Try to sleep after that. A quick check of Twitter showed there had been a shootout and possible explosions in East Watertown and that the suspects were also involved in the shooting of an MIT campus police officer late Thursday night. The officer died.

I live in Watertown, a town just west of Boston where overnight police have converged in their hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers. The town —  and actually the entire metropolitan area including Boston, Cambridge, Newton, and Waltham — is now in full lockdown. My house is barely a mile from what appears to be a paramilitary operation but I can hear and see nothing of it. Nor did I hear the gunfire and explosions that rocked East Watertown in the early morning hours, and which neighbors captured on cell phone video.

In the hours after the robo-call, there was the usual flurry of information and misinformation on Twitter as well as the TV stations — one of the suspects was erroneously identified on Reddit and other sites as missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi. One of the local TV outlets, after spending a half hour rehashing what had been reported and misreported by others, then dropped the feed of the State Police’s statement during the night. Mind boggling.

Friends and family of missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi are frustrated that he was falsely accused of the bombing: ow.ly/kdZL2—
Ted Nesi (@tednesi) April 19, 2013

Folks quickly turned to police scanner apps to get the lowdown. (Ustream then picked up another app here.) That sparked a debate on just how responsible that is.

Police scanner just went down. It's obvious they are trying to keep their operations more private. #watertown—
Josh Varela (@JVarela13) April 19, 2013

Finding out what happened required triangulation — as one Twitter correspondent put it, cops on the scanners are having conversations, they don’t know what’s going on either.

Reports were all over the map. Both suspects of the Marathon bombing were involved; both were killed; one was captured, one was killed; the reality emerging this morning is that one suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was dead; the other, his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was at large wearing a suicide vest. Or not. The latter appears to be suspect number 2 (white hat guy) in the Boston Marathon bombings.

What this shows is that proximity to an event means nothing in terms of accuracy unless you are an actual eyewitness. The information I had a mile away was available to everyone.

The lockdown continues.

Photos courtesy Getty Images.

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Boland co-founded phone baseband chipmaker Icera in 2002, heading up the company as president and CEO for nine years. In 2011, Nvidia — anxious to add radio chips to its mobile processor portfolio — acquired it for $367 million in cash. Boland stayed on as Nvidia’s SVP of mobile communications, but according to his LinkedIn profile Boland left the company in October.

Cambridge-based Neul makes wireless chips, but not for the cellular industry. It’s focusing on the emerging white spaces broadband segment — in particular the Weightless standard gaining traction in the U.K.

White spaces use the spectrum in between TV transmissions for two-day way data communications. The Weightless Special Interest Group hopes to use those airwaves as a backbone network for the internet of things, connecting low-power devices such as smart meters and mobile sensors.

Neul’s principal founders will remain with the company. Former CEO James Collier will become CTO, while William Webb has moved from CTO to chief strategy officer and will maintain his role as CEO of the Weightless SIG. Formed in 2010, Neul has quite the pedigree in mobile silicon. Many of the company’s key executives founded CSR, the U.K. fabless semiconductor giant. Neul, however, has only 45 employees and spent its first two years developing its first radio chip.

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The historic space — in the old brick Kendall Boiler and Tank building — will be home to big data practitioners from academia, private and public industry. Hack/reduce, which sports the motto “code big or go home”, aims to bring top talent together to train the next-generation of sorely needed data scientists, Chris Lynch,  co-founder of hack/reduce told me.

Hack/reduce co-founder Chris Lynch

The facility can accommodate 150 dedicated hackers and is fielding 50 applications per week for spots. The first residents are Sqrrll, a big data startup launched by former National Security Agency technologists. “These 7 young men out of NSA spent 5 years building a big data store in Washington and now we have it in Boston,” said Lynch, who co-founded Vertica.

Lynch said he was inspired to give back to the community by a conversation with Diane Patrick, the wife of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. ”Mrs. Patrick told me about the governor’s transition from a top position at Coke to public service and said he knew he’d be measured based on what he gave back versus what he earned,” Lynch said.

Lynch, whose first job was at Maynard, Mass.-based Digital Equipment Corp., was frustrated seeing so many young computer scientists and programmers — including his own son — go elsewhere for jobs. If hack/reduce can  attract enough talent, only goodness will result, he said: “As we incubate young people, some will go to work at Fidelity as consumers of big data and some will go to EMC or Microsoft and other companies.”

The other hack/reduce co-founder is Frederic Lalonde, an entrepreneur and math scientist from Montreal. “Hack/reduce is his brainchild,” Lynch said. He hopes Boston’s resurging status as a database hub will help the effort.

Hack/reduce sponsors include Microsoft, Google, IBM, EMC’s Green Plum division, along with top venture capitalists and the Massachusetts Technology Cooperative.

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The rise of open source, cloud computing and the newly created distribution channels has also dramatically changed how solutions and businesses are created – known as “lean methodology” – and has been embodied by The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

In a similar manner, the costs associated with startups that include a hardware component are also going through a rapid decline.

And at the same time as these cost reductions, Kickstarter has created a marketplace for the crowd funding of hardware projects. More importantly, it has created a framework for startups to essentially run “smoke tests” — as advocated by Ries — to ascertain whether there is demand for a product or service, as well as the price points that the market might accept.

So why does hardware or Internet of Things need an accelerator?

While many of the conditions are highly conducive to support the rise of Maker communities, it’s still a relatively immature ecosystem. Much of the activity and noise is focused on just hacking around rather than having a commercial focus. It’s a good thing and encourages innovation, but tapping into this high energy Maker culture with a guiding hand from experienced mentors has the potential of spawning new ideas – the black swans for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

More interestingly, this emerging market is also attracting some extremely smart entrepreneurs who avoid the trends and fashions of others and like to play on the edges. The technical complexities associated with hardware – the things that make it hard – immediately limits participation to only the brightest engineers.

