Westboro IT co. raises $58M, to hire 150

A Westboro-based IT infrastructure company has raised $58 million, which it plans to use to hire 150 more people in Massachusetts over the next year.

SimpliVity's goal is to simplify IT infrastructure by taking 12 different products — such as storage and networking — and assimilating them into a single building block that it calls the Omni Cube, said CEO Doron Kempel, who founded the company in 2009.

"We've developed a new data architecture, data that filters any redundancy so that only unique data is stored, which increases the performance of the system and reduces the amount of space and power that is required," Kempel said.

This "architecture" also allows for a single person to manage data globally from a single location, he said.

Matt Murphy, general partner at Kleiner Perkins, the Menlo Park, Calif., firm that led both a $25 million funding round for SimpliVity last year and the latest round, said the firm acted because of an "acceleration of enterprises building out their own cloud-like infrastructure."

"There are between eight and 11 new products you need to manage and work well together," Murphy said. "The beauty of SimpliVity is they did it all in one appliance. They're really taking on IBM, EMC, VMware, Dell. All of them are talking about making their own solution, but they're late to the market."

SimpliVity released its product earlier this year, Kempel said, and since then, demand has soared.

"We need to grow as quickly as possible," he said. The company, which has 100 employees in Westboro, expects to hire another 150 in Massachusetts over the next year, including 50 more engineers within the next four months.

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Milford casino rolls dice today

A sharply divided Milford goes to the polls today to decide whether to allow a $1 billion Foxwoods casino to be built there, as a new poll finds that a majority of Massachusetts residents back casinos for the state, but not in their backyards.

The two sides are campaigning down to the wire, with dozens of volunteers from both Casino-Free Milford and Citizens for Milford's Future planning to offer rides to the polls and standing at key intersections throughout the day with signs.

"We feel like the support is with us," said Geri Eddins, a 20-year resident and spokeswoman for Casino-Free Milford. "As far as Milford's finances go, our town is on solid ground, and we do not need a casino. By allowing a casino into Milford, we would be sacrificing our quality of life."

Whether Eddins' group, which raised about $24,000 as of Oct. 31 for its campaign, is any match for Foxwoods, which has spent $790,000 for everything from an office in Milford to advertising, canvassing, lawn signs, T-shirts, bumper stickers and a voter survey whose results it declined to reveal last night, remains to be seen.

"As an attorney, I'm all about the facts," said Mike Kaplan, chairman of Citizens for Milford's Future, which received $24,000 from Foxwoods, mostly for advertising and mail solicitations. "This project would create 3,500 jobs and $34 million annually to our town. ... We can do a lot of things with that money, including decreasing taxes."

A statewide phone survey of 517 adults conducted earlier this month by Western New England University Polling Institute found that 61 percent said they favor establishing casinos in the state, but 55 percent said they would oppose having one in their community.

"The poll results suggest there is a 'not in my backyard' mindset when it comes to casinos in Massachusetts," said Tim Vercellotti, the institute's director and a professor of political science at the university. "Residents still seem to want casinos, just not too close to home."

So far, Wynn in Everett is the only contender for the sole resort casino license in Eastern Massachusetts to have staged a successful host community vote, although Suffolk Downs may re-emerge as a candidate in Revere if it manages to find a casino operator as a partner.

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European carmakers get 2nd hopeful sign

MILAN — The European car market may have seen the bottom.

The European carmaker's association reported Tuesday that EU passenger car sales rose in October for the second consecutive month. It is the first time since September 2011 that European car sales have grown two straight months — a sign that perhaps the gloom in the car market is about to lift.

Sales in the European Union rose 4.7 percent to just over 1 million units. Italy was the only major market with a contraction, down 5 percent.

There remains cause for caution: Despite the month-on-month increase, October sales were still the second-lowest for the month in the decade since the association started compiling statistics.

For the first 10 months of the year, sales were down 3 percent.

