Yo, is there a ballplayer in the house? Well, there is a House playing ball—professional basketball, that is.

At the age of 33, Adam House, a serial entrepreneur (and shooting guard) who has successfully built and sold three companies—his most recent startup, Velocitude, was acquired by Akamai in 2010—has at least temporarily put aside the tug of entrepreneurship for his love of hoops. More specifically, House has decided to uproot his family from Boston to upstate New York to join the Rochester Razorsharks, a professional basketball team in the Premier Basketball League. Here is his player page).

True, it isn’t the NBA—but House describes the league as very competitive, with most players having come from Division 1 college teams, and several going on to the NBA’s D-League (development league) or playing pro ball overseas. So it’s pretty cool. I caught up with House by phone when he was with the team in Michigan, where they had finished a two-game sweep of the Lake Michigan Admirals. Here is a quick overview of his version of Hoop Dreams…

House grew up in Birmingham, MI, about 25 miles northwest of Detroit. He played basketball for nearby Brother Rice High School, a well-known Catholic school attended by the offspring of many of the Detroit area’s business leaders or auto execs.

But House also had a passion for entrepreneurship. He worked at Rock Financial, a Quicken Loans company, and was able to learn from Dan Gilbert who is now the main owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. So, bitten by the business bug, he left college (Centre College, a small liberal arts school in Kentucky) after his freshman year at age 19 to work for a direct marketing firm in Florida. He quit that after one year, and in 1998 formed a startup to do direct marketing for financial services companies with $500 of his own money. He built that into a multi-million-dollar business (an Internet lead generation startup he also founded merged with the company) and sold it in May 2007. A few years later, House launched his third startup, Velocitude, a mobile services platform company that enabled delivery of video and other content to mobile devices. He built that up as well, and sold it to Akamai in mid-2010 for undisclosed terms.

But let’s get back to hoops. As part of the Akamai deal, House and his family—wife and now three sons—moved to the Boston area. Among other things, he joined CommonAngels, the angel investor group that is the lead investor in Xconomy. After leaving Akamai, House was not quite ready for the grind of another startup, so he decided to train for a triathlon. “I saw myself in bike pants and a helmet, and I just looked in a mirror and said, … Next Page »

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Xconomy held its first Big Apple tech event (well, mostly tech, since there was one life sciences company on hand) on Wednesday. We called it New York’s Venture Emergence, and a fantastic crowd of nearly 250 turned out to the Apella Center on East 29th Street for an afternoon of startup snapshots, VC-entrepreneur stories about building great companies, and keynote chats featuring some of New York’s hottest emerging companies and investors.

On the VC side, speakers included Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures’ Eric Wiesen, Nick Beim of Matrix Partners, Todd Dagres from Spark Capital, Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures, Michael Greeley from Flybridge Capital Partners, and Dennis Purcell of Aisling Capital.

Companies presenting included bitly, Gilt Groupe, Armgo Pharma, Simulmedia, BarkBox, and Gotham Greens. We also heard from HackNY and Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket—on the day Facebook filed to go public.

We snapped a lot of pictures of the speakers—and our audience. Following is a selection of shots of both. We hope you enjoy them.

A great thanks to our venue host, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, and our fantastic event sponsors: Cooley, EisnerAmper, Halloran, IDA Ireland, and TriNet. Special thanks as well to the National Venture Capital Association and New York Angels, which went above and beyond to help with this event.

And thanks most of all to all of you who came to see it, and made such a great crowd. I hope we got a picture of you.

(Xconomy digital media intern Teddy Worcester contributed to the production of this slideshow)

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	New York’s Venture Emergence — The crowd gathers
	Photo by Keith Spiro Photography courtesy of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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“It is the ‘silver’ age of VC/entrepreneurship. It would be the ‘golden’ age if we could fix the liquidity issues.”

Those are the words of Michael Greeley, general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston and treasurer of the National Venture Capital Association, referring to the very tight IPO market that is limiting capital-raising options for emerging growth companies. It is also an issue Greeley intends to explore this Wednesday afternoon, at Xconomy’s conference: New York’s Venture Emergence.

That’s because Greeley will be the moderator of a keynote chat with Barry Silbert, CEO and founder of SecondMarket, the hot New York broker-dealer that is doing its share to fix the aforementioned liquidity issue, in large part by creating ways to trade shares of privately held companies.

The chat between Silbert and Greeley is just one part of a fantastic afternoon of discussion and stories from some of New York’s—and the country’s—leading venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, including Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, the Gilt Groupe founding team, 1stdibs CEO David Rosenblatt, RRE Ventures’ Eric Wiesen, Internet advertising pioneer Dave Morgan (now CEO of startup Simulmedia), Todd Dagres of Spark Capital in Boston—and a whole lot more.

If you don’t have your tickets already, get them fast—time is running out, and space is limited.

Greeley says he is really looking forward to his chat. Some questions he intends to ask Silbert include:

—What is the future of stock exchanges, and how companies raise capital and generate shareholder liquidity?

—What does Second Market look like in five years?

—What are the greatest risks to the business going forward?

—What regulatory issues do companies like Second Market face, and what should the government do?

And last but not least, says Greeley (who remember is from Boston): Who will win the Super Bowl? (I personally feel it will be the Patriots’ revenge).

There will also be time for you to ask Silbert a few questions of your own. We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday afternoon. Register here.

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There is hardly a more important topic to society than the future education. So I’m really looking forward to hosting a Tweetchat later today on education and the future. My guest will be John Seely Brown (@jseelybrown), the technology visionary who previously served as chief scientist of Xerox and also director of Xerox PARC, the legendary computer research lab where so much of modern personal computing was conceived and/or brought to life.

