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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My initial response to this question was, “Chinese!” I was only half joking. English is the most popular second language in the world and in our increasingly connected world, the people who have an understanding of other languages—particularly Chinese—will be better equipped.

As far as computers go, I studied computer languages in school and even though I wish I had studied different “human” languages, I think understanding computer languages will become even more important in the future, since computers are the universal tools of our time. Practically every aspect of our lives has a computer of some sort embedded into it. Having an understanding of how computers work as well as a curiosity about how to tap into their future potential will be important.

This need is especially true when you consider all of the potential applications that could be created to help us better understand biology and how the world works. We are living in an age where information technology and computing are driving the economy, and I predict computer-driven advances in synthetic biology promise to be even potentially more dramatic for the balance of the century.

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There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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[Editor's Note: We asked selected Xconomists a series of questions designed to zero in on the big issues of the year, including "What issues would you be willing to throw a punch over?"]

There are two.

The first is the state of the patent system, particularly as it affects computing hardware and software (broadly construed). Just about everything about the system is broken. In my view it is working strongly against real innovation. Major companies amass enormous portfolios of questionable patents that they can use to bludgeon one another (until they sign cross-licensing agreements, at which point only the little guys are left to be bludgeoned). Organizations that are not in the innovation business acquire portfolios that they assert for profit alone. I have absolutely nothing against the licensing of substantive innovations by those in the innovation business, whether by major companies or little guys . But much of what goes on today does not fall into this category, and something needs to change. I am not sufficiently expert to make appropriate detailed proposals, but I am sufficiently expert to smell a rat.

The second is our “blame the teachers and the teachers unions” approach to improving K-12 education. Yes, K-12 education is a mess, more of a mess in the U.S. than in most industrialized nations, and more of a mess in Washington than in almost all other technology states. (For some facts to support the latter assertion, see this.)

But blaming teachers and unions is a cheap way to avoid confronting the many real problems that plague our K-12 education system and are leading us rapidly down the road to an ever-more-stratified society of haves and have-nots, threatening the raw material upon which the innovation economy depends. Here, too, I don’t have an easy or quick solution—there isn’t one. But we are not going to make progress by sitting around playing the blame game.

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Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and behold…the eighth wonder of the world. No, not King Kong, I’m afraid. But how about a computer that can read and interpret human emotions and mental states?

That would be from Affectiva, a Boston-area startup co-founded by Roz Picard, a 20-year veteran of the MIT Media Lab. Picard (see photo, right) is the founder and director of the Media Lab’s Affective Computing research group, and she has done extensive work in computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interfaces, with applications in autism communication, health and wellness, education, marketing, advertising, and other areas.

Picard is speaking at this Thursday’s Xconomy “6×6” event (Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas) in Boston. In advance of her appearance there, I sat down with Picard at Affectiva’s offices this week to get a demo of the company’s technology and to talk a little about the future of emotional and gestural interfaces.

One of the demos involved a computer tracking my facial expressions via webcam (and also my heart rate via blood flow to my face) while I watched a series of TV commercials. Based on indicators like raised eyebrows, smiles, or a furrowed brow (see example, below), the software tried to figure out how engaged, interested, amused, or disturbed I was during the course of each ad. It’s hard not to be self-conscious during all this, but I’m pretty sure the computer concluded: this guy hates all commercials. (And since I haven’t smiled since 1995, we’ll enlist my fellow editor Erin Kutz for the live demo on Thursday.)

Affectiva also will be rolling out a new product on Thursday—one that has applications in finance and healthcare, among other industries—but I’ll let Picard speak for that when the time comes.

Meanwhile, I asked Picard whether the field of affective computing would continue to advance incrementally (like speech recognition, say) or whether it would undergo a breakthrough of some kind. “I think it’s going to make some leaps,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot more happening by indirect measurement—nonverbal [cues] that people don’t really think machines can do. That’s going to really progress.”

To me, Picard’s work exemplifies what truly big ideas are about—for the first 20 years or so, they might be more interesting scientifically than commercially. But once the technology and marketplace gets to a certain point, a viable business can be built around them, even as the science continues to advance. And then who knows what will happen?

We’re looking forward to a fantastic 6×6 program and some great networking this Thursday (you can register here). Hope to see you there.

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If there’s anybody in the world of genomic computing with dreams of world domination, like a Bill Gates or a Mark Zuckerberg, it might be Andreas Sundquist. Others may have similar ambitions, but the co-founder of Mountain View, CA-based DNAnexus is one of the few with the chutzpah to say that he thinks a cottage industry of today, which measures its revenue in tens of millions, will soon count its money in the tens of billions.

