I have approximately 7,000 baseball cards in my collection. These treasures are arranged in numerical order, in long and slender cardboard “card boxes,” with the typical box containing cards from a single year.

The vast majority of my collection hails from the sixties. My heyday covered the years 1962 through 1965, when I collected every card made by Topps. But I am strong throughout the decade, and also have some great cards from the 50s, 70s, and 80s. Among my favorites: two Pete Rose rookie cards, Nolan Ryan and Reggie Jackson rookies, and a bunch of Willie Mayses and Mickey Mantles (several of which are so battleworn they have lost all but sentimental value). But what I’m most proud of are those four years when I collected every single card out.

Even though I finished this streak before my teenage years began, I still remember the rules I developed for collecting—rules that I only strayed from once, at a painful price (read on). Lately, with the detritus from Wall Street blocking sunlight from the business world like the comet dust that allegedly killed the dinosaurs, I have realized that these rules are helping me today as an entrepreneur. I don’t know how valuable they’ll be to other people running companies, but to me, at least, they seem like they might hold some insights about how not to become a business dinosaur.

So here they are:

1) Collect the Whole Set — A complete set is more valuable than the sum of its parts. That was obvious to me as a seven-year-old, even though I wasn’t thinking economic value, but intrinsic value. Especially for startups running on a shoestring, the temptation in this climate is to go extra lean and not hire every position you have open. This, it seems to me, is a huge mistake. Hire the people your business needs to be successful–you don’t want key roles to go unfilled or to be partially filled by employees who in turn must scrimp on their core responsibilities. One of the best decisions we made in recent months was to hire a part-time business manager to handle HR and office logistics previously taking up founder time.

2) Be Willing to Pay A Premium to Fill the Holes in Your Collection (Because That Still May Well Be A Bargain) — This one is really a corollary of Rule 1, but it merits special attention. Some hires may seem expensive at first blush, yet constitute bargains when you consider the value they add to the team as a whole. This isn’t only true for people, either. It may make sense to take what might seem like less-than-ideal terms on a deal, for instance, if that particular deal validates or allows you to realize a key part of your business model.

3) Collect from Different Sources — I learned early on that my neighborhood stores seemed to sell different editions of cards at different times than stores in nearby cities. I would occasionally convince my mom to take me to these other venues, tapping the high-turnover stores in the city for latest-edition cards that my neighborhood peers hadn’t gotten their hands on yet, and filling in holes in my collection with older-edition cards from stores in the boonies, where my half-brothers lived. Whether you’re looking for employees, partners, suppliers, or customers, diversification of sources can expand your horizons and help you think out of the box (even though in my case, it helped put cards into the box).

4) Develop Great Trading Partners With Whom You Create Mutual Value — Matty Holtz and Randy Dover. These fellow collectors and I always sought fair trades that helped all parties. If someone didn’t like a trade, we renegotiated. Obviously, if you do this consistently in the business world you will have great partners and customers who might just help you out when you need a special hand.

5) Trade to Value — This simply means that despite its “book” value, trading the same card to two different people can bring you wildly different …Next Page »

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Three quiet and unknown Finnish engineers in their late thirties, Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, have spent their working careers at the engineering software company Tekla in Finland. Their clients have used the software they created to model several well-known buildings, including Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, New York’s Hearst Tower, the famous ‘Bird’s Nest’ that is Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, and the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai.

But if matters had turned out a little differently, these men—and a former colleague named Kati Suominen (now Kati Borgers) who could not be present at the interview—might have become known as the Fathers and Mother of the World Wide Web browser.

[Editor's note: This article is our first from Juha-Pekka Tikka, Xconomy's new Fellow from Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program. "JP," a reporter at Ilta-Sanomat, a major national newspaper in Finland, will be based in our Xconomy San Diego offices.]

According to the trio, whom I met earlier this year in Finland, the Internet’s rise and emergence as a daily working tool might have happened a year earlier than it did had their group been able to complete their project.

The four Finns developed a graphical, point-and-click Internet browser a year before the pioneering Mosaic browser on which Netscape Communications was based: the historical Netscape IPO in August 1995 is widely credited with starting the Internet boom.

“Our 1991 X Window system browser, ‘Erwise,’ showed that a net browser was possible. We were ahead of the times. The next step, to commercialize it, did not happen,” Kim Nyberg says.

Aside from some local media, the Finns have never before been interviewed about this remarkable story. But Erwise has an important place in the Internet’s birth history. And its fate offers a case study of what happens when invention and innovation are not accompanied by funding, talent infusion, and a strong venture capital market or angel investor presence—all ingredients that Silicon Valley (where Mosaic was funded and developed) takes for granted.

In the U.S., commercialization of the browser, now so much a part of our everyday lives, began in 1994, after Marc Andreessen left the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where he and Eric Bina had developed the Mosaic browser the previous year. Andreessen had moved to California following his December 1993 graduation and teamed up with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, backed by venture capital powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to form Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape Communications. Europe was quickly left out in the cold.

But for a few key factors, it didn’t have to be that way. In 1991, Nyberg, Sydänmaanlakka, Rantanen, and Suominen were young IT undergraduate students at HUT, Helsinki University of Technology. The campus is actually located in Espoo, just a few miles from Helsinki and only half a mile away from the headquarters of Nokia Corporation. At that time, Nokia was not internationally known.

The four were about half-way through their studies when they met that September at a HUT course on designing and coding software.

In Switzerland, meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee had just laid the groundwork for the World Wide Web at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He thought the Web would be a useful tool for researchers and others but was frustrated at its pace of growth, which he partly attributed to the lack of a point-and-click browser. As he notes in his 1999 book Weaving the Web, “We were so busy trying to keep the Web going that there was no way we could develop browsers ourselves, so we energetically suggested to everyone everywhere that the creation of browsers would make useful projects for software students at universities.”

