The San Diego-based Active Network today named former Monster Worldwide executive and chief information officer Darko Dejanovic as its chief technology, product, and innovation officer, a newly created role.

At Monster Worldwide, parent of the online employment giant Monster.com, Dejanovic was responsible for global IT strategy, product design, online marketing, consumer sales, and operations and development. He is expected to play a similar role at the Active Network, an Internet and online media company that automates online registrations for sporting, recreational, camping, and other activities.

An Active Network spokeswoman says Dejanovic’s background was particularly compelling because Monster, like the Active Network, focuses on both organizations and consumers, and has reached a revenue run-rate of over $1 billion.

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The long-speculated breakup of New York-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) seems to be taking a giant step forward today. The company is “exploring strategic alternatives” for its animal health and nutrition units, so it can better focus on its drug-development and consumer-health pursuits, according to a press release. Pfizer Animal Health is one of the world’s largest providers of medicines, tests, and vaccines for livestock and pets, generating $3.6 billion in revenues last year. Pfizer Nutrition makes infant formula and nutritional products that brought in $1.9 billion in sales in 2010. Pfizer says the options for the businesses include a spin-off or sale, and the company might ultimately pursue separate strategies for the two units.

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Black Duck Software CEO Tim Yeaton says his Waltham, MA-based company is fulfilling a mission that it set out on when he started two and a half years ago.

“We enable organizations that are building software products and applications to use open source components successfully in their development,” Yeaton says.

Black Duck was initially known for its technology that helped software developers comply with the licenses for different open source software components they used. Yeaton says the company’s product can also help others build software with open source elements from the ground up, rather than just policing themselves.

“When used early on in the development process as part of a suite of tools, it enables organizations to accelerate software development and reduce costs,” he says.

Black Duck says it already had the” world’s definitive database of open source projects and information” from its original business, and decided to focus on creating a community for individual open source software developers. Black Duck helped accelerate that with its acquisition of Ohloh.net last year from Geeknet (NASDAQ: GKNT). Ohloh offered a free public directory of open source software and a Web community of developers working with those components. Black Duck is working on integrating Ohloh with its own code search site, Koders.com, to create “a single integrated destination for developers, a wide-angle lens into the open source ecosystem,” Yeaton says.

The company still makes money from selling its technology to enterprise software makers using open source components but connecting with developers and building up that community on its free site supports the business, Yeaton says. “We think that actually better enables the entire software industry to more effectively use open source,” Yeaton says.

Last year, Black Duck also acquired SpikeSource, a maker of software and services for identifying application components and assessing compliance. Yeaton says that deal was entirely a technology acquisition, but that it will build those capabilities into its for-fee enterprise products, as well as its free website for developers. To round it all out, Black Duck also acquired the consultancy Olliance Group, which helps companies define and drive their open source strategies, this past January. “Our products work best when they’re automating a series of well defined policies and strategies,” Yeaton says.

Black Duck has added 24 jobs this year, largely in development and services roles. The company now has about 150 employees, and has had 40 percent year-over-year sales growth for the last three years, Yeaton says. It hasn’t raised outside venture funding since 2009, and has been able to finance its own recent acquisitions.

The firm has better branded itself as the open source enablement company in the past few years, Yeaton says, and it’s going to keep going on that mission. It’s all about “enabling other organizations to drive their own innovation,” Yeaton says.

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Help desk automation startup Zendesk said today that it has outgrown its South of Market digs at 410 Townsend Street and that it will move this summer to new quarters downtown, not far from the San Francisco Mart building that Twitter plans to occupy next year. As a new tenant at 989 Market Street, Zendesk will be part of a revitalization project granting payroll tax waivers to companies that locate in Central Market area. “Zendesk was founded in Denmark and moved to San Francisco in 2009,” CEO Mikkel Svane said in a statement. “We have been humbled by the wonderful way we have been welcomed to this city. In return, we are proud and happy to help invigorate this up and coming neighborhood.”

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A juicy excerpt from billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen‘s new autobiography caused plenty of chatter around Seattle and the broader tech world this past week, and considering that he’s starting a book tour, I guess that’s the point. The stunning vignette, in the excerpt published in Vanity Fair, was a scene in which Allen writes that he caught co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer conspiring to dilute Allen’s stake in the company while he was undergoing cancer treatment.

