The Friday5 is a list of five things worth knowing about, each with a Boston connection.

In honor of Black Friday, today it's sites and services geared to finding great buys online.

Want to add to the list? Post a comment...

You may be spending today preparing for Thanksgiving dinner, or a gift-buying foray shortly afterward.

But if you have a high-schooler in the house, the preparation they're thinking about is for two important standardized tests looming in December: the SAT (December 5th) and the ACT (December 12th.)

Socrato, a North Andover-based start-up, hopes to build a business upon students' (and parents') desire to do well on those tests. "With students putting all this effort into preparing for the test, we want to help personalize their learning plan in a very efficient way," says founder and CEO Raju Gupta. Students practice taking the test, and then they or their tutors or teachers can get personalized advice from Socrato geared to boosting their scores. Socrato already offers analysis for the SAT and MCAS tests, as well as the U.S. Citizenship test; the ACT should be online soon, and Socrato eventually plans to expand into exams for securities brokers, realtors, firefighters, and other professions.

Individuals can use a basic version of Socrato for free; the company earns money by selling its analysis tool to schools and tutoring centers. Pricing for that starts at $10 per student assessment, and decreases with volume.

Gupta says the start-up has just four employees, and outsources most of its software development to firms in India and China. Socrato raised some angel funding in 2008.

Here's an earlier Globe piece on Socrato, and a TechCrunch profile.

Also worth mentioning in the local test-prep space is Stoneham-based Studypoint, founded ten years ago to help connect students with tutors.

I moderated a panel last week at the Association for Corporate Growth fall conference, an agglomeration of dealmakers. Speakers included Picis CEO Todd Cozzens, Athenahealth CFO Carl Byers, Terry Hyman of Flexpoint Ford, and Peter van der Goes Jr. of Goldman Sachs.

We talked about how federal stimulus will affect healthcare IT companies; opportunities in the space; some of the challenges of deploying electronic health records (EHRs); and the M&A and IPO dynamics of the sector.

The complete panel, with questions, is about an hour long. The MP3 version is here, or just click play below.

I wanted to write a column about the rivalry between Care.com and Sittercity, two Web sites with Boston connections that aim to be to home-based care services what Match.com has been to dating, or Monster.com has been to jobs. All I knew was that Sittercity at one point had spoken with Matrix Partners, the Waltham venture capital firm that eventually funded Care.com. Care.com founder Sheila Marcelo had been an entrepreneur-in-residence at Matrix.

I thought this was mainly going to be a column about how the two sites are competing with one another to win the hearts of moms and dads looking for high-quality childcare.

Until, talking to Marcelo last Monday, she brought up out of the blue the discussion on TheFunded.com, in which several anonymous posters allege that Marcelo met with them while at Matrix, got an in-depth look at their businesses, chose not to invest, and then went off and started Care. Marcelo posts a lengthy rebuttal under her own name.

It seems like this 2006 dust-up, for whatever reason, is still very much on her mind. I wanted to write about it this week without using a single anonymous source, and using the story (told from three founders' points of view) to illustrate the sometimes knotty relationship between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and the entrepreneurs-in-residence who sometimes hang out at VC firms, drawing a salary, while working on their next idea or helping the firm find worthy start-ups to look at.

While most entrepreneurs know that good VCs look at a lot of the companies in a given sector before deciding where to put their money, I think there's less clarity around the role of the entrepreneur-in-residence: Are they an investor? Are they helping with due diligence? Are they about to launch something of their own? Are they incubating it right now, in the VC firm's offices?

Here's some of the e-mail correspondence behind the story, along with traffic data comparing Care.com, Sittercity, and Sitters.com (a Virginia based start-up that also spoke with Marcelo and Matrix about a deal.)

I think there's a new trend surfacing in Boston: the Open Office Hours movement.

The idea is that you create a time slot in your busy schedule when anyone can come meet with you and get some free face time (and perhaps some good advice.) Basically, there are no strings attached -- it's just a chance to get a slice of your attention somewhere other than a cocktail party or conference hallway. You might do it in your office, or at a cafe or other public place. You might ask people to sign up in advance, or just show up. Open Office Hours get announced via blogs and Twitter.

Venture capitalist Chip Hazard of Flybridge is holding Open Office Hours on December 9th (advance sign-up required). Rob Go of Spark Capital held them earlier this month in Kendall Square. Dogpatch Labs, a start-up workspace operated by Polaris Venture Partners in East Cambridge, has a combination open house/office hours every Thursday afternoon. Pennsylvania-based First Round Capital held office hours last summer at Toscanini's in Central Square.