“When you look at DNA sequencing and what’s happening, the sequencing itself is commoditizing. What’s not commoditizing is what you do with the data downstream,” Sundquist says. “We are building a new industry here. Within the next three years, I think we’ll see upwards of 1 million sequenced genomes. I really think that’s going to happen.”

And the long-term market opportunity for computing systems that analyze/visualize/interpret all that data, as full genome prices plummet from $4,000 to $1,000 and below? “It’s easily a $100 billion market.” And yes, I did ask him to clarify over the phone that he meant billion, with a “b.”

Sundquist, one of the speakers at Xconomy’s “$1,000 Genome” event next Monday at UCSF Mission Bay, has reason to be bold these days. He raised $15 million last week in a second-round financing led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech, with classic tech investors like First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, K9 Ventures, and Felicis Ventures also on board. The company, which Sundquist co-founded with colleagues from Stanford University in 2009, isn’t saying yet how much revenue it generates, how many customers it has, or who they all are. But as part of the financing, DNAnexus and Google said they have agreed to collaborate on a free public site that will be a mirror image of one of the deepest and most valuable datasets in genomics today—which the National Center for Biotechnology Information is phasing out because of federal budget cuts.

Andreas Sundquist

Providing that valuable resource to customers is just one step in the process, Sundquist says. The bigger vision is for DNAnexus to prove, through its relatively low-cost, easy-to-use, Web-based interface, that it can serve as a default plug-and-play genomic analysis system for biologists. These are people who don’t typically have much math training, and often have limited access to the bioinformatics experts who have traditionally helped them play around with the data.

It’s not uncommon today for researchers to run a sequencing instrument to get the data, and then spend months “playing around with the data,” as Sundquist said in an Xconomy feature in July 2010. The goal is to minimize the amount of time a scientist has to spend fiddling around to find out what tools are available, downloading them, and figuring out how to make formats compatible with their instrument,

The pressure to come up with simple interpretation tools is going to be immense in the future, Sundquist says. One analyst, Isaac Ro of Goldman Sachs, noted in a recent report to clients that current sequencing labs spend just 2 percent of their budgets on computing, but that is fast climbing … Next Page »

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When I heard the news of Steve Jobs’s death last night, even though I was hardly surprised, I felt like I had been kicked in the gut—as if the industry in which I’ve spent my career had lost its soul.

I’m rarely shy about criticizing the titans of our industry, but from the beginning Steve was different: a brilliant businessman whose primary motivation wasn’t money, a CEO who involved himself in every detail of product design, and a restless perfectionist who would change his plans in a heartbeat if he saw a better way to do things.

I saw this first-hand in the 1980s, when he visited my team at Carnegie Mellon. We introduced him to sending pictures, fonts, etc., through e-mail. He saw the value instantly, and tried to hire the whole team on the spot. When that failed, he quickly created the team that built NeXTMail, which eventually evolved into Mail.app on the Mac. Nobody ever “got it” faster than Steve—and when he got it, he made things happen in a hurry.

One of Steve’s least-mentioned talents was his mastery of e-mail. He was surely flooded with it, yet he answered more promptly than I can. I’ve spent my whole career working on e-mail, but if he had written a book on how to manage your e-mail, I would have bought it the day it was released.

I also admired Steve a great deal as a person. When he was the busy CEO of NeXT, my wife once put him on hold for over ten minutes while she hunted for me. He graciously uttered not a word of complaint. And when he famously called LSD “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life,” he risked broad censure rather than betray the truth as he saw it—that LSD had helped open his mind to the insanely great possibilities of the coming digital age.

Steve left us too soon, when he still had much to teach us. But our world is incalculably better for the 56 years he gave us. May he rest in peace.

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I’m so sad this evening—as millions are—to hear of Steve Jobs’s death. Scattered over the last quarter century, I learned much from Steve Jobs, and was proud to consider him a friend. And indeed, he contributed in various ways to all three of my major life projects so far: Mathematica, A New Kind of Science and Wolfram|Alpha.

I first met Steve Jobs in 1987, when he was quietly building his first NeXT computer, and I was quietly building the first version of Mathematica. A mutual friend had made the introduction, and Steve Jobs wasted no time in saying that he was planning to make the definitive computer for higher education, and he wanted Mathematica to be part of it. I don’t now remember the details of our first meeting, but at the end of it, Steve gave me his business card, which tonight I found duly still sitting in my files:

…

Over the months after our first meeting, I had all sorts of interactions with Steve about Mathematica. Actually, it wasn’t yet called Mathematica then, and one of the big topics of discussion was what it should be called. At first it had been Omega (yes, like Alpha) and later PolyMath. Steve thought those were lousy names. I gave him lists of names I’d considered, and pressed him for his suggestions. For a while he wouldn’t suggest anything. But then one day he said to me: “you should call it Mathematica“.