How did this project end up in Finland? It was largely because …Next Page »

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It’s no secret that the Massachusetts economy benefits from the presence of large, prestigious, star-studded universities and the companies started by their faculty and graduates. In fact, these universities take every opportunity to remind people of their importance: Just a few weeks ago, Harvard put out a report
taking credit for nearly $5 billion in economic activity around the Boston area in fiscal 2008.

But it turns out that area universities may not be tooting their own horns loudly enough. Companies founded by the alumni of a single university—MIT—are responsible for more than a quarter of all sales by Massachusetts companies, or some $164 billion per year, according to a report released today by the Kauffman Foundation. If the revenues of all active companies around the world formed by MIT graduates were aggregated, the study estimates, they’d surpass $2 trillion a year—which is more than the gross domestic product figures of all but the 10 largest nations in the world.

The study, which will be released in full this morning at a briefing in Washington, D.C., was conducted by MIT Sloan School of Management professor Ed Roberts and doctoral candidate Charles Eesley. The point wasn’t just to cheer for the home team, but to build a detailed, quantitative picture of how one university’s entrepreneurial alumni—especially those in technology fields—contribute to regional economic growth. “We found that the MIT alumni-founded companies have a disproportionate importance to their local economies because so many of them are manufacturing, biotech, software or consulting firms that sell to national and world markets,” Roberts said in a statement.

The Kansas City, MO-based Kauffman Foundation, which focuses its spending on programs that foster entrepreneurship and innovation, paid for the study in part because it needed more ammunition in its fight to get more universities and state and local governments to support university-industry exchanges, says Lesa Mitchell, a vice president at the organization.

“Though everyone might tire of hearing about MIT, the reality is that they continue to encourage the things in terms of university-industry collaboration that we fear are really getting broken in other places,” Mitchell says. She points to efforts such as the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, which provides seed grants for proof-of-concept work by MIT faculty and graduate students and matches MIT innovators with experienced business mentors.

“There out outcries in Washington about too much interchange between universities and industry,” Mitchell says. “But in fact, it’s industry that is leading the idea process, and it’s the relationship between universities and industry that allows that to happen, because as ideas get funded and supported in the university they will spill over and land either in small companies or big companies. Having that porous boundary, we think, is unbelievably critical.”

On average, MIT graduates form just under 1,000 companies every year, according to an executive summary of the report shared with the media before today’s announcement. Massachusetts is home to some 6,900 alumni-founded companies, while another 18,900 are scattered around the world, including 4,100 in California. MIT alumni-founded companies employ just under a million people in Massachusetts, 526,000 in California, 231,000 in New York, 184,000 in Texas, and 136,000 in Virginia, the study found.

The study expands on a similar report about MIT’s economic impact published in 1997 with funding from BankBoston (now part of Bank of America). The earlier study was apparently far less thorough: it turned up only 4,000 companies founded by MIT alumni, with annual world sales of just $232 billion. The new study was based on …Next Page »

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“You should visit us more often!” said one of our hosts during the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Massachusetts Tech Trek two weeks ago. The host’s enthusiasm was understandable—the company had just received news of a fresh round of funding in the midst of our visit. But such enthusiasm and energy (pun intended) was clearly evident at all of the firms that we visited as part of the Trek’s energy track on January 12-14, and was a welcome distraction from the economic malaise we keep reading about.

Co-sponsored by the Sloan Energy and Environment Club, the Energy track allowed our group to visit energy-related businesses in the Boston area to learn about firms in different stages and sub-sectors of the energy space. With the economic crisis in play and Barack Obama’s administration taking control, it was definitely an interesting and opportune time to be visiting these companies.

The energy firms we visited covered energy generation and transformation, efficiency and conservation, and consulting and research. In the generation space, we met with firms working on fossil-to-energy, storage, waste-to-energy and solar power. Interestingly, each is currently in different stages of development as a business entity.

Ze-gen, which started with SEED funding in 2005, utilizes a molten metal bath to vaporize construction and demolition and municipal waste to synthesis gas and electricity. Chief operating officer George McMillan said the company’s business model is based on the premise that they can produce energy cheaply even without taking into consideration any carbon offsets, tipping fees, or renewable energy credits. Ze-gen has plans to build its first commercial plant by 2012.

GreatPoint Energy is tackling the controversial problem of utilizing fossil fuels to “cleanly” produce energy. Dan Goldman, GPE’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, told our group that the advantages of GreatPoint’s process are low cost due to the lower temperature catalytic process, and an ability to capture CO2, which can be delivered for oil recovery or geological sequestration. GreatPoint is planning on starting operations on its $30 million feedstock testing facility in Somerset, MA, and signed an agreement with Datang Hyoin Electric Power Company in China to build and operate a plant that will process 1,000 tons per day of feedstock.

Innovative battery maker A123 Systems‘ technology went through multiple phases to reach its current level, said Andy Chu, director of the company’s automotive product line. Chu seemed confident that A123’s diversification into new areas including grid stabilization and airplane starter battery backups will ensure the company’s future success.

There is a small but loyal group of entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the U.S. who are advocating energy efficiency over energy generation. Advanced Electron Beams is one of these. AEB claims that its technology reduces energy usage by 40 to 90 percent in the surface sterilization, air treatment, and advanced curing industries, according to CEO Mitch Tyson. With a Fortune Global 1000 ranking behind them, AEB is seeking Series C funding to take their technology application to the next level.

Remember when Nanotechnology was the “it” word? You’ll be glad to know some of the nano materials have become commercial and are widely used now. Aspen Aerogels manufactures insulation materials that are two to eight times more thermally efficient than convention materials due to their nanoscale properties. Don Young, CEO of Aspen, told us that the firm is concentrating on reaching a reasonable earnings level for 2009 and diversifying into new segments.

