By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

Check out...

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

And BookBub was only founded in January of last year.

Schanker says got the idea for BookBub from talking to a friend, Jennifer 8. Lee, who had started an e-book publishing company. "It seemed like publishers were looking for ways to build awareness for their titles and authors, and they wanted to spend money doing that, but no one was there to take their money," he says.

Readers sign up for the free BookBub newsletter, and specify the genres they're interested in. Each day, they get an e-mail touting three to five free or discounted e-books. Publishers and independent authors pay to be listed in the newsletter, though Schanker says there is some curation: "Everything that we feature is fundamentally an ad, but we reject more than half of the submissions sent to us." He says five of the largest book publishers are customers, along with "hundreds of independent authors."

Why do authors or publishers pay money to promote e-books they're giving away for free? "At the very basic level," Schanker explains, "it may be to get more exposure for themselves as an author, for the publisher, or maybe for a book series. Everyone is trying to build up an audience base."

The company has six employees in Kendall Square, but Schanker says they're about to post another another five or six job listings. Schanker previously started and sold two other local companies: Sombasa Media (acquired by About.com) and Sconex (acquired by Alloy Marketing & Media.). He and BookBub co-founder Nicholas Ciarelli have been bootstrapping the company so far, without outside funding.

Update: On April 15th, FlightCar announced that it had raised $5.5 million from a group of investors that included General Catalyst, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky, and "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest.

Co-founder Shri Ganeshram tells me he is moving back to Cambridge this week, where the plans to begin recruiting additional employees; he hasn't yet figured out where FlightCar will be based. "We're looking to hire designers and software developers at the moment," he says. The startup participated in the Y Combinator accelerator program in Silicon Valley earlier this year.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

What if you could drive to the airport, hand your keys to a valet, get free parking for as long as you wanted, and have your car washed and cleaned. Oh, and you'd get a free gas card when you returned to pick it up?

A California start-up called FlightCar is testing the concept at San Francisco International Airport. There's just one catch: while they have your car, they rent it out to other travelers. It's a fascinating new twist on the car-sharing business model, which includes big companies like Cambridge-based ZipCar (now part of Avis) and smaller start-ups like RelayRides (founded in Cambridge by a Harvard Business School alum).

Co-founder Shri Ganeshram is taking time off from his undergrad studies at MIT to help launch the company; the three-person FlightCar team is now participating in the Y Combinator accelerator program for entrepreneurs.

Ganeshram tells me that the team noticed something basic about every major airport: there's usually one garage where departing travelers pay money to park, and another where arriving travelers pay money to rent a car. The founders — two of whom were high school students getting ready to head off to Harvard and Princeton — thought there might some synergy to be found in combining those two businesses. (Pictured above are founders Kevin Petrovic, Ganeshram, and Rujul Zaparde.)

Right now, they've rented a warehouse near SFO that can fit 30 or 40 cars, Ganeshram says. Departing travelers that have registered with the site can call FlightCar when they're driving to the airport, and they're met there by a valet. He takes the keys, makes notes about things like the gas level and mileage, and also snaps a few pictures to document the condition of the car. The company only accepts cars with fewer than 150,000 miles on them, and nothing made before 1999. "They have to be generally rentable," Ganeshram says. "We don't want cars that people would be embarrassed to drive around."

While you're gone, FlightCar tries to rent your wheels to arriving travelers. (A Volkswagen Toureg SUV rents for a quite reasonable $30 a day.) The company has $1 million in liability insurance, and comprehensive collision and theft coverage, so the owner's insurance "doesn't get involved at all," Ganeshram says. FlightCar's daily rental rate includes 90 miles; there's a 35 cents per mile charge after that, all of which goes to the vehicle's owner.

When you return from your trip, you call FlightCar again and they bring your vehicle back to the airport. Even though they've filled the tank to the level you left it at, you're given at least a $10 gas card (the amount can go up, depending on how new and nice your wheels are.) And even if the company hasn't managed to rent your car, the parking and valet service is still free.

"Instead of paying $18 a day for long-term parking somewhere, you might be able to buy an extra ticket and take a friend along with you," says Ganeshram. "And you get a cleaner car when you come back."

We'll see what happens to FlightCar when county and state tax authorities discover it. Ganeshram says that because FlightCar is a car-sharing service for members (similar to ZipCar), it shouldn't be subject to the same taxes levied on car rental companies. ZipCar managed to successfully use that argument, he points out. FlightCar intends to only collect sales tax, which Ganeshram says is included in the daily rates its web site displays. FlightCar charges a flat $30 a day for that Volkswagen SUV; by comparison, renting a BMW SUV from Avis at SFO for one day costs $210, $60 of which is taxes and surcharges.

If things go well in San Francisco, Ganeshram says the company plans to launch in a second city later this year. They're considering Boston, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

What do you think? Would you give it a try, either as a car owner or a renter?

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Kalma, a well-known user experience (UX) guru, joined Gemvara only in October 2011, moving to Boston to help the customization-oriented site streamline the configuration and purchase process. He'd previously worked in New York for Gilt Groupe, the "flash sale" site, and for Zappos.com in Las Vegas. At Zappos, he spent seven years overseeing user experience, up to and just beyond the point the footwear purveyor was acquired by Amazon.

"I made a big move to come to Gemvara, and I'm very fond of what's going on here. The decision wasn't easy," Kalma told me earlier this week. Kalma had served as a mentor to the MIT-educated Ministry of Supply team last year, when the startup participated in the MassChallenge entrepreneurship competition. "I wanted to get back to the roots. I just had the burning desire to roll up my sleeves with something small and unproven. Hacking the apparel industry was appealing to me."

Kalma will be the sixth employee at Ministry, which raised more than $400,000 last year on Kickstarter for its Apollo dress shirt. The startup has been working to create a new men's apparel brand, based on a James Bond-like image and advanced materials that dissipate heat, resist odor, and don't wrinkle. I wrote about the company last July.

Kalma says that there aren't formal titles at Ministry, but that he will "spend the first phase of my time there tightening up the web experience and marketing." While he isn't a big wearer of dress shirts, Kalma says he is a fan of the company's Atmos v-necked t-shirt, which sells for $38.

I last covered Gemvara in November 2012, when co-founder Matt Lauzon stepped away from the CEO's role and became chairman; the company is still on the hunt for its next chief executive officer... and perhaps also a new chief experience officer, too.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

And the company, which graduated from the TechStars Boston program last fall, has just raised $1.4 from a group of investors including Lightbank, Cambridge-based Launch Capital, LionBird, and TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen.

Today, Ovuline sells a mobile app ($9.99) and access to a website ($30) that help women monitor their fertility, and supply advice about "what to do every day to maximize it," Wallace says. "We are finding our early users are getting pregnant two times faster than the national average." (The company also sells supplies like ovulation tests, fertility supplements, and basal thermometers.) Going forward, Wallace says, Ovuline is expanding its focus to "use the same data analytics and clinical guidelines to help women have a healthier pregnancy." Wallace talks about collecting data with devices like home blood pressure cuffs, scales, and pedometers.

"Right now, the standard of care is 10 to 14 doctor visits over the course of a pregnancy. But taking your blood pressure daily can be a way to spot problems like preeclampsia, which can threaten the health of the mother and the fetus," he says. "You can catch things early."

He talks about pregnancy as "one of the times when women radically change their health behavior. We are trying to take quantified self technology and apply it to a very specific time when people are motivated to change, and willing to engage."

The company has five full-time employees, and "we're going to be growing with this financing," Wallace says. Ovuline will be moving into Launch Capital's Harvard Square offices sometime later this month.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I served as ringmaster, and the speakers included:

- Gemvara founder Matt Lauzon
- Kate Castle, marketing VP at Flybridge Capital Partners
- Laura Fitton, inbound marketing evangelist at HubSpot
- David Meerman Scott, author of the books "Newsjacking" and "Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead"
- BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I was hunting for examples of local companies that have already hit the wall, and in the article I mention a few. But this morning, my inbox provided another example: Tasted Menu, a "social dining" site and mobile app that encouraged users to take pictures and post reviews of individual menu items they'd tried at restaurants. The e-mail went out to everyone who'd registered as a user of Tasted Menu, notifying them that it will shut down as of the end of this month. (I covered the Brookline company last year, when founder Alex Rosenfeld told me it had collected about $350,000 in capital. At that point, the company had five employees.) Like many startups, it was trying to attract a large base of users so that it could spool up a business model, like selling advertising or promoting restaurant special offers. And like many startups, it was trying to raise additional funding to stay alive — about $1 million.

I asked Rosenfeld what had transpired since we spoke. Here's what he said:

We came very close to raising our first institutional round this past summer, with a lead investor and term sheet in place, and a majority of the round raised. Unfortunately, the rest of the raise stalled out as consumer funding slowed with the fallout from the Facebook IPO. Out of cash, I had to part with the remaining team at the end of the summer, and have known since then that winding things down was a real possibility. It was nevertheless a tough decision. I'm very proud of what our team accomplished and really believe that, with a fraction of the funding of our competitors, we built as good a product as any in the restaurant dish recommendation space. It would have been great to have a shot at expanding nationally.

As I know you aim to cover things from a Boston angle, I will say that the challenge of fundraising in Boston as an early stage and particularly an early stage consumer/content start-up remained an obstacle for us. (Most of our angel money came from New York and the west coast, and of the committed capital for our Series Seed, not a dollar was out of Boston.) The irony is that Boston is actually a *great* place to launch consumer products, with its young, social, tech savvy population. It was also an excellent area to recruit consumer talent, especially for non-technical roles, which as a media guy I'm sure you appreciate as essential for content-driven businesses. I hope this incongruence lessens, but having been on the ground for the past three years, I saw a lot of promising talk but not enough progress.

Update: The new accelerator program, LearnLaunchX, announced that it will begin in June 2013.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

One group has been calling its project Exponential Boston, and raising money to launch an inaugural program in mid-2013, aimed at helping education-focused entrepreneurs turn concepts into companies. The core team at Exponential includes EdTech entrepreneur Hakan Satiroglu; Boston University entrepreneurship czar Vinit Nijhawan; and Mark Miller, a banker who often works with EdTech companies.

The other group, LearnLaunch, just unveiled a new non-profit this week seeking to bring together EdTech entrepreneurs for conferences, demo nights, and networking. The accelerator program it has been cultivating seems somewhat more nascent than Exponential's, but it has been dubbed LearnLaunch Labs. The trio behind LearnLaunch are angel investor Jean Hammond; Marissa Lowman, right, founder of the monthly EdTechUp gatherings and formerly an executive at AisleBuyer, a mobile commerce startup; and Eileen Rudden, who served as a Chicago Public Schools official, and before that an executive at companies like Lotus and Avaya.

"Accelerators take funding and real estate," Hammond told me yesterday, "and it takes time to pull that together. We're also working on building the team that would run it."

Hammond also said that she was in conversations with Satiroglu and his group about combining efforts: "I don't know if there's room for two." But she and Satiroglu both said that they hadn't reached a decision yet. "Everybody is urging us to work together," Satiroglu said.

Satiroglu describes a six-month accelerator program that would provide $25,000 in seed funding, free office space, and in-kind services in return for a six percent chunk of each startup's equity. He says he has been scouting locations in the Back Bay; along with housing the accelerator participants, an Exponential office would also include a co-working area for other EdTech entrepreneurs and early-stage companies. Satiroglu already has some funding commitments to support Exponential Boston, but says that he'll focus more explicitly on raising money in January. He says his goal is to collect $2 million to $3 million to run an accelerator program for two or three years. The first cycle of the program could start in May or June, he says, and the Exponential site is already accepting applications.

Both groups talk about bringing in textbook publishers and online learning companies as partners, especially those with big Boston operations like Houghton-Mifflin and Cengage Learning. "One question for us is how close do you want to involve industry players as sponsors and mentors," Hammond says.

Satiroglu and Hammond both say that their objective is to create a stronger support system for EdTech entrepreneurs, helping them learn from one another and connect to universities, school systems, and teachers.

"My main goal is to establish Boston as the EdTech capital of the world," Satiroglu says. "I think we can own that domain."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

But nine years after Lorem Ipsum opened, Mankins now works in New York, as the chief technology officer for the company that publishes Inc. & Fast Company magazines. And the Cambridge bookstore, created as an attempt to get e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar to work together harmoniously, is losing money. (There have been earlier cash crunches, too.) Mankins tells me that he has never drawn a salary from the store, working various software-related day jobs over the years.

Over the weekend, Mankins posted a message to the Hacker News discussion forums announcing that Loreum Ipsum is for sale, and soliciting creative ideas about how to sustain a bookstore in the Age of Amazon. It has sparked 86 comments so far. The suggestions range from "sell the inventory and find another business to be in" to printing PhD theses, setting up an in-store café, or turning part of the store into a co-working space for freelancers and entrepreneurs. There are even a few respondents who seem interested in talking to Mankins about taking over Lorem Ipsum.

"I'm looking for someone to pick up the fight, to be an on-the-ground advocate proclaiming 'bookstores are here to stay…if we can change with the times,'" Mankins writes via e-mail. (He acknowledges that running the store from New York, where he has lived since 2009, may have contributed to its situation.) "Ideally I'd find an innovator who enjoys reading, understands the community benefits that bookstores provide, and isn't afraid to do things differently to nudge the store and the industry in different directions. I just started the process of looking in earnest. I don't really want to sell the store, but think it's the right thing for the store."

An excerpt of Mankins' Hacker News post is below.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I've listed the company name below, the founder or CEO who'll be presenting today, and a brief description. When companies are based somewhere other than Boston, I've listed that in parentheses. (At right are Fashion Project co-founders Christine Rizk and Anna Palmer.)

You can view tweets about the event by watching the hash tag "TSDemoDay."

• BetterFit Technologies
Julia Winn
Gathering data and building predictive software to understand which drug — for instance, a birth control pill or an anti-depressant — may be most effective for an individual patient, with the fewest side effects. Previously participated in Highland Capital's Summer@Highland program.

• Careport Health
Lissy Hu
Helping find the right services and facilities for patients who have just been discharged from the hospital.

• CoachUp
Jordan Fliegel
Building a marketplace for private sports coaches. CoachUp raised some money last month at a "Shark Tank" pitch event, and I covered them earlier this year. The company also participated in MassChallenge this year.

• Dashbell
Paige Brown
A reservation system for independent hotels, delivered over the web, to help them fill more of their rooms.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

That's what was on my mind on Monday evening, when I got an early look at the thirteen companies that will present in Providence tomorrow as part of Betaspring's fall "Launch Day." (A group of investors saw the company's present Tuesday morning.)

Betaspring essentially doubled in size this year, by accepting a spring and fall cohort of entrepreneurs. Here's what the fall group is up to. I've starred the ones I think are most likely to succeed, and offered an explanation in bold as to why. Just my opinion — and I hope a few of the non-starred ones keep me humble by proving me totally wrong. (In the photo above is Kirsten Lambertsen of Kuratur, which collects social media posts and transforms them into nicely-designed "web magazines.")

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Was that a joke? Most Uber cars I've ridden in in Boston have been black Cadillacs, Lincolns, and other comfy-but-nondescript sedans.

I called up Uber Boston general manager Michael Pao this morning, and he confirmed that, yes, a livery driver had signed up to be part of Uber's virtual fleet last week, with a black Porsche Cayenne. (Pao told me the driver's name is Adam, but didn't have his last name readily available.)

He sent the pic below as evidence, and told me that the Porsche shows up as a normal black car on the Uber app, at normal black car rates. You can't make a special request, in other words — you just get lucky. Pao also mentioned that a driver with a Mercedes GL 550 would soon start roaming the streets of Boston, and said that as more of these high-end cars hit the road with Uber, the company might create a separate class for them — right now, the two options are "black" or "taxi" — and charge higher rates.

Are you feeling lucky, Uber riders?

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Siegl is a former Austrian cultural attache (and long-time motorcycle racer) who came to Harrisville from New York five years ago. "It's always a jump in the cold water when you start your own business, especially after my career in the foreign service, where there are safety nets built into the job," he says. He'd already been building bikes as a sideline, but when he came to New Hampshire, he committed to doing it full-time. "I felt confident that since I was doing something that I was good at and loved to do, everything would work out," he says.

He makes about four custom bikes a year, designing the bodies himself, and typically relying on upgraded Ducati and Harley engines. Prices are $50,000 and up, though Siegl tells me he is doing a limited-edition run of about eight bikes, "The Walt Siegl Superlight," that will be priced at $30,000. His workshop, in the ground level of an 1860s-era textile mill, used to be the mill's machine shop, and it's filled with welding gear, drill presses, milling machines, and work tables.

When I visited last month, Siegl was finishing up a bike that had been commissioned by Puma for display in its stores. He's also working on a line of shoes, out in 2013, for Puma, and a leather racing jacket in collaboration with Puma and Fall River-based Vanson Leathers.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Founded in Cambridge in 2005, Y Combinator created a new model for investing in "classes" of promising startups, and offering guidance and mentorship to help increase their chances of success. The program now operates out of Mountain View, and included 84 startups in its most recent cohort. Y Combinator's alumni include Airbnb, Reddit, Omgpop, Disqus, WePay, Hipmunk, and Dropbox. (Those last three were founded by entrepreneurs who went to school in the Boston area.) Graham is also the author of a thoughtful series of essays on entrepreneurship.

We chatted for about a half hour on the outdoor patio at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto; that explains the background noise. Among the topics we covered:

- What role Graham sees himself, and Y Combinator, playing in the Valley
- Whether there is a limit to how big Y Combinator can get - The profusion of other accelerator programs for startups
- Which Y Combinator alumni haven't gotten the attention they deserve, in Graham's view
- Kickstarter as a fundraising mechanism for startups
- His experiment with letting entrepreneurs into Y Combinator, even if they didn't yet have an idea for a startup
- The relative health of the startup ecosystem in New York and Boston
- The "demo day" at which Dropbox presented
- His decision to stop holding the Y Combinator summer program in Cambridge, and operate in Mountain View year-round

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Ravikant explains that the survey is being used to help his team at AngelList figure out what new features to build. The top needs that startups have, he says, are funding, engineers, and designers, "which is why we have specific products for each of those (angel.co/talent, for example.)"

So what do startups say their other most-pressing needs are?

Here's the top ten list:

1. Advisors
2. Press
3. Social media marketing
4. Co-founders
5. Board members
6. Salespeople
7. PR firms
8. Office space
9. Lawyers
10. Accountants

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

When Fitzgerald first showed up to work for Rue in the spring of 2008, just after the site had launched, she didn't know much about the company. "My agency asked me to go down and meet with them," she says. "At that point, you didn't really have anything to compare it to. Flash sales were just getting started. I got a password, became a member, and I felt very elite."

Since then, Fitzgerald has become a familiar face to the six million shoppers who receive Rue's daily e-mail, or access its mobile apps, to see what's on sale today. When we spoke on Wednesday, she was doing a shoot for Lilla P, a Manhattan-based label, and she'd also recently modeled apparel from French Connection, Kay Unger, and Narcisso Rodriguez. A day of work at Rue typically starts at 8 a.m. with hair and make-up -- "which is a really nice way for a girl to start the day," she says -- and lasts until about 4 p.m. "Typically, you're doing one brand a day," Fitzgerald says, and there are three or four models simultaneously at work in the company's photo studios.

For a city like Boston, which isn't home to many fashion magazines or major retailers, Rue has been "heaven-sent," creating lots of additional work for models that doesn't require them to travel. And she's a true local, having grown up in Medford.

Fitzgerald says she's often a Rue customer herself, though she doesn't get a first crack at merchandise or an insider discount. "The one advantage I have is that I get to try on the clothes first," she says. "And there have been quite a few days when something shows up on the site at 11 a.m. and I'm there waiting to buy it."

Rue La La is 30 percent owned by the auction giant eBay, which recently started showcasing some Rue merchandise on its site.

A few examples of Fitzgerald's work for Rue La La are below:

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Wayland-based Pearl's developed its own breeds of seeds for low-maintenance lawns, which don't require as much water or mowing as typical seeds. In 2010, the company took one of the top prizes at the inaugural MassChallenge startup competition.

Madnick tells me that Logan Airport has been using Pearl's, and that a 662-year old castle in England, right, has been relying on the seed to grow lawns in areas previously considered too shady for grass. (Madnick adds that Langley Castle Hotel happens to be owned by his brother, Stuart Madnick, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management.)

Madnick, left, says the company's most recent distribution deal is with Home Depot in the Chicago area (it can also be found in Whole Foods Markets throughout New England, along with Mahoney's Garden Centers.) The company has been supported so far by investments from friends and family, but Madnick says they're hunting for additional funding.

Madnick's tour of the U.S. (he's in Omaha, Nebraska today) brings him to the Wellesley Public Library on the evening of October 3rd, for a talk on "Green Home, Health and Lawn."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

They turned their observations in to a senior thesis project at Wentworth Institute of Technology, building a prototype pedicab, and went on to win the top prize of $10,000 in the university's very first Accelerate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Challenge this summer. And now Pelkey and Crouch are talking to owners of pedicab fleets about placing orders for their new vehicle, which still doesn't have a name. (Pelkey is on the right in the photo.)

I got to take it for a spin last week at Brigham Circle, with Crouch as my passenger. It was surprisingly maneuverable, and the gear shifting was so smooth it was imperceptible. (The prototype uses a continuously-variable planetary transmission made by NuVinci.) I was ready to start picking up fares and carting them around town — or at least around the big plaza in front of JP Licks.

"We realized that these are horrible products, and we thought we could do better," says Pelkey. "We wanted to design a pedicab that was more reliable, easier to maintain, and lighter weight." They relied on their own experiences, and also talked to mechanics at Boston Pedicab about what broke most often. Instead of a fiberglass passenger area prone to cracking, they use fabric wrapped around lightweight aluminum tubing. They created a step to make it easier for passengers to get in and out, and added extra legroom for passengers. (See photo below.) They specced out a "lefty" hub for the rear wheels, intended to be only supported from one side and less likely to break.

"We designed this pedicab for Boston," Pelkey says. "If a cab works year-round in Boston, it'll work anywhere."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

"What we noticed is that the person arranging food for a meeting usually had a collection of menus, they ordered from the same few places that they knew they could rely on, and they never knew how much to order so they usually over-spent," says Marcus, a former U.S. Department of Energy official who recently earned her MBA at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Lupoli adds, "And there are no Yelp reviews for catering that tell you about the food or about the service, like whether it'll show up on time." Lupoli, also a newly-minted MBA, is the co-founder of Sal's Pizza and Salvatore's Italian Restaurants, with about 50 locations in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. (Lupoli is pictured below.)

Earlier this year, they began testing their website Phoodeez with MIT users. It's intended to streamline the process of ordering food for groups, and help "local restaurants that have great food attract more business in catering, which is very lucrative," in Lupoli's words. (Yes, his pizza shops and higher-end Italian restaurants are featured on the site, along with several other suppliers.) This week, Phoodeez is launching a redesigned site and targeting off-campus customers in the broader Boston area.

Restaurants participating in the site so far include Guru the Caterer, Spice and Rice, and Aceituna. Every item listed, liked the "good morning breakfast" pictured above, from the Danish Pastry House, explains how many people it feeds. Prices are the same as if you'd ordered directly from the restaurant, Marcus says, but Phoodeez takes a small referral fee off the total amount.

The new site will compete against other online food-ordering businesses like Seamless and Foodler. Marcus says they are considering a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for marketing and promotion. But so far, she says, "we are doing it the very old-fashioned way, having raised the initial funds from friends and family, as well as from revenue."

The company has been using office space at MIT's Beehive Cooperative and Harvard's Innovation Lab.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Two Hingham entrepreneurs have come up with a solution: linens made out of a fiber derived from Eucalyptus trees (it's called Tencel) which you can simply toss into a compost bin or trash can when they're dirty. The sheets from their startup, Beantown Bedding, are both compostable and biodegradable. A set that includes a fitted sheet, flat sheet, and pillowcase costs $25. (So far, they're only selling twin extra-long sheets, which is a bed size common on college campuses. And the sheets are only available in white.)

"We met when our kids started dating," explains Kirsten Lambert (she's on the left in the photo, with co-founder Joan Ripple.) "Then they went off to college, and we found that they basically never washed their sheets."

"We joked about sending them a roll of paper like you see on the exam table of a doctor's office — but comfortable," says Ripple. They started developing the concept of disposable sheets last year, got their first wholesale orders at a trade show in March, and received their first inventory in June. Tencel is used to make some brands of baby wipes and clothing, but Beantown's founders believe they're the first to be using it for linens.

Lambert and Ripple say that many parents already throw away sheets after a summer of camp, or a semester of college, and contend that sheets that can be composted (or at least biodegrade in a landfill) will have a lesser environmental impact. (That may be true, but those who choose to wash their traditional cotton sheets use about 40 gallons of water each time, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, while it requires about 150 gallons of water to make a pound of Tencel fiber. The manufacturing process for cotton sheets can use as little as 10 gallons of water per pound, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.)

I asked Heather Henriksen, director of the office of sustainability at Harvard University, what she thought of the concept of compostable sheets. She said she thought it might have merits in places where there isn't sufficient water to regularly wash linens, like a disaster relief camp. But on a college campus, she suggested that using a washing machine or laundry service is still better. She wrote via e-mail, "I think the most important R in the 3R's (reduce, reuse, recycle) is of course, reduce — do not create the waste in the first place."

The sheets from Beantown are intended to last about a month. "After that, they start to pill and look worn," says Lambert. In addition to summer camps and colleges, Beantown is also marketing its compostable sheets for vacation house rentals. Right now, Beantown's products are being produced in China, but the founders say they're hoping to find a domestic factory.

Update: On Wednesday, August 15th, after hundreds of Uber supporters signed an online petition and thousands voiced their displeasure via e-mail and Twitter, one of Governor Deval Patrick's communications staffers tweeted that the state was "working on a swift resolution" (and acknowledged that he'd used the service just the night before.) Later that day, Massachusetts' Division of Standards reversed its earlier position, allowing Uber to continue operating.

Update #2: In September, the City of Cambridge sued to overturn the state's ruling on Uber.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Here's why I think they're doing the wrong thing.

We live in a city with too few taxis, which happen to charge the highest rates in the entire U.S. In many parts of the greater Boston area (like Cambridge), you can't be guaranteed that a cab will accept credit cards. So Uber, a San Francisco company that makes town cars available at a higher price than taxis, but a lower cost than traditional car services, provides a really beneficial service for city-dwellers and tourists. I've used it many times when I needed a lift in a neighborhood with no taxis or cab stands, or when I wanted a more spacious vehicle to take me to the airport. (Many of Uber's fans are women, who tell me that they occasionally are refused rides by taxis late at night if, for instance, they're trying to travel from Somerville to Boston.) Every Uber driver I've met so far — about a half-dozen now — has been courteous. They're all licensed livery drivers, working as independent operators or as part of a small livery company, according to Uber. And they all seem to like being part of the Uber network, which generates additional income for them when they otherwise wouldn't be busy.

Uber is totally transparent about how its pricing works. Customers receive an e-mailed receipt almost immediately after your ride is over, complete with a map of the ride. (There's never any issue with illegible receipts, or receipt printers that have run out of paper.) You also have an opportunity to rate your driver on a 1-5 star scale.

The core of the argument that the City of Cambridge and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are making against Uber is that an iPhone is not an "approved device" for use in a commercial transaction — in this case, tracking where a trip starts and ends, calculating the fare, and billing the rider's credit card. (Some of that process involves Uber's servers, communicating with the iPhone.) So essentially, if I were an independent livery driver and you asked me to take you from Wellesley to Logan Airport, I could pull a number out of thin air and say "$80," but it's not legal for me to use an "unapproved" iPhone to figure the fare. (See if you can explain to me how Boston Coach comes up with its fares, which are more than twice as expensive as Uber's.) Who decides which devices are kosher for use in Massachusetts and which are not? Only the National Conference on Weights and Measures, which is apparently not yet aware of GPS-enabled smart phones.

Uber, for its part, believes that it is operating legally in Massachusetts, and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told me earlier today that the Commonwealth shouldn't be trying to prevent his company from doing business here, given that no standards exist yet for using an iPhone's GPS system for fare calculation. "They can't enforce standards that don't exist," he said, adding that Uber's approach to calculating the distance traveled is "very accurate."

Incidentally, I also asked Kalatnick whether it was a consumer complaint that spurred the City of Cambridge's recent investigation into Uber. "No," he said, declining to elaborate on who might have prodded the city into investigating. Do you have any guesses?

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Upstart's founder is a Massachusetts native, former Google executive Dave Girouard, right, and one of his founding board members is Cambridge entrepreneur and angel investor Andy Palmer. The company's initial funding — $1.75 million — comes from Google Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and Kleiner Perkins.

