Time for an update on Boston’s marketing tech cluster. It’s one of the real strengths of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it looks like it’s getting stronger, with a couple of leaders making news this week. Here is a tale of two companies that have become competitors:

—Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), the Waltham, MA-based online marketing firm, has seen its stock price jump nearly 30 percent—from about $24 to just over $30—since Facebook filed for its IPO last week (coincidence?). Constant Contact has been positioning itself as a leader in digital marketing for small businesses across e-mail, social media, and Web platforms—especially social campaigns. The company also released some promising stats on its revenues and profits for 2011 and its most recent quarter.

—HubSpot, the Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm, said it has hired J.D. Sherman, Akamai’s former chief financial officer (also a former IBM exec). The company says Sherman is being brought in partly to help it prepare for a future IPO. HubSpot has been hiring aggressively and working on new products, while it pares away others (like Oneforty.com, which it acquired last summer). It remains to be seen whether the company will actually make it to an IPO before getting snapped up by Salesforce.com or some other suitor.

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A young Canadian software startup with Boston investors is now part of a big Boston-area company. Ottawa-based Blaze Software has been acquired by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) for an undisclosed cash sum.

What’s interesting here is that Akamai, the Web content delivery and networking giant, is making a move into Web performance optimization—basically tackling Web performance at the browser level (what some call “front end”), rather than the network level. Akamai has been positioning itself as a one-stop provider of a secure platform for businesses to reach customers via the Web, mobile, and cloud. That approach also includes, among other things, speeding up Web and mobile applications, as evidenced by the company’s recent acquisition of its California-based rival Cotendo for $268 million.

Today’s deal is no doubt smaller than that, but it could be an important sign of things to come—especially around Boston. Blaze started in 2010, and its seed funding came from local investors CommonAngels and Boston Seed Capital. So why sell now?

“You always have a choice of how you want to grow the business,” says Chris Sheehan, managing director of CommonAngels. “It made a lot of sense for the guys to partner up with Akamai, who’s so strong in the [content delivery network] space. When I made the investment, [Web performance optimization] was just beginning. The timing was sooner than I expected. But in the last 12 months, this whole thing has really started to take off.” [Disclosure: CommonAngels is an investor in Xconomy, and Sheehan is a board member at Xconomy.]

Blaze’s approach is to optimize the code on Web pages so as to speed up the transmission of content and render pages faster on whatever device the customer is browsing on—PC, tablet, or smartphone. This is particularly useful for e-commerce and media sites, which tend to get gummed up by lots of different pieces of code loading on them. The company’s technology (and team) will be integrated into Akamai’s cloud platform, said Rick McConnell, executive vice president of products and development at Akamai, in a statement.

In speeding up websites, Blaze competes directly with Boston-based companies Yottaa (which is also in Boston Seed’s portfolio) and SiteSpect. Google’s team in Kendall Square also released a free tool for Web page optimization in the fall of 2010.

It’s not just about making websites faster, however. All of the above companies have been trying to combine Web optimization with business analytics so as to help businesses track things like sales and customer behavior more effectively. Now Akamai is firmly in the game, and we’ll see how that affects the competitive landscape.

“It’s going to make it a lot harder,” Sheehan says. “It puts a lot of pressure on the other startups.”

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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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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … Next Page »

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Sometimes the most interesting gatherings have the strangest names. What does “Boston Hadoop Meetup Group” say to you? To me, it says “future of big data in Boston.”

Hadoop is an open source data-analysis platform that is gaining popularity for helping companies and IT departments crunch huge amounts of information. The Hadoop meetup group in Boston, like those in other cities, has been around for a couple of years, but until now it hasn’t been very active. That’s about to change on February 15, from 6:00-9:00 pm, when the group is getting together at Fidelity in Boston to talk about the technology and how it can be used.

Spearheading the new effort is Hadapt, a big-data software startup in Cambridge, MA, that combines Hadoop with advanced database technology. Hadapt moved to the Boston area from New Haven, CT, in early November after raising a Series A venture round from Bessemer Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

Hadapt will join Cloudera and MapR, other players in the sector, in giving informal talks at the meetup, which is expected to draw upwards of 50 developers, entrepreneurs, and folks from big companies like Akamai, IBM, and EMC/VMware. “It’s important to build awareness about Hadoop and bring together people already working on it,” says Justin Borgman, the CEO of Hadapt. “We don’t yet have a community built around it in this city.”

