Technology

Follow USRep_Keating Bill Keating on twitter here.

Follow USRep_Keating Bill Keating on twitter here.

The Boston Business Journal reports that Terrafugia, our favorite flying-car company in Woburn, has raised almost $1 million in new equity funding.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/12/27/for_web_ready_boston_city_council_paper_is_so_last_century/

• Eliminate Stenographer... check
• Put everything online... check
• Make it searchable... check
• Reduce costs... check
• Add accessibility... check

I can only imagine how happy he must be... oh wait! Is that him... complaining at 1:47am in the first comment?

MIT charges a Littleton startup failed to pay licensing fees for three of its patents, so now it wants a judge to order the company to stop using them - and pay the fees.

It's MIT's second suit this month against Still River Systems. Last week, MIT sued Still River to force it to add an MIT researcher to a patent used for the company's single-room synchrocyclotron, which can be used to target an intense beam of radiation at certain types of tumors.

In a suit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, MIT alleges Still River agreed to pay it nearly $900,000 for the use of three other patents for the device - all based on work by Timothy Antaya, the researcher MIT charged was improperly left off Still River's patent. MIT says that as part of an agreement with the school in 2004, Still River agreed to sponsor Antaya's work on shrinking the size and cost of the devices - existing proton-beam accelerators can cost up to $100 million each - and to pay the licensing fee for Antaya's three patents, all assigned to MIT, then stop using them.

• Complete complaint
• Magnet structure for particle acceleration
• High-field Synchrocyclotron
• High-field superconducting synchrocyclotron

Cambridge Day reports on that joint Cambridge/Boston city-council meeting at the city line, which included a talk by an expert on regional economic development who is really grooving on the state's plans to renovate the "Grand Junction" rail line that will let trains from Worcester sail into North Station:

We have to find a way of connecting these geographies, these populations. So I start talking about how do we improve commuter rail access from Worcester to the Allston Landing area to Cambridge and to Boston. It's very important because the high technology, life-science, educational credentials of the Worcester area need to relate directly to the Boston-Cambridge area. We want these clusters to grow and really develop, but the transportation system really needs to support that.

BostInnovation marvels at some start-up that has offices in both cities.

Hundreds of business professionals are gathered this morning for the second day of the Gilbane Boston conference at the Westin Copley. Pasted below is the live blog I wrote about a content strategy session at the conference this morning.

BostInnovation introduces us to NextTrain T Tracker, an iPhone app that lets you find the nearest T stop if you find yourself in some unfamiliar neighborhood. Basically, you turn on the phone's camera, point it somewhere and a compass pops up to point you to the nearest T stop.

EMERGENCY PETITION TO FCC CHAIR JULIUS GENACHOWSKI:

"Don't let Comcast block Netflix or other online innovators for their own profit! Support the strongest Net Neutrality protections possible -- and keep Obama's promise."

SIGN THE PETITION

The city of Somerville is looking to hire a New Media Analyst/ResiStat Coordinator to head up the city's various online outreach programs.

Via Eric Andersen.

Jason Evanish maps local start-ups and labs clustered around Red Line stops, from E Ink at Alewife to the UMass Venture Development Center at JFK/UMass:

There is significant power in clusters. Startups working closely together helps an entire industry. We need even more activity along the "Innovation Line" and we need to recognize that this is the case and think about how even more of our innovation can be a part of the power. We should also celebrate this as there's a great opportunity for a "walking tour of innovation in Boston & Cambridge" from this.

Hmm, the Ashmont line is completely missing. But the people building tomorrow's future today tend to mainline coffee, and you can't beat Flat Black Coffee at Ashmont, right?

The two Cambridge institutions charge Cotendo, of Sunnyvale, CA, is violating patents they hold for speeding up delivery of content over the Internet.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, Akamai and MIT focus on one patent owned by MIT and licensed to Akamai and two patents owned by Akamai, which also claims that

Cotendo has utilized product descriptions and designations developed and used by Akamai in the marketplace for years, such as “Dynamic Site Acceleration” ('DSA'), in an attempt to sell services that embody Akamai's inventions.

Complete complaint

Patents at issue:

• Content distribution system using an alternative domain name system (DNS) and content servers
• SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE DELIVERY OF WEB CONTENT USING HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMMUNICATIONS PROTOCOL BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND SPECIALIZED INTERMEDIATE NODES TO OPTIMIZE A MEASURE OF COMMUNICATIONS PERFORMANCE BETWEEN THE SOURCE AND THE DESTINATION
• HTML delivery from edge-of-network servers in a content delivery network (CDN)

Local robotics investors fret that Google's recently announced robot car could be the beginning of the end of our local dominance of robotics.