Here's how it will work: anyone wrapping up their undergraduate or graduate studies this spring at Upstart's five launch schools can create a profile on the site. (People who graduated in 2010 or later are also eligible.) They might be looking to raise money so that they can work on a startup, make an independent film, travel with an eye toward starting a non-profit, or begin a career as an artist. Similar to Kickstarter, other individuals can decide to put money toward their fundraising goal. But unlike that site, the recent grads who take the money must repay their backers a share of their income — no more than 7 percent, and over no more than 15 years of working. In years when they earn less than $30,000, they pay nothing. And the profit upside tops out at a 14.99 percent annual return to backers. (To fund its operations, Upstart will keep a 3 percent slice of the money invested in recent grads, and a 1.5 percent slice of the money returned to investors.)

Upstart is working with just five schools to start with, to "make sure the agreements are right, and that we have sufficient backers, and that the right processes are in place," Girouard says. The group includes Dartmouth College and the Rhode Island School of Design. And among the first group of students is Nathan Sharp, a 2012 graduate of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business; he's working to launch the online shopping start-up PayOrPass. Sharp will be using the money he raises from Upstart to pay off the debt he racked up while earning his MBA, so that he can focus on the new venture.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The program starts on August 11th, and runs every Saturday for six months. Participants are matched with mentors, who will take them to at least one networking event, says Malia Lazu, the group's director. Among the entrepreneurs who'll run workshops for the participants are Avid Technology founder Bill Warner and Alec Stern, a founder of Constant Contact. At the end, one winner will get a year of free office space in the Back Bay (at the headquarters of Karmaloop, whose CEO helped form the alliance), along with at least $5,000 in cash. Lazu says she's still trying to increase that prize purse.

Here are the ventures, along with descriptions supplied by their founders:

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Here's a quick run-down, along with the four concepts I liked best.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Brand Networks, founded by a veteran of the ad agency Arnold Worldwide, is announcing this week that it is expanding new outposts in New York and Los Angeles, in addition to its Boston headquarters and a technology operation in Rochester, New York. The firm has 65 employees and is continuing to hire engineers, account managers, and social media strategists.

"Being in New York is obvious for us, since there's so much business there from agencies and big brands," says CEO Jamie Tedford, adding that Brand Networks already counts American Express and General Electric, both headquartered in Manhattan, as clients. "In LA, our main focus is the entertainment industry, and we've done some work with Sony Pictures, Paramount, and other studios. But they want their partners to have a local presence." New York is now six people, including former Facebook marketing director Sean Mahoney. The sole employee thus far in Los Angeles is Paul Falzone.

Locally, Brand Networks works with clients like Monster.com and Puma; its national clients include Wal-Mart and JetBlue. Tedford says that Brand Networks is one of only eight companies that have been awarded three badges as part of Facebook's "Preferred Marketing Developer" program, for creating Facebook apps, helping clients manage Facebook pages, and running Facebook ad campaigns. (The fourth badge that Facebook gives out is called "Insights," for measuring and tracking the activity taking place around a brand on Facebook.)

"From the very beginning, we were pretty clear that our goal was to help brands activate consumers on social networks," Tedford says. "After we built our first app on Facebook for Puma in 2007, we realized that this was a really powerful platform."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

"A lot of the existing co-working spaces seem to be serving a limited sliver of the startup community," says Spencer, whose company wants to help transit systems sell advertising on the back of riders' passes. "They have tech or mobile companies as tenants." Startup BLVD Allston hopes to attract a broader range of entrepreneurial ventures, including retail and service-based businesses.

And, adds Enrique Shadah, the founder of Startup BLVD, it will also actively seek to attract minority entrepreneurs. "I am Latino and have a solid connection to the Latino community in Boston," Shadah writes via e-mail. "Also, I sit on the Entrepreneurship Committee of the newly-created New Americans Alliance Institute. We are also connected to New England's Minority Supplier Diversity Council and the state's Supplier Diversity Office."

"Our goal is to connect to all of these channels and ask them to invite their constituencies to join our community," Shadah explains. "Being located in Allston is helpful, because there is a large population of immigrants and minorities." The Startup BLVD Allston space is on Linden Street, not far from the Pizzeria Regina on the Mass Pike, and a short distance from Harvard Square.

A membership that offers access to the new space — including snacks, coffee, conference rooms, and business-class Internet — costs $150 a month, but renting a dedicated desk starts at $400 a month. (A photo of a dedicated desk, in which you can store your stuff, is above.) That's a good bit cheaper than Workbar, a co-working space located near South Station, where dedicated desks go for $500 a month.

"We think this can be a place that benefits both the community and the businesses themselves," says Spencer.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

"Not every charity runs its own thrift stores, and the ones that do can get more value for an item by selling it through us," says Christine Rizk, Fashion Project's co-founder and chief operating officer. (She's on the right, with CEO Anna Palmer on the left.) "We tell people that we want stuff that would re-sell for $40 or more, and on the web site, we list some sample brands. About 80 percent of the stuff we get is sellable."

Non-profits can sign up on the site to have their supporters send in merchandise. And individuals can request a postage-paid donation bag to be sent to their house, fill it with items, and designate a charity that will benefit from their sale. (Donors get a tax receipt directly from the charity.) Both non-profits and individuals can see a tally of how much they've raised on Fashion Project. "Your closet can make a huge impact," Palmer says.

The site has collected about $17,000 in inventory already, though today it only features women's apparel and accessories. Palmer says they'll add men's merch eventually. Fashion Project takes 40 percent of the sale price, and passes along 60 percent to the charity.

Rizk and Palmer met while earning their law degrees at Harvard; they both graduated in 2011. Working alongside them as Fashion Project's chief marketing officer is fashion and social media maven Michelle McCormack, who organizes the annual Fashion's Night Out event. The company has five employees, and offices in the Leather District. Fashion Project has raised $200,000 so far from individual angels, and the founders hope to raise another $200,000 to $250,000 later this year. They're planning a promotion this summer that would encourage Bostonians to donate to the site in exchange for getting a discount on new merchandise at numerous Newbury Street retailers.

(In the photo, Palmer is wearing a jacket from Emporio Armani and holding a Kate Spade clutch; Rizk is wearing a dress by Diane von Furstenberg.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Some interesting tidbits: 7 percent of students think working at a startup "makes me sexier"; 22 percent say their romantic partner "puts up with a lot." Fifty-two percent of students are interested in startups. Forty-eight percent of students say that more money — presumably funding — would encourage more students to devote themselves to startups.

And among adults, 38 percent say they started their venture "based on a crazy idea they had while in college." Twenty-three percent eat at least seven meals at their desk every week. Yikes...

(I edited the above graphic to eliminate some data points I found less relevant, like how many cups of coffee students drink per day and how much sleep they get. Here's the full version.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

(Photo above courtesy Mick Murray.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

From the piece:

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Murfie

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

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

FULL ENTRY

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

Rooting for Them to Take Over the World award

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

Seems Like the Next 'Guitar Hero' award

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Among the things we discussed:

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

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

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

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

- How and whether to offer an exclusive

- Getting covered by influential bloggers and Tweeters

- PR Newswire, Business Wire, and social media releases

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

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

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Here's who participated (along with links to their Kickstarter pages)

- Cambridge singer-songwriter Ariel Rubin, who funded her EP "Big Spoon" on Kickstarter

- Journalist Bill Lichtenstein, making a documentary film called "The American Revolution"

- Brad Geswein (pictured at right holding a prototype) and Slava Menn of Gotham Bicycle Defense Industries

- Coulter Lewis of Quinn Popcorn

We talked about some of the factors that get people you don't know contributing to your campaign; the right length for Kickstarter campaigns, and the right target amount; how you can get blogs and other media to help promote your campaign; and some of the headaches that can arise when you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of donors. And Rubin started things off by singing a great song.

The audio is below. You can stream it here, or click "mp3" to download it for later listening. (Related content: "How Supermechanical raised $550,000 for a new wireless device — without VCs or angel investors.")

Above, from left: Scott Kirsner, musician Ariel Rubin, Brad Geswein and Slava Menn of Gotham Bicycle Defense, filmmaker Bill Lichtenstein, and Coulter Lewis of Quinn Popcorn. (Photo above courtesy of Keith Spiro Photography.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

And Rae and Reed Sturtevant, who helps run the Boston program, say they are hoping to expand its focus, explicitly inviting robotics, bio informatics, health IT, digital manufacturing and edutech companies to apply. The fall program will begin in September.

"The main driver for increasing the frequency of the program is the high quality of companies applying," Rae says. "We also have an incredible mentor network that grows every year, and I think we're personally getting better at running the program. Doing it twice a year lets us have a continuous staff." The spring TechStars Boston program, taking place now, has been held for four years now.

I asked why they wouldn't just expand the size of the spring session, from a dozen to 20 or 25 companies. "We think that core to our model is working with a small group of companies, and enabling them to have lots of one-on-one sessions," Rae said.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The store will feature a selection of products from local startups and student-run businesses, and the goal of the POPstart concept is to help those kinds of companies reach consumers and test out new concepts without the expense of setting up their own retail presence. "While a start-up would normally not have the resources to maintain a permanent brick and mortar presence — particularly on Newbury Street — POPstart provides that chance by aggregating the collective resources of startups," explains Josh Plavner, one of the HBS students working on the project as part of the school's FIELD initiative, which promotes entrepreneurship through the creation of "micro-businesses."

You'll be able to find POPstart at 328 Newbury Street on April 21st and 22nd. It'll be open from 11 AM to 7 PM.

Why only two days? "We wanted to test out a minimum viable product to see if this concept resonated as much with start-ups and consumers as we think it will," says Plavner, adding, "We are really trying to prove out the concept and then evaluate how to take it to the next level on a more permanent basis."

The companies whose products will be featured are:

• 9 Tailors – Bespoke suit and custom tailoring experience for men
• Breakup Box – Gift box for newly-single women
• Cocomama Foods – Gluten-free breakfast cereal
• Ministry of Supply – High-tech men’s business apparel
• Plug Love – Decorative plugs for earphone jacks and smartphones
• Quiyk – Performance athletic apparel with a specialization in quidditch gear
• Survitalize – Interview “survival kit” for college and graduate students going through the job interview process
• Tav Cashmere – Socially-responsible sourcing for cashmere products
• Zeo – Bedside sleep management system

The staff at POPstart will be using mobile credit card readers from Square to take payments for products, and representatives of some of the startups will be present — for instance, 9 Tailors employees will be taking measurements for their custom shirts.

I'll definitely be stopping by to check it out...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The New York-based site lets artists, designers, and entrepreneurs set a fundraising goal and essentially run an online telethon; backers at various levels get different kinds of payouts, from a digital download of an album to a limited edition iPad case.

I'd missed the fact that last year, two Berklee College of Music students used the site to raise $7,200; the money went toward recording and making a video for "The Boston Song," a pop anthem for the city.

And just yesterday, Tufts student Brett Andler e-mailed about his Kickstarter project: trying to raise $10,000 for a game called Whozit. It's a version of the guessing game "Guess Who" that taps into your collection of Facebook friends.

I've written here about how the MIT spin-out Supermechanical used Kickstarter to raise $550,000 to design a new kind of wireless sensor, and also talked about the larger crowdfunding trend in my Boston Globe column.

And later this month, the folks at the Venture Café in Cambridge have put together an interesting panel that I'm moderating: "Killing It On Kickstarter: Running successful campaigns for new products and creative projects." It features four entrepreneurs and artists who've used the site to raise money for everything from a new brand of microwave popcorn to a documentary about the heyday of radio station WBCN ($114,000!). It's free, and it happens on April 19th from 6 to 7 PM. Hope to see you there...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The book reads like a catalog of all of the choices that can either sink a start-up, or help it build momentum — choices around how to divide ownership among the founding team, who should serve on the board, and whether to take money from "friends and family" or professional investors. Wasserman has spent hours interviewing the founders of companies like Zipcar, Proteus Biomedical, Pandora, and Twitter, and he shares their experiences in the book, without sugar-coating them.

I sat down with Wasserman last week in his office at HBS. We talked about founder's dilemmas in general (65 percent of them, he said, have to do with interpersonal issues among founders), and some of the specific companies he has studied, including Sittercity (founded by Genevieve Thiers, a Boston College grad), 38 Studios (the gaming company started by Curt Schilling), and Twitter. The audio runs about a half-hour. You can click play, or click "mp3" to download the file for later listening.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

"They feel that a high-margin sale is much more likely if they can get you there in person," says John Connors, chief executive of Boathouse Media in Waltham. "They do have a price matrix where they know what they'd like to get for each vehicle, but they just don't want to put it on the web."

A new site that Boathouse has developed, Speedbilly, wants to change that, creating a kind of Kayak for new car prices, enabling shoppers to compare the price for the same vehicle with the same options across various dealerships. "When I was buying a Honda Odyssey for my family, I had the experience of no one wanting to give me a specific price in an e-mail until I really pushed them for it," says Connors. "We felt that if we could fix the car-buying experience, that's a pretty big opportunity." (Boathouse is a 45-person marketing agency that works with clients like Merrill Lynch, Thermo Fisher, and Harvard Business School.)

The site's official launch won't happen until later in March, but a beta version is up and running. When it launches, Speedbilly will include inventory from 20 dealers in eastern Massachusetts who sell just four brands: Toyota, Honda, Nissan, and Hyundai. Many other dealers likely want to wait and see how the site performs.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Founders John Clifford and Trevor Schwartz met in a pretty unusual place: while working on the factory floor at Raytheon, building sub-assemblies for Patriot missile radar systems. Clifford went on to earn an MBA at Boston College, and Schwartz is currently pursuing a degree in MIT's Leaders for Global Operations program.

In the company's test phase, they've been limiting sales to 20 passes at each venue. At $50, a pass gets two people into the venue without paying the cover or waiting in line, and also includes $50 in food and beverage credit. Passes can be purchased online as late as 9 PM on the night when you plan to use them, or bought a few days in advance. Schwartz says that even on nights when you arrive to find that there's no line, the pass can be a good deal, since it saves you the club's cover charge.

Schwartz says that venues start off with a free trial of the service, and then at some point start cutting Line Genie in on 10 percent of the pass revenues. "This is a way for them to know that they're going to get at least a certain level of spending from people who come in the door," Schwartz says. Already, the company has sold about 700 passes — many to groups of people (think bachelor and bachelorette parties) going out together.

Schwartz says the company is in discussions with a number of additional venues.

(The Daily Free Press at Boston University profiled the company recently, and found that college students seem to like the idea.)

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

That's the premise of a new Cambridge start-up, Of Course Meals, which is cranking up operations this week. The company delivers a bag of prepped ingredients to your home on Sunday evening. Inside the bag are the items you need to make two, three, or four meals for a family of four. The proposition is that you spend less time grocery shopping, and less time cooking (the meals take about a half-hour to cook), but still provide healthy, home-cooked food for your family. The pricing starts at $60 a week, which covers two dinners for four people. Consumers get to choose whether the meals feature beef, chicken, seafood, or just veggies. The dishes, which include coconut curry chicken and Asian salmon, sound pretty tasty. (It's also getting close to lunchtime...)

"Our mission is that we want to make it easier for families to enjoy meals together, and remove some of the stress for working parents, who tend to start worrying about what's for dinner every weekday around 3 p.m.," says Tom Furber, chief executive of Of Course. "No one wants to come home to hungry kids and chaos."

The company is launching its delivery service in Cambridge and Arlington. (If you order by midnight tonight, you can be part of the first wave of deliveries this Sunday.) You can order week by week, or save a little money by signing up for an on-going subscription.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I'd written about the company a couple times, so I was interested to see how it performed from the consumer's perspective.

The first thing that caught my interest with TurningArt was that at some point, I'd started receiving daily e-mails from the company showcasing the new artists in its collection. The collection is primarily paintings and photography by living artists, much of it with a contemporary, slightly edgy feel. There were a few artists whose work caught my eye. I bought one small original painting from one of the artist's Etsy storefronts for $50. The other artist I liked was selling paintings at a higher price point, and I thought that signing up for TurningArt would be a good way to "test drive" what they might look like in my home.

TurningArt offers two different pricing plans: for $10 a month, you get its standard 16-by-20 inch frame, or for $30 a month you can get a larger 24-by-30 inch frame. Both subscription plans include a free black gallery-style frame with a white mat, and the opportunity to rotate the artwork as frequently as you like. The art you receive is an unsigned, unnumbered "museum quality" print. As with Netflix, you have a queue of artwork you'd like to rent on the website, and the shipping costs are included in the subscription package. Unlike Netflix, you can request your next piece without sending back the one that's in the frame; instead, you use the cardboard box that the new print comes in to send the old one back.

Update: Bolt has found about 10,000 square feet of space at 110 Chauncy Street in downtown Boston (at street level and below ground). In February 2013, the program told the SEC that it has so far raised $3.5 million in launch funding. Bolt's website says that it will "accept 10 teams for the Winter 2013 class. Teams must relocate to our facility in Boston and spend a majority of their time here for the duration of the 6 month program." The word "winter" there would suggest that they may soon announce who'll be part of this first crop of startups...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Ben Einstein, right, wants to change that. He's out raising money and laying the groundwork for a new accelerator program, Bolt, that would focus exclusively on entrepreneurs who want to design physical products. Einstein, previously a principal at the product design consultancy Brainstream, moved from Northampton to Boston last month to make Bolt a reality.

Einstein says that Bolt will focus on "connected devices," including consumer electronics and robotics, but avoid medical devices and other products that would require extensive, blank-sheet-of-paper engineering. "We're thinking mostly about off-the-shelf components being combined in new ways, where you might have a new device that works with a web service, or plugs into a mobile phone," he says. Bolt's offices will include useful tools that the chosen entrepreneurs will have access to, such as drill presses, band saws, 3-D printers, PCB prototyping equipment, and CNC milling machines.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

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

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."

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Already, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York has begun calling the product dangerous to teens; Schumer wrote a letter to the Food & Drug Administration in December suggesting that the product would encourage excessive caffeine intake, and could be used in combination with alcohol to fuel binge drinking.

We got some early AeroShot samples, started the video cameras, and huffed away. Each inhaler is supposed to deliver about 100 milligrams of caffeine — equivalent to a cup of coffee — along with B vitamins and Niacin. There was a noticeable buzz after a few puffs, but the powder's limey flavor was overpowered by an aggressive bitterness from the caffeine. The flavor lingers in your mouth for longer than you'd like, and it resembles lime Fun Dip blended with crushed aspirin. The overall effect is much more medicinal than enjoyable.

Here's the taste test I conducted recently with Boston.com senior business producer Joe Allen-Black.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Just out from John Wiley & Sons, "The Power in a Link" is a 159-page guide to "changing the way you do business using LinkedIn." It covers topics like how to set up a profile that represents you well; the best way to collect recommendations from people with whom you've worked; how to conduct advanced searches if you're hunting for new employees or key business development contacts; and how to think about your status updates on the widely-used social network.

But it also offers three-and-a-half pages on how Gowel stalked me — albeit politely — to tell me about the LinkedIn training services he was offering in 2009, and get me to write a column that featured him. After Gowel started following me on Twitter, reading my blog, and scoping out our mutual LinkedIn contacts, he went to a breakfast panel I'd helped to organize. He writes:

...I arrived at the event early, thinking that if Scott was hosting, he'd be there early as well, and he was. I struck up a conversation in the least harassing way possible by talking about things he'd written, making sure to insert our mutual connections into the brief conversation: "I noticed via LinkedIn that you know Tim Rowe and Jeff Bussgang; how do you know them?"

Truthfully, it's not bad advice for connecting with any journalist: we remember face-to-face meetings much better than e-mails or phone calls, and it sure doesn't hurt to have read some of our recent writing so you know what we cover. (As opposed to asking, "What kind of stories do you write?")

Here's a 2009 column I wrote after meeting Gowel, "Make better introductions." It offers ten pieces of advice for using LinkedIn effectively.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

On New York, Harthorne says, "There's a lot of money, and a big media presence. We've been talking to billionaire types and major corporate entities." While there's no anchor funder yet for a Manhattan-based MassChallenge, Harthorne says there are several interested parties. (Among the benefactors who have supported MassChallenge in Boston are Sycamore Networks founder Desh Deshpande and Vertex Pharmaceuticals founder Josh Boger.)

Co-founder Akhil Nigam traveled to London in November to discuss the potential of a second MassChallenge program operating there. And when I caught up with Harthorne by phone yesterday, he was at Logan Airport on his way to Brazil, where he was participating in the state's "Innovation Economy Mission." "Brazil would be an interesting place for us," he said.

Though the Boston program received applications from 733 start-up teams this year (up from 446 in its inaugural year), there is the question of whether a second site for MassChallenge would dilute the quality of entrants. And also whether state agencies that have offered financial support to MassChallenge here would continue to feel that MassChallenge was doing enough to boost economic development in Massachusetts if it was simultaneously doing the same thing in New York. Harthorne acknowledges the political sensitivities, and says he has talked with city and state officials already. He believes that a New York program "could be complementary to both locations. Boston and New York both have a common enemy, which is California, and all of the hype that surrounds Silicon Valley."

Three things make the MassChallenge different from collegiate business plan competitions, or accelerator programs like Y Combinator and TechStars. First, MassChallenge is open to all sorts of start-ups, whether they're developing biotech drugs or shoes or gluten-free cereal. Second is size: they offer free office space and mentorship to more than 100 companies each year. And third, the prize pool of $1 million, doled out in $50,000 and $100,000 chunks to a chosen few companies, comes with no strings attached; MassChallenge doesn't take equity in the companies that win.

The program's 2011 winners are listed here.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Here are ten I've encountered this month, in no particular order:

- Campus Libre founder Pat de Santis graduated from WPI earlier this year, and he's trying to solve a problem every college student has encountered: the high price of textbooks. Campus Libre offers students a way to buy and sell used textbooks from other students at their school; the company hopes to generate revenues from referral fees, when students can't find a suitable used text and decide to buy a new one online.

- Brendan Smith launched Bizulu, a new twist on online auctions, last month. "eBay was built in 1995, when Al Gore had just invented the Internet," Smith jokes. "We built Bizulu for generation instant gratification. They want to get in and get out." Auctions on Bizulu last exactly ten minutes, and there are interesting competitive ways to "blitz" other bidders, reducing the amount of their bid, over several rounds of bidding.

- Ever been to an event — maybe a wedding or graduation party — where everyone seemed to be snapping pictures, but only a few surfaced afterward on Facebook or Flickr? Junctions, from John Hoopes and James Rogers, wants to solve that problem with a new iPhone app that lets you produce, organize, and share group photo albums.

- Mads Srinivasan, a recent graduate of MIT's Sloan School of Management, is working on Neemware, a tool to gather user feedback and market research information within mobile apps. Srinivasan says he's talking to a number of app developers now (Neemware is rolling out first for iPhones), and adds that he may try to raise money for the start-up soon.

- Dave McLaughlin's start-up, Vsnap, was part of this year's crop of MassChallenge companies. Vsnap is geared to sending short, person-to-person video messages via e-mail — 60 seconds max — using the Webcam on your computer, and including related documents like a product info sheet or photo.

- CoPatient, from Rebecca Palm and Katie Vahle, offers to help analyze your medical bills, spot mistakes, and negotiate for fairer rates if you're being billed more for a service than is typical. They either work on contingency — taking 30 percent of the amount they save you — or you can buy a $50 monthly subscription. (Both Vahle and Palm are employees of athenahealth, a Watertown company that helps doctors wring money from insurance companies.)

- Groupize helps small groups find hotel rooms, book buses, and make restaurant reservations. Founder Charles de Gaspeau Beaubien has worked in tourism for his entire career.

- Fivi is a "personal wellness community" that encourages you to set and manage your fitness goals. There are also videos on topics like preventing injuries and controlling your sodium intake. Nabil Aidoud, a former consultant at IBM Global Services, is the founder.

- With CollegeGolfPass, Kris Hart is trying to make the links, lessons, and driving ranges more accessible to college students.

- Lindsey Witmer describes MyOmBody as "a holistic health coach in the palm of your hand." Does eating slowly with others improve your mood? How much exercise does it take to reduce your stress level? The start-up's mobile app, now in a testing phase with iPhone users, will help track those dynamics.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The company was founded by David Edwards, a professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard who earlier in his career was involved with Advanced Inhalation Research, a start-up that worked on turning drugs like human growth hormone into powders that could be inhaled, rather than injected. (That business is now known as Civitas.) Another Edwards company, Pulmatrix, is developing inhalable drugs to fight respiratory infections.

AeroShots will cost $2.99, and they contain a blend of caffeine, Vitamin B, natural sweeteners like Stevia, and natural lime flavor, all distilled into tiny particles that are about 10 microns in size. (At that size, they dissolve in your mouth and are swallowed, rather than entering your lungs, the company says.) Each lipstick tube-sized inhaler contains between 4 and 6 puffs. You can use it a puff at a time, or all at once if you're feeling especially dilapidated. One AeroShot contains about 100 milligrams of caffeine — roughly the same as an average cup of coffee.

Breathable Foods will also market another product Edwards developed and launched in 2009: Le Whif, a calorie-free chocolate inhaler. Edwards tells me that without much marketing, 400,000 Le Whifs were sold in 2010, mainly to women. Another product in development is Le Whaf. "It's a carafe that you can pour a liquid like orange juice or a martini into, and it forms a cloud of flavor that you can put into a glass, and sip out with a straw," Edwards explains. "When you use it with something like whiskey, it gives you the essence of the experience, while the alcohol content is small."

Edwards says the company will be developing other products that can deliver flavor without calories, or nutritional supplements without having to pop a pill. Edwards says that Breathable Foods' products are intended to appeal to people "interested in the new."

Noubar Afeyan, managing director at Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, says that his firm invested in Breathable Foods because "we think that the platform could be used to deliver nutrients and health-related products" in a convenient way — and in a product that isn't stringently regulated by the FDA, as are many of the biotech and pharma companies Flagship usually backs. (The FDA considers Breathable Foods' products to be GRAS substances, or things "generally regarded as safe.")

Terry McGuire of Polaris calls Breathable Foods "a novel approach to an enormous industry... Proof that we as venture capitalists should always be on the frontier of where science meets life." His firm is also invested in Living Proof, perhaps the only MIT spin-out company, ever, to make hair care products.

I just got a few AeroShot samples delivered to my office; I'm planning to try one tomorrow morning instead of my morning cup of coffee. I'll let you know how it goes...

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Uber is a way to summon a town car using an app on your mobile phone. For livery drivers, it's a way to fill in extra work at times when they might otherwise be sitting around. And for consumers, it's a way to get a ride in a car that's more spacious and better-maintained than your typical cab. And the Uber app also provides better information about when exactly you'll be picked up.

Here's how it worked for me...

As my 1:30 PM coffee meeting in Kendall Square was wrapping up, I opened the Uber app on my iPhone. I'd already set up an account, giving Uber my credit card information. The iPhone's built-in GPS knew just about where I was, but Uber's app gave me the opportunity to adjust my location to the exact spot on the map where I was sitting. (Voltage Cafe, at 303 Third Street.) It told me that a driver named Hassan would arrive in about ten minutes, and that Hassan had received a 4.9 star rating from other passengers.

I left the app open on my phone, and could watch on the map as Hassan's vehicle made its way from Boston across the river.

You don't tell Uber where you're going — the company doesn't want its drivers to accept or reject passengers based on their destination — and so one drawback is that the app doesn't really give you a sense in advance for how much the ride will cost. (Uber tries to position its service as slightly more expensive than a cab, but far less expensive than a traditional car service.)

Exactly ten minutes later, I saw Hassan's car pull up outside. I told him where I was going, and we set off down Memorial Drive toward Brookline. Suction-cupped to his car's windshield was an iPhone supplied by Uber, which relayed rider requests to him, and allowed him to accept or reject them based on whether he was available. The car was spotless, and Hassan was attired in a blue suit and natty striped tie.

There's a $7 base charge as soon as you get into an Uber car, plus time and distance charges. (Uber charges a distance fee when the car is traveling faster than 11 miles per hour, and a time fee below that speed.) The final fee includes any tolls as well as a tip, and is automatically billed to your credit card.

When I arrived at my destination, the total — $23 — showed up on my phone, and shortly after on Hassan's. We both had the opportunity to rate one another on a scale of one to five stars. (I gave Hassan five stars.) By the time I opened my laptop at my home office, Uber had e-mailed me a receipt: $7 base fare, $14.56 distance, and $2.21 time, for a total of $23. (They round down to the nearest dollar.) Uber takes 20 percent off the top, with the driver receiving the rest.

The cost of my Uber ride was comparable to what it would've cost to hail a Cambridge cab. That would've run me about $18.40 without a tip. When I tried to get an estimate for how much it would cost to arrange for a Boston Coach sedan to do the trip, the company's Web site told me that arranging for a car in 15 minutes would be impossible. But with an hour's notice, the Cambridge-to-Brookline trip would've cost $111, including tip.

I mainly try to travel around Boston using public transportation, my bike, and occasionally, my own car or a Zipcar. I rarely use taxis or town cars. I can definitely envision myself summoning an Uber car when I'm pressed for time, or traveling a route that requires multiple T transfers. Also, for airport or train station trips when I'm schlepping lots of luggage.