I'm going to do office hours this coming Tuesday, November 24th, from 9-10:30 at Cosi in Kendall Square. It's a chance to tell me about what you're up to... new sectors or clusters you see emerging... trends worth covering... or things I should absolutely not write about anymore. (VC real estate moves, anyone?)

Here's how it'll work: 9 to 9:30 AM will be open to anyone -- just show up. From 9:30 to 10:30 AM, I'll have six 10-minute slots. Just e-mail me using the form at right (or by clicking my name in that right-hand column, under "About the Blogger") if you'd like to sign up for a slot, and let me know if you have a time preference or a range of times that work best for you in that 9:30 to 10:30 AM hour. I'll let you know here when all the sign-up slots are gone. Update: All the sign-up slots are gone, but feel free to come by in the 9 to 9:30 time slot for a chat.

And one more thing....I'd like to encourage entrepreneurs, investors, execs, and people running important non-profit initiatives related to the innovation economy to show up. Especially good is if you're planning to launch a new venture soon. My only request: no PR people. (I love you, but we already see each other enough.)

My hope is that other folks much more important than I will decide that doing Open Office Hours once a quarter is a great idea -- something that will make our region's innovation economy feel much more supportive of people just starting out, and trying to get momentum for a new idea.

Who ought to give it a try? People with expertise in PR and marketing; angel investors; attorneys; realtors; recruiters and HR experts; scientists and CTOs; logistics and operations mavens; killer sales and bizdev execs.

If you don't have a blog of your own, and you'd like to announce Open Office Hours, just post a comment here with the details and send me an e-mail, and I'll help spread the word.

Welcome to the movement, and I'll see you on Tuesday!

The Friday Five is a list of five things worth knowing about... and a chance for you to build on the list and make it better by posting comments.

This week, it's the most influential companies in Boston's SonicTech cluster.

SonicTech is my term for all things music-related: tools, games, Web sites, marketing platforms. This list was triggered by two upcoming music-related events: Music Hack Day, on Saturday and Sunday at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge (it's sold out), and a much smaller "unconference" event that Charlie McEnerney of Musicians for Music 2.0 is organizing on December 1st in Harvard Square.

Here's my five:

Earlier this month, I promised that this blog won't become obsessed with the real estate decisions of Waltham's venture capital firms, but -- just one more tidbit...

I'm told that Atlas Venture has been sniffing around Cambridge office space. The firm moved from Back Bay to Waltham only in 2002, but tech/cleantech partner Jeff Fagnan (who lives in Brookline) seems interested in nudging the office back to the city; chief financial officer Kristen Laguerre, who lives in Sudbury, will also be a key decision-maker. Atlas' lease in Waltham is up next year, and it's absolutely possible that the firm could opt to stick around Waltham or another western 'burb, though spokesman Matt Burke notes that many of Atlas' life sciences investments are in Cambridge.

Earlier this month, Waltham-based Greylock announced that it will be moving in to Harvard Square come January.

You know you are a bit innovation-obsessed when the highlight of your Tuesday night is meeting a Nobel Laureate: Joseph Murray, the 90-year old Wellesley resident who performed the first successful organ transplant in humans, in 1954. Murray was a guest at the Boston History & Innovation Collaborative's 10th annual awards ceremony, held last night at the Hotel InterContinental.

It was a pretty high-wattage crowd, including Governor Deval Patrick, MIT president Susan Hockfield, Globe publisher Steve Ainsley, Boston Harbor Association executive director Vivian Li, Charles River Ventures co-founder Rick Burnes, Boston Foundation president Paul Grogan, Leo Beranek of Bolt Beranek & Newman, and MIT prof Jim Utterback. In the photo are Tim Rowe, founder of Cambridge Innovation Center with Marina Hatsopoulos, whose father, Thermo Electron founder George Hatsopoulos, was being honored. (Rowe, whose Twitter name is @rowe, did a good deal of tweeting from the event, as did I.) The whole shindig was emceed by Jim Rooney of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and Bob Krim, executive director of the Boston History & Innovation Collaborative.

