The Hubcap

Dramatic moments in the Boston tech community today as an explosion and fire struck a high-rise office building in Kendall Square this morning. Among other tenants, the affected building, 1 Cambridge Center, is the home to the Cambridge Innovation Center — an incubator space housing many local startups. The 17 story tower is owned by MIT.

One NStar employee who was working on the building’s electrical system in the basement was killed, and over 100 people suffered from smoke inhalation. Universal Hub points to a blog update from someone who works in the building, who gives a first hand account of the smoky panic.

Red Line service was temporarily suspended and power was out in at least 12 neighboring buildings, shutting down much of the Cambridge technology scene for the afternoon. The Marriott Cambridge Hotel served as a staging area for emergency operations.

Last week the Herald featured an article on Mall Networks, a Lexington company that provides outsourced affiliate marketing programs to online retailers. Specifically, the story reported on CyberMonday.com, a site created by Mall Networks for Shop.org. That organization is a consortium of online sellers infamous for coining the term Cyber Monday just last year to complement Black Friday, the ceremonial start of the holiday shopping season in good old meatspace.

Turns out Cyber Monday may not be so fictitious after all. One week later, Mall Networks reports that $2M in sales were conducted through the site on Cyber Monday alone. $75,000 of that take was donated to — you guessed it — a scholarship fund for students pursuing careers in e-commerce.

Mall Networks was founded 18 months ago and is staffed by veterans of Lycos and affiliate marketing specialists Upromise and BeFree. The alumni seem to be on good terms with at least some their previous employers, however: Mall Networks powers the Upromise online shopping portal. The company is funded by VCFNE, IDG Ventures, and LBO Enterprises.

Cambridge startup Oxy Systems has announced the availability of its flagship product phling!, a mobile music sharing service with a social networking angle aimed at teens and young adults. Sensibly enough, the company seems to have chosen to downplay its corporate name when marketing to this demographic, to avoid conjuring thoughts of the similarly named acne treatment.

By installing the phling software on both a PC and a J2ME MIDP 2.0 compatible handset, users gain the ability to stream music directly from their PC to their phone over the air. Users can share their music library with up to six friends, create a profile page to show off their musical tastes, and browse the profiles of other users.

Oxy Systems was founded in 2003 by a management team hailing from Comverse. The company has its headquarters in Cambridge and a European office in Switzerland. Oxy claims that phling! is in trials with multiple US and european carriers.

Several Boston area startups previously featured on Hubcap announced additional funding in the past few weeks:

• Cambridge based Top 10 Media, parent company of human-edited blog aggregator Top 10 Sources announced a $3.5M round led by Highland Capital. The company also announced the acquisition of blog aggregator Blogniscient. We previously covered Top 10 in October.
• Boston-based Gather, purveyor of “social networking for adults”, announced a $10M round led by include Hearst, McGraw-Hill, and Pilot House Ventures. We previously covered Gather in October.

Boston open source consultancy Optaros has announced a $13M Series B from Globespan Capital, Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst Partners.

Optaros offers systems integration and consulting for companies looking to make use of open source software in their IT infrastructure. The company competes with firms including SpikeSource and SourceLabs.

President and CEO Bob Gett was most previously the Chairman and CEO of Viant and the President of Cambridge Technology Partners, and the Optaros management team is stocked with alumni from each. The company has reached out in recent months to form partnerships with emerging open source enterprise vendors including Pentaho and Alfresco.

Although the Hubcap usually reports on Boston-based company, we think it’s fair to stretch our house rules to report on Mountain View based Meraki Networks. The wireless mesh networking company was launched to commercialize the technology developed in the MIT Roofnet project, and counts current and past MIT researchers among its founders and advisors.

Unstrung and GigaOm are reporting today that Google has invested in the firm alongside “a few silicon valley angels” in a sub-$1M round. Meraki produces wireless routers that operate in a peer-to-peer fashion to create wireless mesh networks, or to extend existing wireless network. Among other things, Google appears to be interested in using Meraki’s technology to complement the municipal network it’s building under contract for the city of San Francisco.

Meraki is reportedly also contributing its wireless mesh networking expertise to the One Laptop Per Child project, another MIT spinout aiming to distribute low-cost laptops to children in third world countries.

Zipcar, the urban car sharing pioneer, announced $25 million in funding led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Globespan Capital Partners existing lead investor Benchmark Capital.

Along with the investment, the Cambridge company announced the launch of operations in London, its first international market. The company plans to have over 100 vehicles operational in London by January 2007. In a unique twist on globalization, Zipcar customers from the US will be able to check out cars while traveling in London using their home accounts.

But Zipcar won’t be spending all of its money on steel and rubber. The company also intends to use its new shot of capital to “advance key elements of the company’s unique self-service business model, including its proprietary, technology platform.”

Om Malik reports that Khosla Ventures has made a $6.2 million investment in iSkoot, a Cambridge based mobile VoIP startup we reported on last month. Khosla Ventures is the investment vehicle of Vinod Khosla, former partner at VC powerhouse Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, Byers and co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

In addition, iSkoot announced in mid-November that it had partnered with eBay subsidiary Skype to offer a Skype-branded VoIP service pre-installed on Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets from mobile operator 3 Group.

iSkoot’s client software allows users to access the Skype service from their handsets. The software provides an IM-style buddy list on the handset, allowing users to make unlimited free calls via peer-to-peer networks.

Boston-based mobile marketing firm Enpocket was named a winner of the 2006 International Summit Marketing Effectiveness Awards competition for its Vodafone Live Music campaign. Enpocket’s campaign allowed consumers to use their mobile handsets to learn about, rate, and gain admission to private music performances sponsored by Vodafone.

Enpocket was launched in 2001 and draws its key leadership from Engage, the formerly highflying CMGI online marketing spinout. In addition to Vodafone, Enpocket customers include Cingular, Sprint, BT, Orange, and Virgin Mobile. The firm has worked on campaigns for brands including McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, Motorola, and Samsung.

Enpocket combines its mobile marketing expertise with technology including the Enpocket Marketing Engine and the Enpocket Personalization Engine. The company is hiring for a range of positions across engineering, sales, and operations.

Andover startup Helium is a unique take on user-generated and peer-moderated content. The site allows individuals to contribute original articles on a wide variety of topics. Upon submitting an article, Helium asks the authors to select the better of two anonymized stories on a similar topic. Highly rated stories appear more prominently on the site.

In this way, the site seeks to balance expert knowledge with the wisdom of crowds (or madness of mobs) that dominates sites like Digg. Helium authors earn a share of the AdSense dollars their articles bring in.

Helium launched in early October and is backed by Signature Capital. Techcrunch also reviewed the site last month.