Based on this first experience, I liked getting a more spacious and spiffier car than the typical Boston or Cambridge cab, and knowing exactly when it would arrive. And the price felt like a good value — a town car experience at a yellow cab price point. All that was missing was the Wall Street Journal waiting for me on the seat...

Uber feels like a car service designed for the 99 percent.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The winds shifted a bit in 2011, with Polaris announcing that it had raised a new $375 million investment fund — much smaller than the $1 billion it had collected in 2006. (The firm had initially hoped to raise a tidy half-billion, but the market didn't cooperate.) Shortly after that, partners began to splinter off from the firm, including Mike Hirshland, the guy who'd developed the Dogpatch Labs concept in the first place.

Also, over the last two years, while about 150 75 companies have circulated through the Dogpatch Cambridge space, Polaris has found just one company in which to invest: Biff Labs, a stealthy search-and-social media related start-up that recently graduated out of Dogpatch and into its own Central Square office space. (Biff's founders had previously worked together at Microsoft's New England R&D outpost, on social media oriented projects like Bing.com's Twitter search.) For context, Polaris has put money into nine start-ups that gestated in the Dogpatch Labs offices in California and New York. [Update: Dogpatch has 40 alumni companies and 35 currently in the facility. The original 150 number earlier in this paragraph was my mistake.]

Dogpatch Cambridge is great for the local innovation scene, but is it meeting Polaris' expectations — and more importantly, those "limited partners" who give Polaris money to invest?

To see where things stand, I got in touch with David Barrett, the Polaris partner who oversees the Cambridge location. He served up some stats from the first two years, and underscored Polaris' commitment to keep supporting the space.

- While Polaris has made just one bet at Dogpatch Cambridge, 22 companies that have shacked up there have received seed funding so far, and 11 have raised bigger "Series A" rounds.

- Dogpatch Cambridge is currently home to 110 people working on 35 different companies. There are about 100 companies on the waiting list to get in.

- The typical length of stay is between six and nine months. Of the 40 companies that have moved out of Dogpatch Cambridge, Barrett says roughly 90 percent are still alive and kicking.

- The typical seed round for a company at Dogpatch Cambridge has been $500,000 to $750,000. Series A fundings for Cambridge companies have ranged from $1.5 million to $8.5 million.

- There are over 30 open jobs with companies at Dogpatch Labs Cambridge.

- Over $140 million has been invested in companies across all four of the Dogpatch Labs locations.

- While Polaris has only made one investment in a Dogpatch Cambridge denizen, other firms have rushed into the void, including Venrock, Spark Capital, Shasta Ventures, CommonAngels, and NextView Ventures. So the early worries about "signaling risk" — what will other investors think if I move into Dogpatch but Polaris chooses not to invest in my start-up — seem to have dissipated.

Earlier this month, Gus Weber, an entrepreneur-in-residence who helps Barrett run Dogpatch Cambridge, posted this status update, which reports on some recent fundings and new residents.

I asked Barrett how Polaris evaluates the success of the various Dogpatch locations (Cambridge, New York, Palo Alto, and Dublin). His reply:

We measure success by asking several questions:

• Is our DPL location a strong community, with residents and mentors supporting each other?
• What is the quality of ideas we are seeing?
• Have we created a magnet for other investors and repeat entrepreneurs?
• Are we contributing to a richer, deeper ecosystem in each community in which we operate?
• Are we seeing a good ratio of financings and acquisitions?
• Are we building deeper relationships over a “rationalized” period of time with entrepreneurs we find to be compelling?

We think the track record across each of these measures is strong.

...Dogpatch is attracting very high quality, repeat entrepreneurs that have typically shied away from traditional incubator/co-working type spaces.

For us, Dogpatch has proven to us that it's a great vehicle for meeting, building relationships with, and working closely with next-gen entrepreneurs. For potential investment now as well as down the road as they continue to progress.

For entrepreneurs, our “open source” construct has proven very attractive as it enables relationships to be built with a cross-section of investors, advisors and mentors.

...The feedback we’ve received is that all of our DPL communities are contributing to a richer ecosystem in each operating area. We believe you'd hear from folks in Cambridge that we've been active participants in the area’s ecosystem — and active partners in helping all DPL companies succeed (regardless of [Polaris] investment).

Lastly, as we look at potential DPL investments, it goes without saying that it’s about quality of fit — not quantity...

Dogpatch gives Polaris a view into the where/what/how compelling innovation is happening. It gives us a great opportunity to share networks, learnings and experiences with entrepreneurs. And to help catalyze them to do so with each other.

Bottom-line, we’re early stage investors with a long-term view. Building these relationships helps us to not only help support the community at-large — but also helps to make us better investors for Seed, Series A & Series B opportunities today and down the road.

I asked Barrett whether his firm is committed to keeping the Cambridge location going indefinitely. (Here I should note that Microsoft, as a sponsor of Dogpatch Cambridge, underwrites the cost of rent, with Polaris paying utilities and other operating costs... so the space isn't a huge commitment for the VC firm.) "We're 'all in' with Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge and the other Dogpatch Labs communities," he said.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

That’s the question I’ve been wondering about lately, as I see so many people toiling at two-person companies. Maybe they’re relying on their own savings, or maybe they’ve raised a few hundred thousand dollars from angel investors. Some of them win admittance to programs that try to help young companies gain momentum, like TechStars Boston or MassChallenge.

But a lot of them were two-person companies last year too, and the year before that. At the same time, many of Boston’s most promising companies with 100 or more employees have a tough time hiring. Could too much of Boston’s talent be stuck in start-ups that are going nowhere?

“The inability to recruit enough bright software developers is definitely a governor on growth,’’ says Brian Halligan, chief executive of the Internet marketing firm HubSpot, which has 280 employees.

“It’s a constraint in Boston, and it’s a huge constraint in Silicon Valley,’’ he said. “Right now, the alternative to working for a company like ours is to go out and start your own.’’

I wanted to share some perspectives from entrepreneurs and VCs whose thoughts didn't make it into the column. Some agree that we're seeing a start-up surplus in Boston, and some disagree vehemently that this is any kind of problem. As Carbonite CEO David Friend puts it, "What are you going to tell the next ambitious inventor or engineer? 'There are already too many startups. Forget that dream. Go back to your job at Raytheon.'"

Antonio Rodriguez, General Partner, Matrix Partners

I agree with you that [the surfeit of startups] seems to be a problem of the current boom...

I think the unfortunate consequence of all of this is going to be a whole swath of potentially really good entrepreneurs that, at best, move on to do something else after their thinly-staffed startup doesn't make it, with a hole in their resumes and at worst, burn out on the whole startup thing and go into investment banking or some equally valueless career track.

One other thought for you: this is a wildly unpopular thing to write about. When I talk to entrepreneurs, I often mention the importance of "execution context" in entrepreneurial success, arguing that it pays to go to an already humming startup for a few years to get some relevant perspective on a customer/market/etc. I think for the most part they look at me like the old guy who doesn't get that everyone can be Zuck these days.

Randy Battat, CEO, Airvana

Too many start-ups? That's a bit of a strange concept. As you know, my beef is that there are not enough anchor tech companies in Boston. But that's another topic...

My view is that it's all about supply and demand. If there is demand for engineers, there will be supply — in the long run. In the short run, there are the classic economic short-term problems. Bubbles can form, as in 1999-2000 when too many companies got funded in *every* tech space — routers, optical, search engines, B2B, mobile infrastructure, etc. There was too much money funding too many companies going after the same ideas, and very few were successful. But there were always plenty of engineers available to fill the openings.

The bloom has fallen off the engineering rose in the last few years. It's not obvious that engineering is the direct path to riches that it was a decade ago, so supply is certainly less than it was when demand felt infinite. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Supply and demand always end up in equilibrium, price being the great equalizer.

And price is really about opportunity and excitement. I've never agreed with those who whine that hiring good engineers is hard. If a company is working on interesting stuff and the opportunity is compelling, then good people will kill to join.

Too many start-ups? I doubt it. Too few really good ones? Always.

David Friend, CEO, Carbonite

There is a shortage of engineers, and I have been complaining about that for decades. And in Massachusetts, we're in relatively good shape, with MIT just around the corner. After Sputnik, it was suddenly cool to study science and engineering. Today it's not so cool, and many science and engineering majors go on for MBAs and look for work in the financial world. Too bad, because we need them to be designing products. You'd need to compile some statistics, but I doubt that the allure of startups is making a significant dent in the number of engineers available to work at companies like Carbonite.

I would never discourage anyone from trying a startup. What are you going to tell the next ambitious inventor or engineer? "There are already too many startups. Forget that dream. Go back to your job at Raytheon." I don't think so. And I don't think it's really all that easy to pry a couple hundred grand out of angels or funds. You still have to have a good idea and convince some smart people that you can actually deliver.

As for hiring good engineers at Carbonite, yes, it is hard to find good ones. There just aren't enough people studying science and engineering. With a strong anti-science current in society coupled with fast money in other professions, it shouldn't be a surprise. The best and brightest will often go where the money is (or was). Too many lawyers, too many investment bankers. I'll bet some of them are now wishing they had stayed in engineering.

John Prendergast, CEO, Blueleaf

I don't think that we have too many startups for the overall ecosystem, it's a self-balancing system. Resources go to the strongest and get pulled from the weakest. Those that fail often go on to become part of another startup, better for what they learned, and the ecosystem is stronger as a result.

For me, the larger issue is that real talent is always in short supply in concentrated markets like the Valley, Boston and New York. The best talent always have choices. In times with higher demand...the competition seems to actually change more noticeably for engineers of more average ability.

More broadly though, startups employ a relatively small percentage of the talent even in concentrated markets. The larger issue is that startups compete with large companies for talent, and that trade-off choice changes based on market conditions. In addition, needed skills change relatively quickly compared to people's training and it's particularly acute at startups, which typically work on the newest technology.

On your closing point, "Is it a constraint to growth that talent is spread too thin in Boston?" Attracting the right talent is a constraint for every company trying to innovate in every market. However, if you're a company in Boston or the Valley and you're limiting your talent search only to your local market, you're already behind the competition. The best companies search for talent globally.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The new Cambridge Co-Working Center (C3) space is just under 5700 square feet — about twice as big as the original co-working area, which opened in 2009. (As HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah notes in the comments below, the fourth-floor real estate was formerly the home of his digital marketing start-up — until HubSpot outgrew it.) The new "czar of co-working" at the Cambridge Innovation Center is Sidi Gomes, an entrepreneur and alum of Harvard's Graduate School of Design. There's a champagne toast planned at 4 p.m. today to inaugurate the new space.

Some pics:

Sherry Zhao, who is overseeing the iCollaborative space. She says six students have already won admission to it.

Near the entry to C3, a flat-panel TV with videogame consoles and comfy seats.

Aside from the Aeron chairs, most of the furniture comes from IKEA.

I am pretty sure I could eat $250 worth of the complimentary Oreos every month.

There are bunkbeds for those who need a refreshing nap after a late night of user interface design. "Naps are a very high-productivity thing," Warner says.

A blackboard calendar will be filled with two months' worth of upcoming events. The rolls of brown paper in the middle are intended for sketching schematics and group brainstorming.

Entrepreneur Nick Tomarrello of Escapist was responsible for outfitting the Anything Goes Lab.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Jessica Kim raised $1.2 million for the company just last month, and the very first of its BabbaBoxes began shipping last week. (Boston's NextView Ventures was among the investors in BabbaCo.)

What's a BabbaBox? It's a collection of activities geared to three- to six-year old children that you can order a la carte, or have sent to your house on a monthly basis. "The concept is that we work with preschool educators to select what goes in and develop activities, and the boxes will be customized to the age of your child," Kim says. A single box costs $30; an annual subscription is $300. Though Kim is now based in Boston, five other BabbaCo employees still work from Chicago.

The sample box she showed me had an insect theme. It included craft materials to make a ladybug and a butterfly — and learn about their anatomy in the process. There was a plastic magnifying jar, intended for collecting bugs and inspecting them up close, and a hardcover book called "Earl the Earthworm Digs for His Life" (signed by the author.) There were coloring sheets about butterflies, and an iTunes Store credit for a specific app — Paint My Wings — that works on iPads or iPhones. Plus, there's always a small gift inside for the mom. (This box, appropriately, included some lip balm from Burt's Bees.)

"We include everything you need for the activities, too," Kim says. "I'm a busy mom, and I hate the 'batteries not included' thing." She emphasizes that the BabbaCo team strives to include products that most families won't already own: "The book we send you will never be 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar.' Everyone seems to have three copies of that already." Kim has two children, ages four-and-a-half and nineteen months. (Her husband is a hand surgeon at Beth Israel.)

While Kim just arrived in town, and just banked more than a million bucks, she has been having some introductory conversations with local VCs. "We know competitors are coming out, so I've been talking to a couple VCs now, just to know what our options are," she says. Kim seems like she's expecting some sharp elbows in the market for selling kids activities by subscription.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

"Plastic bottles last forever," says Park, who has been raising money for a new beverage start-up called Greater Good. "We're trying to create a new brand of beverage that is better for the environment, with contents that are better for you, and a company that gives back to society. We think all brands of the future will represent that." Park is best-known as the founder of Newton-based Custom Clothing Technology Corp., a pioneer of the "mass customization" movement that was acquired in 1995 by Levi Strauss & Company to crank out custom-fit jeans. He has also served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the product design firm IDEO.

Greater Good is working on a package made from cardboard and plant materials. "The cornerstone of the product is the packaging," says Park. "It's compostable and biodegradable." The company is considering selling water and other beverages, including some fortified with Vitamin D. "It's hard to get, and incredibly good for you," Park says of the vitamin.

Park says he has assembled a group of advisors for the new venture that includes current and former executives of PepsiCo, Trader Joes, and Honest Tea, as well as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Early investors include John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures and Woody Benson of Prism VentureWorks. "We're still out grubbing for money," Park says.

"We believe that in every product category, there will be an 'eco' segment," Park says. "In automotive, the Toyota Prius owns that position. We're staking out an effort in the beverage category."

Greater Good is a spin-out from Umagination Labs, an "innovation factory" run by Park. It's currently operating out of the Cambridge offices of General Catalyst Partners, though Park says the venture capital firm is not an investor in Greater Good.

RelayRides, the "neighbor-to-neighbor" car-sharing service, is jumping the Charles this month, using $3.6 million in new funds to expand from Cambridge, where the company was founded, into Boston. The company is also expanding in the city of San Francisco, where it is now headquartered.

Unlike Zipcar, which leases the cars in its fleet, RelayRides invites car owners to rent out their cars when they don't need them. (The company was created last spring by Harvard Business School student Shelby Clark, and won a $50,000 prize in the inaugural MassChallenge start-up competition.) Clark tells me that the average car owner is earning about $250 a month by renting out a car through RelayRides, and that the company has 150 cars signed up for the service so far in Cambridge and San Francisco.

"We're starting to cover all of Metro Boston," Clark writes via e-mail. "The first car that we enrolled in Boston proper (near Boston Common) is an awesome Mercedes CLK convertible, which is available for only $8 an hour (priced lower than most standard car-sharing cars)."

Perhaps in response to recent negative publicity about Airbnb, a start-up that enables people to rent their homes — or rooms in their homes — to strangers to earn extra money, RelayRides is now emphasizing the $1 million insurance policy that covers cars rented out through the service.

RelayRides has now raised $10 million from a group of investors including Google Ventures, August Capital, Shasta Ventures, and Lisa Gansky. Several new competitors have cropped up since the company was founded, including Getaround.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

What if waiters could see their performance relative to their co-workers every day when they checked in for work, and what if better performance meant they could nab the shifts they most wanted to work? Borrowing terminology from the world of sports, what if there were a "leaderboard" in the workplace?

"Hourly staff at a restaurant can be hard to motivate, but they can also have great energy when they are motivated," says Objective Logistics CEO Philip Beauregard, a former waiter and bartender himself. "One of the things that motivates them is that they want to name their own schedules."

Here's how it works: Objective Logistics' system, called MUSE, monitors a waiter's performance based on how well he sells. That can mean pushing the special of the day, selling bottles of wine with dinner, or encouraging big groups to order appetizers and desserts. (Eventually, the company also wants to integrate feedback from diners — after all, a waiter who foists sparkling water on a table that doesn't really want it might be driving away business.) The software grades wait staff performance on a curve: it's obviously a lot easier to gin up big checks on a Saturday night than it is Monday at 11 a.m.

The servers who rise to the top get first dibs on the shifts they want to work. That frees the restaurant manager from what Beauregard estimates is as much as eight hours a week of scheduling his wait staff. (Managers can tweak the schedule, if they want.) Beauregard, a former investment banker, and chief technology officer Matthew Grace, an ex-Oracle software developer, have been working on the concept since late 2008.

Beauregard says the software will be sold on an annual subscription basis. "We see it going beyond just restaurants, into places like hair salons, clothing stores, car dealerships, any kind of retail environment." The company is about half-way done raising a $1 million funding round, he says.

So far, the software has been tested at Not Your Average Joe's locations around the Boston area, starting in Beverly and Acton. (One of Objective Logistics' early investors was Stephen Silverstein, founder of Not Your Average Joe's.) Beauregard says he has been negotiating with other local and national restaurant operators.

At Joe's, vice president of operations Scott Flanagan says that "one or two" of the servers at his Beverly location quit because they didn't like the system. "Those were the people who were ranked down low, and the people who were performing better were getting the better shifts," he says. A future version of the software will enable servers to choose not just shifts, but also the group of tables that they serve (known as a station). "Certain stations are just better, if they include a lot of booths or they're close to the window," Flanagan says. "We now have data that shows that one station may sell $400 more food and beverages during a shift than another." A server who doesn't want to work a Friday night for personal reasons might earn about the same amount by working a Wednesday night, but getting the best station in the restaurant.

Beauregard acknowledges that the idea of making employee performance so visible — and encouraging competition as a way to control one's schedule — can be "polarizing" among servers. But, he says, "you can tell how good a waiter is by their response to the system. We had one server who was ranked #22. She'd lost her Saturday night shift. Suddenly, she was asking how she could do things better. And she started rising in the rankings, and got that shift back."

Darwinism is the newest menu item, it seems, at a dining establishment near you.

Here's a screenshot from the MUSE system:

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

This afternoon, Highland is revealing the ten start-ups that were accepted into this summer's program. (More than 225 applied for admission.) Six teams are based in California, and four in what will soon be Highland's new headquarters in Kendall Square.

The descriptions below were provided by Highland; I've listed the four Cambridge teams first, and added their university affiliations.

Cambridge teams:

- additup – an advertising platform designed to increase attention and drive engagement [Boston College; start-up tied for first place in the most recent BC Venture Competition]

- ByteLight – secure wireless communications through energy efficient LED lighting [Boston University]

- Tivli – building a platform to deliver TV, DVR and VOD cable services to any device over the Internet [Harvard and University of Michigan]

- Type-U – a vibrant, invitation-only health and wellness platform that helps people with diabetes live healthier and happier lives [Babson]

California teams (Highland offers space in San Francisco and Menlo Park):

- 27Bards – a site where people create, offer and go on unique tours

- AdRaid – enabling brands to reach a captive audience through innovative product placement

- Clinkle – software-based mobile payment platform

- Imprint Energy – redefining the limits of energy storage with entirely printed, rechargeable batteries

- Lemonwi.se – online product review and social media solutions for consumer facing brands

- Waddle – mobile photo-journal for groups of friends

From Highland's press release:

For 2011, teams benefit from over 40 forums and events involving top serial & young entrepreneurs and thought leaders in business, design, legal, product, talent and technology. Speakers in this year’s program include founders and CEOs from Airbnb, Dropbox, Gemvara, Quattro Wireless, RentJuice, SCVNGR, session M and WePay. Also lending their expertise are serial entrepreneurs/founders Steve Blank (“Four Steps to the Epiphany”), Desh Deshpande, Naval Ravikant (founder of AngelList) and Bill Warner, along with business & technology experts from Amazon, Engine Yard, Google, HumanLogic, IDEO, KAYAK, Russell Reynolds and WilmerHale.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Two people sitting in a room is a conversation. Three is a meeting, and things start to deteriorate from there. As the number of participants grows, the odds increase that PowerPoint slides will be shown, meaningless “action items’’ distributed, pet projects trotted out, oratorical skills exhibited, and BlackBerrys checked.

Here's some supplemental info:

- From Forrester Research, a great guide to handling the different personality types that populate the typical company meeting.

- Chris Meyer of Monitor Talent on the importance of differentiating between two kinds of meetings: decision-making meetings, and more exploratory meetings.

- Vertex Pharmaceuticals checklist: do you really need to hold a meeting?

- Kayak chief technology officer and co-founder Paul English on how he approaches stand-up meetings and brainstorming sessions at the whiteboard.

- John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess, on "Running an effective meeting."

- How to run a 22-minute meeting, from Scott Berkun's blog.

- Finally, the best idea that didn't make it into the column came to me from Fidelity Investments. I'm not sure if anyone there uses this strategy, but here's how it goes: place a big bottle of water in front of each meeting participant. As soon as someone needs to get up to hit the restroom, the meeting is over.

If you try that at your company, will you let me know how it goes?

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

I met with founder David Soane, formerly a tenured chemical engineering prof at UC Berkeley; Dan Jacques, an ex-Ocean Spray exec; and Lauren Fortin, a UMass-trained food scientist with extensive experience in "omega-3 fatty acid stabilization, snack food texture optimization, food surface adhesion, and food texture optimizatiom," according to her bio. (That's Fortin in the picture, with the lone sweet potato fry that survived the lunch.)

It's tough to bake potatoes in the oven and achieve anything like a proper french fry texture, Fortin explained. And once you start dunking a potato in a Jacuzzi bath of hot oil, it gets fattening fast. What DuraFizz has been developing is a healthy french fry that tastes super-crispy, but can be baked in an oven. The customers they've got in mind aren't just restaurant chains and frozen food producers, but also schools and military installations.

The coating they've developed, which they call Oh So Crisp, uses starches and flours from corn, rice and potatoes, which form a layer around the potato itself. "The ingredients are all natural," Fortin explains, and the fries are gluten-free, too. Soane says the coating works by creating a stiff, ridgy layer that your tongue and teeth perceive as crispiness, along with pores that allow the moisture inside the potato to escape without creating sogginess. Even when you reheat the fries in a microwave, Soane says, they stay crispy. "And there are no new ingredients in the coating — nothing that would require FDA review," he says. DuraFizz is already working with Russet House, a Canadian company that produces sweet potato fries for restaurants and grocery chains like Trader Joe's, on production tests of the Oh So Crisp coating.

Fortin whipped up two samples of the fries in a convection oven, baking them at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. I tried them sans ketchup.

Both the white and sweet potato fries had a crunchy coating. (That's a sweet potato fry in the picture at right.) On the white potato fries, the coating was so assertive that it overwhelmed the potato filling, and for that reason, I preferred the sweet potato variation, which had been cut thicker. They had a light, pillowy interior. But while the Oh So Crisp coating succeeded in conferring a substantial crunch, it also had a strange stickiness to it, adhering to my tongue and teeth in a way that you don't expect from a french fry. (It caked on, a bit like a candy coating would.) Fortin explained that they are working on a way to apply a thinner coating more evenly, eliminating that problem.

If a traditional, well-made fry is an A (and healthfulness isn't factored in), I'd grade DuraFizz's sweet potato fries as a solid B, and the white potato fries as a C+.

As for the calories and fat, a 100-gram serving of McDonald's french fries (slightly bigger than a "small" order) has 324 calories and 15.5 grams of fat, while the same serving size of Oh So Crisp fries has just 170 calories and zero grams of fat, according to DuraFizz. Compared to Ore-Ida sweet potato fries (190 calories and 9.5 grams of fat for a 100-gram portion), Oh So Crisp prevails, too (140 calories and 0.5 grams of fat).

It'll be interesting to see whether DuraFizz's Oh So Crisp gets adopted by the restaurant and food service industries; an earlier breakthrough from the company, instant cappuccino foam that didn't require hot steam, never took off. (Turns out that café customers will pay more for the experience and the sound of milk being frothed just for them.) For now, the only place you can taste the Oh So Crisp fries is at Arizona Pizza Company in Hadley, where a basket costs $5.49. (Regular fries there cost $2.99.) Once the Oh So Crisp coating is being made in large volumes, they predict that it won't add that much to the cost of an order of fries.

"We've been talking with the Army, universities, and restaurant chains," says Jacques. "Their big question right now is, how are you going to make enough to supply us?" He says the company is focusing first on sweet potato fries, which Jacques says have a higher profit margin. Also, sales are growing fast.

DuraFizz raised $250,000 last year from a Japanese venture capital firm, Global Venture Capital.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Rajat Suri, founder of E La Carte, which is developing a tabletop ordering system for restaurants, went pretty far. (I wrote about E La Carte last October; Suri dropped out of a master's program at MIT to work on the company full-time, and later moved to California to participate in the Y Combinator program for start-ups.)

This past spring, Dave Balter, one of Suri's investors and the founder of BzzAgent, was out in Palo Alto for a visit. He and a colleague, Jennifer Fremont-Smith, had a few hours before they needed to catch a red-eye flight back to Boston, and they asked Suri about good places to grab dinner nearby. Suri recommended a sushi spot, adding, "Steve Jobs goes there all the time."

Balter and Fremont-Smith went over, and as they sat at a table, who should come in but Jobs himself, grabbing a seat in the middle of the sushi bar. They both snapped photos with their mobile phones — Jobs was clad in his trademark black turtleneck, and looked pretty frail — but didn't go over to say hello. Though Balter and Fremont-Smith are both working on a start-up together, "I didn't consider going up to him for a second," Fremont-Smith says. "It did not feel like a pitch moment to me."

But Balter did text Suri to let him know about his Silicon Valley celeb sighting, and he sent along the pic. Suri showed up at the restaurant a short while later. "It was kind of an impulsive thing," Suri says. "Maybe it's just stupidity."

Though there wasn't an empty seat at the sushi bar in Balter's photo, by the time Suri arrived, a spot had opened up right next to Jobs. Suri took it.

Since Suri had been to the restaurant several times before, he and Jobs chatted a bit about the menu. (Jobs touted the mackerel.) Suri just happened to have brought one of his company's tablet-like, wireless ordering devices (pictured at right) with him. He didn't want to come out and ask if he could demo it for Jobs. So instead, he put the device on the counter in front of him and started tapping through its features, which include games and digital images of food and beverages that a patron might order.

"He stopped eating his food and was staring at me the entire time," Suri says. "I was hoping that he would ask me questions, rather than my having to say, 'This is what we're working on.' But he didn't take the bait." And Suri couldn't quite find the right conversational gambit to ask Jobs for feedback on what he had built.

Suri does sound like he regrets not getting a gem or two of wisdom from Jobs, who knows a thing or two about what makes consumer electronics easy to use.

But he does note that he's had a decent track record with other interactions with tech bigwigs. Not long ago, Google chairman Eric Schmidt was visiting the company's Cambridge office to speak with employees. Suri smooth-talked his was into what sounds like a group interview session that Schmidt was conducting with several journalists, and he lobbed a few questions of his own. When the press event was over, Suri told Schmidt that he'd left MIT to work on a start-up, asked if Schmidt ever made investments in fledgling companies, and got Schmidt's card. Though Suri had several subsequent conversations with someone who helps manage Schmidt's investments through TomorrowVentures, it didn't lead to any money for E La Carte. (The company has raised over $1 million from other investors, however.)

"It's pretty easy to get to these people if you know how," Suri says. "I think that's the moral of the story."

I'm not sure I would've had the chutzpah to take the seat next to Jobs, and neither Balter nor Fremont-Smith chose to seize the opportunity.

How would you have played the situation?

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The founder of Monster.com and Eons is setting up offices and a recording studio in Dorchester for his latest venture, Buffalo.dj. As he describes it, the company will represent, record, and promote DJs who create their own music and perform at major music festivals — not those who spin "We Are Family" at weddings and bar mitzvahs. The start-up may also produce its own concerts, and at some point stage a larger music festival.

Taylor says that through starting six companies, he has been performing as a DJ on the side — on Sirius satellite radio, the Ultra Music Festival, and various clubs in Massachusetts. (He performs both as Jefr Tale — pictured below — and as a character called STR!PE, who wears a mask. Among his favored genres: electro, house, progressive, and dubstep.) Taylor also plays at — and helps organize — the Root Society "party dome" at the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

"New music has always been a passion for me, but this is the first time I'm really pursuing it as a business," Taylor says. "When you go to festivals like Bonnaroo or Coachella, what you notice is that they're giving bigger stages to the DJs every year, and the DJs are attracting bigger crowds. You have DJs headlining in Vegas. Games like DJ Hero are getting young kids exposed to it, and you've got something like two million people who are doing it in their bedrooms."