The Tweetchat, sponsored by Babson College (@babson) and AMA enterprises is (@AMAnet), will take place from 2-2:30pm EST today. I will be tweeting through my personal account @bbuderi and @xconomy. The hashtag where you can follow the action and send your questions for JSB is #XCed.

Brown, commonly known as JSB, is now retired from Xerox and a visiting scholar at USC, and still very much a technology visionary—and what it means for society. He also knows a lot about education and learning—and was one of the prime contributors to our just-released Xconomist Report on the Future of Education, in which 22 leading thinkers on innovation answered the question: What should students be studying now to prepare for 10 years from now?

JSB’s litany of accomplishments relating to education include being a cofounder of the Institute for Research on Learning, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and of AAAS and a Trustee of the MacArthur Foundation. He is also the co-author of a book published early last year called A New Culture of Learning, which looks at the future of learning.

All of which to say is he is a great person to take part in a tweet chat on this critical subject. Again, the chat takes place at 2pm EST. And the hashtag for following the chat is #XCed.

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[Updated, Jan. 18, 2012---The Xconomist Report on the Future of Education is live---click here.]

As the presidential race picks up steam, you know that we will be hearing a lot—a lot more, that is—about the need to create jobs. But where will those jobs come from, and what fields are really likely to spur growth over the next decade? These are questions that anyone interested in the country’s economic well-being wants answered. And they might be especially on the minds of millions of college students contemplating an uncertain job market, and millions of high school students who just finished their college applications for next fall.

There are a lot of places to turn for answers. But Xconomy decided to look no further than its own advisors, the Xconomists. This group includes some of the world’s leading innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, and investors across an array of fields, who have a unique eye on the future. Their attention is largely on the innovation that leads to exponential growth and, ultimately, jobs. So we asked them one question designed to cut through the worry and haze:

What should students be studying now to prepare for 10 years from now?

The result, which will debut tomorrow morning, is our Xconomist Report on the Future of Education. It includes insights from the likes of Vinod Khosla, Esther Dyson, Nathan Myhrvold, and Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, along with 18 other of the nation’s leading thinkers—and doers—in innovation.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and now an internationally known venture capitalist, asserts that an “updated curriculum should eclipse the archaic view of liberal education still favored by institutions like Harvard and Yale based on a worldview from the 1800s.” He recommends that schools (and students) put their efforts into economics, statistics, mathematics, and programming while making areas such as history and literature “optional subjects.”

For her part, Dyson, a renowned angel investor and tech guru, suggests pursuing new tools for extracting meaning from the vast amount of data being collected about a wide range of subjects. She envisions putting that data and knowledge to work to do things like inventing 3D personal printers or terraforming asteroids.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services CTO Todd Park, another of our contributors, says flatly, “Students should be studying how to start things—how to create and grow new products, initiatives, ventures, and enterprises—a skill set that never goes out of style.”

We hope you’ll check back tomorrow to read the full report and join in the debate and discussion it’s sure to inspire. We think the Xconomists have provided some valuable insights about where the future is headed—and how students can prepare themselves to make the most of it.

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Day in and day out, venture capitalists ask questions of entrepreneurs—some might say grill them. But on February 1, at Xconomy’s New York Venture Emergence forum, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, who’s now CEO of luxury online marketplace 1stdibs and chairman/co-founder of Group Commerce, will help us turn the tables. Rosenblatt will be the moderator of a fireside chat with legendary investors Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Todd Dagres of Boston’s Spark Capital.

Rosenblatt knows both men well. He and Wilson served on the Twitter board together—Rosenblatt is still on it, while Wilson is no longer a director. And Rosenblatt knows Dagres through Spark Capital’s investment in Group Commerce.

He has some great questions ready for the both of them. I spent some time on the phone last week with Rosenblatt—who outlined his plans. I can’t reveal his specific queries, so as not to ruin the surprise for Wilson and Dagres and let them get too prepared. But I can say they will cover the gamut of how to start companies (and who should start them), how to mentor and grow them, the latest trends and their downside, and a lot more. The discussion should be of immense interest to entrepreneurs and hopeful entrepreneurs, not to mention anyone interested in entrepreneurship, investing, and innovation. “I’m an operator, not an investor,” Rosenblatt says. “And the questions will be for the most part from the point of view of companies—not investors, but entrepreneurs…Hopefully, they are questions that will be helpful for you in relating to investors.”

Rosenblatt plans to leave plenty of time for audience questions as well. But just in case you are shy, or he doesn’t get a chance to call on you, feel free to share yours beforehand. Just put them in the comment stream below, or send them to events@xconomy.com. We’ll do our best to make sure they get addressed.

The keynote chat between Rosenblatt, Dagres, and Wilson is just one part of a star-studded afternoon that includes another keynote chat with Barry Silbert, founder of SecondMarket, and featured talks with the founders and founding investors in Gilt Groupe, bitly, Simulmedia, and more.

We hope to see you there. Get your tickets soon—space is limited for this great event and Early Bird registration ends tomorrow.

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A mini-invasion of tech companies hits Boston today. The clock is counting down for 6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas, Xconomy’s forum this afternoon that features one cool tech company from each of the six cities in our network. The legendary computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, kicks things off with the opening keynote.

We have just five tickets left, and if you act before noon, you can avoid the at-the-door premium. The event starts at 1:30 today at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston, right next to South Station, making for an easy commute. So get those last five tickets here.

The great lineup of people and tech companies presenting today includes: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (New York); Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk (San Francisco); Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (Detroit); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego); and Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston).