The meetup is the latest sign of a critical mass of interest building around Boston in big data and analytics. Earlier that same day (the 15th), MassTLC is organizing an event around the impact of big data on the tech industry. Last month, startups Chart.io, Kinvey, and Session M organized a very well attended meetup around data analytics and visualization. And earlier this week, Vertica (acquired by HP last year) said it is relocating to Cambridge and setting up a center for big data analytics and community outreach.

Bryan Stevenson, chief technology officer at Cambridge-based startup InsightSquared, says he has just joined the Hadoop meetup group and that “there’s a lot of buzz around the technology in general.” InsightSquared, which helps staffing, recruiting, and software businesses analyze and display their data, has been experimenting with Hadoop. Stevenson, who’s relatively new to Boston, says it’s important to have a peer group so he (and others) can “ask the stupid questions.”

Hadapt, for its part, has grown to about 20 employees and is currently hiring. The Yale University spinout’s software is in late-stage beta trials now and will be generally available later this year, Borgman says.

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Some big-company-related news to report in the Boston area. Let’s get right to it.

—Microsoft Research New England has made three new hires in its social media research group, joining danah boyd. They are professors Nancy Baym from the University of Kansas (specializing in personal connections and online communities); Kate Crawford from the University of New South Wales (mobile media and youth culture); and Mary Gray from Indiana University (youth sexuality and digital media).

—Speaking of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the software giant is working with Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F), Watertown, MA-based BlueMetal Architects, and Boston mobile-health firm Healthrageous to do research on extending health management to people’s vehicles. The companies are building a prototype system that collects biometric data and sensory information from a car that can be uploaded to a person’s health and wellness database.

—PayPal, the subsidiary of eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), is looking to add staff in the Boston area, according to a report by the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner. The report says Scott Thompson, formerly president of PayPal and incoming CEO of Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), visited Boston last fall to discuss PayPal’s expansion in the area. PayPal, which may or may not get spun out by eBay (I’ve heard rumors), acquired Boston mobile firms Where and Fig Card last year. Thompson, a Raynham, MA, native and Stonehill College alum, was also a board member of Vertica, the Boston-area big-data company acquired by HP (NYSE: HPQ) last year.

—My colleague Curt Woodward spoke with Facebook engineering director Jay Parikh about the social network’s ongoing upgrades to its technical infrastructure. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because Parikh is an eight-year-plus veteran of Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM). He served as a vice president of engineering for the Web content-delivery firm from 1999-2007. No word on why Facebook hasn’t set up an engineering center in Boston yet.

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Time for our data-driven roundup of the latest deals news from around the San Francisco Bay Area.

$17 to $18 billion—The approximate amount Yahoo could raise by selling off its stakes in China’s Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, according to reports today from Fortune and Dow Jones VentureWire. Yahoo’s board is reportedly considering the transactions this week.

$268 million—The price fetched by Sunnyvale, CA-based Web and mobile content delivery acceleration specialist Cotendo, which was just acquired by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai, the big operator of private content distribution networks. Xconomy’s Greg Huang reported on the story.

$130 million—New financing announced this week for San Jose-based Stion, a maker of thin-film photovoltaic materials. Avaco, a South Korean equipment supplier, and unnamed private equity funds in South Korea led the round.

$94 million—The amount Google has invested in a group of four photovoltaic installations being built outside Sacramento by Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco-based subsidiary of Japanese giant Sharp. KKR and Recurrent itself also invested in the projects.

$40 million—New financing for San Francisco-based Jawbone, best known for its Bluetooth mobile headsets. Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and DST Global’s Yuri Milner ponied up.

$27 million—Total venture backing raised by Seeker Wireless, an Australian maker of geolocation software acquired this week by the Safely division of Emeryville, CA-based Location Labs. Financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but Ina Fried of AllThingsD pegged the deal at “just over $1 million.”

$11.6 million—Series B funding for Houzz, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup whose website and mobile applications offer renovation design ideas and product leads to homeowners. Sequoia Capital led the round.