The business is still at an early stage, Taylor says, and he's bankrolling it himself. He expects to have about five employees by the end of the summer. "I'm going to represent ten or twelve DJs to start out with," Taylor says, managing their careers and assisting with record producing. He also envisions building an "Internet talent management platform to source the best [up-and-coming DJs] and build their careers," he says. And his plans for the Buffalo.dj studio in Dorchester involve connecting top DJs with vocalists for recording sessions. Without getting into specifics, Taylor says he'll use his Internet experience to help build big audiences for the DJs with whom he works. And he notes that New England, with its scads of college students, is notably lacking major music festivals — a void he may try to fill at some point.

As for the Buffalo.dj name (and the parent company, called Buffalo Entertainment), Taylor says, "A herd of buffalo move in these graceful patterns, but with lots of noise and commotion. At a festival, you get that same feeling of being part of the herd, and watching it move."

Taylor is still best-known in the business world for creating the jobs site Monster.com, and serving as its "Chief Monster" until 2005. His next company, Eons, a social network for baby boomers, raised $32 million in funding but never achieved critical mass. (Apparently, boomers figured out how to use Facebook, and Eons was sold earlier this year for an undisclosed sum.) Eons did, however, spin off two other sites: the 40-and-over online dating service Meetcha, and Tributes.com, which produces digital obituaries (they prefer the term "tributes.") Taylor is also on the board of Sonicbids, a Boston start-up that helps musicians land gigs.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

It sounds like there's strong investor interest in this year's crop of companies, which may be due to the program's selectiveness...or the seed-stage investor frenzy that's building in tech...or a bit of both. One TechStars entrepreneur predicted yesterday, "I don't think any of us will be boot-strapping after the program is over. It seems like everyone has interest from investors." Already, two local VC firms have plunked a bet down on one TechStars company (GrabCAD), and local angels are backing several others.

Update: According to my tally, as of today, the dozen TechStars Boston companies have funding commitments totaling at least $4 million.

I met with the companies back in March, but here's a quick cheat sheet in advance of demo day; presentations begin at 9:30, and I'll update this post as necessary.

- Daily Data (from Ginger.io)

Background: MIT Media Lab spin-out that aims to use mobile phones to collect passive and active data about your health and activity level. Are you exercising, experiencing new symptoms, or taking the meds your doctor prescribed? Ginger.io wants to gather this information — with user permission, of course — and sell it to healthcare and pharma companies. What is the user's incentive for participating (aside from perhaps improving one's health)? That was unclear from the team's presentation. Advisors include Frank Moss, former Tivoli Systems CEO (and ex-Media Lab director) and Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technology. Working on partnerships with Merck, Pfizer, and Cincinnati Children's.

Funding status: Seeking to raise $800,000. Warner says he has invested, but hasn't disclosed how much.

- EverTrue

Background: Co-founders hail from Harvard Business School and Boston University. Helping prep schools and universities stay in touch with alums using mobile apps and social networks like LinkedIn. (And raise money, of course.) Has generated more than $150,000 in revenue so far.

Funding status: Hoping to raise $1 million; $750,000 committed so far. Vermont-based angel investor Ty Danco and Joe Caruso of Bantam Group already involved.

- GrabCAD

Background: Founded two years ago in Estonia, GrabCAD is a marketplace site that connects people who need products designed in CAD (computer-aided design) programs with 8500 mechanical engineers who can do the work. CEO Hardi Meybaum says 7000 of those engineers have joined within the last month, and predicts that the site could represent "the world's largest engineering team" within six months. Big companies like ABB are using engineers on GrabCAD to convert old 2-D product models into 3-D, Meybaum says. Much of the GrabCAD team in Estonia consists of former Skype employees; Meybaum says that as a result of participating in TechStars, the company will make Boston its new headquarters.

Funding status: Pulled in $1.1 million from Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture, NextView Ventures, and individual angels including SAP veteran Alex Ott, TellMe co-founder Angus Davis, and former SolidWorks CEO John McEleney. The company may add more angel investors to the round, Meybaum says.

- Help Scout

Background: A trio of founders from Nashville want to make it easier for customer service or sales teams to manage incoming e-mail messages. Assign responses to particular team members, and track messages so they don't fall through the cracks. Co-founder Nick Francis says they've had the service live for almost two months now, and have signed up more than 250 users so far, including social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library. Pricing ranges from free to $20 per month.

Funding status: Seeking $400,000. Francis says they're "about halfway where we want to be." Boston angel investors Joe Caruso of Bantam Group and HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah are involved. (Shah made his offer to invest — and got a "yes" — via Twitter, and Performable CEO David Cancel is also reportedly putting money in.)

- Kinvey

Background: A trio of University of Texas alums simplifying the development of new mobile apps by connecting them to various cloud-based services, like storage or video transcoding. They call it BaaS: "back-end as a service." More than 180 developers have already signed up for the Kinvey beta. See the TNW write-up on Kinvey here.

Funding status: Hoping to raise $1.5 million; at least $1 million committed so far from Atlas Venture, Bantam Group's Joe Caruso, and Bill Burnham, formerly at Softbank Capital.

- Memrise

Background: Co-founded by British memory champ Ed Cooke, Memrise aims to make it easy to learn new vocabulary in any language. Focusing now on Mandarin Chinese and SAT words in English (though there is also material on the site to teach Japanese, Spanish, Italian, German, and more.) Cooke jokes that the team initially planned a "smash and grab" operation — raising money in Boston and then absconding to the UK — but will now likely remain in the States for at least a year.

Funding status: Trying to raise $1.5 million. Already committed are Balderton Capital, angel investor Bill Warner, and Nabeel Hyatt, general manager of Zynga's Boston game development studio.

- Placester

Background: Helping real estate agents and landlords manage their online advertising and subsequent tenant leads. Agents pay for performance, measured by inbound e-mails and phone calls. Barba says 450 agents and brokers are already using the service. Co-founders are Frederick Townes, former CTO at Mashable, and BU School of Management grad Matt Barba.

Funding status: Hoping to raise $600,000; $325,000 already committed. (Via Twitter, angel investor John Landry offered to put money in.)

- Promoboxx

Background: Enables Web sites to run giveaways, promotions, and sweepstakes, easily and legally. Specifically focused on helping big consumer brands run promotions that drive traffic into retail stores. Charges $99 per month, per retailer that is involved in a promotion. Has run more than 400 promotions so far. TechStars Boston's lone team from New Hampshire. (They plan to remain in Cambridge after the program.)

Funding status: Raising $750,000; $250,000 already committed, according to CEO Ben Carcio. BzzAgent founder Dave Balter is among the investors. (HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah has also offered to invest in the company, via a tweet.)

- Sennexx

Background: A Web-based, private, internal Q&A application for companies, designed to help find the experts on given topics with an organization. (Remember knowledge management?) Israeli team educated at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. Working with Novartis and Xerox as beta customers.

Funding status: Raising $500,000; $100,000 committed thus far.

- Spill

Background: Encourages college students to talk about issues they're grappling with — from roommate quarrels to binge drinking — and receive confidential online counseling from trained "student supporters" who've dealt with similar issues in the past. "We're bringing empathy online," CEO Heidi Allstop said in her presentation. (Allstop says there has also been interest from the military and large companies.)

Funding status: Hoping to raise $400,000, with $120,000 already committed.

- Strohl Medical Devices

Background: System for quickly triaging patients who may have had strokes, intended for emergency room use. Founder Heather Keith calls it "the EKG for stroke," intended to get stroke victims the clot-bosting drug tPa within the three-hour "golden window" following a stroke. Device is portable enough to be carried on ambulances. Intellectual property licensed from Tufts.

Funding status: Looking to raise $750,000 to launch its product.

- The Tap Lab

Background: Mobile game from two Boston University alums, Dave Bisceglia and Ralph Shao. Think "Monopoly" meets Foursquare. Of course, you need friends and virtual goods to defend properties you "own," like Fenway Park or the House of Blues. Hopes to generate revenue not just from selling virtual goods to users, but developing sponsored content for big brands. Building other games tied to real-world properties.

Funding status: Targeting $500,000, with $150,000 committed already. Harmonix Music Systems co-founder Eran Egozy is among The Tap Lab's backers.

Some other coverage of TechStars' Boston demo day (the program also operates in Boulder, Seattle and New York): Xconomy ... BostInnovation ... Bill Warner's blog ... Boston Herald ... The Next Web.

This week's Boston Globe column looks at people starting companies as "side hustles," while working at full-time jobs. Here's the opening:

Is it possible to be an entrepreneur without sacrificing a steady paycheck?

A small subset of office workers — from State House staffers to Web designers to equity traders — believe they can temper the risk of launching a start-up by holding tight to their 9-to-5 jobs. With businesses that sell second-hand luxury handbags or iPhone apps, some are just looking to earn a little income on the side, while others hope they’ll be able to keep revenues climbing and eventually make the transition to full-time entrepreneur.

I corresponded with two other entrepreneurs who also work full-time gigs, but their perspectives didn't wind up in the finished piece. So I'm posting them as "bonus material":

- Lee Schneider, a VP at an investment management firm, who started a "green products" retailer on the side.

- Ryan Gruss, a digital asset manager at the consultancy Continuum, also runs a site for musicians.

And here are the other "side hustles" mentioned in the piece:

- Shareaholic

- Living To 100

- PaperPhobic

- decktOut

- Offshore Wind Wire

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Here's what's notable about this year's program:

1. The competition received 733 entries from 24 countries and 34 states, up from 446 entries last year. (Interest from Israel apparently perked up after Governor Deval Patrick led a recent trade mission there.) The finalists from outside the U.S. hail from Israel, Portugal, Canada, and South Korea.

2. The finalists include companies that have already participated in other start-up programs, like TechStars Boston, Dogpatch Labs Cambridge, and the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and that it also includes several companies that were part of MassChallenge in 2010.

I asked MassChallenge CEO John Harthorne about giving alums of his competition a second go-round. He said that any start-up that won prize money in 2010 wasn't considered eligible to return. But, he added, "Many of the teams that entered last year were very early stage — some of them just ideas. Some of those idea-stage entrants were still identifying the right target market and building out their business plan throughout the summer. While the mentoring and other benefits were extremely helpful for them during that process, it was more difficult for them to simultaneously compete against more established teams given their context. Following the competition, we felt that many of the alumni could still benefit from MassChallenge and deserved another shot at winning now that they had built out a more thorough plan." Like the other entrants, they needed to have raised less than $500,000 of funding so far, and be bringing in less than $1 million in annual revenue.

3. Last year's finalist set included 111 companies, so the program has grown a bit this year. Organizers call it the "world's largest global start-up competition."

4. The digital media and marketing trade association MITX will offer mentorship to companies participating in MassChallenge this year. MITX is also moving into MassChallenge's office space on Fan Pier, as I'd reported earlier on Twitter.

5. In the seven months since the 2010 program launched, last year's finalists have raised more than $30 million in funding and hired over 300 new employees, according to MassChallenge.

Here's the list of 125 finalists, in PDF form. The awards ceremony, at which $1 million in cash will be doled out, is scheduled for October 20th.

Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff Photo

(Left to right) Johnny Earle, Jeffrey Anderson, Gail F. Goodman, and David Vieau.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

The participants were:

- Gail Goodman, chief executive of Constant Contact, a Waltham company that sells digital marketing services to businesses

- Johnny Earle, founder and chief executive of Johnny Cupcakes, a clothing chain (specializing in high-end T-shirts) based in Hull

- David Vieau, cofounder and chief executive of A123 Systems, also in Waltham, a maker of batteries for power tools, electric vehicles, and utilities

- Jeffrey Anderson, founder and chief executive of Quick Hit, a developer of Internet football video games based in Foxborough.

I opened with a question for Johnny Earle, the t-shirt mogul.

Globe: Apple has this interesting aura where they have created scarcity for the iPad 2, and people line up in front of the stores, waiting for iPads, and everyone’s excited for the white iPhone. You seem to have kind of tapped into a smiliar idea of, ‘Let’s do interesting, fun designs and make people want them.’ How do you create this demand, when every other t-shirt maker is probably cranking out hundreds of thousands or millions of units of their product?

Johnny Earle: When I first started, I was doing it just as a hobby. It was a joke that turned into a hobby, and then it turned into this brand. I was designing the t-shirts out of my parents’ house at the time, and while everyone else was going out partying, I decided to gear my time and money towards this business. I wanted it to be something that had longevity, so I chose not to sell to some stores. We had some offers from Macy’s, Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, and even Barneys, and we just went a different route. We started numbering shirts, and once we’d sell out of something we’d never make it again. We began focusing on packaging, which I think is a big thing when you come out with a product. Growing up, we’ve all been addicted to McDonald’s at one point, because of the Happy Meals. Instead of plastic bags, we started making food boxes for our shirts, and even cupcake mix boxes for some of the releases. When you pull out the shirt, you have to dust off real flour and sprinkles.

Earle: In the mid-hundreds. We sell our shirts any where from $35 to $75, and they usually sell out pretty quick.

Globe: Let’s talk about the video game industry. What would you say is the vision for the videogame cluster here, Jeff? The industry in Massachusetts is about 1300 people by the most optimistic estimates today. What is the vision? Is this going to be an industry that’s going to be 50,000 or 100,000 people, or are we investing in growing something that’s relatively small? And I presume you are for the proposed tax credit for video game companies.

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

To keep my iPhone safe, I bought a hard plastic case made by Case Mate — and even that has chipped a bit after four months of duty. I love the look of the case, but it does make the iPhone bulkier, and it conceals everything but the phone's screen and its essential ports.

Last week, Boston entrepreneur Naveed Ghalib started selling Loopskis, a $2.99 accessory he invented to help keep your mobile phone in your hands. ($2.99 is the introductory price, and he may increase it once the first batch is sold out.) Ghalib was kind enough to send over a Loopski that I could try.

I extracted my phone from its case and applied a piece of Velcro with adhesive to the back of the phone. Then, feeling a little like a boxer preparing for a fight, I wrapped Velcro bands around two of my fingers. When the Velcro on my fingers met the Velcro on the back of my phone, it allowed me to keep the phone from falling even if I wasn't gripping it at all.

It was easy to see how the Loopski would keep the phone in my palm — but it also made it hard to switch hands (rrrrip!) or put the phone down on the table (rrrip!). Doing either thing went from a one-handed to a two-handed job. And keeping the Loopski "Band-Aids" on your fingers when you don't have a phone in your hand just looked strange. ("Why do you have tape on your fingers?" my young son asked. "I'm not sure, son," I replied.)

Loopskis may solve a problem for those of you who insist on using mobile phones without a protective case, but I put mine aside after my brief trial run. I wish Ghalib luck — as I do to every entrepreneur who comes up with something no one else has thought of before — but I wonder if this isn't an Optigrab-type solution to the problem of holding on to your phone. (Ghalib works at a well-known Cambridge company that he didn't want me to mention; Loopskis are a side project.) Still, perhaps you'll want to be the first on your block to start the black Band-Aid trend...

The New England Venture Capital Association and five of its member firms will sponsor free Kendall Square desks for early-stage entrepreneurs, starting March 31st. The 2,500 square foot space will be part of a new co-working facility — where numerous start-up teams share open space instead of hermetically-sealed offices — called CriticalMass that will be part of the Cambridge Innovation Center.

Nancy Saucier, a spokesperson for NEVCA, says that the five firms sponsoring the space will choose the entrepreneurs who get "golden tickets." (Others can pay $250 a month to have access to the same space.) The current sponsors will cover the costs for about 48 entrepreneurs a year to get three months of free rent, but Saucier says other NEVCA members have expressed interest in getting involved with the program, and she expects that as many as 100 tickets could be handed out annually. Sponsoring VC firms will also have conference rooms with their names on the door, which they'll use periodically to meet with entrepreneurs (but which will otherwise be open to CriticalMass denizens.) CriticalMass will also host Q&A sessions with angel investors, as well as "how to" workshops geared to entrepreneurs.

How will entrepreneurs get a "golden ticket"? They'll be doled out by the venture capital firms underwriting CriticalMass. Saucier notes that entrepreneurs who take advantage of a sponsored pass to the CriticalMass space won't be under any obligation to the sponsoring firm.

The initial sponsors of CriticalMass are Charles River Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Flybridge Capital Partners. Many of the partners of those firms have been participants in regular "office hours" sessions that the NEVCA has held at the Cambridge Innovation Center's Venture Cafe. I'm told the idea for CriticalMass came about when Saucier, Cambridge Innovation Center CEO Tim Rowe, and Jamie Goldstein of North Bridge and the NEVCA began talking about how to take those weekly office hours sessions a few steps further.

A grand opening for the new space is scheduled for March 31st.

Highland Capital Partners SVP Michael Gaiss tells me that after a one-year hiatus, the venture capital firm is bringing back its Summer@Highland program for student entrepreneurs. The program will take place both in Highland's Lexington office, and in rented space in San Francisco. The goal is to have four to six teams in each location.

"We definitely think about this as an entrepreneurship program, not a seed program," Gaiss says. "That means we're really looking for teams that are three, six, nine or even twelve months away from raising a seed round."

Highland is specifically looking for tech-focused teams, which the firm describes as "SaaS, internet/digital media, infrastructure, energy efficiency, robotics, advanced materials & semiconductors."

Of the start-ups that participated in the three previous Summer@Highland programs, Gaiss says that Highland has funded two (the custom jewelry site Gemvara and video analytics specialist Affine Systems), and three others have raised money from investors other than Highland. (Fifteen teams in total have participated in prior editions of Summer@Highland.)

Each team receives a $15,000 stipend, free office space, plus access to Highland partners and the entrepreneurs in their network. Highland doesn't take equity in the companies that participate, and there's not even a requirement to give the firm first crack at funding. At least one member of each team must be a current student, or have graduated no earlier than December 2010. The application deadline is April 7th.

The flakes have just started to fall — again. And in January so far, we've gotten more than fifty inches of snow.

As a Zipcar member, during the winter I always wonder: am I going to be the unlucky schlub stuck shoveling out the car I've reserved after (or during) a snowstorm?

I called Zipcar's head of communications, Greg Winter, to ask how the car-sharing company handles it when its fleet gets dumped on.

Winter says that about 60 percent of the company's cars in Boston are parked outdoors (the other 40 percent have cozy garage spots.) Once the snow stops falling, the same contractors that Zipcar employs to clean its vehicles fan out to start shoveling, "even if it's 10 PM at night," Winter says.

And if a member reserves a Zipcar mid-blizzard? Well, there's a shovel and a snow brush in every car, Winter says, and if you wind up having to do significant excavation, the company will give you a small credit toward your next reservation.

The arrival of a new baby brings with it the sudden explosion of several things: laundry, plush toys, garbage, enough medicines and ointments to fill a small U-Haul, and clothing that, after being worn twice or thrice, is suddenly two small.

ThredUp is a clothing swap site that concentrates on that last problem, enabling parents to swap boxes of clothing that no longer fits (but is still in good condition). The company was founded in Cambridge in late 2008 by James Reinhart, then a Harvard grad student; in 2010, it raised $1.4 million in funding from investors including Cambridge-based NextView Ventures and Founder Collective, but the company also relocated to San Francisco. I joined the service last summer, and wanted to share my experience with it so far.

ThredUp is free to join, and when you do, the company sends you a stack of United States Postal Service Priority Mail boxes; these are what you use to send clothes to other members. You're initially asked to fill a box with clothes in roughly the same size range (say, 6-to-12 months), and all for the same gender child. You describe the clothes and check off some of the brand names (Baby Gap or Disney, for instance), but you don't need to photograph each individual item. Boxes are categorized by season (is it mostly summer clothes, or winter?) and whether they include tops, bottoms, or a mix.

For every box of used clothing you list, you're able to pick a box from the site's inventory. For each swap, you pay $15.95, $5 of which goes to the company, and the rest of which covers postage.

The first box I received through the service was a bonanza: it contained a vintage-looking "Star Wars" t-shirt and a "Thomas the Tank Engine" long-sleeve shirt with a little speaker sewn in that makes a train whistle sound whenever you press the button. There were two pairs of Old Navy jeans, a hoodie, and assorted other clothes: a dozen items in all.

The first box that I'd packed was selected by another user about ten days after I signed up for the site. ThredUp instructs you to leave the box on your doorstep, and says that it'll arrange for a letter carrier to pick it up. (I ordinarily would've been inclined to just drop the box off at the post office.) From there, the box seemed to have vanished. ThredUp sent me an e-mail saying that the letter carrier hadn't found the box, and when I spoke to my friendly neighborhood postal worker, he confirmed that he hadn't picked up anything.

The site's e-mail customer service was really helpful; staffers canceled the transaction and credited my account $5 for the hassle.

But then, almost a month after I set it out on my front porch, the box was delivered to the person who requested it. (Either it was picked up and misplaced by the Postal Service, or someone swiped it, opened it, didn't have a toddler-age boy, closed it up, and re-mailed it.) As a result, the person who received the box gave me a two-star rating on the site (out of four), complaining that the box had arrived late, and that "a few items were too worn to give away," but noting that she liked the shirts and sweaters I sent. I confess: I did cram in a couple pairs of pants that were more "family hand-me-down" quality than something that you'd turn over to a consignment store. In all, there were a dozen items in the box I sent.

Last month, my son needed some extra winter clothes, so I picked another box from the site. Shopping ThredUp was, for me, a slow process; while it's convenient not to have to post pictures when you're listing a box on ThredUp, the lack of images makes it hard to find clothing that you're confident you'll like.

I did finally find a box that looked promising, and submitted a request for it last month. More than two weeks later, I got a notice from ThredUp that my pick had been cancelled. Why? A ThredUp rep explained by e-mail that "sometimes people are unable to send their boxes due to illness, family emergencies, etc." (I haven't yet tried to find another box that looks good.)

I also listed two more boxes of clothes on ThredUp in December; the process is streamlined, and it takes only about eight or ten minutes to describe what's going into your box, and then make it public so other members can see it.

But neither of my two new boxes has been picked. That could be because the site doesn't yet have enough swappers hunting for clothes, or it could be that my two-star rating has branded me with the equivalent of the scarlet letter with other ThredUp members. (Update: I've since found takers for those two boxes, and the favorable ratings on the transactions — one box I dropped off at the post office, the other was successfully picked up from my porch — improved my status on the ThredUp site.)

ThredUp did feel like a good value when I received the original box of clothes, and I like the idea of reducing my household's consumption of newly-manufactured stuff. But since that original delivery, the site it has required too much of an investment of time and effort for me to want to keep using it. (It's easier to donate old clothes to charity.) And time, of course, is the one thing no parent has in plentiful supply.

I had a chance to spend some time on the phone yesterday with Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder, venture capitalist, hedge fund manager — and early Facebook investor. He’s speaking at MIT this coming Tuesday night, at an event organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge.

We talked about Thiel’s new fellowship program, which will provide twenty $100,000 grants to potentially world-changing young entrepreneurs in the for-profit and non-profit sectors; why it might be better for would-be entrepreneurs to drop out of school today than it was when he attended Stanford; whether Facebook could have thrived if it had stayed in Boston; what Thiel sees as a dearth of innovation globally; and the risk tolerance of Boston investors.

(Incidentally, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was twenty when Thiel first met him, so he wouldn’t have been eligible for the new Thiel Fellowship, which is open only to people who haven’t yet ticked out of their teens.)

Here's a very lightly-edited transcript of our conversation.

Scott Kirsner: So what will you be talking about Tuesday at MIT?

Peter Thiel: The objective is really just to give a general talk about technology entrepreneurship in the U.S. It’ll basically be a bit of an overview of my thinking about how to start companies. I’ll talk about my PayPal experience, and offer some perspectives on what I see going on in the technology industry in the decade ahead.

And I will probably talk about this fellowship program we just announced for twenty students under twenty to take a couple years off of school and work in a technology start-up-type context.

SK: You’ve gotten a good amount of criticism for the program, which some see as encouraging students to leave school. You went to Stanford, and finished, and then went on to law school and got a degree there, too.

PT: There are certainly a number of things that are quite different from when I went to college a quarter-century ago. The big issue we zeroed in on – which really hit me over the last year or so –is the extraordinary amount of student debt that people are racking up, and the ways that is effectively changing the kind of decisions they can make later in life. When you rack up enormous amounts of debt, it sort of tracks you toward the higher-paying job, but away from something that is less remunerative in the short run, but maybe more entrepreneurial – or a non profit – or something that’d be socially useful.

I think there’s a very significant set of problems around the debts people are amassing. One of my concerns is that that is starting to discourage genuine entrepreneurship. People get super-tracked toward safe things, so they can pay off their debts.

I basically graduated with no debt. I was lucky to have parents who were middle class and could pay for my education.

[For me,] there was a way in which getting educated was actually a way of deferring thinking about the future… Part of our effort is to encourage some thinking about why are people being educated – what is the purpose?

SK: Well, what about someone who is studying chemistry or molecular biology? That seems like an important foundation if you want to develop a new drug.

PT: It depends a lot on the subject matter and the field. But I’m actually not convinced that even in some of these harder technology type areas, the incremental value [of advanced education] is quite high.

SK: So you’re saying that after high school, a kid might be ready to develop an important new cancer drug?

Here is a lesson in why consultants should not be allowed to give themselves advice.

Continuum, headquartered in West Newton, is one of the world's biggest "design and innovation" consultancies, with more than 180 full-time employees spread across the world. The firm helped Procter & Gamble create the Swiffer, has collaborated with Samsung on flat-screen TVs, and worked with Bedford-based Insulet Corp. to launch a wearable insulin pump for diabetics. They pride themselves on their ability to think through tough design challenges — whether building a lunchbox-sized, battery-powered testing lab that doctors can use with AIDS patients in developing countries, or figuring out how General Dynamics can better integrate communications systems into a Humvee. Continuum, once known as Design Continuum, was founded back in 1983.

Early last month, I started getting a series of e-mails from Continuum about "important news" that was on the way. A meeting was scheduled, then rescheduled.

I finally got a chance last week to hear the news directly from Continuum CEO Harry West. I was not allowed to divulge it until this morning.

Continuum is creating a new division at the company. They "prototyped it" last year. It is called Continuum Advanced Systems. It will be run by its very own general manager, Tom Merle, a Continuum employee.who has been at the firm a dozen years. It may even have its own office space someday — right next door to the rest of Continuum. What is actually different about Continuum Advanced Services? It will concentrate on "developing complex systems and technologies that are based on a fundamental understanding of people," according to a release going out today. In my one-hour meeting at the company last week, it was not really clear how CAS will be different from plain old Continuum — aside from mostly taking care of the medical and technology projects. There's no change in ownership; the firm is still privately held by Gianfranco Zaccai, one of the original Design Continuum founders, and eight members of the management team, including West and Merle.

I was handed some press information in two separate, very different gray folders: one for Continuum, and one for Continuum Advanced Services. (Pictured above.) You can obviously tell which folder contained the information for each, right?

When I followed up with West by e-mail to ask what exactly the new division would handle, he wrote, "If the client wears a tie; uses Microsoft Project; or asks about our
experience with optics, wireless protocols, regulatory requirements, or C#,
then he or she is a CAS client." Funny.

Also, I was told that while Continuum had considered changing its name, the firm decided to continue being called Continuum. They will, however, now have a new URL: continuuminnovation.com, instead of the old dcontinuum.com, a relic of the Design Continuum days.

I had to wonder how many meetings, and how much strategizing, were required to arrive at these momentous decisions.

The only actual news at our meeting last week? Last year, Continuum opened up an office in Shanghai that has since grown to about 16 people, and the firm may soon set up a branch in South America (most likely in Brazil). (Continuum already had a presence in cities like Milan and Seoul.) "About 25 percent of our business these days touches on China and South America," West said.

West says that Continuum is among the largest design and innovation consultancies on the East Coast; the compete with the larger firm IDEO, which has an office in Cambridge but is headquartered in California.

Blaze Software is a start-up obsessed with speed — and the company has been setting some new speed records in its first few months of existence.

Michael Weider left his job at IBM in late August, started raising money for Blaze at the beginning of September, and "we had it sewn up by the end of the month," he says. His Ottawa-based company just raised just over $1 million in seed capital from individuals and organizations like Lexington-based CommonAngels and Boston Seed Capital, a new firm in Wellesley run by Nicole Stata.

Blaze was created to help customers make their Web sites zippier — when viewed on PCs, mobile phones, or tablets. "With poor site performance, you lose people," Weider says. "It used to be your pages could load in five seconds, but people are now looking for two seconds or less. There's a growing correlation between how fast a site is and its business success." And if your site is slow, that can hurt its ranking on Google, Weider adds. (Here's a sample analysis the company did on my personal Web site, http://scottkirsner.com.)

Weider says that Blaze's software automagically optimizes a Web site's performance for various desktop and mobile browsers, "without having to change any of your code." The start-up had a beta version of the software, and was able to show investors before-and-after examples of how it improved sites' performance.

Also helpful, Weider acknowledges, is that his last start-up, Watchfire Corp., was acquired by IBM in 2007, for an undisclosed sum. Three Watchfire veterans are working alongside him at Blaze. "People want to invest in teams that have done it before," he acknowledges.

