Monday, March 28, 2011

Startup Watch | February 2011

The number of tech workers in San Francisco today is nearing its peak in 2000. The city had more than 32,000 tech jobs last year, compared with approximately 34,000 in 2000. Could this be an indicator that a new bubble is about to burst?

Bay Area economists and commercial real estate experts think not. Today's startups seem more cautious. They rent less office space. Also, there is less risk of a bubble because investments by venture capitalists last quarter were less than one-fourth the value of investments made at the peak of the boom.

According to one Bay Area real estate expert:

"This leg of job growth is in its early stages. The whole dot-com revolution started in 1995, and it took five years to reach its crescendo."

Details are available in a San Francisco Chronicle article.

How does this translate to Boston? Perhaps it doesn't. However, startup companies do create jobs. According to StartUpHire.com there are nearly 800 job openings at startup companies in the Boston metro area.

Mass High Tech highlights startup companies each week in a series called "Five You Should Follow."

Startup Watch for February

Here are 12 startup companies to keep your eye on:

[NOTE: Hover over company name to view a tooltip summary of that company's value proposition.]

» Aura Biosciences, Inc. | Cambridge

» Bliss Healthcare, Inc. | Waltham

» Conversation Media, Inc. | Brighton

» Good Start Genetics, Inc. | Boston

» HeadSpin Software, LLC | Burlington

» Jarvian, Inc. | Boston

» Owlchemy Labs, LLC | Watertown

» Playrific, Inc. | North Billerica

» Proteqt Technologies, Inc. | Franklin

» SocialSci | Cambridge

» SweetDeeds | Boston

» Ziptivity, LLC | Carlisle

Five new startups are listed every Tuesday at Mass High Tech -- The Journal of New England Technology. Access Startup News for details. If your company was founded within the last three years, and would like to be considered for the Watch List, contact the Startup Watch editor.

Access previous Startup Watch lists:

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Saturday, March 19, 2011

SXSW Interactive Awards | 2011

This year's South By Southwest Interactive (SXSW) festival offered a showcase of trends in interactive design.

Taking home the Best of Show award was The Wilderness Downtown, the HTML5 experiment featuring the music of Grammy Award winning Arcade Fire. If you have not yet experienced the capabilities of HTML5 video coding technology, download Google Chrome and witness the future of interactive design.

Awards were handed out in 17 categories. The Film/TV category showcased Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy. Collapsus is a transmedia project that combines interactivity, animation, fiction, and documentary. The following three-minute video provides an overview of this emerging transmedia trend.

Collapsus Walkthrough from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.

SXSW Interactive Awards Categories

Here are the 2011 award winners by category.

Activism: The Tiziano Project | 360° Kurdistan

Amusement: Most Awesomest Thing Ever

Art: The Johnny Cash Project

Business: Get Satisfaction

Classic: The Onion

Community: iFixit

Educational Resource: Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe™

Experimental: Isle of Tune

Film/TV: Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy

Kiosk/Installation: Unilever - Smile Activated Vending Machine

Mobile: Airbnb

Motion Graphics: Record Tripping

Music: The Wilderness Downtown

Personal: JKVC Interactive & Print Design

Social Media: Conan O'Brien Presents: Team Coco

Student: FeedSpeaker

Technical Achievement: AP Timeline Reader

Special Honors

People's Choice: Groupon

Breakout Digital Trend: GroupMe

Speaker of the Event: Jane McGonigal

Digital Campaign of the Year: Old Spice: Smell Like a Man, Man

Best of Show: The Wilderness Downtown

For additional creative ideas check out The Finalists at the SXSW website.

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Monday, March 14, 2011

Boston Market | March 2011

Job opportunities for Web technology professionals continued to expand over the past 30 days. The pace has slowed somewhat from last month's report. So have the referral bonuses.

March Referral Rewards

Marsh Sutherland at Walden Recruiting is offering $1,000 finder's fees for each of the following opportunities:

~ Web Designer (and mobile too!)
~ Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer

Joe Cronin at Edvisors is offering a $500 finder's fee for the following opportunity:

~ Director of Software Development and Engineering

What do these three opportunities have in common?

  • highly developed technical skills
  • experience implementing these skills in a Web (and increasingly mobile Web) environment

Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot, who fired the first $10,000 shot in the Boston battle for technology talent, reports as follows:

"For us, it's less about specific skills and more about finding people that have a passion for programming and a background delivering applications over the web."