$6.5 million—Series B funding for San Francisco-based Keas, a provider of game-based wellness programs for large employers. Existing investors Atlas Venture and Ignition Partners led the round. Xconomy profiled Keas and its big 2010 pivot last month.

$6 million—A Series A financing round for Tactus Technology of Fremont, CA. The company is developing touchscreens with retractable keys, and is funded by Thomvest Ventures.

$5.33 million—Series B funding for Menlo Park, CA-based ScaleArc, a maker of software for managing the deployment of large databases. Trinity Ventures led the round, with existing investor Nexus Venture Partners joining in.

$4 million—A Series A financing round for Menlo Park, CA-based SurDoc, a new startup offering Web-based document storage, annotation, and sharing. Backers include IDG Ventures.

$1 million—Seed funding for Mygola, a San Francisco- and Bangalore-based startup that connects consumers planning trips with human guides who assemble information about flight options, hotels, and the like. Blumberg Ventures and 500 Startups led the investment.

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Some big acquisition news before the holidays here. Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the Web delivery and networking giant, said today it is acquiring a competitor, Sunnyvale, CA-based Cotendo, for $268 million in cash. The deal, which has been rumored for the past month, is expected to close in the first half of 2012.

Akamai has been positioning itself as a provider of a secure software platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud. Cotendo competes with Akamai in the realm of accelerating Web and mobile applications. The California-based company started in 2008 and has about 100 employees, more than half of them based in Israel.

About a year ago, Akamai and MIT filed a lawsuit against Cotendo alleging patent infringement. Presumably that case is resolved now.

This is a relatively rare case of a Boston tech company acquiring a Silicon Valley company. Most of the other big deals this year have gone the other way (such as Oracle-Endeca, Google-ITA, eBay-Where, and HP-Vertica).

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Xconomy and the folks at WGBH (Bob Seay, to be precise) are at it again: bringing you the latest and greatest in news from Boston’s innovation community. The Xconomy Report airs every Friday morning at 7:49am on 89.7 FM. To find out about the project that both The Who’s Roger Daltrey and actress Julie Andrews are funding, have a listen on WGBH’s website.

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What the heck is social video analytics and advertising?

Whatever it is, Visible Measures has closed a Series D financing round worth $13 million, based on the strength of its software platform in that field. The Boston company, which started in 2005, has raised a total of more than $45 million to date. DAG Ventures led the latest round, and new strategic partner Advance Publications (which owns Conde Nast) and previous investors General Catalyst, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital also participated.

The concept behind Visible Measures is to help advertisers and publishers track online video performance—how Web viewers interact with videos, which segments they watch, when they share it with others (hence the social bit), and more broadly how the content spreads across video sites like YouTube and AOL. At stake is billions of TV advertising dollars that many predict will shift to online as the audience for Internet video grows and software tools allow for better ad targeting.

Visible Measures has nearly 80 employees, according to CEO and founder Brian Shin (see photo above). The team is split between Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Ottawa, Wyoming, and London.

The company operates at the intersection of entertainment, digital media, software analytics, and advertising. Other firms with complementary or related approaches in video and ads include Akamai, comScore, Quantcast, Bluefin Labs, Brightcove, DataXu, Extreme Reach, and Wistia.

It was refreshing to hear Shin speak at a FutureM event last week about how he didn’t have it all figured out back in the early days of Visible Measures.

“We said, ‘Let’s try this advertising thing,’” he said. “When you’re trying to create a new market, there aren’t a lot of great examples. You have to have advisors, people you trust, to help you grow.”

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Earlier this month, Don Rippert made a major career change, going from his gig as chief technology officer of technology consulting firm Accenture to Cambridge, MA-based database software maker Basho Technologies, where he joined as CEO.

“I wanted to really focus on the technology, and I thought this would give me a chance to do that,” he says.

Basho, which also has offices in San Francisco and Reston, VA, announced his appointment earlier this month, alongside the news that it had added $4 million to complete a $7.5 million funding round. The money came from Georgetown Partners, and Trifork AS, a Danish systems integrator that is the European distributor of Basho’s software.