We also have a few bonus features—a special demo from MIT Media Lab professor Rosalind Picard of some of the technology behind Affectiva, her company that enables computers to understand your emotions. Finally, we’ll have a handful of quick presentations from up-and-coming area startups, and a lot of great networking.

So act quickly—and get those tickets. See you soon.

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Think of it as a flying beluga whale. At least, that’s the way Xconomy’s San Diego editor Bruce Bigelow, once described the Global Hawk robot spy plane. And I have to say, I am personally very excited that this reconnaissance craft extraordinaire will be one of the featured presentations at our 6X6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas conference in downtown Boston on December 1.

Get your tickets here—the saver rate ends on Thursday.

Built by Northrop Grumman, the Global Hawk was conceived in San Diego as the modern, robotic manifestation of Lockheed’s famous U-2 spy plane. Under development for well over a decade, it has a bulbed-out nose, a ‘V’-shaped tail, and long, thin wings that span 130.9 feet to be exact. But the important part is that it is built to fly autonomously for 35-40 hours at 65,000 feet-packing more than a ton of surveillance equipment from infrared and electro-optical sensors to synthetic aperture radar.

We are pumped that Bill Walker, chief of Global Hawk business development, will be one of our speakers. Walker reports he is bringing some cool video of the Global Hawk in action to share with our audience. “Global Hawk is a peek into the future of autonomous aircraft that can provide rapid access to remote areas of the world,” he says. Among the potential missions, for war and peace:

—track ground forces over a large area, and identify/locate small targets

—monitor shipping and maritime domain access for protection and threat assessment

—observe/assess large disaster areas to support relief operations

—collect scientific information about weather and climate, including hurricanes

—provide a communications gateway in the sky to connect military troops on the ground and in the air, or to connect first responders in a disaster area

Walker’s presentation and videos should be fascinating, but they are just one part of 6X6, which features one potentially game-changing tech company from each of Xconomy’s six cities—not to mention a special opening keynote from Xconomist Stephen Wolfram, the visionary founder and CEO of Wolfram Research and creator of Mathematica and the Wolfram|Alpha search engine.

You can see the rest of the lineup and get tickets here. We are looking forward to seeing you on Dec. 1.

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Over the weekend, I learned that one of my heroes, Lee Davenport, had just passed away. Lee died of cancer at the age of 95 in his longtime home of Greenwich, CT. That’s where I first met him in 1994, when I was researching a book about the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the World War II lab where some of the nation’s best and brightest physicists secretly developed microwave radar—the most important technological weapon the U.S. and Britain brought to bear in the war.

Lee was an X-ray spectroscopist and all around electronics wizard. He interrupted his doctoral work in physics at the University of Pittsburgh to join the Rad Lab, where he helped lead development of the SCR-584 fire-control radar that tracked planes and buzz bombs and automatically relayed their position to anti-aircraft guns, saving a lot of Allied lives, soldiers and citizens. After the war, he helped build the Harvard cyclotron, and then went into industrial research, rising to become the head of research at General Telephone & Electronics (GTE) Laboratories.

All told, I did six formal interviews with Lee, three for the World War II book (The Invention That Changed the World), and three more for Engines of Tomorrow, a book about the management of corporate research. Afterwards, I saw him a time or two at conferences and when helping with two documentaries about the war, but we fell out of touch in recent years.

The New York Times ran a very nice obituary of Lee on Saturday. There are also some nice details in this article posted by Union College in New York, one of his alma maters. I urge you to read these for more of his story. But I wanted to share a few details that weren’t in those articles that showcase this remarkable and always-humble man—and I especially want to share his principles of innovation, which I think American corporations (or any corporation) would be well-advised to consider.

To start, here are some souvenirs of Lee Davenport’s life:

—Lee was once in a commuter plane crash, I think in upstate New York. He made it off the plane, but realized others were still inside. Dazed and hurt, he risked his own safety to go back and help several passengers or crew members escape. His wife showed me a newspaper clip recounting his actions, but I haven’t been able to track it down for this article.

Lee Davenport. Photo courtesy of Union College

—The GTE lab Lee oversaw was based in Bayside, NY. He spent 15 years as director in the 1960s and 1970s before retiring in 1980. GTE at the time owned Sylvania, and under Davenport, the lab created and patented the bright red phosphor later used universally in color TVs. I believe the patent was later sold or licensed to Sony and became part of its Trinitron technology.

—In 1963, as a publicity stunt while at GTE, Davenport appeared on the live television show I’ve Got A Secret, his secret being a way the lab had developed to transmit TV signals via lasers. The panelists failed to guess the secret, and he brought out the laser. Smoke was blown across the stage so the audience could see its light. Then Davenport interrupted the video portion of the live broadcast by blocking the light with his hand.

—Lee stayed incredibly active. One of the things he did in retirement was restore vintage cars in his garage. He then drove them all around in road rallies well into his 80s.

Lee, as I noted above, also knew some things about innovation. He came up with some basic principles about the subject for a series of lectures at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. Based on his lecture notes, and with his permission, I distilled them for Engines of Tomorrow and my own talks. I’d like to share them again with you here.

Lee Davenport’s Seven Principles of Innovation

1) Success is based on schedules and results—not effort, job difficulty, or loyalty. “You must expect your R&D people to produce results and reward them accordingly.”

2) Since most projects last several years, managers must break them into shorter segments, with measurable goals at each phase.

3) Never allow general goals. Avoid such words as: approve, advance, increase, investigate, study, explore. All are false goals—immeasurable.

4) Look for idea people. Only a few individuals have truly unique, even hare-brained ideas. Encourage them.

5) Find product champions—internal entrepreneurs who understand technology, explain it clearly, and can push ideas through corporate barriers. These traits typically elude top researchers.