Technical skills high on his list include the following:

  • Java
  • Python
  • PHP

Boston Market

It pays to develop your technical skills.

Java, Python and PHP are three skills in the Top 20 Web Technologies in Boston. This list is updated monthly and appears in the right-hand column.

  • Java | 667 job opportunities 66% in two months
  • Python | 167 job opportunities 80% in two months
  • PHP | 152 job opportunities 31% in two months

The list of Average Salaries in Boston has also been updated for March. Data is supplied by CBSalary.com, a service of CareerBuilder.com. A sampling of jobs filled recently and the salaries offered to the selected candidates reveal the following:

It pays to develop your technical skills.

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Friday, March 04, 2011

Web Innovators Group | WebInno29

Ten companies. Ten hundred networking opportunities. All in one room. All FREE.

If you are interested in previewing the latest innovations on the Internet and mobile devices, and networking with industry leaders, then check out the next gathering of the Web Innovators Group.


This 29th installment will feature the following presentations:

Main Dishes

Side Dishes

  • Heretoo | The game begins early 2011

  • Media Armor | an analytics company that helps the mobile display advertising industry

  • MobiFlex | build complex native mobile apps without a developer

  • Newsle | news about your people

  • Postpost | a news aggregator for the social generation

  • Synchronize.TV | enables developers to create applications that augment the television viewing experience

  • TapCity | a multiplayer city-building game with a real-world twist

Building Products That Win

A special optional breakout session will begin at 8:00 pm. The panelists will discuss how to launch great internet products and scale high performing product teams.

Moderator: Nitzan Shaer | High Start Group
Panelist: Ben Foster | OPOWER
Panelist: Adam Medros | TripAdvisor
Panelist: Fareed Behmaram-Mosavat | Zynga

Event Details

Monday, March 7, 2011, 6:30 pm

Royal Sonesta Cambridge

Registration is FREE and the networking could prove invaluable! Check out the Attendee List of more than 1,000 pre-registrants to determine if this networking event is right for you.

Registrants are encouraged to join the Boston Web Innovators Group on LinkedIn and connect with nearly 1,400 members.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011

Startup Watch | January 2011

As the job market for Web technology professionals heats up, the market for ninjas, gurus and rockstars is boiling!

Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot, is looking for developers. There is just one catch. Only awesome ones need apply. Refer an awesome developer and pocket $10,000. Check out the details in his blog post entitled HubSpot Fires First Shot in Boston Battle For Talent: $10,000 Bounty.

This is not just a Boston phenomenon. Rand Fishkin, CEO at SEOmoz in Seattle, has upped the ante to $12,000 for software engineers. Details at WANTED: Software Engineers REWARD: $12,000. To be considered you must be amazing.

GRANA Opportunities

So, are there job opportunities in the current market? Yes, if you can demonstrate GRANA skills:

  • Guru
  • Rockstar
  • Awesome
  • Ninja
  • Amazing

After all of the GRANA coders are locked up with long-term stock options there might even be a few opportunities remaining for mere mortals.

Startup Watch for January

Mass High Tech highlights startup companies each week in a series called "Five You Should Follow."

Here are 11 startup companies to keep your eye on:

[NOTE: Hover over company name to view a tooltip summary of that company's value proposition.]

» Acetylon Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Boston

» Autotegrity, Inc. Cambridge

» Avantra Biosciences Corp. Woburn

» Baydin, Inc. Cambridge

» Gingko Bioworks Boston

» Grembe Apps, Inc. Marstons Mills

» MyPaperlessBills, Inc. Medford

» Novophage Therapeutics, Inc. Cambridge

» TerraVerdae BioWorks, Inc. Beverly

» UpRace Boston

» WaySavvy Boston

Five new startups are listed every Tuesday at Mass High Tech -- The Journal of New England Technology. Access Startup News for details. If your company was founded within the last three years, and would like to be considered for the Watch List, contact the Startup Watch editor.

Access previous Startup Watch lists:

[ NOTE: Follow Beantown Web on Twitter @webapprentices and on Facebook by becoming a Fan of Beantown Web. ]

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Friday, February 18, 2011

Ruby on Rails | Boston

The growing demand for Web technology workers can only be met by increasing the supply of skilled candidates. Skill is developed through a combination of training and practice.

