Massachusetts was the top state in the Milken Institutes’s 2008 Science and Technology Index. The top five are:
It was also #1 in their last two studies, from 2004 and 2002 (no idea why they didn’t do one in ‘06). From their interactive maps, the two big categories they use which Mass cleans up in are per-capita small business grants (SBIR and STTR) and the percentage of engineers and scientists in the workforce.
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Posted by rightcoasttech
PowerSet came out of super-secret beta this week with much buzz. As someone who works on search software and thinks about similar problems all day (albeit in a different domain), I have to admit I was excited to try the company that “has Google scared”.
I tried it and I don’t get it. They may be doing some crazy NLP/semantic web voodoo behind-the-scenes, but I can’t see any way it’s actually making the experience for users better.
Their relevance ranking feels worse than Google, Yahoo, et al. And the only additional feature is that, for certain searches, it will display Factz (sic) which are basically articles it’s pulled out of Wikipedia or Freebase. Only a small subset of the searches seem to have any Factz (sic) and they aren’t that helpful.
It ends up being a poorly-implemented version of what others like Exalead or Hakia already do. Or what a hacker could do in a weekend by putting Freebase and Wikipedia into Solr.
However, they do have good facial hair:
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Posted by rightcoasttech
Looking back, this was a great year in technology. In Boston, it was a banner year for IPOs:
Salary.com (SLRY) 2/14/2007
EnerNOC (ENOC) 5/17/2007
TechTarget (TTGT) 6/4/2007
Starent Networks (STAR) 6/5/2007
Bridgeline Software (BLSW) 6/28/2007
BladeLogic (BLOG) 7/24/2007
Netezza (NZ) 7/18/2007
Virtusa (VRTU) 8/2/2007
VM Ware (VMW) 8/14/2007
Athena Health (ATHN) 9/19/2007
Constant Contact (CTCT) 10/3/2007
Double-Take Software (DBTK) 12/15/2007
There were also pile of acquisitions, including some for big dollars like Equal Logic ($1.4B Dell) and Health Dialog ($775m - BUPA). Venture funding continues to be up, but is still well below it’s peak in 2001. And close to $35 Billion was raised by venture funds in 2007, indicating that investors still believe it’s a good bet.
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Posted by rightcoasttech
