Author: Wade Roush

Wade Roush wrote:

Lexalytics, whose text-analytics software can measure, among other things, whether a digital document is full of praise or insults, did not get off to a superlative start back in 2003.

To begin with, its investors almost closed the company down. Lexalytics got started when the venture funders behind a Woburn, MA-based content management startup called LightSpeed Software decided to consolidate that company on the West Coast. “They were going to close the East Coast operation, so I basically convinced them to give it to me to avoid the shutdown costs,” says Jeff Catlin, a former LightSpeed general manager who, together with a LightSpeed engineer named Mike Marshall, salvaged the Woburn operation, moved it to Amherst, MA, and renamed it Lexalytics.

But three months later, a wrinkle cropped up. Marshall, a UK citizen working in America on a green card, was deported. “They shipped him back, and we didn’t see each other for about three years,” recalls Catlin, Lexalytics’ CEO.

Marshall remained as chief technology officer, working remotely, and the company worked through its rough patch. Today, business is booming. In fact, the startup has outgrown its Amherst location—it’s already hired everyone it could recruit out of the UMass Amherst computer science department, Catlin says—and this month it opened a new headquarters office here in Boston.

The startup’s current momentum was a long time building, and was partly the result of some long-overdue luck, according to Catlin. Sentiment extraction, the ability to measure the emotional tone of a news story or a product review or a customer complaint, has long been one of Lexalytics’ specialties. But only in the last 18 months or so has demand for sentiment extraction software become red-hot, as companies in many industries have realized how the technology might help them with tasks like brand reputation monitoring and algorithmic investing.

“Looking back from a historical perspective, we were brilliant,” says Catlin. “We were the first vendor to do sentiment analysis, which landed us a number of big clients like …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

One thing was clear from the moment conference organizers opened the doors for the PAX East gaming expo at the Hynes Convention Center Friday afternoon: they’re going to need a bigger venue next year.

Lines to enter the massive meeting, a three-day festival for fans of console and PC video gaming, online gaming, and even arcade and tabletop games, snaked around the block and twisted through a dungeon-like maze inside the convention center. A standing-room-only crowd filled the center’s main theatre for a surprisingly moving opening keynote speech by Wil Wheaton (the actor and writer whose unapologetic geekiness has probably won him more fans than his portrayal of Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation ever did).

CLICK HERE FOR SLIDE SHOW (15 images)

The crowds also stood shoulder to shoulder on the main expo floor, where Rockstar Games, Electronic Arts, and other giant game studios are showing off new and upcoming titles like Red Dead Redemption and Dante’s Inferno. And so many people wanted to attend a panel session on fiction writing for interactive media that the doors to the hall were closed five minutes early—conference staff, who were friendly and unintimidating save for their “Enforcer” T-shirts, barred even this reporter from entering.

Perhaps the crowding should have been expected, given that PAX East sold out in advance, with some 60,000 tickets purchased online. Some enthusiasts drove, flew, or rode to Boston from as far away as Ohio and Washington, D.C., specifically to attend.

They came to see the latest video and PC game technology, yes—Nvidia, for example, used the occasion to unveil its latest graphics processing unit, the GeForce GTX 480, whose 3 billion transistors can power ultra-realistic 3D graphics on multiple screens.

But more importantly, the crowds came for the love of games, gaming, and their fellow gamers. Many in the audience for Wheaton’s keynote nodded and applauded when he confessed that his strongest lifelong friendships have been with the people he played Dungeons & Dragons with as a teenager.

“Gaming is the foundation of the best friendships I’ve ever had,” Wheaton said. “It is the mortar that has held my group of friends together. Some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without playing games. Games are important. Games matter. PAX is where we come to celebrate that.”

For photos from Day 1 of PAX East, click here.

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Wade Roush wrote:

On March 2, I reported to Suffolk County Superior Court for jury duty, certain that I’d be let go after my day of service or excused, just like every other time. So it was a bit of a shock to find myself seated, by the end of the day, as Juror No. 14 on a medical malpractice trial that, according to the judge’s prediction, would take until March 23. (She was exactly right, as it turned out.)

I won’t dwell here on the irony of being forced to spend most of Mass Mobile Month immobile in the jury box, separated from my laptop and unable to use my cell phone. Being part of the 14-member jury on a three-week civil trial was no more of a hardship for me than it was for the other jurors, so I’m not going to complain. But I do want to share a few observations from the experience—some encouraging, some not. I’ll try to restrict myself mainly to talking about subjects related to technology and medicine, which were the big themes in the case.