I’d actually considered that name, but rejected it. I asked Steve why he thought it was good, and he told me his theory for a name was to start from the generic term for something, then romanticize it. His favorite example at the time was Sony’s Trinitron. Well, it went back and forth for a while. But in the end I agreed that, yes, Mathematica was a good name. And so it has been now for nearly 24 years.

As Mathematica was being developed, we showed it to Steve Jobs quite often. He always claimed he didn’t understand the math of it (though I later learned from a good friend of mine who had known Steve in high school that Steve had definitely taken at least one calculus course). But he made all sorts of “make it simpler” suggestions about the interface and the documentation. With one slight exception, perhaps of at least curiosity interest to Mathematica aficionados: he suggested that cells in Mathematica notebook documents (now CDFs) should be indicated not by simple vertical lines—but instead by brackets with little serifs at their ends. And as it happens, that idea opened the way to thinking of hierarchies of cells, and ultimately to many features of symbolic documents.

In June 1988 we were ready to release Mathematica. But NeXT had not yet released its computer, Steve Jobs was rarely seen in public, and speculation about what NeXT was up to had become quite intense. So when Steve Jobs agreed that he would appear at our product announcement, it was a huge thing for us.

He gave a lovely talk, discussing how he expected more and more fields to become … Next Page »

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Updated 11 am Pacific
The tech world is going into hype-tastic overdrive today with the release of Amazon’s new tablet computer. If the predictions and previews are correct, the new device could be a big competitor to the market-defining Apple iPad and cement Amazon as a major player in the computing game.

But this isn’t really about the chunk of hardware that Amazon will be showing off. The reason Amazon’s entry into the tablet market is such a big deal has much more to do with all the merchandise and media that Amazon can put in your hands, without having to pay Apple some pretty hefty tolls for the privilege.

I’m not saying that competition with Apple in the tablet market isn’t a major piece of this story. Plenty of others have come out with me-too devices to follow the iPad, just as millions of people own smartphones from some other company. But none of those tablets has done much to dent the iPad’s hold on the market. Amazon’s move into tablets, however, is the only effort so far to fundamentally copy the Apple playbook, bringing a unified software, hardware, and application experience to the user.

That’s hugely significant as a piece of business strategy, because it signals that one of the more innovative companies around is truly dumping the old Microsoft view of the world, where companies specialize in one area (like software, or retail) and get others to build around that brand. It’s another vote—a big one—for Apple’s approach, and if it catches on, you’re going to see more movement in that direction. That’s surely part of the reason why Google would pay billions for Motorola.

But something much more basic is going on here. Amazon isn’t putting out tablet computers because it wants to be a computer-maker. It’s doing so because Amazon is fundamentally a retailer, and the tablet is the new digital store.

“People leaning back on their sofas, buying things from Amazon, is another tailwind for our business that I’m very excited about,” CEO Jeff Bezos said during this June’s shareholder’s meeting.

Let’s look at some of the offerings that Amazon has in its quiver, either already announced or pretty solidly reported by journalists covering the beat, which would make sense to consume over a tablet:

—Movies and TV: Amazon already has a Netflix competitor, Amazon Instant Video, that beams programs to your computer. Significantly, this has been offered as essentially a loss-leader for Amazon’s Prime membership program, which previously was mostly about free shipping. That seems … Next Page »

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A Boston-area tech startup with a pretty bold vision is announcing its expansion to Silicon Valley today. Waltham, MA-based Affectiva, an MIT Media Lab spinout, is opening an office in Santa Clara, CA, where its CEO Dave Berman is based, along with other key members of the team.

Affectiva, which has about 25 employees (most of them in Waltham), is looking to hire 15 people in Santa Clara, mostly in sales, marketing, and business development, Berman says. He’s a former WebEx veteran, and in fact Affectiva’s new office sits right across from his former company, which is now part of Cisco Systems.

“I’ve been commuting [to Boston] for two years,” Berman says.

Affectiva, which started in 2009, uses computer vision and machine learning software to interpret people’s facial expressions, gestures, heart rate, and other physiological responses. The idea is to be able to track and understand consumers’ emotions as they do things like watch video ads, play computer games, or interact with Web or mobile content. The software works in conjunction with a webcam and/or biometric sensors, like a wristband that monitors temperature, motion, and sweat—and consumers have to opt in to all of that, of course.