The most entertaining story of the evening was told by E Ink CEO Russ Wilcox, an honoree (along with co-founder Joe Jacobson). Early in the company's life, its engineers were having a hard time keeping the tiny black and white microcapsules that serve as pixels on E Ink's displays from being broken as they were pumped through a production system. Wilcox says they imported one of the world's experts on fluid pumping -- someone from outside of Boston, he noted -- to come up with a solution to the problem. Instead, he produced a report that declared that what E Ink was trying to do was impossible. Wilcox was dispirited...Until he showed up at the office the next day and discovered that some of his young engineers had hacked together a solution that worked, using a $12.95 aquarium pump they'd bought at PetSmart. They tossed the consultant's report in the trash and made a lewd gesture at the circular file. (The same gesture you're likely to see in Boston rush hour traffic, he mentioned.)

Boston, Wilcox told the crowd, is the best city in the world for actually making revolutions happen.

Earlier, I'd stopped by the 14th annual MITX Interactive Awards at the Marriott Copley. Bumped into Globe editor Marty Baron, as well as Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge Capital and Cesar Brea. A few pics from the cocktail hour that preceded the awards:

Recruiter Keith Cline of Dissero (who also runs the VentureFizz site) was chatting with Matthew Mamet (now on the market, having recently left Visible Gains/PermissionTV) and Bobbi Carlton, the PR maven who also runs Mass Innovation Nights and the new Innovation Breakfast series.

Carlton was wearing a Poken device around her neck -- a "social business card." (See above.) She hadn't run into any other Poken users with whom she could exchange contact info, though.

Carole Gunst, the marketing consulting who also runs the great High Tech History feed on Twitter, was not at the bar the entire night -- just for this pic.

Michael Barron, the founding father of MITX and an attorney at DLA Piper, with Blaise Heltai of NewVantage Partners.

Brian Cusack of Google Cambridge with Don McLagan, former CEO of Compete.com (both are MITX board members.)

Spotted Sim Simeonov of FastIgnite and Philip Jacob of StyleFeeder on my way out, as everyone else was filtering into the ballroom.

Mass High Tech has the complete list of award winners.

WBZ has put together a really interesting panel for Thursday's "Business Breakfast." The focus is on "Building Your Business in Bailout Times," and the speakers include the CEO of Newbury Comics, Mike Dreese; Scott Griffith of Zipcar; Jim Koch of the Boston Beer Company; and David Kord Murray, an ex-Intuit exec who wrote the 2009 book "Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation By Building on the Ideas of Others." (Rejected title: "Stealing Smart Stuff: Three-and-a-Half Ways to Rip Off Good Ideas Without Getting Caught.")

I caught up with Murray earlier this month. He's a native of Sudbury, educated at UVM, who worked in sales roles here in Massachusetts before joining Intuit, where he was head of innovation. I'd heard good things about talks he gave earlier this fall at iRobot and MIT.

At Intuit, Murray told me, working directly with CEO Scott Cook, he started exploring the questions of where the best ideas come from, how they're honed, and whether you can teach people to come up with them in the first place.

"When you look at great ideas, and where they come from, you find that they're all combinations of existing stuff," Murray says. "For me, the revelation was, you're borrowing other ideas and combining them. Borrowing is where you get the stuff to build great ideas. It's not taking the idea, but using pieces of an idea and reassembling them into something new."

The event is free, and it takes place from 8 to 10 AM at the Westin Copley Place. Register here. (That's Murray in the picture, atop Mount McKinley. I have to wonder: Is that a borrowed climbing axe in his hand?)

I was talking to Matt Douglas last week, founder of the Framingham-based party planning site MyPunchbowl. They're announcing tomorrow morning that they've acquired some assets from GroupGo of Waltham to help party hosts find local vendors, like a flower shop, a balloon-delivery service, or a Mexican restaurant with a private dining room.

Douglas talks about planning a party as a "workflow," which "starts with figuring out the date, sending a save-the-date announcement, then doing an online invitation, managing what people are bringing if it's a potluck, buying supplies, creating a gift registry, organizing travel, and then doing photo and video-sharing after the party is over."

Douglas and his team have raised $3 million from investors including Intel Capital , Contour Ventures, and eCoast Angels. And in many ways, they've built a site that has surpassed the Web 1.0 dinosaur of party planning, Evite (now owned by Barry Diller's online conglomerate InterActiveCorp.) MyPunchbowl makes it much easier to decide upon the best date for a gathering among a group of friends, or organize a potluck where everyone brings a different dish, for instance.