That blow-up, in Allen’s retelling, basically sealed his departure from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Gates called Allen a friend in a reply statement, but did say he may remember events differently. In any case, I kind of thought the attention to that very noteworthy episode actually obscured the more nuanced, diverse portrait that Allen sketched of the two entrepreneurs’ relationship. Basically, it emerges as a complicated partnership—over the years traced in that writing, Allen is by turns amazed by, suspicious of, and angry at Gates. In any case, the whole book should be good reading.

—Amazon.com continued its march into new cloud-based businesses by rolling out a music player and storage service tied to Android devices. There was a lot of focus devoted to the spat that Amazon apparently kicked up by not securing licenses from the record labels. But the even more interesting angle may be that Amazon is leapfrogging ahead of other big-name competitors—especially Apple—by taking personal music collections up to the cloud for storage and playback in a variety of places. Basically, it looks like Amazon is trying to position its freemium service as iTunes for Android—which is a pretty nice market to pursue.

—I sat down with Don Merino from Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s unique patent-licensing and invention firm in Bellevue, WA, to get an inside take on how the company went about setting up a first-of-its-kind modern, large-scale middleman market for intellectual property. Merino was a pivotal player in this tale, having personally purchased about half of the first 1,200 patents that Intellectual Ventures secured—the portfolio is said to number above 30,000 at this point. This topic gets more energy every week, it seems, particularly in mobile—just this week, Google announced it was going big in a bid for Nortel patents in a bankruptcy auction.

—We also checked in with the folks at Seattle’s Zipline Games, which rolled out its new Moai development platform and cloud-hosting service for professional game developers. Moai’s main selling point is that it tries to bust down language barriers in game building by letting developers use Lua, a familiar game coding language, and translating that work into the different formats needed to make mobile games … Next Page »

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It seems like the pace of mobile and casual game development is already pretty fast. But the folks at Seattle’s Zipline Games think it could be faster.

Today, the startup is unveiling the beta version of its new Moai mobile-game development platform. The idea is to take friction out of game-building by offering a single open-source platform that will allow developers to produce both the front-end elements seen by consumers and the back-end infrastructure by using a single familiar coding language. And after the game’s deployed, Moai offers cloud hosting to keep everything running.

Why is this noteworthy? As CEO and co-founder Todd Hooper put it, publishing a game can require mastery of separate coding languages for iPhones, Android devices, and the back-end architecture. Moai’s open-source platform is based on Lua, a common gaming language, allowing it to serve as a digital translator between all the other languages.

That could speed up game development by allowing even small companies to deliver their product without having to find someone with different coding skills to do the translating for another device or the cloud-based hosting portion.

Zipline’s attempt to help make game development even quicker comes at an interesting time in the growth of mobile, casual, and social games. There’s a bit of tension in the gaming world between bigger console producers and the smaller, startup-oriented mobile and social developers.

This was embodied by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata’s recent keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March, where he questioned whether cheap, simple games would erode the ability of higher-end games to charge premium retail prices. Among his notable quotes: “Our industry has certainly expanded, but it also gives me concern because I feel our business is devalued … Next Page »

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The Echo Nest, a Somerville, MA-based music data service powering interactive music applications, announced today that it has closed a $7 million Series B investment, led by new investor Matrix Partners and joined by existing backer Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

The startup, founded by two MIT Media Lab PhDs, did not disclose the full amount of its Series A financing, but CEO Jim Lucchese says the second round total is “significantly larger.” With this newest swath of cash, the company is making a push to help the more than 5,000 independent developers building atop its data get their products to market faster. To date, more than 80 apps have been built on the company’s platform.

“We’re connecting independent developers—those who otherwise can’t build commercial music apps—with the licensed commercial world,” he says.

It’s a newer push for The Echo Nest, but, basically, a developer could build apps for things like more intelligent music searches, playlists, and recommendations, but may not know how to navigate the complexities of music licenses. So, The Echo Nest is looking to help connect that developer with a traditionally more established party in the music business, says Lucchese.

One example is a deal announced last month with 7digital, a London-based digital media company, that enables The Echo Nest’s developer community to build with 7digital’s MP3 library and 10 million globally licensed songs, Lucchese says.

Unlike personalized radio station provider Pandora, which is powered by a team of musicians who listen to and manually categorize each song in its trove, The Echo Nest has built its library of data on more than 15 million songs with machine listening and natural language processing technology. It analyzes both the content and culture of music, by categorizing the sound of each song, and aggregating all that is being said on the Internet about music, Lucchese says.

