What’s in a tech startup name? More specifically, is there a correlation between the type of name a company has and its success?

That’s a question every startup founder and investor should be interested in. Because if there is a correlation, then using a name-based strategy for picking winners would be, well, about as good as any other strategy. And much faster.

Consider the following companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. And more recently, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga. Or how about these biggies: Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm. These are all top companies, no doubt about it.

Notice anything about their names? None of them has a capital letter in the middle of its name—sometimes referred to as “camel case,” because an upper-case letter in the middle of a word looks like a hump. (Of course, there’s also plenty of startup name-ology around whether to use real words, made-up words, misspelled words, acronyms, and so forth, but we don’t have all day.)

Maybe I’m getting punchy as the holidays loom, but as an end-of-year exercise, I thought we’d play the name game and see where it leads. So let’s drill down into some specifics. What I’m really talking about are company names that are two words mashed into one, where each word or part could stand on its own. Because there are so damn many of them these days. Not just Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Rackspace, mind you, but also Admeld, Airbnb, Dropbox, Foursquare, Zipcar, Wayfair, Redfin, Evernote, Flipboard, Shopkick…and the list goes on.

Note that the above companies—all of whom are doing reasonably well, I think—spell their names without the camel case. It’s Facebook, not FaceBook. Salesforce, not SalesForce. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Historically, camel-case companies have had their share of difficulties. Consider the plight of AltaVista, the early search engine that lost out to Google. Or of struggling MySpace, which seems to have actually changed its moniker to Myspace—exactly my point, of course. More recently, GlassHouse, the cloud computing and virtualization company, withdrew its plans for an IPO earlier this month (for the second time). BlackBerry hasn’t done much to … Next Page »

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Slackers hate it. Go-getters love it. And store owners and managers? Well, so far they seem to be buying it. I’m talking about Objective Logistics, a New Bedford, MA-based software startup that’s looking to transform work environments, starting with restaurants and retail stores.

“It’s polarizing as hell,” says CEO and co-founder Phil Beauregard.

If you believe controversial companies are good, you’ve come to the right place. Objective Logistics has created a Facebook-like interface that accesses the point-of-sale database of a given store, ranks the performance of waiters and salespeople compared to their peers, and rewards high achievers with perks like getting to choose their own work schedules. In certain establishments, that can mean an extra $1,000 in tips for working a busy Saturday instead of a slow weekday, for instance.

“We’re kind of ‘gamifying’ the labor market,” Beauregard says. “The real vision is, if I can rank productivity through technology, I can reward you and compel you to perform better.” He adds that his company is about “objective transparency through technology.”

And despite its clunky name, Objective Logistics has been attracting lots of buzz among venture capitalists—and customers—this year. The five-person company’s software was first deployed last month at Not Your Average Joe’s (it’s slated to go live in 15 of those restaurants), with several other local stores and major chains also at various stages of adoption. Objective Logistics has raised $750,000 in seed-stage funding from angel investors including Richard Darer, Greg Pesik, Serguei Netessine, Nigel Machin, and other Boston-area investors. The company might look to close a VC round in the next few months, Beauregard says.

Beauregard, who turns 30 next week, is a former investment banker who started Objective Logistics in early 2009. His partners in crime include co-founder Matt Grace, who was reputed to be the youngest product management director in Oracle’s history, and engineering vice president Dan Velcea, a 3Com and Credit Suisse veteran and a Romanian native who, in 1986, dropped his army-duty AK-47 … Next Page »

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Internet tycoon Bob Metcalfe, who recently moved from Boston, is giving his first lecture as professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin this afternoon. I don’t know exactly what he plans to say, but what’s particularly interesting is how he’s delivering the talk—to more than just the people in the room, through a virtual collaboration interface from Avaya, the New Jersey-based business communications firm. The technology is being led by an Avaya group with a strong presence in Boston.

Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet local-area networking standard, founder of 3Com, and partner at Polaris Venture Partners, moved to Austin for the faculty job earlier this month. He has been a mainstay of the Boston innovation scene for the past couple of decades. (For his part, he said he’s not leaving, he’s expanding—and he’ll still spend his summers in New England.)

The topic of his lecture will be “Enernet: Internet lessons for solving energy.” Reached by e-mail, Metcalfe says, “I will again urge that we all use the Internet to conserve energy: Transport your bits, not your atoms.”

Case in point: Metcalfe will speak not only in person to the audience in the UT auditorium, but also to remote viewers (who will see his avatar) using Avaya’s new system. The online platform, called web.alive, uses video-game graphics, immersive audio, and personalized avatars to create a 3-D virtual environment for business collaboration among remote participants. Metcalfe calls it “emersive collaboration through the Internet.” (The URL for the lecture has not been given out publicly; I’ll update this story if that changes.)