6) Keep a little something on the side. A bootleg research budget is sometimes the only way to pursue ideas that break the mold.

7) Hire young blood. A research staff’s average age must not increase even one year per annum. In a high-tech lab, a nice average is under 35.

As I once wrote of Lee, “as a physicist and industrial research director, he has enjoyed a ringside seat on the electronics age—from tubes to chip, analog to digital. In war and peace, he’s seen ideas come and go—and come again. That gives him an all-too-rare commodity: perspective.”

Here’s to you, Lee.

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The worlds of founding and investing in startups seem to have turned almost upside down in recent years—at least in the Internet space. Suddenly, in this age of the cloud and mobile apps, it’s possible for hopeful entrepreneurs to create a hugely profitable company, not out of their garage, but from their desktops—and they might be able to bootstrap things themselves or get the money from a friendly angel rather than a big venture firm.

But can things really be so simple? Don’t you have to have, say, a business model and access to customers and potential partners and acquirers? And putting such questions aside, if you are an aspiring Internet or cloud company, and especially if you are focused on the consumer rather than the enterprise, is Boston even the place to be?

Well, we are hoping to shed some real light on such issues at Xconomy’s upcoming venture chat on Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond—New Rules for Innovation, which will take place the evening of September 26 in downtown Boston.

We are extremely fortunate to have a great group of investors to address them—Larry Bohn from General Catalyst Partners, Jeff Fagnan of Atlas Venture, and Rich Levandov of Avalon Partners—and an experienced startup CEO to moderate. That would be David Patrick, CEO of Boston-based Apperian, which is developing a mobile-app platform and has raised a fair bit of venture money.

Patrick says he is looking forward to turning the tables a bit on the VCs—and being able to ask questions of them, rather than the other way around. And he is especially focused on bringing out what entrepreneurs need to know.

“Since I am usually on the other side of the fence, I will try to ask a few questions from the entrepreneur’s perspective. Obvious areas include how companies are ramping up using SaaS models, cloud services, and other innovative tools,” he says. “How much company progress are you looking for to consider funding a company? Are there certain check box items you need to check before moving forward and what are they?”

Patrick says he will also be asking about valuations, both East and West Coast, and “a personal question: does a deal have to have a billion-dollar exit potential before an A-level firm will consider it?” And if so, he says, he wants to bring out some real thoughts from his guests on where smaller success stories in the Boston area can turn.

“My thinking here,” Patrick says, “is to help ramp up the tech sector in Boston and combat the perception that it is easier to get funded out west than in Boston.”

It promises to be a fun and illuminating evening. We hope to see you there. Get your tickets here.

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Venture capitalists are always interviewing entrepreneurs and CEOs—whether hearing pitches, sitting on boards, or looking for a chief executive to spark growth in a startup they have backed.

It isn’t too often that the tables are turned. But they will be for Xconomy’s upcoming evening chat, Consumers, the Cloud & Beyond, featuring three leading venture capitalists—Larry Bohn of General Catalyst Partners, Jeff Fagnan from Atlas Venture, and Rich Levandov from Avalon Ventures (you can read more details about them by following the link above)—talking about the hottest things in Internet venture investing.

This conversational evening event will take place in downtown Boston on September 26—and we are pleased to announce that moderating our interchange will be David Patrick, CEO of Apperian, the maker of a software platform for enterprise mobile apps that earlier this year took in nearly $10 million in a financing round led by North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (from its iFund, focused on Apple iPad and iPhone software). Previous backers CommonAngels and LaunchCapital, both investors in Xconomy, also took part in the round.

David has more than 25 years of executive experience in the software industry, and is a serial CEO—having previously led xkoto (a cross platform enterprise database virtualization software company acquired by Teradata), and Ximian (a leading Linux and open source software company acquired by Novell). For good measure, he has experience at bigger companies, too. He became VP & General Manager at Novell after the Ximian acquisition. And he previously served as President of worldwide sales and operations for both The Learning Company and Mattel Interactive.

Along this fantastic executive journey, David has raised a lot of money from VCs, and interacted with them on other fronts as well. “After going through a significant process recently raising $10 million for Apperian, I appreciate the opportunity to reverse the tables for a few minutes and ask questions from the entrepreneurs’ perspective,” he says. “I am looking forward to the opportunity to discuss with three top VCs on how they see the climate changing for early stage companies that are looking for funding. What are the major changes we are seeing in how companies are ramping up using the cloud, SaaS, and other tools? How much progress with revenue and business model development do VCs want to see before funding a company? Also what trends to they see with early stage valuations both on the East and West Coast?”

Like Anderson Cooper, he seems ready to keep ‘em honest—and have some fun in the process. The event takes place in a spectacular location in WilmerHale’s conference center on the 26th floor of 60 State Street in Boston, with a sweeping view of Boston Harbor. Besides the lively chat, there will be food and drinks and plenty of time for networking. Get your tickets here—the early bird rate is ending soon, and they are going fast.

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A new front has been opened in the longstanding legal war between two Massachusetts speech technology powerhouses.

On Thursday, Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court of Massachusetts charging its much bigger archrival with unfair competition, commercial bribery, breach of contract, and intentional interference with prospective business relationships. Among its chief allegations is that Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), out to drive up Vlingo’s costs and force it to agree to an acquisition or technology partnership, filed a baseless patent infringement lawsuit against the smaller company. The complaint also charges Nuance with interfering with Vlingo’s efforts to negotiate deals with AT&T and Nokia, in the latter case by hiring a key Nokia executive who had confidential knowledge of Vlingo’s patent portfolio and patent strategy, and says Nuance CEO Paul Ricci attempted to bribe three key Vlingo executives by offering them $5 million apiece if they could convince their board of directors to sell to Nuance.

