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Microsoft vacating a Kendall Square office,sending workers to Burlington

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Microsoft's office in Burlington, which formerly housed Nokia.

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Curt WoodwardFollow @curtwoodward

2 days ago

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Real estate, Microsoft, Burlington, Tech, Robert Davy, NERD Center

Microsoft is clearing out one of its two Kendall Square offices, sending 300 sales

and marketing employees to Burlington in a multiyear move that will begin later

this year.

In a blog post Wednesday, Microsoft general manager Robert Davy said the sales,

marketing and services group workers will move to a former Nokia office in

Burlington.

Microsoft’s office at 255 Main Street in Cambridge, on the edge of the MIT

campus, will be emptied once the lease expires in 2020, the company said.

Microsoft first moved into that space in 2012.

The new Burlington office “places us in a centralized location close to Boston, but

with easier access to all the surrounding states in our sales region,” Davy wrote.

Microsoft also has branch offices in Hartford, Conn. and Rochester, NY.

About 450 employees in Microsoft’s research and development group will remain at

1 Memorial Drive in Cambridge, known as the New England Research and

Development Center, or NERD.

The company also plans to renovate the 150,000 squarefoot NERD Center to give

employees more elbow room and space to add new hires.

Kendall Square has become a hotbed for biotech and pharmaceutical companies in

recent years, which has helped raise rents and forced smaller tech startups into

other areas of Boston and Cambridge.

Several West Coast tech companies also have branch offices in the neighborhood,

including Google, Amazon, and Twitter. Homegrown tech companies such as

Akamai and HubSpot also are headquartered around Kendall Square.

Updated 5:05 pm with detail on lease.

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WEB

Globe sells .boston domain, but local nonprofitswill get discount on addresses

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Gerrit Photography via Flickr

By Hiawatha Bray

Globe Staff

2 days ago

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Web, Media, Internet, ICANN, TLDs

Nearly four years ago, The Boston Globe tried to get in on an Internet land rush

when the number of domains — the .com, .org, or .edu in online addresses — were

expanded. Now, the Globe’s parent company has decided to stick to more familiar

territory.

Last week, Boston Globe Media Partners LLC sold the right to sell Internet

addresses ending in “.boston” to Minds + Machines Group Ltd., an Internet address

marketing firm with offices in Los Angeles and Dublin.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and it must be approved by the

Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Number (ICANN), the global

organization that manages Internet addresses.

When the deal is completed, Minds + Machines will be able to sell Internet

addresses specifically targeted to Bostonarea businesses. For example, a cab

company might run a “taxi.boston” website, or a diner might buy

“joesburgers.boston.”

“We’re superexcited,” said Minds + Machines chief marketing officer Toby Hall.

“We see it as a massive opportunity for communities.”

A thousand “.boston” addresses will be set aside for government use, while another

15,000 will be made available to local nonprofit organizations at a discount price of

$8.75 per year. The city also requires that between 10 and 30 percent of all

revenues from address sales be put into a fund to support various community

organizations.

Boston officials, who must also approve the deal, said they were pleased that the

pending sale will soon allow businesses and residents to use “.boston” Internet

addresses.

“You have this incredible asset,” said Jascha FranklinHodge, chief information

officer for the city of Boston, “and we’re finally going to be able to bring it to

market.”

With nearly 300 million registered online addresses, most of the easytoremember

domain names — like bostonglobe.com, comcast.net or npr.org — are long gone. In

2008, ICANN launched a program to create thousands of new domains, like adding

area codes to the phone network.

ICANN began taking applications for new domains in 2012. Thousands of

businesses and organizations worldwide signed up, each of them paying a $185,000

application fee. Many of the new domains have already gone online, such as “.top,”

“.xyz” and “.club.”

Kevin Murphy, editor of Domain Incite, a Londonbased online newsletter that

tracks the industry, said the new domains have been less popular than many

predicted. “There were some people who thought this was going to be a getrich

quick scheme and have been disappointed,” Murphy said.

But he added that addresses based on the names of cities are doing quite well. For

example, about 70,000 businesses or individuals have purchased “.nyc” addresses,

which cost about $20 a year; another 60,000 have signed up to use the “.london”

domain, priced at around $40 per year.

The Globe is unloading “.boston” just one month after the company received

permission from ICANN to begin selling addresses using the new domain. The

Globe first filed for the rights to “.boston” in 2012, when it was owned by the New

York Times Co.

But the following year, the newspaper was acquired by John Henry, principal owner

of the Boston Red Sox. The Globe’s new management sees the Internet address

business as a distraction from the Globe’s central business of providing information

through its print and online outlets, said Jane Bowman, the Globe’s vice president

of marketing and sales development.

“The .boston domain business was inherited by the current management team and

is not perceived as core to the mission of supporting the highest quality journalism

in the region,” Bowman said in a statement.

Minds + Machines was founded in 2008 to help companies apply for new Internet

domains and to sell addresses.

The company specializes in the sale of citybased Internet addresses. It controls the

“.miami” domain, in a deal with the Miami, Fla. city government, and has a

partnership stake in the “.london” domain. Minds + Machines, which trades on the

London stock exchange, earned a 2014 profit of $22 million.

Companies like Minds + Machines can make additional money by setting aside

some “premium” addresses in hopes of charging a lot more for them. For instance,

a local restaurant chain might pay thousands to own an address like “pizza.boston.”

Such premium Internet addresses can attract even bigger money. In 2010, the

social network Facebook paid $8.5 million for the right to control “fb.com.”

The Globe could still get a piece of the action. The company will retain a small

ownership stake in “.boston,” and Bowman said the Globe “will receive certain

future revenues” from Minds + Machines as part of the deal.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at hiawatha.bray@globe.com. Follow him on

Twitter @GlobeTechLab.

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