Breaking News: "Sandy's" rampage

Resident sticks it out on Plum Island; wave-watchers flock to Revere 

 

By Taryn Plumb and Katheleen Conti, Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff

Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe

Giacobbe Ward. 8, and his mother Kelli Ward of Everett, watched the waves at Revere Beach as Hurricane Sandy arrived in Massachusetts.

Bob Connors, a resident of Annapolis Way in Newbury on Plum Island, spoke with the constant whining sound of wind in the background.
“It’s a doozie of a storm, that’s for sure. Everybody is taking the storm seriously. Everybody’s taken the proper precautions. The next 24 hours are going to let us all know how bad this storm was, what areas got hit the hardest, and what properties are at risk,” Connors said.
Connors said he decided not to voluntarily evacuate because of Hurricane Sandy, as officials had requested, because his home is newer, and is built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane
He said he had seen “a number” of people with special needs — such as the elderly or those with special medical conditions — leave the island. The local police have set up a checkpoint coming onto the island; those who aren’t residents or part of the emergency response team can’t get on.
The midday high tide brought levels about 5 feet above normal. Connors said he’s seen 12- to 16-foot waves throughout the day. The next high tide is at midnight, and is a “concern,” Connors said.
Eight houses on Plum Island have had the beach scraped in front of them through special permits, and that’s “working as planned, providing storm protection for the homes,” he said.
In Gloucester, an emergency operations center was opened at an elementary school. Schools and courts were closed, meetings canceled. The Magnolia Pier was cordoned off. Residents were urged to stay off of it and out of harm’s way along the coast. In Swampscott and Marblehead, little traffic moved along the streets.
Many on the North Shore were also following the fate of the tall ship the HMS Bounty, which was reportedly sinking 90 miles off North Carolina’s Outer Banks after the crew abandoned ship in the storm. The 180-foot Bounty visited Newburyport this summer, docking along the waterfront for several days of tours and a benefit for Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury.
The Coast Guard rescued 14 from the sinking ship and were still searching for two more crew members, according to news reports. Caleb Twombly of Groveland and his wife Rebecca met while working on the Bounty and crewed on the ship on and off in recent years, but are not currently on the crew and are both safe on land, according to Caleb’s mother, Alice Twombly.
Just north of Boston, in Revere, the tides at Revere Beach were high at midday and the storm surge strong, as punishing winds violently rattled street signs and pelted sand on the faces of curious onlookers gathered under the historic gazebo.
Despite official recommendations that people stay home, traffic was backed up along Revere Beach Boulevard. On the other end of the beach along Winthrop Parkway, the tidal gate was closed and traffic was being detoured until at least Tuesday, said Revere Fire Captain Tom Todisco.
As of 1 p.m., Sandy had not caused any major emergencies in the city, other than a tree down in an isolated area on Reservoir Avenue, Todisco said.
“The power company is there right now. They may have shut off some power there,” he said. “It’s just an isolated area so it probably doesn’t affect much of the area.”
Todisco said there have been reports of a couple of felled tree limbs, but not much else.
“It’s been pretty quiet,” Todisco said. “That’s probably a good thing.”
Public safety officials are monitoring the situation and have an evacuation plan in place depending how the storm progresses.
“If we feel we have to evacuate people, we will do that,” Todisco said.
At Renzo Brick Oven Pizzeria on Revere Beach Boulevard, Sandy was proving to be quite profitable.
Residents and wave-watchers who trekked to Revere Beach across the road stopped by for lunch and to get storm updates from newscasts blaring from the two televisions at the bar.
“This is better than a regular Monday,” said bartender Avis Surette. “We got, like, 40 people since noon. It’s the people going outside taking pictures of the water. I didn’t even think we’d get anyone in here today.”

Steven Rosenberg of the Globe staff and Globe correspondents Joel Brown and David Rattigan contributed to this report.

RAMPing up metadata

Startups & Venture Capital

Content optimization company RAMPs up

Premium content from Boston Business Journal

 

By Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, October 26, 2012

W. Marc Bernsau

Tom Wilde is CEO of RAMP, which uses metadata — data about data — to make digital content more useful and searchable. 

