Read about Kingdom Ventures in the article "Palm is my Copilot", which appeared in the business section of the Boston Globe on Monday, 9th of October 2000. (Click to read section.)

PALM IS MY COPILOT

Author: BY SCOTT KIRSNER Date: 10/09/2000 Page: C1 Section: Business
TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION
@LARGE/ SCOTT KIRSNER

Scott Kirsner is a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines. His e-mail address is kirsner@att.net.

For entrepreneurs starting tech companies right now, the magic words that seem particularly effective at shaking money from the trees are: Wireless. Personal digital assistants. M-commerce. (The M stands for mobile.)

How will Palm Pilots and cell phones and other hand-held devices allow us to communicate and engage in transactions? Will people actually book airline tickets and send flowers from their Nokia phones? What kind of information will people want to read on their Handsprings?

All that uncertainty about how people will use handheld devices, wireless and otherwise, is producing a new generation of really creative start-ups, all of which hope they can build empires on this as-yet-unsettled landscape.

Two of the newest local players are AdAlive and Coola.

AdAlive, located in the shadow of Lycos headquarters in Waltham, wants to help marketers and content providers zap relevant offers and useful information to your PDA (personal digital assistant) in public places.

Upon arriving in an airport terminal, for example, you would be able to download a free restaurant guide to your PDA from a small AdAlive box. The restaurant guide is sponsored by Westin, and while waiting for the download - which takes place quickly, using the PDA's infrared port - you're standing in front of the billboard, paying attention to an ad you'd otherwise breeze by.

AdAlive's technology might also be deployed in shopping malls, in subway stations, and at trade shows. In addition to offering free content, marketers could offer discount coupons or use AdAlive to gather information from prospective customers, with permission, of course.

"The idea is to turn something that has traditionally been a static medium into something inter active," says Dipinder Singh, executive vice president of marketing. Singh founded AdAlive with Vinit Nijhawan, chief executive of Kinetic Computer Systems, Rohit Arora, and Raj Sisodia, a professor of marketing and information technology at Bentley College.

AdAlive raised $2.5 million in May and plans to raise another $6 million to $8 million by the end of the year. The product will be tested at a major airport in the Northeast beginning in November and begin rolling out early next year.

Woburn-based Coola lets you grab information from the Web and easily transfer it to your PDA. For example, while visiting the Boston Symphony's Web site, you could tag particular concerts (assuming the site had licensed and deployed Coola's technology). The next time you synched your PDA with your desktop PC, the concerts would automatically show up in your calendar.

Coola was founded by husband-and-wife team Sudha and Shirish Jamthe. Sudha is a former executive at Harcourt Online, and Shirish worked most recently as a manager at Keane Inc. The two raised $1 million in March to start the company, which now employs 10 people. Chief executive Sudha Jamthe explains that she's in the process of raising another round of $10 million to $12 million, which should be completed this fall.

It's chairman Nicholas now

Did you hear that Walter Bender has replaced Nicholas Negroponte as the MIT Media Labs executive director?

I'm guessing no, because the ordinarily publicity-hungry lab never put out a formal announcement of the change, which was effective Sept. 1. The only article about Bender's promotion and Negroponte's new senior director role appeared late last month in Tech Talk, the MIT administration newspaper.

One reason MIT was reluctant to make lots of noise about Bender's promotion: It's not exactly MIT policy for a faculty member to unilaterally designate his successor, as Negroponte apparently did, according to one person who's familiar with the situation.

Negroponte described his new senior director post as "chairmanlike" in a letter to the lab's sponsors. He'll focus more on international relations - the Lab recently opened Media Lab Europe in Dublin - and fund-raising.

Bender can't be too thrilled about the muted approach to notifying the tech community of his ascension to the lab's directorship, which has only been held by one other person before him (Negroponte, the lab's founder). Bender was part of the lab's original crop of researchers and later started the News in the Future program there.

"In many ways, Walter is the soul of the place," Michael Hawley, a professor at the lab, writes via e-mail. "It's just the right time for a person like Walter to be hands-on and nurturing, re thinking and refashioning our core, in all the ways Nicholas has been hands-off and spectacularly extramural (and will continue to be)."

Bender has a difficult job ahead. An article in the September issue of Technology Review, a magazine published by MIT, indicated that the lab may split into "three distinct and largely independent 'centers.' " One would deal with education and Third World development and be headed by Mitchel Resnick. A second would research "things that think" and be led by Neil Gershenfeld. The third would concentrate on performance and the arts and be run by Tod Machover.

But that reorganization may not happen until a spacious new Media Lab building is completed in 2003, which will leave Bender presiding over a somewhat fractious faculty suffering from, as one observer puts it, cabin fever.

Serious change, which includes messy debates about whether to focus on near-term or long-term technologies and how to work with industry, is only beginning to come to the Lab.

Into the groove

One of the most anticipated events at this month's Internet World conference in New York will be a press conference Oct. 24 unveiling the first product of Groove Networks. Groove is the Beverly- based company that Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie started in 1997.

An intentionally vague invitation to the event describes Groove as "a product that leverages peer-to-peer communications technologies to do things previously not possible using the Internet." Last month, Ozzie participated in a "Peer-to-Peer Summit" in San Francisco, discussing the potential for P-to-P, which can be loosely defined as Net-based communication between two computers that doesn't involve a central server. (Napster is only one well-known example of peer-to-peer computing.)

Groove has two things working for it: positive prelaunch buzz and a seasoned - some would say legendary - technologist at the helm. And there's still time to join the cause: Groove is hiring.

One of the few features on the company's sparse and stealthy Web site is a list of the top 10 reasons to work in Beverly, where Groove is housed in the old United Shoe Machinery complex. Among them: "Renovations have gotten rid of that old shoe smell."

Kingdom coming

Next month, Larry Cheng of the Boston venture firm Battery Ventures plans to launch Kingdom Ventures, "a philanthropic venture capital firm focused on supporting emerging Christian ministries," he explains by e-mail.

Through working at Battery and Bessemer Venture Partners, he has "learned about investments, teams, business, and capital-raising," Cheng says. "I want to use that to help ministries get started locally and internationally."

He will use his own money to get Kingdom Ventures started, but hopes to raise a first fund of as much as $10 million.

We are currently working on a project to help build an orphanage ministry in China," Cheng writes. "We are also looking at Internet-based ministries that could be broadly categorized as distance learning."

Kingdom Ventures won't be a full-time project; the 25-year old Cheng plans to stay at Battery. "I still think I have a lot to learn about venture capital, so that's why I'd like to do both," he says.

WITI summit

Women In Technology International holds its East Coast Technology Summit this Wednesday and Thursday at the Hynes Convention Center.

Sessions will cover topics like "Creating Maximum Buzz" and "Negotiating Your Compensation Package in the New Economy." Deborah Kolb of Simmons Graduate School of Management and Megan Smith, the CEO of PlanetOut, are among those delivering keynote addresses. More info at www.witi.com.

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