The trial, in a nutshell, was about a health emergency that went undiagnosed far too long. The plaintiffs were an elderly church pastor from a Boston suburb and his wife. (I’m not going to use their names.) The pastor had a history of back trouble, but nothing incapacitating. The weekend before Thanksgiving in 2003, he began to experience unbearable back pain, and was taken to the ER of a local hospital (which I also will not name—if you want to go dig up the details, I’m sure there are public records).

Doctors there quickly determined that the pastor had a streptococcal infection in his bloodstream and started him on the appropriate antibiotics. They began a series of tests intended to locate the source of the infection and the pain. But the agony continued, and it wasn’t until five days later, after the pastor had been transferred to a prominent Boston hospital, that its true source was discovered.

An imaging study showed that the infection had taken root in the pastor’s spine in the form of a large epidural abscess, a pocket of pus inside the spinal canal between the bone and the dura, the outer lining of the spinal cord. As soon as the abscess was detected, surgeons operated to drain the pus. But by then it was too late. The abscess had pinched off the pastor’s spinal cord, causing permanent nerve damage. The pastor, now 75 years old, can’t walk on his own and suffers from a range of other disabilities.

The plaintiffs’ attorney was an outstanding Boston trial lawyer and medical malpractice specialist named Gregg Pasquale, of Keches Law Group. I’ve since learned that in the 1980s Pasquale was an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County, where he prosecuted murder cases. His fiery zeal was evident every day in our courtroom. Pasquale argued that the defendants in the case—a radiologist from the suburban hospital and two doctors from the Boston hospital—should have done more to diagnose the pastor’s problem.

One of the many difficulties in the pastor’s case was that the abscess didn’t appear on the standard MRI exam ordered by the ER doctor at the suburban hospital. But Pasquale argued that …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

The largest gaming expo on the East Coast, this weekend’s PAX East festival, will be preceded by what’s likely to be the biggest party the Boston gaming scene has ever witnessed, tonight at Microsoft’s New England R&D Center in Cambridge, MA.

A packed house of 800 guests is expected at the PAX East “Made in MA” bash, organized by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) and sponsored by AMD and Microsoft. The event is intended to celebrate the $2 billion cluster of companies in the video game and online game industry in Massachusetts. Many of these companies will be exhibiting at PAX East (but some won’t—and therein lies another story).

PAX East itself, the first PAX event outside of the conference’s home city of Seattle, is expected to attract a sold-out crowd of 60,000 gamers to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Local officials are hailing the consumer-oriented expo—the creation of Seattle-based Penny Arcade, whose online comic books, forums, and videos have a big following in the gaming community—as a confirmation that the Boston area is home to a critical mass of both game players and game builders.

“It’s huge for us,” says Jason Schupbach, creative economy industry director for the Massachusetts Office of Business Development, a wing of the state government’s Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development. “This will be the biggest gaming conference on the East Coast, and it’s a nice affirmation of what’s already going on here, and of the work the local gaming industry has done to build their community over the past 10 years.”

As part of an initiative Schubpach helped organize, all of the Massachusetts-based companies exhibiting at PAX East will have special “Made in MA” stickers on their booths. And there’s a plan for representatives of local gaming companies to wear “I Work in Massachusetts” pins to the event.

But as large as it will be, the expo won’t be all-inclusive. Some local gaming companies are shying away from the event, out of concern that small- to medium-sized local developers will be drowned out on the exhibit floor by the free-spending giants of the industry, such as Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive, maker of the Grand Theft Auto series.

Foxborough, MA-based Quick Hit, for example, considered exhibiting at PAX East but ultimately decided against the idea. Last fall the company launched an online football game incorporating elements of role-playing and strategy games, such as the ability to assemble teams of players based on real-life football stars. To attract crowds to its booth, Quick Hit wanted to bring in ex-NFL athletes and coaches for product signings, according to Samantha Smith, the startup’s director of communications. But there was a flag on the play.

“When you have companies like Electronic Arts and Harmonix and Take-Two exhibiting, we felt we needed something big to stand out and draw the crowd appeal, but that was really frowned upon by the PAX staff,” Smith says. “They felt that PAX is really about …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

Lexington, MA-based Wistia, whose software helps businesses measure customer interaction with online videos, has raised an additional $775,000 from a group including existing and new angel investors, according to co-founder and CEO Chris Savage. One of the new investors is Renesys CEO Ashton Peery, who is also an investor in BzzAgent and Gazelle. “Raising this round allows us to capture more of the opportunity that’s out there, expand the team, and to continue to accelerate growth,” Savage tells Xconomy. “We’ve been able to grow the company without having to bring VCs into the mix thus far.” Xconomy profiled Wistia, which previously raised $650,000, in September 2008 and May 2009.