Digital text, audio and video content can be likened to a tree falling in the woods: If you have content, but no one sees it, does it really exist?
This is the premise that Boston-based RAMP is based on; as a content optimization company, its goal is to create, manage and ultimately wrangle rich metadata — that is, data about data — helping make digital content more useful and searchable.
Metadata has become much more complex, and ripe for exploitation, than in the past, said RAMP CEO Tom Wilde. “The more data we process every day, the smarter we get,” he said.
Launched in 2006, the company’s automated, cloud-based platform is built on a core technology developed at BBN Technologies in Cambridge that incorporates speech recognition and natural language processing. The 30-employee company now holds more than 20 patents, and has been backed by $35.45 million in venture capital — most recently, $15 million in a Series C round in September. Investors include Fairhaven Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Comcast Ventures, StarVest Partners and Hearst Interactive Media.
One of the company’s unique abilities is to create time-coded metadata in audio and video.
Although there are untold hours of online audio and video — and they’re the fastest-growing types of Web content, Wilde noted — they are, at the same time, “tricky,” “opaque,” and “lumpy.”
But RAMP has honed its ability to organize, index and search within video and audio, navigate with scenes and tags, and associate related content, essentially “taking it to this next level,” Wilde said.
As a result, RAMP customers have seen engagement rates go up anywhere between 70 and 300 percent, he said.
Entercom Communications Corp., for one — which operates WEEI, WAAF and WRKO locally, as well as more than 100 other stations across the country — has seen its number of referral visits through Google “skyrocket,” according to Tim Murphy, vice president of digital strategy and enterprise platforms.
On a given day, a search for “Red Sox” under Google News will yield an audio piece from WEEI high up in results, he said. RAMP’s technology is “fairly brilliant,” Murphy said.
Up to this point, audio has been behind the curve, he said, but because podcasts and audio are important in terms of news, there’s “no reason (they) shouldn’t be competing as vociferously.”
In June, the company moved from Woburn to Fort Point in Boston to get closer to the city’s talent pool, Wilde said. RAMP has reached profitability this year, he said, and its longer-term goals include expanding internationally.

Original story link here.

The Walkers...

Mother and son makeup artists create the walking dead

Jazmin Johnson, 10, was made up for a Halloween party by make-up artist Mike Vacchio.

By Taryn Plumb / Globe Correspondent

October 24, 2012 

REVERE — The 34-year-old nurse came in with a sweet, pretty, round face . . . and left utterly ravaged.

Her eyes were hollow sockets; the skin on her cheeks rotted through and caked with blood; her forehead pockmarked with hollows of ragged black that looked like birdshot wounds.

“You look . . . completely gross,” said Maria Sartorelli’s husband, Rob Sartorelli (who, at that very moment, was being made to look ghastly himself).

The undead walked the halls of the Hampton Inn in Revere last Saturday intermingled with a few witches, skeletons, and at least one Grinch. Halloween had come early, with seemingly genial locals being transformed into grisly ghouls, zombies, and other unthinkable creatures by hair and makeup artist Ginny Colangelo and her son, Michael Vacchio.
“People love Halloween; they really get into it,” said Colangelo, 63, who runs Revere-based Gin C. Productions, and does a brisk business this time of year, taking back-to-back appointments at the Hampton Inn to scare people up for Halloween parties and events. Clients paid $35 to more than $60 for the privilege of looking ugly.

“I think grownups never like to get old,” she said of the appeal.

But they don’t mind being dead (or at least pretending to be).

“Everybody’s zombie-d,” Colangelo said as she moved between tables laid out with brushes of all sizes, liquid latex, freeze spray, color wheels, makeup wedges, airbrushes at the ready, and special touches such as fake glass shards. “Zombies are a big thing.”

Jeff Janco, 47, of Methuen  was a nurse zombie: face mangled, nose rotting and gushing with blood, jagged fake teeth protruding, blue scrubs gore-streaked and flecked with gobs of chewed-over flesh, paired with wife Laura’s Amy-Winehouse-as-a-zombie. A Mr. and Mrs. Edward Scissorhands also made an appearance, as did a pink-haired, white-skinned witch, and a sexy skeleton (if that’s at all possible).

For Cheryl Ryan of Lynn, Colangelo layered on gelatin to create a cadaverous texture; airbrushed on a pallor with the not-so-subtle title “corpse flesh;” dabbed and spattered a syrupy-like blood mixture onto her nose, mouth, eyebrows, and face in no particular pattern. Like some sort of macabre Jackson Pollock.

“You like my face?” Ryan asked her granddaughter Jazmin Johnson after getting a bit of a shock herself with a peek in a handheld mirror.

“You’re kind of freaking me out a little bit,” the Chelsea 10-year-old replied, her own face painted like a hollowed skeleton.

The occasion? Jazmin’s birthday costume bash.

“I just like to be made up,” Ryan said of Halloween. “No one knows who you are.”

The Sartorellis, for their part, were zombifying themselves for a house party — fittingly in their home in Salem, the mecca of howls and haunts — and planned to complete the dead look with clothing that they ripped and dyed to be dingy and ratty, and speckled with fake blood.

But going one more rigor mortis-stiff step beyond that?

“I’ll roll around in the dirt, get grass stains, like I just clawed my way up out of the ground,” said Rob, a 30-year-old engineer, his wife sitting nearby, somewhat of a dichotomy with a destroyed face paired with benign jeans and a sweatshirt.

Face disfigured, fake blood trickling from his ears, Rob ruminated on Halloween: “I like that it’s the only holiday just for fun.”

Colangelo will be doing makeup at the Hampton Inn on Friday, Saturday, and on Oct. 31, and is available for appointments on other days leading up to Halloween. Call 617-610-4720 or e-mail gincproduction@aol.com.

Original story link here.

© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.

Screaming down the road on bikes for Halloween (and charity)

Annual Halloween ride to Salem draws 2,000 bikers

By Taryn Plumb / Globe Correspondent

October 24, 2012

EVERETT — They just kept coming, a mass of colors and glittering chrome.

On Harleys and Hondas, Suzukis and Kawasakis, there were straw-haired witches and empty-eyed skeletons, menacing devils and demons, mythical beasts and superheroes.