“The bottom line is we’ve really got a case against Nuance now for illegal acts in terms of interfering with our business,” said Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan during a phone interview about the lawsuit. “They’ve really tried to destroy or buy our business anyway they can.”

(Disclosure: Xconomy Boston editor Gregory Huang is a brother-in-law of Vlingo co-founder and CTO Michael Phillips. He was not involved in the reporting, writing, or editing of this story and saw no part of it before publication.)

This is just the latest in a string of legal disputes between the two firms. Indeed, Grannan says the companies are now involved in seven open lawsuits—five brought by Nuance, two by Vlingo—covering patent infringement claims on both sides, a false advertising suit brought by Nuance against Vlingo, an investor rights case also lodged by Nuance, and last week’s unfair competition complaint filed against Nuance by Vlingo. (This is all despite the fact that Nuance is an investor in Vlingo, having led the company’s $25 million Series C financing round in October 2009 and contributed $15 million to the round.) The firms have settled one other case, and just last month, a jury in a federal court in Boston determined that Vlingo did not infringe on Nuance’s so-called ’295 patent, ending a suit that was filed by Nuance in June 2008.

The new complaint (click here to view the PDF), filed on the heels of Vlingo’s success in the ’295 patent case, tells a fascinating story of this complicated relationship and the long-running tension between the two speech recognition leaders, which dates back almost to Vlingo’s founding in mid-2006. Keep in mind that it only gives Vlingo’s view of events. In response to my request for comment, Nuance only provided this statement from senior vice president and general counsel Jo-Anne Sinclair: “Nuance strongly believed, and continues to believe today, that Vlingo ran afoul of Nuance patents. We dismiss the recent claims as a distraction from the one principle that matters most—that Vlingo is infringing upon Nuance’s deep, long-standing investments in innovation and intellectual property.”

Long-Spurned Suitor

“Nuance has been aware of Vlingo since Vlingo’s inception as Mobeus, Inc. in June 2006 and, since that time, has coveted Vlingo’s innovative, cutting-edge technology,” last week’s filing asserts. Just a few months after Vlingo’s formation, it says, the company presented prototype products to a Nuance sales representative for evaluation, leading to an invitation from Nuance to take part in its annual users group conference in Orlando. Nuance’s “excitement” about Vlingo at that event, the complaint says, led Ricci to invite Vlingo co-founder Mike Phillips to lunch.

That meeting took place on October 24, 2006, according to the filing, and apparently marked … Next Page »

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Well, it turned out that perhaps I was too cynical. On Friday morning, I posted the Labor Day Bad News Poll, pointing out that companies often buried bad news after markets closed on a Friday—and asking readers to predict what type of bad news they expected, if any, on the extra slow Friday before Labor Day, when hardly anyone is left around to see the aforementioned bad news.

In focusing on companies, I forgot about Uncle Sam (read on).

I presented my top predictions: major layoff, CEO ouster, and a lawsuit loss or otherwise bad news about a lawsuit. I also offered readers the choice of saying I was too cynical—that nothing too bad would happen this past Friday given all the bad news out there recently. And finally, I had a fifth option—for readers to write in with their own ideas of what bad news might be announced.

I shut off the voting at 4pm on Friday, when markets closed, and promised an update this week. So here we are:

The good news, I guess, is that nothing big seems to have come after the markets closed last week. Nothing I spotted, anyway-which could of course mean PR folks were successful at burying it!

As for our reader choices, the most popular vote—made by 40 percent of those taking the poll—was for major downsizing. (Wow, that is cynical—the idea a company would lay off a bunch of workers before Labor Day and try to bury it.) Next in line, in a dead heat with 18 percent of the vote each, were CEO ouster and major lawsuit. Only 7 percent thought I was too cynical, which it looks like I was: score one for the optimists.

But none of this means there wasn’t some big bad business/economic news last Friday. As one reader commented and another wrote in, the government released some truly dismal jobs news on Friday that showed no net new jobs were added in the U.S. in August—the worst showing in 11 months.

Technically, this jobs news was released before markets closed, so doesn’t qualify as being buried. But it sure does qualify as bad.

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Any savvy news hound knows that companies love to bury bad news by disclosing it after the close of markets on a Friday. The Friday before a long weekend like Labor Day is especially attractive.

That got me wondering what bad news might be coming today. Is there another big CEO shuffle looming, a la Apple and Steve Jobs (which of course they recognized was far too big to bury)? A major layoff or lawsuit loss perhaps?

Or have we had enough bad news as an economic whole that everyone—even the PR moles—will take this Friday off?

Since there’s wisdom in crowds, I figured why not have a little fun and set up a survey to see what readers think? I’ve included my top choices below, but also left room for you to point out something else. This poll shuts down at 4pm EST on Friday, when the markets close.

I’ll announce the results next week. Have a great long weekend–with only good news!

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A double dip recession may be looming. But you wouldn’t know it from the valuations of venture-backed companies like Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Groupon, Gilt Groupe—as well as a host of other startups either based in the cloud and/or focused on the Internet and consumers.

So is there some perfect, endless summer-type wave in these fields that entrepreneurs can still catch—or has it already broken? Are there new areas of opportunity that are only just emerging? How have the rules for investors and entrepreneurs changed in an era where the barriers to entering many fields are so low a wave of new startups might arise overnight to threaten your innovations? And how does this all affect consumers and more established companies alike?