The point of web.alive is to do better than existing collaborative tools like video conferencing, which don’t let you move around in the remote environment or interact with people individually. So presumably you could ask Metcalfe’s avatar a question in an interactive way, or even greet him “in person” after his lecture (see image of the virtual auditorium below).

And web.alive is different from existing virtual worlds like Second Life, in that you can set up secure and private meeting areas. What’s more, you have an individualized audio mix through your headphones—so you can have a private conversation with someone in the back of the room, say, and not disturb the speaker (though his avatar might yell at you).

It’s still early days, but Avaya is signing up customers in industry and academia who seem eager to try it out. “Every person we’ve shown it to has wanted it,” says Mohamad Ali, senior vice president of corporate development and strategy, who heads up the web.alive effort from Avaya’s Waltham, MA, office. As a start, he says, “We want to link up other universities.”

Ali says when he’s in the office, he conducts about half of his meetings in the web.alive environment. And Avaya uses it in-house for all of its leadership training courses and new-employee programs. “Over the next year, we mostly want to get people to use it,” Ali says. “Then at some point we have to figure out how to make money with it.”

Metcalfe says he will also use the Avaya system to hold “virtual” office hours, which will be open to his UT students as well as remote visitors. The first session will be tomorrow from 2-5 pm Central Time. If you have a Windows-based PC, you can check it out (and say hello to Metcalfe’s avatar) at utexas.avayalive.com.

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Big news in the New England innovation community today. Bob Metcalfe, an inventor of the Ethernet local-area networking standard, founder of 3Com, partner at Polaris Venture Partners—too many qualifications to list here—is joining the University of Texas at Austin as “professor of innovation” in UT’s engineering school as of January 2011. The news was first reported this morning by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe.

According to the Globe report, Metcalfe (who is an alum and lifetime trustee of MIT) wanted a change of scenery, and is also at work on a new book called Metcalfe’s Law. He will start teaching at UT next fall, and is scaling back his venture capital duties at Polaris to one new investment a year, at most. The report also details Metcalfe’s mixed record of returns as a VC, including the now-defunct companies GreenFuel Technologies and SiCortex, and Mintera (acquired by Oclaro in July for far less than the venture money invested in it). Metcalfe is still an investor in several energy-focused companies such as 1366 Technologies and Ember.

Reached by e-mail today, Metcalfe talked a bit more about his goals at the University of Texas. “UT already has an extensive entrepreneurship curriculum,” he wrote. “I may teach an existing course, or one of my own design, starting next September. The particular innovation ecology I would like to research, teach, and practice consists of fiercely competing teams of research professors, graduating students, scaling entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, strategic partners, and early adopters.”

He touted the Texas capital’s history of innovation: “Austin has long been a happening place in technology entrepreneurship. And it is the Live Music Capital of the World. And Lance Armstrong lives there, and Whole Foods is HQed there. And I love the motto, Keep Austin Weird. I would like to have impact on moving along UT, Austin, Texas, and the USA in the above innovation ecological style.”

As for his forthcoming book, he said, “It will be about the network effect, especially in innovation. And it has to be a networked book—the readers have to connect to one another so as to get the network effect.” (Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected nodes or users in the system.)

All in all, the move seems like a drastic change for Metcalfe, who has been a mainstay of the Boston-area tech scene over the past two decades. But Boston’s loss is Austin’s gain. In a press release today, Rudy Garza, chairman of UT’s alumni association and managing partner of G-51 Capital, says, “Bob’s expertise of bridging science and technology into thriving businesses of the future will speed the success we all will experience as we work hard to spur innovation, build world-class businesses and create wealth and jobs in our great state.” (The move also makes me wonder if Metcalfe wants to be closer to an epicenter of alternative fuels and wind power, given his recent focus on energy.)

Lastly, I asked Metcalfe whether the Boston winters finally got to him. He replied that he is “planning to enjoy the Boston and Maine summers.” He added, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only improperly dressed people.”

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The somewhat lurid circumstances surrounding Mark Hurd’s resignation Friday as chief executive of Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard have left plenty of room for gossip. Hurd stepped aside after a board investigation into a sexual harassment claim by a former marketing contractor; the board cleared Hurd of the harassment allegation, but found that he’d fudged expense reports to hide payments to the woman, who, it emerged over the weekend, is a former actress named Jodie Fisher.

For HP insiders, the episode must feel like a painful echo of previous executive departures, notably that of former board chair Patricia Dunn, who stepped down after a corporate espionage episode came to light in 2006. Now employees and shareholders must wait while interim CEO Cathie Lesjak, formerly the company’s chief financial officer, works to contain the damage and find a replacement.