“I would absolutely say it’s a technology bet,” Matrix general partner and Echo Nest board member Antonio Rodriguez says of the firm’s investment. Echo Nest also has a strong application programming interface (API) that sits atop its data, and a strong service selling its data, he says. The company has the opportunity to help power smart music applications on social networking platforms, mobile platforms, and alternative devices like the Sonos Internet Radio, he adds.

The Echo Nest raised $1.3 million in follow-on funding earlier this year, with money from investors Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, Donald McLagan, a digital media and data veteran, and James Pallotta, a board member of the Boston Celtics, Lucchese says.

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Cambridge, MA-based biotech Dyax (NASDAQ: DYAX) announced it has inked a deal with Japanese contract research organization CMIC to develop and commercialize its drug DX-88 (ecallantide), a treatment for the inflammatory disease hereditary angioedema, in Japan. CMIC will pay Dyax $4 million upfront and $102 million in development and sales milestones for the FDA-approved treatment, marketed as Kalbitor, and is responsible for all costs surrounding development, regulatory activities, and commercialization of the drug for angioedema conditions in Japan. In turn, CMIC could receive royalties ranging from 20 percent to 24 percent of the net sales of DX-88.

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Seattle-based small-scale hydropower startup (and McKinstry Innovation Center resident) Hydrovolts said today that it has received a $250,000 investment from U.S.-based civil engineering firm DLZ Corp. to develop a 25 kW hydrokinetic canal turbine for the company. DLZ plans to use the prototype in a hydrokinetic power project on the 14-km Chilla Canal in northern India, which feeds water to a hydropower plant on the Ganges River. Following successful demonstration and delivery of the prototype, DLZ could potentially order an additional 400 turbines from Hydrovolts, at an estimated value of $20 million.

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Compared to the handful of “under the radar” deals we had to report on in our May roundup, the month of June was buzzing with deals, both small and large, for Seattle-area tech and biotech companies. Normally we publish our “under the radar” roundup for regional deals worth less than $1 million in a monthly post. However, for the first time this month we are combining our normal “under the radar” list with deals worth more than $1 million, creating one comprehensive report of all local equity deals. This information is based on data provided by New York-based private company intelligence platform CB Insights, and our own past coverage.

Despite the fact that deals of all sizes are represented on the June list, the majority were for less than $1 million. And contrary to what you might assume, given that Seattle is a hub for many areas of information technology, healthcare and energy/utilities companies dominated the roundup. Of the $104.3 million in venture dollars raked in through 20 equity deals in June, Washington companies in the healthcare sector pulled in $41.1 million, while those in energy and utilities brought in $35.8 million.

The third leading sector was computer hardware and services, which raised $15 million in investments last month. Internet startups came in fourth at $4.9 million, and industrial startups followed up with $3.95 million, while financing for business products and services, software, and video startups all trailed behind.

We reported on the majority of June venture investments as the news broke, including the $40 million nabbed by Seattle-based Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, amounting to the biggest Washington venture deal of 2010 thus far. Not far behind was three-year-old Intellectual Ventures spinout, Bellevue,WA-based TerraPower, which brought in $35 million in Series B funding for further development of its traveling wave nuclear reactor. Other notable deals include the $11 million Seattle software developer Opscode earned in Series B led by Battery Ventures, and the $4 million raised by cloud storage and data protection Seattle startup Symform.

However, a number of interesting deals slipped under our radar. Here are a few that I found interesting: Bellevue, WA-based online collaboration and file sharing software developer OneHub raised $750,000 in equity. The three-year-old company, which provides cloud-based software-as-a-service for thousands of companies, raised $1.3 million in Series A financing led by local venture capital firm Ignition Partners back in October. Liberty Lake, WA-based Demand Energy Networks, which is developing technology to help energy providers manage their electricity supply, brought in $650,000. The company, founded in 2008, has developed a tool called the Demand Shifter, which allows a variety of businesses and consumers to store electricity at distributed end points during times of low demand, and control and dispatch it as it’s needed.

Seattle-based medical device developer Uptake Medical raised $600,000 in equity in June. The interventional pulmonology company then followed that up with another $17.5 million in a Series B round led by Maverick Capital this month. The only video game startup on the list, Redmond, WA-based Novel, raised $550,000 in equity. The 20-person startup plans to change the gaming industry and corporate culture as we know them by applying massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming techniques to create new kinds of games and business simulations for companies. Seattle-based Liquid Light brought in $200,000 in equity financing. The early-state energy startup is expanding on the research of Princeton University professor Andrew Bocarsly to develop highly efficient technology for converting carbon dioxide to fuels and industrial chemicals without using biological feedstocks. this month. The only video game startup on the list, Redmond, WA-based

Here’s the full list of June’s equity-based deals, both under the radar and on it:

June also saw a few startups raising cash through deals based on debt, options, and/or warrants, rather than equity. Those three transactions, worth a combined $1.64 million, are listed below.

