Technology

Fast Company grooves on Citizens Connect, says its very simplicity - all it does is let people complain about potholes and the like - is why it works:

With its Citizens Connect app, the Hub is showing how to use technology to empower citizens and involve them in the inner workings of the city.

Mass High Tech reports.

Wait! Printable robots or printer robots?

A guy who bought stock in A123 Systems sometime over the past year wants his money back, and then some.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Scott Heiss charges the Waltham-based company, which makes large lithium batteries for auto manufacturers, knew about problems at a Michigan manufacturing plant well before it went public with them and that mean he bought stock at artificially high prices - the price tumbled after the news came out.

Heiss is seeking to be made lead plaintiff in a class-action suit that seeks lots of money for the alleged damages to the portfolios of investors like him.

Local venture capitalist Bijan Sabet reports he and his family are very happy with the technology they chose for their new custom-built home, except for the sad state of residential phone offerings - from both Verizon and competing home-PBX systems, all of which seem stuck in the 1980s:

The state of residential phone systems is a joke. reminds me of how mobile phones used to look before the iphone/android. adding names to the address book is torture. i gave up after adding my parents and my brother. ...

I'd love to see someone do for home phones what Nest did for thermostats. Build a beautiful android based landline phone system with a set of rich cloud apps along with Google's marketplace.

Ongoing allegations of drug activity & prostitution result in the Mayor's office pulling out the ol' Scarlet Letter. Bring back the stockade!

BostInnovation chronicles the firestorm over an upcoming "hackathon" that promised its brogramming attendees women beer attendants.

The same day the state announced no change in our unemployment rate, the Venture Development Center at the University of Massachusetts Boston tweeted:

Dear Boston, you are creating way too many tech jobs. Please slow down while your universities catch up preparing workers. Thanks.

The "Dear tech workers, please go to California," was, of course, too long to fit.

High-tech marketer John Cass found the statement disconcerting:

Would zero jobs open mean everything is okay? I think that's rather an indication of the strength of the MA economy.

The center replied:

Mass last year created 3,550 new inno economy jobs. But are they filled? 3,772 tech jobs open according to Dice. 3,772 tech jobs open in Boston Metro Area, +10% over last year. Shocking failure to prepare workers for innovation economy jobs. Mismatch of jobs and qualifications undermines innovation economy.

Spatch reports on an extensive experiment with Java on a server. And TNT.

Electronics Weekly reports researchers at MIT have managed to stuff an electrode into a moth that can be used to control the moth's behavior:

"This is a major advance," says insect neurobiologist Roy Ritzmann at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. DARPA hopes this kind of control will one day allow intelligence agencies to use insects to carry surveillance equipment and spy on unsuspecting enemies.

The article does not say if they are also experimenting with ill tempered sea bass.

Via BostInnovation.

Ronan Park and Town Field now have WiFi, the city announces, adding they join Boston Common, Statler Park in Park Square, Christopher Columbus Park in the North End, and the clubhouses at George Wright Golf Course in Hyde Park and William Devine Golf Course in Franklin Park.

Street Fight interviews Mike Conley, director of marketing at Sebastians Cafe, which now has 2,200 people signed up for its phone-based payment and loyalty programs - customers use their phones rather than old-fashioned cash or credit cards to pay for lunch. Naturally, the chain started with its Kendall Square location first.

It's just an easier, great way to pay. I forgot my wallet one day, going into a meeting, and I was like: "Oh, crap. I can't pay for food. Oh, wait a minute. I have my phone. I have LevelUp." It's interesting that everyone is starting to realize how this is a very usable tool for payments.

Xconomy provides the roundup.

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 state Department of Transportation and the city of Boston today announced a competition for applications that let users navigate between the T and the Hubway bike system and find the location of the nearest food trucks.

State and city officials are hoping the real-time MBTA and Hubway data, coupled with information about food trucks, will lead to the same sorts of applications that emerged after a similar competition in 2009, then based just on data for certain bus routes.

Officials announced three categories of apps: One that highlights "the transit connections" between the T and Hubway rental stations, one that best visualizes "A day in the life of the MBTA and New Balance Hubway" and "Bikes, Lunch and T" to highlight city food trucks.

Apps can be submitted through Feb. 24. Developers of the winning apps will get a CharlieCard LinkPass and Hubway membership good for one year and two free passes to upcoming food-truck festivals.

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.

Two users of Android mobile phones yesterday filed class-action lawsuits against the manufacturer of their phones and a software company that boasts it can track what Android users are doing even when their phones are in airplane mode.

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.

Pleasant dreams:

Freaky Boneless Robot Walks on Soft Legs.

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

Mass. High Tech reports researchers at MIT may have figured out the first step in building all-optical microchips - using garnet - which could mean faster computing.

As Mitt Romney has taken to the national public stage as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Deval Patrick's administration has been asked many times to provide e-mails from Romney's time as governor. The catch: they can't find any to hand out.

Romney's staff paid the state to take their hard drives with them in a move Romney's campaign is calling "a longtime executive branch practice". The server was wiped completely and the computers in the State House were even replaced. As a result the State House now has no electronic mail archive from anyone between 2002-2006.

Welina Farah reviews the weekly Venture Cafe at the Cambridge Innovation Center, which serves as a sort of welcome party for Kendall Square's technopreneurs:

The overall feel of the Café is one that puts a kind of nervous college student walking into a room full of established women and men doing what she one day aspires to do- at ease. I look forward to the next time I have a chance to attend Venture Café.

MIT's Infinite Corridor will be alligned with the sun tomorrow, on 11-11-11. The allignment happens a couple of times each year.

No word if the sun will be turned up to 11 for the event.

Forget Wall Street and Whole Foods - this is important: A group of users of Google Reader are planning "a wake" outside Google's Cambridge offices at 5:30 p.m.

We'll be mourning together outside the closest Google office, in Cambridge, near Kendall Square, where perhaps a Google employee or two will briefly notice our useless grief.

Bring flowers or signs or memes or eulogies. Wear black if you can.

Google Reader is a service that lets you organize and read headline feeds from Web sites.

Steve Berry reports his Verizon 4G wireless works as advertised when he's in a 4G coverage area, but that the problem is that his commute takes him into 3G territory and that's a problem:

When the 4G signal is low and a 3G is available, the device switches modes. This drops the existing connection and 3G takes 20-30 seconds to activate. If you happen to come back into a 4G area (signal level above the 3G value), it switches modes again taking another 30 seconds to establish an active link. In the 1 hour Worcester to Boston route, I used to lose 3G connectivity twice and lose about 2 minutes while the SSLVPN and MiFi resynchronized. Since moving to the 4G, I lose 30 minutes of the 1 hour commute due to continuous mode changes.

There is no ability to force the unit into 3G or 4G only mode. There is no standard for setting up a new connection before dropping an existing connection.