But more significant than the scandal and the gossip, in the long run, will be the market’s assessment of Hurd’s record as a promoter of growth, innovation, and strategic change within HP. And the biggest lesson here—one that Hurd’s successor would be wise to learn—may be that vertical integration pays. The company’s biggest successes in recent years have come from taking manufacturing, software, and services—components of the computer industry that have been largely scattered since the 1980s—and tying them back together.

Certainly, Hurd leaves HP in a much sounder financial state than when the former NCR executive was chosen in early 2005 to rebuild the company after years of disappointing performance under former CEO Carly Fiorina. Net revenue grew from $86 billion in 2005 to $115 billion in 2009, increasing through the recession and helping the company to surpass even longtime rival IBM to become the world’s second-largest information technology company by revenue (trailing only Korea’s Samsung). While HP’s stock dipped nearly 10 percent on Friday following the announcement of Hurd’s departure, that same stock had more than doubled on Hurd’s watch, from a low of around $20 per share in April 2005 to the $43-$53 range this year.

In the market for consumer PCs, long the foundation of HP’s business, the company bounded forward under Hurd’s leadership, regaining the No. 1 spot in global market share from Dell in 2006. It’s held on to that ranking ever since, despite a major dip in PC purchasing in 2008-2009. In 2009 the company also became the leading supplier of PCs to the U.S. enterprise market, and it’s consistently in close competition with IBM to supply the most enterprise servers.

Between 2004 and 2009, HP spent $17 billion on research and development and $20 billion on acquisitions, capping off a buying spree with the purchase of infotech giants Electronic Data Systems (EDS), 3Com, and Palm. “The corporation is exceptionally well positioned strategically,” Hurd said in a statement announcing his resignation. “HP has an extremely talented executive team supported by a dedicated and customer focused work force. I expect that the company will continue to be successful in the future.”

To the extent that Hurd’s prediction comes true, some observers believe, it may be thanks to his own aggressive effort to extend HP’s product lines, making the company into a one-stop shop in many of the markets where it plays.

In the realm of corporate data centers, for example, the acquisition of Opsware in 2007 and of 3Com this year brought the company networking software and switches to layer atop its server and storage technology. In corporate computer services, the acquisition of EDS in 2008 brought HP an enterprise IT outsourcing division to help big companies run the same hardware and software that it was selling to them. And while competitors like IBM have exited the PC market, HP has … Next Page »

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Venture capital firm Venrock, which has offices in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, MA, New York, and Israel, announced today it has closed a new $350 million fund that will be focused on early-stage technology, healthcare, and energy companies. This is the firm’s sixth venture fund, and it follows a $600 million fund raised in 2007. Venrock started in 1969 and was originally established as the venture-capital arm of the Rockefeller family. It has $2.2 billion under management and is known for its early investments in companies such as Intel, Apple, 3Com, Genetics Institute, Idec Pharmaceuticals, and Gilead Sciences. Its current investments include Boston-Power, Sapphire Energy, and Adify. Venrock has had a number of exits this year, including IPOs for Alimera Sciences, AVEO Pharmaceuticals, and Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, and the acquisition of PGP by Symantec.

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Dealmakers appear to be getting their business done before the week of Thanksgiving—because we’ve seen a decent stream of deal closings involving Boston-area life sciences and tech companies over the past week or so.

—Framingham, MA-based Punchbowl Software, which operates the party planning website MyPunchbowl.com, said it acquired technology assets of a group vacation website called I’m In. Punchbowl founder and CEO Matt Douglas provided details on why the transaction made sense for his startup.

—After months of operating quietly, seed-stage venture fund Founder Collective officially debuted last week. Eric Paley, a managing partner and co-founder of the firm, told us why he and other software entrepreneurs came together to form the new venture outfit, which has offices in Cambridge, MA and New York City. Here’s a hint: They were a bit frustrated with the status quo in the venture industry.

—Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego-based biotech startup focused on developing techniques that make stem cell research practical for the pharmaceutical industry, reeled in $30 million in a Series B round of venture financing. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led the new round of investment in Fate, which was founded by top academics at Harvard University, Stanford University, The Scripps Research Institute, and the University of Washington.

—ImmunoGen (NASDAQ:IMGN), a Waltham, MA-based biotech firm, reported this week that the firm sold a second license to its technology—which is for linking targeted antibodies to cell-killing molecules—to industry giant Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) for $1 million upfront, plus potential milestone payments.