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You can’t win them all, but you can sure win a few. Ask C-Crete Technologies, the winner of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition this year. Team founder Rouzbeh Shahsavari, a MIT civil engineering PhD candidate, also won the Elevator Pitch Contest segment of the $100K in November for his 60-second pitch of his technology, which is a nanoengineered formula of concrete designed to reduce the carbon emissions that occur in traditional production of the building material. It’s also stronger and cheaper than the concrete already out there.

C-Crete was also a finalist in MIT’s Clean Energy Prize this week, but Stanford University team C3Nano won the $200,000 grand prize, for the transparent electrode technology it says will make photovoltaic solar panels less expensive and more efficient. That prize money was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and NSTAR.

Life sciences track finalist Aukera Therapeutics won the $10,000 audience choice award at tonight’s $100K awards ceremony, for the treatment it’s developing for the neurodegenerative disorder commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, by harnessing a naturally occurring protein that stimulates nerve growth. Wade described the finalist teams in greater detail in a piece earlier this week, so check out his story for a closer look at the other technologies that were in the running. I’m excited to see where C-Crete and Aukera are going, and am hopeful that at least a few other teams will turn into future startup profile subjects for this website.

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Fighting illiteracy in Indian villages; facilitating local health reporting in Mexico; creating a mobile logistics app for truck drivers in Colombia. These may sound like projects run by a big non-governmental organization like the United Nations Development Program, but in fact they are three examples of MIT NextLab projects run mainly by MIT students and local organizations in the respective countries.

“Traditional aid does little for the very poor,” says Jhonatan Rotberg, founder and director of the NextLab program. “Only a fraction of the donated money trickles down to those who need it most. But with a mobile phone, poor people can get ahead. For countries in the Third World, a smart phone is the perfect tool for creating local progress in a society.”

Rotberg’s vision is that one day we could all have an open-source smart phone, running an operating system such as Google’s Android that can easily be adapted to the need of different user groups. These phones will be able to do basically anything a computer can do today, but anytime, anywhere, and much more cheaply. They will bring content, applications and services to the people of the developing world, reducing friction in economic transactions and helping people to be more effective in their everyday lives.

Already, over 4 billion mobile phones are in use in the world today. Markets in the Western world are near saturation. The next billion new users, Rotberg says, will be spread out in the developing countries, mainly in Africa and Asia. Many of them are poorly educated and live in rural areas. That means builders of mobile devices and mobile applications need to bring a different mindset to their work, he says.

“The big challenge is not technical, it is about usability,” Rotberg says. “Getting people to use and understand the applications is a daunting task.”

Rotberg, who gave the opening address at Xconomy’s recent Mobile Madness forum, is a lecturer in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division. Before coming to MIT four years ago, he spent years developing new business models for Telmex, the largest Latin American telecom company. At MIT, he has studied how technology, especially mobile communications, can be used to enhance quality of life in the developing world, and has worked with students and local partners to create joint MIT-industry programs that spin off promising mobile technologies for use in developing countries.

“The idea was to get access to MIT’s large intellectual capital and use it for the benefit of emerging markets,” explains Rotberg. “Together with MIT Media Lab, we worked out the concept for the MIT Next Billion network”.

After that project was completed in 2009, Rotberg says, he felt no wish to go back to his old job. On the contrary, he wanted to … Next Page »

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Crisis Commons, a non-governmental organization formed last year to apply information technology to disaster management and humanitarian relief efforts, will mount a “CrisisCamp” session for Boston-area developers this Saturday in Cambridge. It’s the second weekend in a row the group has organized such sessions; similar camps took place last weekend in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and other cities.

“The goal is to bring together a large group of volunteers from the technical community—at varying levels of technical proficiency—to collaborate on technology projects that aim to assist in Haiti’s relief efforts by providing data, information, maps, and technical assistance to NGOs, relief agencies, and the public,” says Liz Campbell, vice president at Cambridge-based Fama PR, which is assisting Crisis Commons with publicity around the event. Previous CrisisCamp sessions have produced digital maps of Haiti to help relief groups coordinate rescue operations and a Creole-to-English dictionary for the iPhone and other smartphones.