This cacophonous, vibrating — and slightly macabre — spectacle of hundreds of bikers thundered its way from Everett to Salem on Sunday as part of the annual Halloween Witch Ride  to raise thousands of dollars for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.  

“It’s a beautiful day, and you get to do something you like, raise money for a worthy cause,” said Michael Medeiros of Haverhill, whose girlfriend, Regina Sall, held on in her vampy witch costume as he navigated his 2008 Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Road King among the teeming riot of bikes.

Roughly 2,000 bikers dominated the 15 or so miles of roads between Everett and Salem for the 24th annual ride, drawing hundreds of spectators and stopping traffic at busy intersections for 30 minutes at a time. Organized by the Boston chapter of the Harley Owners Group (HOG for short) and Boston Harley-Davidson, the ride ended, fittingly, in the Witch City — Shetland Park on the waterfront — assembling for a small party among the city’s much larger, weekslong Halloween revelry.

According to Brad Gosselin, a fund-raising coordinator with the MDA (appropriately dressed in an eye-popping orange T-shirt), the event raises about $40,000 every year, through $25 to $40 entry fees or personal pledge drives. That money is used for research for numerous diseases, he explained, as well as to help local families (the organization serves more than 1,000).

Blasting the biker stereotype (that they’re loud, they’re rebels, or they’re inconsiderate), Gosselin called the support “tremendous,” noting that, “Bikers are the nicest people; they really are.” (They are also reticent about giving their age; all interviewed for this story declined, but appeared to be in their 40s and 50s.)

On this particular fall afternoon, they were decidedly creepy.

“It is a witch ride, so we need a witch,” said Sall, of Haverhill, standing with Medeiros before the ride started, hundreds of bikes stretched on the road ahead and behind.

Her version of Halloween biker: Green face, purple-and-black striped tights, the quintessential pointy witch hat (which she had to hold onto when the bikes started moving), straggly, silver hair, and the look finished off with bright purple nail polish.

“Fortunately this is a wig,” she said with a laugh. “Otherwise I’d be having a really bad hair day.”

She also carried a black plastic cauldron, tossing out gummy candies to kids on the sidewalk.

She and Medeiros spend a lot of time riding; about 25,000 miles a year, they estimated. Medeiros called it “relaxing,” noting that, particularly on weekends, “You can do your own thing, set your own pace.

“You see a lot of new stuff, and re-see places you’ve been before, but in a different way,” he said.

“But today,” Sall quipped, motioning to the Harley, “it’s my broom.”

When you look at it that way, Rob Hathaway’s bike doubled as “web” — he rode as Spider-Man; his girlfriend, Rochelle Dickerson, as a gorilla.

“It’s one of the best possible rides out there,” Hathaway, of Wilmington — sans his super hero mask — said as he stood beside his bright red, Ultra Classic Limited Harley.

A 25-year biker and Halloween lover, he’s come in the past as a gorilla and a werewolf, and he called the ride “almost like a parade in every town,” based on the number of spectators who gather on sidewalks and roads as the convoy passes.

John Gaudet of Danvers, meanwhile, rode as a skeleton knight (pairing a traditional Knights Templar -type costume with a silver skull mask). Finishing off the theme: Numerous skulls hung off his Honda VTX1300, and his “passenger” was a zombie animatronic that detached its own head with the flick of a switch.

What he likes about Halloween?

“Scaring people,” he said with a mischievous laugh.

There was plenty of that going around.

Like ghoulish holiday trees, bikes were adorned with rubber rats, spiders, and skulls of all shapes and sizes. Some had decals of crushed, mangled bats on their windshields, while the handlebars of others doubled as devil horns. Giant skeletons with decrepit wings and creepy clowns also served as lifeless “riders.”

A little after 1 p.m., the frightening cavalcade set off. Engines rumbled in a deep, collective, sonorous growl that absorbed all other sound, vibrating bystanders deep into the chest. The air filled with the smell of fumes and gasoline. Eerie Halloween sounds blared from a radio on one bike; Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take the Wheel” from another — both intermingling with the shrill scream of police sirens.

The riders blew by on neon green, yellow, blue, purple, red, and black bikes — there was a devil and his mate; Mario and Luigi from the classic Super Mario Bros. video game; a paired-up Mitt Romney and Big Bird; a tutu-ed gorilla; a very easy-to-pick-out Waldo; at least three Santas; Daisy Duck: a duo of Teletubbies: and plenty of skeleton faces, black capes, and devil horns.

The crowd, holding up smartphones and pointing, roared and cheered. Or were they screaming?

Associated slideshow.

Original link to the story here.

© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.

Smashing Pumpkins (and not the band...)

Look out below during the Pumpkin Chucking Fest

 

By Taryn Plumb / Globe Correspondent

October 24, 2012 

AMESBURY — The crowd counted down from five in a collective chant, and then there was a cry of “Fire in the hole!” 

Necks craned and fingers pointed at a small round object high above, a projectile against a sky quilted with wispy clouds.

It screamed down in an arc and then — splat — met a hill a few hundred feet away, exploding in a firework of orange.