—Corindus, a Natick, MA-based startup developing a robotic system for implanting vascular stents, collected $5.3 million of a planned $10 million in venture dollars, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

—Cambridge -based Ligon Discovery found $1 million in a seed round of financing from incTANK Ventures, with plans to validate its small molecule microarray system for drug discovery that was developed at Harvard. The company was founded by folks from Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

—We spotted Angus Davis, a co-founder of Microsoft’s voice-based Internet search subsidiary Tellme Networks, at Polaris Venture Partners’ Dogpatch Labs recently and wondered what he was up to. It looks like he’s been working on a new Providence, RI-based startup called Swipely, which quietly swept up a cool $1 million from First Round Capital.

—Jealous? Highland Capital Partners, the Lexington, MA-based venture powerhouse, closed its eighth fund, worth a whopping … Next Page »

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether a surge in call option trading on 3Com shares just hours before the announcement that Hewlett-Packard would take over the Marlborough, MA-based networking equipment maker for $2.7 billion was a result of insider knowledge of the deal, Bloomberg and other outlets are reporting today. Trading in call options—which guarantee the right to acquire a stock at a certain price—hit a 26-month high on November 11, just before the after-hours announcement of the acquisition. That “screams insider trading to the SEC,” Wayne State University law professor and former SEC attorney Peter Henning told Bloomberg, whose report was based on information from an unnamed source inside the agency.

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Marlborough, MA-based 3Com and Realtek Semiconductor Corporation of Hsinchu, Taiwan, said yesterday that they’ve resolved a longstanding patent dispute over Realtek network controller chips that 3Com claimed appropriated aspects of its parallel processing technology. 3Com won a $45.3 million judgment against Realtek in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in April, but the new agreement nullifies that settlement, replacing it with a $70 million licensing payment to 3Com that will allow Realtek to continue sell chips containing the disputed technology.

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Robert Mao, named yesterday by Marlborough, MA-based 3Com as the replacement for outgoing CEO Edgar Masri, will be based in China, where he’ll be able to oversee Internet switch and router maker H3C, 3Com said in a press release. Currently 3Com’s only profitable division, H3C started out as a joint venture between 3Com and Chinese networking vendor Huawei Technologies in 2003 and is now wholly owned by 3Com. The company has also hired Ronald Sege as its new president and chief operating officer; Sege will be based in the United States and will oversee 3Com’s operations outside China.

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3Com of Marlborough, MA, said today that a federal jury in California awarded it $45.3 million in its patent infringement lawsuit against Realtek Semiconductor Corporation of Hsinchu, Taiwan.

3Com charged in the suit that Realtek’s network controller chips appropriated aspects of parallel processing technology 3Com developed for its own network interface devices. A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that Realtek had infringed on four 3Com patents, three of them willingly.

The company said it is pursuing a larger award as part of a final judgment in the case. “We are extremely pleased that the jury has found in favor of 3Com in this important case and recognized the damage caused to 3Com by Realtek’s willful actions,” 3Com executive vice president and chief administrative and legal officer Neal Goldman said in a press release issued today. “3Com has a very broad portfolio of networking technology patents and an active licensing program. We will continue to aggressively protect our valuable patents against any and all infringements.”

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The word of the week for Boston-area deal-making was acquisition. You’ll see what I mean.

—Data-center-automation firm BladeLogic (NASDAQ: BLOG) of Lexington, MA, scored an impressive $800 million in a buy-out deal with Houston, TX-based BMC Software (NYSE: BMC).

—Beverley, MA-based Axcelis Technologies, a maker of specialized semiconductor manufacturing equipment, once again rejected a takeover offer by Japanese conglomerate Sumitomo Heavy Industries. Wade unravels the complicated history between the firms.

—EMC (NYSE: EMC) of Hopkinton, MA, had better luck with its second shot at San Diego-based Iomega (NYSE: IOM). The California firm announced that it’s willing to discuss a revised bid from EMC, worth about $205.5 million, after rejecting an initial $180 million offer.

—Cambridge, MA-based Teragram was acquired by Cary, NC, business-intelligence giant SAS for an undisclosed sum. Teragram develops natural language processing tools for a host of companies.

—DNA-based diagnostics developer Exact Sciences (NASDAQ: EXAS) of Marlborough, MA, announced it would explore a sale of the firm or other strategic options. Money manager Kenneth Luskin of Santa Monica, CA’s Intrinsic Value Asset Management had urged the company to put itself on the block in an SEC filing made a few weeks earlier.

—Bedford, MA-based mobile music distributor Groove Mobile was bought by Framingham, MA-based NMS Communications (NASDAQ: NMSS) for only about 45 cents on the dollar.

