2012.

I'm posting the audio below; it runs for about an hour. The quality is good, though audience questions are tough to hear. The speakers started off in this order: Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, Jonathan Seelig from GlobeSpan Capital Partners, Rob Go from NextView, and Jo Tango from Kepha Partners.

Among the questions I asked:

• What was your most successful investment, and what was a deal you didn't do and lived to regret? (Among the companies they passed on: Groupon, lululemon athletica, and HubSpot.)
• What was the most important thing that happened in 2011, in the world of tech and venture capital?
• How would you assess the health of the Boston VC scene?
• How can Boston produce more individual angel investors, and be less reliant on venture capital firms?
• What themes or sectors are you interested in right now?
• What happens to all the start-ups that have done $1 million seed rounds over the last two or three years?

The audience asked about the way the structure of VC firms might change... the attitude toward investing in consumer Internet companies in Boston... whether angel groups are passé...and the Stop Online Privacy Act.

Here is a slide show of the photos that Dan Bricklin shot at the event:

Kyle Alspach of the Boston Business Journal wrote two pieces about the event: on Destin's comments about angel groups and the deals the VCs passed on.

And here's the audio. You can click play, or click "mp3" to download the file for later listening.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The business of selling home heating oil is not exactly full of marketing geniuses. When you buy a new house or condo that has oil heat (as opposed to, say, natural gas or electric), they send you a single piece of direct mail to persuade you to become a customer. And once you pick a provider, they assume you will be with them as long as you own the home. The relationship is simple: they send a truck to deliver oil every few weeks, and you pay the bills.

An Andover-based start-up, NeighborOil, wants to inject some modern marketing techniques into that relationship. Namely, they want you to be able to shop around online for the best price per gallon of oil — the same way you can when you fill up your car — and they want to reward you with discounts if you refer friends to the service, or do some of your online shopping with any of NeighborOil's 4000 retail partners.

"There are about nine million homes in the U.S. that use oil to heat their home or to heat hot water," says founder Paul Harkins. "And about six million of those homes buy oil on an as-needed basis, as opposed to being on a long-term contract. But most people don't know that they can shop around to find the best value."

When you create an account on the NeighborOil site, it asks for your ZIP code; the service currently covers more than 80 percent of the parts of the U.S. that use oil, Harkins says. (Not Arizona or Hawaii, for instance.) You can accumulate points by inviting friends and neighbors to use the service; by allowing NeighborOil to post a marketing message on your Facebook wall; or by shopping at sites like Home Depot, Sears.com, or Barnes & Noble. (The site offers a toolbar that integrates into Firefox and Internet Explorer to make that last task easier.) You also earn points when you buy oil through NeighborOil. Each point can be converted into a dollar off when you purchase oil.

The big behavioral shift that NeighborOil asks consumers to make is to start monitoring the level of oil in their tank, so that they can order a refill well before they run out. (I use oil at my house, and it's kind of nice to let the oil company worry about that — especially if you travel a lot.) But the upside is that you can save a Boston-area customer about 30 cents a gallon, according to the site. (Looking at my most recent oil bill, using NeighborOil would have saved me about 10 cents a gallon, or $14.50. But I'm still benefitting from a "new customer" discount that reduces the price I pay per gallon with my current provider, and the NeighborOil price I'm comparing it to is also before any additional discounts I could have earned through doing online shopping or pitching all my friends on the service.)

Harkins says the site, which launched last summer, is adding about 30 homes a day. "The main acquisition strategy is members inviting other members," he says, "but we're also doing some search engine advertising."

For many oil dealers, Harkins says, "marketing is really a secondary consideration. We help them with that, and it's guaranteed payment. They don't need to invoice the customer and worry about that percentage that don't pay, or pay late."

Eventually, Harkins says the company hopes to help consumers upgrade older, less efficient boilers and furnaces: "Our thinking is that you'd take a picture, and we'd look at it and be able to tell you that it's a 1985 unit, running at 45 percent efficiency, and that you'd use half as much oil with a newer unit." He says the company plans to start testing a new financing offering within the next month or two that would help consumers purchase more efficient equipment — and they'd be able to apply their points to that, too.

