It has been a tough year for The Boston Globe

Last week’s announcement (more here) by the Boston Globe that they’d be splitting their news content across two properties, one of which would require a paid subscription, drew oodles of attention from the media industry. Though it’s certainly not the only attempt to resurrect the slumping newspaper business, the Globe’s strategy charts an unknown course in the new media landscape.

The plan, slated for rollout in the “second half of 2011,” will effectively split the Globe into two online brands. The current online iteration, Boston.com, will remain online with a more limited content base, while a new site, BostonGlobe.com, will host all the content produced by the newspaper’s staff and require a subscription to access. Prices for the subscriptions have not yet been announced.

In light of yesterday’s Future of News event, hosted by our crew here at BostInnovation and Pinyadda and part of FutureM, here are three theoretical scenarios the future might hold for the Globe and its two-brand strategy:

1) Tempered Success

If things go as the Globe hopes, traffic to the Boston.com domain will remain relatively stable, leaving advertising revenues for that property intact. As the editorial focus shifts more toward local communities and breaking news, increasing numbers of people will feel connected to the site, increasing community engagement, opening up new opportunities for local advertising, and increasing the amount of time people spend on the site. On the flip side, a small but dedicated customer base who appreciates more in-depth analysis and investigative reporting will slowly start to pony up for BostonGlobe.com content, along with another minority that simply must have their favorite columnist or reporter. The key to the success of this approach, in my opinion, is the Globe’s ability to provide content and services that create very significant differentiation between the two products. If a subscription to BostonGlobe.com gave me a visually appealing, ad-free reading experience and free access to a great mobile and iPad application, I’d at least have something to think about.

2) Stabilization

In the second best scenario, the change causes Boston.com’s traffic and subsequently, its ad revenue, to decline. Parts of this revenue decline are made up for by a small influx of paid subscriptions to BostonGlobe.com. The paper experiments repeatedly with a different mix of content on both properties, trying to get the subscription revenue gains to exactly offset the ad revenue declines. The result is a stabilization of revenue, but a dampening of user experience on both properties as the paper keeps turning knobs and dials trying to balance the equation. The major question in this scenario is whether or not the increased cost and resources of running two different destinations will ultimately add to the burden or product enough revenue to lessen it.

3) Continued Decline

In the nightmare scenario for the Globe, traffic to Boston.com drops sharply and BostonGlobe.com’s potential subscribers, uncertain about the value of the new destination, trickle in slowly and defect over time. The increased overhead of managing two domains and still continuing the print edition leads to a widening revenue gap that places still more pressure on an already shorthanded newsroom. Mobile experiences become victims of cost-cutting measures and overall readership continues to trend downwards as upstarts like Patch and independent bloggers take local news market share. If the outcome of the planned split is two independently good products that people like, this scenario can be avoided. But if the split produces two mediocre properties in place of the current one, the results could be dire.

Certainly, there are innumerable scenarios that could play out, and the ones above are meant to illustrate some broad reactions that could affect the Globe’s future. No matter what happens, the Globe deserves credit for its willingness to step outside the box and try something new. The company’s decision in 1995 to brand the online version separately has come full circle in 2010, and only time will tell if the attempt is successful.

For more on the Globe’s impending split, check out these great links:

Double, double: More on the Boston Globe’s new Two-Site Strategy – Nieman Lab

Boston.com’s New Strategies: Retention and Switch – Newsonomics

Make Like Boston.com and Split – Columbia Journalism Review

The Globe Mates With Itself – Bostonist

Beard leaves, paywall goes up: R.I.P. Boston.com, 1995-2010? – Boston Phoenix

Publisher Chis Mayer on the Globe’s new pay model – Media Nation

What are your thoughts on the Globe’s new model? Genius innovation, moderate improvement, doomed to failure? Leave a comment and let us know!

Note: This article was originally published here by The Huffington Post. BostInnovation.com and The Huffington Post have a content partnership. Chase Garbarino, BostInnovation and Pinyadda founder & CEO, contributes to a weekly column on entrepreneurship for the Huffington Post.

On Christmas Day in 2005, during my junior year of college, my mother gave me a copy of the Small Business Opportunities magazine in my stocking. To this day, I can still remember the headline jumping out at me: “College Student Makes $300,000 In A Month.” After briefly skimming the article about the student setting up an affiliate shopping site, my mind was was made up – I was going to start an internet business.