The company’s technology comes from the Media Lab’s “affective computing” research group, led by professor Roz Picard. Picard and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby are founders of the startup, which most recently raised $5.7 million in a Series B funding round led by Kantar (part of communications firm WPP) and Myrian Capital. “I wanted something that was next-gen, a software-as-a-service model, a huge opportunity. And something pretty early,” says Berman about what attracted him to work at Affectiva. “I met Roz and Rana and they blew me away. This is going to be everywhere.”

Talking to Berman, I still felt like I was in a sci-fi movie, though. I’ve followed Picard’s research over the years—including recent work with el Kaliouby on autism-related technologies—but I don’t have an intuitive feel for how well a computer can classify a person’s emotions based on their expressions. (I would guess not all that well, though it’s improving.)

Berman walked me through a demo that was eye-opening. The company had volunteers watch a series of TV commercials—standard baby-product stuff, for instance—while a webcam captured their facial expressions. Affectiva’s software identifies key movements and facial markers—regions around the eyes, lips, and more—and infers positive and negative reactions during the course of each ad. What’s more, it tries to distinguish between different mental states, such as frustration, confusion, excitement, contentment, concentrating, interested, disagreement, and unsure. (Another Affectiva technology that is in the early stages of development involves monitoring heart rate based on webcam images that can be analyzed to track the blood flow to a person’s face.)

The business idea is to “send real-time insights back to the marketer,” Berman says, and to provide a sample pool of “thousands of [consumers] in seconds.” On the advertising front, the company is already making money. Its customers include Disney Media, Millward Brown, IPG, and some 150 universities and nonprofits on the research side. But you can also imagine a much wider range of applications, if enough people opt in to the technology—which Berman says could help make “content more relevant to them.”

Imagine retail kiosks that react to customers’ expressions as they browse products by trying to show them things they like, he says. Or websites and smartphones that react to people in real time as they interact with content, play video games, take online education courses, or watch presidential debates. It’s all part of the big vision of computers that understand their users’ emotional states—something that’s been talked about for decades, but is only starting to see the commercial light of day now.

“It’s a big business if we do this right,” Berman says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Dan Reed heads a crew within Microsoft that may have the coolest name of any division in the company: the eXtreme Computing Group, or XCG. Formed a little less than two years ago, the group is part of Microsoft Research, but its mandate goes beyond R&D: it’s to help the company as a whole look into the future and question its assumptions about the nature of computing.

Which makes Reed the perfect panelist for Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, Xconomy San Francisco’s marquee information technology event this spring. Set for next Tuesday, May 17, on the campus of SRI International in Menlo Park, this evening forum will give audience members a chance to interact with Reed and a cast of brilliant thinkers, researchers, and entrepreneurs on a question we’re all usually too busy to think about: just where is all this technology taking us? Given the current pace of progress in semiconductor and software technology, what sorts of capabilities will computers have 10 years from now? And what can we do now to plan for the entrepreneurial opportunities—and social and political challenges—that these capabilities will create?

Reed—a former UNC Chapel Hill professor and a onetime member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology—is uniquely qualified to talk about those questions, because he’s not just a technologist. He’s also Microsoft’s corporate vice president of technology strategy and policy, meaning he spends a lot of his time thinking and talking about how trends in computing technology translate into issues that politicians and businesspeople are going to have to work through at some point.

I spoke on the phone with Reed last week, getting his views on everything from smart radios to data center design to AI. We’ll delve even deeper into many of these issues at next week’s event, so be sure to get your ticket now. Meanwhile, as a preview, here’s an edited summary of my talk with Reed.

Xconomy: Being a futurist is notoriously hazardous. Bill Gates himself said, “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” What do you do in your own work to try to work around all the uncertainties and biases involved in technology forecasting?

Dan Reed: One of the things I do is look at exponentials that have been in flight for a long time and ask how long they can continue. I think our semiconductor roadmaps are an example of that, looking at transistor size and some of the quantum-mechanical issues that are starting to rear their heads, and the power issues. When people start to struggle with something, then there is a chance that a phase transition is about to occur. It doesn’t mean that some breakthrough won’t occur to obviate the conventional approach. But when you see the bag of tricks starting to look empty, then I ask questions. It’s time to point out that this field may be in for a disruption.

I also talk to people outside technology. I talk to my friends in the arts. What do they find interesting? I try to listen to users of technology who aren’t technologically sophisticated to see what unexpected things they’re doing. And I do a lot of general-interest reading and trying to understand societal trends, and looking at where some of our social structures are being challenged.