Among the start-up's advisors are David Baum, managing director of Stage1 Ventures; Julie Roehm, SVP of marketing at SAP; and Ian Bowles, a former secretary of energy and environmental affairs in Massachusetts.

Harkins says the company has been self-funded so far, but has lately been in conversations with several venture capital firms. No doubt January is a better time of year than July to be pitching this business to investors...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

A decade ago, entrepreneur Geoff Palmer and Ken Kimmel, then the chief marketing officer at Dunkin' Donuts, were brainstorming about the potential of the early cameraphones that were just starting to reach the market.

"Suddenly you had phones with cameras built in, and we started talking about taking pictures of the donut cases in our stores," Kimmel recalls. "You can tell a lot about how well-run the restaurant is if the donut case is well-stocked and beautiful."

The spit-balling didn't go anywhere... until 2009, when Palmer and Kimmel decided to start Survey On The Spot, a business that would use mobile phones as data collection devices. Their premise was that if businesses asked customers to use their own phones to fill out a survey, the feedback would be fresher, and the response rate higher than with traditional paper-based survey forms. The company, based in Newton, recently raised its first outside funding: $750,000 from Kepha Partners, a Waltham venture capital firm, Angel Street Capital in Providence, and Mike Sheehan, CEO of the Boston ad agency Hill Holliday.

Survey On The Spot offers a Web site for creating surveys, and both an iPhone app and mobile-friendly HTML5 Web site for collecting information from users. Subscription fees for using the service start a $40-per-month for each location a business operates. The company's customer list already includes chains like 7-11, The 99 Restaurants, Not Your Average Joe's, and Carrabba's Italian Grill. Most use it to gather information from customers, but some use the surveys as part of store inspections, or in the case of The 99, for gathering employee feedback on new menu items being developed internally. And not all businesses expect their customers to use their own mobile phone to fill out the survey: at Not Your Average Joe's, servers hand diners an iPod Touch with the survey on it, which can be filled out as the diner's credit card is being processed. (The Joe's set-up is pictured in the photo at right.)

"When you're collecting data quickly, as opposed to the next day or two days later, you have the ability to fix problems before they affect more customers," says Kimmel. "Certain kinds of complaints" — those related to under-cooked food, for instance — "can automatically go to the manager of the restaurant, and they can deal with that right away."

While the company's first customer was Finale Desserterie & Bakery, Survey On The Spot's technology has more recently been adopted by veterinary clinics, tire stores, hospitals, and even a Whole Foods Market in Scotland, Palmer says. The partners had self-funded the business until late December, when the seed investment round took place.

The new funding "gives us an opportunity to build a team," says Palmer, who was a co-founder of uLocate, a start-up that became Where Inc. and was acquired by PayPal last year. "Up to this point, it has been just the two of us, working with outside contractors." (That list includes Raizlabs of Brookline and OneStopTechnology of Holyoke.) He says Survey is now hiring in engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Governor Deval Patrick and Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray were entertaining a visitor from Silicon Valley last November: Scott Thompson, a Raynham native and Stonehill College alumnus who was hired last week as Yahoo's new chief executive.

But last year, Thompson (pictured at right) was still the president of PayPal, the electronic payments division of eBay, and he was at the State House to talk with the state's top two officials about expanding PayPal's presence in Boston. Accompanying Thompson were two Boston-based executives — Walt Doyle and David Chang — who had joined PayPal after their company, Where Inc., was acquired last spring. The company currently employs just over 100 people at its office in the North End, which is evolving into a "center of excellence for mobile development and ad technology," in Doyle's words.

Doyle told me earlier this week that PayPal could be adding "several hundred people" in Boston over the coming years. (There are currently only three open jobs in Boston that I could find.) While Thompson has since moved on from PayPal, eBay's government relations staffers plan to pay another visit to Beacon Hill next week to continue the discussions.