Crisis or Opportunity?

The unemployment crisis is not abating. Yet, as reported in Boston Market | February 2011, the demand for Web technology workers increased steadily in 2010 and experienced an upward spike in January.

Still, many unemployed and underemployed workers are underskilled for these information technology opportunities.

Ruby on Rails

Let's dig deeper and explore a technology whose demand profile does not yet place it on the Top 20 Web Technologies in Boston list posted in the right-hand column:

~ Ruby on Rails | 43 job postings

This technology was developed by 37 Signals, creators of Basecamp, the popular online project collaboration tool, and authors of Rework, one of the Best Business Books of 2010. Wikipedia provides a nice overview of Ruby on Rails (RoR) which is defined as an open source web application framework.

You may already be using an RoR application and not even be aware of it. Twitter and Groupon are just two of many thousands of websites built using Ruby on Rails.

A recent Dice article confirms that "demand is high, but supply is low" for Ruby on Rails experts in the greater Boston area. There apparently is a talent shortage in other large technology markets as well, including Chicago.

Training Opportunity

A Cambridge-based venture capital firm, Fairhaven Capital, has joined forces with thoughtbot, inc., a Boston-based web design and development company, to offer Ruby on Rails training at a 50% discount. Not just anyone can sign up, however. You have to apply.

First, you must demonstrate experience in web languages such as Java, Python, C#, PHP, HTML, and SQL.

Second, preference will be given to developers from start-up companies.

If you feel you meet the qualification standards, then apply online for one of the 25 available training slots.

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Sunday, February 13, 2011

Boston Market | February 2011

Demand for information technology talent exploded in January!

Job postings for the top 20 Web-related technology skills in Boston increased 36 percent year over year, as detailed in the Boston Market | January 2011 post. From early January to early February these same technology skills experienced an average 49 percent increase!

  • Top 20 Skills (January 2010 - January 2011) 36%
  • Top 20 Skills (January 2011 - February 2011) 49%

We'll take a closer look at the numbers in a minute. First the bigger picture.

Job Growth 2010

According to the Labor Department three U.S. metropolitan areas added the most jobs in 2010:

  • Washington, DC
  • Dallas
  • Boston

All three cities are home to industries that are poised to hire this year:

  • information technology
  • biomedical research firms
  • government contractors

Details can be found in a Bloomberg Businessweek article.

Boston Market

The list of Top 20 Web Technologies in Boston has been updated for February and appears in the right-hand column. The list is comprised of keyword searches for web-related technologies mentioned in job postings at Boston.com (managed by Monster.com).

The usual suspects of programming and database skills populate the Top 10 including the following:

#3 - Java 53% in 30 days
#5 - JavaScript 57% in 30 days
#6 - XML 50% in 30 days
#8 - C# 54% in 30 days

The biggest mover, however, enters the Top 10 for the first time:

#9 - social media 73% in 30 days

A closer looks at the posted jobs that list "social media" in the description reveals that many of the positions are more suited for writers and marketers. None-the-less, the social media experience occurs on the Web and Web technology professionals should know how to incorporate social media content into Web projects. This content includes, but is not limited to the following:

~ Facebook integration
~ Twitter integration
~ YouTube integration

Social Media Opportunity

Social media is not a passing fancy any more than the World Wide Web is a fad that will quietly disappear. Web technology professionals should consider adding "social media" to their technology skill set.

The best way to start is to develop a 30-day action plan to incorporate Facebook, Twitter and YouTube into your business communications.

[ NOTE: Beantown Web is now on Twitter. Follow Beantown Web @webapprentices and on Facebook by becoming a Fan of Beantown Web. ]

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Monday, January 31, 2011

Startup Watch | December 2010

There are five differences between Boston and Silicon Valley. When compared to its California counterpart, Beantown exhibits the following:

  • an abundance of non-Web 2.0 companies
  • an abundance of events
  • an abundance of marketing talent
  • an obsession with raising capital
  • an ignorance of how to raise capital

These observations were offered up by Jeff Seibert, Engineering Manager at Palo Alto-based Box.net. Seibert recently relocated to open the company's new East Coast office in Central Square, Cambridge. Details can be found in a blog article compliments of Greenhorn Connect.