Though Weider only left IBM at the end of August, several other engineers had been laying the groundwork for Blaze's product for several months, including co-founder and CTO Guy Podjarny, another Watchfire vet who left IBM back in January.

Blaze now has a six-person engineering team in Ottawa, but Weider says "we'll probably open up an office in Boston for sales and marketing as we get further along."

Here's a video explainer of how the technology works. It was produced by Blaze, which has several others on its Vimeo channel:

Blaze - How It Works from mikeweider on Vimeo.

Practically Green, a Boston Web site that offers what you might call a "green lifestyle make-over," plans to announce tomorrow that it has raised $750,000 from CommonAngels and individual investors. The company was founded earlier this year by two former Boston.com executives, Susan Hunt Stevens (the former general manager for the site) and Jason Butler (formerly director of community product development.) Also coming tomorrow is an announcement about the site's first major media partnership.

Practically Green is built around a quiz that serves up a report card based on your household's current activities. Do you use an all-natural toothpase? Buy organic chicken? Have you installed a low-flow showerhead or toilet? Once the quiz is completed and you're scored in categories like energy and water usage, the site makes some recommendations about greener choices you might make. "It could be something big, like installing a programmable thermostat," Stevens explains, "or something small like switching to an all-natural dish detergent." The site has a database of more than 400 specific actions to recommend based on the results of the quiz.

The site also integrates social networking, allowing you to compare your rankings with friends, and, Stevens explains, "if you commit to taking an action, you can share that with a friend, which makes you more likely to follow through."

Practically Green's business model is built around pay-for-performance advertising and sponsorships. If your score on the quiz earns you the "natural baby" or "green kitchen" badge, for instance, that might be sponsored by a relevant brand. And companies will pay Practically Green lead-generation fees for consumers that the site sends their way. Someone, after all, wants access to all those consumers who suddenly want to install new toilets or thermostats.

Joining the board as the result of Practically Green's first round of funding are Chris Sheehan of CommonAngels and John Landry, a CommonAngels member and investor with Lead Dog Ventures. (Stevens had previously worked at Abridge, a New York collaboration software company where Landry served on the board, and she is on the board of Xconomy, a Cambridge-based media start-up, with Sheehan.) Also investing in this round is bacon baron Stephen McDonnell, CEO of New Jersey-based Applegate Farms, which markets organic and natural meats. And Eric Hudson, founder of Waltham-based Preserve Products, which makes consumer products out of recycled plastic, is joining Practically Green's advisory board.

Practically Green launched a beta in May with a test community of 100 mothers (they cleverly dubbed the group "the Mother Board"), and opened the site to other users in late June. The start-up is currently operating out of Back Bay office space loaned to it by the PR firm Elevate Communications.

I had a chance last Friday to try another mobile payment system developed here in Boston. This one is called Fig Card, from the dynamic South End developer duo of Max Metral and Hasty Granbery, who previously built Povo, a wiki site that collects information about neighborhoods.

Paying with your mobile phone feels novel and cool, and one of the great promises that the techno-future holds for me is that I will no longer have to tote around my two-inch thick wallet, jammed with cash, receipts, credit cards, Charlie Cards, ZipCar cards, and various loyalty cards. Fig Card is developing an app (initially for iPhone and Android) that will allow you to pay for a purchase at a local merchant, get a digital receipt, and chalk up points in the store's loyalty program (for instance, giving you an eleventh coffee for free after you purchase ten.)

Of course, swiping back and forth on your phone's screen in search of a payment app could simply replace today's acts of jingling around in your pocket for correct change, or hunting through a wallet for the right credit card.

Metral and Granbery have an office on Appleton Street, and Metral also lives nearby, so it's natural that the spot they've chosen for a pilot test of Fig Card is the Appleton Bakery Cafe. They told me they've had lunch there almost every weekday for the last two months.

While Granbery was installing a beta version of the iPhone app on my phone, Metral purchased a couple cookies and a coffee to show me how the app worked. When he opened it, he first punched in a four-digit code for security, and then the app displayed a green button that said "Ready to Pay." After the cashier had rung up the order, Metral clicked the button, and an itemized bill showed up on his phone. (Metral's photo also popped up on the cash register's screen, to give the cashier a way to verify that the phone's owner was paying the bill — a second layer of security.) It offered him the opportunity to add a tip, and then click "pay," which completed the transaction. Fig's servers charged his credit card, sent information to the cash register that the transaction was complete, and filed a digital receipt away in his phone.

When I set up the app on my phone, it asked for a credit card number, a four-digit security code, and a photo that would allow cashiers to identify me as the rightful user of the Fig app. It took less than a minute. I went up to the cashier to buy a pound of coffee beans, and except for fumbling for a second to find the "next" button that would advance the transaction, everything went smoothly. The app offered me a screen where I could sign my name as an extra level of anti-fraud protection (this feature wasn't on Metral's phone, which was running a different version of the app.) My iPhone wasn't connected to the store's WiFi, but just the wonderful AT&T 3G wireless network.

Metral explained that from the merchant's perspective, the only hardware required is a $5 WiFi antenna that plugs into a USB port in the cash register. (You can sort of see the WiFi antenna in the picture at left, between all the cables.) When you open the Fig app, it looks for nearby cash registers using the system. When you click "Ready to pay," the cash register sends you the bill that's currently on its screen. (The phone and register don't talk directly to each other, but rather the phone sends info over the wireless network to Fig's servers, and then Fig's servers in turn communicate with the register.) Metral says the system is every bit as secure as using a credit card, except that "the one security hole is that if you're standing in line with a friend, and you click 'Ready to pay' before they do, you could pay their bill for them." Metral adds that your encrypted credit card information is only sent to Fig's servers once — when you initially set up the app — and that it is never actually sent to the merchants cash register.

The Fig app, unfortunately, isn't yet available for anyone to use. (They're submitting it to Apple's app store this week, so it may show up soon.) Metral and Granbery say they're hoping to raise some money — in the neighborhood of $500,000 — so that they can integrate Fig with all of the major cash register (or "point-of-sale") systems. They say they have a list about about twenty local merchants who've expressed interest in using it. And they've also got a list of features they plan to add: tagging receipts ("Client lunch with Jeff," for instance), allowing users to rate specific items on a restaurant's menu, or enabling one person to pay for a group and then automatically send e-mails to others to request their share. Metral, a co-founder of Firefly Network, one of the earliest online recommendation start-ups, also envisions being able to suggest dishes that are popular this week, or cocktails that you're likely to enjoy based on what you've bought and rated highly in the past.

They say that merchants who allow customers to use the Fig app for payment will pay the same for a credit card transaction as they do today — about 2.5 percent to 3 percent. Their expectations are that by building up enough transaction volume, they can get a discount from payment processors, and earn money on the spread. Eventually, Metral says the company could charge additional fees for helping merchants manage loyalty programs.

Later this month, Metral and Granbery are bringing on Dave McLaughlin to assist Fig Card with business development. McLaughlin was previously the founding executive director of Boston World Partnerships, a non-profit created by Boston mayor Thomas Menino to encourage the growth of entrepreneurial businesses in the city. Now, McLaughlin will try his hand working for one.

Seems to me that Fig Card is the kind of business that needs to get a bunch of merchants using it (and loving it), and garner some favorable buzz — and then get acquired by a company that needs a mobile payment solution and already has relationships with millions of retailers and restaurants. In other words, speed is of the essence...

Let's say you're a CIO with a problem: you need a services firm to help you roll out desktop virtualization software to 5,000 employees, or to get the inventory system in your retail stores communicating with your e-commerce site. How do you find one that'll fit the bill? (Assuming that you don't want to hire any of the vendors who wine you and dine you and treat you to leisurely rounds of golf?)

Boston-based xPeerient, launching today, hopes to supply a solution by creating a marketplace where chief information officers and other executives who spend money on technology can explain their needs, and then anonymously screen the service providers who say they can help. The company has raised nearly $1 million in angel funding and another $1 milion from Waltham-based Stage 1 Ventures.

"We think of it as eHarmony for the IT industry," says founder Mark Hall. "The buyer can post a project anonymously at no cost, ask questions of the candidates, and create a short-list."

Hall says that online and print advertising to senior IT buyers just doesn't work anymore: "They've become incredibly desensitized to advertising. So we're trying to use technology to bring the buyer and the seller together at the right time."

About 5000 "partners" (like systems integrators, value-added resellers, and other service providers) are already participating in xPeerient's marketplace. Participation is free initially — they pay only for the opportunity to communicate with a prospective customer once they've made it to the short-list. Hall says the company will charge vendors a fee of "a couple thousand dollars for a $2 million deal, for instance, and the pricing is tiered based on the size of the deal." Hall also says xPeerient can provide value for IT executives by connecting them with one another on the site, so they can share advice with peers who may be embarking on the kind of project they've been through before.

Hall says xPeerient is still a virtual company, with 12 full-time employees but no office. Until late 2008, he was the chief information officer at Framingham-based CXO Media (publisher of CIO Magazine and other titles); he started xPeerient in early 2009, and began beta testing the site over this past summer with about 25 customers. He raised just under $1 million in angel funding for the company, from investors like Roy Rodenstein of Hacker Angels, Dennis Philbin of Lux Research, and Kevin Laracey, founder of edocs (and until recently an investor at Sigma Partners.) The company's Series A investment closed at the end of September, from David Baum at Stage 1. "We didn't want to do an equity round until we got the product built," Hall says.

OK, I was totally wrong about the MassChallenge.

When John Harthorne (at right, in the yellow tie), Akhil Nigam and their team were running around town trying to drum up support for a competition that would bring start-up companies to Boston from around the world, my response was: do we really need another entrepreneurship contest? Doesn't every local school with a business class or two, from MIT to Babson to BU to Harvard, already run a contest of their own?

It also seemed unlikely that they'd be able to raise $1 million in prize money in the midst of a recession.

And when they announced the 111 teams that made it into the competition — and would receive free office space on the Boston waterfront and mentoring from local entrepreneurs and investors — they included a handful of start-ups that seemed to me like they were on life support, having failed to raise money or come up with a workable business plan.

But by the time tonight's final awards ceremony was held, I'd been converted. The MassChallenge, mainly funded by businesses and individual philanthropists though also supported by the state with about $500,000 of seed money, fills an important role in the local scene. While university business plan competitions encourage students to consider starting companies (and have spawned local successes like Akamai), there isn't much for post-collegiate entrepreneurs.

Sure, you can apply to get into an accelerator program like Y Combinator or TechStars. But many of those programs have a distinct bias for Web and software ideas — products that can be built and launched quickly with very little capital. 

What made MassChallenge work well is that it attracted founders of energy, life sciences, software, hardware, and retail businesses. It attracted founders fresh out of business school, and at least a couple in their 40s and 50s. 

Of tonight's winners, some are already up and running and generating revenue, and some are still in the prototype or testing stage. Tonight's event felt, as does TechStars and the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, like a community coming together to support entrepreneurs in pursuing their vision. (Among those who made the competition possible are people like 170 Systems co-founder Karl Büttner, A123 co-founder Desh Deshpande, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals co-founder Josh Boger, pictured at left with Greg Bialecki, the state's secretary of housing and economic development.) And handing out $50,000 or $100,000 apiece in prize money to 16 companies ain't bad either: a little financial boost, without having to part with equity.

The MassChallenge wound up being global, not provincial (they scrapped a requirement early on that would've required all entrants to agree to relocate Massachusetts after the competition ended.) As a result, it attracted support from Russian investors and entrepreneurs from Israel. And it gave many of the community's successful entrepreneurs, investors, lawyers, and PR consultants an opportunity to help guide the up-and-comers. 

There was a really nice moment that I caught as the awards were being handed out — the obligatory giant cardboard checks. Shelby Clark of RelayRides was heading back to his table from the stage, having just won $50,000 for his car-sharing start-up, launched earlier this year in Cambridge. I was standing next to Zipcar chief executive Scott Griffith, who is preparing to take his Cambridge company public. Clark looked over to Griffith and caught his eye.

That's the kind of Massachusetts I want to live in: one that is building industry leaders like Zipcar, and also cultivating the next wave of innovators, too, to keep them on their toes.

[...A few more pics follow...]

Eric Paley of Founder Collective and Elon Boms of Launch Capital.

Olivier Boss, chief scientific officer of Energesis Pharmaceuticals, a $50,000 winner.

Derek Ohly of Zyrra, a $50,000 winner, with Howard Davidson and Michel Ohly.

What makes a great demo?

For me, it's a product that actually works (or at least looks like it does), and that does something you've never seen before. And a back-story about why you developed the product always helps, too.

I finally got a chance to see the demo from JoyTunes last week. They're an Israeli start-up that has been participating in the first annual MassChallenge start-up competition this summer and fall. (An hour or so after co-founder Yuval Kaminka gave me the demo, MassChallenge announced that JoyTunes had made it into the final round of judging, which takes place Thursday.)

Kaminka told me that after watching how intently his 7-year old nephew played with his Nintendo Wii, and contrasting that with how unmotivated he was to practice his recorder no matter how much his mother harangued him, he began thinking about how to blend the two activities. Collaborating with his brother Yigal — a professional oboist — they developed JoyTunes. (The third JoyTunes founder is Roey Izkovsky, a buddy of Yuval's from the Israeli army.)

The concept is pretty simple: instead of a strumming a fake plastic instrument a la "Guitar Hero," music students play a real recorder into a microphone connected to a laptop or PC. The pitch, volume, and duration of the notes they play controls what happens on the screen. Play properly, and you advance in the games on the screen. Miss a note, and you don't. The software costs $35.

The game was developed in Israel, and Kaminka discovered the MassChallenge competition through a random Google search. As a result of participating, he says the company will maintain a sales and marketing presence in Boston even after the competition concludes this week. JoyTunes hasn't yet raised outside funding. The game launched in Israel earlier this year, and in the U.S. in August. (In addition to the Hebrew and English versions, there's also a German version in the works. Germans, he explains, are pretty serious about music education.) Kaminka says that after recorder, the company plans to develop versions of the game for flute and clarinet.

Here's one demo video:

And a few others are on YouTube.

(Two guitar-based videogames, PowerGig and Rock Band, both developed in Boston, also enable players to use real instruments, but the games are not focused on teaching elementary music principles... yet.)

Understanding how to generate buzz is a crucial entrepreneurial skill — especially for ventures that haven’t raised jillions of dollars to spend on advertising or giant trade show booths. At last week’s MassTLC Innovation Unconference, a group of PR pros, journalists, social media experts, and entrepreneurs got together to collaboratively create this list of 43 ways to generate buzz in both traditional media and social media. It’s not a definitive list by any standard, and I don’t agree with 100 percent of it, but it collects a number of perspectives about how to get free ink for your company.

I’ve edited the original list to try to make it more useful than the rough notes from the session (which were kindly taken by Richard DiBona of Episend), and added some advice that I found myself dispensing after the session to people who stuck around. When I recall who made a given point, I’ve attributed it.

1. Know what your message is. What is important about your company and how are you going to talk about it? Have a brainstorming session to talk about how best to present your story.

2. Who are you trying to reach? Investors, prospective employees, users, CIOs? That should influence the blogs and media outlets you focus on.

3. You only get a chance to launch once. There is no “undo.”

4. Your outreach efforts shouldn’t involve contacting every single journalist and blogger you know at the same time. Be selective about who you contact, and think about it as a “retail,” one-to-one conversation, not spamming.

5. Don’t ask a journalist, “How can I get you to write about my company?” That’s like asking an investor, “How can I get you to give me money?” There needs to be some romance…intrigue…storytelling…or a demo to get them interested.

6. If you’re targeting consumers, getting on morning shows (like “The Today Show”) can be really effective. (Meg O’Leary, Inkhouse.)

7. Three quarters of the word “news” is “new.” Product launches count, but product updates (version 2.3) are usually not that relevant. Funding, new executive-level appointments, major new customers, or new office space can be considered news-worthy events. (Doug Banks, Mass High Tech.)

8. Many journalists say that meeting you in person at an event is a much better way to get a sense of whether they want to write a story than getting an e-mail or a phone call. Just like the sales process, you’ll often find that you need to follow up on an e-mail with a phone call, or catch a journalist or blogger in the hallway at a conference, to make sure you get a few minutes of their attention.

9. Position yourself as part of a trend that’s happening – explain,“this is how we relate to this trend.” It’s hard for reporters to write about companies that claim to exist in a marketplace vacuum.

10. Be able to tell your story in 30-60 seconds – be “Clear, Concise, Compelling.” Messaging is an exercise in cutting back, not saying more.

Next week, the 26 start-ups below — plucked from an original applicant pool of 446 — will be vying for $1 million in cash prizes, as part of the inaugural MassChallenge start-up competition, which has brought entrepreneurs to the Bay State from places as far-flung as Israel, California, and North Carolina. Judges of the final round will include Nantucket Nectars co-founder Tom First and Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman. (You can read the official press release here.)

As it happens, I've written about nearly one-third of the finalists over the past year, many before they entered the MassChallenge competition... links below to those stories and blog posts.

- 3Play Media
- 7Solar Technologies, Inc.
- Abroad101
- Architexa
- Aukera Therapeutics, Inc
- Brass Monkey
- Embed.ly, Inc.
- Energesis Pharmaceuticals
- JoyTunes
- Ksplice
- Locately (formerly known as Cadio)
- Novophage
- OsComp Systems
- OsmoPure
- Pearl’s Premium
- Relay Technology Management, Inc.
- RelayRides (and my experience using the service)
- Rentabilities
- Samanta Shoes
- ScholarPro Inc.
- Seeding Labs
- Sproxil
- StorageByMail.com
- Symmetric Computing
- ViThera Laboratories
- Zyrra

Today's Globe column collects advice from local investors and entrepreneurs about raising money — specifically for first-time founders.

People shared far more insight with me than could fit into the printed column, so I'm posting some "bonus material" here.

- David Beisel, Founder, Web Innovators Group; partner, NextView Ventures

The one piece of advice I most often share with entrepreneurs fundraising is: tell a story. Even the most analytically-driven investor will ultimately base his decision on an emotional connection to the vision of the company. Fundraising shouldn't be just telling the what and how of the endeavor, but also the why. Of course all of the fundamentals must be in place for the company to succeed; but the deeper a narrative is intertwined in the pitch, the more likely an investor will become excited about the human element which is inherent in every startup.

- Laura Rippy, board member and advisor to start-ups; former CEO, Handango; former GM, Microsoft

...One [piece of advice] is to take a page from investment bankers' playbook and "make a market". Prepare your pitch, your network, your targets beforehand. Reach out simultaneously to multiple investors. Then, create a sense of urgency so that multiple offers line up at the same time. It makes you look like a hot property and is the best strategy for a good valuation, best ancillary terms, and full syndicate. I have seen a few entrepreneurs take a slower serial approach instead, and backfire, as the first investors get tired of waiting.

- Angel investor Joe Caruso of Bantam Group

Entrepreneurs too often think their first task is to raise money......and waste a lot of time during the early months of their venture pitching an incomplete idea to people who need a lot of convincing....

Instead, much of that time is better spent convincing customers.... or at least talking with prospective customers. The feedback from them... the questions and suggestions.... will be somewhat similar to the kinds of conversations they have with prospective investors, but will be FAR more productive.

1. The feedback will be knowledgeable
2. You will learn a lot if spend more time asking questions than "pitching" your product/service
3. As your offering morphs, and you get a few people interested, you might get some early revenue (or at least early commitments for revenue)..... which will make money raising MUCH easier....

While not an accurate algorithm, I suspect what initially might be a 6-9 month money-raising effort, if preceded by 6 months of customer activity, will become a 90 day money-raising effort..... making overall time to raising money about the same, but you'll have a company with a vetted product, and maybe even some market traction....

...Entrepreneurs waste too much time pitching something unproven to the unreceptive....

- Christopher Mirabile, managing director, Race Point Capital Group

(1) DO: Research and network your way to potential investors. DON'T: Contact investors cold.

(2) DO: When pitching, set the table before jumping in - tell a story about who your customer is, and why your product helps them in a compelling way. DON'T: Jump into the middle of a detailed discussion of product features

(3) DO: Have some skin in the game, a rough prototype, and some solid market data. DON'T: Shop a PowerPoint business plan from the cubicle of your full time job.

- Jeffrey Bussgang, partner, Flybridge Capital Partners; author of "Mastering the VC Game"

A “do” would be establish both credibility and a relationship – investing is a game of trust and investors want to know that you know what you are doing, can trust you to do the right thing, and will enjoy sitting beside you during the wild roller coaster ride.

A “don’t” would be to oversell. There is a tendency for entrepreneurs to exaggerate or spin in order to sell prospective investors. There’s almost never a happy ending in those situations – either before or after due diligence is completed.

One story that sticks out in my mind – after signing a term sheet and before closing, one entrepreneur called me to tell me that his technical co-founder was moving out of the country for personal reasons. He was understandably nervous to tell me about it, but by proactively letting me know the news and his adjusted plan going forward, he earned my respect and, eventually, the investment.

- Dharmesh Shah, angel investor and co-founder, HubSpot

1. DO Be honest with yourself and talk to someone that's done it. Very few ideas and very few entrepreneurs are venture-fundable. If you don't fit the profile, you are going to experience unnecessary pain and frustration and most importantly take time away from actually building the business.

2. DON'T raise venture capital as a response to a competitor raising a large amount of funding. Although it's scary when that happens, in practice, their odds of beating you don't dramatically change as a result of the additional capital. Focus on your strength (which may just be that you're scrappier, hungrier and care about customers more). Remember, raising money does not create value -- it simply provides the opportunity to create value. For example, for my first startup, we had 3 competitors that all raised over $25 million in funding. We were terrified. We hadn't raised a penny. Two of the companies cratered and the third we acquired for less money than I had spent on my car (granted, it was a nice car -- an Acura NSX).

- Paul Maeder, Managing Partner, Highland Capital Partners

1. Create scarcity. The best way to raise $15m is to ask for $7m. The
best way to raise $0m is to ask for $15m.

2. Say you are only looking for ONE new investor. They will think it's
a race and work hard. If you say you are looking for 2, they will wait
until someone else commits, which will never happen.

3. You need to have 3 purportedly independent, trusted people tell the
VC it's a hot deal before you ever call him. You need to "Pre Buzz"
your deal.

4. Presentation: If you can't manage a meeting, I expect you won't be
able to manage a company. Right number of slides, topics are Mgt.,
Mkt., Product, Deal in that order. 1.5 hours in total. End on time
having covered all your key points, including banter about sports with
the partners.

5. The best meetings never get to the slides.

6. Remember, you are selling your company, not your product.

7. Objective of the first meeting: a second meeting, and nothing more.
Stop selling once you achieve that. The happiest dinner guests are
those that leave the table a little hungry for more.

- Bob Metcalfe, general partner, Polaris Venture Partners

My fundraising for 3Com in 1980 turned more productive in 1981 when I finally got that VCs wanted me to tell them how they were going to get their money BACK. I had focused on what I would do in the unlikely event that they gave it to me.

Do not run on about what [jerks] you think all those other VCs are.

Do not ask a VC to sign an NDA because your idea is way too easy to steal.

Do not explain how you plan to be capital efficient by having your Dad rent you the space and your wife be CFO.

Do start the meeting by thanking your VC for inventing Ethernet, even if it was before you were born.

- Brian Shin, CEO, Visible Measures

You need to decide on a funding route: 1) bank loans/credit cards 2) friends and family 3) angels 4) angel groups / super angels 5) venture capital - it largely depends on how much money you (and your team/advisors) think you need to raise based on your vision and your plan.

It also depends on your risk tolerance & your tolerance for pain. Simple rule for me is this: If you want to go big, and go fast, and you know you're going home if it doesn't work, then try to raise Venture Capital. If you are going to most "formal angel groups" then imho you might as well go for venture capital since it's practically the same level of diligence for less money. If you have an in with some so-called super angel or micro-vc (in boston that'd likely be Founder Collective or NextView Ventures) then I'd take that route over an angel group (easier diligence, faster process). If you can get a check from a legit angel (someone who has done an angel investment before in a true tech startup), I would almost always take it b/c it validates, takes a little pressure off of you, and the first money in is always the hardest money to get.

No matter the route, these tips apply:

A) Think about "building the onion" - adding layers to your pitch such that you are constantly improving and building momentum. Have a hole in experience? Recruit a partner or an advisor. Not sure about the market need? Talk to prospects. Want to validate the solution? Get a customer. Bottom line is that you want to the building blocks (big market, big idea, strong team, aided by a convergence of market trends making it seem like you MUST start this company now), combined with a perceived trajectory.

B) Don't be unrealistic or greedy - pushing valuations up or trying to solve for retaining a certain amount of equity should not be key goals. Your goals should be to get the best partner and get the best funding terms possible (liquidation pref, participation, drag along, board, etc).

C) Create competition. Investors see a lot of deals and are looking at a lot of stuff or working on other stuff all the time. There needs to be a sense of urgency. Competition for a deal creates urgency. Part of the supposed "AngelGate" situation was folks talking about how competitive deals have gotten. A good deal should have multiple suitors. That is the best possible situation for a startup. But again, don't focus too much on getting a sky-high valuation. The higher the valuation, the harder your job is going to be and the higher the expectations. I'd rather set the expectations low and go from there :)

D) Solve for the best long-term partner for the business: you really do have to pick the person (angel, vc or otherwise). Do your homework. It's OK to ask for references from a VC.

E) Have a coach - an advisor or a friend who can be your Yoda...investors look at a lot more deals than you have ever pitched, so you need a little guidance to off-set.

F) Negotiate everything before signing a term sheet. if you have competition for a deal, you can ask for stuff before you sign. Once you sign, you are sort of locked up with that investor for a while...all the leverage shifts away from you. So ask early and often. But see point B above :)

Next week is the meatiest part of Boston Region Entrepreneurship Week, being held for the first time.

Joe Caruso, an angel investor and start-up advisor, had the idea to create an umbrella atop a few big events happening just after Columbus Day, to highlight entrepreneurial activity around Boston, across all industries. The concept took off quickly over the summer, and what Caruso had dubbed BREW grew into what should more accurately be called BREESAMO: Boston Region Entrepreneurship Events Spread Across the Month of October.

Caruso has been an investor in companies as diverse as Coffee Connection (acquired by Starbucks), Softricity (acquired by Microsoft), and Constant Contact (publicly-traded.) His Web site also candidly lists, with a skull-and-crossbones, those portfolio companies that bit the dust.

Right now there are north of 100 events on the BREW calendar. Here are my picks of the ten that look most promising to me, in chronological order.

1. Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences, October 12th

UMass Boston's Venture Development Center hosts a schmooze-fest and panel discussion.

2. Take Flight!, October 12th

Fundraiser supports The Engineering School, a Boston public high school. Donate $5, design your own paper airplane, and fly it against others for a chance to win prizes. (I'll be there, flying an airplane along with folks like Avidyne CEO Dan Schwinn, Mass High Tech editor Doug Banks, and Mary Lockshin of Zink Imaging.)

3. Using PR and Social Media to Generate Buzz for Your Startup, October 13th

Free panel discussion at a law firm's downtown offices, featuring local journos and social media guru Paul Gillin, author of "Secrets of Social Media Marketing."

4. MassTLC Innovation UnConference, October 14th

What's an unconference? It's a gathering where the participants create the agenda at the beginning of the day, and where attendees are encouraged to be actively engaged in each session — not just listeners. This one features a roster of industry experts who will sit down throughout the day for one-on-one meetings with the entrepreneurs in attendance, offering advice and guidance.

5. Harvard Business School Entrepreneurship Forum, October 14th

Staples founder Tom Stemberg discusses his career as an entrepreneur, board member, and investor, and a panel of four women founders share their learnings. Free.

6. Powered Up Boston, October 14th and 15th

Boston's videogame community gets together for a conference and expo, featuring speakers from Quick Hit, Linden Lab, Turbine, Harmonix, and Rockstar New England.

7. "How I Got Funded," October 19th

Free eventing panel discussion with the founders of SocialSci, Localytics, Assured Labor, and Retroficiency.

8. Brewing Your Business Dream, October 20th

Excellent: a BREW event at an actual brewery. The Samuel Adams Brewery in Jamaica Plain is the site of a free seminar on marketing, PR, managing cash flow, and more, designed specifically for entrepreneurs in the food, beverage, and hospitality industries.

9. MassChallenge Final Awards Ceremony, October 21st

Which of 111 start-ups will take home the big money in this first-ever entrepreneurship competition? The prize pool is $1 million in cash, divided up however the judges seem fit. Entrants are working on everything from airborne wind turbines to online music education sites to customized women's shoes.

10. MIT Elevator Pitch Contest, October 27th

What better way to hone your own elevator pitch — the way you'd describe your business in 60 seconds or less, with no visual aids — than by watching a dozen entrepreneurs do it on stage? A handful will win cash prizes. Free.

What'd I miss that looks good to you? Comments welcome...

Charles Grinnell believes that every farmer needs a few good robots working his acreage, and this morning, he's announcing that he's wrapped up a $5.3 million first round of funding for his Billerica start-up, Harvest Automation.

