It has happened to all of us. “File size to large to send.”
As a college student, it happened to me a LOT. Sending presentations became a hassle. I had to put them on a thumb drive, or put the file into a Google doc and hope that the format was preserved. (It never was.) And nothing can be more infuriating when you’re on a deadline than finding out your file is just a tad too big to send through Email.
There are services that provide large file sharing, YouSendIt being one of the most well known, but they are all services you need to sign up for. That, in turn means another hoop to jump through and another password to remember — it can also make users worry about spammy Emails.
This is one place where Episend sets itself apart from the competition; ease of sign in. Episend allows you to sign in using your Google, Yahoo, or Facebook accounts.
Episend founder Richard DiBona told me that one of the reasons Episend is unique compared to its competitors is, “the fact that it was built 100% from the ground up to be completely integrated with the Amazon Web Services Cloud.”
As DiBona as told me, “starting a company like this with no funding would not have been possible even three years ago because it would have required a sizable upfront hardware investment.”
Epsisend is another example of how the cloud is changing the way we do business. (more…)
DBMS's have come a long way over the years. Vertica Systems is leading the way.
Vertica Systems, located in Billerica, Mass., isn’t your mother’s data base management system (DBMS).
Vertica recently built new uber-powerful software to manage huge amounts of data that linearly scales and automatically distributes to Vertica’s customers.
As Vertica CEO Chris Lynch explained to me, their biggest differentiating point from competitors is their speed of data turnover. Most DBMS’s can return usable data to customers in days, or at best, hours. Vertica returns data in close to real-time, allowing companies to use their data more effectively.
As Vertica’s VP of Products and Business Development Colin Mahony told me, their software was built with only one question in mind for their customers: “What is the ROI?”
If return on investment is something that gets companies excited about digital and software investment, we don’t know what is.
In case you don’t know how DBMS’s benefit businesses, here is an example of how Vertica can benefit a telecommunications company that Mahony offered. Let’s say a large number of customers were dropping calls on a certain stretch of highway, Vertica can identify that almost immediately and report it to the telecommunications client. This would allow the telecommunications company to immediately identify a dead zone for service and quickly begin to remedy the problem.
“Any industry that needs to improve time or save money needs analytics,” said Lynch. (more…)
Earlier today, AlwaysOn announced their third annual AlwaysOn East Top 100 private companies list. According to the announcement, the top 100 companies were chosen for “demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technologies in on-demand computing, digital media, and green tech.”
With innovation on the East Coast accelerating rapidly, it was fun to compare Massachusetts vs. New York companies in a head-to-head battle.
When any company buys Software as a Service (SaaS) there is one thing they are always expecting – increased velocity and productivity. That is exactly what Bullhorn, which delivers staffing and recruiting software, offers to its 16,000 users during some 270M monthly transactions.
The director of product marketing, Jonathon Wall, summed up the Boston-based company’s goal well when he told me, “Bullhorn’s SaaS-based approach provides freedom and flexibility to our customers.” The company’s goal is also to have their customers live within the software 100% of the time. Part of that is serviced by Bullhorn’s ease of access — users can not only access Bullhorn from within their local networks, but also from any computer or smart phone because it is totally web-based.
Wall told me, “Our customers love that they can get to anywhere in the product with just one click, and that they can very easily multitask.” This all-in-one staffing service is unique within the industry; most of Bullhorn’s competitors offer some of their services, but not all in on place.
Instead of having to deal with a slim, prepackaged service, companies can select whatever features they want most in Bullhorn and also bring their own developers in to customize Bullhorn’s offerings even more.
Cambridge-based Cadio has developed technology that mines analytics data from mobile devices. But as Cadio co-founder Thaddeus Fulford-Jones told me, “We don’t really think of ourselves as a mobile analytics company; it’s more like we’re a consumer analytics firm that happens to use GPS data from mobile phones.”
The focus on GPS is what truly differentiates Cadio from the other mobile analytics companies available. With the data they accrue from consumers’ mobile devices, they are able to provide actionable intelligence to brands, retailers, market research firms and ad agencies using their own consumer analytics engines.
Fulford-Jones said that market research is a $15B a year industry, and nearly half of that is devoted to media and marketing research of packaged goods. Fulford-Jones told me that this led he and co-founder Eric Weiss to realize that they “could build a highly successful business going after major problem points in these specific areas.”