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All the dirt on the best Roomba yet

iRobot Roomba 880 ($699.99, irobot.com)

The new Roomba robotic vacuum features a totally rebuilt dirt removal system that does away with those pesky bristles, which do little more than become tangled with hair and debris. The Roomba 880 automatically will vacuum your floors at a preset time, and is more powerful and efficient than previous models.

The good: iRobot has gone to great lengths to make sure you'll never need to use an upright vacuum again. The Roomba 880 is quieter, faster and just darn better than its predecessors.

The bad: If only you could afford a Roomba for each story of your home! But barring a future Roomba that climbs stairs, robotic vacuums are for single-story living.

The bottom line: This is an amazing robotic vacuum for certain living situations and individuals who can afford the steep price. You'll only need to plug in that old-fashioned vacuum for the occasional food spill.

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Google takes flight to NSA

Google is becoming a leading voice against government cyber-spying, with rank-and-file employees as well as top executives issuing scathing — and even expletive-laced — rebukes of the National Security Agency.

The unusual activism by Google — which ironically enough has been on the receiving end of frequent privacy complaints itself — follows newly disclosed documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden alleging that the NSA secretly had hacked Google's private data storage centers around the world.

Google's top security exec testified before a Senate subcommittee last week that the future of cloud computing — the practice of storing information on the Internet rather than on site — is threatened by these allegations of government spying.

If people don't trust their data is secure on the Internet, he said, they'll store it on a hard drive instead, reversing one of this decade's most fundamental computing innovations, and potentially resulting in untold economic losses.

Other tech giants on the receiving end of alleged government spying have chosen to write letters and seek new laws allowing them to release national security requests for data.

But Google's reaction has been far more explosive:

• On Oct. 30, Brandon Downey, a Google security engineer, took to his Google Plus page to publish a response to new allegations of NSA spying. "(Expletive) these guys," Downey wrote. Though Downey wrote that his opinions weren't those of his employer, they did seem to reflect the general sentiment of the company.

• Six days later, one of Downey's colleagues, Mike Hearn, wrote on his Google Plus page that he joined Downey in "issuing a giant (Expletive) You" to the NSA and adding, "Thank you Edward Snowden."

• That same week, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, called the alleged spying "outrageous," and said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: "There clearly are cases where evil people exist, but you don't have to violate the privacy of every single citizen of America to find them."

In testifying before the Senate subcommittee, Google's information security director, Richard Salgado, highlighted an estimate from Cambridge-based Forrester Research that the NSA's PRISM project, leaked to the media in June, could mean up to $180 billion in losses — or a 25 percent hit — to the cloud computing industry 
by 2016.

Those estimates were made before the latest news broke about the NSA having compromised Google's cloud servers.

Salgado testified data localization efforts are already beginning in South America.

If they become more widespread, he said, "Then what we will face is the effective Balkanization of the Internet and the creation of a 'splinternet' broken up into smaller national and regional pieces with barriers around each of the splintered Internets to replace the global Internet we know today."

The effects on Boston's innovation economy would be disastrous, with cloud computing services estimated to comprise 20,000 jobs in the area by 2015.

I never pegged Google for a privacy activist, but money, like politics, can make strange bedfellows.

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Once a leader, Oregon exchange struggles

PORTLAND, Ore. — With all the problems facing the rollout of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, nowhere is the situation worse or more surprising than in Oregon, a progressive state that has enthusiastically embraced the federal law but has so far failed to enroll a single person in coverage through the state's insurance exchange.

Despite grand ambitions, an early start, millions of dollars from the federal government and a tech-savvy population, Oregon's online enrollment system still isn't ready more than a month after it was supposed to go live. The state has resorted to hiring or reassigning 400 people to process insurance applications by hand.

"We're all surprised and frustrated that we're in the position that we're in now," said Jesse O'Brien, a health care advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, which lobbied for the exchange.

