Boston Archive

If you look at the photos from any tech event, most of the guys are wearing the standard-valley-issued blue button down shirt. Techmeme’s Megan McCarthy noted the trend back in mid-2007 and wondered if the trend “could…die”.

A new Boston-based startup aims to help every man look good in a “co-created” shirt. Blank Label founder Danny Wong notes that they, “are providers of co-created men’s dress shirts, designed by you, created by us.”

You can select the shirt color, fabric, style (including collar, cuff, shoulder, pockets, etc.), personalization and size. You can even receive a “split personality” shirt which is two shirts that meet in the middle.

Shirts start at $45 plus $6 for shipping (they split the shipping with you). Interestingly they even allow you to return the shirt if you aren’t satisfied for any reason.

Blank Label should look at adding the ability to send a design to a friend and maybe even share a design on any of the social networks. And even more importantly, customers should be able to save a shirt so they can return to it later.

Also worth a read is the Blank Label blog post regarding the service and why they use the term co-created instead of custom.

When you ride the subway, have you ever thought, “boy I’d like to get her on my Twitter”. Or what about, “his tush belongs on my Facebook”. Perhaps, “She would be a great friend for my feed”. But the problem is that it’s hard to go up to someone and tell them about your interests and desires on a train.

There’s a new service that will help you reveal your interests in a man or a woman named SubwayCrush. The service currently serves NYC, London, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The idea is simple…find someone on the train you are interested in, write up the person’s specs on SubwayCrush and then the person might just answer. Naturally the more people who know about, and use, SubwayCrush, the better chance you have for a match.

You can view all “crushes” by city or by type (e.g m4w, m4m, w4m, w4w). You must enter the rail line you were on when you found your crush — this helps narrow down who it might be. I hear stories all the time about people finding love on the subway. I did a search for “hot male entrepreneur who also runs a tech blog” on a few of the subway lines in NYC but I came up empty.

I am guessing at some point they will add the ability to post photos – which might be a bit creepy. They should also add the ability to signup for alerts based on location and/or subway line.

The service was created by NY-based Lolz.

Boston-based Traineo has announced the launch of a new paid subscription service named Traineo Plus. The service was first mentioned on the Traineo Blog last month. Traineo was one of the first services we wrote about and has been part of the Fat-Off each year.

Traineo Plus is centered around the new graphing application inside of Traineo. From the announcement, “After recording weight loss, and gain, frequently, users are presented with an intuitive graph that smoothes short-term weight fluctuations to illustrate their true weight trend, accurately projects their weight based on their historical weight changes, and provides accurate calorie intake requirements based on their trends relative to their weight loss target.”

Personalized weight loss tips are also part of the subscription. The tips are provided by DietsInReview.com. I am hoping to give a variety of the new online weight loss tools a try soon.

Traineo Plus is available now for $10/month or $60/year. Here’s an overview of Traineo Plus from CEO Alasdair McLean-Foreman:
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Content sharing and bookmarking service Shareaholic has announced a new round of angel funding this week. Founder Jay Meattle says that they raised a, “few hundred thousand”. Meattle also notes that more items are shared each day via Shareaholic than on Digg.

Xconomy has more details on the funding.  The full list of Shareaholic’s angel investors includes:

• Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
• Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
• Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
• Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
• David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete
• Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
• Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It looks like their business model will be based on data usage. Check out our post about their buzz monitor launch from this past summer.

Boston-based online money management tool Geezeo will announce tomorrow the launch of a white label version of their application. The service will be called Geezeo Spectrum and will be available to financial institutions in the U.S. As you can see in the screenshot below, all branded Geezeo elements would be replaced with the brand of the financial institution. Pricing for the white label version was not provided.

Geezeo co-founder Peter Glyman tells me that the white-label offering was core to their strategy since the beginning and the time is right as they have been receiving more and more inquiries about the service. This actually is a good time for Geezeo to reach out to the financial institutions. The banks are trying to keep their costs down but provide enough unique services to keep their customers. This white label option will remove the need to build a similar suite of tools in-house and eliminate the maintenance costs as well.

Back in November Geezeo launched their financial marketplace and just about a year ago they received an investment from TheStreet.com.

Last weekend the big topic around these parts was how much content scraping is too much? Our house band even created a music video to explain the scrape and why it’s all about links and cash. I am all for excerpting when needed while using as little as possible with links to the story source. I will have more on this topic over the next week or so – trying to work through some ideas and concepts.

Elinor Mills at CNET has the lead on a story today out of Massachusetts. Apparently a Massachusetts-based newspaper has had enough and has decided to sue the parent of boston.com, The New York Times Company. Elinor notes, "The links, as seen on Boston.com’s Newton site for instance, lead to the original articles on the GateHouse-owned sites, which display advertising. However the lawsuit claims GateHouse is losing advertising revenue as a result of the linking because readers don’t see the ads on the GateHouse site’s home page."

The newspaper publisher also says the links confuse readers. NY Times spokesperson says this is a common practice used across the Web. I believe this topic will only become hotter as we enter 2009. While it seems that the NY Times may not have been scraping, there’s no doubt that there is big money in scraping.

Update: Duncan Riley has a good look at the case discussed here. He believes it’s more about competition than about the actual linking. 

Here’s the full complaint document for download.

Boston-based MyPunchbowl has announced the launch of their eCard Studio today. The eCard Studioallows you to customize the cards by changing the color, font, text and the ability to add your own photo to the card.

eCards can be shared via Facebook and Twitter — the Twitter sharing seems unique. MyPunchbowl notes that they have hundreds of designs to select from. I like the collaborative ideas I’ve seen with the picturebooks I’ve reviewed over the past week. Perhaps that’s something for an online card creator to think about. The "office" cards work pretty well and with all of the "friends" online, could work well in this new media age as well. Would be pretty cool to get a birthday card signed by 50 of my online friends.

With all of the free eCard providers online, it will be interesting to see if MyPunchbowl’s eCard Studio can make any headway into the pack. I assume they will be able to get traction from their current userbase but getting past that will take a lot of effort.

Here’s a demo of the eCard Studio from MyPunchbowl CEO Matt Douglas: