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Boston Startup Play140 Acquihired By OOmba Founded By The Creator Of Atari

Play140 CEO Shawn Broderick and his team thought they were onto something that could be game changing. The company had built an acronym game, called The Acronym Game, to be played on Twitter. Their thinking was simple, make Twitter more than just communication. It was a novel idea, play games on Twitter, I mean everyone was doing it on Facebook.

The game was simple, see who could make the most clever phrase out of the acronym provided. For whatever reason the game never took off. The company’s Twitter feed shut down and they stopped posting on their blog. Boston.com reports that the employees of the company, including two of the three co-founders went to find other jobs. That left Broderick and the company’s CTO Michael Johnson left manning what was left of the game.

Fast forward to this week and they’ve had some rather exciting news. A venture funded startup called Oomba has acquired Play140 for an undisclosed amount. What’s really interesting is that this startup’s founders include Nolan Bushnell. Now if y you’re thinking that name sounds familiar, it’s because Bushnell founded Atari and Chuck E Cheese among other feats in his career.

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MA Startup: Copiun Closes $5M Series A Round For Entreprise Alternative To DropBox

Cloud based storage is a hot topic these days. We’re all anxiously awaiting for Google’s product in the space, said to be called Google Drive. The top contenders in the space already are the popular Dropbox and equally as popular Box.com. Both services offer user the ability to store any kind of file they’d like in their own personal space on the cloud. Both are also using promotions with vast amounts of free storage to attract personal users. However some IT departments don’t feel that traditional cloud based storage offerings are adequate for enterprise.

That’s where Massachusetts based Copiun comes in. Founded by CEO Puneesh Chaudhry and plans to tackle cloud based storage secure enough for corporate IT departments. Chaudhry has found that many people like DropBox however they want it more secure.

“They are saying, can you make my corporate data accessible on these devices, in a secure way,” he told the Boston Business Journal.

While making cloud based data services more secure for enterprise they are also tackling the BYOD market of prosumers as well. More and more people are choosing to bring their personal device to work. There are a variety of software solutions that allow IT departments to securely allow those employees to use a separate “area’ of their phone for business and another for personal.

“You could be sitting in a Starbucks and not connected to the corporate network, and whatever data your company has authorized to be accessible on a device, you can access it, edit it and sync it back. And it only goes to the corporate repository,” Chaudhry said in the same interview.

Copiun’s current $5 million dollar series A round was led by Maryland Venture Capital Firm Novak Biddle Venture Partners. They previously received $1.86 million dollars in a 2010 round led by Boston venture groups; Hub Angels, Launchpad Ventures and Beacon Angels.

Source: Boston Business Journal

Massachusetts Startup: 7 Lunches Brings Lunch Specials Right To Your Email Or Phone

The daily deals space is blowing up like crazy. Other than social discovery apps, daily deals has to be the hottest app platform out there right now. It’s getting crowded, but every once in a while something different comes along in the daily deals space worth mentioning.

7 Lunches is one of those things. With the hustle and bustle lives we all live these days, the cost conscious business professional doesn’t have time to comb through lunch specials on restaurant websites. They also don’t have the time to cruise down to their local hot spot to just “see” if there is a good special. We need to know the specials and we need to know them now.

That’s how co-founder and co-creator of 7 lunches, Ryan Maturski came up with the idea for 7 lunches. He was eating in a local sub shop in North Adams, MA and he told the owner that he should send his daily lunch specials out via email. Voila. Marturski and co-founder Jeff Lee set out to do just that, not just with the sub shop but with every restaurant that they could get to participate.

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New Start Up Will Let Developers Sell Their App (as in the business) E-Bay Style

When I first heard about Apptopia and the words “app” “sell” and “purchase” were in the same conversation I instantly thought we had another third party app store on our hands. No, that’s far from what Apptopia is.

This Boston based start up is headed by Jonathan Kay and Eli Sapir. Kay was the Ambassador of Buzz for Grasshopper, the phone service for startups. Sapir was the former Entrepreneur in Residence at GreatPoint Ventures. Sapir also founded GPush a Gmail notification iPhone app. It was GPush, and his difficulty selling the business which prompted Apptopia.

Apptopia is a marketplace, not for downloads, but for app developers to sell their businesses, not just licensing either, the whole shooting match. Betabeat characterized Apptopia as an exit strategy for unprepared developers.

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