The state has received about 18,000 paper applications, at 19 pages each, and is scrambling to manually file and clear them. State officials have not been able to say when they expect the online system to launch, nor have they established a deadline to submit paper applications in order for coverage to begin Jan. 1. Meanwhile, the exchange's board is demanding answers from the executive director about when the website will work and how his team will get people enrolled on time.

For consumers, the application process can be long and frustrating.

"I've been trying since the very first day of October just to try to find out the coverage I could get," said Donna George, 43, a bookkeeper from Bend, Ore., who's been uninsured for three years.

When the online system wouldn't work, George submitted a paper application Oct. 7 for herself and her husband. Finally, on Nov. 12, she received an enrollment packet that tells her how much of a tax credit she'll receive and lays out her coverage options. She's now waiting to meet with her insurance agent to pick a plan and return the forms.

Oregon has long prided itself on being a leader in health policy. Its Medicaid system has been a testing ground for new innovations since the early 1990s. The state started laying the groundwork for an insurance exchange a year before Congress passed the health care law that called for one in every state. Gov. John Kitzhaber, a former emergency room physician, is a respected voice on health reform.

The state also has a large population of young, underemployed progressives who might provide a burgeoning market for affordable coverage. Its ultra-competitive health care market led to lower-than-expected premiums. Lawmakers from both parties have embraced the law. And the Portland area is a thriving hub of technology companies known as the Silicon Forest.

In other words, Oregon had everything going for it.

But its exchange, known as Cover Oregon, became a victim of its own lofty ambitions and the state's stubborn refusal to dial them back until it was too late.

While exchanges in many states are telling applicants who appear to qualify for Medicaid to contact a separate agency, Oregon insists its exchange must be a "one-stop shop" for both Medicaid and private insurance. The state also wants its exchange to eventually be able to help enroll people in a wide array of public-assistance programs, not just health care.

Exchange leaders stuck with their plan even as risk consultants warned repeatedly that they were in danger of missing the Oct. 1 deadline to launch.

"We won't know whether we made the right decisions until our system is up and running," said Amy Fauver, chief communications officer for Cover Oregon. "But we're going forward in the way we feel we can best serve Oregonians."

Exchange officials say they haven't fully launched their website because their software still can't accurately determine whether applicants are eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program, particularly for people with complex family arrangements.

Kitzhaber, a Democrat, has pledged that the problems won't "interfere with our objective of making sure that every Oregonian that wants to be enrolled" by the start of the new year "is, in fact, enrolled."

Oregon does have one big success to brag about. The state has enrolled 70,000 people in Medicaid, reducing the ranks of the uninsured by more than 10 percent. The large number of Medicaid enrollments came in large part thanks to a "fast-track" enrollment process approved by the Obama administration. Using income data already on file, the state mailed a simple seven-question Medicaid enrollment form to people in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program who qualify for health coverage under the federal health law's expansion of Medicaid.

Pressure is growing on exchange officials to fix their problems. U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, a moderate Democrat who took heat after voting for the health care law, released a sharply worded statement on Friday demanding that the exchange and its main contractor, Oracle, make it work.

"The implementation of Oregon's health insurance marketplace has been abysmal," Schrader said. "The current situation is completely unacceptable, and I expect much more from a state with a reputation for being an innovator in the field of health care."

___

Follow AP writer Jonathan J. Cooper at http://twitter.com/jjcooper .

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Young entrepreneurs get real

A group of entrepreneurs, armed with business plans, prototypes and mock-ups, pitched their start-ups to a panel of potential investors, and then got back to work on college applications.

High school seniors taking an entrepreneurship class at Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, presented business plans Wednesday for companies ranging from a recipe website that links with grocery delivery companies to a running-shoe sole that tells the wearer when shoes need to be replaced.

"We're putting them in real situations. It's so authentic," said teacher Kevin Bau.

Students pitched their companies to a panel of "sharks," including Michael Bronner, founder of Digitas and natural food company UNREAL, and Jeremy Levine, founder of StarStreet and a BCDS alum.