I took this as an opportunity to sit down and talk to Rippert, sift past the database buzzwords, and figure out what exactly Basho and its open source software, Riak, do.

It all goes back to the CAP Theorem, originated by Eric Brewer, now Google’s vice president of infrastructure and also a Basho board member, Rippert explains. In a nutshell, the theorem states that no database or distributed system can provide consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (the ability to break up data and store it in different physical locations) at the same time. From the 1970s until five or so years ago, the bulk of information in databases was largely consistent and transaction based (for example, the specs on a customer in a sales database), Rippert says. But recently, gadgets like smartphones sprouted up and started producing loads of more complex data.

Traditional relational databases worked well for storing the more uniform, transactional types of data, and focused on providing consistency and availability. That didn’t work so well for the complex data found in videos, data logs from smart meters, and the like.

“Existing databases were the wrong storage mechanism for the sudden jump in data, based on unstructured and machine-made data,” Rippert says. “An industry formed around solving that problem. Basho is one of the companies in that industry.”

Basho, and others in the industry, focus on the A and the P of the CAP Theorem— availability and partition tolerance. Base on those principles, the software is designed to help break up the data and store it in different pieces, and then know what sits where. It also stores the same data in multiple places to “take into account the possibility that some piece will break,” Rippert says. Other database technology that is part of this new generation includes MongoDB, CouchDB, and DataStax. Basho’s founders come from Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the Cambridge-based maker of technology for delivering Web content.

Customers can download Riak right from … Next Page »

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All my peers in tech seem to be talking about wireless these days. So this past Friday, I stepped outside my world of the data biz to attend the MassTLC tech event on “The Global Impact of Mobility” at the Kendall Square Marriott next to MIT. The event included panelists from industry (Groupon, BT, Cisco, Thomson Reuters, Akamai, Jumptap, Where, and others), venture capital (Highland Capital, Castile Ventures), and academia (MIT, Fletcher School at Tufts University).

The news was good for Boston—we’ve got 400 companies and 30,000 jobs in the wireless sector, the vast majority of which is local. Once we were done with the self-congratulatory navel gazing, we got down to business to review the mobile landscape. My top three takeaways were surprising.


1. Wireless Safari



Despite all the great work on mobile done in the U.S. and in Europe, the adoption of new wireless technology in emerging markets can be the most rapid. Nicholas Sullivan of the Tufts Fletcher School noted that 70 percent of adults in Kenya use a mobile payments solution such as M-PESA and stated that 20 percent of the country’s GDP is moved by mobile daily. This technology has proved to be a vastly more efficient, reliable, and safe way to pay for services and do banking in a country that only has 1,500 ATMs total. To me, this is reminiscent of emerging markets skipping landlines and going straight to wireless—it’s a lot cheaper and more efficient than building a traditional infrastructure.


2. Ma Bell, Ma Bank



As a corollary to the above on new technology adoption, the leading providers of these services are not who you think. It’s not Bank of America or Deutsche Bank rolling out mobile payments—it’s Vodaphone, one of Europe’s largest telephone providers. Maybe there is hope yet for Verizon and AT&T, who missed the boat on Skype to Microsoft. In fact, I can just see the advertisements now in the US—why sign up for a triple play bundle (voice, data, TV) with your telco provider when you can have a “quadruple play” and do your banking too.



3. SoMoLo



SoMoLo is the latest buzzword—social, mobile, and local. It’s the new trifecta. “Hyperlocal, hypertargeted ads are a key to monetizing mobile experience,” noted Tom Erskine, a director of the communications and media industry at Pegasystems and a panelist on Media Convergence. It’s why Michael Shim, the VP of global partnerships at Groupon, who was on the panel on Making Money in Mobile, is rolling out Groupon Now!. Steve Whittaker of BT noted that with all this data, there is now a compelling use for the cloud for wireless. This would include collecting info in a city and then using the cloud to process info at an aggregate level of activities and trends. (Hmmmm…the cloud and lots of data. Now I can justify this expense report back at my database company!)