The huge inflow of human and financial capital into the energy sector in recent years has necessitated the need for unambiguous information on the viability of technologies and business ideas. The Brattle Group has industry practice groups in most major traditional energy sectors and has developed expertise in pricing carbon and trading emissions. Dean Murphy, a principal at Brattle, felt the new administration should focus on controlling carbon emissions via a carbon tax rather than through the cap-and-trade program.

Lux Research, our last host on the trek, is a strategic advice firm that provides intelligence and consulting services in the nanotech, solar, power, water, and bio-sciences sectors. Lux Research analysts gather critical information by visiting and talking to firms in the specific sectors, according to president Matt Nordan. He emphasized a continuing need for critical analysis as we move to large-scale investing where the tolerance for market and technical risk is low.

Our interactions with so many energetic and exciting entrepreneurs, investors, and thought leaders rejuvenated our group. Leaving the classrooms to witness innovative technologies in person was a rejuvenating experience for me personally. We are looking forward to being part of a revolutionary energy innovation phase in our history.

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When I first moved from Detroit to Boston a year ago, I discovered a plethora of opportunities in technology companies that are not available anywhere else. Unfortunately, I’ve found that personal connections sometimes matter more than resume credentials in finding a job in the start-up technology space.

As a second year MBA student at MIT Sloan School of Management who graduates in May, I will be jumping head-first into the
workforce in an economically difficult time. I am focusing exclusively on Boston start-up technology companies, which means I may not have a finalized job offer until April. Start-ups rarely know what their cash position will be three weeks from now let alone three months from now. If this all seems a little gloomy, well, then you are spot on. Business has never been tougher in recent history for fledgling ventures (unless you ran a dot-com back in 2000). So what is a poor MBA supposed to do?

Network as if your life depends on it.

Putting together a cold-call campaign is quite a daunting task for one person. The sheer volume of companies in the Boston area is enough to make my head spin. Furthermore, a target company may not have the time or resources to recruit and select from dozens of individuals who want a full-time job. Assuming I do not wave a stack of venture money in front of him or her, I find it hard to believe that a CEO will take an hour of his or her time to chat about jobs with me. How am I going to solve this dilemma?

Well, if I brought a group of MBA students all at once on a company visit, the company saves on recruiting costs. In addition, my classmates and I would get access to top executives at the companies of our choice. Sounds like a plan to me!

Years ago, a group of MIT Sloan MBA students and school administrators had the same revelation and called it the “tech trek.” The MIT Sloan School of Management created the Massachusetts Technology Trek (MTT) to give students an advantage by connecting them face to face with Boston area startups. The premise of the MTT is simple. Small groups of students meet with local companies to listen to a presentation by top executives. Students run the whole program with the assistance of school administration and this year they arranged for 32 company visits over 3 days.

Connections are the name of the game in this tough economy. From this couple of days of networking I received a solid foundation to begin my job hunt this spring. I netted follow-up coffee chats and e-mail conversations with some of the fastest growing tech companies in the greater Boston area. CEOs and directors from startups such as Vlingo, Pongr, JumpTap and HubSpot all took a seat to talk with me about their companies. The conversations got rolling along and I am now further toward getting a job than my classmates who did not attend the MTT.

So can you get a job out there? I assert that you can, but you need to get in the door first. Using the MIT brand name certainly helped me to open doors. Alumni want to help you; otherwise, they would hide from the alumni database. Leading a pack full of focused, excited MBA students also helps to get the ball rolling. Strength is always in numbers.

However, I think the most critical traits for getting a job in this economy are being creative and being assertive. The organizers of the MTT did not wait for CEOs and directors to call them for a time-slot. My fellow students sold themselves as an asset this company would want to have visit any day. So too will I sell my strengths and create projects that bring instant value to any start-up I join. Companies have pains and you can use this to your advantage. Is your dream startup running out of cash? Come in the door with a list of alumni VCs or maybe a few sales leads for their flagship product. Your imagination is the only bound to what value you can bring.

Now back to the issue of MBA-level jobs. I feel better now that I see all the work that someone needs to do inside the companies I visited. Cash-strapped companies desire the biggest bang for their VC dollar in terms of talent, now more than ever. Building companies is a full-time job and I think there is plenty of work to go around. If you are a MBA student and you’re graduating this year: keep your head up—and network hard.

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Map and list updated Dec. 19: Want to know where your favorite VC gets his or her morning latte? How about where tech and life sciences entrepreneurs gather to network and discuss ideas? If you’re looking to rub shoulders with the technological elite—or if you’re just looking for a quiet cafe to have a meeting or get some work done—you’ve come to the right place.

Here at Xconomy Seattle, we’ve been keeping track of the coffee hotspots around town favored by the tech-business leaders we talk to and write about every day. We thought it would be fun to share what we’ve found, both as a list and as an interactive map you can click around on (see below). In many cases, we’ve met the innovators or investors in their favorite haunts and sampled the local beverages. In other cases, we’ve gone by what they told us. But this is in no way a comprehensive list. We’d love to hear from you about where you like to go, where plans get hatched, and where tomorrow’s deals are being discussed. We’ll update the list as we go.

It may be cliché to say the Seattle innovation scene runs on coffee, but it seems to be true. One of the amazing things about the region is the sheer number of great cafes and places to gather, talk, refuel, and recharge. There’s something for everyone, from the quiet elegance of Caffe Fiore on Queen Anne Hill to the casual charm of Louisa’s on Eastlake to the hustle and bustle of Espresso Vivace near downtown. Not to mention the old reliables, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Tully’s (especially on the Eastside—what’s with the dearth of independent cafes over there?).