[ Update: Nikki Smith-Morgan @publicwords provides one additional area where Boston lags behind its Left Coast competitor. ]

If you are looking to learn more about the startup culture in Boston consider attending the next Meetup event offered by Lean Startup Circle Boston.

Startup Watch for December

Mass High Tech highlights startup companies each week in a series called "Five You Should Follow."

Here are 18 startup companies to keep your eye on:

[NOTE: Hover over company name to view a tooltip summary of that company's value proposition.]

» AcceloWeb | North Easton

» Affectiva, Inc. | Waltham

» Basho Technologies, Inc. | Cambridge

» Cambridge Semantics, Inc. | Boston

» CFRx, Inc. | Charlestown

» Dear Panda LLC | Cambridge

» Edimer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. | Cambridge

» Ginger Software, Inc. | Lexington

» Healthrageous, Inc. | Boston

» ItsMYurls LLC | Boston

» MedicalRecords.com | Cambridge

» MobiLaurus | Newton

» NewPower Energy Systems | Boston

» Provasculon, Inc. | Cambridge

» SBR Health | Cambridge

» StopGoStopGo | Boston

» Swift Mobile, Inc. | Cambridge

» Worldwide Center of Mathematics LLC | Cambridge

Five new startups are listed every Tuesday at Mass High Tech -- The Journal of New England Technology. Access Startup News for details. If your company was founded within the last three years, and would like to be considered for the Watch List, contact the Startup Watch editor.

Access previous Startup Watch lists:

[ NOTE: Beantown Web is now on Twitter. Follow Beantown Web @webapprentices and on Facebook by becoming a Fan of Beantown Web. ]

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Thursday, January 13, 2011

Boston Market | January 2011

An upward hiring trend is expected in 2011 and information technology (IT) workers are in best position to benefit from this increase in employment demand.

This finding was revealed in a report released by CareerBliss, an online career community designed to help everyone find happiness in the workplace. Here are the five career specialties with the highest anticipated job openings:

  1. Information Technology
  2. Sales
  3. Engineering
  4. Marketing
  5. Healthcare

Access Top Hiring Cities and Jobs for 2011 from CareerBliss for details.

Boston Market

Information technology is a broad category. In many instances specific technology expertise and experience are required to fill these positions.

The list of Top 20 Web Technologies in Boston has been updated for January and appears in the right-hand column. The list is comprised of keyword searches for web-related technologies mentioned in job postings at Boston.com (managed by Monster.com).

The average Top 20 technology has experienced a 36% increase in demand since early January 2009. Here are the technologies that have demonstrated the greatest job growth in the past 12 months:

Here is the biggest mover not yet in the Top 20:

Other technologies experiencing above average year-over-year growth include the following:

Web professionals who have developed an expertise in these technologies and can demonstrate projects that utilize these skills will likely command attention as the job market continues to expand during the first quarter.

NOTE: Beantown Web is now on Twitter. Follow Beantown Web @webapprentices and on Facebook by becoming a Fan of Beantown Web]

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Sunday, January 09, 2011

Best Business Books | 2010

Seven books stand above the rest as the Best Business Books of 2010.
What follows is Beantown Web's annual quasi-scientific analysis of the Best Business Books published in the previous year. The search began with an online review of 10 "Best of" lists from the following sources:
All told, 103 books were mentioned on at least one "Best of" list. Among these offerings twenty books were mentioned on two lists (The Honorable Mention).

Best Business Books | Runners Up


Here are the four books identified on three lists (The Runners Up):

Best Business Books | Winners


~ Third place, mentioned on five of the 10 lists: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
~ Second place, mentioned on six of the 10 lists: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
~ First place, mentioned on seven of the 10 lists: Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard?


Personal Recommendations


I can personally vouch for four of the seven books identified, having read and posted reviews for the following:
I look forward to chilly winter nights getting acquainted with the other three recommended books. [ Note: Check out additional bookshelf recommendations in the right-hand column. ]

Suggested Success Strategy


Identify one book from the seven listed above and commit to learning more about the business world. Making a study of best business practices can only help improve job prospects and career success as we continue to establish a foothold in "the new normal."
Check out previous lists:
[ NOTE: Facebook Fans of Beantown Web gain access to a list of the 20 additional books that made The Honorable Mention list. Become a fan today! ]
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