More on "Sandy" aftermath

Cats rescued in Methuen; Plum Island escapes major damage

Compiled by Globe correspondents Brenda J. Buote, Taryn Plumb, and David Rattigan.

 

High tide swelled to 8½ feet around noon Monday in Newburyport, covering the Black Cow restaurant’s lot.

Merrimack Valley

About 10,000 customers lost power and close to 2,000 were still waiting for the lights to come back on Thursday. National Grid was expecting everyone to have power restored by noon Friday.

Route 133 was closed about 7 p.m. Monday when light poles fell across it, Andover Police Lieutenant James Hashem, deputy emergency management director, said. There were no injuries reported.

Methuen

A Good Samaritan dropped off a mother cat and her two kittens found trapped in a wind-lashed carrier on East Street Monday during the howling winds and driving rains of the storm. He sheltered the cats at his house before bringing them to the MSPCA. Since they have no IDs, they will go up for adoption as soon as they are vaccinated and neutered.

Plum Island

Thanks — residents say — to recent beach scraping projects that shored up sand in front of eight properties, the island escaped the storm largely unscathed.

According to Bob Connors, who lives on Annapolis Way and serves as an advocate for Plum Island homeowners, dunes along the barrier island did erode about a foot or two — as typically happens during big storms — but the majority of impact came from wind damage, such as shingles being torn off by violent gusts.

Connors reported seeing waves 12 to 16 feet high, and a tide 5 feet above normal.

But, as the result of the beach scraping, “homes were protected that might otherwise have been damaged,” he said. “It worked as planned.”

Beverly and Cape Ann

High winds were more of an issue than rain or tides. “Overall, we can thank our lucky stars,” said Beverly Mayor Bill Scanlon. “We had the tide rising and a lot of trees came down, but not many trees that we couldn’t lift. The city was fortunate to be where it is, physically.”

Gloucester was hardest hit, with approximately 3,000 residents losing power. There was damage to the corrugated metal siding at the former Birds Eye seafood factory, and a dock broke free from the Cape Ann Marina but was secured by the Coast Guard and harbormaster before it could damage any vessels.

“We were lucky that we didn’t have much rainfall to add to the the coastal flooding issues,” said Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello.


Original story link here.

Managing documents in the cloud

Startups & Venture Capital

Control after hitting the send button

Startup offers new way to track and secure digital documents after they’re sent

 

Boston Business Journal by Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, November 2, 2012

Courtesy

It's often hard to truly know the fate of emails and documents you send and share. Sometimes you're simply left to wonder: Did they arrive where they were supposed to? Were they looked at? Or did they get intercepted or passed along to someone who was never intended to view them?
That's a level of control you shouldn't have to give up, according to Clement Cazalot, CEO of the startup docTrackr, which has entered the hot market of cloud document management.
The company launched in Paris in 2011, took part in the 2012 winter session of the TechStars Boston accelerator program, and is now based in Boston. In early October, docTrackr announced raising $2 million in seed funding from investors including Polaris Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, CommonAngels and the French government.
The startup doesn't aim to directly compete with powerhouses like Box -- in fact, it's forged partnerships with them. Instead, the company intends to add a layer of protection and insight through encryption and analytics that its founders say has been lacking in the industry.
"Being able to control and protect documents is a huge challenge, especially in the cloud," Cazalot said. "We give you the power to know what is happening to your documents after you share them."
To do so through the cloud-based platform, users upload files, choose recipients who can access them, and set privileges - such as whether the receiver can edit, share or print. Documents or files are encrypted and can be password-protected, and opened through traditional tools such as Adobe or Word.
The moment the email or document is opened, the sender starts to get a history through docTrackr's detailed intelligence analytics. The sender can see when the file was opened, how long it was open, who it was shared with, and if it was printed. The sender also continues to have the ability to update, edit, and change the file's accessibility.
"They're controlling their document, owning their data," said Cazalot, saying that docTrackr is "democratizing" online document security, and helping to curb unintended sharing of intellectual property or sensitive information.
With numerous companies now offering cloud document management, docTrackr is entering a robust, flourishing market.
"As the cloud grows in popularity, document exchange among business partners will also grow," said Michael Krigsman, president and CEO of Brookline-based IT consulting firm Asuret. "Unlike paper documents, material sent over the Internet can be easily replicated but not easily tracked."
Still, he noted, docTrackr faces a challenge in asking customers to entrust sensitive and confidential documents to a "new, untested service."
"That's the biggest hurdle this company faces in the short term," Krigsman said.
But Cazalot doesn't appear to be intimidated. Developed at the accelerator Le Camping in Paris, the nine-employee company has partnered with Box, and has an eye to also integrate with Dropbox, YouSendIt and Egnyte.
The startup is currently focused on small to midsized businesses, although it has worked with SNCF, France's national railway, and also has a beta version available for individuals. Cazalot declined to disclose numbers related to customers or growth.
As for settling in Boston? Cazalot explained it this way: "We believe Boston is where there is talent in the U.S."

Original story link here.

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.