To shed light on such questions (well, why not just go whole hog here—to give ultimate, hard, final, complete answers to them), Xconomy is pleased to announce our first event of the fall: “Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond—New Rules for Innovation.” This evening chat, which will take place on September 26 in downtown Boston, brings together three leading venture capitalists who have backed some of the hottest consumer, cloud, and Internet startups around—from Hubspot here in Boston to Zynga in Silicon Valley. In an intimate, conversational forum, with plenty of time for audience Q&A, they will tackle some of the tough questions about how venture investing and entrepreneurship are changing, what it takes to be successful with consumer-facing startups (not exactly an area for which Boston is well known), and a whole lot more.

We’ve got a few surprises we are still working on and will announce soon after Labor Day. But in the meantime, here’s the lineup of participants:

—Larry Bohn, managing director, General Catalyst Partners: Larry knows both sides of the startup equation—the founder’s and the investor’s. He previously served as the CEO of software and analytic solutions company NetGenesis, which he led to a successful IPO. But now he wears the VC hat. His investments at General Catalyst include HubSpot, Visible Measures, and Black Duck Software, among many others. (And of course, GC itself is known as one of the few Boston-area firms that takes a lot of risks in the consumer space.)

—Jeff Fagnan, partner, Atlas Venture: Jeff focuses on very early-stage projects spanning enterprise and Internet infrastructure and including security and privacy—in some senses, the “beyond” part of Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond. He currently serves as a director of Abine, Bit9, DataXu, Grockit, Hopper, Keas, and Veracode, among others. Jeff is also a founder of TUGG (Technology Underwriting Greater Good), a non-profit foundation harnessing “crowd-sourced philanthropy” to catalyze social innovation in New England.

—Rich Levandov, managing director, Avalon Ventures: A co-lead investor in Zynga, Rich has blazed trails investing in Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley. Early in his career, he co-founded Phoenix Technologies, a company that helped launch the PC revolution, and then served as a VP of America Online. Beyond Zynga, he led Avalon’s early investments in Ad Summos, Backupify, Cloudant, Cloudkick (acquired by Rackspace), Pictela (acquired by AOL), Simulmedia, and more. You can read the story of how Levandov came to invest in Zynga here.

We hope you will join us on September 26 (my birthday, by the way). We promise it will be instructive, highly interactive, a lot of fun, and maybe even a bit dangerous:

One leading entrepreneur we spoke to said he wasn’t sure he could attend, but if he did, “I would bring a paint gun and shoot the VCs when they do not answer a question the way I want :).”

OK, we also promise no paint guns. Get your tickets here.

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“The time to invest in social media was two years ago.” That was a quote—or the gist of it, anyway—from Todd Dagres, co-founder and general partner of Spark Capital, during the venture panel at XSITE, Xconomy’s innovation summit last month.

Dagres ought to know, since Spark is an investor in both Twitter and Tumblr, the white hot mixed-media blogging platform—and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone recently became a Spark strategic advisor. So his quip seemed a perfect setup for me to ask the obvious follow up: What’s next?

I sat down with Dagres last Friday in Spark’s offices on Newbury Street in Boston to get the skinny on what he sees as the emerging new areas for investing that might take off the way social media has the last few years. “I can’t tell you that,” was his first reaction, but he wilted, as you’ll see. We also covered some other interesting ground—such as his views on what has made New York tech so hot and how it compares to Boston, why Groupon doesn’t get his investor juices flowing, why tech investing is better than making movies (Dagres had a stint as a Hollywood producer and still does it on the side), and more (Governor Patrick—read on, because there’s some stuff for you, too).

We started with New York, since late last month Spark closed its 19th deal in the Big Apple—joining in a new $50 million round for Foursquare—out of a total of 43 the firm, which was founded in 2005, has done. And Dagres says Spark has signed two more term sheets with NY companies. That’s a whopping percentage, almost half the total. The rest, he says, break down as a dozen in Silicon Valley, seven or eight in the Boston area, and a few others scattered around.

Here are the take-homes from our conversation:

Boston vs. New York—Dagres says New York surpasses Boston on some key parameters for entrepreneurship. “It really is a vibrant community of entrepreneurs. It’s a very creative environment. It’s an environment where there’s a sense for the customer. And it’s also a community where there’s a lot of sharing going on.” What Dagres calls “a powerful mixture of factors” has led to the ascendance of New York entrepreneurship. “I think it grew out of the Wall Street bust and also the transition from traditional media to digital media. Kids grew up in a media hub and an environment of a lot of risk-taking. That all mixed together. The other thing I will throw in there is the artistic element.” All these things previously existed in pockets around the city. “Now, it’s kind of come together into one big vibrant, collaborative community.”

Todd Dagres of Spark Capital participated in a discussion of the social media bubble, among other things, at XSITE 2011.

Boston, says Dagres, now falls short of New York on at least two of the factors listed above: collaboration and sense for the consumer. When it comes to venture firms, he says Boston VCs have traditionally invested in enterprise-focused software companies-and see consumer-oriented startups as too risky. “It’s all risky,” he counters, and meanwhile the unprecedented ability of small companies today to reach billions of consumers is “incredibly powerful.” Besides Spark, Dagres could only name one other Boston-based firm he felt was comfortable investing in consumer plays and taking big risks (another, oft-cited critique of Boston venture firms, which Dagres agrees with)—and that was General Catalyst.

But Boston’s shortcomings vis à vis New York don’t stop with venture firms. Dagres says as a whole, Boston’s entrepreneurs lag New York startups when it comes to collaboration and sharing—and that, in turn, has prevented Boston from matching the spirit of the entrepreneurial community in New York. “We don’t quite have the critical mass in the community,” he says. “And we don’t have … Next Page »

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It’s an idea people love the instant they hear it: movies stars have their Walk of Fame out in Hollywood, so entrepreneurs should have one, too—and what better place than right here in Kendall Square, the most fertile, concentrated ground for entrepreneurship in the world?