X: What benefit do you get from talking to people outside of technology or engineering?

DR: I think sometimes people outside a domain are actually better at predicting than people inside it. They’re usually less technologically knowledgeable, therefore they can make wildly inaccurate assumptions. But at the same time, they are not encumbered by the conventional wisdom that those of us in the discipline may have.

X: How would you describe the mission of the eXtreme Computing Group?

DR: Craig Mundie [Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer] and Rick Rashid [senior vice president of research] originally asked me to come to Microsoft to take a blank sheet of paper on how to build a data center. They said, “Don’t take any of the … Next Page »

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If the future is here but unevenly distributed, as William Gibson said, then where is it concentrated?

One place, certainly, is the contract research giant SRI International. Created by Stanford University in 1946, it’s the organization we have to thank for inventions like automated check processing, the computer mouse, hypertext, the ARPANET (which evolved into the Internet), and ultrasound as a medical diagnostic tool. And SRI is still innovating today—one of its recent creations is Siri, the virtual-assistant iPhone app that was spun off as a startup last year and quickly snapped up by Apple for a reported $150 to $250 million.

SRI researchers like the legendary Douglas Engelbart have long had a knack for seeing how the rest of us will be using computers in the future. Eager to hear what SRI is cooking up these days, I talked yesterday with Bill Mark, the head of the institute’s Information and Computing Sciences Division. Aside from directing a staff of 250 scientists, Mark is a software systems designer who studies smart spaces—environments where embedded computers help people work, learn, or communicate more effectively.

Mark argues that despite our culture’s current infatuation with iPhones, iPads, and the like, mobile devices are actually ill-suited for many tasks, especially those involving group interactions. In those situations, he says, it would make more sense to embed computing smarts in the environment, be it a conference room or a classroom.

I asked Mark to lay out some of those ideas as an appetizer for Xconomy’s May 17 forum Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021. At this evening event on the SRI campus in Menlo Park, CA, Mark will be on stage alongside Calit2 director Larry Smarr, Microsoft eXtreme Computing Group leader Dan Reed, and myself to talk about the current trends shaping the way computers will fit into our lives in 10 years’ time. The following outtakes from my conversation with Mark give a partial preview of the topics we’ll unpack at the event. To hear the rest, you’ll have to buy a ticket. (Disclosure: SRI is an Xconomy underwriter.)

Wade Roush: To build the Siri mobile app—which can help users do things like buy concert tickets or book a table at a local restaurant—your scientists drew on years of defense-funded research at SRI on natural language understanding and other aspects of artificial intelligence. But the app is still limited to fairly simple query-response situations. Will we be having full conversations with future versions of Siri?

Bill Mark: Yes, we view Siri as a first step in that direction. When you say something to Siri, it understands your intent and puts together a set of services that fulfill that intent. That is great—I really think Siri did a fantastic job, and we’ll see what Apple does with that core technology. But there is much more to the story than that. One thing is dialogue. In real life, we use dialogue all the time. It’s extremely rare that you say something and your assistant goes off and does it and that’s the entire interaction. Our research right now is pushing into systems that can do that.

Roush: That sounds an order of magnitude harder than just responding to a spoken search query.

Mark: It’s much harder. This sounds obvious, but one challenge is that the system needs to understand what it just told you. People in a dialogue assume that the other person, or in this case the piece of software, understood the previous utterance. Most systems don’t. There are also performance issues. The system has to come back with a reasonable response in a reasonable amount of time, otherwise it’s not dialogue. And the key piece is that the system has to … Next Page »

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Venture capital for early stage companies remains a serious concern among San Diego’s high tech startups. We have details on how that is being addressed, along with a wrap-up on the rest of the week’s biztech news.

—The San Diego Venture Group has hired a local VC, Windward Ventures co-founder David Titus, to serve as its first official president. Titus, who has been working on ways to improve the availability of venture capital in San Diego, wants to establish a networking group like the Western Association of Venture Capitalists in the Bay Area. He also wants the SDVG to become a better resource for out-of-town VCs looking to invest in San Diego companies.

—Can online social networks be used to accomplish widespread social change? A debate has been underway for at least a year, with The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell arguing against the idea. UCSD professor James Fowler says online social networks include both weak ties with acquaintances and strong ties with close friends and family—and the strong ties can make all the difference when it comes to overturning governments in Tunisia and Egypt.

—Sportaneous, a San Diego-based startup, won the grand prize for popular choice and second prize overall in this year’s NYC Big Apps 2.0, a competition created by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The mobile app and website urges users to “be sportaneous” won recognition for using public data to allow users to arrange and play pickup sports games with the help of location-based technology.

