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Boston's push for citywide wireless Internet access, delayed by technical challenges and slower than anticipated fund-raising, is no longer expected to meet the city's original goal of blanket coverage by the end of next year, project leaders conceded.

Citywide deployment is now "unlikely in 2008," said Pamela Reeve, chief executive of OpenAirBoston, the nonprofit corporation established by the city to manage the program. A pilot WiFi project once scheduled to launch last June in a square-mile area of the Grove Hall neighborhood, straddling Dorchester and Roxbury, won't be running at full capacity until later this month.

This list of 25 companies comprises entrants from the gaming space, our contribution to the virtual world and several game related companies. Even though I have spent a bit of time researching the economics of the virtual world, I will admit that my expertise is not in the pure online gaming space (outside of hours of Counter Strike, Stars Wars Battlefront and a former career playing online poker).

This is also by no means a complete group of all local companies. Special thanks go to Boston PostMortem, Waltham’s Zoominfo and, of course…Google who I used heavily to put the list together. If you interested in the space you should check out the PostMortem site and their complete list of local game companies.

The name m-Qube Inc. may be gone from the local technology community, but it is not forgotten.

Slightly more than a year after the Boston-based mobile marketing channel developer was acquired by California's VeriSign Inc. for $250 million, m-Qube's inspiration lingers. For instance, executives that once made the company the fastest growing startup in New England are busy planting new seeds across the region with the hope of duplicating m-Qube's success.

Waltham's Mobicious Inc. and Quattro Wireless Inc. are two examples that have emerged over the past few weeks. This week, Mobicious, co-founded by former m-Qube director of marketing David Chang, landed $4 million in its first rounding of funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures. Quattro Wireless, on the other hand, was launched publicly last week, driven by a $6 million round of funding from Highland Capital Partners, and led by former m-Qube general manager and CTO Andrew Miller and Eswar Priyadarshan, respectively.

In fact, of the 13-member management team in place at the time of m-Qube's acquisition in March 2006, 10 have moved into positions within the local high-tech startup community.

As Harvard Square counts down the days until its free Wi-Fi goes live, it has become increasingly digital.

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Already, some of the 8 million or so visitors to the Square can take an anticipatory virtual tour of its streets and shops online, through a link on the Harvard Square Business Association website. And Harvard students and staff can now log on to the Internet to track university shuttle buses - no more worried waits at night or cold waits as the weather turns to winter.

Come Nov. 1, all of that online tracking and exploring can happen at places like Winthrop Park or the Pit outside the T stop. Free wireless service will be offered outdoors from the Inn at Harvard to the Charles Hotel to the Cambridge Common, according to Denise Jillson, executive director of the business association.

"After working with the city and Harvard, we hired a private contractor to deploy a mesh network," she said. "The technology has advanced so much in just the last six months."

As any of the three 25-year-old self-made men will tell you, the hugely successful launch of PureVolume.com, a Web site dedicated to promoting independent, unsigned rock bands by allowing users to download free music, required the sacrifice of their personal lives. And although the party will be fun, it’s largely in the name of giving the Web site visibility.

“You sort of have to be obsessed to make a business successful,” explains Woitunski, business developer and creative director. “We work 18-hour days. We’ve slept here on occasion. In some ways it’s a 24-hour job. We’ll leave the office at eight, 10 p.m., or midnight, thinking about decisions we have to make the next day.”

Neuroscientists are using brain imaging to understand the organization of the mind. Asia specialists are challenging the notion that a rising China threatens the United States. And in education, engineers are pushing teachers to refocus attention on the human-made world, in addition to the natural sciences.

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Those were just a few examples discussed yesterday at the Ideas Boston 2007 conference, which highlighted Boston-area innovators who are reimagining everything from chemistry and religion to architecture and geopolitics. Speakers said they often achieve breakthroughs by borrowing concepts from other disciplines.

"To innovate, to think new ideas, we often have to think outside our own discipline," said Nader Tehrani, a principal in the Boston architectural firm Office dA and associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The techniques of architecture [are] sometimes not sufficient for where we need to go."

Tehrani's architectural designs use materials and building methods creatively, with wood structures appearing to ripple like water and corrugated aluminum fashioned into pleats. He said he has been influenced by everything from the flat canvases of modernist painting to the pleating and darting employed in clothing design.

In the field of cognitive neuroscience, researchers are pushing into new frontiers by identifying specific regions of the brain that recognize faces, places, and bodies, Nancy G. Kanwisher, an investigator at the McGovern Institute and professor in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, told about 300 people gathered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for the third Ideas summit.

Kanwisher said many brain scientists had long resisted the idea that certain parts of the brain are selectively engaged in specific mental processes. But she cited fresh research by MIT's Rebecca Saxe demonstrating that, in addition to the "brain real estate" devoted to face, place, and body recognition, another part of the brain is engaged in "thinking about what other people are thinking."

David C. Kang, professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, meanwhile, has been rethinking East Asia policy.

While most American policy experts view the rise of China as a threat or a future threat, he said, other Asian countries have been boosting their trade with China, leaving the Asian continent more stable today than at any other time in the last century. "So far, it's fairly clear that countries in East Asia see China as an economic opportunity, and they think that the military threat is fairly low," Kang said. He said that a rivalry between the United States and China isn't inevitable.

Other speakers talked of pioneering new fields.