Travel reservation software company ITA Software is hosting the session, which will run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. this Saturday, January 23. At press time, there was still room for at least 60 participants. For detailed information about the event, see this CrisisCommons wiki page, and to sign up to participate, go to this Eventbrite registration page. For more background on the CrisisCamp phenomenon, see this informative article at CNN Tech.

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Every so often, we like to check in with Walter Bender, the former president of software and content for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation. He’s always busy with something interesting—and lately, it’s been Sugar, the classroom-oriented software environment that he and a team of software engineers originally developed for the OLPC’s $200 XO Laptop. Bender left the OLPC Foundation in 2008 to start Sugar Labs, a Brookline, MA-based non-profit organization that continues to make improvements to Sugar.

The most recent, which Bender told us about back in February, is Sugar on a Stick, a version of Sugar that fits on a USB key. Insert Sugar on a Stick into the USB slot of your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, and you can start up the computer in Sugar instead of the native operating system. The implications are exciting: for the first time, any classroom or consumer with a computer can try all of the educational software built into Sugar without having to obtain an XO.

Last week, Sugar Labs announced the debut of Blueberry, the second major release of Sugar on a Stick. I caught up with Bender just after he’d returned from the Netbook World Summit in Paris, where he says many netbook manufacturers expressed interest in putting Sugar on their devices. I asked him, among other things, for his views on the future of the netbook category, where Sugar fits in, and how Blueberry changes the picture.

I was particularly intrigued by two points Bender made. First, he says Blueberry includes a vastly improved e-book reader that makes any computer running Sugar into “a pretty darn good e-book reader” (his words), with built-in access to the hundreds of thousands of free books available from the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg, as well as cool tools for shared book annotation. The implications for schools are obvious.

Second, Bender hinted that the next release of Sugar on a Stick after Blueberry, code named “Cloudberry,” will take Sugar in some very interesting new directions, bringing capabilities like cloud-based storage to Sugar users. That ought to make it easier for teachers and students to share documents and applications, for one thing. Click through to the end of the interview for the details.

Here’s the full record of our talk.

Xconomy: You just got back from Paris. What were you up to there?

Walter Bender: I was giving the keynote at the Netbook World Summit. This is the second year they’ve had it in Paris, hosted by Mandriva [maker of a popular version of Linux]. It was a small group of about 200 people, but the right people. A lot of people were there from the various manufacturers, talking about different approaches to netbook software. There was somebody from Google talking about Chrome OS, and somebody from Samsung. I also gave the keynote last year, and I talked then about the difference between computer culture and phone culture, and about how computer culture was going to give the netbook guys an edge. What happened was, I was 100 percent wrong, because Apple and Google wrested the phone away from the wireless operators and the netbook industry just started emulating the status quo. Netbooks today all look the same, and all do the same thing, and the innovation is really happening on smartphones.

So I challenged the netbook community to wrestle back their innovative lead, and to frame it in terms of what you can do with a netbook that you can’t do with a phone. At some level, they are all just computers. But a netbook has a bigger screen, it has a keyboard, and there is a certain level of expression and creativity that those affordances give you that you are going to be hard pressed to do on a phone. A lot of people shoot video on a phone, but not many edit video on a phone. On phones, a lot of people type text messages, but … Next Page »

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Yesterday we ran the first part of our interview with Steve Bratt, the CEO of the new World Wide Web Foundation, which was unveiled on November 15 by Web inventor Tim-Berners-Lee. The foundation aims to empower people in developing regions to access “life-critical information” on the Web using mobile phones and other simplified interfaces.

Bratt, who leads the Geneva, Switzerland-based foundation from offices in Boston, talked in the first half of the interview about the origins of the group, how its mission differs from that of its sister organization the World Wide Web Consortium, and the gaps in content, research, and technology it hopes to address.

In Part 2, below, Bratt details the foundation’s initial projects in Africa and South America, the role of voice technology in broadening Web access, and the foundation’s plans for growth.

Xconomy: What can you tell me about your initial projects?

Steve Bratt: There are two: the Web Alliance for Re-Greening Africa, and Empowering Youth in Inner Cities. Both are in partnership with other organizations. With the first one, the goal is to provide Web systems that will help capture local knowledge about how to plant in very harsh desert environments. There is a group, the Africa Re-Greening Initiative, that has been working for 20 years to take local innovations in how to plant and conveying them to others. This is a great example because it’s not a case of foreign aid coming in and saying, “Let’s build a dam and here’s some chemical fertilizer and some genetically engineered corn.” It’s about what is working for the 1 percent and how to convey that to the other 99 percent. I met this farmer in Burkina Faso, Yacouba Sawadogo, who figured a different geometry for making trenches to grow seeds and plants that turns out to be much more productive—what size hole to use, when to put manure in. He didn’t have any training, he just discovered it. It’s a perfect example. They’ve been busing farmers into to see him; he might see 10 a month. We want to create a digital bus to allow all of the farmers in that area to have the knowledge.