—San Diego’s Maxwell Technologies (NASDAQ: MXWL)  said it had submitted a shelf registration filing that will enable the company to arrange as much as $125 million in stock sales or debt financing, as needed. The company, which makes energy storage devices called ultracapacitors, says the amount to be raised, type of securities, and other issues will be determined at the time of sale, if such a sale occurs.

—San Diego and other Xconomy cities finished near the bottom of a list that Forbes magazine recently compiled of the best U.S. cities for minority entrepreneurs. Forbes ranked San Diego at 48th, behind Detroit (47th), Boston (45th), New York (39th), San Francisco (35th), and Seattle (27th).

—I sat down with San Diego serial entrepreneur Neil Senturia to talk about startups, entrepreneurship, and his self-published book, “I’m There for You Baby: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to the Galaxy.” As a startup CEO, Senturia says you don’t need to know everything. You just have to know what you don’t know. He says, “If I’m the dumbest guy in the room, my company has a chance.”

—San Diego’s Active Network said it plans to expand its Schwaggle deal-of-the-day program into New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago later this month. Active.com intends to launch Schwaggle offerings, such as discounts on golf tee times, in a total of 25 major markets by the end of 2011, and in select international markets next year.

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If you don’t know Hadoop from a hole in the wall, please meet Justin Borgman. He’ll break it all down for you.

Borgman is the co-founder and CEO of Hadapt, a New Haven, CT-based startup that is coming out of stealth today at GigaOm’s Structure Big Data conference in New York City. Hadapt calls its product “the adaptive analytical platform for big data,” but trust me, it isn’t that boring.

The company is trying to merge the best features of advanced databases with a software platform called Hadoop to enable business customers to analyze enormous amounts of data, both structured (e.g., spreadsheets) and unstructured (e.g., free text), in a super-fast and efficient way.

OK, first things first. Hadoop is an open-source version of a software platform originally built by Google to store and analyze data generated from search indexes. But Hadoop is primarily used for unstructured data, and mostly by technical geeks. So, what Hadapt is trying to do is broaden the market for Hadoop by opening it up to all types of data and queries, by linking it to what’s called a relational database (which handles structured data).

“We’ve built a true hybrid,” says Borgman, a Yale MBA with Boston-area engineering roots. “You can have both structured and unstructured data in one platform, and do analytics across both.”

If you’re wondering how it’s different from the dozens of other companies trying to harness Hadoop, or otherwise help companies crunch huge amounts of data faster, well, it gets a bit … Next Page »

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We’re coming off a fantastic health IT event last night at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center (more on that soon), but I wanted to take a minute to give our readers an update on Mobile Madness 2011, our next forum, which is just under a month away. It’s Xconomy’s third annual mobile event, and it’s happening on the afternoon of March 9, also at NERD (agenda here).

Stephen Wolfram, the distinguished scientist, author, and creator of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science, and Wolfram Alpha, has agreed to give a keynote presentation. You might wonder why Wolfram is speaking at a mobile conference. Well, it turns out that mobile computing is a big focus at Wolfram Research, the scientific software firm he founded in 1987 (he’s still CEO).

You’ll have to tune in on March 9, but I think Wolfram will touch on themes of information discovery, knowledge computing, and enterprise applications—all centered around his intellectual curiosity for mobile interfaces. (In an interview just over a year ago, he told me about the new kinds of computing he’s been doing on his iPhone, and the fact that “if you showed it to a technical person from years ago, they would think it’s a bizarre, impossible object.”)

The full agenda and speaker list for Mobile Madness is here. My colleague Wade Roush is making a triumphant return to Boston to emcee the event (unfortunately he’s going back to San Francisco afterward). Wade will kick things off by leading a panel on the future of 4G, which will be followed by moderated chats on mobile interfaces (how your phone is making you smarter), mobile payments and commerce, enterprise apps, and, lastly, the no-holds-barred “location smackdown”—a free-for-all discussion about the future of location-based apps and platforms—refereed by John Landry, in a reprise of his role from last year’s smackdown segment.

And a bonus feature: We will have not one, but two mobile startups coming out of stealth at the event. These companies and founders, who shall remain nameless until the big day, will give “burst” presentations to introduce their new businesses.

You can get more information and registration details on Mobile Madness 2011 here. Tickets have been going fast, but we hope to see you all on March 9.

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[Updated 5:15 pm. See below] Ken Olsen, the co-founder and former CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), died on Sunday. He was 84. The news was confirmed yesterday by Gordon College in Wenham, MA, where Olsen was a longtime trustee. There has been an outpouring of commentary about Olsen’s career and the impact of DEC on the computer industry. (You can read obituaries in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and CNET.)

