Garmin tells us it likes to pack as much cool stuff as possible into every one of its sports watches, but users asked for something simpler. “So we did a little editing,” says Garmin spokesman Jake Jacobson, resulting in what the company calls the “easiest” Garmin GPS watch yet. What’s so easy about it? It’s as simple as pressing Start, and the thing is off and running with you, showing your distance, pace and time. Just like its big brother the mighty Forerunner 405, you can upload all that data to Garmin’s way-cool website for some fancy graphing and [...]

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Most people are pretty good at guessing which cities rank highest in crime. But, how well does your hometown do when it comes to cybercrime? When I think about criminals, I think about shady characters lurking in dark alleys. Turns out, cybercriminals might be hanging out at the original Starbucks in Seattle. According to a new report by online security giant Symantec, creator of Norton, Seattle ranked number one, by a huge margin as the riskiest online city, followed by Boston, Washington DC, and San Francisco. Not exactly cities you imagine to be hotbeds of criminal activity. The report looked [...]

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Do you feel in tune with the colors of the world and how they change with the seasons? Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab do. That’s why they’ve created Flickr Flow, a visualization of colors throughout the year. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The image [above] is an early sketch [...]

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I sat down with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week to talk about his business. Brightcove isn’t the sexiest startup out there. They’re a video platform – giving websites the tools they need to host and stream video, for a fee ranging from $100/month to “six figures per year” for the largest customers. For the most part users never see the Brightcove brand. And Allaire is just fine with that. He just wants happy customers. The company launched in 2005, has raised just over $90 million in venture capital, and is [...]

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The Receivables Exchange, an online marketplace for real-time trading of accounts receivable, this morning announced that it has closed $17 million in Series C financing led by Boston, MA-based Bain Capital Ventures, with prior investors Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks participating. This third round of financing brings the total invested into the company to just south of $30 million. The Receivables Exchange started its online receivables financing marketplace in 2008 with the launch of its proprietary receivables trading platform. The platform essentially enables businesses to sell [...]

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SecondMarket opened up its private company stock marketplace in early 2009 and gave employees at hot startups something they never had before – an organized place to sell their stock even before the company went public or was acquired. For the first time the company is releasing information on private company buy/sell demand and completed transactions. Most companies don’t like SecondMarket one bit, at least at first blush. Companies don’t want random outsiders holding their stock before they’re public. And they don’t like some employees having liquidity events before [...]

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BuyWithMe uses social networking to aggregate large groups of buyers to make purchases in bulk — thereby lowering prices at major retailers. It has just raised $5.5 million in first-round capital to scale its user base and forge more vendor partnerships. The service also sends out email alerts to users calling their attention to sales and other deals in their local areas (right now it only operates in Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Diego). Based in Boston, the company received the recent financing from Matrix Partners. It was previously backed by family and friends.

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The New York Times plans to introduce a metered billing system on its Website sometime next year. The newspaper will begin to charge frequent visitors to its Website along the lines of what the Financial Times does on FT.com, which starts charging people who visit the site more than 10 times a month. But the new model is unlikely to move the needle on the New York Times’ digital revenues. Details are spare on how exactly the model will work, but it is possible to do some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations. According to comScore, NYTimes.com attracted 12.4 million U.S. visitors in [...]

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We all know the crisis in the venture capital community is starting to have real word effects, but for some it means totally changing how they run. Today Atlas Ventures announced it is moving its entire operation to Boston, bringing together its US and European teams in one place, and reducing its headcount. Atlas says its fundamental international early stage investment strategy “will not change” nor will its plans to “add new European investments” to its international portfolio. However, being based in Boston – with the normally European-based partner Fred Destin [...]

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Steve Ross (real name Szmulek Rozental) is the founder of The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. He says he survived 10 camps, and that one time he hid from the Nazis in an outhouse submerged up to his neck in human excrement. On the Holo circuit, he shows the kiddies animal figurines allegedly made from the crushed bones of Jews. Holocaust survivor recalls tale of Kristallnacht by Alison Pfeffer and Michaela MayNews | 11/12/02The Justice (Independent Student Newspaper of Brandeis University) Speaking in an event commemorating Kristallnacht, Steven Ross told an audience Thursday that it [...]

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