"I actually felt like I was running a small business," said Isabel Hechavarria, who pitched Bella, her line of swimwear made from material that lets the wearer get an all-over tan.

Bronner said the students' detailed pitches and business plans impressed him. "I've seen presentations from kids coming out of college, honestly, that are not as strong as these," he said.

After the pitches, Hechavarria was approached by one of the judges about setting up a "game-changing" conversation, according to Lisa Trask, the other teacher in the class.

"This is definitely a case of the classroom and real-world experience overlapping and transitioning, and she'll have the support of the school to pursue this endeavour," Trask said.

Trask would not say which entrepreneur was involved or what the talks were regarding, but during Hechavarria's pitch and after, several of them expressed interest and said if they became involved they would seek a celebrity endorsement.

Other CEOs said they were interested in pursuing the proposals beyond the class, but said they would likely take some time before they did so.

Steve Gold, an entrepreneurship professor at Babson College who is not involved in the BCDS class, said the program will be valuable for all the students. He said skills critical to entrepreneurship, such as communication, organization and leadership, all translate to nearly every other job.

"It's the kind of thing that benefits everybody, no matter what path these students take in life," Gold said.

Bau said one of the main goals of the class, now in its second year, is to help students understand that they can make an impact in whatever field they go into.

"You don't have to fit into the existing structure exactly as it is," Bau said.

"I think it's going to change their lives," Bronner said.

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Pontiac problem is a thing called piston slap

I have a 2003 Pontiac Vibe with 135,000 miles on it. This past winter it would knock for a minute or so on a cold start. A GM tech told me that it has a cold piston slap and it will go for a long time. I could faintly hear it this summer. Could it be anything else? Is there something I need to do so it will last two to three more years and 60,000 miles?

Hoping to get close to 200,000 miles out of this or any engine is a worthy goal but of course there are no guarantees, knock or no knock. The GM tech is likely correct. Piston "slap" occurs when the excess clearance between the piston skirt and the cylinder wall allows the skirt to "slap" the wall as combustion pressure drives it downward in the cylinder. As the piston warms up and expands a bit, the clearance is reduced and the noise stops. And as the tech said, this isn't particularly harmful and does not mean impending failure. The engine in my '70 Corvette with 120,000 miles on it has reminded me it has a slight piston slap every time I have started it for the past 20 years!

A mechanic's stethoscope can pinpoint the particular piston/cylinder in question. If disabling the spark for that cylinder during a cold start test, which eliminates combustion pressure that slaps the piston skirt against the cylinder wall, eliminates the knock, it's piston slap.

If it is piston slap, don't worry about the noise and just drive the car. The only "repair" would be a complete engine overhaul that would not be economically justifiable.

There's one more possibility: combustion chamber deposit interference, or CCDI. This occurs when carbon deposits build up on the top of a piston and/or the roof of the combustion chamber to the point where there is physical contact between the two on cold starts until all the components warm up and expand enough to eliminate the contact. Again, like piston slap this isn't particularly harmful, but unlike piston slap it may be easily "fixable."

A professional or DIY induction cleaning with SeaFoam or GM Top Engine Cleaner can remove the carbon build-up and eliminate the noise.

L L L

I would like to better understand oil change intervals on little used vehicles. I have a '77 F-150 that I use around the ranch about 20 hours and maybe five miles per year. I completely rebuilt the engine and the oil I put in more than five years ago is still honey-colored. Am I hurting the engine? Seems silly to change it every year, but is there a shelf life?

In this case the word "silly" is synonymous with "wasteful." I just checked the date I last changed oil and filter on the aforementioned 'Vette and it was 2009 — four years ago. In that time I've driven the car fewer than 2,000 miles so I guess you've reminded me it's time to change it again.