—Marlborough, MA-based 3Com said it would seek a $66 million penalty payment from Boston-based Bain Capital, which gave up on a proposed takeover of 3Com after failing to get approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States for the deal.

And in non-acquisition-related news…

—LED lighting developer Luminus Devices of Billerica, MA, raised some $72 million in a round led by Braemar Energy Ventures of Boston and joined by CMEA Ventures, Paladin Capital Group, Battery Venture Partners, Argonaut Private Equity, Stata Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, DFJ-New England, Eastward Capital, and others. Luminus, which previously focused on providing lamps for TVs and projectors, is in the midst of a big push to expand into the general-illumination market and other areas.

—Pogo Jet added its IPO to the list of offerings that have been pulled or delayed since the new year.

—Highland Capital Partners of Lexington, MA, and California’s Draper Fisher Jurvetson led a $12 million Series D round for CafeMom, a New York-based social network for mothers.

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Last month Boston’s Bain Capital and Chinese investment partner Huawei Technologies withdrew their petition with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States for permission to take over Marlborough, MA-based 3Com in the face of the committee’s security concerns over partial Chinese ownership of 3Com, whose TippingPoint subsidiary makes security software used by the U.S. government. Yesterday, Bain gave up entirely on the deal, the Boston Globe and other outlets are reporting. And today 3Com announced it would squeeze Bain for a $66 million breakup penalty payment, saying the investment firm’s reasons for pulling out of the deal were “invalid” and “not grounds for termination.”

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Bob and Rebecca both went on vacation last week, but local newsmakers didn’t. I did my best to keep on top of the business-and-technology headlines, with some help from a terrific freelancer, Neil Savage; here’s a look back at the bounty.

—Pogo Jet, a Chicopee, MA-based regional airline planning to fly very light jets like the Eclipse 500 between destinations in the Northeast and Canada, set the terms for its planned IPO at 7 million shares to be offered at $12.50 to $16.50 per share. The move came a year ahead of Pogo’s first planned flight.

—Bain Capital of Boston pulled the plug on its proposed $2.2 billion buyout of Marlborough, MA-based 3Com. Federal regulators opposed the deal because 3Com has a division that makes security software for the U.S. government and Bain’s partner in the buyout, Huawei Technology, is Chinese.

—A DowJones VentureSource report showed that two New England firms, Matrix Partners and Canaan Partners, were among the top 10 venture firms putting money into startups in India in 2007. Altogether, Indian entrepreneurs collected $928 million in 2007, up from $349 million the year before.

—In a Series E round, Waltham, MA-based Incipient, which makes software for managing enterprise data on storage-area networks, raised $15.6 million.

—Our stock description of Hopkinton, MA-based company EMC used to be something like “a maker of networked storage hardware.” Seems we’ll have to revise that description in light of EMC’s hiring this week of Paul Maritz, founder and CEO of Seattle-based software company Pi Corporation, to lead its new Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division, which will focus on various forms of utility computing and software-as-a-service. An company exec blogged that the move is a fundamental change of direction for EMC, which also acquired Pi for an undisclosed amount and will fold it into the new division.

—Luminus Devices, a Billerica, MA-based maker of very bright LEDs used in projection TVs, believes its Phlatlight diodes have the potential to light up indoor and outdoor spaces. It inked a deal with Phoenix, AZ-based Avnet Electronics Marketing to distribute its Phlatlight technology in the general illumination market.

—Digit Wireless, a Lexington, MA-based startup that licenses alternative designs for mobile-phone keyboards that allow faster text messaging, picked up $4 million from existing investors Qualcomm and Venrock and got a new CEO, former Telus Communications executive Robert Blumenthal.

—CMGI in Waltham, MA, paid $24.5 million to acquire Dedham, MA-based OCS, maker of a software system for administering software licenses.

—At the Game Developers Choice awards, the highlight of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, 2K Boston’s groundbreaking title Bioshock brought home the statuettes for Best Visual Art, Best Writing, and Best Audio.

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Bain Capital, the Boston-based asset management firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, has suspended a joint effort with China’s Huawei Technology to acquire Marlborough, MA-based 3Com for a proposed $2.2 bilion in cash, 3Com reported today. Bain and Huawei withdrew their joint filing with the U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which has proved unwilling to okay the deal. According to PE Week and other reports, U.S. legislators were concerned about Chinese ownership of 3Com, whose TippingPoint subsidiary makes security software for the government; apparently, Bain, Huawei, and CFIUS were unable to settle on “mitigation” terms under which TippingPoint would be excluded from the merger. “We are very disappointed that we were unable to reach a mitigation agreement with CFIUS for this transaction,” Edgar Masri, 3Com’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

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