Shopping hits homestretch

If yesterday's snow put a crimp in your holiday shopping plans, fret not: Today is "Free Shipping Day," and close to 900 online stores have agreed to a new change this year — no minimum purchase required for orders with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve.

With Christmas just a week away, 49.9 percent of consumers expect to finish their shopping online, according to the National Retail Federation.

Meanwhile, this weekend's "Super Saturday" is projected to be among the busiest shopping days of the holiday season for brick-and-mortar stores.

Analyst Ken Perkins said he expects those sales to finally pick up after a couple of weeks of the "typical December doldrums" that follow Black Friday weekend.

In-store retail sales fell 0.8 percent last week from the same period last year, and foot traffic dropped 19.9 percent, as a weekend snowstorm hit the Northeast and Midwest, retail tracking firm ShopperTrak said yesterday.

"The issue is going to be whether it really picks up and there's a crush, or did more sales go online the previous two weeks" said Perkins, of Swampscott's Retail Metrics Inc. "We would expect the retailers ... to ramp up discounts in order to generate more traffic for this final push."

Toys'R'Us yesterday said its stores would stay open for 87 straight hours starting Saturday at 6 a.m. to take advantage of the final rush through 9 p.m. Christmas Eve.

But armchair shoppers can find online stores participating in the sixth annual Free Shipping Day at FreeShippingDay.com. The for-profit venture derives revenue from participating retailers.

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B.R.A. adds huddle to end Menino era with project OKs

The Boston Redevelopment Authority is squeezing in an additional meeting Jan. 2 to approve development projects before the Menino administration comes to an end.

"The lending and financing community is very confident in Boston right now, so we want to take advantage of that," BRA spokeswoman Melina Schuler said. "There are projects in the pipeline that we think are going to be ready."

A BRA board meeting tomorrow has hearings on proposed projects, including Boston Properties and Delaware North's 
$950 million redevelopment of the old Boston Garden site into a mixed-use complex with a 600-foot tower and a Star Market. A vote on $7.8 million in tax breaks also is expected.

Other projects up for approval are a 21-story, 202-room hotel at Tremont and Stuart streets; Trinity Place, a 33-story building with 220 hotel rooms and 142 residential units; 1350 Boylston St., a 200,000-square-foot building with 200-plus residential units and ground-floor retail; and Innovation Square, a 355,000-square-foot research and development/manufacturing facility in the Boston Marine Industrial Park.

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Nonprofit to invest $20M in South End

Community Builders Inc. is planning more than $20 million in renovations to its South End properties, including 32 additional apartment units it has acquired for 
$5 million.

The Hub-headquartered nonprofit housing developer, which has a 49-year history with affordable housing in the South End, will outfit a total of 146 apartments in 29 South End buildings with new safety systems, upgraded heating systems and improved handicap accessibility. The work is scheduled for completion in late 2014.

Included in the rehab program will be the apartments in eight separate, but contiguous buildings at 160-174 West Springfield St. that Community Builders purchased from Ebenezer Homes Associates.

"The acquisition ensures continued affordability and professional management of the Ebenezer-owned apartments as part of the (Community Builders) portfolio," spokeswoman Stephanie Anderson Garrett said.

Community Builders recently formed Historic South End Limited Partnership to combine into one entity the West Springfield Street units and the two other South End Section 8 developments slated for renovations.

It is financing the acquisition and rehab with tax-exempt bonds, 4 percent low-income housing tax credits from the state, federal and state historic tax credits, and a $22.9 million loan from the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency, according to Garrett.

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Google will keep robot co. in Mass.

Boston Dynamics — the maker of uncannily agile robots including Cheetah, WildCat and BigDog — is staying in Massachusetts for now after its acquisition by Google, a purchase that could draw investors to other robotics companies in the state and ultimately lead to more jobs.

A Google spokesman yesterday declined to comment. Marc Raibert, the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who founded Boston Dynamics in 1992, said in an email:

"We have had a great time building our unusual robots and bringing them this far along. Now we are excited to see how much further ahead we can take robotics, working with Google's gangbuster team. Our entire robotics team will continue on, working here in Waltham."

The acquisition — Google's eighth in robotics in the past six months — "materially changes the odds of getting a return if you're a prospective investor in robot companies," said Colin Angle, CEO and co-founder of Bedford-based iRobot.

"Massachusetts is kind of the Silicon Valley of the robot industry, with more than 50 companies here," Angle said.

"If these exits create more of an appetite for investments in robot companies, Massachusetts will benefit disproportionately because we're the hot spot for robot entrepreneurship in the world. Even though we're losing one of our top-tier robot companies as an independent business ... we could see the creation of new jobs as other robot entrepreneurs found new companies here."