View Larger Map

And behind every great cafe is a great story. Take Trabant Coffee & Chai, known for its strong espresso, tasty drip coffee, and spicy teas. The Pioneer Square branch is a personal favorite of Dan Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of Ontela—and there’s an interesting reason why. In early 2006, Shapiro says, he was one of several entrepreneurs pitching their companies at a Keiretsu Forum angel investor meeting downtown. “We were singing for our supper,” he says. The guy in front of him was pitching a $12,000 drip-coffee maker, and he had coffee samples for everyone (Shapiro was too wired to try any). The panel asked the coffee guy questions like, Aren’t you just going to compete with Starbucks? Why wouldn’t Starbucks just do this? He replied that Starbucks’ leaders were too set in their ways, and the only way they’d do it is if they saw it in action.

The guy was Zander Nosler of the Ballard-based Coffee Equipment Company. His machine was called the Clover, and sure enough, he was right. His 11-person startup was bought last March by Starbucks, which now has Clover machines in several-dozen stores in the Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Boston metro areas. So what does this have to do with Trabant? The local coffee shop was a key early customer of the Clover, buying the machine in the spring of 2007. “Every time I go there, I feel like I’m supporting the local startup scene,” says Shapiro.

There are many more stories, but we won’t get to them today. Instead, we present our first pass of the Greater Seattle Coffee Cluster: an alphabetical list of cafes (50 and counting), and some of the notable people you might run into there. If you’ve got a favorite spot, or a story to pass along, please do comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com. Then again, you might want to keep your local treasures to yourself…

Belle Epicurean
1206 4th Ave, Seattle, WA
Recommended by Megan Muir of DLA Piper for its pastries, good coffee, and confidentiality.

Caffe Fiore
224 W. Galer St, Seattle, WA
Martin Tobias of Kashless is known to arrive for meetings here on his Segway. Also the favorite of Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games and Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Caffe Ladro
600 Queen Anne Ave North, Seattle, WA
Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games also lists this institution as one of his likes. …Next Page »

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Virtualization software company VMware today announced that it will buy B-hive Networks of San Mateo, CA.

VMware, a Palo Alto, CA-based subsidiary of Hopkinton, MA, storage giant EMC, makes software for both desktop machines and servers that can make a single computer appear as a number of different virtual machines. These can be run simultaneously, and even have different operating systems. In this way, you can, for instance, run some applications in Windows and some in Apple’s Mac OS X on the same piece of hardware.

Data centers use VMware’s technology to assign different virtual servers to different users and different tasks. This form of virtualization helps companies save money on computer servers—if , that is, they can manage the complexity of having all these virtual servers as an extra layer on top of a network of real, physical hardware.

B-hive, which is based in California but has R&D labs in Israel, has developed programs that help monitor and control this virtual infrastructure. If a virtualized application starts to run very slowly, for example, b-hive’s software can automatically allocate more resources such as an extra virtual machine to help handle the task.

VMware made a similar acquisition in January when it bought desktop virtualization company Thinstall. The San Francisco company makes a system that lets users in large organizations run Windows programs on their computer, without having to install them locally.

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Being the leader of the pride, it seems, doesn’t guarantee you a nice meal everyday. Waltham, MA-based Lionbridge Technologies (NASDAQ: LIOX) may be the world’s largest provider of localization services, helping hundreds of other companies from Microsoft to Merrill Lynch to Pfizer go global by translating their websites, product manuals, software programs, and drug warnings into other languages. But it sure isn’t getting rich doing it: On May 6 the company reported a net loss of $4.4 million for the first quarter—its third straight quarterly loss—and last Friday Lionbridge stock dipped to $2.37 per share, its lowest point in more than five years, and down 61 percent compared to a year ago.

That’s lower than even the most pessimistic analysts were predicting at the beginning of 2008. As the financial website 24/7 Wall Street put it in a catty post recently, “It looks like the lion’s roar is a meow, at best.”

It’s a frustrating reversal for a company whose CEO, Rory Cowan, was being lionized (that’s the last cat pun, I promise) just three years ago for putting together a $180 million deal to buy one of its main competitors, the Global Solutions unit of New York-based Bowne & Company. That acquisition vaulted Lionbridge into the ranks of Boston’s 60 largest companies. And it’s a puzzling state of affairs, given that the company’s revenues are large and growing—a record $117 million in the first quarter, up more than 8 percent from a year earlier. But no matter how high the company’s revenues go, its expenses seem to go higher.

One answer to the puzzle seems to be that Lionbridge’s expansion has put it at the mercy of the same twin forces—technology and globalization—that drive demand for its services.

Analysts who follow localization services—a $12 billion industry in 2007—point out that translation is still a labor-intensive process, and that Lionbridge’s strategy of employing hundreds of managers, engineers, and translators in expensive regions like Europe may be backfiring with the weakness of the U.S. dollar against the Euro and many other currencies.

And while Lionbridge has made a significant investment in technology—especially on work-flow automation and memory systems that save labor by identifying material that’s already been translated—it hasn’t really profited from that spending. “What has happened is that the benefits of the efficiency gain that Lionbridge has been able to produce through the use of technology have been handed right to the client” in the form of prices that have stayed flat despite global inflation, says Ben Sargent, content globalization strategist at Common Sense Advisory, a localization market research firm in Lowell, MA.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Lionbridge, founded in 1996, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on acquisitions and other growth strategies, and has the client list (Bayer, Cisco, DuPont, GE, Google, IBM, Merck, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nokia, Pfizer, Sony, and Wal-Mart are a few of the big names) and revenues ($452 million in 2007) to show for it. With 4,600 employees in 45 offices around the world and a network of 25,000 freelance translators skilled in more than 200 languages, the company is three times the size of …Next Page »

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I’d like to explain what’s cool about Kalido, a Burlington, MA, software company spun off five years ago by Royal Dutch Shell, but let’s start with a story about beer.