The stack of resumes and cover letters prepped for internship opportunities at Lehman Brothers, Goldman and other financial companies never ended being mailed. Instead, a friend of mine and I created an internship position on several job recruiting sites calling for the nation’s top collegiate journalists and media makers to join “The New York Times of college publications.” That night, as I went to bed, it hit me like a ton of bricks: Did I seriously just bail out on applying for legitimate internships to start a national collegiate news site with absolutely no technical or media experience?

After several beers, a night of tossing and turning, and 24 hours of avoiding internet access, I finally checked my e-mail. We had received over 100 applications within a day and ended up receiving a total of over 300 by the time the listing expired after three days. The magazine headline that planted the seed for my interest in entrepreneurship quickly faded to the back of my mind. I was hell bent on giving students at the peak of their intellectual curiosity and development, a platform to share their new ideas and beliefs with the world, and CampusWord was born.

The next 18 months of my college career could be described as fearlessly trying to row the boat and plug the holes at the same time. I andCampusWord’s other co-founders, Greg Rogan and Kevin McCarthy, had little technical experience on our side, so running our website in the early days was always an adventure. With little to no money, we were forced to outsource our development efforts to countries like China, Vietnam and South America.

To give an example of what life in the tech fast-lane was like, at one point during the summer I was on my way to meet the parents of my then girlfriend for the first time. They knew little about me other than that I “ran a news website.” As I walked in the door ready to turn the charm on, the conversation quickly moved to CampusWord. I began giving my best speech about the importance of hosting an open platform for students across the country to share ideas and opinions. I was really on a roll. As we migrated over to their computer to view the site, I continued to ramble on as I typed in the domain. My gaze turned to the screen and rather than seeing a vibrant homepage of student contributed articles, there was simply a black screen with a picture of a masked man with a ticking time bomb and some questionable text in a different language. Needless to say my confident rambling quickly turned to broken and confused sentences as the grandmother’s face turned white. I assured them this wasn’t our site, I wasn’t a radical extremist of any sort and that we must have been hacked. Soon after, our hosting company confirmed a number of sites had been hacked and they corrected the problem. Regardless, the dinner conversation was stilted to say the least.

At its peak, CampusWord’s network included over 100 of the nation’s top collegiate journalists and media makers and drew an audience of over 100,000 unique visitors a month. Ultimately, though, CampusWord didn’t end up turning into a big, successful business and never made $300,000 in a month, as promised by the Christmas stocking magazine. This was mainly due to my lack of understanding of true marketing scale, and partly because of our team’s ideological desire to keep CampusWord in the hands of students — not to mention that we decided to pursue what we believed to be a bigger opportunity in creating a large-scale news aggregation technology that now powers our current properties, BostInnovation and Pinyadda. We are, however, proud of the fact that our staff of contributors from CampusWord have gone on to work for top media companies like Politico, CNN, Mashable, NY Daily News, TV Guide, The Onion and many others.

I consider an entrepreneur to be someone who creates something out of nothing. Good entrepreneurs create something of value out of nothing. While we certainly would have liked to have created more monetary value from CampusWord, we created value developing the foundation for our current business and in helping launch some very promising careers for others. When you see true value delivered to your users and customers from work your team has done with little to no resources, or your former employees enjoy success, there is no better feeling. And that is why I am an entrepreneur.

You can contact Chase at chase at pinyadda dot com

Featured Panel Participants

Panel 1: Content-Side

Panel 2: Business-Side



As print media continues to decline and more consumers turn to digital technologies for their daily news, publishers are reinventing the way they create and distribute content. Pinyadda and the leading digital publishers, content creators and strategists above will discuss the evolving news landscape and future of this rapidly changing industry. Factors such as location, search, new media, and a socially enabled world will all be discussed.

Panel Details

The first panel will cover how the editorial process has changed around gathering news, creating community, and user-driven content creation and aggregation. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s product lead, Austin Gardner-Smith, will moderate. Themes include: Changing distribution structures; New consumption platforms; Content and demand.

The second panel will discuss new business models for digital content and opportunities across platforms such as mobile and tablet. Pinyadda and BostInnovation’s Co-Founder and CEO, Chase Garbarino, will moderate. Themes include: Revenue glut; Paywalls and subscriptions; A way forward.