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Wade Roush wrote:

It may not be a coincidence that the companies most closely associated with the idea of cloud computing, such as Google, Amazon, and Rackspace, are known mainly as Web or Software-as-a-Service companies rather than as makers of actual computer hardware or shrink-wrapped software. After all, the whole idea of the cloud is to outsource your computing and storage needs to far-away computing utilities and their data centers, diminishing the need to own on-site hardware and systems.

But now there’s a second wave of cloud computing companies coming along—and some of them do sell their own physical products. One leader in that group is EMC (NYSE: EMC), the Hopkinton, MA-based maker of storage systems like the Symmetrix enterprise storage array. As EMC and other hardware and software makers ramp up their sales efforts, the dominant picture of the computing clouds as something you rent, but don’t own, may change. And if Mike Feinberg has his way, many clouds, both public and private, will bear a figurative sticker saying “Atmos Inside.”

“Most people would say that cloud computing is an Internet-delivered service,” says Feinberg, who was appointed as senior vice president of EMC’s cloud infrastructure group in 2008. “I think that’s a fallacy. In reality, it’s about infrastructure that scales up and down very quickly. At a certain scale, many companies will deploy this as part of their own infrastructure.”

Atmos, which Feinberg runs, is EMC’s family of cloud storage technologies. That includes Atmos Online, EMC’s own cloud storage service, which is an Internet-accessible, self-service, pay-as-you-go operation similar in most respects to Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services. But much more important to the company’s business is the Atmos software itself—the engine behind Atmos Online—which can be purchased outright and installed in any private data center, giving cloud-like storage capabilities to companies with lots of data to manage. (It’s as if Amazon were to take all of the software it’s written to run Amazon Web Services and boxed it up for sale, so that other companies could set up their own versions of EC2 and S3.)

While Atmos Online is a full-service cloud operation, it was conceived mainly as a proving ground for the Atmos software, says Feinberg, who laid out parts of the Atmos vision at Xconomy’s Cloud³ forum in December (his PowerPoint presentation is online here). “We purposely built Atmos Online to demonstrate to our engineers and customers that these technologies can be utilized to provide a service,” whether that service is being provided to users inside an organization or paying customers outside it, he says.

So it’s the shrink-wrapped version of Atmos that EMC sees as its flagship cloud product. In the long run, the company has little interest in becoming a leading cloud service provider, according to Feinberg: instead, it wants to be the company that …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

Somebody at Intuit must have seen the writing on the wall. Last September, the Mountain View, CA, software company, which has been selling PC-based personal finance programs since 1983 via floppy discs, CD-ROMs, and downloads, paid $170 million to buy a two-year-old Web startup called Mint.com. If you believe, as I do, that almost everyone who uses a computer to manage their personal finances will be doing so using a Web-based service like Mint.com within a few years, then you have to conclude that Intuit got a great bargain.

In essence, Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU), by acquiring the one company that had the potential to destroy its personal finance business, bought that business an indefinite life extension. Imagine how much stronger Microsoft’s position would be now if it had bought Google when the search company was two years old, back in 2000, and you begin to get a sense of what I mean.

The move was unexpectedly insightful. Few companies have the wisdom to recognize that they’ve been superseded, let alone the courage to admit that they aren’t competent to reinvent themselves from within. As a result, Intuit, the maker of Quicken and TurboTax, has won back at least one customer, namely me.

I used Quicken for years, probably starting around 1996. At home I have an ancient Dell Inspiron laptop computer, purchased in 2004, that I have kept around far past its point of obsolescence—and long after switching the rest of my life over to my Mac—solely in order to run Quicken. (Until very recently, there wasn’t a decent version of Quicken for Mac.) But even that use tailed off around 2008, as I ran into more and more difficulties with the aging version of Quicken that I was running, and as the online alternatives grew more attractive. Finally, in the middle of 2009 or so, I stopped using Quicken altogether.

I haven’t missed it in the least, because the combination of Mint.com’s free service and my bank’s website give me all the information I need about the status of my savings, checking, investment, and credit card accounts. (I use Bank of America, which has pretty good online tools.) But now that Mint is part of Intuit, I’m back in the fold.

I should say up front that I was never an advanced user of Quicken, and neither do I make use of all of the features of Mint. Also, my financial situation isn’t very complicated—I’m single with no kids and no mortgage. Mainly, I just need to see all of my updated account balances in one place. I don’t care much (though I probably should) about comparing the performance of every fund in my 401(k) to the broader market. Plus, being a natural-born skinflint, I don’t need help from software to …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

Swaptree, a Boston startup whose website allows members to trade used books, DVDs, CDs, and video games, has raised $4.8 million out of a planned $6 million offering involving equity, options, and warrants, according to a regulatory filing published today. Swaptree’s $3.35 million Series C financing round in September 2008 came from Safeguard Scientifics of Wayne, PA; the company has not identified the source of the newest funding.