Angle said he suspects Google acquired Boston Dynamics to help develop an autonomous car that can drive itself and deliver packages, which could lower costs and decrease delivery times for e-commerce.

Jordan Graham contributed to this report.

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Dropcam Pro monitor remains best in the business

Dropcam Pro ($199, various retailers)

The sequel to the Dropcam's original Wi-Fi video monitor offers twice as sharp viewing, a wider field of view and zoom capabilities. A two-way talk feature allows you to chat through the camera to whoever — or whatever — you're monitoring.

The good: The original Dropcam has been our reliable baby monitor for the last year, and the new version simply improves on an excellent product. The accompanying app (official apps are for iOS and Android, and a customer-created app was recently added to the Windows Phone store) allows you to monitor the camera from anywhere as long as you have a smartphone or tablet. Notifications pop up on your device alerting you to any movement in the field of view. The camera's night vision is as good as anything else on the market.

The bad: If you want your video footage saved in the cloud — for instance, if you're spying on the new nanny — you'll need a monthly subscription. Cloud storage subscription plans can be pricey, from $10 to $30 a month, while the livestream is free.

The bottom line: If you want a reliable video monitoring system with night vision, look no further than the Dropcam Pro. And for $50 less, the original Dropcam is still a good option for basic monitoring of pets and kids.

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Tablet solution in sight

A Boston nonprofit is putting the finishing touches on the world's first affordable "tablet" for the blind, an Android-based device that is part of an innovative campaign to turn around a little-known literacy crisis among the visually impaired.

"If only 12 percent of children could read today, it'd be the biggest discussion in the world," said Brian A. MacDonald, the president of National Braille Press, located in the Fenway. "But because the blind are such a small population, it's not very well known."

Literacy among the blind has plummeted in the past four decades to that astonishing number — 12 percent — due in part to the lack of qualified Braille instructors in regular classrooms, the flipside of the mainstreaming movement.

MacDonald and his team of techies hope their Braille tablet for the blind — dubbed the B2G-20 — will fill this void, eventually leveling the playing field for a population increasingly mired in unemployment and poverty.

But what does a tablet for a blind person look like? For starters, it doesn't require a display screen. Instead, a 20-character text output field features tiny pins that pop up and down to form Braille letters. An eight-key standard Braille keyboard for data input lies above the display. The whole thing is about the size of a Kindle.

Designed by assistive technology pioneer Deane Blazie and hardware engineer Mike Romeo, both volunteers, the tablet runs the latest version of Android. It has speech recognition, GPS, Wi-Fi, cell service, optical text recognition and even a camera.

The speech recognition is linked to Braille tutorials that can help the user learn Braille. The camera is a real game changer. The user can take a picture of a sign or a menu to have it read back in Braille, or use it to double-check the color of a shirt they're about to wear.

"We're ready to start building a bunch of units," said Blazie, who came out of retirement to help MacDonald pro bono. "But we have budget problems."

The group has raised and spent $1 million already. They need $200,000 more to bring the device to market, where it likely will sell for under $2,500 — far less than any electronic Braille product ever. They are about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the remainder of the project.

But what's perhaps most remarkable is what's next: The first 3-D graphic display tablet for the blind. The prototype, just weeks from completion, features a moving carriage that prints a refreshable display of Braille and raised images made up of tiny nickel-titanium pins. Again, money is the issue. When they hit the $1 million mark, a blind consumer conceivably could have it in two years.

"A lot of people have tried to make full-page Braille display devices," Blazie said. "Nobody has succeeded."

Seventy percent of blind adults are unemployed. One of these upcoming devices could change that.

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Fuel assistance drying up

Community activists are urging the federal government to increase fuel assistance funding, saying 50,000 households across the Bay State who depend on the aid to heat their homes may be left out in the cold by Christmas.

"We have thousands of households who do not have enough assistance," said John Drew, CEO of Action for Boston Community Development. "We're not in a position to help a lot of people right now."

ABCD has significantly less money this year, in part because of the federal sequester, to provide fuel assistance benefits to those who heat their homes with oil, Drew said.

"We're starting this winter off with about 25 percent less money than last year," he said.

The maximum benefit for the poorest families is $950, and with oil at $4 a gallon, ABCD is only able to fund one tank of oil, he said, meaning those who applied early will use up their benefits soon. ABCD estimates 5,000 households they help are maxed out and may run out by Christmas, and 50,000 across the state are in the same position.

"In past winters, we had enough money to provide two tanks for the winter," Drew said.

ABCD has received more than 17,000 applications for fuel assistance so far.