John C. Warner, president of the Warner-Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, is championing toxicology programs for inventing safer materials. Ioannis Miaoulis, director of Boston's Museum of Science, is pushing for K-12 science education to include the study of cars as well as volcanoes. And, Kecia Ali, a professor of religion at Boston University, hailed "the possibility for transformation within an Islamic context" in the relationship between husbands and wives.

Ideas Boston 2007, moderated by National Public Radio's Tom Ashbrook, was sponsored by the Boston Foundation, Boston World Partnerships, Partners Healthcare, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Longworth Venture Partners, Plymouth Rock Assurance, McDermott Ventures, Business Wire, Conventures, Ambit Press, UMass Boston, and Nutter, McClennen & Fish LLP.

Conference media partners were The Boston Globe, 90.9 WBUR, and WCVB TV, Channel 5.

With the quality of our talent pool and the caliber of our business and political leadership, it’s not all doom and gloom. With home-grown powerhouses like Genzyme and Biogen leading the way, our position as a biotechnology cluster appears to have strengthened recently and we are increasingly attracting out-of-state employers who want to tap into the world-class scientific talent residing here. There are early signs of hope that we are well-positioned to lead in the nascent but potentially robust Green industry, with companies like Evergreen Solar and EnerNOC leading the way. And one of our most promising information technology "up-and-comers", Akamai, appears poised to achieve the magic $1 billion in sales in the next two to three years, dominating the Web content distribution market.

I am thus hopeful that we are on a stronger path in Massachusetts than ever before, so long as we have the continued leadership of the business, financial and political community to show the way.

Event based social network Going.com has taken an additional $5 million in funding, in a round led by the sites original investors General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

Going.com recently passed 500,000 users, up from 200,000 users in early June and an impressive feat considering the service currently only operates in four cities: New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

George Bell and Bob Davis from General Catalyst and Highland Capital respectively will remain on the Going.com board of directors.

Going.com competes with Minglenow, Socialzr and LateNightShots. Going.com was previously known as HeyLetsGo.

David Aronoff

General Partner

David is a General Partner at IDG Ventures Boston whose investment interests and experience include semiconductors, enterprise systems, and security sectors.

He currently represents IDG Ventures Boston on the boards of Acinion, CHil Semiconductor, and VidSys. David was recognized by Forbes on their prestigious Midas List as one of the top 100 venture capitalists in 2004 and 2005.

David's blog, the diary of a Geek VC, can be found at www.geekvc.com.



Background

Prior to joining IDG Ventures in June 2005, David spent nearly a decade focusing on early-stage investing at Greylock Partners where he led several of the firm's successful investments in the communications and systems markets. During his time at Greylock, he built a strong investment track record including investments in Akara (acquired by CIENA), Cimaron (acquired by AMCC), e-Dial (acquired by Alcatel), Ikanos (IPO), Sandburst (acquired by Broadcom), SiTera (acquired by Vitesse), Xedia (acquired by Lucent) and Xros (acquired by Nortel).

Prior to Greylock, David held management roles at Chipcom, an enterprise network equipment vendor where he led development efforts in Ethernet bridges, switches and routers. While working full-time on his MBA, David co-founded the Attitude Network (acquired by TheGlobe.com), an Internet content startup with the top two game sites of the day. Earlier in his career he held technical positions at Bell Labs where he developed secure network systems for DoD customers.

A passerby would be forgiven for not noticing the MIT Museum. The nondescript metal-sided building squats on an awkward corner of Massachusetts Avenue between a Korean market and a brick warehouse. Visitors must enter through a side door and climb a steel staircase, a humble porthole for a place that aims to be the institutional memory of one of the nation's top scientific institutions.

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But all that will change next month when the museum completes a $3 million expansion, knocking out the ground-floor walls and replacing them with plate glass that will literally shine light on the latest research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology brain trust.

The new gallery will eschew historical exhibits to focus on cutting-edge projects including a stackable electric car, new-generation robots that explore the ocean floor, and tropical fish that are helping scientists in the search for a cancer cure. It is the brainchild of museum director John Durant, who arrived two years ago from a British science museum with frenetic energy and what he calls a bullish outlook about the ability to engage the average Joe or Jane in learning about science.

128 has largely died as a haven for startups, just some VCs left behind there now. But meanwhile Cambridge seems like it has hit a tipping point. Now Google Boston is here, Ideo moved in from Lexington to Central Square, and there are even rumors some of the VC crew out in Waltham may be eyeing the area.

It seems that the combination of Harvard & MIT, the relatively (for this
close to the city) inexpensive rent, and efforts like Cambridge
Innovation Center (CIC) have really helped spur this growth. And I don't want to underestimate the help CIC has given to this effort. CIC started out as a doomed incubator concept and was reborn after the dot-bomb as a mixture of flexspace & entreprenuer support network.  They now take up something like six floors of a fourteen floor building and host 100+ companies.

Ambient was born in CIC in those dark of 2001, and they are still here now. Who else is here? I pinged Tim and got a quick list of a couple of the guys I could run into in the kitchen:
- iSkoot (CRV-backed VOIP over your cell phone, including Skype)
- Great Point Energy (raised a $30m A round from Kleiner and others to gassify coal)
- Visible Measures (General Catalyst-backed metrics for online video)
- Sconex (MySpace for the high school set)

Hell, there's even an NPR show (currently being recorded in Second Life) that's on the third floor. Walk out of the building and you can hit Tabblo, Vanu, Harmonix, Brightcove, E-Ink and many others in less then a mile radius.