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Wade Roush wrote:

Framingham, MA-based CorrelSense, which makes software that tracks business transactions and helps companies improve the performance of large enterprise applications, has collected $8 million in Series B venture funding, according to an announcement today. Accel Partners led the round, with existing investors Vertex Venture Capital, eXceed Technology and ProSeed Ventures joining in. The company says the new funds will help it continue development of its technology and pursue new marketing and sales opportunities in North America and Europe.

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Wade Roush wrote:

A couple of weeks ago, Xconomy broke the news that Russ Wilcox, co-founder of Cambridge, MA-based E Ink, was leaving the company after eight years as CEO. Shortly after that report I caught up with the organization’s new leader, T.H. Peng, who is an executive vice president at Prime View International (PVI), the Taiwanese display maker that acquired E Ink last year for about $450 million.

We talked about Wilcox’s departure, as well as the division’s expansion plans as it tools up to produce even more of the electrophoretic displays that go into e-book reading devices made by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and other companies. Currently the company has over 100 job openings in 37 different categories, from R&D engineers to manufacturing specialists, making it one of the fastest-growing technology organizations in Massachusetts.

The division definitely needs the help, considering forecasts that annual sales of e-book devices, which surpassed 1 million for the first time in 2008, are expected to rise to 18 million by 2012. It’s also in the midst of an aggressive push to perfect full-color displays to supplement today’s monochrome versions—an improvement that’s critical to PVI’s future if devices with electrophoretic displays are to keep pace with LCD-based competitors from the likes of Apple.

Here’s a writeup of my conversation with Peng. E Ink’s vice president of marketing, Sriram Peruvemba, was also on hand for the interview.

Xconomy: How has the acquisition of E Ink by Prime View International changed each company?

T.H. Peng: The first thing to know is that right now, the Cambridge office is one organization of a global company, and the name is Prime View International. The focus will not just be on Cambridge. It’s going to be a combination of the management team in Korea, Taiwan, and Cambridge, under the global organization. We have a CEO in Taiwan, Scott Liu. Right now in Cambridge, we are working very closely with a team in Taiwan on the integration effort, in which we want to come up with a very strong service to our customers as well as supply more and more advanced products to our customers.

X: What can you tell me about the thinking and the timing behind Russ Wilcox’s departure as CEO of the E Ink division? Why was this the time for the transition?

THP: I don’t want to speak for Russ. The thing I do want to say is that I really admire his capabilities. He’s one of the smartest persons that I have met. We still maintain very good relations after his departure. The decision was made jointly by …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

HubSpot, a fast-growing marketing technology startup born at the Cambridge Innovation Center, will leave its space at One Broadway this summer for new offices at 25 First Street, about 10 city blocks north, Xconomy has learned. While the move will take the startup out of the center of Kendall Square, vice president of marketing Mike Volpe says he hopes HubSpot and its weekly webcast parties will create a new center of gravity for tech entrepreneurs in the Lechmere Square neighborhood of Cambridge, flanking the Cambridgeside Galleria mall.

Call it Kendall Square North. “There are already a few tech companies” at 25 First Street, the building HubSpot will occupy in August, Volpe points out. Zipcar is one; enterprise storage company Permabit is another. “It’s not quite as central to the true heart of Kendall, but finding space for a couple of hundred people is quite an undertaking,” Volpe says.

HubSpot considered moving to a larger space inside One Broadway, and also looked at space in the Tech Square development, Volpe says. “What made the most sense in terms of the layout of the space and the pricing was the First Street space. I think we can make it work—we have people coming every week for HubSpot TV so hopefully we can create a little bit of an attraction ourselves.”

HubSpot’s growth has been rapid. The company started off in 2006 with a single bay on the 14th floor of the Cambridge Innovation Center, the business incubator space that occupies much of the MIT-owned One Broadway building. In January 2009 it moved to the fifth floor, into space that it sublet from RFID startup ThingMagic. But with a current staff of 120, the company is already spilling back out into a few miscellaneous desks at the CIC. To keep growing, the company needed to look elsewhere, Volpe says.

“We expect that by the time we actually move, we’ll have about 150 people, and we’re going to keep growing from there,” Volpe says. “The new space should carry us through for a while—it’s 37,000 square feet, with the potential to take over some more.”

HubSpot has already begun to build out the new space in anticipation of the move, he says. “It’s a very open environment, and we’re going to have a bunch of studio space to do the media production that we do in terms of videos, as well as …Next Page »

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