Maria Cazeau, a 54-year-old minister who was laid off and receives heating assistance, said she depends on the oil ABCD provides.

"I don't have enough money to support me, so I need that help," Cazeau said.

She said her home needs to be kept warm because a sick, elderly woman is staying with her.

In November, Gov. Deval Patrick and governors of 13 other states sent a letter to Congress seeking a boost in the funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program from the current $2.6 billion to $3.6 billion. The letter noted average winter home heating costs have increased by 6 percent.

"LIHEAP is a critical bridge of Americans — many of them elderly, disabled or caring for dependent children — who otherwise may be forced to choose between paying home energy bills and paying for food, medicine or other essentials," the letter said.

Still, Drew said more funding is anything but certain, even with the promise of a newly signed federal budget deal.

"There may be some federal money, and there may not be federal money," Drew said.

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Reading the tech tea leaves

Predictions are a tricky business, but I did tell you last year that 2013 would be the year that Best Buy started to go bye-bye, that wearable devices like the Jawbone Up would be huge and that Apple's stock surge would start to collapse. So I'm reading technological tea leaves again for 2014. Here is my five-part forecast for next year:

5: It will be the year foreign diplomacy goes social. We saw the first hint of this Nov. 23, when the Iranian president retweeted Secretary of State John Kerry's comments following a historic agreement on nukes between the two parties in Geneva.

Though I wouldn't call Kerry and the Iranian president "tweeps," Hassan Rouhani's Twitter olive branch received thousands of retweets and exposed a new way to take foreign policy directly to the people — for better or worse — in 140 characters or less. More foreign leaders, perhaps even some right here at home, are sure to follow suit.

4: Health care will go the way of the wearable. Consumers will begin to see and experience many more devices and apps that help them to monitor personal health and wellness, with metrics like blood-sugar levels, blood pressure and more. These devices will begin to automatically send information on you to your doctor, and will be pushed by health insurance carriers who see their value in disease prevention.

3: Google Glass will not come to market. Though I'm as jazzed as anyone about the prospect of augmented reality goggles that make my line of sight a whole lot smarter, I don't see how they get the price down to a level that consumers will be willing to pay. Despite many pronouncements that the product will be available to consumers in 2014, I see the device remaining with a select group handpicked by Google for their beta-testing program, at least for the next year.

2: Haptics will be the next big thing. That's a field of technology devoted to tactile feedback, or in some cases tricking your nerves into thinking they feel virtual objects that aren't actually present.

We'll start to see the first rumblings of tablets that allow you to virtually "feel" a sweater before you buy it online.

1: The next holiday shopping season will feature a new addition: 3-D printers and pens. A beneficiary of this hopefully will be the fine folks at Somerville's Formlabs, whose pioneering 3-D printer, the Form 1, is a sleek-looking producer of three-dimensional objects.

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Get your mall buys delivered

Massachusetts mall-goers, who don't want to be saddled with their shopping bags, soon may have a new way to get their purchases home.

California startup Deliv has jumped into the same-day delivery fray, offering the service to malls through crowdsourced drivers.

And Simon Property Group, the largest owner of malls in Massachusetts, hopes eventually to roll out same-day delivery to its customers at Bay State retail centers.

Shoppers at Simon's Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, Calif., now have two options for shopping hands-free.

They can have their purchases from participating mall retailers sent to their homes for $10, as long as they're within 15 miles of the center.

Or they can have them sent to a central mall location and pick them up when they're done shopping, or have them loaded into their cars curbside, for free.

Simon started the service Monday to "elevate" its customer service, according to spokesman Les Morris.

"Our expectation is that it will be successful, and we can roll it out to more properties," Morris said. "At the end of the day ... if, because of this delivery system, there are stores that are even more productive, it's a win-win."

Approximately 50 retailers are participating in Deliv's same-day service, which also is offered online.

At the Stanford Shopping Center, they include Sony, Hugo Boss, Lucky Brand, Bose, Johnston & Murphy, Kate Spade, Crate & Barrel and White House/Black Market, Morris said.

Founded in 2012, Deliv has raised $7.8 million in venture capital funding from companies including Cambridge's General Catalyst Partners.

Its service is now offered in nine malls in California and Chicago.

Deliv generates revenue from fees paid by the retailers and malls — currently $5 to $15 per delivery — who can opt to charge customers or offer free deliveries, according to founder and CEO Daphne Carmeli.

The key to the business model is getting as many packages and as many stops per route, so the cost of delivery comes down, said Carmeli, whose company hires the drivers.

"What I wanted to do was build a company where we would not have to be a two-sided marketplace, where we would have to acquire demand in every city," Carmeli said.