NOTE: This event is sold out. If you would like to attend, we have a limited number of reserved spaces. Please contact cheryl at pinyadda dot com.

1. Your browser just got a lot more powerful. What people commonly refer to as HTML5 is more than a simple update to the world’s most popular markup language. In addition to providing us with lots of new elements that makes constructing web pages easier (and makes more sense) than ever before, there are lots of ways that this bundle of innovations is making your web browser a lot more powerful. Things like local storage (allowing web applications to use the browser, instead of their own servers, for storing temporary information, in some cases enabling offline work), geolocation (it knows where you are!), and advanced javascript API’s mean that things once possible on the desktop will now be widely deployed on the web.
2. Web applications are about to be just applications. HTML was created and standardized when most websites were mostly read-only entities. HTML5, on the other hand, reflects an understanding that the web is about applications that require write access and all kinds of other user interaction. With native support for drag and drop, animation, and vector image creation using the versatile canvas element, HTML5 has all the tools you need to do some truly amazing things with web pages.
3. No more plugins. Perhaps the coolest part of HTML5 is also the part you’re likely to find in wide usage first: inline audio and video. What does that mean? The days of downloading plugins to view video and and audio content on the internet are over. It’s about time we started treating these media types as first class web citizens, and this standard really makes that dream a reality. It also means that video and audio content can be implemented much more seamlessly in web pages – no more bulky frames or outmoded modules. Just the content, however and wherever you wanted. Here’s a kickass example of how cool all this can be.
4. Mobile, mobile, mobile. All browsers, even mobile browsers, read HTML. Which means that in large part, the new standards will be supported across a huge variety of mobile devices and platforms. In devices with smaller memory and processors, there’s a lot of hope that HTML5 can reduce load times, dependence on processor-intensive scripting, and help cut down on other minutiae that can suck the life out of your battery and make the mobile experience cumbersome. And we can all agree on that
5. Style that’s fresh to death. With all kinda of new tricks and goodies making their way into the CSS3 spec, we can expect lots of really good-looking websites to be born of HTML5 and friends. Whether it’s using @font-face declarations to spice up topography, using CSS3 transitions and animations to give designs an extra kick, or simply making good use of the rounded corners, gradients, and shadows that are built right in to CSS3, designers, developers, and users will be sure to notice a lot of new hotness around the web. The added bonus? Using CSS and HTML5 reduces the need to use javascript and images in many cases, making for speedier load times and better mobile experiences.

Check out the links below for more great information on HTML5 and lots of great demos:

To keep up with the latest HTML5 news, be sure to follow the Web Design, Internet, Web Development and Web2.0 topics on Pinyadda.

Paul Irish’s Presentation at Google GTUG Campout 2010

HTML5 Rocks

HTML5 Doctor

Dive Into HTML5

First, let’s set up a .htaccess file. Open a blank text file, name it .htaccess and upload it to your server. Wherever the .htaccess file is located is where it takes its affect. So if I upload the .htaccess file to http://blog.pinyadda.com/testing, all the configurations correlate to that directory /testing directory. You can write all of the following tricks one after another. The “#” mark is used to designate comments in .htaccess.

1. Deny IPs- Ever have a Bulgarian spammer flood your comments?  You’ll want to block that IP from gaining access to your site.  Here’s how:  open the .htaccess and simply type:
   

   order allow,deny
   deny from 127.0.0.1
   allow from all

   Replacing “127.0.0.1″ with that crazy Bulgarian’s IP. You can add more “deny from” lines if you wish to add more IPs to block. The same works for allowing only certain IPs:

   order allow,deny
   deny from all
   allow from 127.0.0.1

   This method is sort helpful when isolating areas of your site only you want access to. A better way however is to password-protect using .htaccess…

2. Password Protect- Ever notice certain sites ask for a strange user name and password combo? They’re using Apache’s password protect functionality. Here is a great tutorial. This is probably the most difficult of the .htaccess modifications listed here, but is definitely worth the trouble.
3. Permanent Redirect- Changing the URLs of static pages is annoying. The old URL is going to be in Google for a long time and will still see a lot of traffic. Pretty easy fix using .htaccess: forward the old link to the new link using:
   

   Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

   After this, /oldpage.html will always be redirected to /newpage.html.