The company, which once tested its prototypes in a greenhouse behind Grinnell's Groton home, initially had trouble finding financing to develop a robot strong and rugged enough to move potted plants around as they grow in nurseries. Harvest says that its initial target market will be the largest growers in the $4 billion wholesale ornamental plant market, I.E., the kind of company that grew that ficus tree sitting in the corner of your reception area. These plants get moved a lot from the time they are tiny seedlings to when they head for the marketplace, and Harvest's robots are designed to take over that manual labor. The company has conducted a few field tests of the robot, but Grinnell says they'll begin a more formal alpha test in the early part of 2011.

The new funding is the biggest investment so far for Cambridge-based Founder Collective, which joins other investors including the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp., Life Sciences Partners and Cultivian Ventures (formerly known as the Midpoint Food and Ag Fund.) Joining Harvest as advisors are iRobot CEO Colin Angle, and Mick Mountz, CEO of Kiva Systems, a Woburn company that makes a robotic order fulfillment system for warehouses. (Harvest's chief technology officer is Joe Jones, who led the development of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner when he worked at iRobot.)

"I think Harvest as a company really plays to the strengths of Boston," says Eric Paley of Founder Collective. "There aren't that many people with the expertise to create these complicated hardware-and-software systems." Paley says Harvest reminds him of the start-up he ran after business school, Brontes Technologies, which developed a 3-D imaging system that helped dentists create better crowns and bridges. "We pitched 40 VC funds, and had trouble raising money," he says. "It was a pretty weird niche, but there was a very specific customer with a very specific return-on-investment." (Brontes was acquired by 3M for $95 million.)

Harvest's belief is that growers will turn to robots to improve their productivity while lowering costs — and that robots can reduce the risks that some growers face of hiring undocumented workers and facing enforcement actions and fines.

I wrote about Harvest's technology back in 2008, and shot this video of their prototypes:

In the same way that certain people aspire to become the FourSquare mayor of their favorite coffee shop, will they vie to become the "CEO" of their favorite brand? Pongr, a Boston start-up planning a big promotional campaign during Advertising Week next week, hopes so.

Playing Pongr doesn't require an app on your mobile phone — you just snap a photo of an advertisement or product, and either e-mail it or text it to the company. Sending in a photo of your favorite Ben & Jerry's flavor after you've demolished a pint of it, for instance, might get you a reward from the company (like 10 percent off your next purchase), or it might help you gain status within Pongr's system. Your goal is to ascend the corporate org chart from intern to CEO. Pongr founder Jamie Thompson says that the photo-based game is a way for marketers to identify the biggest fans of their product, and build relationships. And through the magic of social media, of course, Pongr players can also share the photos they've taken with friends, generating even more brand awareness.

"People already like to take pictures of themselves with brands," Thompson explains. "So if you're a Sephora enthusiast, and you're inclined to take your picture in front of their lipstick poster, with Pongr you can do that and see if Sephora is going to give you anything in exchange."

Pongr's image-recognition software examines the photos that are sent in, comparing them to pictures in its database, and then it generates a scripted response, whether it is more information about the product, a special offer, an entry in a contest, or just status points on the way to becoming CEO of that brand. (Thompson says that you can take pictures of ads, objects, logos, or even TV commercials, and have Pongr's software identify what's in the image...as long as it's part of the company's database.) Thompson says that taking a picture of something is much more elegant than having companies plaster barcodes or QR codes on everything and then asking consumers to scan the code with their phones. (But how well and how consistently the company's image recognition technology works will be key; I haven't yet been able to test it.)

The company, founded in 2008, originally planned to use its image recognition technology to help shoppers conduct price comparisons on products, and either buy an item in the store or online through the shopper's mobile phone. But the price comparison space started to get crowded, and so the company began to focus on how marketers could better connect with consumers through photos taken on mobile phones.

The company's slogan is "The picture-sharing game with real-life rewards."

Thompson says Pongr recently raised another $500,000 from angel investors, including Chris Maeda, former CTO at Kana Software. The total funding Pongr has collected, Thompson adds, is "just under one million." The company has nine full-time employees, spread across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Iowa. Last month, the company worked on a promotional campaign with Hearst's Marie Claire magazine to give readers more info about products featured in the September issue.

And next week, they'll be demoing the game to ad agencies and marketers at New York's Gansevoort Hotel, as part of Advertising Week.

Here's a zany company video that offers an overview of how Pongr works:

When I first wrote about a start-up called CMarket, in October 2003, it was a little company challenging eBay for supremacy in the world of online auctions to benefit non-profits.

Since then, the Cambridge company has raised $30 million (from investors like Morningside Technology Ventures and Canaan Partners)... grown to 42 employees...changed its name from the generic-sounding CMarket to BiddingForGood.com...and generated $98.5 million for various non-profits. Company founder Jon Carson tells me that they plan to mark the $100 million milestone early next month with a party.

"What we'd initially developed was a tool for non-profits to put their auctions online, for the 90 percent of people who couldn't make it to the fund-raising gala to bid on things," Carson says. "And what we found is that the philanthrophy sector turned out not to be early adopters." He says it took the company nearly four years to run its first 1000 actions, and just over a year to do the next 1000.

On the site today, you can bid on things like a guitar autographed by Justin Bieber; a VIP tour of the U.S. Capitol, followed by lunch with a Senator; or an aerial tour of the New Hampshire seacoast.

BiddingForGood charges non-profits $595 for a year's access to the site, and also takes a percentage of each successful sale (for the first $20,000 in sales, the company's take is nine percent, and it decreases until the $90,000 mark, when it disappears entirely.) While many charities round up their own auction items, BiddingForGood also offers to provide auction items — it sources them in bulk — and in those instances, it takes one-third of the sale price and passes along two -thirds to the charity. As an example, Carson says the company secured 1500 one-week vacations at a resort in Cancun, which charities can offer as part of their auctions.

Carson says the latter part of the year is BiddingForGood's busiest time. "We typically have 400 or 500 auctions happening simultaneously in the fall, and December is the big month," he says. With charitable giving down over the past year, Carson hopes that more non-profits will look to online auctions to make up that revenue.

As for eBay, Carson says, "They've been the best of all competitors. They're out there, and they have two people who work in this space [non-profits]. But it is the age-old story of a specialist innovator picking off a corner of the generalist's market."

And on the subject of profitability, Carson explains that his company turned cash flow positive earlier this year. But, he writes via e-mail, "we raised $2.5M of growth capital in the spring and this summer turned the spend up (5 new sales reps for the AIRS item request system, testing NPR campaign this fall, adding auction sales reps, more engineers to work on mobile app, etc). We’ll spend that thru 2011 and then be back to profitability in 2012 presumably with a stronger market position."

Does your pooch deserve a higher-quality dish of dog food?

Brad Bishop, general manager of the canine business at Plymouth-based SmartPak, says that most American dogs (like their owners) consume too many carbs, and as many as one-third are obese. His solution? Replace kibble and canned food with a well-balanced meal of that includes white meat chicken, dried fruits and vegetables, and a tasty pumpkin broth.

“Kibble is basically dough that is fried, and then sprayed with synthetic vitamins to make up for the nutrient loss,” Bishop says. “What we’re doing is taking a lot of carbohydrate calories out of the meal, and replacing them with high-quality protein.”

SmartPak launched its Proportions brand of dog food this past spring. It can be customized online, based on your dog’s breed, activity level, and reproductive status (spayed, neutered, or not), to supply the ideal number of calories at each meal. You can also upload a photo of your dog, which appears on the packaging, along with her name. Depending on the size of the dog, each meal costs between $1 and $3. SmartPak purchases the ingredients from other companies, like Tewksbury-based WellPet LLC, and assembles the individual meals at its Plymouth facility.

With 225 employees, SmartPak’s main business is selling nutritional supplements for horses, and all kinds of other equine supplies and gear. The company says it operates the biggest equine catalog retailing business in the world, and not long ago, SmartPak began expanding into canine merchandise. “We realized that about 90 percent of horse owners also have dogs,” says Paal Gisholt, SmartPak’s CEO. And of course, the number of dogs in the U.S. (60 million) dwarfs the number of horses (about nine million.)

Gisholt says that the primary investor in SmartPak, founded back in 1999, has been Waltham-based North Bridge Growth Equity, which has put about $30 million into the company.

The company is targeting the Whole Foods shopper with the Proportions brand. (They describe Proportions, in fact, as "whole food nutrition for your dog.") “It’s for people who believe that their dog is a member of the family, and want to feed them consistently with their belief,” says Bishop. After rhapsodizing about the hand-carved, hormone-free, human-grade white meat chicken included in the meals, Bishop popped a morsel in his mouth.

That felt like a dare, so I decided to give Proportions a try myself. (See the video below.)

Proportions offers a two-meal trial pack through its Web site for free. It has also been promoting the food at farmer’s markets, with Internet search advertising, and through incentives that it offers to dog groomers, pet sitters, and trainers. Bishop says the company may soon offer the option to have nutritional supplements included with the food packages — like glucosamine for joint pain.

You can see my reaction to Proportions in the video below, but I also wanted to see what an actual dog thought of the food. So my sister, who owns a Goldendoodle, requested a free sample of Proportions through the Web site. Her dog scarfed it up, and so she ordered a four-week supply of the food — and also received another four weeks free through a promotion.

“I liked having Willow’s picture on the box, and the food really looks like people food,” she told me, adding that Proportions’ customer service reps were helpful on the phone. She said the food, at $144 for a four-week supply, was about as expensive as the Beneful brand food she already gives the dog. But she wasn’t sure she intended to sign up for the monthly shipments of Proportions. “It just seems more expensive when you’re paying for four weeks of the Proportions at once, as compared to when I buy a couple week’s worth of food at Target and it’s mixed in with all my other stuff,” she said. (I should perhaps add that she is not a Whole Foods shopper.)

Here's the video of my visit to SmartPak HQ in Plymouth.

Listening to Governor Deval Patrick address a room full of venture capitalists last week, one string of comments bugged the heck out of me. The governor said that CEOs of big tech companies like EMC and Cisco, in comparing Massachusetts entrepreneurs and investors to their California counterparts, have told him that we:

• Are too insular
• Don't give entrepreneurs a second shot after a failure
• Don't network enough.

The "spirit of collaboration is not as robust" here in Massachusetts, the governor said.

I wanted to jump out of my seat. What crusty old doughnut still thinks any of that is true?

(Instead, I turned to Jamie Goldstein of North Bridge Venture Partners and said, "Someone needs to remind the governor how many times Ric Fulop failed as an entrepreneur before he started A123 Systems," the battery company that North Bridge backed, and which was the most successful IPO of last year.)

Here is how someone living in the year 2010 and participating in this region's innovation economy sees things: we collaborate, converse, connect, and mix it up with a vengeance seven days a week.

Last Saturday, you could've been part of the packed crowd at MIT for Startup Bootcamp, soaking up lessons from successful entrepreneurs — including A123 co-founder Fulop. This past Monday was the 27th meeting of the Web Innovators Group in Cambridge, which brings together about 500 people to see demos from start-ups. Last night, you had Mass. Innovation Nights, an entirely different collection of demos. As part of programs like MassChallenge and TechStars Boston, start-ups get a chance to be mentored by an impressive bullpen of successful executives and entrepreneurs. At the annual Innovation Unconference organized by the Mass Tech Leadership Council, there's a lengthy roster of experts who'll offer advice to the entrepreneurs in attendance. (Funny, but no one from EMC or Cisco participates in any of those events.)

Next month, we've got FutureM Boston and Boston Region Entrepreneurship Week back to back. One emphasizes all of the activity around new approaches to marketing, and the other will feature a couple dozen events for start-uppers — and both are packed with so many events that it'll be tough to choose what to attend.

And earlier in September, Boston was named the top city for innovation anywhere in the world by an Australian research firm.

All this leads me to conclude that there are two kinds of people in Boston right now.

There are the crusty old doughnuts who like to keep repeating the same old garbage about how Boston is too insular... doesn't network enough... doesn't tolerate failure. All that may have been true the last time they were actually connected to reality — two or so decades ago. Unfortunately, a lot of these people (likely senior execs at some of the state's bigger tech companies) seem to be filling the governor's ear with this obsolete data.

The second group of people actually go to an event or two every month to make new connections and share what they know. The more experienced folks among them think nothing of sitting down with an entrepreneur for an hour (maybe at OpenCoffee or the Venture Café) to offer some feedback and advice about a nascent business plan.

That first group is mired in the past. They're crusty, and getting staler by the minute. While they may have the dough to donate to Governor Patrick's re-election campaign, their outmoded take on the innovation economy here is not worth listening to.

That second group is shaping the future here. (Maybe we should call them the fresh, warm croissants. Isn't that so much better than a crusty old doughnut?) The new culture of entrepreneurship and creativity they're establishing — no, have already established — is about openness, sharing, and swinging for the fences. It's a culture of continual improvement, too, focusing on the things we can do better to retain the smartest students who come here to get degrees, and grow small start-ups into industry leaders.

You are welcome to be part of this new culture if you want. We'd love to have you.

But if you opt out, as lots of people with well-paying, secure gigs at technology companies will likely do, here's my one request: kindly stop jabbering on about the past.

Okay, doughnuts?

One of the cooler companies demoing at tonight's Web Innovators Group gathering in Cambridge believes that a computer keyboard is far from the ideal videogame controller. Brass Monkey, a spin-out from the Boston-based software development shop Infrared5, thinks that smartphones work much better.

Just hold your iPhone horizontally with two hands, and you can fly spacecraft or drive race cars, thanks to the phone's built-in accelerometer sensor (newer iPhones also include a gyroscope), which relays information about its position and movement via WiFi to your computer. "We think the future of the user experience is people interacting with screens in new ways," says CTO Chris Allen, pictured above. "You don't have to buy special gloves or anything. We said, 'Let's take the thing you already have in your pocket and use that as the input device.'" The Brass Monkey system requires that you download an app to your iPhone, but there's no download required on your computer; the phone can control a game that's being played in most major browsers.

To show what smartphones can do as game controllers, Brass Monkey "sister company" Infrared5 developed a game called "Star Wars: Trench Run" last year, under license from Lucasfilm. You can use your iPhone or iPad to fly the Millennium Falcon, shoot down TIE fighters, or try to destroy the Death Star from behind the controls of Luke Skywalker's X-wing. What's surprising is that there's basically no perceptible delay between your movements and what happens on the screen.

Eventually, the company envisions the Brass Monkey software deployed to enable multiple players to play the same game using different smartphones. (An Android version of the controller is nearly done, Allen says.)

The next game to use the Brass Monkey controller will likely be a driving game released as part of a promotional campaign for a major car maker. The company is also actively talking to other game companies about licensing the Brass Monkey software development kit for their own games. But one challenge will be the simplicity of many of the popular Web-based games these days: do you really need an iPhone controller to tend your virtual peas in Farmville?

Brass Monkey was one of the 100-plus finalists selected in the inaugural MassChallenge start-up competition. So far, Brass Monkey has been self-funded. The start-up is led by Jim Bull, a co-owner of Strategic Marketing Partners, a firm that helps market and distribute videogames.

I sat down yesterday with the two founders of Aeris Partners, the newest mergers-and-acquisitions advisory firm in town.

The firm has been taking shape since earlier this year; its principals are Stephen O'Leary, chair of the Mass Tech Leadership Council and a former entrepreneur-in-residence at General Catalyst, and David Joncas, who until last month was co-head of technology investment banking at Harris Williams & Co, working out of the Boston office. Back in the dot-com heyday, the two worked together at Waltham-based Broadview International, which was acquired by Jeffries & Co. in 2003. (O'Leary is on the right in the photo above, taken yesterday at their office at the Cambridge Innovation Center.)

Aeris intends to provide M&A advisory services to all kinds of software companies, the founders say, from analytical software to healthcare IT to e-learning to payment technology to energy management. While their sole office for now is in Cambridge, they plan to work with companies in markets like Louisville, Atlanta, and Little Rock, Joncas says, "where you can find great technology-based firms."

O'Leary notes that "the IPO market is down 80 or 90 percent, compared to where it was pre-Internet bubble, and that's not a statement about the value of technology companies. It's the market." Assuming there's an appetite for IPOs, the surviving investment banks want to focus on taking companies public that have an enterprise value of $300 million and are looking to raise at least $100 million, says O'Leary, who left General Catalyst last fall.

That means that most up-and-coming software companies will get acquired instead, by a major player that has already built a sales force, established distribution partnerships, and created a trusted brand. I asked Joncas and O'Leary to list some of the more active acquirers of Boston-area tech companies, and their list included Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Symantec, and EMC. Apple and Dell, they said, have both done high-profile deals recently (acquiring Quattro Wireless and EqualLogic, respectively.)

As I was talking with Joncas and O'Leary, I could see the Cambridge offices of ITA Software, now in the process of being acquired by Google (assuming the anti-trust authorities give their OK.) We discussed the possibility of Akamai, another company within a stone's throw of Aeris' office, being acquired. Joncas and O'Leary speculated about possible buyers, from IBM to Cisco to HP to EMC.

"I keenly hope Akamai doesn't get acquired," said O'Leary, sounding like he was wearing his Mass TLC chairman's hat.

Even EMC, the biggest tech company in Massachusetts, is occasionally the subject of take-over rumors. "I don't think any [Boston tech companies] are untouchable," Joncas said. "It's not a bad thing necessarily. It's just a statement of fact." (Yes, I found that a bit depressing.)

If the economy improves, O'Leary predicted, "we may get to 20 or 30 IPOs a year. But it won't be 100 or 200."

That, they hope, will create an opportunity for one more M&A firm that helps promising young companies find deep-pocketed new parents.

Between club meetings, classes, hockey games, and study groups, college students have a lot of demands on their time.

Few entrepreneurs understand the scheduling chaos with which students must cope better than Jay Rodrigues. The Rhode Island native and founder of DormNoise is today starting his senior year at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Rodrigues, 21, launched the company, which offers an online calendaring system for colleges, just after he finished high school at the Wheeler School in Providence.

"On any given day, I'll get probably 15 or 20 e-mails about events at Penn," Rodrigues says, "and that's not including e-mails from friends. On top of that, people will hand you printed fliers when you walk around campus, or a friend might text you about a study group." DormNoise collects everything in a single online calendar, from big campus events like the homecoming parade to small gatherings like a group working on a course project together, which can be synced with a user's smart phone or a calendar system like Outlook or iCal. Students can also be alerted about events via text, if they belong to a given group — like a last-minute marching band practice, for example.

Sold as a hosted application, universities can either pay a fee of about $2 per student to use DormNoise, or allow the company to sell corporate sponsorships to their application, and use it for free. (Colleges can also choose to blend those two options, paying less per student and perhaps even generating some revenue through the sale of corporate sponsorships.)

The company recently signed Bay State College in Boston and Newbury College in Brookline to three-year contracts. Rodrigues says DormNoise has raised $500,000 $950,000 in funding so far (some of the earliest came from his father, who runs a textile dyeing and printing company in Fall River.) The company operates virtually, with a half-dozen employees scattered around Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida. "We're gearing up to raise more money to bring everyone to one location," Rodrigues says, perhaps as soon as January. Both Philadelphia and Boston are under consideration.

Here's a company-produced video demo:

Textaurant founder Josh Bob tells me his Waltham start-up has just landed its first big customer in Boston: Finale Desserterie & Bakery. Textaurant's technology allows restaurants to use a laptop to manage their list of customers waiting for a table, sending out a text message to let customers know when one becomes available. Finale will be using the system at the local chain's two busiest locations, in Harvard Square and Boston's Theater District, starting later this month.

You can already see Textaurant's system in action at Cafe Luigi in Bedford, and the Right Fork Diner on Martha's Vineyard. Bob says that the Right Fork Diner began using Textaurant just before July 4th, "and they were handling about 400 people a week day."

Instead of writing your name down on a yellow pad and hollering it out when your table is ready, or handing you a buzzing pager that limits where you can wander, Bob says that hosts using the Textaurant system simply type your phone number into an Internet-connected laptop. A few minutes before your table is ready, you receive a text message. "You can go anywhere you want," he says. "You can go to the bar next door, or you can go home and take a nap."

Textaurant charges a monthly fee of roughly $50 to use the system, and a small per-party fee for every group that is seated. Bob's goal is to undercut the prices of rival systems from companies like JTECH and OpenTable that also allow restaurants to manage a waitlist. But those players, with their big sales forces and established relationships with national chains, will be formidable competitors for Textaurant. My sense is that the Waltham company, which has been funded by "friends and family" thus far, will have to build a great product, and fast, and hope to be acquired by a more established provider of restaurant technology.

Next up is an enhancement to the Textaurant system that will let you put your name on a restaurant's waitlist via their Web site, without having to show up in person first. Working alongside Bob at Textaurant is Dan Pickett, formerly director of engineering at Second Rotation (the company that became Gazelle.)

"Right now, we're almost exclusively focused on Boston restaurants," Bob says, "but we've had some discussions with national chains. We think Finale will open up a lot of doors for us." (Red Stripe, a Providence restaurant, will also begin using the Textaurant system later this month.) He says the company's "white whale" prospect is the Cheesecake Factory, where hour-long waits aren't unusual.

Textaurant pitched at the first Open Angel Forum in Boston back in June, and the company will be demoing at BizTechDay in New York later this month.

Would you start to sweat if you accidentally deleted a crucial spreadsheet you’d toiled over using Google Docs? Would your spouse wail if someone hacked into your Flickr account and deleted the years of vacation photos you’ve uploaded there?

Safeguarding an extra copy of files that you keep on Internet-based services is the simple idea behind Backupify, a start-up born in Louisville, Kentucky that moved into new offices in East Cambridge last week. The company offers a free service for consumers who might want to make sure they have an extra copy of that video they uploaded to Facebook, and a paid offering geared to businesses, many of which are required by regulations to archive something as seemingly innocuous as a Twitter message. The free offering stores up to two gigabytes of data, and the higher-end paid offering, at $60 a year, stores up to 25 gigabytes of data and makes a new back-up copy of everything once a week.

The company is planning to announce a $4.5 million A round this week, led by two Cambridge investors: David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners and Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures (that’s on top of just over $1 million the company had raised previously). Also investing in the A round are First Round Capital and Lowercase Capital, founded by former Google executive Chris Sacca.

Backupify CEO Rob May says the company is mainly acquiring customers through social media, PR, and the Google Apps Marketplace. When Web-based services like QuickBooks go down temporarily, or the note-taking service Evernote loses some customer data, that only helps get people focused on the downside of storing their data on someone else’s servers. But May says that most of the times when someone has an experience that makes them grateful for having signed up with Backupify, it’s user error: they’ve accidentally deleted something important.

Backupify already can stash a copy of data from services like Blogger, Photobucket and Gmail. The company is working to make its backups of Facebook content (like a company’s Fan Page) more complete, and May says that a link to SalesForce.com and Evernote are in the works. Where does Backupify stockpile all of its data? Yet another cloud service: Amazon's Simple Storage Service.

The company is also developing its own API (application programming interface), to enable other cloud-based services to easily integrate with Backupify, adding data to the service or pulling data from it. One example May cites is a new start-up that wants to create online accounting software: it might find that prospective customers are more likely to try it if they know a copy of their data can be stored with Backupify. But another is enabling Backupify users to write code that would synchronize data between two Web-based services, or move their data easily from one service to another, dropping SugarCRM, for instance, in favor of SalesForce.com. “We are starting to position ourselves as less of a backup company, and more of a data liberation company,” May says.

The company now has three employees in Louisville and seven employees in Cambridge, where it plans to hire five or six Rails developers and database gurus with experience with the Cassandra distributed database.

Backupify’s first angel investor, in 2009, was Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of the Cambridge marketing software company HubSpot. Shah had previously bought a small application that May had written, which tried to analyze the value of a user's Facebook account. When May built the prototype of Backupify, which stored only Twitter messages, he e-mailed Shah to get his feedback. “It was really a side project,” May says, “and I never thought I’d raise money for it.”

Shah’s feedback was positive. "We chatted about the idea a few times," Shah writes via e-mail, "and ultimately, I agreed to put $25k in to help give him that final nudge" to pursue Backupify full-time.

The company began its move from Louisville to Boston in the spring, shacking up for a while in unused office space at General Catalyst’s Harvard Square offices. May says that one reason that Boston was more attractive to the company than New York or San Francisco is that many potential acquirers and distribution partners are here, including EMC, Iron Mountain, and Carbonite.

While the company began by targeting consumers, Backupify’s strategy now focuses mainly on enterprises. “We want to be the market leader in office productivity backups for SaaS offerings,” says May.

This Sunday's Globe column looks at some of the animation studios clustered in Watertown (and Boston, too), which produce work for the Web, TV, and mobile devices. Here are some samples:

- The show that started it all: "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist," which debuted on Comedy Central in 1995. The show was produced by the animation division of Watertown's Tom Snyder Productions, which was later dubbed Soup2Nuts.

- Jim Lehrer interviews WordGirl, the hyper-literate PBS superhero created by Soup2Nuts, headquartered at the Arsenal on the Charles in Watertown:

- TV ad for the Jay Peak ski resort, by Clambake Animation in Watertown:

- Fizzy's Lunch Lab, from Cloudkid (which just moved from Watertown to Boston. I wrote about Cloudkid's recent Emmy nomination here.)

- The Zebrafish series of Webisodes, produced by Boston-based FableVision for Childrens Hospital Boston.

- Animation demo reel from 360KID in Watertown.

- Work samples from Waltham-based Handcranked Productions, which focuses on mixed media and stop-motion animation.

When a Tennessee start-up hires a Massachusetts-based chief executive, as Moontoast did last month, it means one of two things: either the new leader is going to be racking up scads of frequent flier miles, or the company is soon going to set up an office in the Bay State.

In the case of Moontoast, the second scenario is playing out. New chief executive Blair Heavey is subletting space for the company in Andover, and company co-founder Marcus Whitney has moved north from Nashville. The company is also hiring for a handful of marketing, infrastructure, and user experience positions.

The "social commerce" start-up aims to make it easier for entertainment and media companies to find fans of their properties wherever they may be spending time online; deliver content; and ideally, entice them to buy stuff. "It's a huge pain for a musician or a magazine to be able to keep fans and subscribers engaged both on their own sites and throughout social media sites," Heavey says. "And they also have revenue problems. They want to be able to monetize their content, wherever a fan base is, with things like exclusive offers and special member benefits."

The company describes its three software-as-a-service offerings as "branded communities, embedded stores, and private sale clubs."

Last month, Moontoast announced a partnership with Big Machine Records, a Nashville label whose roster includes Rascal Flatts, Trisha Yearwood, and Taylor Swift (whose Moontoast-powered Web site is pictured above.)

Heavey says the company has "funding commitments" of up to $5 million, but that they've been collecting money in "seed increments" of about $1 million at a time; most recently, the company pulled in $780,000 last summer.

Investors so far include country stars Vince Gill and Wynona Judd, according to Venture Nashville. Other Moontoast backers include the Martin Companies of Nashville; Stephen Collins, formerly CFO at DoubleClick; and Joseph Glaser, founder of a Nashville company that makes and repairs musical instruments.

Heavey says the company plans to maintain an engineering presence in Nashville, where about seven people work. Moontoast will likely move its Massachusetts headquarters from Andover to Boston or Cambridge within the next six months. At some point in 2011, Heavey says the company might seek additional investment from a strategic investor in the media or entertainment sector, or a traditional venture capital firm.

Heavey was an early executive at OpenMarket, the pioneering Cambridge e-commerce firm, and BeFree, the affiliate marketing company; both went public back in the dot-com era. More recently, he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at North Bridge Venture Partners and CEO of My Perfect Gig, an online recruiting service funded by North Bridge and Commonwealth Capital Partners.

I've been hearing good things about yet another MIT Media Lab spin-out, PerfectSight Opticals, which comes out of work done at the lab's "Camera Culture" group.

A group of four Media Lab researchers developed a plastic lens assembly (cost: $2) that can clip onto the front of a mobile phone. When a user looks through the lens at the mobile phone's screen, she sees a set of parallel lines. She presses keys on the phone to make the lines overlap, and in about two minutes, the phone displays the proper prescription data. (See the videos below.)

The project won a $5,000 award at last spring's MIT Ideas Competition, and a small team working to commercialize the technology also was chosen as a finalist for the MassChallenge start-up competition this summer. The team says that "uncorrected refractive errors" (near-sightedness and far-sightedness) affect about 600 million people, and are the second most common cause of blindness worldwide. As you might expect, the majority of those people live in less-developed countries, where there isn't a Lenscrafters on every corner, and where the lowest-tech equipment for diagnosing eye problems still costs around $100.

Leading the venture are Chika Patrick Ekeji, a Sloan School of Management student who'll finish his MBA next spring, and Vitor Pamplona, a visiting PhD candidate at the Media Lab.

Ekeji writes via e-mail, "We are working on productizing the prototype...We are in discussions with several potential partners in that regard, and our current plan is to have a [Version 1] product available in six months or so."