"We wanted to find an opportunity where we could immediately plug into a demand stream."

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JP condos have energy to spare

New contemporary townhouses in the Woodbourne section of Jamaica Plain are designed to create more energy than they use so that utilities cost nothing.

Part of Boston's Energy Positive Green Building Program, GFC Development partnered with Hub architecture firm Utile to build the just-completed two-unit attached townhouse at 64-66 Catherine St. on land owned by the city. The purpose of this and other such projects in the city is to show that housing can be designed to be both completely energy independent and stylish without costing a huge amount more to build. This project meets the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum designation, the highest rating.

The three-story townhouses on Catherine Street are on the market for $595,000 each. They feature high-end white kitchens, tiled bathrooms, 8-foot doors throughout and third-floor master bedroom suites with cathedral ceilings and a skylight.

The exterior of the building is dark-brown Hardie Plank, with unfinished shiplap cedar clapboard accents and a rear sloped roof pointed 42 degrees south that holds 21 photovoltaic electric panels for each unit.

These panels provide all the energy needed for the electric-only townhouses, producing 8 percent more energy than they use, according to preliminary testing. Homeowners will earn credits from electricity given back to the grid.

The townhouses are 
superinsulated, with 8 inches of icynene foam insulation in the walls, Alpen windows and a multilayered rubber roof. Windows are deep-set to attract winter sun and the first-floor concrete floor acts as a thermal mass to retain heat. The condos are heated and cooled when needed by wall-mounted Mitsubishi electric AC/heat pumps.

We took a look at staged model Unit 1, a 1,416-square-foot three-bedroom that has a fenced-in backyard and a driveway that will fit two cars.

You enter the unit through a foyer with polished cement floors, a wood bench and a closet holding the unit's 80-gallon solar hot water heater.

To the right sits an open living/dining area with large windows and a glass back wall with a door to a cedar fence-enclosed backyard. There's a patio with Hanover permeable pavers and a rainwater irrigation system.

Back inside, an adjacent open kitchen has recessed compact fluorescent lighting and polished cement floors. There's Parapan high-gloss white cabinets, many pantry sized, above and below white quartz countertops. There's an island with a stainless-steel sink and Mirabelle single-handle faucet. The white appliances are high end, including a Kitchen Aid refrigerator, a Jenn-Air oven, a Whirlpool electric stovetop with a Cristal range hood and a Bosch dishwasher.

Behind the kitchen sits a half bath with a white solid-surface IKEA vanity.

Stairs with white ash treads lead to the second floor where there are two ash-floored bedrooms and a full bathroom off a hallway that holds a closet with a high-efficiency Bosch washer and dryer.

The recessed-lit bedrooms on this floor have big windows with transoms, but are on the smaller side. Between them is a bathroom with beige porcelain tile floors and surround for a Grohe showerhead and deep soaking tub. There's also a white IKEA vanity with Grohe fixtures and a built-in linen closet.

The entire third floor of the unit is a master bedroom suite that features a good-sized bedroom with large windows with transoms, recessed lighting and a skylight. There are three closets, one a large walk-in that could serve as a nursery.

The en-suite master bathroom has slate-colored porcelain tile floors and surround for a walk-in shower with a glass partition. There's a linen closet built in and a white IKEA vanity with Grohe fixtures.

The townhouse is built on slab and does not have a basement.

But there is a dedicated driveway that will hold two vehicles next to the unit, with permeable Hanover pavers that allow grass to grow between the stones. The yard will be landscaped with low-water-use plants and grass.

• Address: 64-66 Catherine St., Unit 1, Jamaica Plain
• Bedrooms: Three
• Bathrooms: Two full, one half
• List price: $595,000
• Square feet: 1,416
• Price per square foot: $420
• Annual taxes: To be determined
• Monthly condo fee: $240
• Features: Architect-designed two unit townhouse designed for high energy efficiency; lots of large windows with transoms; open living/dining area with glass wall and door to back yard; kitchen with high-gloss cabinets, white quartz countertops and high-end appliances; third-floor master bedroom suite with ash floors, cathedral ceiling, skylight and large walk-in closet; porcelain-tile bathrooms; ash floors on top two floors; 40 solar panels on south-facing sloped roof; cedar-fence-enclosed backyard with rainwater irrigation system; driveway holds two vehicles L Location: About a mile from Forest hills Orange Line T station and retail offeringsalong Hyde Park Avenue; two miles from Jamaica Plain centerL Built in: 2013
• Broker: Coldwell banker agents Ellen grupert at 617-256-8455 and Janis Lippman at 617-869-0496

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