On Thursday afternoon Deloitte and Touche was running their fourth annual play bocce at the Tech Center afternoon networking event. The main draw suggested that we would be able to play bocce with venture capitalists and potential investors. Actually the main draw was also free food and an open bar. Since Jeremy doesn’t have a car I had driven him over to Burlington in the morning and he didn’t have a way to get home other than to go to the VC Bocce thing Aaron, Jeremy, and I all wandered over to this Waltham event in two cars. Upon arriving both Jeremy and I were lacking in the pre-registration category so we didn’t have our nifty name tags pre-made. So we got the low-budget ghetto hand written name tags. Jeremy was one step lower on the name hierarchy because I at least had a card to drop in their bucket of who attended. Jeremy had to write his name onto one of my cards. I suspect they use these business cards for witching ceremonies creating broths fed to CEOs for special corporate events like IPOs and FEC investigations. “Eye of newt, tongue of frog, business card of software engineer, cackle, cackle.” Actually business cards in buckets perform an important role in the economy. They are consumed by hungry interns who diligently enter large buckets full of them into spread sheets and then generate beautiful but useless reports to new employees at consulting firms who then roll-up the reports to real partners who ignore them and are glad to not be distracted by the underlings but also happy that the underlings are miserable and staying-up all night making reports.

The bocce game itself was quite fun for almost an entire game. The people we were playing with were not venture capitalists. I actually didn’t meet more than one venture capitalist the whole night. Most people were either other entrepreneurs looking to find the venture capitalists, a ton of young accountant/consultants from Deloitte clustered together and chatting about how they were going to make a great report out of the business cards later, and some service providers looking to sell things like part time CXOs, leasing at high rates on office equipment, executive recruiting, and IPO document management. I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place or not but since the bar was open and the Corona’s had limes in them I wasn’t going to complain too much. So we played Bocce against a pair of people, one of whom I swear was Slobidan Milosevich or Mikhail Gorbachev but since he spoke very little English I never figured out his name or nationality. His business partner was a tall guy who thought that bocce wasn’t quite as much fun as boule, a similar game with an oblong shaped throwing stone that processes and spins in cycles after being thrown. I’m still waiting for space bocce although the game might take too long.

In my defense the Waltham Tech Center is at the top of a hill overlooking a large reservoir. The road itself that leads to the parking lot is at the bottom of a cliff that is at the end of some woods with a steep incline that are at the base of the hill where the grass forms a slight saddleback where while there is a stone barrier, the stones are mainly level to the grass, especially where the saddle reaches it’s lowest point into the woods leading to the cliff leading to the road. The bocce courts we played on were defined by string rather than regulation wooden border bocce courts. The end of the court was at the top of the saddle leading down to the woods. We did manage to play until the score was seven to five when I decided to go for a long and high shot where the white ball was near the back corner of the court. The big green ball bounced once and then started rolling first slowly and then more quickly down the hill. One attendee stood by and watched the ball roll past him and then proceeded to watch the ball tinker down the saddle through the grass to the low point in the stones lining the border to the woods, hop over a stone and then roll down through the woods.

After looking carefully for the ball in the woods and nearly spraining my ankle I was unable to locate it anywhere. Part of the problem was that it was a dark green ball in the middle of some fairly dark green wooded area. I went all the way down the side of the cliff to see if there was a ball at the end of the road but even if it had reached the road it would likely have rolled another half mile down the winding road until it reached the street in front of the reservoir. So Jeremy and I switched places and he went to look for the ball while I continued to play the two folks with only three balls. I was doing fine and then Jeremy returned so that we could play some more.

Among the highlights of who I saw at the event was Mr. Jim Levinger, formerly of Pixeldance and now working at a new start-up that produces software for reading encoded messages through camera phones. The camera phone takes a picture of some dots and it then knows what to do next. It looked quite cool but I couldn’t think of the killer application for this other than in an upcoming spy movie where messages could be hidden in paintings or walls and a camera phone with the decoder software was the only way to read the message. That would be quite cool. He should call the DOD. Some other folks were doing some RFID work and I told them that the killer application for RFID would be a system to find the bocce ball lost in the woods.