So lots of disruption and lots of good opportunities abound. What are the possible pitfalls? Several folks pointed to concerns about privacy—not surprising given the recent headlines about location data and smartphones. Also, with all this power and thousands upon thousands of apps, getting to what you need has to be more efficient with more intelligence built into your phone. Just imagine if your phone had the right apps on your screen ready to launch depending on where you were or what you were doing. This should be feasible. According to Professor Iqbal Quadir of MIT, the typical smartphone these days has more processing power than the Apollo computers that got us to the moon. Personally, I just hope my smartphone doesn’t get too smart, especially if I ever need to run the “open pod bay door” app I was thinking of installing.

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I spent a couple of days at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco last week, but unfortunately the news didn’t slow down to accommodate my absence from the office.

—Our marquee infotech event of the spring, Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, is coming up tomorrow at SRI International in Menlo Park; you can get your ticket now. One of the panelists coming in to help explore the long-range future of consumer computing is Dan Reed, head of Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group (XCG); on a Q&A published last week, I asked Reed how he compensates for the inevitable uncertainties in technology forecasting and where he thinks cloud computing, mobile computing, and AI research are heading.

—Staffers at PARC published a blog post taking issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article last week about Apple, Xerox, and the nature of innovation. PARC argued that Gladwell’s picture of innovation at the legendary lab is outdated, and that if Steve Jobs were visiting PARC today, he wouldn’t be allowed to walk away with the lab’s best ideas—there’d be a collaboration informed by the philosophy of open innovation.

—The tech world buzzed with discussion over Microsoft’s $8.5 billion takeover of Skype, which has major operations in the Bay Area. My colleague Curt up in Seattle rounded up blog reaction to the acquisition, Microsoft’s largest ever, while Greg reported on his conversation with Microsoft online services president Qi Lu, who said Skype’s Internet calling functions will enhance existing Microsoft products like Xbox Kinect, Windows Phone 7, and Lync instant messaging.

—I was one of 5,000 attendees at Google I/O to pick up a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet computer. I’m a committed iPad fan and will remain so, but as I reported in my Friday column, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which hits stores in the U.S. on June 8) comes closer to matching the iPad 2 than any other tablet on the market. In fact, it bests the iPad 2 in some respects—it’s thinner, with a larger screen and much better cameras, for example.

… Next Page »

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[Updated 5/8/11. See below] It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of events, it was the age of allergies, it was the epoch of objectivity, it was the epoch of PR and self-promotion, it was the season of writing stories, it was the season of prescription drugs and nasal spray, it was the spring of big financing rounds, it was the winter of boring software acquisitions. (I’m not actually a Dickens fan, in case you couldn’t tell, though his career is one of the first things I wrote about as a journalist.)

My point is there’s a lot going on around town—at Xconomy and beyond. You can always find a current run-down on goings on at our local events page. But to help you sort through some of the key events going on in the innovation community in this particularly busy month, I’ve prepared a quick cheat sheet (in chronological order):

—Next week, on May 11, you’ll have your choice of hearing about the future of search and online services (and Bing vs. Google) from Microsoft president Qi Lu, or watching the grand finale of the MIT $100K business plan competition (with Vinod Khosla speaking). We’ll be at both events, which are free to attend. I’ll be moderating a Q&A with Qi Lu at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square, and my colleague Erin will be at the $100K finale at Kresge Auditorium.

—On May 13, Health Tech 2011 is taking place at Bingham McCutchen in downtown Boston. Regina Herzlinger, Jay Parkinson, and Esther Dyson lead an all-star cast of innovators who will be speaking about the latest opportunities and strategies in healthcare delivery, mobile health, wellness and behavior change, and investing in all of the above. The event is organized by careinnovators, a healthcare website and networking-resource organization. [We meant to list this event in the original version of the article---Eds.]

—A big mobile event from MassTLC on May 13 at the Kendall Square Marriott will focus on the global impact of the wireless industry. Kara Swisher from WSJ and senior execs from Akamai, Cisco, Groupon, Jumptap, Movik, Where, and other top tech companies will be on hand.

—On May 18, the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is happening at Kresge. The theme this year is “beyond the crossroads”—how chief information officers and senior managers must adapt to the digital business world, and what the latest opportunities and strategies are across industries. I’ll be moderating a CEO keynote panel featuring Brian Halligan of HubSpot, David Castellani of New York Life Retirement Plan Services, Tianwen Liu of iSoftStone, and Eric Openshaw of Deloitte.