The company isn't yet actively raising money, though Ekeji says they may talk with some individual angel investors soon.

PerfectSight doesn't yet have a Web site, and when I e-mailed with Ekeji earlier this month, he said they hadn't yet incorporated.

Two videos about the original MIT project, below:

[ Second video is from the Media Lab's LabCast series, by Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams. ]

When I needed wheels for a quick trip to Plymouth yesterday, I didn't reserve at the nearest Avis location or grab a Zipcar from one of their designated spots. Instead, I popped the locks on a neighbor's car when he wasn't around and took off. It was cheaper than the other two options.

While it sounds absolutely illicit, borrowing a neighbor's car when it isn't being used is the concept behind RelayRides, a Cambridge start-up company that I wrote about earlier this year. Instead of leasing a fleet of vehicles like Zipcar, RelayRides finds people who have underutilized cars and wouldn't mind earning a little money with them. Car owners pocket some of the hourly rental fee paid by RelayRides members, with the company taking a percentage for facilitating the transaction and insuring the drivers; RelayRides also installs the necessary technology in each car.

The company has been running a pilot test this summer in Cambridge and Somerville, with a few dozen vehicles. I signed up for a membership in late June, and received $25 worth of free rental credit for doing so. A few days later, a membership card arrived in the mail. Embedded inside was an RFID chip that would give me access to the RelayRides fleet.

I perused the RelayRides site a few times in July and August — at one point hunting unsuccessfully for a minivan or large SUV that could fit seven people. It wasn't until this week that the stars aligned and I made a reservation. Since there are no RelayRides cars in my immediate neighborhood, I needed to wait for a day when I had the extra time to walk about twenty minutes to a car parked near Porter Square, just across the Somerville line. (Google Maps pinpointed the parking spot as exactly one mile away, though the RelayRides site claimed the distance as 0.66 miles.)

After deciding against renting a car that was described in member reviews as exuding a distinct eau du pooch, I booked a neighbor's 2003 Toyota Matrix from 10:45 AM to 3:00 PM. (RelayRides offers pet-friendly and pet-free vehicles. The Matrix displayed the pet-free icon.) The car's hourly rate, including gas and insurance, was $7.00.

Here's my take on the pros and cons of the experience.

Pros:

The biggest advantage to RelayRides is cost. My rental totaled $35.33; the use of a newer Toyota Matrix a bit closer to my home with Zipcar would've cost $49.14 (Zipcar's rate for that vehicle is $9.25 an hour, though Zipcar offers discounted rates to members who commit to spending at least $50 a month with the service). RelayRides also lets you reserve cars in 15-minute increments, while Zipcar limits you to half-hour chunks. With Zipcar, that policy would've forced me to pay for fifteen minutes that I didn't need.

I found the car easily, even though it wasn't in a marked spot, and I waved my membership card over a sensor on the windshield. The locks popped open. Inside, I found a key to the ignition, and a note from the owner informing me that I was their first renter. "We're really excited to be part of this new venture," the owner wrote. He also apologized that the driver's side window didn't work (there was a Band-Aid over the button that would've opened it), and said he'd made an effort to get it repaired. Clipped to the note was a $4 "rebate" for my rental (in folded bills), which I decided not to take. On the passenger's seat was a tote bag full of maps. In the tape deck was an adapter that enabled me to plug in my iPhone so I could listen to my own tunes. There was just over one-third of a tank of gas in the car. Though the carpets hadn't been vacuumed recently, the interior was relatively clean.

Unlike Zipcar, RelayRides features a small white digital display and keypad mounted at the top of the windshield, just to the left of the rear-view mirror. It shows you the current time, the miles you've driven, and the start and end times for your reservation. I liked being able to see the "official" RelayRides time, and to be reminded of the time my reservation ended, since RelayRides charges you $50 if you return the car late. (Zipcar has an identical penalty.) Stashed in a slot just behind the display is a credit card that enables you to fill the car up with gas if necessary.

On my return trip, I left Plymouth a bit later than I'd planned, and traffic was worse than I'd expected, so it was quickly clear that I'd need to add an extra half-hour to the reservation. I called the phone number on my membership card and an operator helped me out. Within a few minutes, the updated reservation time showed up on the car's display. The operator mentioned that there is also a way to add time to the rental using the keypad, but that hadn't been readily apparent to me. (I later learned that you can add time yourself only immediately after you turn the car on — and not while you're driving.)

While most Zipcar vehicles have decals all over them that make it clear you're not driving your own vehicle, RelayRides is a bit subtler with its branding. There was a small sticker on the back, and a small one on the front windshield where the RFID sensor is (pictured above).

Cons:

The Matrix had 86,000 miles on it, and once I hit the road, it had a bit of a rattletrap feel. The brakes and suspension were about as loosey-goosey as you'd expect from a seven-year-old car that has done a lot of city driving. The non-functional driver's side window would've been annoying if I'd had to pay any tolls. There was a small banner hanging from the rear-view mirror that I had to remove — I don't like anything that obscures my view for no good reason — and then remember to replace when the rental was done. (I probably forgot to turn the volume on the stereo back down when I checked out of the car, and for that I am sorry.)

Bottom Line:

I've been a Zipcar member for about three years, and while the rental rates are higher than RelayRides, I'll continue using Zipcar for two reasons: convenience and confidence. The cars are closer to where I live (and also convenient to use when I travel to other big cities where Zipcar has a presence), and I'm confident that they'll be well-maintained and relatively new. But if RelayRides starts adding cars closer to me — and especially if they add vehicles that Zipcar doesn't offer — I'll likely start using it more frequently. I called RelayRides founder Shelby Clark after my rental yesterday to check some facts about the service, and he mentioned that a sporty Audi S4 may soon be entering the fleet; they've also occasionally offered access to a Porsche Cayenne. Some minivans or big SUVs would be handy, too, for when you're planning a group outing.

Clark said the service will officially launch on September 1st; the company is also looking for "community organizers" who will help RelayRides expand to towns outside of Cambridge (but within a 50-mile radius of Boston.) RelayRides is still offering $25 in driving credit to new members.

Have you tried RelayRides? Do you rent out your car through the service? Post a comment if you would...

Entrepreneurs pitched subscription underwear delivery services, medical devices to alleviate the pain of being poked with a needle, and an iPhone app that could bring back the days of Fonzie and the jukebox this afternoon at the annual Betaspring Demo Day in Providence. Betaspring offers fledgling companies twelve weeks of free office space and mentorship, along with a small cash stipend/investment that ranges from $15,000 to $20,000. (Betaspring co-founder Allan Tear described it as “rent and Ramen money” for the summer.) At the end of the program, investors gather to see ten-minute demos from each company.

This summer’s crop of nine companies were looking to raise anywhere from $250,000 to $750,000 to continue building their products and bring on software developers, marketing staff, and business development executives.

A few quick impressions:

Now that Boston seems to be undergoing a welcome explosion of food trucks, I wonder whether retail trucks might be next...

Retail trucks? Basically, boutiques on wheels.

Part of the first wave is the bGreen Mobile Showroom, the first real-world manifestation of an e-commerce site launched last fall that focuses on — what else? — environmentally-friendly products for your home.

Founders Barry Greenstein and Lee Schneider brought the showroom to my neighborhood in Cambridge earlier this week to give me a chance to check it out. (See the video visit below.) Its first public appearance is this week at the Boston GreenFest on City Hall Plaza ... but when they parked it in Cambridge and threw open the back doors, a handful of passersby couldn't help but wander in.

After launching their Web site last October, Greenstein and Schneider had to acknowledge that it was going to be hard to generate traffic, in a cost-effective way, for yet another specialty e-commerce site. That's when they came up with the idea for a mobile showroom, which they thought would stand out.

There are two kinds of products inside. There's stuff you can purchase on the spot, like toys made of recycled plastic, EcoDiscoveries kitchen cleaner, and Klean Kanteen water bottles. You pay with a credit card (the showroom uses a nifty credit card reader from Square, which plugs into an iPhone.) But bGreen's founders expect that the bigger revenue generator will be home renovation projects using sustainable materials, like bamboo cabinets, cork flooring, and colorful countertops made of recycled glass and concrete. (They're even happy to drive the truck to your house, show you product samples, and refer you to a contractor who can handle the installation.)

"You might buy a ChicoBag [a compact, reusable shopping bag] for five bucks, but we look at that as a gateway drug," says Schneider (on the right in the pic). "Our interest is really in the home design stuff."

After the GreenFest, the truck will be at the Sowa Open Market on certain weekends in September and October, "but at the events, the goal is to meet people, and then bring it to their homes to show them product samples in a more leisurely way," says Greenstein. The plan is to communicate the truck's current location on Twitter. On test runs, they've had as many as eleven people in the truck, a FedEx-style box truck that they bought used last year). At that point it starts to get a little crowded, they say. The truck, incidentally, runs on regular unleaded gas; the cost of converting it to burn biodiesel was prohibitive, say bGreen's founders, who spent about $50,000 of start-up capital building their Web site and outfitting the mobile showroom.

I wondered about parking it. No one bothered us while we sat for a half-hour on a side-street near Porter Square, but Schneider said they haven't yet been able to figure out what permits they might need to park on a city street. "You can get a permit if you want to sell burritos, but no one seems to know what we need to sell beeswax candles," he said.

Here's a first look inside their mobile showroom.

Last year, Evan Saks was working for a Stoughton mattress company that was in a precarious spot: it was the New England franchisee for Dial-A-Mattress, which had just been through bankruptcy proceedings. As soon as Dial-A-Mattress was purchased by a new owner, the Stoughton company's franchise agreement was revoked, and it went out of business last fall.

But Saks, who comes from a long line of mattress merchants, had an idea for a new start-up: what if you could design your own mattress online, and have it delivered to your home within two weeks?

With funding in "the low six figures" from of a group of angel investors, and a collaboration with the Boston Web development shop MaintainNet, Saks launched Create-A-Mattress last Memorial Day weekend.

Customers can select the size of their mattress; the type of support (like traditional coils or pocket coils, supposedly better at isolating movement); the mattress thickness; an optional "Craftmatic"-type adjustable base; and mattress covers made out of bamboo fibers or organic cotton. There are about 1,000 possible combinations of features. Special feature sets, like the "bad back package," include things like memory foam, quadruple layers of thick latex, and "upgraded zoned coil systems."

A label on the lower right edge of the mattress can also be customized; one recent shopper had it imprinted with the phrase "Where the magic happens."

The site claims its prices for its finished mattresses, which start at $370, are at least 20 percent lower than retail.

Unlike Dial-A-Mattress, which relied on heavy radio advertising to attract customers, Saks has been focusing his marketing efforts on search engine advertising, and a YouTube channel he plans to expand. He's also experimenting with Facebook advertising. (Saks concedes that he did test some radio spots in July, when airtime is especially cheap.)

"We're trying to attract folks who might have some idea of what they want, and say, look, you can get exactly what you need to fit your budget, but take the confusion and the deception out of the showroom environment, where you get overwhelmed by choices," Saks says. "For most people, it's impossible to tell the difference between the $500 and the $1500 mattress." (And you can just guess which one the typical salesperson would rather sell you.)

Create-A-Mattress' product is made in the Boston area by a "major brand manufacturer" — in the mattress industry, that means either Sealy, Simmons, Serta, or Stearns & Foster — though Saks says he can't disclose which one.

There still isn't much on the Web site to describe what Project 11 Ventures will do, aside from "invest in and assist early stage companies." The fledgling firm's Twitter account has so far had just two messages posted to it.

But I'm told the firm, founded by ex-Microsofties Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae, is looking to raise a small first fund of under $5 million, mainly from established and wanna-be individual angel investors, and will make investments in the $10,000 to $50,000 range in Internet-enabled businesses that can prove their business models with a couple hundred grand, not millions.

Sturtevant spoke with me this morning, discussing how the firm will try to differentiate itself in Boston's seed-stage investing scene. He also mentioned that he and Rae have made a first investment using their own capital (putting $10,000 into a company he wouldn't yet name), and may do a few more small deals this fall as they work to raise the Project 11 Ventures fund.

Sturtevant and Rae are stressing their "operational expertise" working inside start-ups, incubators, and big companies. "We believe we can do executive coaching, and help people think about rapid product design and their go-to-market strategy," he said. They plan to get to know entrepreneurs — and help the entrepreneurs in whom they've invested — by holding a series of invite-only seminars. One took place yesterday at the Cambridge Innovation Center, walking participants through a half-day of exercises like creating a product road map, and understanding the different constituents (customers, partners, vendors, etc.) who will play a role in a given company's business.

Rather than listening to PowerPoint pitches in a board room, Sturtevant suggests that "you can find a lot out about how people deal with things by working with them on a real issue."

As for Project 11's investment focus, Sturtevant says he's interested in themes like "manufacturing as a service, the democratization of creative design, and people having a closer relationship with producers, like you see with Etsy and the local food movement." He also added that ideas that tap into the processing power of smartphones are appealing.

Rae is especially interested in software-as-a-service and freemium business models, "but I also love things where you really care that they're actually going to make the product — because it might improve healthcare or the way we communicate."

"All I've really done in my career is stuff that has a social and community aspect to it, and usually some kind of game mechanics," Rae continues, adding, "I really care about businesses actually making money."

Rae spoke to me from her mobile phone outside the Peet's in Newton Center; I met with Sturtevant earlier today at Crema Café in Harvard Square. "We have a list of the best free places to work," Rae jokes.

Before Microsoft, Rae and Sturtevant worked together at Eons, the social networking site for baby boomers founded by Jeff Taylor of Monster.com. And previously, Rae worked at Terra Lycos and AltaVista, and Sturtevant was at the Boston office of Idealab and Lotus Development. Both were cut loose from Microsoft in a re-org last fall.

The pair have been active in all sorts of local start-up activities this year, reviewing business plans and serving as mentors at Angel Boot Camp, TechStars Boston, and MassChallenge. They've been out to Boulder to meet with the TechStars companies there, and plan to be in Providence next week for the Betaspring start-up demo night. Sturtevant says that their primary geographical focus will be start-ups in the Boston area and New York City.

Rae and Sturtevant will also be teaching a new course at MIT this fall with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web.

Project 11's name, of course, is a reference to the most excellent mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap," in which guitarist Nigel Tufnel shows off a special amp that goes all the way up to 11. "If we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? 11. Exactly. One louder," Tufnel explains.

(Photo above by Chris Herot. Used with permission.)

In August of 2007, Lewis Weinstein launched the beta version of ReferralKey, a site intended to help digitize the process of sending referrals from one professional to another. If a real estate agent sent one of his clients to a mortgage broker, the site would track that ? and also keep tabs on whether the mortgage broker ever returned the favor. Weinstein envisioned building a new kind of social network for small businesses that would provide continual streams of leads to its members, in a way that sites like LinkedIn and Facebook do not.

But the site didn't immediately take off. Weinstein, a serial entrepreneur and third-generation tax accountant in Needham, found that professionals using the site felt it just wasn't helping them generate enough new business. "The common response was, 'I thought you were gonna send me referrals,'" he says.

That's where the steaks come in.

When Weinstein relaunched the site this past April, he decided to create a new system of incentives. Professionals can now offer a cash bounty to spur others in their online network (or anyone who views their profile on ReferralKey) to send them a new prospect. (Some professionals, such lawyers, real estate agents, and accountants, have codes of conduct that prohibit them from taking such a payment.) If the prospect turns into a paying client, the recipient of the lead instructs ReferralKey to cough up the money via PayPal.

Users of the site can also upload their databases of clients and send out a message encouraging them to refer their friends and relatives to their trusty financial planner, for instance. "The site will track what happens as a result, and offer them an Omaha Steaks gift certificate, one from Callaway Golf, or one from L.L. Bean, for the new business that gets generated," says Weinstein. As an accountant, he says, he would typically send his clients a letter once a year that offered them a $75 gift certificate to Legal Sea Foods for any new business they sent his way, but the program was a pain to administer.

Weinstein says that ReferralKey attracted about 5000 members during its beta period. Since then, it has grown to just over 32,000 members. Premium memberships, offering an unlimited stream of referrals, cost $19.95 a month. Weinstein raised a first round of about $1 million from individual investors to launch the site, and says he's now hoping to raise a $3 million second round from venture capital firms.

He still operates his accounting practice, with offices in Boston and Needham, noting, "Accountants work their a--es off three months of the year, but that gives me time to do entrepreneurial stuff the other months." ReferralKey, with four employees, is co-located in the Boston office of his firm, GenerationTax.

Just over a month after it raised $1.4 million from a quartet of venture capital firms, Cambridge-based ThredUP, a site that enables parents to swap clothing their kids no longer wear, is moving to San Francisco. ThredUP co-founder James Reinhart says the company signed a lease on office space this week. Five employees will head west with him, with two remaining in Boston (both working from home.)

Reinhart says the decision was primarily a personal one. He and his wife had their first child last month, and his wife is originally from the Bay area and has family there. Reinhart spent six years in Santa Cruz, working as a teacher and helping to start a charter school, in between his undergrad studies at Boston College and earning dual Master's degrees from Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government.

In raising funds for the company earlier this year, Reinhart says "I'd mentioned to Trinity Ventures [based on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park] that we were thinking about moving [west], and I think they sort of came to expect that it would happen at some point" — especially after Trinity decided to lead the company's funding round in July.

Two Boston firms, Founder Collective and NextView Ventures, and a New York investor, High Line Venture Partners, also put money into ThredUP in that round.

Eric Paley of Founder Collective told me this afternoon that "when I met James, before Trinity got involved, he told me that he was probably moving to the Bay area," but that Reinhart was also considering staying in Cambridge. "All things considered, I'd love for him to be here, but look, we invest in companies in Europe and California. I didn't push him in any direction," Paley says, noting that when he was running the MIT spin-out Brontes Technologies, Left Coast investors at times encouraged him to move the Lexington-based company to California. (Paley successfully resisted.)

"I don't think Boston would've been at all a bad place to do this kind of start-up," Paley says.

And neither does Reinhart, noting that several Boston-area companies like Swaptree, Gazelle, and RelayRides are encouraging people to swap, re-sell, and share things in new ways.

But he does note that when looking to hire people who've built and marketed consumer-oriented Web businesses, there's a much deeper talent pool in the Bay area. Reinhart says that Trinity has already started to help ThredUP connect with some prospective new hires.

ThredUP launched last fall, and shifted its focus from men's and women's clothing to kid's stuff this past April. Members of the site list a box of kid's clothing they'd like to get rid of, and they can select a box of clothes they'd like to receive from the site's inventory. Members pay $13 per trade, and a premium membership with extra features is available for $30 per year. (It costs the company $10.70 to ship each box via USPS Priority Mail.) About a quarter of the site's swappers eventually upgrade to the premium level, Reinhart says, adding that about 1000 members are joining the site each week. There are currently about 1500 boxes listed on the site for trade, he says, and members have shipped 3000 boxes to one another.

"We believe we're building something for every parent in America," Reinhart says. "This is a fundamental consumer behavior change. We want people to say, 'Oh, my kid has grown out of these clothes. I need to ThredUP.'"

Reinhart (center, above) met co-founder Oliver Lubin while studying history at Boston College; he met Chris Homer, ThredUP's chief technology officer and third co-founder, while at Harvard Business School.

ThredUP plans to be in their new Union Square digs in San Francisco by September 1st. In total, the company has raised about $1.7 million in funding.

(The photo above comes from a Boston Globe feature on the "25 Most Stylish Bostonians of 2009.")

One of the investors in Bedford-based Reveal Imaging tells me this week's purchase of the company by Science Applications International Corp. is "a very positive acquisition," though the price wasn't disclosed.

Reveal makes a special automated scanner that airports use to check bags for explosives; in 2004, just two years after its founding, the company won approval from the Transportation Security Administration, which became its biggest customer — spending nearly $80 million in stimulus money to purchase the scanners. The company's compact CT scanners are also used in Israel, Mexico, and China.

Reveal, with just over 100 employees, was #284 on the Inc. 500 list of fast-growing private companies last year, and I mentioned them in a recent column about IPO prospects. (Guess that won't be happening.) Reveal's 2008 revenue was $47 million, and the company ("nicely profitable," according to the investor with whom I spoke today) could surpass $100 million in 2010 revenues.

Investors including General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, and Flybridge Capital put just under $25 million into the company.

I first visited the company in 2003, and mentioned them again in a 2005 column about venture debt.

Talking to people this morning about Rhode Island's apparently-successful play to lure Curt Schilling's game start-up, 38 Studios, with a $75 million loan guarantee, one thing emerges: the littlest state is taking a big risk.

Jeff Bussgang, a Boston venture capitalist who co-wrote a Harvard Business School case study late last year about 38 Studios, called the loan guarantee "a bold move."

"It's almost like Chinese-style industrial policy on Rhode Island's part, trying to create a games and digital media cluster this way," Bussgang said. (Rhode Island's legislature recently permitted the state to guarantee up to $125 million of loans... so $75 mil represents a big chunk of that.)

Of course, Bussgang said, the loan guarantee requires the company to raise money from banks or institutional investors first, perhaps by issuing bonds, with Rhode Island serving as a "backstop" for those investors. In that sense, the state's risk is pretty binary: either it'll have to pony up $75 million if the company fails, or it'll never need to actually cough up that cash. (Here are the details of the deal.)

Of 38 Studios' ambition to employ 450 people in Rhode Island by the end of 2012, Bussgang said actually doing so would be "extraordinary." (The company today has about 70 employees in its Maynard, Massachusetts office.) It'd mean that 38 Studios would grow into the biggest videogame company New England has seen in recent memory (even Turbine Entertainment and Harmonix Music Systems, two of the most successful existing game companies, have employed 300-350 people in their busiest periods.)

Bussgang said he doesn't think Massachusetts made a mistake in not trying to match Rhode Island's incentives.

Even Saul Kaplan, the former head of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp., seemed surprised by the size of the state's loan guarantee. "I never really contemplated a deal this large," Kaplan said, but instead smaller loan guarantees and investments to get "a portfolio of technology and IT companies based here." Kaplan is now founder and "chief catalyst" of the Business Innovation Factory in Rhode Island.

In the old days of economic development, when a state got involved in assisting companies, Kaplan observes, there would be some hard assets — like a factory or production equipment — that could be sold off if things went south, helping to repay the loan. "In a knowledge-based industry like gaming," Kaplan says, "when these companies go out, there isn't much in the way of assets to liquidate."

"Now the real open question is what will the market demand and penetration look like for these two first games" that 38 develops, Kaplan says.

Interestingly, when I asked Kaplan about a few small Massachusetts tech companies that Rhode Island successfully managed to attract earlier in the decade with incentives, he had trouble recalling their names. Had any of them grown into 100 or 200-person companies? "Probably not," Kaplan admitted.

Dave Schlafman, a media entrepreneur in Watertown, told me he felt it'd be a challenge to hire a couple hundred videogame programmers and designers in Rhode Island. Many big game developers, like Harmonix, hit that same hiring wall even here in Massachusetts, and they're forced to find freelancers or small contract shops in other states.

On Twitter this morning, Angus Davis, founder of the Providence start-up Swipely, said that "since all Mass. VCs passed on [the] deal, I guess it's a great idea for RI taxpayer, right? Meanwhile, state cut Slater VC fund. Dumb."

(The Slater Technology Fund was created by Rhode Island in 1997 to make small investments in early-stage start-ups, and its funding was cut recently.)

Bill Reed, CEO of Demiurge Studios, a game development shop in Cambridge, posted this open letter to Schilling (and his employees) this morning. In it, Reed wrote, "If anyone on the talented 38 Studios team wants to stay in Massachusetts, where we play major-league ball, they're more than welcome to join the team at Demiurge Studios, the state’s soon-to-be largest independent game studio."

Game entrepreneur Jon Radoff says, "If they have a successful MMO launch and wind up being one of the top MMO products out there, then I think it's conceivable" that 38 Studios might employ 450 people in Rhode Island within a few years. [MMO refers to a "massively-multiplayer online" game, which is the second product 38 Studios has in development.]

Like many other states and provinces in Canada, Rhode Island "may be getting more aggressive to court the videogame industry because it is an industry that experiences a lot of growth, and can inject a lot into local economies," Radoff said, adding that the trend is "definitely a threat to Massachusetts."

About a year ago, Apple issued a press release to announce that Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, was resigning from Apple's board.

"...[A]s Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses with Android and now Chrome OS," Steve Jobs said in the release, "Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest."

I have a hunch we could see a similar thing happen locally, with Constant Contact and HubSpot, two companies that help small and mid-sized businesses with digital marketing. Constant Contact, based in Waltham and run by Gail Goodman, is publicly-traded, and best-known for its subscription service that helps companies manage their e-mail newsletters; HubSpot, headquartered in Cambridge and run by Brian Halligan, helps companies use social media (including blogs and Twitter) to build their customer bases. Goodman sits on HubSpot's board.

HubSpot offers as part of its subscription service an e-mail marketing tool that makes it simple, the company says, to send "a single email to just a few leads or a personalized email offer to your entire database of contacts." In May, Constant Contact bought a small California company specializing in social media, and now offers webinars and an e-book on "35 things you should know about Facebook, Twitter, and other networks."

When I spoke to Goodman last month, she acknowledged that what was once a clear boundary between the two companies is now a bit fuzzier, but she said she didn't have plans to split from HubSpot's board. Goodman, in fact, was over at HubSpot's Kendall Square offices last week to give employees a talk about leadership.

Halligan acknowledges that the two companies have been edging closer together over the past year, but says that HubSpot sells to a "slightly bigger company," with a monthly subscription fee in the $500 range, while Constant Contact targets individuals and small business owners who pay an average of about $30 a month.

As for the question of whether there's a growing conflict with Goodman serving on HubSpot's board, Halligan says "it has definitely come up, but she doesn't seem particularly worried about it, and I'm not. We'll see how it goes down the road."

Goodman joined the HubSpot board in March 2008.

John Harthorne, CEO of the MassChallenge start-up competition, tells me that this week a group of judges are working to winnow 300 teams of entrepreneurs to 100 finalists; they're hearing some company pitches in person; some via Skype from as far off as California, Spain and Argentina; and Harthorne says a Brazilian team even flew to Boston for some face time. Judges include folks like 170 Systems founder Karl Buttner, Raj Melville of nTag Interactive and BeFree, and Micah Rosenbloom from Brontes/3M.

The goal of the competition is to encourage start-ups to come to Boston — or stay here and grow. The hundred finalist companies (finalists will be announced later this month) will be offered several months of free office space at the One Marina Park high-rise on Fan Pier; Harthorne is expecting about 200 people to use the space, noting that each team has 2.7 members on average. (Some entrants already have office space elsewhere.) A few lucky winners will receive either $100,000 or $50,000 at the competition's conclusion this fall. The cash prizes will total $1 million, and all of the prize money, Harthorne explains, comes from private sponsors like Microsoft, Xerox, and the law firm Foley Hoag.

Bill Starr of MyLifeList, who'd been living in Venice, Calif. earlier this year, says the MassChallenge competition — along with a more active early-stage investment community here — persuaded him to move to Swampscott in March. The site, which encourages visitors to list their life goals and then supplies encouragement, was founded in 2008.

You can view other team pitches on the MassChallenge Web site.

Scouting the Boston area for office space this week is CardStar Inc. The start-up makes a popular, free iPhone app (1.5 million downloads so far) that enables you to digitize all of your loyalty cards and then simply show the bar code on your iPhone's screen when you're at the checkout counter. The company has previously operated virtually, with employees in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. Bizdev chief Stuart Hilger says there will be three employees in the new Boston office, and CEO Andy Miller will work from it part-time.

I've tried the app three times now. It didn't work at my local Shaw's grocery or at PetSmart, but on the third try, at a CVS Pharmacy, it finally generated that sought-after beep from the laser scanner. (My hope was to be able to get rid of all those loyalty cards hanging off my keychain or stuffed into my wallet; for now, I'm holding on to them) On Apple's iTunes Store, CardStar currently has a 2.5 star rating, out of a possible five stars.

Hilger explains that the on-screen barcodes work well with some stores' scanning equipment, and not with others. "It's totally a binary thing," he says. "If it works the first time, you'll keep using it, and if it doesn't, you'll probably never use it again." Shoppers at City Sports tend to have good luck, but not Sears. At places like Staples and K-Mart, you may find one store where the app works, but others where it doesn't due to different scanning gear.

The company hopes to sell sponsorships in the app (Chase Manhattan Bank ran one recently), license its barcode-rendering technology to others, and also make it convenient to save and redeem coupons using the CardStar app. Hilger explains that CardStar can earn a few pennies for each coupon a user cashes in.

CardStar raised a first round of funding earlier this year: $1 million, some of it from Cambridge-based LaunchCapital. Hilger says the company may wind up adding a bit to that round, given that some strategic partners have expressed interest in putting more money into CardStar.