4. Turn Off Directory Browsing- Ever notice on some sites you can see all of the files in a directory? Usually, it’s just images but sometimes you can see actual code files, which is pretty dangerous. (Imagine if there were database information in those files?) Real easy fix:
   

   Options All -Indexes

   This is a small security prevention technique, but an important one.

5. Redirect while updating- Say you’re making changes to your live site’s template and don’t want the user’s to see your screw-ups. A good way to avoid this is to simply redirect them to a static page in the interim. First, only allow your IP address to see your website:
   

   order allow,deny
   deny from all
   allow from 127.0.0.1

   Replace 127.0.0.1 with your IP then add:

   ErrorDocument 403 /be_back_soon.html

   allow from all

   Now, all of your users will be directed to http://yoursite.com/be_back_soon.html while you’re free to see your site as is.

As you can see, the .htaccess file is pretty dynamic and robust. If you’d like to know more, allow me to Google that for you.

As I’ve mentioned before, we are all about helping publishers succeed online, so I wanted to share the 3 things I think online news sites and bloggers could take from the lean startup philosophy that could help their businesses:

1. Don’t write a single sentence of a post/article without talking to potential readers – Both Ellis and Ries stress the importance of testing the market for a web app before wasting the time of writing any code.  There is no reason journalists and bloggers should be any different.  Before starting a blog or new media property, create a simple landing page through Google docs with a description of the content you will be creating with an email form for interested users to fill out so you can notify them when you launch.  You can simply email the link to the page to people you think may be interested, post the link on social networks or even buy some Google AdWords for targeted keywords relevant to your content type.  From the number of people who fill out the form, you will be able to get a small sample size of early reader’s you can speak to about the direction of the blog that will give you some good data on your target audience.

2. Test several content types and then kill some – Ellis and Ries are big advocates of killing features early in a products lifecycle in order to develop the “Minimum viable product” for adoption in market.  Assuming you see some demand for the general topic you plan to cover, next you should develop several different content types you intend on creating on your site.  For example, some content types might include opinion/analysis pieces, list posts (i.e. top 10′s), summaries or reviews, etc.  Once you have created one or two items for each content type, ship them off to the users who expressed interest in your content type and see which type users like the best.  You should be able to tell from certain metrics (clicks, comments, link backs, retweets/pins, etc.) and from speaking to users what the minimum viable content types for a site would be to continue to retain them as readers.

3. Published doesn’t mean complete, optimize and iterate quickly - If a developer finished writing the code and designing his app, opened it for users and then didn’t continue to improve upon the product after it were live, they probably wouldn’t be very successful.  Now that we are no longer restricted to printing stories permanently on paper, there is no reason we shouldn’t iterate on our content after it is published online and we have been able to collect some data about how readers are taking to that piece of content.  Some of the simplest metrics we can gather to test how a piece of content is performing are click-through rates, time on page and bounce rates.  If an article isn’t getting clicks or retweets, trying changing its title on the fly.  Here is a great example of how the HuffingtonPost A/B tests their headlines in real-time.

These are just a few of the principles we can apply to help us create successful online content.  Are you a practitioner of the lean startup methodology?  Have suggestions for how this can be applied to online news and journalism?  Share them with us in the comments below!

I mean, who wouldn’t want an excuse to be 11 stories high, right on the Charles, looking at the best view of the Boston skyline?  Not to mention N.E.R.D.’s technical evangelist Gus Weber knows how to host these events – cash bar, foosball and pingpong tables, a sideroom for Rockband, and the Microsoft Surface (and of course a different focus at each event) help draw a fresh crowd every time.

Check out a little preview below of the badges and then jump in and start Pinning to get yours!  Who knows, maybe you even have what it takes to be a “Maven” of Boston Start-ups on Pinyadda… Um, holler.

Here’s how you can earn Microsoft NERD’s badges:

*Click to join Pinyadda if you haven’t yet

1. Follow the “Boston Start-up” topic, a packed feed of breaking articles and blog posts about and from Boston startups – yeah, we know you will be chiefin’ in that feed all day (click the link, login and then click “follow”)
2. Pin and discuss articles from that topic feed about all the hot startup action in Boston (hint: it may take more than one Pin)
3. Boast your NERDiness a.k.a. prowess in knowing all the great Boston start-ups that frequent N.E.R.D. events with your Twitter and Facebook  networks by clicking on their badges in your Pinyadda Profile

About Pinyadda:

Pinyadda is a personalized social news platform that provides the easiest way to follow the news from the people, sites and topics you are interested in.  Share, or as we say “Pin” articles, engage in interesting conversations and earn points to become a “Maven” of a topic or an “Ambassador” of your favorite site!  Pinyadda is the most fun way to share the news!  Located in the majestic Downtown Crossing are of Boston (yea, we said majestic) our doors are always open for a pop-in from loyal users.  See you on the ‘yadda!