Their point of attack? Geo data received from the mobile phones we carry with us everywhere.
Sency real-time search lets you see what Boston is saying about almost anything
Imagine if you could hear everything everyone in Boston was thinking. Well, everything anyone was thinking on Twitter, anyway.
With the new realtime search engine, Sency, you can listen in on the voices of your city by tapping into region-specific Twitter posts.
Based in Santa Monica, California, Sency was conceived last year when founder, Evan Britton went to a Twitter conference and recognized all the data Twitter was giving away for free. Being one who “believe[s] in real time data,” Evan set off to create a way to harness the “value in what’s being created by the user.” With the help of Boston developer, Dan Nissenbaum, Sency launched in September of 2009.
To give you the basic idea, Sency is a search engine that can mine realtime Twitter data. In this sense it’s similar to a Twitter search, but things get a little more interesting when you find out Sency takes the roughly 55 million daily Twitter updates, filters out the spam, and organizes them by city. Currently you can narrow this Twitter search specific to 14 cities, and we were psyched to see Boston on that list. (more…)
Boston is leading the charge with apps like Citizens Connect, available in the iPhone App Store
After years of feeling envious over the fact that Boston’s transit authority is the MBTA while New York’s is the much more Twitter-friendly MTA, it looks like we can all take a little breather.
Contrary to what you might expect from so-called “open governments,” the cities’ transit authorities are not developing these applications in-house, but are instead opening up all kinds of data APIs so the best private developers in the country can access transit information, including delays and even the realtime GPS coordinates of trains, buses and ferrys. Developers working for private companies are then using the free data to create user-friendly interfaces for the masses. (more…)
We here at BostInnovation like to think we have a good sense of humor. (That’s what we tell ourselves, anyway.) We’ve found some hilarious YouTube and Funny or Die videos to lighten the mood on this lovely Saturday morning. These videos are special though — they’re all about Boston. Sit, back, relax and enjoy these classic clips from Boston — a city that has good sense of humor.
Local startup Book Of Odds takes to the streets of Boston to find out if people can guess the odds of some strange occurrences. What they discover is that some people are just too indecisive to be interviewed.
Boston Globe Widget- The Boston Globe’s Android widget and application keeps you up current with local, national, and international news. Developed by Androidz, The Globe’s widget lets you Email, text, comment, and archive stories. Price: Free
PrimoSpot Parking- As in any city, it can be brutal finding a parking spot in Boston. PrimoSpot Parking’s Android application shows you all of the garages, parking, and bike racks based on your address, intersection, or zipcode. With PrimoSpot you can even see how much time is left before metered spots turn free and compare garage prices. Price: $2.99
AnyStop: MBTA- If you’re not lucky enough to have a car and ride the T or bus instead, AnyStop is for you. It reminds us of the T Tracker app for iPhone, because it combines the GPS on city trains and busses with the power of Google Maps to predict REAL arrival times. AnySpot also shows you the nearest transportation stops for the bus, ferry, and commuter rail. Price: Free(more…)
Facebook's location feature could enable stalkers!
Along with those in other cities, Boston residents are getting more comfortable sharing their exact locations with friends in realtime. Today, anyone who wants to be is a public figure with his or her photos, tweets, and locations posted publicly online. Yesterday, TechCrunch’s MG Sieglerreported that Facebook “will launch a location based-feature.” What does this mean for Boston?
…Our quarter-million or-so college students are in trouble.
It should be noted that Twitter launched geo-tagging recently, but Twitter users are generally thought to be veterans of the realtime game. Many comfortable Foursquare users have already been posting their locations via Twitter and Facebook, but these users were early adopters of the first geo-location fad — They began using Foursquare because it was about location-based messaging.
By adding geo-location to Facebook posts, Facebook is exposing a massive new audience to the where-are-you-now? world of geo-tagging. That audience simply may not be ready to take that step. (more…)
Just last Tuesday I completed my last-ever college final. It was quite a glorious moment. I must admit, there were times I hardly believed it would happen, and that I would survive it and become a “real person” as we like to say at Emerson. Thanks to college, I have gained a myriad of traditional skills, like learning how to write effectively, speak poignantly and do many other important things that will help me find and keep a job.