Wade Roush, who covered the local startup scene until moving to San Francisco, makes the argument: Entrepreneurial types out there often get together after work for a drink, but our boring start-up types just go home or something.

Friends scoffing at David's choice for a replacement car as too wasteful got him to thinking about electric cars:

Exactly where and how would I charge an electric car when I live five stories up and park on the street? Even if I could reliably park near my building, I'd need at least 50 feet of extension cord from my window just to reach the ground. I somehow doubt that the even the People's Republic of Cambridge would grant me the right to monopolize a chunk of curb space right in front of the building for this purpose.

Herzog explains why he deleted his FourSquare account.

Ned Batchelder works at what was once a DEC plant in Marlboro that current owner HP is in the process of shutting down. He posts photos of some old gizmo (stamped with the old Digital logo) that turned up as people clean up their old offices, seeks help in identifying its purpose.

Daniel Choi reports he's released OpenMBTA for the iPad.

California is within the middle of a titanic budget crisis, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken it upon himself to pummel any source of wasted funds into submission – including strip club ATMs. The Los Angeles Times reports that more than $ 12,000 designated for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which is intended for welfare purposes, was withdrawn at various strip clubs across the state from 2007 to 2009. Sam's Hofbrau, Seventh Veil and Star Strip are just a few of the clubs under investigation by California's Department of Social Services.

Post resource: Strip club ATMs banned from TANF use in California by Personal Money Store

Strip club ATMs are welfare sinks

Cora Sharma talks to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's chief information architect about why the hospital is sticking with browsers even as doctors and other staffers increasingly call up data on smartphones and tablets. For one thing, browers are browsers - there's no need to constantly reinvent the wheel as new devices and operating systems come on the market - he says.

Ed note: Speaking of apps, the Universal Hub iPhone and BlackBerry apps are, yes, still under development as the vendor tweaks the underlying code to make it work better. Hopefully by month's end, you'll actually be able to download it (or use a mobile-ized Web site if, like me, you have an Android phone, or some other non-iPhonish thing).

EveryScape, a small Newton company, yesterday sued Adobe Systems over a Photoshop tool that lets users "clone" sections of photos.

The company, founded in 2002 by Byong Mok Oh, says it has patents on techniques for easily adjusting the perspective and lighting on pieces of images copied to other parts of images (for example, to erase a bird from in front of a cloud)and that Adobe illegally copied those techniques. In a lawsuit filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Boston, Everyscape says it began selling a Photoshop plugin called "Perspective Clone Brush" in early 2005, but that:

Three months later, on April 27, 2005, Adobe announced the release of its next version of its PHOTOSHOP program, Adobe PHOTOSHOP CS2 ("CS2"). Adobe press releases touted PHOTOSHOP CS2's new feature, “Vanishing Point, which allows users to clone, paint and transform image objects while retaining visual perspective." Adobe's promotional literature called Vanishing Point "Nothing less than revolutionary” and claimed "[O]ne use and you'll wonder how you ever lived without it." In fact, however, Vanishing Point used the same functionality as the Mok3 Perspective Clone Brush technology.

• Everyscape complaint
• First patent
• Second patent

City of Boston Website Earns 1st Place in National "Best of Web" Competition

We beat out Louisville, Fort Collins, Castle Rock and Coralville! (Yeah, I had to look up the last two.)

I find it hard to believe that no other huge-ass city in this country has a web portal better than this collection of burgs (including Boston).

A Boston company with a service for pinpointing the location of cell-phone users is suing Google, alleging Google's similar offerings violate its patents.

Skyhook Wireless filed its suit in US District Court yesterday, demanding Google stop selling its own geolocation services, and, naturally, pay Skyhook tons of money for the "willful nature" of Google's patent infringement.

AT&T yesterday filed a federal lawsuit against Cambridge because the Zoning Board wouldn't let it put up some antennas in Harvard Square.

I met today with some folks from Clearwire, which today launched a wireless broadband service in the Boston area. I'll have a more complete report later (and a coverage map), but for now, here are answers to questions folks asked me on Twitter:

• Clearwire is working with Sprint and Comcast. It has no plans to work with Verizon or AT&T.
• Clearwire does have a mobile hotspot gizmo that lets you connect an iSomething (Pad, Phone and Pod) to its network (it has a similar gizmo for PCs and other devices that can connect to WiFi)
• The company has not talked to the MBTA about putting antennas in T tunnels; says it will once it finishes the buildout of its above-ground antennas over the next year or so.
• The company plans to blanket the entire area within 128 first (looks to have about 60% covered now), then the area within 495. Currently uncovered areas include large parts of Roxbury, Hyde Park, Roslindale and West Roxbury and parts of Mattapan, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester.
• The company is still looking for testers (will get contact info).