In November, the governor and lieutenant governor "made the case for Massachusetts: the strong and growing industry cluster, the talent pool, etc.," explains Greg Bialecki, the state's secretary for housing and economic development, via e-mail. With companies headquartered elsewhere, he says that "we invite them to ask Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Novartis, Sanofi, etc. about how their decisions to take a major position here have been very good for them."

But in the November meeting, "there was not a discussion of financial incentives" to encourage eBay to grow its PayPal presence here, Bialecki says. While the topic of a tax break for adding jobs in the state could be discussed at future meetings, he says, "incentives often aren’t the primary issue for companies like this." (Presumably, being able to hire talented software developers is.) But last December, the state did OK a $3.4 million tax credit for open source software company Red Hat, which plans to add 181 jobs at its Westford engineering headquarters. (Red Hat also got almost a million dollar break on its property taxes from the town.)

Before its acquisition by eBay, Where had built the largest location-based advertising network, Doyle says, which enabled it to display ads as you used apps on your mobile phone that were relevant to where you were standing. Now, as PayPal seeks to be a payment system that consumers can use for bricks-and-mortar purchases, not just online ones, the Where group will be responsible for "demand generation," Doyle says. That means delivering ads and special offers to your mobile phone that might encourage you to buy some fresh flowers or try a new restaurant for lunch. (And eventually, pay using the PayPal "mobile wallet" app on your phone.)

"You might be listening to music on your Pandora app," Doyle says, "and you see an ad for a Dyson vacuum cleaner or a Sony Blu-ray player. Because of the information we have from eBay, we might know that you've been searching for those items, or maybe you lost an auction for something similar. We'll be able to show you those products available locally, and possibly deliver discounts that will get you to utilize your mobile wallet in a store."

Doyle says that while other mobile advertising start-ups, like Quattro Wireless and M-Qube, saw their Boston offices disintegrate following acquisitions, his goal is to keep the Boston office growing within PayPal. (A few weeks before PayPal acquired Where, it purchased a much smaller Boston company focused on mobile payment technology, Fig Card.)

Already, Doyle says he is in the market for expanded office space. He says the group will most likely stay in Boston, as opposed to moving to Cambridge or the suburbs.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Conventional wisdom says that investors are fleeing biotech and cleantech. So it's surprising to hear that Cambridge-based Flagship Ventures has raised its biggest fund so far — $270 million — explicitly to invest in those two sectors, where companies can require large amounts of capital and long gestation periods.

Flagship managing partner Noubar Afeyan told me last night, "I think the remaining limited partners who want to be in venture capital" — the pension funds, wealthy individuals, and university endowments that give VCs money to manage — "are looking for differentiated strategies, and they're looking for track records."

Two Flagship-backed companies went public in 2010 and 2011: AVEO Pharmaceuticals and BG Medicine. Big acquisitions from past Flagship funds included Accuri Cytometers (acquired by Bechton Dickinson for north of $200 million last year) and Adnexus Therapeutics (acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb for $430 million back in 2007.)

"For 11 years, we've operated as though it's a tough capital environment," Afeyan says. "Fortunately or unfortunately, we've been more right than wrong. We haven't adjusted our model of de-risking things before we pour a lot of money in. It's just a discipline that serves early-stage ideas well."

In addition to the typical early-stage investing that Flagship has done in the past, a portion of this new fund will be dedicated to later-stage investments. "In some cases, it can take longer for a company to get the product ready, or the investment syndicate may not be willing to continue, and there's a moment in time to join in where the value proposition for investors can be much higher," Afeyan says. "We see an opportunity to get in, it has been de-risked, and we're not paying a premium to get in. We're not talking about restarts and recapitalizations. We're talking about where there's an opportunity to capture value over a shorter period of time. Those are the investments that allow a fund to return value earlier in the life of the fund. The reasonable complaint that limited partners have had in the early-stage VC world has been, 'I'm getting nothing for four or five years.' They may not need huge returns, but they'd like something. You're trying to create a balance in terms of timing."

Flagship has six investors on staff that focus on finding worthy investments, and eight people focused on internal company-creation projects as part of Flagship VentureLabs, which has cultivated start-ups like Seventh Sense Biosystems.