Catapults have been used for centuries as the ultimate siege weapon: breaking down walls, terrorizing, subduing. But these days a robust and diverse subculture is using them for a much more benign purpose: To whip innocent pumpkins through the air.

Newburyport native Chip Hersey is of this gourd-hurling clan, and, at the third annual Pumpkin Chucking Fest  fund-raiser Oct. 14 at Amesbury Sports Park, he showed off his handmade catapult, sending dozens of pumpkins to their crushing end.

“It’s a huge challenge,” said the mechanical engineer who now lives in South Portland, Maine, noting a ceaseless process of problem-solving and trial and error.

He and Perry Stone, an economist from Arlington, built their giant throwing machine — menacingly named Mischief Knight — several years ago, tinkering and adjusting ever since.

The pair also have joined a growing legion of pumpkin smashers in Punkin’ Chunkin’,  the so-called world championships of jack-o’-lantern jousting held every November in Delaware.

The event, scheduled for Nov. 2-4 in Bridgeville, Del., airs on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel on Thanksgiving night, and usually attracts about 20,000 spectators and competitors, the latter of whom employ — and at times defy — physics, gravity, and ingenuity with a variety of man- and mechanically-powered catapults, ballistas, and trebuchets.

Mischief Knight’s longest pumpkin toss at the event in the past: 1,596 feet.

“It’s the only place where you’ll see rednecks and MIT professors consulting each other,” said Hersey, fittingly wearing a pumpkin-orange cap.

His enormous hurler — more than 10 feet high with a 16-foot-long arm crafted from surgical tubing and aluminum sailboat parts — has become the centerpiece of the local competition and has raised about $37,000 in three years for Coastal Connections Inc.,  which helps people with disabilities.

Priming Mischief Knight takes two minutes of swift pedaling on a bike attached to the device; that tenses the lines and tubing and ultimately transfers kinetic energy to them, Hersey said.

“It starts out easy, like a hill climb, one that gets steeper and steeper,” said John Kerrick of Peterborough, N.H., a bicyclist who lent his powerful legs to the task during the Amesbury event.

The ideal pumpkin used is small, dense, and around 8 pounds, Hersey said. But how far it goes, and where, depends on numerous variables, and is almost impossible to predict.

“I’ve never seen it go in the same spot twice,” he said, readying his catapult for another throw.

Nearby, bins brimmed with pumpkins awaiting their fate; Frisbees flew; and a rock band played.

As Hersey let another gourd go — this time above the trees and out of sight — the crowd clapped and whooped.

Watching, Kerrick said with a shrug, “It’s a primitive thrill to see something be launched.”

Associated slideshow.

Original story link here.


© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.

Printing from the cloud

Startups & Venture Capital

HubCast delivers cloud-based printing services

 

Premium content from Boston Business Journal by Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, October 19, 2012

W. Marc Bernsau

In some cases, businesses can spend as much (or more) money shipping printed materials as they do printing them. Meanwhile, of the printed materials that are warehoused for future shipping, about a third are thrown away — useless before they’re even used.
“It seems archaic, and it is archaic,” said Tony Dolph, president of Wakefield-based HubCast, which aims to bring the premium printing process into the 21st century.
Through its cloud-based service, HubCast gives its customers the ability to load, store, manage, and order printed materials on demand, and ultimately have them printed close to their destination and then delivered. All told, this process not only drastically reduces printing and shipping costs, Dolph said, but it cuts down on the various environmental impacts that come from long-distance shipping and freight.
The company has partnerships with premium print suppliers in 50 countries, and its platform manages the full supply chain — pricing, routing, production, quality assurance, all the way to “the last mile of delivery,” Dolph explained.
Founded in 2005, HubCast is backed by $12.4 million in funding from Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners. The company’s latest financing, a $4.3 million Series B round closed in late September, has been targeted for general expansion.
Dolph said the company is seeing “very robust” revenue growth, though he declined to offer specific dollar amounts. The company serves roughly 600 customers — typically companies with large global footprints in health and life sciences, manufacturing, and various technology fields, he said.
“We have grand ambitions,” Dolph said. “We want to be in every country and every region with next-day service, so no matter where you are and where you want to go, we can accommodate that.”
Although cost is certainly a factor, the advantage of using HubCast is “mainly in efficiency,” said Sean Ogarrio, senior manager of creative services at JDS Uniphase Corp. The Milpitas, Calif.-based company has 80 global locations and 5,000 employees, and provides optical, test and management products for the communications industry. JDS has used HubCast for more than a year now, typically for lower-volume runs of sales materials overseas, Ogarrio said.
“It’s printing only the amount that you need, when you need it, and more importantly, where you need it,” he said.
Ultimately, experts say this model positions HubCast for the future of printing. Commercial printing is shrinking, with a “major shift” from analog to digital printing taking place, said Gartner research director Pete Basiliere.
Over the next decade, the amount and types of print will also change; Basiliere noted the trend toward fewer office-printed pages, and more presentation and marketing materials displayed on mobile phones and tablets.
“The transition from pages to pixels is accelerating, no question,” he said in an email.
But HubCast is “well positioned” for this change, Basiliere said, because it “enables a wide range of print, and in dispersed, digital forms.”
“Those are the more valuable pages and products,” he said, “so the future for well-done, digital print is quite relevant, much more so than today.”
Dolph said he sees the old model of order-print-warehouse-ship-throw-away slipping into obsolescence.
“We see it increasingly evolving into an on-demand model,” he said. “It’s a trend that is going to accelerate and will become the new norm — simply because it makes a whole lot of sense, both physically and economically.”