—Angel Bootcamp is happening June 14, organized by Jon Pierce. This event, now in its second year, brings together the top people in early-stage startup investing, plus entrepreneurs and those who want to learn more about the field. Everyone from TechStars to Bill Warner to Founder Collective to Dharmesh Shah to CommonAngels will be there. But it’s invitation-only, so go to the site to request yours.

—Last but not least, XSITE 2011, Xconomy’s third annual flagship conference, is at Babson College on June 16 (whew—still lots to do). Our theme this year is “the entrepreneurship era,” the challenges and opportunities that are evolving fast as startups—and entrepreneurial practices in general—go increasingly mainstream. Our speakers include Desh Deshpande, Edward Jung, Phil Sharp, Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, David Cancel, Nicholas Christakis, Joe Chung, Todd Dagres, Paul Sellew, Katie Rae, and many others. More to come soon.

We are getting a critical mass of startups, entrepreneurs, students, and investors involved, and we want to make sure everyone has a blast while making lots of great connections. If you have feedback or suggestions about how we can make XSITE more valuable to the innovation community, please contact me at gthuang@xconomy.com or @gthuang on Twitter.

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An intriguing Boston-area tech company is going public after more than 10 years—and it’s not too late to shake things up in its market. I’m not talking about Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), which had its long-awaited IPO a couple weeks ago. I’m talking about SMTP, a pioneering e-mail software firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Yes, the company with the famously boring name—it makes software for e-mail delivery management and marketing—is going public today. It’s not debuting on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange; rather, trading of SMTP’s stock begins this morning on the over-the-counter bulletin board (OTCBB: SMTP). Companies that trade over the counter generally don’t have to meet the same SEC filing requirements as those that trade on the more regulated stock exchanges; it can also be harder for investors to trade OTC shares, partly because buyers and sellers must arrange their trades directly.

About two months ago, SMTP made an initial stock offering to 81 shareholders, who invested a total of $100,000 at 25 cents per share. The deal is different from a traditional, big-company IPO in that there is no investment bank involved as an underwriter—the offering went directly to a small pool of investors.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill penny stock, though. SMTP says it doesn’t need the money, so it can afford to separate the process of going public from fundraising. The idea is that the firm could raise a few million in a secondary offering down the road—if its stock goes up—and in the meantime, it will keep growing and work towards becoming a much bigger player in e-mail tech. What’s more, its CEO has a contrarian’s sense of timing (and other important lessons to share), which we’ll get to in a minute.

SMTP, known as EMUmail until about a year ago, started in 1998 and first released its product for businesses in 2002. The company has grown a lot in the past year and has been making a small profit—just under $400,000 after tax in 2010, on $2.7 million in revenue. The firm had about 10,000 customers worldwide at the end of December. It says it competes with bigger companies like Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), JangoMail, MailChimp, and Amazon.com, which recently got into e-mail bulk delivery. SMTP currently employs 31 people, most of them in Ukraine; four are based in Cambridge.

“It’s small, but it’s solid, growing, and profitable,” says Semyon Dukach, SMTP’s chief executive (see photo, left). “Once we begin trading, we may very well go and raise a few million dollars in order to make acquisitions of related companies in our space.”

Indeed, anything seems possible when you have a guy like Dukach at the helm. While some might call him crazy (he wouldn’t deny it), Dukach has made a modest fortune thumbing his nose at the establishment. Most people know him as a swashbuckling master of disguise and leader of the MIT blackjack team, popularized in Ben Mezrich’s books Bringing Down the House and Busting Vegas. (He has the distinction of being the latter book’s main character.) But you might also say that Dukach, who is 42 and has five kids, has grown up a lot since then.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the beginning. Dukach is a Moscow native who came to the U.S. when he was 10, settling in Houston, TX, via Newark, NJ. He studied computer science at Columbia University and came to MIT in 1990 to do a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. His thesis was on e-commerce and Internet money exchange (“way before it was cool,” he says).

Dukach got involved with the MIT blackjack team in the mid-1990s, and that story has been told. But it isn’t how he made his millions. That would be from his first software startup, … Next Page »

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Companies offering new takes on social media and collaboration dominated the local business and technology news last week, as they seem to be doing an increasing amount of the time.