Douglas tells me that the main way people discover MyPunchbowl is that they're invited to a party that uses it, or they hear about it from a friend. "It is a viral model," he says. "The more people who are exposed to it, the more people who tell others about it."

I'm sure that's true, but MyPunchbowl (founded in 2007) still lags way behind Evite (founded in 1997) in terms of usage:

(The chart above doesn't show that MyPunchbowl has actually been growing its user base over the past year.)

So what's your theory? We all have our favorite example of a Web 1.0 dinosaur that hasn't innovated enough (eBay, Craigslist, and Expedia among them.) Is it just ennui inertia? I still find myself using KodakGallery (founded in 1999 as Ofoto) for much of my personal photo sharing and printing, even though I'm sure there are many better options.

Is it just that Web 1.0 dinosaurs got the flywheel spinning first, and achieved a level of virality that it's hard for anyone to match?

Interested in your opinions: why is it so hard to kill a Web 1.0 dinosaur? And what examples can you think of (aside from Google vs. Yahoo) where a Web 1.0 dinosaur has been brought down by a new entrant?

(Douglas, for his part, says that he doesn't like his site being compared to Evite; he says it's more similar to sites like TheKnot.com, which does start-to-finish wedding planning. He does acknowledge, though, that his start-up may suffer from a perception problem. "You can't win a war of perception on $3 million bucks. It's a long-term effort.")

Here's the video that accompanies this week's Globe column, on companies in the Boston area developing high-style pre-fab housing. This is a visit to Blu Homes' factory in Littleton (where the MTBA's Green Line trains were once assembled), and it includes some time-lapse footage of one of the company's "Origin" homes being put together and shipped out to Los Angeles.

Airing on two WGBH channels this week is a great new documentary about the annual FIRST Robotics Competition called "Gearing Up."

You'll find it enjoyable whether or not you've been exposed to FIRST, the robot-building program founded by New Hampshire inventor Dean Kamen and MIT prof Woodie Flowers, which sneakily teaches kids about design, engineering, and problem-solving. The film follows four very different teams competing in the 2008 season, including one from an all-girls school in Baltimore and another from a correctional facility for teenage boys in Colorado. "Gearing Up" captures much of the energy and enthusiasm that FIRST generates, but I wish its tone was a little less dry and clinical.

You can catch "Gearing Up" on WGBH on November 22nd at 5 PM, and also several times (starting November 19th) on WGBH's World channel. The doc is also available on DVD, for $19.95.

I keep getting sent links to this TechCrunch article, via e-mail and Twitter: 'Why Silicon Valley Left Route 128 in the Dust.'

It's a pretty worthless piece of typistry. Entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa concludes that Silicon Valley is a more dynamic, vibrant, and supportive ecosystem for start-ups because, this past Columbus Day, he was invited to three different tech-related events. Yes, that's the only piece of data in an 1,100 word essay. About this deep primary research, Wadhwa writes:

It was a really hard decision which one to pick. And I found myself wondering, where else in the world would I have to face such a decision? The answer is nowhere. Silicon Valley, which has expanded to embrace the entire Bay Area as an engine of entrepreneurship and innovation, is a unique place of powerful and concurrent overlapping networks.

Wadhwa also trots out some of the arguments from AnnaLee Saxenian's book "Regional Advantage," which accurately portrayed the cultural differences between Route 128 and Silicon Valley in... 1994.

I'm very interested in understanding the differences between these two regions, and in making New England a better place to do innovation.

But I prefer informed arguments to people just writing about what they feel when spending time in a certain area. (Some interesting data comparing the two regions has been presented by Tim Rowe of Cambridge Innovation Center and Paul Maeder of Highland Capital.)

If I were to use data the same way Wadhwa does, I would observe that on Tuesday, November 17th, I was invited to three different events: the MITX Awards, the Boston History & Innovation Collaborative Awards, and a cocktail reception focused on personalized medicine. By Wadhwa's sophisticated reasoning, this must mean that Boston is on par with Silicon Valley in terms of innovation.

...Or maybe you feel there's more substance to the TechCrunch article than I do?

I am not challenging the conclusion that Silicon Valley has more tech companies, big and small, than Boston, or that it serves as a beacon to smart techies and driven entrepreneurs from all over the world. That's obvious, and you probably knew that before reading Wadhwa's TechCrunch ramblings.

I think that we in New England are playing a different set of games than the Valley, and are (hopefully) getting better at each of them. We're playing these games as a region of the world that needs to be competitive in the global economy -- not against Silicon Valley.