But, with the increasing focus on social media in all professions, (especially my own, marketing) some of the most important pieces of information I learned while in college related to my use of social media. Since Emerson Social Media (on Twitter, #ESM) is so well-respected, and many BostInno readers don’t have any idea what you’d learn in a social media class at college, I thought I’d share a few inside tips. Here are the five most important things I learned about social media while in college.
1. Don’t underestimate the power of numbers
The most important thing I learned about social media at Emerson College is that like in any other situation, numbers are revealing. The power is in the people, and when they all rally around a cause it can be really powerful. Whenever Emersonians worked together to tweet about one subject, it got noticed. During Emerson’s social media class, taught by Dave Gerzof, there were a number of times that through sheer number of tweets we were able to get the attention of just about anyone. For example, when local video blogging guru Steve Garfield spoke to #ESM, the whole class tweeted constantly to his friend Jimmy Fallon, which soon elicited a response from the Twitter-savvy comedian. This wasn’t a very important “cause,” but when this kind of social activity is applied to a useful cause, it can be truly powerful. Twitter gives us all the chance to be heard, especially en masse. (more…)
In the world of Internet-connected mobile devices, Google is blazing the way by creating new services and technologies that many of us rely on every day. My iPhone, for example, wouldn’t be half as useful without my Gmail account for Emails, Google Maps to find my way around town, and Google Search to look up general information. And just a few months ago, Google’s experimental labs division cooked up perhaps one of the most promising new services to hit smartphones: Google Goggles.
Since it’s currently only available on select Android devices, I ditched my iPhone and hit the streets of Boston recently for a few days with a Motorola Droid to try out the new app first hand. (more…)
Even if traffic cams can't prevent road rage like this, they can at least catch it on tape
Boston will be one of six new cities to be installed with a number of EarthCam network cameras to be used in conjunction with traffic monitoring service, Total Traffic Network (TTN), according to a press release sent out yesterday.
The good news? TTN provides real-time traffic updates that can be streamed through a number of consumer devices, and EarthCam provides advanced webcam technology – making what seems a match made in heaven for Bostonians trying to avoid hours staring at the same “clever” bumper sticker for three miles.
TTN prides itself on providing “best-in-class, real-time traffic data service for broadcast, web, wireless, and navigation consumers, with an emphasis on providing accurate, relative, and timely information.” The company is currently the leading source for accurate, real-time traffic data, serving an estimated 125M users already. Most of the monitoring, it seems, comes from their proprietary video network.
Apparently it’s a subsidiary of the always-loved Clear Channel Radio network, but hey, if it makes navigating the system of worm holes and skyline pathways in Boston, we’re all for it. (more…)
One of the first questions I asked Localytics co-founder Raj Aggarwal was what prompted him to start a mobile analytics company. What he told me was simple, but true: “There’s a hole that needs to be filled for more powerful analytics.”
While Localytics only launched in the fall of 2008, they have already developed an industry-leading mobile analytics platform for publishers. They have been providing a free model of their analytics to publishers since they launched, and just last Tuesday, Localytics released their enterprise solutions.
During this recent launch, Localytics was able to announce two large publishers who will be using their enterprise solutions, KAYAK and CardStar. It should come as no surprising that they are already attracting large publishers to the new service, because their other analytics technologies are seriously powerful and well-known in the mobile space. Before the enterprise launch, Localytics was already providing solutions for over 400 publishers.
Why all the buzz?
Localytics provides the only realtime mobile analytics in the industry. (more…)
You can’t argue with Boston summers; one, we’re home to Red Sox— Fenway, in the summer, is where dreams come true. Two, the Boston Common and the Charles River– city parks don’t get much more beloved. Third, Bostonians come alive in the summer— we’ve been hiding under out winter parkas for too long and we can’t help but break lose. BostInnovation is here to help make this summer in Boston the best yet. Before you head out into the sun check in with these websites, tweeters, and Facebook profiles to see what’s happening in Boston.
Websites TeaParty Boston- No, this doesn’t have anything to do with Sarah Palin. We’re letting you in on a secret of ours and it’s the TeaParty Boston—one of the hippest Boston blogs you probably don’t know about. TeaParty Boston is your source for a non-mainstream look at Boston’s fashion, music, food, arts, and event scenes. (more…)
It has happened to all of us. “File size to large to send.”
This is one place where Episend sets itself apart from the competition; ease of sign in. Episend allows you to sign in using your Google, Yahoo, or Facebook accounts.
