Christopher Calnan

The founder of a Maynard dot-com whose Super Bowl commercials came to symbolize the excesses that led to the tech economy’s crash earlier this decade is taking a crack at his own professional 2.0.

Mike Ford, a co-founder of Computer.com Inc., has launched a website for suburban families to create their own social networks and schedule anything from block parties to play dates.

Ford gained notoriety in 2000 when he spent $3 million of the company’s $5.8 million in venture capital on three 30-second Super Bowl commercials — only to watch the business hit the skids the following year.

It was nearly 40 years ago when New England staked its claim as a hub for the computer-aided design industry.

The ripple effect since has led to a new crop of firms that now develop niche software tools in specialty CAD markets to design everything from the latest European motorcycles to selling refrigerators.

It all started in 1969, when industry pioneer Computervision Inc. was founded in Bedford. Three years later, Prime Computer Corp. was started in Natick, and the two companies merged in 1988, eventually adopting the Computervision name.

When Needham-based Parametric Technology Corp. acquired Computervision for $490 million, it formed what remains today as one of the CAD industry giants alongside others like SolidWorks Corp. in Concord.

Boston’s Iron Mountain Inc. is bridging its conventional storage business and its digital-storage operations with a new unit that converts paper documents to digitized images.

Although Iron Mountain data centers have been producing digital images for customers for more than a decade, the new division was formed to centralize the business and to produce uniform packaged products.

Known as the document-conversion services unit, already the business is converting 20 million documents a month, company officials said.

Three years ago, the former lead engineer of the Roomba vacuum cleaner shifted his engineering focus from vacuums to video and began developing a virtual television studio set that some observers believe could change the video-production industry.

Last month, Eliot Mack and his company, Cinital LLC, publicly showed the latest version of that studio technology — which creates a high-definition, 3-D set at about one-fifth the cost of existing systems.

Known as Previzion, the technology behind the product could level the playing field for smaller studios, according to those in the TV production industry.

Two Cambridge entrepreneurs launched their first software product this week to provide users with reports on their e-mailing habits — a crowded market with a large growth trajectory, particularly among enterprise IT departments looking to reduce wasted time.

Xobni Corp., taken from the words “in box” spelled backward and pronounced “zob-nee,” is offering its program free for personal users and plans to launch a business version within two months, said co-founders Adam Smith, 21, and Matt Brezina, 25.

The idea behind the software is to save businesses — Xobni’s eventual target market — money by identifying inefficient e-mailing practices. They consider the software an e-mail productivity tool.

Business, technology and family matters converged for serial entrepreneurs David Friend and Jeff Flowers last year.

That’s when the two decided on their latest collaboration, a Web-based company that automatically backs up personal computer files. But it was pair of digital disasters that prompted the move.

In 2004, Flowers’ wife lost two years’ worth of family photos when her laptop was stolen. Then Friend’s daughter lost a college research paper and all of her iTunes MP3 files when her personal computer crashed.

So they founded Boston-based Carbonite Inc. — a move into the vast consumer space the two businessmen relish.

Recent University of Virginia graduates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were on a train back to Maryland last April when they got the call that changed their lives.

The two buddies had come to Boston to apply for a summer program that would give them living expenses while starting a new website collecting popular news stories recommended by the site’s visitors. It would be called Reddit.com.

But the venture firm that had offered to pay their expenses, Y Combinator in Cambridge, had considered 227 startup proposals – and Reddit hadn’t made the cut.

So Huffman and Ohanian began the trip back home to Charlottesville, Va., dejected but determined to prove Y Combinator officials wrong.