Labatt Breweries is Canada’s largest beer producer, brewing 60 brands of ale and distributing them in stores, bars, and restaurants across the great North. Because Labatt has bought up so many regional brewers over the years, and because every province in Canada regulates the sale and taxation of alcohol differently, the company has inherited dozens of different sales databases and reporting systems, making it extremely difficult to figure out exactly which Canadians are drinking what kinds of beer.

Typically, big companies get a grip on their sales data, customer information, departmental budgets, and the like by buying a “data warehouse” where all of the most important information from lower-level transaction systems can be organized for fast retrieval; then they use “business intelligence” tools to transform the information in the data warehouse into charts and graphs that give historical, current, or predictive views. Labatt was deep into all of these technologies. It had enterprise resource planning software from Oracle, customer relationship management software from Seibel and SAP, data integration tools from Informatica, and business intelligence tools from Cognos. But when Labatt itself became part of Belgian beverage conglomerate InBev a few years ago—meaning that it would have to start feeding business performance data up the chain to managers in Europe—the company realized that its various divisions were still counting the same things different ways.

That’s when Labatt turned to Kalido, which is the product of a similar but even more severe crisis at Shell. During the 1990s, the petroleum giant acquired some 75 companies using 110 different reporting systems, according to Kalido CEO Bill Hewitt. “The guys in Beijing would call a brand of oil ‘A’ and the guys in Cincinatti would call the same product ‘B’, and the process of rationalizing the data every year was taking far too long,” says Hewitt. “So they built a data warehouse and generated reports off that—but the problem was that every time they wanted a different report or brought in a new company they’d have to rebuild the data warehouse, which would take months. Finally they ended up separating the rules that governed the data warehouse from the data itself. Instead of building a new warehouse, they built a business model”—a graphical representation of Shell’s business, with active links back to the raw data.

With this new interactive tool, the graphical model didn’t simply depict but actually controlled the way data was piped between the company’s low-level operational systems and its business intelligence software. So adding a new subsidiary’s data to the mix would be almost as simple as drawing a new box in the org chart and connecting it to the proper parent divisions. Other changes in the organization could be replicated in the model simply by dragging boxes around and redrawing the arrows between them (more details on that below). And not only that, but because the data was now tied to a flexible model, analysts could store snapshots of the model representing different points in time, then run the clock backward and forward to examine different what-if scenarios.

Back to Labatt. In 2005, the company hired Kalido to build a new data warehouse that would bring together data from 93 transaction systems databases holding 16 years’ worth of records on products, customers, suppliers, employees, and so on. A real-life test of the Kalido installation and its flexibility came almost as soon as it was completed, when Labatt acquired yet another brewery. Labatt’s field sales staff wanted to integrate the new company’s product information into the sales database right away, so they could see how Labatt’s new sales totals would look. But the company’s accountants didn’t want to integrate the new information until the end of the fiscal year, fearing it would mess up the books. “In a traditional data warehouse you’d never be able to have it both ways,” says Hewitt. “But because we have the ability to recreate a view at any point in time, the data warehouse managers could give the sales people the view they wanted and still wait until the end of the year to consolidate the financial information.”

Okay, you may have a hard time getting excited about a new data modeling tool that reconciles incompatibilities in a company’s database infrastructure and brings out the full potential of business intelligence software. And admittedly, developments in enterprise software can seem deathly dull to outsiders who aren’t enmeshed in the complexities of running a big business. But if you follow the larger world of software engineering, then you may appreciate the novelty and power of Kalido’s idea, which builds on more than a decade of R&D on graphical models that define and drive underlying data structures.

The linking of graphical models to actual software code and data is the core concept behind the Unified Modeling Language first developed in the early 1990s by Rational Software, which went on to be acquired by IBM and is now at the epicenter of Big Blue’s software development platforms business. Suffice it to say, business data modeling is an idea that’s picking up steam, and that’s likely to become more important as …Next Page »

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Boston-based information protection and storage company Iron Mountain announced today that Richard Reese, CEO since 1981, will step down in June. Taking Reese’s place will be Bob Brennan, who joined the company in 2004 with Iron Mountain’s acquisition of Connected Corporation and has been its president and chief operating officer since 2005. Under Reese’s leadership, Iron Mountain grew from $3 million in revenue in 1981 to $2.1 billion in annualized revenue last year, and became a leader not just in secure document storage but in electronic records management. Reese will continue as the executive chairman of the company’s board.

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Virtualization of server resources—allowing corporate IT managers to consolidate workloads onto fewer machines—is the big technology wave sweeping the corporate data-center market. Waltham, MA-based Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) is an important player in that market, but its products are focused around identity management (a legacy of the company’s original focus on server operating systems and directory services products), the Linux operating system (an area it entered with the acquisition of Ximian in 2003 and SUSE Linux in 2004), and workgroup collaboration tools (a focus bolstered by the company’s acquisition two weeks ago of Maynard, MA-based SiteScape). Now, eager to avoid being left behind in the virtualization race, Novell has acquired yet another company—Toronto-based PlateSpin, which makes workload management software for virtualized data centers.

The all-cash acquisition, which will cost Novell $205 million, is “a true milestone in Novell’s history” and “provides a critical piece in completing our commitment…to delivering the best IT management software for both physical and virtual environments,” Novel CEO Ron Hovsepian said in a telephone press conference this morning.

Stephen Pollack, CEO of PlateSpin, said the company offers three key technologies: a visual planning-and-analysis tool for managing data center resources, a workload management package that makes software jobs portable across virtual and physical servers, and a hardware appliance for disaster recovery with virtualized workloads. “IT executives consistently list optimizing, virtualizing, and controlling their heterogeneous IT environments as the core of what keeps them up at night,” Pollack said. “The reason I and the PlateSpin team are so excited about becoming part of Novell is that it already has a successful strategy in data center management, and now we can truly deliver the next-generation infrastructure for flexible data centers.”