About Microsoft NERD:

The Microsoft New England Research & Development Center is a key part of a long term strategic investment by Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie to build a world class center for research and innovation right in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

By Pinning articles from Mass High Tech, BostInnovation, and Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy in the Boston Globe you not only support and learn about Boston’s startup ecosystem, you get to boast some slick badges that let everyone know you’re part of the BeIn Initiative.  Have fun with this one, and do your part to BeIn the Boston startup renaissance by sharing news to your social networks about all the incredible companies that are killing it here.

Here’s what you have to do to take part in the BeIn Initiative badge campaign:

*Click to join Pinyadda if you haven’t yet

1. Follow Mass High Tech, BostInnovation, and Boston Globe’s Innovation Economy sites (click the links, login and then click “follow”)
2. Pin and discuss articles from these sites about all the hot startup action in Boston (hint: it may take more than one Pin)
3. Stamp on your social networks that you’re part of the BeIn Initiative by sharing your BeIn badges from your Pinyadda Profile.

About Pinyadda:

Pinyadda is a personalized social news platform that provides the easiest way to follow the news from the people, sites and topics you are interested in.  Share, or as we say “Pin” articles, engage in interesting conversations and earn points to become a “Maven” of a topic or an “Ambassador” of your favorite site!  Pinyadda is the most fun way to share the news!  Located in the majestic Downtown Crossing are of Boston (yea, we said majestic) our doors are always open for a pop-in from loyal users.  See you on the ‘yadda!

About the BeIn Initiative:

BostInnovation.com proudly presents the BeIn Initiative — an initiative by, for and of the Boston startup community.  BeIn was started to help, foster, and grow the startup community here in Boston.  After spending countless hours networking, running to events, and scouring the city for entrepreneurs, one thing stood out; Boston is experiencing a startup renaissance.  The primary goals of the Be In initiative are:

• To host engaging social and informational events to promote entrepreneurship and technology in the Boston area.
• To bolster user testing and adoption of new web and mobile products in Boston.
• To help bridge the gap and build strong ties between Boston’s startup community and the many valuable educational institutions in the Greater Boston area.

Sharing Boston startup news on Pinyadda and the BeIn badges kick the initiative off.  Are you in?

– Being lean is about doing things that make sense and about being efficient, not necessarily about following every step of the ‘methodology’ to a T.

The lean startup movement/philosophy/methodology has lots to teach businesses and entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes, but it’s not a live-or-die guide to building a successful company. In building Pinyadda we’ve done some things a little backwards and maybe a few others a little out of order, but for us it’s become clear that being lean is about lightweight, fast product iteration and hands-on customer development. The exact methods we use to achieve these goals have changed and will continue to change and evolve along with us.

Did we smoke test hundreds of landing pages? No. Did we build a product with the absolute minimum feature set? No. Have we learned and improved by integrating customers early and continuously iterating based on their feedback? Yes. The main point here is that it’s a good idea to read and absorb as much as you can, but don’t drive yourself crazy trying to implement the latest and greatest trends. Every business will have different customers and different products that demand different tactics and different solutions. Do what’s best for you.

– Measurement takes many forms.

With most Web 2.0 – style products, what you’re building is not so much a ‘product’ in the traditional sense as an experience. In this vein, while it’s really important to measure things like clicks and actions and pageviews that can be quantified, it’s also important to realize that actions are often dictated by psychological and emotional reactions which cannot be easily quantified.

A careful reading of most lean materials will reveal that qualitative data (surveys, interviews, observations) can often be as useful or more useful than all the numbers in the world. There are certainly instances where the reverse is also true, but the main point is not to throw feedback out the window because it’s not numeric in nature. Some of the most important feedback we’ve ever received about Pinyadda has come in casual conversation over a few beers.

– There’s no magic button.

