Some tidbits that we need to note from the past week or so around the Boston region:
—HubSpot, the fast-growing online marketing software company, posted its annual report online to tout another year of growth. The company says its sales grew 82 percent to $52.5 million in 2012. HubSpot also continues to make noise about going public, with CEO Brian Halligan telling the Boston Business Journal that the company “might file later this year, or next year … I think we’re big enough and predictable enough to go (public) now, but we’re not in a big hurry.” Those kind of pronouncements can also be a prelude to being acquired, however, so stay tuned.
—Harvard Business School announced the 10 winners of $5,000 grants in the second round of its Rock Accelerator Award program (which was previously called the Minimum Viable Product Award). The Rock award program focuses on teaching proto-companies to develop early products in line with the “lean startup” methods popularized by Eric Ries, an entrepreneur in residence at Harvard Business School.
—Some strange news dribbled out of Avid Technology (NASDAQ: [[ticker:AVID]]), the Burlington, MA-based company that makes video and audio editing software. Avid says it is looking into its “current and historical accounting treatment related to bug fixes, upgrades and enhancements to certain products,” and has delayed its most recent earnings report as it irons things out. The announcement, in an SEC filing, comes shortly after CEO Gary Greenfield stepped down.
—Input Factory, a mobile app startup headed by veterans of Bagcheck and PatientsLikeMe, has raised $1.2 million to finance development of Polar, an app that lets users vote on mini-polls. Investors include Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang (now at AME Cloud Ventures) and Greylock Partners’ John Lilly. The money will be used to grow the product and hire more people—Input Factory had just two people working on the effort until the start of the year.
—There’s also some good news from the Zynga Boston diaspora. A group of five former senior Zynga employees—who also were part of the Conduit Labs team acquired by Zynga in 2010—are back together at a game developer called Proletariat, which expects to release its game Letter Rush on iOS next week. Zynga (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ZNGA]]), which has struggled after a fast rise in the casual game market on the back of Facebook, abruptly closed its Boston-area studio in October.
