Sunday, July 28, 2013

Mass. (finally) represented in seafood cook-off

Local chef heads for Big Easy cook-off

Friday, July 26, 2013

hack/reduce: Boston is the future hub of big data

Jul 26, 2013
Startups & Venture Capital
Nonprofit goes the distance with ‘hackathons’

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Hack/reduce’s Executive Director Adrienne Cochrane and Chris Lynch, co-founder and partner at Atlas Venture.

 
W. Marc Bernsau

At hack/reduce, the nonprofit center in Cambridge focused on big-data exploration, the Boston area has a chance to “take back our place in tech history,” says center co-founder Chris Lynch.
A major part of that effort is running events such as “hackathons,” in which groups of people with software expertise come together to write new applications over the course of a few hours or days.
In late June, hack/reduce hosted the first-ever hackathon with the U.S. Department of Defense, a 24-hour event that challenged its 100-plus participants to create nutritionally focused apps for soldiers.
The winners, a group of four UMass Lowell students — three computer science majors and one nutritional science major — garnered a $3,000 prize for creating the Android-based app MARTEE (Mobile Access Rations Tracking and Energy Expenditure). Serving as a training tool for soldiers going into the field, it includes full nutritional data on combat rations personalized to their height, weight and activities. The group drew, sketched and did the planning before the coding, said team member Mike Stowell; they then split the work while still collaborating on design choices, until “we finally reached the best product we could make in 24 hours.”
“If anything, I learned the limits of my focus and patience,” said fellow team member Jeremy Poulin. “I learned what it feels like to push myself beyond my own expectations. Our group basically didn’t stop working for the full 24 hours.”
Going forward, the goal is to host even more hackathons based around varying themes, executive director Adrienne Cochrane said. “We’re always looking to provide access to more and more interesting technologies and data,” she said.
According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day — and 90 percent of the data now in the world has been created in the last two years. And more and more corporate, government and nonprofit organizations are looking to tap big data for marketing, research and insights.
Looking ahead, Lynch would like to see Boston generating a thousand data scientists a year, and within 10 years, no fewer than three, $1-billion companies in the space in the Boston area.
“We need more EMCs in New England if we’re going to make a difference in the tech community,” said Lynch, a partner at Atlas Venture in Cambridge who previously headed database tech firm Vertica Systems, which was bought by HP in 2011.
Hack/reduce is backed by more than $1 million from more than a dozen sponsors, including Google, Atlas Venture and Microsoft. Lynch says the center houses roughly 50 “residents” — people who have skills in big data and are approved by hack/reduce — per day. The residents, who get free desk space and access to technology and data sets, wrestle with the three basic barriers to solving big-data problems — scale, security and simplicity.
“We want to be flourishing with new opportunity that not only is good for residents of Massachusetts, but the world,” Lynch said. “We need to be a leader, and take back our place in tech history.”

Original story link

Friday, July 19, 2013

Not happy with the way you look in photos?

Jul 19, 2013
Startups & Venture Capital

Pixtr develops clear picture for growth

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal 

Aviv Gadot, co-founder and CEO of Pixtr, with a before and after photo for the startup’s new app.

 
W. Marc Bernsau

Most people are highly critical of the way they look in photos. Aviv Gadot’s wife certainly is — a fact that prompted the Israeli engineer to create an app, Pixtr, that enhances photos taken on mobile devices.
“It does it subtly,” said Gadot, CEO and co-founder of the startup of the same name. “We don’t want to change who you are. We want to make you look the best you can, but still keeping your authentic look.”
Founded in January 2012 in Israel as Photo-Genie, the company is now headquartered in Boston after its acceptance into the 2013 MassChallenge startup program. Pixtr has also secured a prominent angel investor: Uri Levine, co-founder of navigational app firm Waze, which Google reached an agreement to acquire for $1.1 billion in June.
Gadot declined to disclose the size of Levine’s investment, but termed it an “impressive amount.” The startup, now with five full-time employees, also received $20,000 in prize money for placing first in the Intel Business Challenge Europe 2011 program.
How the Pixtr app works: Users run a photo through the app, which then enhances it with one click. For example, skin tone might be evened out, hollows beneath eyes lightened, the symmetry and proportions of cheek bones, noses, and jawlines subtly adjusted, eyebrows clipped, and camera distortions and overall coloring improved.
As Gadot explained, the app makes use of facial recognition software and numerous algorithms designed to understand age, gender, the location and quality of facial features, and the content of photos.
“Everything is fully automatic,” Gadot said.
He has more than 1,000 photos stored on his iPhone, and described his wife as beautiful, but someone who really hates pictures of herself. In creating the app, he says he “wanted her to feel good about the way she looks in photos.”
The app is free and currently only available in Apple iOS. The company is focusing its energy on perfecting it before releasing it on Android. Since its release at the end of April, it’s been downloaded close to 100,000 times, Gadot said. A forthcoming updated version will allow users to make changes to, and have more control over, the automatic adjustments.
The plan is to eventually generate revenue through advertising through the app, Gadot said, and the startup is also exploring the idea of in-app purchases, such as captions and backgrounds.
Ultimately, with more people relying on ever-more-improving cameras on their phones, the goal is to give amateur photographers editing abilities, and have the end result look like it was taken by a professional, Gadot said.
“It’s Photoshop for people who don’t know how to use Photoshop,” said Rebecca Carrol, a Brown University student who uses the app and is involved with the internship program Boston Onward Israel. “It’s just really simple — that’s why I like it.”