At first glance, it can seem like the lean startup approach makes for clean periods of structured action, where one piece fits nicely into the next. The truth is that it’s nearly impossible to suddenly declare yourself “done” with one stage and simply transition cleanly to the next step. Often (especially in the early stages) things are muddled and it’s very difficult to tell exactly where you are in the life-cycle of the company (this isn’t made any easier by the fact that most entrepreneurs are, by nature, somewhat delusional). And even if you can get a good sense for where you are, trying to plot a course into the next phase can be daunting.

Going back to the first point – there’s no formula for this stuff. We have a general idea about where Pinyadda stands with our customers and we’ve defined some tangible goals for ourselves that should manifest over the foreseeable term (for us, about 3-6 weeks at a time). But we don’t sit around wondering if we’re in Phase 1.3 or 1.4. Set a goal, use your core philosophies as a guide, and then do everything necessary to achieve it.

Here’s the video of the presentation. Thanks to Matthew Mamet of EditMe for the recording. Matt’s original post on the meetup is worth a read as well.

Boston Lean Startup Circle – Pinyadda from Matthew Mamet on Vimeo.

Each greater Boston area school fosters dense pockets of innovation, top-notch professors, interesting speakers, and unique curriculums, programs and opportunities. Seeing and reaping the benefits first-hand of the support, positivity, collaboration and idea sharing happening at a lot of the Boston startup scene as well as from working in an incubator space, I can’t get away from the benefits these campuses and the greater Boston creative economy could reap from more cross-campus collaboration.

On the one hand, I understand why college administrators might not want to do this: ultimately they’re competing for talent and revenue. Their focus is on getting the best professors to their schools, the best speakers, designing the best programs and curriculums and more to lure in the best students and teach them well so they will hopefully be successful out of school and give back to the college as alumni. However, that doesn’t mean collaboration can’t bring greater value to each individual school and students as a whole.

For example, Babson doesn’t focus on engineering/programming like MIT, but we certainly have a deep understanding of markets and are well-schooled in evaluating opportunity and developing strategies to execute on ideas. Imagine what the two could do together, even simply in informal networking events. It’s the whole collective intelligence idea that I seem to be obsessing about right now. And there’s lots of other theories to back up the importance of differences in mindsets and schools of thought in fueling innovation, like open and cumulative innovation theories that have been substantiated by neuroscientist research (a good read on this is Iconoclast). Here are a couple ideas that I think could help foster more of this, and ultimately lead to more successful startups in Boston:

Student-run startups get a cross-campus pass

The first would be a simple program that allows student startups at various schools to visit events and get hands-on advice from classes at other regional Boston schools.

The events are pretty straightforward and I can’t imagine are hard to operationalize. Lots of panels and speaking events at colleges cost money to attend. Let’s face it: college students bootstrapping a startup just don’t have the money for these. However, these students are more often than not the people that can add the freshest perspective to these discussions and reap the most benefits from applying learnings to their immediate situation.

As for cross-campus classroom collaboration, I can’t think of a better win-win: startups from school A get advice from classroom at school B; students from school B apply learnings and critical thinking in a real-life case study. So perhaps a Bentley non-tech startup needs advice from a entrepreneurial programming class at MIT or creative social media class at Emerson: new ideas, un-thought opportunities or applications surface, solutions to a current challenges are offered, etc. Conversely, maybe a killer invention from an MIT student startup is struggling to identify their market potential and could reap the help from students at an entrepreneurship class at Babson. It’s benefiting the students in the classroom (think and apply knowledge to a real-life idea/startup) as well as these 2-3 person student startups that need help at their critical early stage, and who will eventually graduate and give back to the colleges later in life.

Cross-institutional incubator for early-stage recent alumni startups

This would be an incubator house in the city for most promising entrepreneurs from a variety of schools. You can imagine top-notch seniors or recent alums from these schools (pairs, trios, etc.) apply and if accepted are housed for a certain amount of time. They’re mentored by faculty at these different schools and the various startups assist one another in their critical early-stages (this happens naturally in an incubator, anyways). This would give these students a higher probability of success and a great support and learning network.

I think this would add the most value to colleges outside of Boston (Babson, Olin, WPI), where their location gives them an inherent disadvantage in terms of networking in and collaborating with the entrepreneurial scene downtown and in Cambridge, and students at other schools. These students could offer and reap a lot in this scene.

I’d love to hear what current student startupers or aspiring startupers think about this idea. And what about college administrators?