Original story link here.

Fear of a Black Cat?

Black cats on display in Hudson

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent 

October 14, 2012

They’re sly, mysterious creatures, sometimes considered harbingers of bad luck, or devious conspirators to witches — not to be trusted, and certainly to be avoided.
But Barbara Bonazzoli has been, well, bewitched by them.
The Hudson octogenarian has spent decades collecting likenesses of black cats — and just in time for Halloween, several of her antique figurines are on display at the Hudson Historical Society Museum.  
“I’ve always loved cats,” 83-year-old Bonazzoli said as she sat in the cavernous room in the Hudson Mill Business Center that houses the museum. “I’m cat crazy.”
Throughout history, felines of all kinds have inspired both devotion and disdain. But a particular mythos and mystique has developed around the shiny-coated, yellow-eyed black cat.
In the United States, they’ve become a Halloween cliché — many a lawn ornament has the familiar silhouette of arched back, claws out, fur standing on end — and, of course, there’s that ominous, well-known warning should one appear in your path.
But history shows that many cultures have linked them with good omens rather than bad.
In ancient Egypt, for instance, black cats were considered sacred; a home that kept one was blessed (they were said to capture the setting sun in their eyes and hold it safe until morning) and killing one was punishable by death, according to Hudson Historical Society Museum curator Peggi Sullivan, who did research for the exhibit.
Meanwhile, they were given as wedding gifts in England, and kept as “ship’s cats” on boats for good luck (with sailors’ wives doing the same at home to ensure their husbands’ safe return). Others around the world and through the course of time have seen them as a token to ward off evil, maintain a happy home, or ensure prosperity.
“The black cat has always gotten a bad rap,” said Sullivan. “It’s hard to understand black cats.”
But is Bonazzoli superstitious about them?
“No,” she said with a laugh, “not at all.”
As for Halloween? Although she gladly gives out candy to trick-or-treaters (and keeps some for herself, too), she said: “I don’t like it. Never did.”
Her collection began simply by chance and grew as the years accumulated: She got her first (a teapot cover) from her late mother, Anne LiPetri.  
“It was just a casual thing. She happened to have one,” said Bonazzoli, a retired secretary and mother of nine and grandmother of three. “I’m vague on when it all started.” (Maybe around 1980, she thinks.)
Since then, she’s amassed hundreds of cats — specifically post-World War II red clay figures made in Japan — that are occasionally repaired or tinkered with by her husband of 57 years, 82-year-old Richard Bonazzoli.  
On display among the more than 50 pieces at the museum are whimsical whiskey decanters, ash trays, pepper shakers, planters, creamer and sugar pots, mugs, boiled-egg holders, cookie jars – all cats in one shape or another, most with green eyes and red ribbons around their necks.
One teapot takes shape with a curled tail as a handle and demure paws as spouts; a small figurine has a tongue that pulls out to become a tape measure and a red felt back that serves as a pin cushion; another has a back that looks like a slinky (meant to hold letters or recipes); and there’s even a working cigarette lighter (a kitty curling up beside a miniature lamp).
Bonazzoli picked them up over time at flea markets and yard sales, and got others as gifts from family members (many of whom have since started their own collections). Usually, they’re displayed in a hutch in her kitchen, and added to now and again — most recently on her birthday in March.
“Most of the time, I just ignore them and they get dusty,” chuckled Bonazzoli, who has two live feline companions, as well.
She added with a shrug, “It’s just something we like, I guess.”
And are they valuable? “Only to me, probably.”
Not true, said Sullivan, noting that the museum aims to show off more collections from locals — other recent displays have included dental instruments, nutcrackers, and baby bottles.
Because collectively, she said, they tell the story of Hudson and its residents.
“It might not be significant to the world,” she said, “but it’s significant to our town.”
The exhibit will be on display through the end of October. The museum is open Tuesdays from 2 to 4 p.m.

Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe

© 2012 The New York Times Company

Payments, 2.0

Startups & Venture Capital

Punchey takes new swipe at payment systems

Dynamic databases can be formed to drive growth

 

Premium content from Boston Business Journal by Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, October 12, 2012