As for venture capitalists fleeing from the energy industry, Afeyan says, "I don't think the level of activity has gone down. I think that the level of noise has gone down. There was a time in cleantech when people were just spraying money around indiscriminately. What we've seen is that cleantech has turned out to be more like biotech. You need patient, flexible execution to generate reasonable companies."

Flagship had raised its prior fund in 2007; that one totaled $235 million, and was invested in 24 companies including Joule Unlimited, Agios, and Selecta Biosciences, a start-up developing an anti-smoking vaccine that I covered last year in my Globe column.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Joi Ito started last fall as the new director of the MIT Media Lab, the famed research group that explores how technology is changing communication and culture, often by building dazzling hardware and software prototypes. Among the lab's best-known spin-offs: early Internet personalization start-up Firefly Networks, e-book display maker E Ink, and Cambridge game developer Harmonix Music Systems.

This morning, Ito gave one of his first talks to the Boston tech community at the British Consulate in Kendall Square. (Ito is at left in the picture, with interviewer Larry Weber of Digital Influence Group.) Ito mentioned that he maintains three residences, in Dubai, Tokyo, and Boston, and travels around the world about twice a month. Only occasionally, he quipped, does he feel properly adjusted to the time zone he's in.

Video of the talk is below.

Some highlights (these are rough notes on Ito's comments, and not a complete transcript of the talk):

- On Silicon Valley's weaknesses

Silicon Valley is so good at what it does. But certain categories of venture don't get a lot of attention in Silicon Valley. It doesn't make sense for Reid Hoffman [founder of LinkedIn and an investor at Greylock Partners] to start spending time with hardware start-ups. Silicon Valley tends to hunt in packs. So there are big blind spots, areas that they're not interested in. Reid has these basic golden rules: don't work with start-ups that have to deal with big companies, or start-ups that work in heavily-regulated areas. The flip side of that is, those aren't the kind of companies that get funded there.

[On the east coast,] we're closer to regulators and big companies. With things like big data, you need to talk to government, work with big telcos, and understand privacy. The west coast guys don't care about policy, and they don't want to talk to Washington, D.C.

Hardware is another area [of opportunity.]

Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley may be international, but they're not good at thinking globally. Silicon Valley has no culture. Have you ever tried to get food in Palo Alto? I don't think Silicon Valley spends a lot of energy on art, culture, and the humanities. When you're building 3Com and [data] switches, all you need is people who sit and focus on bits. But as we get to the World-Wide Web and think about how does social media impact politics, how does it affect fashion, how do we bring museums online — that is much more New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C. There are hopefully some regional advantages.

- On the future of the Media Lab

We may be selling ourselves too cheap. For $200,000, the price of hiring one engineer, you get access to 350 crazy ideas that may completely change your company, and access to all the intellectual property we generate. For the price of one person, you get a super-advanced research group.

I'm trying to change the Media Lab to be much more of a platform. Membership should be about companies working together, an ecosystem. When the Media Lab started, you had products like the Sony Walkman — a single product from a single company. The iPhone is an ecosystem. Ten companies will create the ecosystem. Can we convene the meetings, nurture a platform, and get those companies to hang out with each other. Not just a hub-and-spoke model where people come to the Media Lab with their clipboards and then bring ideas back to their companies.

I want it to be that we only bring companies in that contribute knowledge and wisdom and ideas and interesting things. I don't want to use the word "club," but it will be somewhat exclusive. You won't just get in because you have money. I want it to be a team of people.

[Ito told me afterward that the way he can have the biggest near-term impact on the lab's research focus is by bringing in new faculty. He mentioned that there's currently a search going on to fill two tenure-track faculty positions. When I asked about research gaps at the lab that he'd like to fill, the first two things Ito mentioned were "games and government," followed by "food."

- Advice for college students after graduation

I would spend time in Brazil, Russia, China, and India, and if you have an inclination, the Middle East. I would spend a year or two roaming around.

