MyRoar

Genotrope Record: MyRoar

Funding Status: Bootstrapped

Investors:

Founders or Execs past companies: Feedster, Lehman Brothers

Industry: Web Search, Financial Services

Offering Description: MyRoar provides a unique offering for data vendors and data consumers. Unparalleled insights are provided to users who can now do research quickly and easily, resulting in increased satisfaction and productivity.

What's Next in Tech in Boston

Sometimes it makes sense to change directions in your career to stay relevant or improve your market value.

The best time to do this is when a new tool or technology is just catching on. The simple reason that this is possible is that the technology has not been around long enough for anyone to have significant experience and therefore a company cannot expect to find candidates with a shipped product under their belt, let alone 5 years of experience.

For example, an embedded control software engineer could learn the android platform and transition into the growing field of mobile applications. Or, an enterprise software developer can learn Ruby on Rails and greatly increase the amount of opportunities available.

To successfully pull off this type of change, you need to be able to spot what trends and technology will be the next wave.

An upcoming event on June 25th will help you spot those trends. What's Next in Tech, organized by Scot Kirsner will be held Thursday, June 25th at Boston University's School of Management auditorium, from 6 PM to 8:30.

What's Next in Tech will feature networking among people who really care about this question -- perhaps they're in the process of starting a new venture, or simply looking for their next career move. Plus, there will be speakers who've really helped spark the creation of new clusters here recently... people like Helen Greiner (a founder of iRobot, and now The Droid Works), Mike Dornbrook (COO of Harmonix Music Systems, the creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band), Ellen Rubin (founder of cloud computing start-up CloudSwitch), and Brian Halligan (CEO of social media leaders HubSpot). We're also including some forward-thinking investors like Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and John Simon from General Catalyst.

Registration is limited. It is shaping up to be an interesting event.

Webheads, Free Pizza+Beer and a bit of Testing April 30th 6:30-9:30 pm at betahouse

TestCase is a cool event happening @ betahouse this Thursday. While the giant schmoozefest meetups are valuable, we think there is room for a smaller meetup with a more practical approach.

Webheads, free pizza+beer and a bit of testing. Register Here attendance is Limited.

Cover via Amazon

Josh Porter owner of Bokardo Design and author of Designing for the Social Web, will be conducting a Lightning Usability/Comprehension test with the participating start-ups. Three of them may be new to you.

Come out and have some fun and learn something too. Genotrope is one of the sponsors.

Thanks to our Sponsor of TestCase I

Participating Companies

Nominate Boston for TechFellow Awards

The TechFellow Awards 2009 has been announced by Founders Fund to honor innovators  for excellence in high-tech entrepreneurship. Together with TechCrunch, they have pooled influence and finances to produce an excellent program to stimulate the pro-entrepreneur economy.

An impressive list of Internet luminaries will judge the contest and they will choose twelve Fellows to receive the Genius Grants for Geeks. Each winner will receive $50K to invest in a new start-up of their choice.

What we need to do is make sure that Boston has strong participation and a bevy of candidates nominated.

It would be great to see if we can marshal forces on Twitter and other means to nominate some of our best and brightest.

For example, now would be a good time to see the Hubspot fans in action to garner a nomination for  a certain founder and OnStartups blogger.

The four fields of nomination are:

Engineering Leadership

Product Design and Marketing

General Management

Disruptive Innovation

Nominate your choice now as voting ends midnight pst Friday, May 8. Help make sure that Boston is represented and recognized in the internet community.

If you have any nominees you would like to share and maybe gain them some support, leave a comment below.

Boston's @biz Twitter Fit

Image via CrunchBase

Been watching the dialog about a "tweetup" held in honor of Biz Stone put together by HubSpot, between @hybernaut and a slew of @'s from Hubspot.

The controversy arose when Hubspot announced a "tweetup" at their regular Friday night web video program Hubspot.tv where they hoped to get Twitter's founder to appear.

Hubspot had good luck with this type of Twitter onslaught when MCHammer was in town.

So the issues are

1. whether a company should promote a Tweetup mentioning the "stars" name, when he actually hasn't said they would attend, thereby harnessing the "stars" juice without permission.

2. is a Tweetup a community entity and should not be appropriated by a corporate entity to use as a marketing vehicle.

If you want to view the whole shebang search the twitter hashtag #bizinboston

If I was Twitter I would revel in all this attention, not to mention that @biz has been compared to Bono and Prince. It can't be all bad when your passionate users defend your platform in the name of the community.

Stay tuned as it keeps getting better. The word communist has entered the dialog. Could Nazi be far behind?

Tikatok

Genotrope Record:  Tikatok

Funding Status:  Seed Funding

Investors: Launchpad, Boston Harbor Angels, Golden Seeds

Founders or Execs past companies: Zoomix, uTok

Industry: Consumer Web, Childrens online publishing

Offering Description: Tikatok is a free creative community for kids under 13 where they can write, illustrate, and share their original stories, and have them printed out into real hardcover and paperback books. It was developed by two mothers to encourage the imagination and creativity of their children and children everywhere