Hovsepian said that with the PlateSpin acquisition Novell “will be in a unique position” to help customers manage and protect virtualized workloads, use resources more efficiently, cutting the cost of deploying new applications, and control the sprawl of applications that can run over virtualized systems.

Bringing in PlateSpin could help keep Novell competitive as a growing number of enterprise software companies offer either virtualization systems (including VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, Citrix, Virtual Iron, SWsoft, Qumranet) or software for managing workloads on virtualized systems (including Incipient, Vkernel, AutoVirt, GlassHouse, to name just a few local entrants). A venture-backed startup founded in 2003, PlateSpin has about 220 employees in the Toronto area. Its investors included Insight Venture Partners, OpenView Venture Partners, CastleHill Ventures, Covington Capital, Skylon Capital, and Four Quarters.

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Editor’s note: This article was published last July 2, during our first week in existence. Given the attention to last week’s post by Chris Gabrieli questioning Harvard’s legacy of tech transfer, we wanted to share Sahin’s thoughtful observations with a wider audience.

The buzzword of the 1980s and ’90s was “entrepreneurship.” This decade, the obsession is with “innovation” as the presumed path to riches for people and nations. Since the key generators of innovation are research universities and the key implementers of innovation are companies, there is an ever-increasing focus on making the university and industry interface more effective. But will the twain meet? It could be very difficult.

The question is critical, and there is no better place to ask than here in Kendall Square, at the confluence of great universities, multinational companies in both the life sciences and information technology, and scores of start-ups.

Though hugely complementary, academic and industrial entities hold different values and are motivated by different incentives. One key to surmounting the many obstacles to successful collaboration is to better understand the two worlds, identifying those differences that are truly reconcilable, temporarily reconcilable, and totally irreconcilable. There’s no point in dealing with irreconcilable areas.

Universities are akin to malls: they have a common roof and share services. The mall manager, like the university president, cannot dictate to the stores or close them at will. But a company is more like a department store. The president can reorganize the store whenever he or she wants. So, even as they share the same title, the two presidents hold vastly different powers. Think of the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, who was forced out last year under pressure from his “store managers,” and the current president of the UMass system, Jack Wilson, whose “store managers” in June passed a no-confidence measure against him.

University faculty are excellent at starting novel things and very poor at completing them in industrial terms. The rewards for starting a novelty are reporting it in publications. But for industry, starting is secondary to finishing in terms of bringing successful products and services to the market. Realizable market value far outweighs novelty.

Universities have a peculiar secondary workforce: students. A lot of work in academia is accomplished by students who actually pay to work. Not only that, but after they are “fired” (i.e., graduate) they continue to pay. What company has employees who pay to work and continue to pay? This “paying,” “transient” workforce gives academia unique characteristics and strengths not found in industry. Further, this workforce never ages. Students in any era tend to span the same age bracket.

Partly because of the transitory nature of the workforce and partly because the faculty focuses on novel “starts,” true production prototypes from which commercial products will be created do not get built. Most universities do not have, and cannot have, pilot plants. As a result, most university-generated innovations do not make it past the early stages.

Academic institutions have huge reputations and visibility, but a very small or dedicated core staff. For instance, MIT is huge in reach, breadth, impact, and reputation. Yet its core faculty has hovered around 900 since 1950. Contrast this with IBM at some 350,000 employees.

Then there are the differences in perception. A lot of academics view themselves as selfless workers at the service of humankind, while viewing business/industry as the contaminated world. Industry holds similar negative views of academia, believing it to be populated by people who are disconnected from reality and hold irrelevant—or even dangerous—ideas. While the distrust between academe and industry is less pronounced today than in the past, it certainly still exists.

Faculty members think they work very hard. Business executives think academics hardly work. Academics tend to think business people are vastly overpaid.

Businesses think academic institutions have very poor business models: they shun growth and charge prices (tuition) well below cost. Yet, on the average, companies survive barely a few decades. Universities mark time in centuries. So one wonders who has the better “business model.”

The challenge is to connect a long-lived entity that is loosely organized and that distrusts or at least is suspicious of the outside world with one that is results oriented and ruled by an iron-fisted and truly empowered “unitary executive” president, but has a much shorter business life.

It’s critical to make this connection stronger and more enduring if we want to receive the full benefits of the university innovation machine. The first step is to understand and respect the differences. What a loss it would be if universities become like businesses (likely) and businesses like universities (unlikely). The second step is to live with the irreconcilable differences (the university president cannot order change; universities have a “transient” workforce, etc.) and build the interfaces accordingly.

I don’t have definitive answers, and I’d love to hear some great ideas from readers. In a future column I will offer what I have come up with and to an extent experimented with as someone who is squarely between the two worlds, and part of both.

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Collaborative online workspaces for business people—a fringe concept just a couple of years ago—is now a hotly contested market, with WebEx launching WebOffice, Adobe’s Acrobat gaining Web conferencing features, Yahoo integrating Zimbra, and Microsoft pushing Office Groove (the legacy of its 2005 acquisition of Beverly, MA-based Groove Networks). And that’s just the beginning of the list. Now Waltham, MA-based Novell is solidifying its own presence in presence, so to speak. The business infrastructure software provider announced that it’s acquiring Maynard, MA-based SiteScape, which makes an office collaboration suite called SiteScape Forum and an open-source Web conferencing platform called ICEcore.