W. Marc Bernsau

Millions of times a day, all around the world, consumers swipe their credit and debit cards through those small, ubiquitous electronic readers.
And with each swipe, potentially valuable data that could be captured for merchants is simply getting lost in the retail ether. That’s where Boston-based startup Punchey comes in, with the goal of upending the payments process as we know it.
Founded by Nathaniel Stevens — best known for developing Yodle (an online marketing and technology platform) — and backed by $1.7 million from his Cambridge-based investment firm Stevens Ventures, Punchey aims to provide businesses with an intuitive, Web-enabled payments platform.
“I’ve always been fascinated by electronic commerce, and by the electronic movement of money,” Stevens said. “You’re looking at an industry that really hasn’t had much innovation for the last 30 to 40 years.”
When businesses sign up with Punchey, they swap their old card readers for mobile card terminals or countertop readers that attach to Internet-connected devices. Then, each time a customer swipes their card, a profile is created (and then updated) in the business’ Punchey dashboard. Over time, those profiles develop into a more dynamic database, and can begin to reflect various trends in the business, Stevens explained, from top customers, to transaction volume and frequency. Businesses also receive customized sales forecasting.
All that data can, in turn, help businesses improve their numbers or shift their focus when it comes to staffing, sales, promotions and marketing campaigns, Stevens said. They can also create reward and loyalty programs through the platform, and provide their customers with automatic email or text receipts.
“The idea is to give them a view into how their business is doing,” Stevens said. “It’s really designed to help them grow.”
Officially launched Aug. 16 — but in the works since mid-2011 — Punchey has secured “dozens” of small to-medium-sized customers, according to Stevens.
The startup has reeled companies in with lures such as no long-term contracts, a pledge against hidden fees and the option of flat-rate pricing. In contrast, fees from credit card companies vary widely based on the company, bank or type of card, and are typically 2 to 5 percent of the payment price, according to financial experts.
That can take a big chunk out of profits, said Peter Solomon, who expects to save 15 to 20 percent with Punchey at his Boston-based State Street Barbers.
He called the platform an “innovative” addition to an industry that has been “devoid” of change.
“Traditional payment processes are going to go under extreme scrutiny,” he said, calling them “dinosaurs.”
And with credit and debit cards accounting for 60 percent of in-store sales, according to Javelin Strategy and Research, Stevens sees immense opportunity.
Punchey has a “long road map” for the future, he said. A main goal is to further delve into business operations and analytics, and help businesses develop stronger relationships with customers.
Ultimately, “we’re hoping to create an East Coast tech giant,” Stevens said.

Original story link here.

The Real (?) Housewives of Wellesley

Suzy Duffy writes about Wellesley wives in her new book

 

By Taryn Plumb | Globe Correspondent

October 07, 2012

Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff

 

WELLESLEY — They’re beautiful, spoiled rich, enviously thin, always well-styled, and naive to the day-to-day struggles of everyday Americans.
In short: They’re Wellesley wives.
Or so they are depicted — admittedly in caricature — in Suzy Duffy’s new novel, titled for its quartet of gorgeous, popular, more-privileged-than-the-rest-of-us socialites. But Duffy, a native of Ireland and a Wellesley wife herself, stressed that her book is “not an exposé on Wellesley women — it’s a celebration of life. Women around the world, we’re all the same: We think the same, we worry about the same things.”
Still, in“Wellesley Wives,” which was released Sept. 28 by the Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House, those larger, shared issues — such as romantic relationships and family dynamics — are intermingled with more superficial concerns, such as how to “work’’ a room, the proper flowers for accenting a palatial home, and whether a screaming-red Ferrari is the best accessory for driving around town.
The novel follows the high and low times of protagonist Popsy Power, a ditzy glam mom who only barely grasps the value of money; her best friend Sandra, an exercise fanatic who is trying to return the luster to her marriage; and Popsy’s daughters, Rosie and Lily, who are contending with their own romantic entanglements.
“It’s a story about women surviving together — we can really survive anything that life throws at us, as long as we have friends surrounding us,” explained Duffy, a mother of five who moved to Wellesley from Dublin three years ago, and, when asked her age, replied wryly that she has “seen 40 come and go.”
“It’s just to entertain women, to make them laugh. It’s pure escapism.”
Ultimately, Wellesley has long been an exotic and enigmatic lure for writers looking to expose the gilded underbelly of the affluent suburbs.
A 2003 film, “Mona Lisa Smile,” for example, portrayed several 1950s Wellesley College students as snobby husband-seekers (and drew widespread criticism as a result, including from the college’s president at the time, Diana Chapman Walsh).  
This spring, Dover author Janet Eve Josselyn set part of a novel about the cutthroat suburban social-climbing scene in Wellesley; and Linda Erin Keenan’s 2011 “Suburgatory: Twisted Tales from Darkest Suburbia” (recently adapted for an ABC show) took a few bits of inspiration from her experiences in town.
Meanwhile, exposing real-life dark tales, the new “A Murder in Wellesley” by Tom Farmer and Marty Foley, explores the 1999 murder of May Greineder by her physician husband Dirk Greineder, who purportedly lived a double life filled with pornography and prostitutes.
“Wellesley women (and men, for that matter), and Wellesley itself, are all easy targets for fiction writers’ imaginations and for exaggerated prose,” Bob Brown, author of the town news blog “The Swellesley Report,”  said in an e-mail interview.
The town has a “well-earned” reputation for being wealthy, he said, adding drolly that he’s “pretty sure it’s a law that anyone from outside of town who is writing about Wellesley has to (use) one of the following words on first reference: ‘affluent,’ ‘wealthy,’ ‘chic,’ ‘prosperous’ or ‘well-heeled.’ ”
Meanwhile, the fabulously stylish sisters Kimberly and Alexis Kissam, who run an upscale boutique, Isabel Harvey, said they believe it’s the “moral” issue that makes Wellesley a desirable backdrop for writers.
That is: “Thinking that money will make you happy,” Kimberly wrote in an e-mail. “However, as life unfolds, it’s not the material things that make people happy, it’s finding that perfect recipe for happiness — and that is a story that most people can relate to. It’s the perfect storm of the American dream vs. the pursuit of happiness. Happiness is not found in Ferraris or Lamborghinis.”
Well, at least in the beginning chapters of “Wellesley Wives,” it seems to be: In the opening pages, Popsy’s adoring husband dishes out $500,000 for a “special edition” red Ferrari.
And Duffy, an international best-selling author, is playful with the concept of a “Wellesley wife,” describing such a creature as a unique breed with “25 percent lower BMI than the average American wife, and 1,275 percent greater net worth.” They are smart, beautiful, and confident, “more capable than they realize and more envied than they wish,” she writes.
But as Sandra, Popsy, and her daughters struggle through hardships they’d never imagined — relationships gained and lost, love triangles, extramarital affairs, financial troubles, deaths and rebirth — they become even more endearing and accessible to the everyday reader, and even humbled.
“The story can be applied to any affluent town,” said Kimberly Kissam. “Every town has its share of different characters . . . its share of cliques.”
Brown agreed that Duffy’s book is meant to be light-hearted, and that, overall, “people in Wellesley are good at poking fun at themselves.”
And contrary to popular belief, he’s met “all types” in town, including “a bunch of smart women” who put their careers on hold to take care of children, and redirect their skills to organize school, athletic, art, and philanthropic programs.
This trait is evident with Duffy herself: She plans to donate 10 percent of what she earns from “Wellesley Wives” to the nonprofit Friends of Boston’s Homeless.  
That act embodies what the Kissams called the “thoughtful community” that Wellesley is, but that isn’t often emphasized. Ultimately, they stressed, Wellesley women are friendly, kind, thoughtful, health conscious, well educated, and hard workers, and they give back to the community.
Duffy, for her part, agreed, calling the upturned-nose, money-spilling-out-of-purse reputation “rubbish.”
“The women I’ve met in Wellesley are all highly normal women: If they eat a doughnut, it goes straight on their hips, just like any other woman in the country,” she said, laughing through her rolling Irish lilt.
They’re living their lives just like everybody else, “doing right by their kids,” she noted. She added that she and her family “fell in love with Wellesley,” and have found “incredibly good soul mates here.”
But look out, Newton and Natick: In the works for  next fall is “Newton Neighbors,” which explores the “ridiculous lengths” people will go to live in desirable areas; and after that, “Natick Nannies,” (its working title), inspired by what Duffy described as the “power that nannies can wield in a house.”
In the end, it’s all meant in good spirit.
“It’s really just about women on fun adventures,” she said.