Original story link

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Rebirth on the Sudbury River

From the Nyanza disaster comes renewal



Friday, July 12, 2013

Attendance 2.0

Jul 12, 2013
Startups & Venture Capital

Attendware: Making attendance count

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal 

Greg Skloot’s Boston startup Attendware offers digital sign-in for events, providing organizers real-time analytics on attendees.

 
Sandie Allen

At the regular weekly meetings of the Entrepreneurs Club at Northeastern University, Greg Skloot remembers looking out at a mass of faces and thinking, “I don’t know any of these people.”
So, he decided to design a way to find out. The initial result was the simply-titled “Signin App” — students, upon entering, would provide their name, major and graduation year. Club leadership could then track attendance trends, week-to-week.
First developed by Skloot at Northeastern in September 2012, that initial application has since evolved into a broader software offering for event management. And Skloot’s Boston startup, Attendware, is now commercializing the software.
“There’s a white space in the events world around making some of these on-site processes, like attendance and name tags, work more smoothly,” said Skloot, who graduated from Northeastern in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
Founded in March, Attendware is backed by a $1 million Series A round from .406 Ventures, announced in late June. It counts among its customers Northeastern, Mount Holyoke College and MassChallenge, with several other contracts pending, according to Skloot. Attendware earns revenue from annual licenses for the software.
“It’s a very simple product,” Skloot said. “(But) it solves a lot of old-school pain points.”
Through desktop and Web apps — with an iPad app forthcoming — the software offers a digital sign-in for guests, then instantly prints out name tags. Organizers can then receive real-time analytics and custom demographic breakdowns about their guests, can track flagged “VIPs,” and create automated email surveys.
As Skloot noted, collecting attendance data doesn’t sound that complex — but it is, as he knows from experience as the one-time president of NU’s Entrepreneurs Club. He joined as a freshman, when it had fewer than a dozen members. Over the years, he helped grow it into a burgeoning enterprise, with more than 150 members, a leadership team of 25, and a yearly budget of $35,000.
But because the group relied on “disorganized spreadsheets,” he found it difficult to extract any insights or trends from its regular events.
“Making data more available is very helpful and new for events people,” he said, noting that the goal of Attendware is to make it “as easy as possible” for customers to gain “deep insight” on how to improve their events.
That has been a crucial takeaway for Northeastern’s Center for Research Innovation, directed by Tracey Dodenhoff. The center holds a Research, Innovation and Scholarship Expo every year. This March, it used Attendware’s software to sign-in and track its roughly 2,000 attendees. Previously, guests didn’t register, Dodenhoff said, “so we never knew who was coming and going.”
But by finally having that data, they now know where to concentrate their marketing efforts for next year — specifically on alumni, she said, as there weren’t as many in attendance as they’d previously assumed.
So, ultimately, while Attendware is easy to use and adds a “layer of professionalism” to an event, she said, because of the data it provides, “it’s about much more than just the logistics of registering.”

Original story link. 

Friday, July 5, 2013

Shipping containers the new vehicle for growth

Jul 5, 2013 
Startups & Venture Capital

Freight Farms sees right climate for growth

Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal 

Co-founders of Freight Farms Jon Friedman, president, left, and CEO Brad McNamara, in a retrofitted shipping container using hydroponics and LED lighting to grow such plants as basil.