The basic concept behind all of the collaborative workspace platforms is the same, although the list of components differs from product to product. Most combine a range of disparate tools that office workers tend to use anyway— e-mail, instant messaging, message boards, shared calendars, secure document sharing with version control, and live multimedia Web meetings—into a single package accessible via either a downloadable client program or a Web browser. Some, like SiteScape Forum, add additional features borrowed from the Web social-networking world, such as wikis and blogs.

Increasingly, providers of business-communications and productivity software feel they must offer all of these real-time collaboration features to stay competitive. Novell formed a partnership with SiteScape last year, using its open-source ICEcore platform to create a workspace service called Novell Teaming + Conferencing that complemented the company’s existing GroupWise product. Given that partnership, plus Novell’s heavy investment over the last several years in other open-source systems such as SUSE Linux, the prospect of owning the ICEcore code base made SiteScape into a logical acquisition target.

At least, so says Ron Hovsepian, Novell’s president and CEO, in the press release announcing the purchase, the financial details of which were not disclosed. “The acquisition of SiteScape fits squarely into the corporate strategy we have laid out,” Hovsepian said. “It extends our leadership in promoting open source in the enterprise market and is a key technology addition in an area where we see great growth potential. Most importantly, it allows us to move aggressively to give customers a new, open option for collaboration, helping them escape vendor lock-in and offering easy integration across platforms, whether Linux or Windows.”

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Boston-based Vaultus, which makes “mobile middleware” allowing road warriors and other workers to use their smart phones to access key enterprise systems such as customer relationship management, business intelligence, and help-desk software, announced today that it has raised $6 million in new venture funding to expand its sales and marketing operation.

Point Judith Capital of Providence, RI, led the expansion round, which also included existing investors Susquehanna International Group and IDG Ventures. That brings total investment in Vaultus to $70 million, according to CEO David Birnbach.

Vaultus’s technology helps in three areas. It provides “connector” software that takes data from corporate servers running programs such as Siebel or Salesforce CRM software, Cognos or Business Objects business-intelligence software, or BMC-Remedy help-desk software and prepares it for mobile distribution. Second, it actually pushes this data out to mobile devices, compressing it enormously to compensate for the limited bandwidth of wireless connections and the limited storage capacity of many mobile devices. Third, it gives corporate IT managers the ability to customize the look, feel, and function of the applications on these devices (including all Windows Mobile devices, Research In Motion’s Blackberry devices, Nokia cell phones running the Symbian operating system, and soon, the Apple iPhone).

One key feature that has given Vaultus’s technology a foothold among big businesses, especially in the financial and health-care sectors, is its built-in security, which is based on a system of short-lived “lease keys” that block access to all corporate data on a mobile device if the device fails to check in wirelessly with corporate servers on a set schedule. “Last year 84,000 mobile devices were left in New York City cabs and one-third of them were sold on eBay,” says Birnbach. “If I lose my device, I can call my help desk and they can issue a ‘kill’ instruction that will shut it down—but the first thing that a thief is going to do is turn the signal off. We handle that condition. Our servers ping every device on the network every so often, and if they haven’t reached a particular device after x number of hours, as dictated by corporate compliance officers, software inside the device makes the data on that device inaccessible until a new key is procured.”

Vaultus has signed up about six dozen big customers, including Merrill Lynch, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Genzyme, Avon, and the U.S. Army. But why, at this late date—almost eight years after its founding by a group of MIT undergraduates and graduate students—does the company need more money to beef up sales? There are two interrelated reasons, according to Birnbach.

The first is that it’s taken longer than expected for the market for mobile business applications to mature. “What everybody thought was the big wave of wireless back in 2000 was really about seven years ahead of its time,” says Birnbach. “But with all the customer wins we have had in the last year or two, the mobile software realm is now getting to be big for the first time. It’s been demonstrated that the large enterprises are paying attention and investing real money in these initiatives.”

The other reason is that the company was busy behind the scenes making sure its software would work across a range of business applications, wireless networks, and mobile devices. “We did all the heavy lifting when no one was paying attention to the sector,” says Birnbach. “So to date we’ve been very technology and engineering heavy, with very few sales folks, because we thought it was very important to build technological superiority on the platform side.”

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We got an interesting e-mail on Tuesday from the global communications staff at IBM. The company was concerned about the message some readers might be taking away from an economic report published last Friday, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s 2007 Index of the Massachusetts Innovation Economy.

That report’s executive summary emphasized the growing challenges for Massachusetts companies in the face of international competition, and it listed IBM, alongside General Motors and Microsoft, as one of several U.S. companies expanding its global footprint and hiring large numbers of employees in places like India and China. In their note to us, IBM staffers expressed concern that readers of the summary might peruse that section and question Big Blue’s commitment to employment and innovation in Massachusetts.

Curious about the scope of this apparent spat between one of the Commonwealth’s leading economic development agencies and one of its largest technology employers, I called up both organizations. In the end, it seems, everybody’s still friends: the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative didn’t mean to imply that IBM’s global expansion is hurting the state, and IBM isn’t feeling irreparably wounded by the report’s language. But the whole conversation is an interesting case study in the politics of economic development in Massachusetts, and in large U.S. companies’ sensitivities to even indirect suggestions that they’re shipping jobs overseas.

Here’s what the report’s executive summary actually says about IBM: “The rules of the game for research and development investment, market access, and competition in and among states, regions, and countries are in flux…Evidence of these sea changes abound….IT services and hardware giant IBM counts more than 50,000 employees in Bangalore (the greatest concentration of employees outside the US) and went so far as to hold its annual investors conference there in 2007, an event historically and exclusively held in New York.”

I talked yesterday with Mohamad Ali, IBM vice president for business development and strategy, who said he was “a little bit surprised” by that wording. He pointed out that over 5,000 of IBM’s 250,000 employees worldwide are in Massachusetts, making it one of the state’s 20 largest employers; in fact, the new campus it’s building in Littleton and Westford will be the largest IBM software development lab anywhere in the world. “I think you’re seeing our non-U.S. employee population increasing, but you’re also seeing our U.S. population increasing,” Ali says.