The five games we're playing are:

The hot-ticket event next week seems to be Eric Ries' "Lean Start-Up" presentation, which takes place at the Stata Center on MIT's campus on Thursday. The subtitle is "A Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products." Ries is a techie, entrepreneur, and advisor to the eminent Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins. He blogs at Lessons Learned, and tweets at @EricRies.

It's totally sold out, but you can have one of the last five tickets. Just e-mail me using the form at right ("Send an E-mail to Scott") or by clicking my name in that right column, and tell me what your one can't-miss event for the rest of 2009 is. What's the event on your calendar (aside from this one) that you've been telling your friends and colleagues about most often? On Monday, I'll pick five entrants at random to get tickets to Ries' talk at MIT, which happens Thursday, November 19th at 6:30. And I'll post some of the most frequently mentioned events. (Get your e-mails in by Monday, November 16th at noon Eastern. One entry per person, please, or you'll be disqualified.)

And if you can't make the "Lean Start-Ups" talk on Thursday, but would still like to share what the can't miss event on your 2009 calendar is, feel free to post a comment below.

Here's Ries' presentation from this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco:

And here's some video of Ries in action:

The Ries event is being organized by Tom Summit of the recruiting firm (and start-up info site) Genotrope. (Incidentally, tickets to this event were all given out free and thus have no face value. I suspect some attorney somewhere would like me to let you know that.)

On Fridays, I often post a list of five things, and ask invite you to build on the list by adding more good stuff in the comments.

This week, it’s the five signs that you may have Big Company Syndrome. Big Company Syndrome usually starts to emerge as soon as small businesses pass the 100-person mark, and employees usually contract it after just a few weeks on the job at a Big Company.

You're afflicted by Big Company Syndrome if:

There's always a lack of suspense at awards ceremonies where the winners have been announced ahead of time, but ideally that lets the attendees focus more on drinking and schmoozing -- the real reason anyone goes.

Next Tuesday, the annual History & Innovation Awards are doled out by the Boston History & Innovation Collaborative and the Boston Museum.

George Hatsopoulos, founder of Thermo Electron, will be honored for "environmental and technology innovation" (he's pictured at right), with MIT prez Susan Hockfield presenting the award; Russ Wilcox and Joe Jacobson of E Ink score one for their development of digital paper-like displays (Globe publisher Steve Ainsley will hand it over); and Senate candidate Alan Khazei and Michael Brown will win in the "social innovation" category, for starting City Year. (Khazei isn't expected to be there.)

Governor Patrick, an award presenter last year, will be back again this year. Hopefully, the speeches will be short.

Expected to be in the house are other innovators, like Joseph Murray, the 90-year old doc who performed the first-ever organ transplant (at the Brigham), and Leo Beranek, one of the founders of Bolt Beranek & Newman. Tickets are still available, at $250 a head.

Also on Tuesday night are the annual MITX Interactive Awards, which celebrate great Web site design, useful mobile apps, and Internet-based software. Winners of those aren't announced beforehand, but the finalists are listed here. Tickets for that party are $180 a pop.

Last November, it seemed a bit strange that a group of executives trying to raise money to build a movie studio in Plymouth would hand over $25 million to MIT's Media Lab, to endow the Center for Future Storytelling. Why make such a big commitment to research before you've even gotten your own business off the ground?

This November, the Media Lab is reaching out to other sponsors who might be willing to help foot bill for the new center, after the latest deal to finance the $550 million, 240-acre studio complex in Plymouth fell apart.

I asked Media Lab director Frank Moss today whether he'd seen any cash from David Kirkpatrick, the head of the Plymouth Rock Studios project, and a former exec at Paramount Pictures. "They did give us a material amount to get us off to a start," Moss said, "but obviously, I can't give you details of their financial arrangement." The commitment made last November was $25 million over seven years, but, Moss said, "the world has changed since that happened, and they've encountered tremendous challenges" with funding.

Even before yesterday's news about Plymouth Rock broke, Moss said, the Media Lab has been reaching out to current and new sponsors to find other backers to underwrite the Center for Future Storytelling. "They've been a great partner, but we're making this a multi-sponsor effort, in the style of the Media Lab," Moss told me.

In late October, there was a "Transmedia Summit" at the lab that brought some sponsors in (and also provided some content for Plymouth Rock's on-going Internet video series.)