In 2005, Vineet Sinha was a PhD student in MIT's computer science department, presenting some of his work at a prestigious academic conference in San Diego. The project, Relo, proposed that one way to increase programmers' efficiency was to help them understand vast swaths of already-existing software code more quickly; understanding the code that exists, Sinha explains, requires an enormous investment of time, but if programmers don't do it, their new contributions tend to create problems. Relo created diagrams that showed how various chunks of code were connected to each other — a sort of automatically-generated Rand McNally road atlas of complex software.

After that 2005 presentation, several people in the audience asked Sinha how they could buy a copy of Relo. It wasn't yet a packaged product that he was prepared to support, but after he earned his doctorate in 2007, Sinha began to focus on turning it into one. The company he started, Architexa, is preparing for its commercial debut this month; already, several hundred non-paying customers have been testing it. Sinha says the company has three full-time employees and several interns. Initially, it supports only the Java programming language, but he hopes to eventually expand into C++, and perhaps Ruby and PHP.

Sinha acknowledges that Cambridge-based Architexa will compete with some of the tools sold by IBM's Rational Software division, but he says that his start-up is focused on developing a wider range of features that will help programmers explore and understand knotty code bases.

Sinha says the company plans to price its product somewhere between $150 and $450 annually. He intends to "switch on" payment for the current free trial users of the product this month. Later, he may seek angel funding for the company, which would primarily go to staff salaries and a concerted sales and marketing effort.

But in advance of that, to help generate buzz, Sinha plans to launch a site that will offer Architexa's roadmaps for popular open source programs.

Here's a video overview of Architexa, produced by the company:

Dave Schlafman and Evan Sussman of the Watertown-based digital animation studio CloudKid are in Los Angeles today to attend an Emmy Awards ceremony. It isn't the big prime-time Emmy Awards, but rather the "37th Annual Daytime Creative Arts and Entertainment Emmy Awards," which honor "the craft behind the many shows that grace the Daytime genre," according to the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which puts on the ceremony.

CloudKid won a nomination for Fizzy's Lunch Lab, a nifty PBS-funded Web site that uses videos, games, and simple recipes to encourage kids to eat better.

Schlafman says CloudKid was only formed in May of 2009. Shortly thereafter, the small studio won a $400,000 PBS grant to develop the Lunch Lab site, which went live in November 2009. Schlafman says its attracting 675,000 unique users a month, with new content added each week. PBS just gave CloudKid another grant to produce even more Lunch Lab material. "It could eventually turn into a series on the air," he says.

But right now, Schlafman says, PBS seems especially interested in developing Web content. "The number of kids watching TV is continuing to drop, compared to those consuming online video content," he says. "So many media companies still look at TV as the golden standard, but we're trying to find the sweet spot between TV and social gaming and interactive games."

Schlafman's former employer, Watertown-based Soup2Nuts, is also at the Emmy ceremony tonight, hoping for a win in a different category.

If you don't work in IT, you may not be up to speed on VDI yet.

VDI is "virtual desktop infrastructure," and information technology executives have been hearing a lot about it over the past year. It enables them to manage the hundreds or thousands of PCs used by their employees more cost-effectively; rather than running around to each desk to install a new piece of software or an update, the IT crew can deliver the operating system and applications to each user over the network from a central data center. They get more control, and ideally the user can access the same customized desktop set-up whether they are at home, on a netbook, a laptop, or even a smartphone. Whenever she logs in, the same desktop picture is there, with all the applications she uses and the proper security privileges.

Boston is becoming a hub of VDI activity (also sometimes called "desktop virtualization.") Companies like Desktone in Chelmsford, Viewfinity in Waltham, and Virtual Computer in Westford are all taking different approaches to helping IT organizations lower the cost of managing PC users. Scott Davis, the chief technology officer of VMWare's desktop virtualization business unit, is based in Cambridge. And today, Marlborough-based Unidesk formally launches its VDI product.

Unidesk has been working on "the ultimate virtual desktop" for more than two years, says founder and CTO Chris Midgley. "Desktop virtualization is really all about people," he says. "You can't give everyone the exact same terminal. They want to make the desktop theirs. But IT wants to be able to treat thousands of desktops like they're one desktop."

Unidesk has raised $20 million in venture capital funding from Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners, and the company has 34 employees. Midgley says they're currently hiring in the sales and support departments. Early customers include architecture firms, universities, and the Glasgow Housing Authority in Scotland. Customers pay Unidesk on a per-user basis, starting at about $150 per user.

It was a coup for Unidesk when Don Bulens joined last June as chief executive; Bulens had previously run New Hampshire-based EqualLogic, acquired by Dell in 2007 for $1.4 billion in cash — Dell's biggest acquisition ever.

Bulens said he found that he "very much missed being part of a team on a day-to-day basis."

I asked Midgley about his fund-raising experience with Unidesk; he'd earlier sold LiveVault, an online back-up and recovery service, to Boston-based Iron Mountain. (That company raised about $25 million in venture funding, and was acquired for $50 million.) He said he pitched only two firms, Matrix and North Bridge (Matrix was among LiveVault's backers), and both decided to do the deal after about two weeks of due diligence. As for not making the rounds to talk to more firms, Midgley explains, "You want to keep ideas in this world extraordinarily confidential." Some founders seek to shop around their ideas to get the best possible valuation for their company, he says, "at the cost of too much exposure."

When I wrote last November about Local Motors, a Wareham start-up that was crowdsourcing the designs for a new line of cars, founder and CEO Jay Rogers mentioned that the company would likely set up its first production facility in Arizona, lured by government incentives.

The move happened this spring, I'm told, but it also included the company's headquarters staff and most of the company's handful of employees. (Two people focused on Web site maintenance and finance remain in Massachusetts, but without an office.)

The company had been located next door to Wareham's Factory Five Racing, one of the country's biggest manufacturers of kit cars, and the co-founder of that company has been a big supporter of Local Motors, financially and otherwise.

I talked to Rogers this morning, who told me that the relocation had nothing to do with labor costs in Massachusetts, and said that the company eventually hopes to open one of its regional "micro-factories" here.

In Massachusetts, Rogers said he founder the Governor's office unhelpful. In Arizona, by contrast, "the Governor and the local municipality reached out to us, offered help with permitting, and with the application process for the federal Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program." In Arizona, the company was offered sales tax rebates and several hundred grand in cash, Rogers says, to make improvements to Local Motors' 20,000 square foot facility in Chandler, Arizona, just southeast of Phoenix.

"We had a number of meetings with economic development officials in Massachusetts," Rogers says. "We met with people and met with people, and there was basically no action. It's like there wasn't any seriousness about keeping our business in Massachusetts."

Update: Kofi Jones, director of communications at the state's Office of Housing and Economic development, writes in an e-mail that "business retention and expansion is a top priority of the Patrick-Murray Administration, and we have had great success with companies like Cisco, IBM, and Liberty Mutual. After meeting with Local Motors and their consultant, the Administration’s economic development team presented the company with an incentive proposal. Although we did not receive any feedback on the proposal, we remain prepared to work with Local Motors on any and all future opportunities."

Rogers says the company currently employs a dozen people, and plans to eventually employ 50 to 60 in Chandler. Local Motors will begin delivering its first vehicle, the $50,000 Rally Fighter (pictured above, with Rogers), to customers this August, he says.

Another factor in the company's westward migration is that the Rally Fighter is intended for off-roading. Ariel Ferreira, a Local Motors spokesperson, writes via e-mail that "...we're 100 percent certain we're doing the right thing by building the Micro-Factory and Rally Fighter in the place where it is meant to be driven; the place where majority of customers for this vehicle reside."

They'll be holding an open house at the new digs in Arizona July 31st. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood...

I've run into three entrepreneurs this week who are getting ready to begin beta tests of new products.

- Shelby Clark tells me that his new peer-to-peer car-sharing service RelayRides (I've described it as Zipcar without the fleet) logged the first rental of its summer beta test in Cambridge last night. RelayRides had a demo table at the Web Innovators Group last Monday night, and company employees were out in Central Square this week handing out postcards. The company is both looking for potential drivers as well as car owners willing to assign their car's unused hours to the service, and earn money in return. Clark tells me the vehicles available include a Toyota Prius and, amazingly, a Porsche Cayenne. (Vehicles start at $6 an hour for older models, and the Cayenne rents for $14 an hour.) The company is currently based at the Polaris-run DogPatch Lab space in East Cambridge.

- Brothers Kyle and Matt Rushton are both still working day jobs, but they're also nudging Blogcastr, a live-blogging tool, toward a closed beta test in the next few weeks. The idea is to make it easy for folks "blogcasting" from live events (publishing repeated updates) to share both text and photos (and eventually, audio and video, too) with readers, who'll be able to add their comments and reactions. The Rushton siblings started work on Blogcastr late last year, and they're hoping to get the service up-and-running before looking for angel funding.

- Vikram Venkatasubramanian and two other alums of Avaya are working on a neat voice-driven service called TopicPhone. Their idea is that it's still too complicated to navigate phone menus (especially on a mobile) by pressing 1 for sales, 2 for customer service, or 3 for billing. With TopicPhone, the goal is to enable a caller to say, "I need to have my house painted," and then serve up a choice of several painters in the vicinity. They plan to operate TopicPhone as an 800 service that would be free to callers, and initially focus on serving the elderly and visually impaired. Venkatasubramanian tells me his advisory board includes he has been getting some informal advice from Ron Croen, the former CEO and founder of Nuance, and now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Tufts.

As for the business model, Venkatasubramanian explained in an e-mail:

The revenue model for TopicPhone is an auction-based, pay-per-call model where businesses bid for the phone calls (which represent a 7-10 times more valuable lead than a web click) that are relevant to topics of interest for their business. We plan a TopicPhone premium [service] at a later date which is subscription-based and stores information about the callers, such as their prescription codes, bank account numbers, etc. so that they are able to do things like check their bank balances or refill their prescriptions by just stating that need.

(And if you're working on something that's getting close to launch, I'm eager to hear about it; just drop me a line using the comment box at right or by clicking my name.)

Out later this month from Boston entrepreneur Jennifer Floren is "The Innovation Generation: The Gen Y Way & How New Thinking Can Reclaim the American Dream." Floren is founder and CEO of Experience, a company that links students, colleges, and employers to help students and recent grads find fulfilling internships and jobs.

The book makes the case that more than ever, employers need to be clever about identifying and hiring the best entry-level talent. "A lot of companies don't do internships or hiring of students, or get their front-line people into the world of education as mentors, and that's a huge missed opportunity," Floren says. If they don't, as the Baby Boomers start to retire en masse, "that's going to put them at a competitive disadvantage," she says.

The book makes the case that Gen Y brings a new perspective to the office that differs from older employees — especially with regard to communications technologies and social networking. That can create management challenges, Floren admits, but it "can also be applied in your organization to fuel innovation."

Floren says she started writing the book only last year, booking a few days at a time on her schedule exclusively for writing.

Floren started Experience when she was 24, just after leaving a consulting job at Bain & Co. Since then, the company has raised about $46 million in venture capital (most of it used for acquisitions, Floren says.) The company achieved profitability in 2006, and today has just over 40 employees.

Buzz is starting to build this week about the new videogame "Power Gig," from Boston's Seven45 Studios. The game isn't out until October, but the company will be demoing it next week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.

What's unique about the music game — aside from the fact that they've licensed some tunes from the likes of Eric Clapton and Dave Matthews — is that rather than playing it with a toy guitar, you use a real, tune-able six-string. It's as easy to use as a typical plastic guitar controller, but as you progress in your ability as a musician (or if you're already one), you can actually crank out real power chords, or simply plug it into an amp and rock out separately from the game.

Seven45's sister company, First Act, is a musical instrument maker in the Back Bay (and yes, 745 Boylston is the address of both companies.) Jeff Walker of Seven45 tells me the two companies share some executives and other resources, and that Seven45 has been entirely self-funded, without outside capital. (Walker is the VP of marketing for both Seven45 and First Act.) The game developer has about 75 employees, and has been working on "Power Gig" for just over two years, Walker says.

The guitar and drum peripherals that come with "Power Gig" will work with other music games, according to Seven45. Here's a preview of "Power Gig," which will be available for the Xbox 360 and Sony PlayStation 3, from IGN.

Interestingly, Billboard writer Antony Bruno says that the rival game "Rock Band," from Cambridge-based Harmonix Music Systems, may also wind up heading in a more educational direction with its forthcoming "Rock Band 3."

Here's a video from the company explaining how the guitar will work.

In Los Angeles for a conference on Saturday, who should I bump into but ex-Cantabrigian Eliot Mack, an alum of MIT and iRobot who is now running a small start-up in Venice, CA?

I last wrote about Mack and his company, Lightcraft Technology, just over two years ago, as they were starting to pitch TV and movie producers on their real-time compositing system; essentially, it can instantly meld live images in front of the camera with digital scenery and characters that were created in a computer, and show the results on a screen. What's cool is that as the camera moves — even if you take it off the tripod to hold it on your shoulder — the background perspective adapts flawlessly.

Founded in Cambridge in 2003, Mack took the company out to California, where the customers are. Since then, Lightcraft's system (the base price is $78,500) has been used regularly on the ABC series "V," and for Tim Burton's recent film version of "Alice in Wonderland." Mack says there's a children's TV series also using the system, but he can't yet drop the name yet. He has also been hiring a few more employees, including a director of sales.

Xconomy founder Bob Buderi confirms this morning that the Cambridge-based start-up is planning to launch its fifth local business news site in Silicon Valley. Buderi, formerly the editor of MIT's Technology Review magazine, also says that chief correspondent Wade Roush will return to the Bay Area, where he'd long worked as a reporter and editor for Tech Review, to open the Xconomy bureau there.

As to rumors I'd heard that Gregory Huang, Xconomy's Seattle editor (and a one-time Bostonian), was moving east to take over Roush's old post, Buderi said, "There's going to be a series of promotions and additions, but we're not ready to announce them yet."

Xconomy launched a news site in Detroit earlier this spring, and Buderi says there are other cities (in the U.S. and outside it) on his radar screen. "Our goal has been to build not just a national network, but an international network," he says. The company has raised two rounds of funding from investors including CommonAngels and Launch Capital, the most recent round last spring. Xconomy has also been cutting deals with Web sites like the Motley Fool and newspapers like the Globe to syndicate its stories. The company has ten full-time employees, Buderi says.

Buderi agrees that San Francisco may be the most competitive media market Xconomy has yet entered, with sites like GigaOm, Venture Beat, and TechCrunch assiduously covering company launches, fundings, and acquisitions. "I have tremendous respect for those guys, who have been real pioneers in business-to-business blogs. It's crowded, sure, but we think we'll be clearly differentiated." One way is by covering the life sciences industry more than the entrenched players; another, Buderi says, is by writing longer narrative profiles of companies.

I ran into Roush last night when he was covering the TechStars Boston demo night, and asked him about the upcoming move. He said he couldn't talk about it on the record yet... and so we had a nice off-the-record chat about the City by the Bay (where I, too, lived for a couple years in the middle of the decade.)

The annual TechStars Boston investor presentations tonight were a hot ticket: I'm told some people were turned away at the door for fear of violating the fire code, and Boston's digerati filled the 10th and 11th floors of Microsoft's New England Research and Development Center.

TechStars aims to help teams of entrepreneurs build a working product in three months, with as much as $18,000 in seed funding and mentorship from local investors and entrepreneurs.

All ten companies tonight were building Web-based businesses, ranging from online survey tools to social networking apps to customizable Internet radio stations. Two of the start-ups, Sparkcloud and Marginize, had received some sort of funding even before presenting to the audience tonight (Sparkcloud from Avid Technology founder Bill Warner, who helped bring the TechStars program to Boston in 2009, and Marginize from angel investors Joe Caruso, Jean Hammond, and others.)

During the course of the evening, HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah tweeted me to let me know that he'd also decided to invest in Marginize — and the way he chose to let the company's founder know that was by using Marginize, a browser add-on that lets you annotate Web pages and see what comments others have added. "How very meta," wrote Shah. (That's founder Ziad Sultan, a former analyst at Longworth Venture Partners, at right.)

In the audience were folks like Rob Go and Lee Hower, who are working together on a new early-stage investing firm...NeoCarta Ventures managing director Jarrett Collins...Jim Savage of Longworth Venture Partners... Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital...Betahouse co-founder Jon Pierce, who also organized this week's first-ever Angel Boot Camp...Oneforty founder Laura Fitton, part of the 2009 TechStars Boston class...Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Greg Bialecki...Google Ventures managing partner Rich Miner...Viximo CTO Sean Lindsay...ex-Microsoftie Reed Sturtevant...FastIgnite's Sim Simeonov...North Bridge's Dayna Grayson...Elliot Katzman from Commonwealth Capital Ventures...Steve Kane, Gamesville founder, angel investor, and master of the Twitter koan...Harmonix co-founder Eran Egozy...and Rich Levandov of Avalon Capital Ventures.

Katie Rae, formerly of Microsoft, mentioned that she'll be teaching a course with Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee at MIT this fall, along with the aforementioned Sturtevant. And Janet Kraus, founder of Spire and Circles, is joining the faculty of Harvard Business School this fall to teach entrepreneurship. (Rae is at left, Kraus at right.)

Richard Dale of Sigma Partners, who writes the blog Venture Cyclist, with Izhar Armony of Charles River Ventures.

Google developer relations exec Don Dodge, who maintains the blog "The Next Big Thing," with Gus Weber of Microsoft NERD and John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures.

I was somewhat alarmed to learn that Ron Schmelzer, an MIT alum and one of the early Internet entrepreneurs in Boston, has (A) moved to Baltimore, where his wife is teaching at Johns Hopkins, and (B) started a baseball cap company called Zoptopz.

Shawn Broderick oversees the TechStars Boston program. He had a great sticker on his Macbook Air: "Those who say it can't be done shouldn't interrupt the people doing it."

OK, on to a few random awards for the entrepreneurs who presented, each of whom was impressive in his or her own way... (As with TechStars 2009, there was just one female CEO in the bunch, Francesca Moyse of Monkey Analytics.)

Most persuasive: Leon Noel of Social Sci, a site that intends to help scientific researchers conduct online surveys efficiently, dangling incentives (a free iPod Touch!) to entice participants. Noel presented first, and by the time he was done, it was easy to imagine every university in America buying a subscription to the service.

The Jerry Lewis Telethon Award: Marginize founder Ziad Sultan, for casually mentioning that he'd already raised $250,000 for the start-up, and just needed $100,000 more to complete his planned $350,000 seed round. (It worked, at least partially.)

Best Acronym Deployed: Appswell founder Daniel Sullivan, building a service that will help companies crowdsource ideas from their customers, talked about "HIPPOS." At big companies, HIPPOS make most of the decisions. Appswell wants to put that power in the hands of the customer. What's a HIPPO? The highest-paid person with an opinion. Love it.

Best Logo: Usermojo, trying to capture the emotions that users feel when they visit Web sites (like confusion) to help site designers improve the status quo. The colorful logo elegantly captures the concept that this is a product about both design and emotion.

Best Multimedia Demo: Brandon Casci of Loudcaster, an Internet broadcasting start-up that lets (paying) users launch their own radio stations. Casci showed some fun examples of how beta testers have been using it to create stations like "Infinite Accordion," a station that plays all accordion music, all the time.

Can't Wait to Use It Award: Jeremy Levine of StarStreet Sports, creating a stock market for trading shares of athletes and sports teams. Levine says it'll be legal for players to trade with real money, though for the World Cup soccer tourney, they're still using play dough. Every sports fan I know will invest at least $100, with StarStreet planning to take 2 percent from the sell side of every transaction. (That's Levine at right, pitching his "Big Vision.")

Appswell founder Sullivan mentioned to me that all of the TechStars Boston start-ups have found office space for the summer in Boston, to "keep the band together," as he put it. Most will wind up at the Cambridge Innovation Center's co-working space (thanks to a sponsorship from Microsoft that will pay the rent); a couple will shack up at Dog Patch Labs Cambridge; and one will share space in Somerville with Viximo. That's good news...and I'll be curious to hear whether some more fundings happen after tonight.

Cambridge-based Zipcar filed to go public this morning (here's the press release, and the SEC document). The three biggest shareholders are ex-AOL CEO Steve Case's Revolution investment arm, Benchmark Capital in California, and Greylock Partners. Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith holds 3.92 percent of the company, about 2.4 million shares.

I went back into the archives to pull out the column I wrote in 2003, a few months after Griffith joined Zipcar as its CEO, replacing co-founder Robin Chase; Chase's husband Roy Russell was still serving as Zipcar's VP of technology. (Both have since moved on.)

My May 26, 2003 @large column, "New chairman, CEO shift gears at Zipcar":

Zipcar is one of the most promising start-ups in Boston.

The question: can a new chairman and a new CEO from the world of high-tech steer it in the right direction and step on the gas?

The Cambridge company, which operates a car-sharing network in Boston, Washington, and New York, was veering off course last year. It was losing money, and didn’t have enough left in the bank to reach profitability. It needed to attract more funding, but the willing investors insisted on replacing the old board of directors and bringing in a new CEO to take over from Zipcar founder Robin Chase.

Enter Scott Griffith, who joined as CEO in February. Griffith had been CEO of Digital Goods, which made software that prevented e-books from being copied. Jonathan Seelig, a co-founder of Akamai Technologies and one of the early investors in Zipcar, took over as chairman. (Chase remains in a business development role, and still serves on the board.)

Standing in a parking lot behind the post office in Central Square, Griffith demonstrates how Zipcar works. In his office nearby, we’d used the company’s Web site to reserve a banana-hued Mini Cooper for a few hours. Using this particular car costs Zipcar members $7 an hour, plus forty cents a mile. Gas is included. Making the reservation took about two minutes.

A few seconds after we made the reservation online, Zipcar’s system beamed a message to the Mini via Verizon’s two-way paging network. The message told a small computer hidden in the car who had reserved it, and for how long.

StarStreet, one of the Cambridge start-ups participating in this spring's TechStars development program, is down in New York this week for the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. They're using the event as an opportunity to open up the beta test of their "sports stock market" to more people, according to founder Jeremy Levine; all you need is a Facebook account.

The first event in which you'll have a chance to participate is the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, which starts June 11th. StarStreet players can "buy" shares in teams and individual players using play money — and see how their decisions play out over time. The company eventually hopes to let you trade on StarStreet using real money (and either turning a profit or chalking up a loss), though there are some questions hovering over the legality of that. (I'm sure StarStreet would be much more hazardous to individual investors than, say, the NYSE.) An early test during the NCAA's March Madness tournament had a small number of users trading with actual dollars, and no legal or regulatory actions arose.

StarStreet will also be part of the TechStars Boston demo night next Wednesday (an invite-only event for prospective investors). The start-up's "coaching staff" (read: advisory board) includes Viximo co-founder Sean Lindsay and Black Duck Software veterans Doug Levin and Palle Pedersen.

On Fridays, I regularly post a list of five things worth knowing about, and invite you to add others in the comments.

This week, it's New England start-ups working on new ideas in the financial services space.

- Cambridge-based Blueleaf wants to encourage you to collect all your banking and investment info in one place, and then collaborate with friends, family, or financial advisors to improve your returns.

- Currensee. A social network built especially for foreign exchange traders. It allows participants to discuss strategies and compare performance. Boston-based Currensee has raised $12 million in venture capital so far, from firms like North Bridge and Egan Managed Capital.

- Taking a page from the ING Direct playbook, PerkStreet is a bank without branches or toaster giveaways. Targets consumers who are happy to bank online, ask questions via e-mail, or call up a live person by phone. By keeping costs low, Boston-based PerkStreet can offer rewards for using your debit card that include free Dunkin' coffee, iTunes downloads, or Amazon.com credit.

- Swipely encourages users to share information with friends (or the Web at large) about purchases they've made, and to rate or comment on the things they've bought. Launched a beta last month, and announced $7.5 million in funding. Based in Providence, RI.

- Trefis is building a community of amateur equities analysts, who use the site to share their scenarios for how a particular stock will perform. Nifty visual tools for estimating how good or bad performance in a given line of business will affect the share price.

(One more company worth a mention is WePay, which offers a solution for group payment situations — like renting a Cape house for the summer with a bunch of friends. Founded here by two Boston College alums, it's now based in Palo Alto, unfortunately.)

Who would you add to the list? Post a comment...

Peeved about events that charge entrepreneurs an entry fee to present their businesses to angel investors, Jason Calacanis decided to create Open Angel Forum earlier this year. The series of events, held so far in places like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, is "dedicated to providing entrepreneurs with free and open access to the angel investors that they need," according to the Web site. (Calacanis is the founder of the curated "question-and-answer" site Mahalo and an angel investor himself, in companies like Gowalla and Blippy.)

At each event, Calacanis and his colleagues round up a roomful of angel investors, and select five local start-ups to present their plans. The first local Open Angel Forum will take place June 18th, at the Polaris-run Dogpatch Labs start-up space in East Cambridge, Calacanis tells me. Info about the Cambridge event isn't yet up on the Open Angel Forum site, but will be soon. For now, entrepreneurs can sign up using this form.

Update: Angel investor George McQuilken correctly points out that most (all?) organized angel groups in New England invite entrepreneurs to present to them sans cover charge. But that doesn't prevent other groups from organizing events here, as youngStartup Ventures tried to do this past spring, where entrepreneurs pay a fee for access to investors.

With abundant seed capital, entrepreneurs are free to test ideas. Many will fail miserably, to be sure, but a few will succeed gloriously, and with that success will spawn dozens or hundreds more entrepreneurs and angel investors.

If you think we could use a few more jobs in the U.S. right about now, you should know about the Startup Visa, an idea that has been gaining momentum in the blogosphere since last spring. Last month, Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar introduced a bill that would create a new class of visa for foreign-born entrepreneurs who start companies (and attract funding for them) here.

Ex- Cantabrigian Paul Graham, an entrepreneur who sold an e-commerce company to Yahoo in the late 1990s and is now well known as the founder of Y Combinator, got things rolling last April with a post titled "The Founder Visa." Graham wrote:

The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley. It's that we won't let the people who want to start them into the country.

Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy. If we assume four people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that's 2500 new companies. Each year. They wouldn't all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.

By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies, only new ones they'd founded. In fact they'd cause there to be more jobs for Americans, because the companies they started would hire more employees as they grew.

Brad Feld, a venture capitalist at Foundry Group, circulated Graham's idea to several U.S. representatives. Feld is also an MIT alum and founder of TechStars, a program in Boulder, Boston, and Seattle which invests small amounts in a few dozen start-ups each year, connects them with mentors, and gives them free office space for several months.

Last September, Feld wrote on his blog:

Two of the ten TechStars Boulder teams were comprised of non-U.S. founders — two from Canada and two from the UK. Both lived in Boulder for the summer and want to relocate here and build their businesses in the U.S. (and — specifically — in Boulder). Over the summer we struggled to figure out ways to get them visas — all of the proposed approaches were expensive, risky, and tiresome. Both companies are still trying, but each [is] now seriously considering returning to their home countries to build their businesses.

I cannot come up with a single reason why this makes any sense from a U.S. perspective. These are young, talented entrepreneurs that have come out of a three month program with amazingly interesting startups. They are in the final process of raising their first rounds of financing. Post financing they will be creating U.S.-based high-tech jobs. If they are successful, they will create a lot of jobs. Plus, they are young so they will do this multiple times in their lifetime.

A number of local venture capitalists signed on to support the idea, representing firms like Spark Capital, .406 Ventures, and Flybridge Capital Partners. And earlier this month, the board of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council voted to support the legislation introduced by Senators Kerry and Lugar, which would issue at most 10,000 visas a year (and probably many fewer than that.) Entrepreneurs who hope to obtain one of the new visas must raise $250,000 in funding from an investor in the U.S., and they become a permanent legal resident after two years if their company has either raised an additional $1 million, hit $1 million in revenue, or created at least five full-time jobs in the U.S.

MassTLC president Tom Hopcroft explained the trade organization's support for the idea on his blog:

First, throughout our history we've relied on foreign-born entrepreneurs to help spur economic growth. Nationwide, about a quarter of our technology companies have been founded by immigrants. Here in Massachusetts, some of our most notable tech giants were created by brilliant, visionary immigrants like An Wang of Wang Laboratories, Desh Deshpande of Sycamore Networks, and Ash Dahod, who recently sold Starent Networks to Cisco for nearly three billion dollars.

Second, now more than ever, our foreign-born students can return to their home countries to find opportunity. A recent study found that 52 percent of the Chinese students attending U.S. colleges and universities believed they would find greater opportunities if they returned home after graduation.

With some 445K students currently enrolled at Massachusetts colleges and universities, we naturally have one of the nation's largest pools of foreign-born students, a disproportionate talent asset that, in turn, can create tremendous innovation and wealth in our Commonwealth. We need to retain every one of those students who is willing to strike out on his or her own to start a company and create new jobs and wealth in our Commonwealth.

...To maintain our leadership position, we need the best entrepreneurs — domestic and foreign-born — to stay here and build tomorrow's leading technology companies in the Commonwealth.

I'm on board. Are you? Do post a comment.