 
W. Marc Bernsau 

If Boston-based Freight Farms has its way, shipping containers could be the preferred vehicle of the future for fresh food production. The startup, founded in 2010, has repurposed standard shipping containers into hydroponic laboratories that can be installed anywhere.
As CEO and co-founder Brad McNamara explained, the five-employee company is starting small, but has much loftier goals.
“We want to take local food global,” he said, “and shift from a broken global food system to a sustainable solution.”
Making use of LED lighting and digital controls, the units grow food vertically, floor-to-ceiling, by the cubic foot, and require only eight hours a week of maintenance, McNamara said.
But this work can grow an acre’s worth of food. “It’s an enormous level of plant density in there,” McNamara said.
The company now has one unit on the market, a “leafy green machine,” that grows anything from lettuce, to mint, to arugula. In the forthcoming months, it will release a “vine veggie factory,” and a “fresh fungi factory.” It also offers solar modification packages, and plans to work with partners to make renewable options more accessible.
McNamara and co-founder Jonathan Friedman struck upon the idea while consulting on hydroponic rooftop design in 2009. Although McNamara had been growing hydroponically on his own, he and Friedman soon realized that rooftop greenhouses weren’t going to be scalable enough to even begin to address wider-reaching food-production needs.
But shipping containers, on the other hand, are not only prevalent around the world, McNamara said, but highly transportable, sealed, insulated, and designed to be stacked.
“It’s the perfect growing condition in any climate — you just put it down, plug it in, add water,” he said.
A participant in the 2013 spring session of TechStars Boston, Freight Farms was initially supported by a $31,000 Kickstarter campaign in December 2011. The startup is currently raising an estimated $1.2 million seed round that it hopes to close this summer, McNamara said.
The company has also closed on about $450,000 in sales over the past three months, he said. Customers buy the containers outright, at a cost of about $60,000 apiece. Then, for a monthly subscription, Freight Farms provides them with everything they need for production.
The startup has six units now in use, McNamara said, with commitments by buyers for another dozen or so. The eventual goal is to bring the farming systems to developed countries and other areas facing various food-production issues.
Ted Katsiroubas, co-owner of Boston-based fruit and produce supplier Katsiroubas Bros., is among Freight Farms’ customers. His company makes use of two stacked units: The bottom serves as a storage and packing area, while the top grows basil — a staple item that it ships regularly.
Being a Boston company, “we could never have the opportunity to have a ton of land (or) a field of products,” he said. But this “allows anybody to grow in an urban setting,” and, in the case of a sensitive item like basil, increases shelf-life, he said.
“What I’m excited about is the opportunity to work with other growers,” Katsiroubas said. “I’m just one piece of what’s going to turn into a big cluster, or hive, of units in New England.”

Original story link.

Thursday, July 4, 2013

Have a drink and create some art!

Paint and sip studios reveal the inner artist

Redefining the Gloucester waterfront in the "spirit of innovation"

Ocean Alliance and Gloucester find a new purpose

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent

July 04, 2013

Iain Kerr of the Gloucester-based Ocean Alliance examines a humpback whale vertebra with Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk.Lisa Poole for The Boston Globe (Iain Kerr of the Gloucester-based Ocean Alliance examines a humpback whale vertebra with Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk.)