Duffy will do a book signing at 7 p.m. Friday at Wellesley Books. Visit her website, www.suzyduffybooks.com, for more details or to buy the book.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

How well do you know your neighborhood?

Startups & Venture Capital

BlockAvenue: Taking it to the streets

Premium content from Boston Business Journal by Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, October 5, 2012

W. Marc Bernsau 

The Web is the ultimate equalizer: Any one of us can take to our keyboards to review restaurants, hotels, stores, books, movies, TV shows, news articles and consumer products.
But what about when it comes to one of the most important aspects of our lives: Our streets, blocks and neighborhoods? Where can we find — or lend our expertise to, or air our grievances about — the hidden-away spots and the nitty-gritty details, the areas to hit and the ones to avoid?
This is the “lifestyle platform” that Cambridge-based BlockAvenue aims to create, by bringing the Yelp and TripAdvisor review concept down to the street-by-street level.
Launched in beta on Sept. 20, the company’s Web platform aggregates 50 million data points — from transit options, to crime stats, to home values, to amenities — and integrates them onto a map with user-based reviews, scores and testimonials, to create a true picture (good, bad, or neutral) of a given neighborhood.
“Some really important decisions are made around location,” said BlockAvenue founder and CEO Anthony Longo, also the founder of Web-based real estate broker Condo Domain, acquired by Better Homes Realty in August.
The goal of BlockAvenue is to bring “transparency” to that process, Longo said, by providing data on “anything and everything that makes up a location, that creates the value of that location.”
In the works since December 2011, the site is most complete in metro areas of Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., but users and demand are expected to broaden that swath over the coming weeks and months.
Longo and his backers have no doubt about the appetite for such a site.
“There’s a lot of fragmented data out there,” said PJ Solomon, general partner of seed-stage investing and consulting firm Second & Fourth, which is advising BlockAvenue on product, monetization and growth strategies. “There’s nothing like it out there.”
The site faces competition from sites such as StreetAdvisor, but Longo said the site has seen an “overwhelming” response so far, with about 400 searches per minute on its launch day.
BlockAvenue employs four full-time staffers and is based at Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge. The startup has raised $300,000 in seed funding from angel investors — $100,000 of that in its first week of launching. The goal is to move forward with a “sizable” Series A round by year’s end, Longo said.
How the site works: Users type in a location, and are brought to a map with different-colored pinpoints — indicating spots of interest such as stores and restaurants, as well as the addresses of registered sex offenders — and an overall neighborhood rating ranging from “A” to “F.” Zooming in closer shows reviews and comments; or users can also simply give a location a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”
“That’s the real value: The tiny tidbits, the one sentence blurbs that people are going to write,” Longo said.
Looking ahead, the company aims to gain profitability by eventually selling B2B products, licensing its data and working ad components into the website. An immediate goal is to create a mobile platform and “get it on everybody’s iPhones,” Longo said, while longer-term plans are to integrate more with social networks and to access “more and better” data.
Ultimately, Longo pointed to the site’s potentially wider implications.
“Over time we’ll be able to see trends on what makes neighborhoods good and what makes them bad,” said Longo — potentially giving insights on how to improve the worse-off neighborhoods.

