Technology

Brad Feld, managing director at the venture-capital firm Foundry Group, says it's past time for Cambridge tech types to embrace their inner Cambridgeness (or maybe even their inner Kendallness) and stop using "Boston" to refer to themselves:

In my world view, the entrepreneurs drive the startup community. Focus on entrepreneurial population density and entrepreneurial density – and make sure your geographic region is small. Over time, linking the critical mass together in a larger region (e.g. Silicon Valley or Boston) is fine, but the real power comes from the startup communities with the largest [entrepreneurial density] in small physical regions which are big enough to have critical mass.

Ed. note: He lost me a bit when, after making his Cambridge argument, he wrote that the 128 and 495 tech belts are part of Boston. Um, what?

The Tech reports an MIT professor thinks the USPS can reinvent and save itself - and the jobs of tens of thousands of workers - by getting into the field of e-mail management and helping companies deal with the never ceasing barrage of electronic messaging:

Ayyadurai believes the USPS can provide a service that will help companies become more efficient at managing their own email. Under his plan, the USPS can retrain workers it intends to lay off in order to support the proposed system and generate enough revenue to avoid bankruptcy. Though some email management systems outsource work to countries like India, Ayyadurai argues that the USPS is a trusted and reliable brand, and can do a better job.

Harvard researchers are hard at work on ways to build and control massive swarms of tiny little robots. They're only up to about 1,000 insect-like "kilobots" at a time, the Crimson reports, but a swarming-algorithm researcher can dream:

The vision might be a million billion robots flying around, each of which has a little component of some building, and they just swarm around and pretty soon you'd have a building the way ants build an anthill. That's pretty far away from what's sitting in any research lab I know about. But the algorithm development is on the way.

Note that these researchers are different from the ones hard at work on octopus-like boneless robots.

Sounds like some salespeople at the Verizon store in Harvard Square need some training.