Last August, Xconomy was first to report on the idea for an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame—the brainchild of Xconomist Bill Aulet, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Now, almost a year later, I am pleased to report, the Walk has moved beyond the talking stage, it is walking the walk, so to speak. The idea has advanced in the Cambridge, MA, City Council, attracted at least one founding sponsor, nomination and selection committees have been formed—yours truly is an official curator, charged with nominating candidates for the Walk—and a launch date of September 16 has been targeted.

“The time has definitely come,” says Aulet. “The idea just resonates. Getting from idea to execution is always a challenge, but the idea has been so good that people have been lining up at all levels.” He says the first entrepreneurs selected would be given tiles in the plaza outside the Cambridge Marriott hotel, in the heart of Kendall Square.

There are still several moving parts to this, details being worked out (dare I say, nothing has been set in stone?)—including the definition of what, exactly, qualifies someone for the Walk, and how many inductees will be named this first year. But here are the key elements that appear to have been decided on so far:

—Each entrepreneur would get a tile, emblazoned with their name and a star. Aulet was vague about how big the tiles would be, whether the tiles would include a picture of inductees and what else would be listed—such as their company name, year it was founded, etc. One idea being considered, though, is that a QR code would be embedded in each tile, so that anyone with a smartphone camera and a reader app might be able to take a picture and have it open a web page with, say, the bio of the entrepreneur, videos of them in action, and other features. The design firm IDEO is working on the tile design now.

—The number of first-year inductees has not been set. But it could be as few as five.

—Aulet says 25 or so people have been named as curators, charged with nominating candidates for the Walk. I don’t have all their names, but here are some from the Boston area: Paul Maeder, general partner and co-founder at Highland Capital Partners; Joi Ito, the newly named director of the MIT Media Lab; Leon Sandler, executive director of the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT; John Harthorne, co-founder and CEO of MassChallenge, and Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group.

—The selection committee, which will make final decisions about those who have been nominated, to date consists of seven people: Aulet; Desh Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks and chairman of A123Systems; Forester Research founder and CEO George Colony; Yankee Group chairman and former CEO Emily Green; Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; … Next Page »

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The sun finally came out and heated up the day a bit yesterday—and at our XSITE 2011 conference at Babson College, things were smoking. We had a great crowd of close to 400 speakers and attendees, among them nearly 100 startups, for this year’s event, themed The Entrepreneurship Era. We had inspiring keynotes, insightful chats, and lively debates—all followed by a reception in the Babson pub where we continued to congratulate each other on the Bruins’ victory.

We will soon be posting some recaps from the day—including the audience selections from our XSITE Xpo startup competition and highlights from Sound Off, where five esteemed members of the innovation community ranted about what needs to change here in New England, and how to bring that change about. And we will be posting photos, videos, and more next week. But right now I wanted to take a little time to thank our speakers and all the great supporters who made XSITE 2011 such a success.

First, our speakers, several of whom journey from across the country, or up from New York (which is like another country) to take part. In approximate order of appearance, they were: Rick Miller, Len Schlesinger, Desh Deshpande, Stephen Friend, Phil Sharp, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Edward Jung, Pattie Maes, Stephen Kaufer, Drew Hession-Kunz, Jason Evanish, Chris Palatucci, Josh Bob, Martin LaMonica, Paul Sellew, Brian Chemel, Frank van Mierlo, Aaron Mandell, Troy Campione, Bob Fabbio, Veer Gidwaney, Michael Martino, Norm Wu, Joe Chung, Ellen Rubin, Jules Pieri, John Landry, Jason Jacobs, Sean Creeley, Charlotte Hubbert, Ziad Sultan, Daniel Isenberg, Todd Dagres, Jamie Goldstein, Lee Hower, Jeanne Sullivan, Katie Rae, Pedro Santos, Jordy Leiser, Timo Platt, Seph Skerritt, Michael Raybman, Karan Singh, Heather Keith, Alain Goubau, Jennifer Fremont-Smith, William Sanchez, Justin Shaka, and Shanker Sahai.

Great thanks as well to our wonderful event hosts, Babson College and Olin College—to their two presidents, Len Schlesinger and Rick Miller, respectively, and to their great staffs. You guys rock!

Another round of heartfelt thanks goes to our event sponsors, starting with Gold Sponsor Microsoft; Cleantech Track Sponsor, Latham & Watkins; Healthtech Track Sponsors AT&T and MFA—Moody, Famiglietti & Andronico; and our IT Track Sponsors, Invest Northern Ireland; Next Stage Solutions; Turnstone; and Windstream Hosted Solutions.

I’d also like to thank our event partners, Dog Patch Labs; MassBio; MassChallenge; The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council; MITX; New England Venture Capital Association; and TIE Boston.

Thanks, too, to our Event Supporter Nutter McLennan & Fish; our Lanyard Sponsor, Carbonite; and our Startup Supporters, Flybridge Capital Partners; Redstar; and Spark Capital.

Our elegant, beautiful stage furniture was provided once again by Turnstone.

We’d also like to thank the underwriters and venture members who support us throughout the year. Without you, Xconomy would not be possible. First, our charter underwriters, who have supported us since our launch in mid-2007: Alexandria Real Estate Equities; Biogen Idec; Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security; and WilmerHale.

Our other great underwriters are: Aderly/Only Lyon; AT&T; BNY Mellon Wealth Management ; Goodwin Procter; Invest Northern Ireland; J. Robert Scott Executive Search; the Kauffman Foundation; Latham & Watkins; MFA—Moody, Famiglietti & Andronico; Next Stage Solutions; NYSE Euronext; SRI International
; Turnstone; UK Trade & Investment; and Windstream Hosted Solutions.