—After two years in stealth, a Mountain View, CA, startup called RockMelt began distributing a new Windows and Mac browser by the same name. In my Friday column I took a deep look at the browser, which is full of features designed to make life easier for heavy users of social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

—AngelPad, one of the newest venture incubators on the scene in San Francisco, graduated its first class of eight startups with a series of demos geared toward venture and individual investors. I summed up the companies’ pitches, which ranged from organizing social media streams (Curated.by, Snip.ly) to overhauling advertising and e-commerce (Adku, MoPub), simplifying online auctions (Egg Cartel), managing home energy consumption (HugEnergy), organizing meetups (RollCall), and aiding outdoorsmanship (AllTrails).

—Flowtown, a San Francisco startup with an online platform that helps other companies kickstart social media marketing campaigns, announced that it had acquired the technology of Who Should I Follow?, which combs Twitter users’ lists followers to suggest new people to follow. I took the occasion to write a full profile of Flowtown, which was co-founded in 2008 by former online video producer Ethan Bloch and IT consultant Dan Martell.

—BroadVision (NASDAQ: BVSN), a Redwood City, CA, company that achieved fame in the first Internet boom for its enterprise portals and e-commerce software, pushed forward with efforts to reinvent its product line around Facebook-style sharing and collaboration. I spoke with BroadVision founder and CEO Pehong Chen, who called the debut of BroadVision’s new “Clearvale Paasport” enterprise document exchange platform a bet-the-company moment.

—We published a report from the Women 2.0 PITCH Night on November 4, where VMware founder and former CEO Diane Greene spoke about how she started the company, and encouraged other women entrepreneurs to think big.

—In funding news, Gluster raised $8.5 million, Zuora raised $20 million, RealGravity raised $3.2 million, Social Gaming Network raised $2.5 million, Twilio raised $12 million, Rhythm NewMedia raised $10 million, and Airbnb raised $7.2 million.

—San Francisco-based event management startup Socializr was acquired by Punchbowl.com, a party planning website run from Framingham, MA.

—Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) sued Sunnyvale, CA, startup Cotendo for allegedly infringing on Akamai patents covering online content distribution.

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This is one of those weeks when it feels like we’ve been overrun by news. Nothing really major, but a lot of things to think about. To get caught up, here’s a sampling of what’s been going on in the Boston tech community today:

—E Ink, the technology maker behind many popular e-reader displays, said that Beijing-based Hanvon Technology will be the first company to sell a color display based on E Ink, starting in March. The New York Times and other media outlets reported the news. The color display, which E Ink told us about a few months ago, works by putting a color filter over E Ink’s standard black-and-white display. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and other big e-reader makers—not to mention Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)—aren’t using the technology yet, but are watching closely.

—Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) is losing Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) as a video-streaming customer (to competitors Level 3 and Limelight), according to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com and Frost & Sullivan. Rayburn estimates that Netflix’s business is worth $10-15 million to Akamai, and that the change will occur over the coming months.

—Rob Go, the co-founder of NextView Ventures (formerly of Spark Capital), has posted a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boston Tech Community.” It’s a quick guide for new entrepreneurs in town. One highlight: Go gives his list of five “scaling companies to watch (i.e., probably hiring)”—Gemvara, CSN Stores, SCVNGR, HubSpot, and DataXu.

—Cambridge, MA-based Backupify, an online data management startup, has released a backup and archiving service for Facebook Fan Pages. The service is geared towards businesses and other organizations that need to keep records of all of their activity on Facebook and other social media sites.

—Boston-based Goby, an activity-based search engine startup, has hired Mike Bennett as its first chief revenue officer. Bennett is a social media entrepreneur and sales and marketing exec who has previously worked at Cheapflights.com, Healthetreatment.com, and Monster.com. (Revenue is a good thing, so hiring a chief revenue officer must be too.)

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A few weeks ago, we hosted an Xconomy Xchange evening featuring Jonathan Bush, CEO of Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN), and Girish Navani, his counterpart at Westborough, MA-based eClinicalWorks. With Pam McNamara, president of Cambridge Consultants, wielding a gavel to moderate, the two competitors discussed and debated the future of health IT. You can read our summary of the Faceoff on the Future of Healthcare IT here. Now we’ve got some video.