Interestingly, the Center for Future Storytelling has not yet hired any faculty members of its own; it is currently run by Cynthia Breazeal, a robotics researcher who also leads the Personal Robots group at the Media Lab.

Asked whether Kirkpatrick has suggested that Plymouth Rock might not be good for its entire $25 million pledge to the lab, Moss wouldn't answer, but said, "He has kept me in the loop on the challenges he's had, and we've both adjusted to the realities of how to make this center great. The center is alive and well."

And for a minimum commitment of $600,000 over three years, you can be one of its new sponsors.

Update: I caught up with Kirkpatrick by phone this afternoon, and he told me that Plymouth Rock is still standing behind its obligation to the Media Lab. I asked him if the funding pledge is about $3.5 million a year, and he said that it starts smaller than that, and "ramps up over time."

Is Plymouth Rock back to Square One, now that its financing has evaporated? "Clearly, this is a big bump in the road, but we do have some alternatives we've been talking with for several months, and we're exploring those more deeply," Kirkpatrick said. "We remain optimistic, and we're going to persist and get this done."

(Before this latest set-back, the state of Massachusetts denied $50 million in infrastructure funding to the studio project.)

I've gotten some tips recently that two other Waltham venture capital firms have been considering a move to Boston and Cambridge. This comes in the wake of Greylock's announcement last week that they're taking space in Harvard Square.

I promise this won't become a blog obsessed with real estate, but...

...I put in a call this morning to Bob Hower, the partner at Advanced Technology Ventures in Waltham who is responsible for their lease. They're one of the firms that has been nosing around Boston and Cambridge, weighing their options.

"We've been talking about it," Hower told me. "But it's more in response to other people expressing some interest in our space [at the Bay Colony Center], which started six or seven months ago." Hower says ATV has a couple years left in its current lease, and "it's very unlikely we'd go anywhere before that."

But as a resident of Cambridge, he acknowledges the allure of being closer to the urban core. "The traffic around [Waltham] is horrendous, and it seems like the construction is never going to stop," he says. Hower also mentions that one reason that many Boston and Cambridge VC firms moved out to Waltham in the first place was to be at a "mid-way point" between the city and companies located out on Route 495, or up north on Route 3. But there's noticeably less action in those areas these days.

"It wouldn't surprise me" if more Waltham firms started to boomerang back to the city, Hower said.

Know who the other firm is that has been hunting for space in Boston or Cambridge? Do post a comment, or send me a private e-mail using the contact form on the right...

Innovation Economy covers the people, companies, and investors who make new things happen throughout New England. I try to write about all sorts of entrepreneurs, in industries like cleantech, life sciences, aviation, the Internet, software, retail, e-commerce, and even industries that don't yet have labels. This blog, updated about once a day, is the companion to my Sunday column in the Boston Globe, also called Innovation Economy.

There are two ways to subscribe, so you'll get every new post that appears (both ways are free):

1. The first is to subscribe via e-mail. You'll get an e-mail once a day with the latest post (or posts). Just fill out the form below, and run through the quick process of setting up an account with FeedBlitz, the service that sends out the e-mails:


Get Innovation Economy updates via e-mail:

2. If you use My Yahoo, Google Reader, or another RSS reader to keep up-to-date with various blogs, you can add the Innovation Economy feed:

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Last month, I was chatting about music with Eran Egozy, the co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems; they make a little video game called "Rock Band," and earlier they created "Guitar Hero."

Egozy handed me a business card with a great color photo on it. It wasn't a card for Harmonix, the Cambridge company that is now owned by MTV Networks, but for the Radius Ensemble.

I knew that Egozy plays the clarinet, and I asked whether everyone in the chamber music group also has day jobs. Nope, Egozy told me, he's the only one. (That's the Radius Ensemble at right, with Egozy in the blue shirt on the right side.)

They've got an incredible Web site -- a real model of how performing artists can spark an interest in their work and build up a fan base. There's an e-mail list, a Facebook fan group, and a podcast where you can hear the group in action. They also sell tickets online (you get a $2 discount for buying that way) -- and take donations via PayPal.

This week, they're playing two concerts, one on Thursday at Rivera Hall in Weston, and another on Saturday at MIT. (Their next public performances aren't until March 2010.)

You can get a sense for how Egozy's clarinet playing connects to his work at Harmonix from this great "Office Invasion" video by Ann Silvio, D.C. Denison, and Carolyn Johnson.