Our venture capital members include: Advanced Technology Ventures; Arch Venture Partners; Atlas Venture; Avalon Ventures; Bain Capital Ventures; Boston Millennia Partners; Excel Venture Management; Flagship Ventures; HLM Venture Partners; LaunchCapital; North Bridge Venture Partners; and Polaris Venture Partners.

And, last but certainly not least, thanks to you, our fantastic audience.

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We try to avoid the obvious pun around here,* but we are excited about XSITE 2011, our big full-day conference, which takes place tomorrow at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. We have had an outstanding response to this year’s event, with more than 400 people signed up—including around 100 startups (you can see the lineup here, and the startup list here). And now, on the eve of the event, we’d like to announce three great prizes that will go to the next three people to buy full-priced tickets to the event.

The prizes will be awarded in this order:

—Samsung SCH-LC11 4G Mobile Hotspot and 4G SIM card good for 30 days (courtesy of Google)

—$100 gift certificate to Gilt, the online fashion site (courtesy of Gilt Groupe)

—$100 gift certificate to Gilt (courtesy of Gilt Groupe)

Remember, you have to buy a full-priced ticket to qualify—student tickets, Startup Specials, and other discounted registrations don’t qualify. And you have to be present at XSITE to claim your prize.

Thanks to Gilt and Google for donating the prizes. Even if you don’t move quickly enough to grab one of them, we feel certain the event will be worth the price of admission. You can register here. Hope to see you there.

* Editor’s note: That’s just a lie.

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Every day in the world’s great science and technology clusters, brilliant people go to work thinking about innovation—how to innovate in research, how to build and grow startups, how to keep innovating at public companies so the startups don’t eat their lunch. Edward Jung admires all that work, but believes it can only go so far—that it can’t provide solutions to the world’s biggest problems. For that, he believes, you need a whole new approach to innovation.

Call it Innovation at Large Scale. And it will be the topic of Jung’s keynote talk at XSITE 2011 (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which takes place this Thurday, June 16, at Babson College in Wellesley, MA.

Along with noted visionary Nathan Myhrvold and two other colleagues, Jung is a co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, the Seattle-area intellectual property firm best known for buying and licensing patents around the world—and for bringing top thinkers together for brainstorming “invention sessions” to create new patents. He is also the former chief architect of Microsoft.

I spoke with Jung last week to learn more about his planned talk at XSITE. I have to say I was expecting something about the importance of invention and patenting. But it turned out he is going to talk about how to bring innovation to some of the world’s biggest and most pressing problems—health care, energy, and the like. “It’s new and it’s not really just about Intellectual Ventures,” Jung told me.

I don’t want to steal too much of Jung’s thunder in advance of XSITE. But here are some notes from our conversation.

First, he’s talking about a model of innovation that actively involves government—rather than asks government to get out of the way. That’s because the problems he means to tackle are so huge and fundamental, government has to be involved. “There’s a whole bunch of problems to solve,” Jung says. “Whether dealing with healthcare in the developing world, or very large-scale problems through energy. It’s at a scale of problem that a single startup can’t solve, and it’s very inefficient to try to create lots of startups. Large companies can’t solve them either.”

One example he gave involves diagnostics medicine and that much-envisioned day when an array of diagnostic sensors—genomic, proteomic, visual, chemical, and behavioral—might warn us in advance of disease risk factors and provide tailored preventative treatments as well as personalized therapeutic regimens. A host of firms, such as Kaiser Permanente, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Baxter, Unilever, Walmart, and even IT powerhouses like Microsoft, Google, Intel, and Cisco—which might provide ways to store and access personal medical information—have released their own visions of the field and how their companies fit into them.

But each of these organizations, no matter how large and important, is only one bit player in what diagnostics medicine will ultimately become, and therefore their roadmaps only point to a piece of the field’s future. Think of a passenger airline industry without an Airbus or Boeing—that’s what diagnostics medicine is today, Jung says. “It’s like having a whole bunch of companies that make parts for airplanes try to talk about the vision of the airplane,” he says. What’s more, he adds, “You have no such uber company for a lot of the problems that were looking at.”

Since hundreds of separate companies aren’t going to spontaneously assemble themselves into a solution, “this is one of the cases where a government has to step in and play a role,” Jung says.

Specifically what’s needed, he says, is a master architect or “integrator” to contract with companies to provide all the pieces and then weave them together into a system that works. Now before you shout out—”Hold on, Uncle Sam as integrator, give me a break”—that’s NOT what Jung says the government should be doing. Instead, he says government should de-risk these big efforts by providing long-term guaranteed funding. It should then choose an integrator—in much the way NASA chose the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to manage its Mars Exploration Rover Project.

“Lots of new innovation can be tapped if you can just unlock the integration problem,” says Jung. The government can’t be that integrator, but it can be a demand customer who “changes the risk profile” of taking on big problems—both for large companies and startups, he says.

I’ll leave it to Jung to fully explain what he means at XSITE—and then hopefully answer some of your questions. I’m really looking forward to his talk, though, which will add an important dimension to our discussion of the Entrepreneurship Era, the theme of this year’s conference. We have speakers from startups, universities, public companies, and venture firms—including Desh Deshpande, Gilt Groupe founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, Biogen founder and Nobel Laureate Phil Sharp, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer, and Todd Dagres of Spark Capital.

Jung’s talk figures to be the icing on the cake—as it brings the entrepreneurship and innovation discussion to mega problems and projects, including how government fits into the picture. Register here. I hope to see you on Thursday.

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