- On international expansion

Many companies end up doing international later. But in a lot of these really big markets, you can't go late. We don't have eBay in Japan because they were late.

- Quick thoughts on some of tech's big names

Apple: One of the few remaining companies surviving as a closed ecosystem.

Amazon: One of the few companies doing what they originally set out to do.

HP: I'm not sure, but lots of smart people.

LinkedIn: Interesting monopoly, with one of the few ethical people I know [executive chairman Reid Hoffman] in control.

Twitter: Tons of potential, but interested where it's going.

Oracle: Do people still use Oracle?

Stanford: We need to learn a lot from Stanford.

MIT: Tons of potential. Needs a kick in the butt.

(Photo above courtesy of MITX director Debi Kleiman.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Here's my list of big events happening in Boston this year. Some are home-grown, and others are major national conventions — like the annual conclaves of the biotech and cable TV industries — that are coming to town.

If I've missed an event you consider unmissable, feel free to post a comment.

- January 27: MITX's E-Commerce Summit

Boston's e-commerce community must finally be hitting an inflection point, since it now has its own one-day gathering. Agenda features speakers from Staples, Wayfair, Gemvara, and Shoebuy.com.

- February 18: Venture Capital & Private Equity Conference at Harvard Business School

What better spot than Mitt Romney's alma mater to chew over the latest trends in the VC and PE industries?

- February 21: Ruby Riot

Just a big party, aimed at making new connections between entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, and techies.

- February 22-24: Offshore Wind Power USA

Regulators and developers get together at the Hynes to talk about the wind turbines they're trying to plant in the ocean floor.

- March 2-3: MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

Economists, team owners, managers, journos, and agents — plus the Godfather of analytics, Bill James — get together to talk about the role data plays in sports.

- April 6-8: Penny Arcade East / PAX East

Gamers (and game makers) from up and down the east coast converge on Boston for panels, demos, and concerts.

- May 3: TechStars Boston Demo Day

A new crop of 13 start-ups present their business ideas to investors and the media; there's also usually a section of seats for "community members," as well as an after-party open to all.

- May 21-23: The Cable Show

The cable television industry tries to figure out its place in a multi-screen, on-demand world. Last year's event attracted more than 12,000 attendees.

- June 3-8: Display Week 2012

The Society for Information Display brings more than 6,000 people to town for some show-and-tell about those things we spend all day staring at: digital displays.

- June 18-21: BIO International Convention

Biotech and pharma executives fill the Boston Convention Center to talk about products in development, hunt for financing, and hope to find distribution partners.

- June 26-29: Red Hat Summit and JBoss World

If open source, middleware, and virtualization get your blood pumping, you'll want to cancel your summer vacation plans and get to the Back Bay this week.

- June 22: TEDxBoston

A cavalcade of short talks by big thinkers trying to change the world, in science, technology, the arts, and the public realm.

- August 13-16: eTail East

Internet retailers talk about how they're using search engine optimization, mobile commerce, and flash sales to sell us more stuff.

- October 24-25: Inbound Marketing Summit

Conference focuses on acquiring and keeping customers using social media.

- October 24: IDEAS Boston

UMass Boston again hosts a day of presentations by provocative personalities, ranging from chefs to surgeons to museum curators.

- October (Dates TBA): Future M Week

A week of events and parties, focusing on what's new and what's next in the field of marketing.

- October (Dates TBA): BREW Boston

Several weeks of panels, workshops, and parties for Boston entrepreneurs.

- October (Dates TBA): Emtech at MIT

Annual conference on emerging technologies, organized by MIT's Technology Review magazine.

- November 16: Mass TLC's Innovation Unconference

The biggest tech gathering of the year, where the agenda is created by the participants on the morning of the event. Also features one-on-one advice sessions for entrepreneurs.

- November (Date TBA): Eighth Conference on Clean Energy

A two-day event that features panels on funding dynamics, start-up pitches, and discussions of new technologies.

(Note: I've left off several events that I'm involved with organizing, like the Nantucket Conference and Convergence Forum, since obviously I'm biased.)