Can governments spark start-up activity and job creation by getting into the venture capital business? Or do they just waste taxpayer money whenever they try?

Those are the two questions that animate the new book from Harvard Business School prof Josh Lerner, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed -- And What to Do About It."

Much of Lerner's book focuses on all the things that can go wrong when governments try to pour taxpayer money into the gas tank of their region's innovation economy.

During his swing through Cambridge this week, Eric Schmidt sat down with "On Point" host Tom Ashbrook for an on-stage interview at MIT's Kresge Auditorium. The event was organized in honor of Michael Hammer, the late MIT professor, author, and management guru who died last September.

Ashbrook tried to conduct a wide-ranging interview with Schmidt, talking about everything from Google's book search project to the business problems of traditional media to Google's vast data centers. Ashbrook didn't get much from Schmidt other that his stock public-company-CEO responses: turns out that while Android is great, iPhone is the dominant smartphone today. Google runs "some number of relatively large data centers." Wow.

Schmidt has a wry sense of humor, but his dominant mode is that of the ultra-logical Vulcan engineer: every problem (or answer to a probing question) can be deconstructed and solved if you are smart enough. (In the pic, Schmidt is at center talking after the event with Rich Miner, the Cambridge exec who runs Google Ventures and helped develop the Android operating system for mobile phones.)

By the end of the event, I found myself wishing that someone with a deeper background in management, innovation, and corporate culture had been chosen to interview Schmidt, to really get at what is so novel about the way Google works as a company (and what challenges it really faces.) Clay Christensen from Harvard Business School would've been perfect -- he appeared in a video tribute to Hammer that was shown -- or Michael Cusumano of MIT. I do enjoy Ashbrook's show on WBUR, but he wasn't the right guy for this particular job.

But the questions from the audience were excellent (it was, as you might suspect, a smart crowd of Hammer's old friends and neighbors), and there were these two great quotes from Schmidt toward the end of the event:

Copenhagen will be the place to be next month for the world's policy-makers, when the United Nations convenes its Climate Change Conference.

But for the doers who're developing new technologies to combat climate change, Boston will be the center of the action next week.

On Tuesday, the nation-wide Ignite Clean Energy Competition comes to the Massachusetts State House, with ten teams of entrepreneurs presenting their business plans and angling for a $35,000 top prize.

On Wednesday night, the New England Clean Energy Council holds its second annual Green Tie Gala at the JFK Library, with tickets priced at $325 a head. Congressman Ed Markey, who'll be traveling to Denmark next month for the UN conference, will be the featured speaker.

And on Wednesday and Thursday during the day, you've got the Conference on Clean Energy at the Hynes Convention Center, which will touch on new research coming out of universities, funding trends for energy businesses, and the latest breakthroughs in solar and wind. Steven Koonin, an under-secretary at the Department of Energy, will give a keynote, as will Gov. Deval Patrick.

There's also, on Sunday, this event at Harvard's Kennedy School that'll focus on the Massachusetts-Israel cleantech connection, with speakers including Rep. Markey, Michael Granoff of Better Place, and Ric Fulop from A123 Systems.

In the wake of Wednesday's lay-offs at Microsoft, which affected several big names at the company's New England Research & Development Center, my big question today was, who's left?

The biggest name to be sent packing Wednesday was Don Dodge, who has been one of Microsoft's main links to the start-up and developer community -- both in New England and nationally. (An item on TechCrunch yesterday was titled, "Microsoft Loses Don Dodge: This is a Huge Mistake," and it attracted 200-plus comments.)

Allison Parker was also laid off, only a few weeks after Reed Sturtevant, her boss at Microsoft's Startup Labs technology development group, was let go.

With those three, Microsoft shed some of its strongest connections to the New England community.

So who's still there in a senior position?

It feels like the end of the telecom era in Massachusetts this evening, as the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council takes over the Massachusetts Network Communications Council, which over the past few years had been idling.

They're calling it a merger, but...

...Tom Hopcroft, president of MassTLC, will remain president of the new group. (Here's his blog post on the news.) Mark Horan, formerly chief of MassNetComms, will be a senior vice president. Aside from Horan, the two staffers who'd been helping to run MassNetComms won't join MassTLC. (Horan said they've already found other jobs.)

...About two-thirds of the 500 corporate members of the combined entity will come from MassTLC, with MassNetComms bringing the minority.

...And the Mass Network Communications name will disappear, as will most of MassNetComms' annual events.