If there were a heat map showing how high-tech entrepreneurs are distributed around Boston, there would be a new red spot at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge’s Central Square.
From the outside, the four-story office building is distinguished mainly by its white-tiled facade and its large plate-glass windows. Deep inside is the office of Carl Barron, the building’s 93-year-old owner and landlord, long adored by neighbors as the unofficial “Mayor of Central Square.”
And now the building is also home to a gaggle of venture-backed Web and mobile startups, including Conduit Labs on the fourth floor and Oneforty on the second. Conduit is best known as the creator of the online music game Loudcrowd, and Oneforty has built a groundbreaking “Twitter app store” guiding Twitter fans to tools that make the microblogging service more useful.
Dozens of familiar faces from the Boston startup and investing scene were on hand for a joint Conduit/Oneforty housewarming party last Friday night, which was also the occasion for the unveiling of the Awesome Foundation’s March 2010 grant (it went to a London biology undergraduate, Charles Fracchia, who’s creating bio-engineered inks). At the party, I learned from Conduit CEO Nabeel Hyatt and Oneforty CEO Laura Fitton that both companies will be sharing their spaces with smaller startups.
Already subletting space from Conduit, according to Hyatt, are Shareaholic, maker of a social sharing plugin for Web browsers, and AccelGolf, which is developing GPS-driven golf apps for smartphones.
Jay Meattle, founder and CEO of Shareaholic, says his company moved into the Conduit space in mid-February. “We have a private room that can easily fit in 3-4 people, which is perfect for our size,” Meattle says. “It’s like an office within an office, with all the amenities of a big space like a kitchen, conference rooms, et cetera.”
William Sulinski, CEO and co-founder of Portland, ME-based AccelGolf, says the Cambridge outpost will become the startup’s sales hub.
Fitton says she’s not sure yet who will move into Oneforty’s space, but that they’ll likely be other entrepreneurs funded by Oneforty’s investors, who include Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners, San Francisco-based Javelin Venture Partners, and a bevy of angel investors such as Dave McClure, Roger Ehrenberg, Lee Hower, and Andy Sack.
There’s “a two-fold benefit” from having other companies supported by Oneforty’s investors in the same space, says Fitton. “It keeps the energy up, and it also means our investors and advisors are coming by the office all the time, so we can grab them for extra questions.”
The new cluster of startups in the Barron Building is another example of the informal incubator phenomenon that Erin spotlighted back in February. In these work/hangout spaces, sheer proximity tends to