Olsen, an MIT alum, started Digital with Harlan Anderson in 1957 with $70,000 in seed funding from Georges Doriot of American Research and Development. The Maynard, MA, company went on to dominate the minicomputer industry (as opposed to mainframes), employing more than 125,000 people in 86 countries and becoming the second-largest IT company behind IBM. Through the 1970s and ‘80s, DEC anchored the burgeoning Route 128 tech corridor and was joined by Data General, Wang, and other computer companies.

But DEC was famously slow to embrace the desktop computer market, and the company struggled through the late 80s and early 90s. Olsen resigned from DEC in 1992, and the company went on to be acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett-Packard. And as DEC went, so did the Route 128 ecosystem.

In a letter, Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates called Olsen “one of the true pioneers of the computing industry.” Gates added, “He was also a major influence in my life and his influence is still important at Microsoft through all the engineers who trained at Digital.”

Some of those engineers are weighing in with their remembrances. Gordon Bell, a principal researcher at Microsoft who spent 23 years at DEC as vice president of R&D, wrote in a post on Xconomy today, “I tend to remember all the humor and moments of irony that we shared while building computers at DEC.”

Yuchun Lee, the co-founder and former CEO of Unica (now part of IBM), worked at Digital from 1989-1992. He writes in an e-mail, “DEC was an organization with a terrific culture: one of intellectual honesty, meritocracy, and a desire to win. All of this can be directly attributed to Ken Olsen and his vision as the founder and leader of the best days of Digital. I’ve learned much of what a great and significant company ought to look and feel like as one grows up and am very fortunate to have cut my teeth there right out of school.”

History is made, and then it’s gone unless we pay attention. Olsen was the prototypical Boston tech entrepreneur. He leaves behind a legacy of thousands of employees who have gone on to new endeavors. DEC also provides a well-known case study of a hugely successful venture-backed company that failed to adapt to a changing market. Then again, not very many tech companies last more than 30 years.

I’ll update this space with any more unique comments or stories I hear from the innovation community.

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Carver Mead and Lynn Conway pioneered a government/university/industry collaboration in the ’70s and ’80s that helped train a generation of engineers to design the chips inside the electronic devices we use today. Now the University of Washington is hoping to spark a new kind of alliance, inspired by Mead and Conway, to help scientists experiment with designs for faster, more energy-efficient optoelectronic chips that compute using both electrical impulses and photons of light.

The new program, which the UW is calling the Optoelectronics Systems Integration in Silicon, or OpSIS, is being unveiled at an event on campus today. The program, to be spearheaded by Michael Hochberg, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering, is being funded in part by Santa Clara, CA-based chip heavyweight Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and the U.S. Department of Defense. Mead, the legendary Caltech professor whose work was harnessed decades ago at an electronics collaborative called MOSIS, plans to personally attend today’s event. So does Intel’s chief technology officer Justin Rattner, and UW’s engineering dean, Matt O’Donnell.

This new effort at UW is supposed to enable scientists from academia, government and industry to experiment more cheaply with new circuits that integrate electronic and photonic technology, O’Donnell says. The underlying hope is that future laptops, smartphones, and other devices will eventually run faster and use less power if some on-chip communications and computations can be carried out using light, instead of just electrons. In the low quantities needed by today’s researchers, however, silicon wafers etched with both electronic and photonic circuits are extremely expensive.

Starting in 1981, the MOSIS project at the University of Southern California addressed a similar problem by making it possible for academic, government, and commercial researchers to combine designs for various integrated circuits onto a single “mask,” the screen providing the etching pattern for a silicon wafer. This allowed many organizations to share the costs of fabrication. UW wants to do the same thing for optoelectronic circuits. If it can become the place where scientists from around the world send in their designs for more integrated electronic/photonic chips, Seattle could turn into a central hub for a new movement toward faster computing devices that consume less power.

“Everybody is working toward this,” O’Donnell says. “It’s wonderful. If this flies, and OpSIS becomes the de facto standard for integrated photonic/electronic design, then we’re the leader. You will be able to point to us as the place this originated.”

The OpSIS project has so far gathered about $250,000 in support from Intel, according to university spokeswoman Hannah Hickey, plus some other in-kind support, O’Donnell says. The U.S. Air Force is chipping in another $500,000 a year for five years, Hochberg says. The chips themselves will be fabricated by BAE Systems. The OpSIS project is being established at what the UW is calling its Institute for Photonic Integration.