But I have no worries that I'm hurting this engine, or any other "low annual time/mileage" engines I own and operate. The oil in these engines is subject to very little fuel/combustion blow-by contamination. The only time-based deterioration is oxidation from exposure to air inside the engine.

I think you're safe, but it's probably time for an oil and filter change. Save the old oil for recycling or use in topping up oil levels on your other low-annual-time engines.

Paul Brand, author of "How to Repair Your Car," is an automotive troubleshooter, driving instructor, and former race car driver. Readers may write to him at Star Tribune, 425 Portland Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55488 or via email at paulbrand@startribune.com. Leave a daytime phone number.

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Trans fat ban irks eateries

Many local restaurants and bakeries could be forced to revise their menus and change their food — thanks to the Food and Drug Administration's decision to ban artery-clogging trans fats — not long after they scrambled to meet different trans fat guidelines.

Bob Luz, president of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association, said many establishments already made major modifications to their food in order to be officially "trans fat-free," a description the FDA said required less than .5 grams of trans fats per serving in 2006. Now, more modifications will have to be made to completely eliminate the artificial trans fats.

"All of the hard work and effort that everybody put into achieving that .5" is for naught, Luz said. "They're going to have to go back to the drawing boards. That's going to be costly, that's going to take time."

The FDA is collecting comments for two months before determining a timetable to phase-out trans fats. Different foods may have different schedules, depending on how easy it is to find substitutes.

Luz said he would have no problem with the FDA regulation if it did not undo the previous guidelines.

"This would not be a major hurdle if not for the .5 definition," Luz said.

Several towns in Massachusetts already have banned trans fats, including Brookline and Chelsea.

Richard Katz, owner of Katz Bagel Bakery in Chelsea and an ardent opponent of the ban, said he was forced to stop making his popular apple and raspberry turnovers. He said he tried to make them without shortening, but "customers came back the next week and said what was wrong with your turnovers?"

While he has no illusions about trans fats' lack of nutritional value, Katz said restaurants and customers should be able to choose what to eat.

"You don't have to eat trans fats every single day, have them once in a while," he said. "People continue to smoke, they continue to drink and they continue to eat."

Katz decided to continue to use trans fats in his chicken pot pie and pie crusts, although he no longer makes the turnovers.

"People love my chicken pot pies. They love the crust because my crust is good," Katz said.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's largest food suppliers, said in a statement that manufacturers have lowered the amount of trans fats in food by more than 73 percent since 2005.

Many high-profile restaurants have largely eliminated trans fats already, including Friendly's and Dunkin' Donuts. Only 18 items out of 547 on the Dunkin' Donuts master menu contain trans fats. The Canton-based chain voluntarily eliminated a majority of the trans fats in its menu items in 2007.

Dunkin' Donuts spokeswoman Michelle King said the company is "assessing" the FDA decision to phase out trans fats and "will continue to monitor the issue."

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FEMA unveiling new Hub flood zone maps

Suffolk County residents will get a first look today at new flood zone maps that have prompted outcry over rising federal flood insurance costs and a deluge of lawsuits across the nation.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency today is unveiling the new maps that Boston officials say are likely to affect about 10,200 residential units and as many as 3,600 businesses.

"As a city, we're committed to accurately identifying the risks from coastal storm flooding and finding ways to support those home and business owners who will be impacted by the remapping of the flood zones," Mayor Thomas M. Menino said.

The city is working on hiring a consultant with the Boston Redevelopment Authority to review the maps to ensure their accuracy and applicability, he said.

The earliest the city of Boston expects to adopt a final flood hazard map is December 2014.

Sticker shock from the new federal mandate has kicked off a rising tide of opposition nationwide.

"These new rates will devastate many families and businesses throughout Massachusetts," said state Attorney General Martha Coakley, who yesterday joined a lawsuit against the new rates in Mississippi federal court. "In setting these new flood insurance rates, FEMA not only failed to evaluate their economic impact, but also failed to gather all the data required to ensure the new rates are accurate."

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