Boston Tech Roundup: Narvii, Q Factor, SiteSpect, & More

This week is, shall we say, eventful in Boston. There’s the MassChallenge awards gala tonight, something else going on at Fenway, and the MassTLC unConference on Friday. Apart from all that, here’s the news:

—Q Factor Communications, a Waltham, MA-based startup working on software to improve video (and other rich media) delivery to smartphones and tablets, has raised a $6.5 million Series A round from Sigma Prime Ventures and Venrock. The company is led by founder and CEO Subhash Roy.

—Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications has opened a mobile innovation center in the Central Square neighborhood of Cambridge. The speech-and-interfaces company says its staff in Cambridge will do R&D in areas such as voice biometrics, wearables, natural language processing, and home automation. Nuance expects to hire dozens in Cambridge over the coming months.

—For Haley Joel Osment, it was “I see dead people.” For Phong Ly, it’s iSeeCars.com. If you’re in the market for a used vehicle, you might want to check out this new search site. The Boston-area startup is also doing analysis on used-car prices across different cities in the U.S.

—Boston-based website marketing and testing firm SiteSpect continues to fly under the radar, but probably not for long. The bootstrapped and profitable company has just signed up real estate marketplace Trulia as a customer, joining the likes of Walmart, Wayfair, and Staples. SiteSpect is led by CEO and founder Eric Hansen.

—Keep an eye on Boston-area startup Narvii. Just sayin’.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.