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Today, Mozilla announced the 2013 class of Knight-Mozilla Open News Fellows. The program, funded by the Knight Foundation, embeds smart developers in some of the world’s best newsrooms for 10 months — among them ours.  The 2012 fellows are also working at the BBC, The Guardian, Zeit Online and Al Jazeera.  In 2013, three other leading news organizations will be participating, including The New York Times.

Our fellow this year has been Dan Schultz, who has been working in our development team and will continue on for 5 more months. Dan has created a tremendous connection into the MIT media lab and has been experimenting with the data mining of closed captions and working on a project to rebuild Boston.com’s quiz tool (among other cool things).

In 2013, we will be joined by Sonya Song,  who has degrees in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in Beijing, the country’s leading university, and a Master of Philosophy in Journalism from The University of Hong Kong.

Song worked as a journalist and columnist focusing on the Internet, online media and technology sectors at various news outlets. Her writings have touched on a full range of China’s new media sector, including coverage of companies as diverse as CCTV, Google China, Baidu.com, Sohu.com, QQ.com, Sina.com, Taihe Rye Music, and numerous start-ups.Sonya is fluent in not only English and Chinese but also Perl, Python, PHP, and Javascript.

We are excited to have Sonya be joining us early next year.  Here’s more on the program from the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Sonya isn’t the only new face who’ll be helping us innovate.  Through a separate program with the Knight Foundation, we have received a grant to hire two full time staffers to create a connection to the MIT Media Lab and other Boston area universities. We’ve posted the two new positions, a Creative Technologist and a New Media Catalyst, who will be working in the Globe Lab and finding ways to grow our audience, tell stories, and connect us more deeply to Boston’s top universities to explore new ideas. We will also offer fellowships during winter and summer breaks for students to join us to work on interesting projects.

Chris Marstall has some more details on the positions, as well as a celebrity photo from the Lab.

Jeff Moriarty
VP, Digital Products, The Boston Globe
General Manager, Boston.com

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By Jeff Moriarty, VP of Product

The Globe is pleased to that through its partnership with the Knight Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, we will have a developer joining our team next year to help build out future projects at Boston.com and Bostonglobe.com.

Dan Schultz is currently a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab studying in the Information Ecology group. At the Lab, he is also a Research Associate at the Center for Civic Media and says he has learned how to make almost anything. Before coming to MIT Dan received a B.S. in Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about “Connecting People, Content, and Community.”

Here’s a photo of all five new fellows being announced today in London.

We’re excited to see what innovations Dan will build with us.

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By Chris Marstall, Creative Technologist

A few of us from the Globe/boston.com went down to Royale for Tech Stars Boston demo day today. The event is the coming out party for the 12 companies that made the cut this year (some 600 applied). The winners gave up 6% of their company in exchange for three months of rent-free office space in Kendall Square, which came along with an intense networking and mentoring program led by Project 11’s Katie Rae.

We were all impressed. The venue is a nightclub and concert hall, and the lighting, staging and music all hung together to make a slick, quickly-moving show that left a lot of people feeling pumped up.

TechStars coaches the pitch, and it shows. The presentations were polished, well-rehearsed and passionate. The introductions, from luminary mentors like Eran Egozy (Harmonix) and Bill Warner (Avid), were usually witty and sometimes emotional. Many of the mentors were clearly smitten by the entrepreneurs. Zynga exec Nabeel Hyatt was one of a few to announce personal investments.

Many of the startups had impressive customer lists to announce. EverTrue, an alumni-tracking service, has twenty schools signed up, including its CEO’s alma mater, Brown University. Senexx, an Isreali startup that helps workers find experts within their own companies, has signed Novartis and Xerox. Email-support service provider HelpScout announced they’d signed up social media guru Gary Vaynerchuck (who delivered a video testimonial from his iconic WineLibraryTV studio).

Most of the companies announced two dollar figures during their pitch. The first was the amount they were looking to raise from investors, typically between $500,000 and $1.5 million. The next was the amount “committed” so far – money that will only be invested if others top up the round. Evertrue, Senexx, HelpScout, Ginger.io, PromoBoxx, Kinvey, The Tap Lab, Placester and GrabCad all have commitments of this kind, with GrabCad, at $1.1M, the biggest winner.

The companies mostly pitched web services aimed at businesses. Promoboxx helps product makers and retailers combine forces in social media promotions. Ginger.io, an MIT Media Lab spinoff, sells a record of smartphone users’ movements to health companies. Placester automates the posting of real estate ads. Grabcad has created a marketplace for engineering designs. Kinvey has sold 180 mobile developers on its simplified data-sharing infrastructure.

A colorful exception to the business-only rule was the language-learning startup Memrise (as in “Memorize”). Its CEO, Edward Cooke, commandeered an early break in the action to recite several verses of Paradise Lost from memory. He is a “Grandmaster of Memory” who tutored Joshua Foer, author of the 2011 memory-culture bestseller Moonwalking With Einstein. Think of Memrise as flash cards 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0). Cooke’s demo, in which he used his technology to teach the crowd four chinese characters in a minute or so, was the most compelling, and fun, of the bunch. (I still remember them, 5 hours later).

There was a warm, supportive vibe emenating at all times from mentors and entrepreneurs alike. Toward the end of the program “WE LOVE YOU KATIE” was shouted out in unison by a crowd in the balcony; there was hugging on stage and frequent full-throated cheering. It was a spirited revue on the last day of camp.

I was booted out at noon – only investors get to remain for the afternoon networking session. But I’ve got a feeling that before Coolio hits the stage for the afterparty, at least a few of those financing rounds will be filled.

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