There’s no guarantee this will work in any practical way. The OpSIS program today has a half dozen experimental users, who are testing to see whether they can create the building blocks for integrated photonic and electronic chips.

Michael Hochberg

The OpSIS project revolves around what it calls “shuttle runs” in which researchers cut costs by sharing silicon wafers between multiple projects. OpSIS leaders hope the strategy will reduce costs for any one team by more than 100-fold, Hochberg said in a statement. Protocols and rules on how to do this are still being worked out, although UW said it wants to make it clear enough that even non-specialists can make integrated electronic and photonic chips.

“You want a minimum of rules because people are going to use the technology in ways that you never imagined,” Mead said in a UW statement. “You want people to use it in ways that seem crazy.”

O’Donnell said the original MOSIS program was “incredibly important” to USC’s electrical engineering program for many years. If UW can do something similar with the new program, it could have a similar impact in the Northwest, he says.

Mead, now an affiliate faculty member at the UW, said in a statement that he’s “rooting for it.” He adds: “It’s a wonderful thing and it needs to happen. I might even use it for some of my own research.”

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The streets of Cambridge, MA, are wind blown and snow-ridden these days. Quiet and beautiful in their way. The breeze is up, but only laggards have not yet cleared their sidewalks. So I thought it was a perfect time to slip on my snow pants, lace up my boots, and set out for a little walk. I didn’t think about it until after I was back, but my path took me right past, or very close to, the homes of some real innovation pioneers. See if you can trace my route by my description.

Here’s a big hint: I started at Full Moon restaurant in Huron Village. After a short walk, I found myself just a snowball’s throw from the home of Turing Prize winner Butler Lampson, a pioneer in Ethernet, WYSIWYG word processing, and laser printing. His famous 1972 memo, “Why Alto?,” envisioned the personal computer. He is now at Microsoft Research.

But instead of going right past Lampson’s place, I turned the other way and strode by the former home of Danny Hillis, the Thinking Machines co-founder and later VP of R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, and more recently co-founder of Applied Minds out in warmer climes in California.

Next up was the home of Xconomist Bob Hower, a partner at Advanced Technology Ventures, and after that I saw some folks putting out garbage at the home of another Xconomist, Joe Chung—he’s a co-founder of Art Technology Group, Allurent, and now (along with former ATG co-founder Jeet Singh) of Redstar, a novel type of venture/investment firm. Right after passing Joe’s place, I threw a snowball at the home of Paul Maeder of Highland Capital Partners but kept on walking instead past the former home of Polaroid founder and legendary inventor Edwin Land.

From there it was a long loop past the old house of Mike Cavallo, domain director of the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Climate Initiative. (He was previously CFO of computer software firm Trenza, as well as executive director of the U.S. Chess Federation.) Then I slipped past Yo-Yo Ma’s mini-mansion (well, he is a different type of innovator), and a short while later passed right in front of Eric Lander’s place—the mathematician and head of the Broad Institute bought an old school building, which he converted into a house but reportedly without sacrificing the gym/basketball court! He must be afraid to mix it up with me on the court (I was champion of the Xconomy H-O-R-S-E tourney this summer after all), which would explain why I haven’t been invited to play there.

Then I was back home, on the opposite site of the “tracks” from Lander. So, can you guess the route? Do you know of any other innovators whose homes my path crossed that I forgot or didn’t know about? Is there another place on the planet with the innovation density of Cambridge?

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Here are a few of my predictions for how 2011 will be remembered:

1. Passive television viewing starts a long slow slide to oblivion. Despite Google’s planned delay of its IPTV launch, 2011 will be the year where Internet Television hits the consumer market and a fundamental shift begins from passive to interactive TV viewing. At the same time—3D television will be a failure.

2. Tablet computing becomes the rage. Apple set the stage but 2011 will be the year when tablet computing becomes the preferred platform for viewing a whole variety of content—so much so that enterprises will begin extending their applications to accommodate the devices. About 15 percent or more of mid-to-large size businesses will have a tablet application deployed.

3. Near field communication technology will hit the market to eliminate the need for credit and debit cards for charging purchases.

4. Enterprise cloud computing adoption will begin in earnest. CIO’s begin to have confidence that moving pieces of their infrastructure such as office productivity tools and testing environments to the cloud makes business sense.

5. And sadly we will see a significant act of cyber terrorism. The electronic services of one country will be knocked out for at least 24 hours due to cyber terrorists or criminals.

[Editor's Note: This is part of a series of posts from Xconomists and other technology and life sciences leaders from around the U.S. who are weighing in with the top surprises they've seen in their respective fields in the past year, or the major things to watch for in 2011.]

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