Original story link here.

Hope springs

Ugandan orphans’ chorus kicks off worldwide tour with Mass. shows

By Taryn Plumb |  Globe Correspondent

October 04, 2012

Watoto Child Care Ministries 

Brenda Namakula is only 9 — but the things the young Ugandan has seen and suffered through belie her years.
Orphaned at a young age, she grew up in a country where poverty and corruption have been the status quo; where HIV and AIDS strike the young, old, and unborn; and where education, health care, and sustainable employment are often luxuries.
But she’s a survivor: Adopted by Watoto Child Care Ministries, she now lives with a caring family.
Hers is a story of hope — and it’s one that she’ll share with thousands of people over the next several months as she dances, sings, and performs across the United States and Brazil with the Watoto Children’s Choir.
The traveling troupe of 22 orphaned Ugandan youths will begin their string of hundreds of shows in Vineyard Haven on Saturday, and will also make stops in Randolph, Foxborough, Braintree, and Weymouth over the next two weeks.
“What I love about being on choir is that we learn many new things,” Brenda said in a written comment, “and [we] get to have lots of fun, too.”
The Watoto Children’s Choir began touring in 1994, and has brought roughly 1,100 Ugandan youths ages 6 to 12 to six continents, with a goal to broaden not only their world views but those of their audience.
It was born of Watoto Child Care Ministries — “watoto” is Swahili for “the children” — founded in 1994 by Canadians Gary and Marilyn Skinner. Describing itself as a “holistic care program,” it provides for the physical, emotional, medical, educational, and spiritual needs of 2,500 children in six of its own villages.
“Everything that a child needs to grow up whole, we provide it, because they’re our kids,” said Watoto executive director Eugene Stutzman, who is based in Tampa. As an extension of that, the choir “does something for these kids that’s almost unexplainable. It develops their self-confidence. You see their characters and their personalities blossom.”
Performances consist of traditional dancing, spoken testimonies, and lively music — a fusion of contemporary gospel and traditional African rhythm — by the children and their adult chaperones.
Local shows will be held at Victory World Outreach Church in Randolph on Sunday, Bethany Congregational Church in Foxborough next Thursday, South Shore Plaza in Braintree and Community Baptist Church in Weymouth on Oct. 13; Church of Abundant Life in Braintree on Oct.14; and Spring of Water Christian Assembly in Randolph on Oct. 16. The group also will make stops this month in Boston, Burlington, Haverhill, and Bolton.
Previous choirs — there have been 57 in total — have performed in Africa, Australia, North and South America, Europe, and Asia — and in front of royals (Queen Elizabeth II) and presidents (George W. Bush), as well as athletes, politicians, and ministers.
One of the main goals is to draw awareness to Uganda’s plight: The small, landlocked country is estimated to have 2 million orphaned children.
“Many of them have experienced more hardship than most of us will in our lifetimes,” said Stutzman, describing children who are abandoned by relatives when their parents die, and a place where babies are in some cases “thrown out like trash.”
The primary cause of death in Uganda is HIV and AIDS, he said, and “the children are the ones who are left to deal with it.”
Watoto gains full custody of the children in its care, nurturing them through college. They live in three villages (while babies are tended to in three other villages), with eight children under the care of one surrogate mother.
As Stutzman explained, the women often come from “broken” backgrounds themselves (widowed, abused, or abandoned), and make a life commitment to caring for the children.
Ultimately, Watoto’s goal is to rescue 10,000 children in Uganda, and it will soon branch out to Juba, the capital of neighboring South Sudan. The hope, Stutzman noted, is eventually to replicate the model across Africa.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” he said.
As do the children about to embark on their life-altering journey with the choir.
Nine-year-old Majorine Nabulime, for her part, noted the group’s “energetic” dancing.
And what she’s looking forward to in America?
“Eating new foods,” she said in a written comment, “like a sandwich.”
Brenda, meanwhile, expressed excitement to see “tall buildings” — skyscrapers.
And her fellow performer, 8-year-old Maria Namukwaya, is eager to see snow for the first time.
“My friends have told me it is white and very cold,” she said.
Of what to expect of the performance, she added, “our beautiful smiles.”
Go to www.watoto.com/the-choir/see-the-choir for details on events.

© 2012 The New York Times Company