“Yes, the reality is that the world is becoming a more competitive place, but I don’t think we are looking to abandon our core position here at all,” Ali continues. “IBM is an American company. We are based in New York and we have a large presence in Massachusetts, and we expect to continue to grow that. The reality is that there are substantial intellectual assets here and we continue to leverage that, and I don’t think the fact that we also have grown our India and China operations means that there is a tidal wave of offshoring.”

Next I called the Collaborative and ended up speaking with Mike Tavilla, the organization’s program manager for research and analysis and the lead author of the Index (a dense, chart-filled, extremely informative report that the Collaborative has been publishing annually since 1997). “We are keenly aware that IBM is hiring people here and consolidating their software labs in the state,” Tavilla says. “We don’t mean to nominate IBM or any other company as a poster child for offshoring. What we are trying to show is that it’s now a condition of global business that activity is growing overseas.”

In fact, the term “offshoring” has acquired an unfairly negative connotation, Tavilla argues. “It’s a common mistake that offshoring is automatically perceived to be a net loss for Massachusetts and for the U.S.,” he says. “There is nothing to document that. In fact, I think it’s a good thing that companies such as IBM can take advantage of what other regions have to offer, be it work forces or raw materials or whatever they need to conduct their business more efficiently. If they can then reinvest those efficiencies back into Massachusetts, that’s clearly a good thing.”

To my own eye, it’s a slight stretch to read the Index’s executive summary as explicitly taking IBM to task for moving U.S. jobs offshore. On the other hand, the statistics about IBM’s hiring in India are part of a passage about the challenges of globalization whose tone might fairly be characterized as defensive or alarmist. Either way, it’s clear that IBM wants the local community to understand that it’s here in Massachusetts for the long haul. And it’s equally clear that Tavilla and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative think it’s important for the Commonwealth to stay engaged in the global economy.

The advisory board overseeing the production of this year’s Index actually included one representative of IBM, corporate community relations manager Maura Banta. But the board wasn’t asked to sign off on the report’s final language, according to Karen Lilla, a spokeperson for the global communications department of IBM’s Software Group.

“I don’t want you to think that IBM is feeling slighted,” Lilla told me by phone yesterday. “I just wanted you to understand that while IBM is a global enterprise, we do have these strong ties to Massachusetts.”

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Time was, if you ran a medium-to-large-sized company and had software that processed lots of data—any kind of data, whether it be payroll or a product catalog for your Web storefront—you needed expensive, proprietary database software like Oracle’s to manage the data and expensive, finicky, power-hungry servers from IBM or Hewlett-Packard to run that software. No more. For several years, many businesses have been turning from Oracle and other traditional database providers to cheaper, open-source database alternatives like MySQL. And now they don’t even need hardware to run those systems: they’ll soon be able to tap into a vast computing “cloud” via the Internet, thanks to new services like one announced by Edison, NJ-based EnterpriseDB last week.

EnterpriseDB makes an relational-database management system, EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, that’s based on the open-source PostgreSQL system and can handle most of the same applications that run on top of Oracle databases, at lower cost. On Tuesday, the company—which will be four years old in March and has venture funding from Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures—said it would begin offering a related product called EnterpriseDB Advanced Server Cloud Edition, customized to run on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and store data on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). EC2 and S3 are “utility computing” services that the online retailer has rolled out over the past couple of years as a way for other companies to tap into the massive computing infrastructure it built to run its own business.

Essentially, small organizations could use EnterpriseDB’s service, which it is marketing in partnership with San Francisco-based database firm Elastra, to access the same computing power long available to big companies, but without having to spend a cent on in-house software or hardware. And judging from the inquiries the company has been getting since the announcement, that’s an opportunity a lot of companies would like to investigate.

“The response has been incredible, to say the least,” says Bob Zurek, EnterpriseDB’s chief technology officer and a longtime fixture of the Boston technology scene who usually telecommutes to work from his home in Acton, MA. (He’s the former director of product strategy for the Information Platform and Solutions Group at IBM, which bought his previous company, Westborough, MA-based Ascential Software, in 2005). “We were a little bit unsure of what the response might be, but the beta applications have been pouring in by the dozen every day.”

Any company with the necessary in-house IT expertise is free to tap into Amazon’s utility computing services directly. But there’s also a small (so far) collection of companies like Elastra and EnterpriseDB that are helping other organizations access the cloud. Elastra, a small company founded last summer with venture backing from San Francisco’s Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, exists solely to help other companies deploy their database management systems on EC2 and S3.

“Immediately upon joining EnterpriseDB [last year] I started doing some research around EC2 and S3—it just made sense to me that since our software has to run on Windows and Mac and Suse Linux and Red Hat Linux, why not run in the context of the cloud as well?,” says Zurek. “And I was talking to the folks at Hummer Winblad, who said, ‘Gosh, you ought to talk to this startup we recently funded called Elastra.’ The next thing you know, we had a partnership established, and we contacted Amazon, and they got all excited too. It’s amazing the applications we’re already getting—we’ve heard from health care companies, startup companies, organizations all across the board who say that it makes sense for them to give this a test run.”

Organizations using EnterpriseDB on EC2 and S3 won’t have to worry about how much server capacity or storage they’re going to need through the course of the day, week, or month—Elastra’s software handles all of the negotiating for resources with Amazon’s systems. “The only difference that you can really see, between running the system on your laptop or desktop versus the cloud, is that instead of the server being inside your firewall there will be a URL pointing to Amazon,” says Zurek. But for a lot of beleaguered companies that want to focus on their mission, not their information technology infrastructure, this small difference could really lift some clouds.

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