The event took place on Sept. 29 at WilmerHale’s offices in downtown Boston, overlooking Boston harbor. Our partners at Schwartz Communications were able to lure Bush, McNamara, and a few attendees away from the view to get their takes on the subject on camera. It was a small but diverse group that (besides Bush and McNamara) included Jeff Livingstone, industry strategist for healthcare and life science at Akamai, Caleb Stowell, a medical student at Harvard Medical School, and myself.

This video, introduced by Schwartz senior vice president Helen Shik of the firm’s healthcare practice, is especially nice because it is easily navigable and allows you to select just the speakers you want to hear—skipping non-experts like me if you so choose. Thanks to the Schwartz video team for putting it together. I hope you enjoy it.

Some of my favorite takes:

—Livingstone on how the healthcare industry has been late to the cloud.

—McNamara on how technology is enabling more focus on improving the patient experience, versus its original implementation almost as an afterthought to improve back office efficiency.

—Med student Stowell on why so many doctors are slow to adopt health IT technology—and why students don’t have that problem.

—Jonathan Bush on how successful adoption of new technology comes down to one thing: “cash.”

Again, you can view the whole video here (scroll down a bit on the page after following the link).

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The Northwest Open Access Network (NoaNet) has received an additional $54.5 million in Recovery Act funds to expand high-speed broadband Internet to underserved areas across Washington state. U.S. Secretary of Commerce and former Washington state Gov. Gary Locke announced the funding, alongside U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee and Brian Baird, at the Seattle Central Library yesterday. All three touted the project as a way to bridge the technological divide, boost economic growth, create jobs, improve educational resources and access to healthcare, and connect the rural regions of the state to the digital economy.

“This critical investment will lay the groundwork for sustainable economic growth by connecting difficult terrain both east and west of the Cascades that has been without the full economic, educational and social benefits of high-speed Internet,” Locke said.

This is the second federal grant Tacoma, WA-based NoaNet has been awarded in the last year for the State of Washington Broadband Consortium, a $185 million project to bring Internet access to 170 communities, and 2,000 schools, libraries, universities, hospitals, and emergency response agencies that lack adequate service. The first grant, for $84 million, was awarded in March.

Altogether, the $185 million will finance the construction of more than 1,300 miles of new fiber, bringing affordable broadband Internet service to 55 Washington communities labeled by NoaNet as “economically depressed.” The project will directly affect 538,559 households and 103,230 businesses throughout 25 of the state’s 39 counties. The plan will also enhance connectivity to six Native American tribal communities in Washington, including the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, the Kalispel Tribe of Indians, the Yakama Nation, the Lower Elwha Kallam Tribe of Indians, the Suquamish Tribe, and the Port Gamble S’Kallam Tribe of Indians.

“This broadband initiative will create immediate jobs, attract economic investment to rural areas, and provide reliable, high-speed Internet,” NoaNet CEO Greg Marney said in a statement released yesterday. “Imagine a rural doctor being able to instantaneously share a patient’s test results and consult with an expert at any major medical center in the world. It’s a big deal for rural Washington.”

The NoaNet project focuses on remote areas, because they are those that most often have rudimentary capabilities. And according to Marney, greater broadband connectivity will bring  an overall enhancement to the quality of life in the areas served. Not only will these communities now have attractive economic appeal that could pull in outside businesses, but those living in even the most remote parts of the state will be able to quickly access and share critical information among fire, police, hospitals, and first responders.

“This is a game-changer for many communities,” Marney said. “It just like when electricity was finally extended to rural communities in the 1930s and 1940s. Broadband will help save lives, reduce government costs, help educate young people, and create business opportunities.”

The news came on the same day that Vice President Joe Biden announced an approximately $1.8-billion investment in new projects to create jobs and stimulate economic opportunities in 37 states across the country.

“Investment in Broadband will be a fuel for the engine of our economic recovery,” Inslee said. “NoaNet’s State of Washington Broadband Consortium is one more link in our economic chain that … Next Page »

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