But it’s not all a bed of roses. It has been previously highlighted that technology projects have one of the lowest success rates among all Kickstarter categories, with only 29% percent being successful. Only fashion projects do worse. In addition, not every project goes well. Delays occur, especially with more complex projects. Some teams over stretch themselves and fail to deal with many aspects of the delivery that are new to them. Even Kickstarter has been forced to admit that “it’s not uncommon for things to take longer than expected.”

And this is where accelerators can help to nurture and support the best and the brightest in this emerging Maker community. As entrepreneurs with domain experience and expertise, mentors can provide first hand knowledge in managing the complexities associated with designing, prototyping, building and the manufacturing of physical devices — which reduces the operational and investment risks of projects.

There are other ways that an accelerator can help, too.

Being a hardware entrepreneur is also a very lonely existence, unlike our more popular and mainstream web service cousins. The peer to peer learning and cohort effect of getting the best and brightest entrepreneurs in the same sector working alongside each other cannot be underestimated, both during the program and in the future.

Finally, there are real practical differences between hardware and software which make being part of a dedicated accelerator even more valuable.

Hardware development has specific resource requirements that include access to a workshop space that with, say, 2D laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC routers and so on as well as support from industrial designers and engineers. Any of these individual resources might be prohibitively expensive or difficult to source, but within the framework of an accelerator their shared cost and accessibility can be invaluable.

Hardware is hard. But that’s what makes it fun and highly investable – given the right resources, environment and support structures. Why shouldn’t the Internet of Things have a dedicated acceleration program?

Jon Bradford is the CEO and co-founder of Springboard, which launched its SpringboardIoT accelerator this week. Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is the founder of Good Night Lamp, a new Internet of Things startup.

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Some of the same names pop up in both announcements, specifically ARM, the British chip-design powerhouse whose architecture underpins almost every mobile processor out there, and white space comms pioneer Neul, a firm that boasts some of the UK’s leading lights in the wireless space.

One must have standards

Let’s tackle the standards thing first, as that’s going to be utterly crucial in the development of the internet of things, or machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, as it has more traditionally been known. Here’s a great explanation from Kevin as to why standards are so important here – it also lists some of the rival standards initiatives that are going on.

The Weightless standard we’re concerned with here comes from Neul, which was founded by veterans of Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) and other top ‘Silicon Fen’ firms.

The royalty-free open standard exploits the so-called ‘white spaces’ between TV transmissions, which are there to avoid interference between the transmission but which can generally be used for short-to-medium-range wireless communications without causing too many problems. The only hitch I can see with this approach is the fact that white space usage is not permissible in every country – it depends on the disposition of the national telecoms regulator.

Weightless was unveiled last year, and now it has a special interest group (SIG) to push it worldwide. SIGs are basically partnerships, and this one’s a doozy: apart from Neul and ARM (also from the Cambridge region), it also includes CSR and Cable & Wireless Worldwide.

“This is a very important milestone for Weightless,” Neul CEO William Webb said. “The SIG now has a board comprising leading players spanning processors, networks, chipsets and innovative wireless technologies. Weightless has gained a solid legal framework enabling royalty-free licensing of terminal-related technology. Our plan is to rapidly grow membership from our current base of 50 high-technology companies and I would strongly encourage interested parties to join this world-changing initiative.”

ARM CTO Mike Muller – whose company must be licking its lips at the ginormous market represented by the internet of things – gave a timely reminder of the kind of use cases we’re looking at here: “the next wave of connectivity across smart grids, enhanced healthcare, smart cities, asset tracking, sensors and future applications as yet unimagined”.

Stimulation too

Over to that other announcement now. This one’s from Springboard, an accelerator program that straddles London and Cambridge, and it involves the establishment of a three-month ‘accelerator bootcamp’.

This time, ARM and Neul are joined by consumer goods behemoth Unilever and the folks behind the Raspberry Pi ultra-cheap computer project (which, you guessed it, is also based in Cambridge).

The program will accept 10 teams in any area of internet-of-things tech, and give founders over $150k-worth of free services, seed capital and mentoring. Needless to say, the mentors are of a pretty high standard – they’ve even got Hermann Hauser.

I’ll skip the quotes from the big players on this one and go straight to Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton:

“To date, the internet of things has been largely the playground of corporates. Dramatically falling hardware costs are shifting innovation toward smaller teams in a similar manner to how web technologies have evolved over the last 10 years.”

It’s very interesting to see the UK staking its claim in the internet of things, and it does make complete sense. Companies such as ARM and CSR have made their names in the low-power wireless stakes, and that’s what this sector is all about.

And now their push is beginning in earnest. Game on.

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“We want to build a community and innovation around big data to make Boston a leader there,” founding executive director Abby Fichtner told me. Hackers with expertise in biotech, medical devices, consumer web, energy, IT, telecommunications, music and art are all welcome to apply.

Boston locals see big data as a way to recapture some the high-tech glory that faded after the minicomputer era, as the center of gravity moved to Silicon Valley and Seattle. Now the plan is to capitalize both on experienced veterans left from Boston’s booming minicomputer years and young talent from area colleges to rebuild that high-tech hub in a big data mold.

Hack/reduce was founded this summer with some state funding and support from Chris Lynch, former president of Vertica Systems, a local big data company now owned by by HP. The group just moved into a historic building in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Fichtner, formerly startup evangelist for Microsoft’s New England Research & Development (NERD) center, came aboard as the hacker space launched in August.