Clad in an orange rain jacket and canvas hat, Iain Kerr gently eases a skiff out into Gloucester Harbor.
He steers through the choppy waves, salty breeze blowing and seagulls wheeling overhead, toward a large structure looming on the nearby shore.
The salty barrage of sea and weather has taken its toll on the neglected building perched at the water’s edge: broken windows, missing clapboards, paint eaten away, rotted wood exposing interior studs, and the once bright-white giant letters proclaiming “copper paint” and “manufactory” faded to a dirty gray.
It certainly doesn’t look like much now, but this building is part of what many hope will be a renaissance – and, at least in part, a repurposing – of the Gloucester waterfront. The once prosperous but long-contaminated Tarr and Wonson Paint Manufactory is the new headquarters of Ocean Alliance, a 42-year-old nonprofit that researches whales and the health of the oceans.
“We bought this because it was an iconic site,” Kerr, the alliance’s chief executive, said through a Scottish lilt. “Here we have a group that studies pollution that bought a polluted site.”
Ocean Alliance, founded in 1971, has conducted research in 21 countries and all the world’s oceans, collecting volumes of information on whales related to toxicology, behavior, genetics, and bioacoustics. (Founder and president Roger Payne made the legendary whale song recordings that were launched with NASA’s Voyager I interstellar exploration spacecraft 36 years ago.)
Payne said in a prepared statement from the alliance that acquiring and restoring the factory is the biggest challenge the nonprofit has faced.
Formerly located in Lincoln, the alliance moved to its Gloucester headquarters in April. It has so far invested more than $3.25 million, raised through grants and donations, into restoration of the site, which it purchased in 2008 with the help of a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
According to Kerr, the alliance hopes to raise $8 million to completely refurbish the buildings, so it needs roughly $4.5 million more to get the job done.
The finished complex is slated to have a state-of-the-art oceanographic research and education center, complete with a green chemistry lab, robotics lab, situation room with live feeds from its worldwide marine projects, as well as a community and conference center, educational labs and study spaces, a museum and art gallery, and media center. A public deck would allow access to the water, and the entire ground floor would be open to the public during office hours.
The site comprises several buildings constructed between 1863 and 1900 — former mills, boiler/engine rooms, manufacturing floors, warehouses, and paint laboratories. In the 1800s, James Tarr and Augustus Wonson created the country’s first antifouling copper paint, which repels barnacles, grass, and other marine life that can attach to, or damage, vessel bottoms. The paint was manufactured and sold all over the world, and also won numerous national and international awards.
“It changed the course of many a nation’s history,” said Kerr, who started as a volunteer with Ocean Alliance 26 years ago.
But in the 1980s, the site was abandoned, and after 150 years of operation, was found to be contaminated with various metals and solvents, while its interior also contained lead paint. Five buildings are to be restored; two brick buildings have been in progress since late 2011, and are expected to be completed this fall.
Initial planning and design started in 2009, with cleanup and remediation beginning the following year. Two wooden buildings were beyond repair and razed, Kerr said, while some toxic contaminated areas were capped and other materials removed.
The remaining wooden buildings will require substantial work; during a walk-through of the dank, low-ceilinged spaces, Kerr pointed out beams stained with streaks of hardened blue, yellow, white, black, and gray drippings from numerous chemicals, as well as hardened antifouling paint four inches thick on one part of the floor.
Kerr stressed that the manufacturer wasn’t being “malicious,” but that they “just didn’t know what we know nowadays.”
Ultimately, he said, the goal is to introduce a new use to the waterfront, but also to maintain the historical significance of the landmark.
“It’s an opportunity for Gloucester to redefine the working waterfront in the spirit of innovation,” Mayor Carolyn Kirk said while seated in a refurbished loft office at Ocean Alliance, seagulls often circling into view in overhead skylights.
With an eye to the 21st century and beyond, she said, the goal is to leverage the port’s assets in varied ways — and not with what she called the “restaurant, T-shirt, taffy” solution.
The ultimate question is, “What is the opportunity that the ocean itself represents?” she said.
An immense one, according to Kerr.
Ocean Alliance — which has nine full-time staff members, as well as affiliations with universities and other organizations around the world — has recently been focused on capturing and studying whale DNA through biopsies to determine what compounds have been absorbed and at what toxicity. Whales — of which there are 82 different species, Kerr explained — are a good “bio-indicator” of the health of the oceans, and the organization is most interested in what compounds and toxins damage whale DNA, and at what level.
This summer, the alliance’s ship, Odyssey, will embark on an expedition to the Gulf of Mexico to study the impact of the massive BP oil spill in 2010. The nonprofit also educates, advocates, and lobbies for ocean health.
As Kerr noted, there’s an initial challenge in getting people to understand about ocean pollution, because on the surface, the water looks beautiful.
But “oceans are downhill from everything,” he said, “and gravity never sleeps.”
At the rehabbed Gloucester facility, the first project he would like to embark on is creating plastic that is biodegradable in oceans. Another interest is drone-like craft that can go out in bad weather when boats can’t, and can provide information and eyes above, below, and on the surface of the water.
Then there’s the aptly named “snotbot.”
Drew Bennett, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, is working on that project with Ocean Alliance. Essentially, it’s a flying robot with a spring-loaded cup that collects the detail-rich mucus expelled from a whale’s blowhole.
“It’s like doing a biopsy without ever having to touch the whale,” he said, explaining that mucus samples contain information about anything from gender to compound toxicity levels.
“They’re just shedding goo all the time,” he said. “We want to capture the goo.”
Ultimately, as far as Kerr is concerned, the ocean’s the limit.
“Some people are upset that we know more about the moon than our oceans, but I’m excited about that,” he said. “There is a huge adventure ahead of us.”

Ocean Alliance’s history of studying whales

July 04, 2013



Sperm whales
55 to 65 feet long, up to 50 tons; usually dark gray or black.
For one of the deepest-diving whales, descending as far as 2 miles, Alliance chief executive Iain Kerr developed a tracking process using a multibeam scanning sonar. This technique enables researchers to calculate the whale's rate of descent, ascent, maximum dive depth, bearing, and speed, creating a three-dimensional dive diagram. 


Humpback whales
40 to 60 feet, up to 40 tons; dark gray or black with white patches on stomach.
In 1967, alliance founder Roger Payne, working with Scott McVay, realized that the humpback’s song was made up of fixed rhythmic patterns of repeated sounds. Ocean Alliance has gathered songs from humpback populations throughout the world, amassing more than 1,500 recordings from 14 geographic regions. 

Right whales
50 feet, up to 60 tons; dark gray/black.
For 40 years, Ocean Alliance has studied a population of rights — the most endangered of the great whales — that uses the bays of Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula as a nursery. It is believed to be the longest continuous study of any great whale.

SOURCES: Ocean Alliance, whalefacts.org 

Original story link here.