We’re working with VU University in the Netherlands, and we’re going to see if the Web can empower the conveyance of information, and how to use voice to enable the Web. VoiceXML has been heavily used commercially in the West—every call center uses it—but it hasn’t been used as much for development. There are no new standards needed. We just want to work with local developers and local farmers so they can develop something that meets farmers’ needs.

The Empowering Youth project is in concert with the Center for Digital Inclusion, a fantastic organization started by Rodrigo Baggio in Brazil. They started in the poorest areas of Rio de Janeiro and they have close to 800 community centers in inner cities training kids on computers. We’re going in to help them develop a curriculum to teach youth how to develop content and Web applications. Again, we’ll focus on mobile and voice, because those are the predominant technologies available to people, even in poor areas. Even in the Sahel in Africa, we were told that every family has access to a mobile phone and a radio. It’s the same in Brazil and Latin America. So that will be a pilot project in five cities—one in Brazil, one in Latin America, one in the Middle East, and probably one in a Western city. But this is an unfunded project at this point, so we’re looking for partners to help fund it.

X: Do you ever worry that the voice-accessible Web that you’re describing will be an extremely slow, impoverished version of the Web that we enjoy here in the United States? I mean, just to keep things manageable, you’d probably have to limit menu choices at each level of a voice interface to four or five. How do you translate a complex Website into something that can be consumed that way?

SB: We are so spoiled. We have our iPhones and our high-speed Internet. Well, if you’re making a decision about what movie to go to and it starts in five minutes, you need a pretty fast answer. But if you’re making a decision about which direction to walk in when … Next Page »

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Only 25 percent of adults around the world have access to a computer that they can use to reach the Web. But 75 percent have access to a mobile phone. So the simplest way to open up the wealth of information on the Web to more people would be to make it usable via voice connections—for instance, through some combination of speech synthesis and speech recognition technologies and voice-driven interfaces customized for each region.

Making that happen will be the first mission for the new World Wide Web Foundation, officially launched November 15 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and the director of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Berners-Lee unveiled the foundation’s plans in a speech before the Internet Governance Forum, a non-governmental organization meeting this week in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. (Watch the video.)

It was 20 years ago this year that Berners-Lee proposed the Web’s basic markup language (HTML), its data protocol (HTTP), and its system of document addresses (URLs). “The thing that made the Web work then and the most important thing about it today is its universality,” Berners-Lee said in his speech. “Two Webs doesn’t work. It has to be one Web for all sorts of information, no matter what hardware you have, no matter who you buy your computer from, and now more importantly, no matter what sort of device you have.”

The basic tenet behind the Web Foundation is that the Web can empower people around the world to help themselves, if only barriers of language, literacy, location, and income can be overcome. The foundation’s first efforts in this direction will include support for an emerging discipline it’s calling “Web science,” as well as collaborations with VU University in Amsterdam and the Center for Digital Inclusion in Brazil focusing on the deployment of Web-based mobile communications technologies among farmers in Africa and schoolchildren in South and Central America and elsewhere.

A non-profit founded in 2008 and operating largely under the radar until now, the Web Foundation is subsisting for the time being on a five-year, $5 million seed grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The organization (which is not using the acronym WWWF, perhaps to avoid confusion with the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wrestling Federation) is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. But its CEO, Steve Bratt—formerly the CEO of the W3C—is working from a newly opened office in Boston’s downtown financial district.

Bratt met with Xconomy on Monday morning for his first detailed Q&A session about the creation of the Foundation, the philosophy of its early projects, and his and Berners-Lee’s ambitious plans for making the Web more accessible. Part 1 of our interview appears here; we’ll publish Part 2 on Wednesday.

Xconomy: What’s the mission of the World Wide Web Foundation, and how is it different from the mission of the World Wide Web Consortium?

Steve Bratt: Our overarching theme is empowering people through the Web—giving people the power through the Web to accomplish their own goals. It’s about helping people, not just having cool technologies. You never hear Tim Berners-Lee give a talk without … Next Page »

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The world of traditional mobile games can be tough for small studios and publishers to navigate. Having to work around all the different wireless carriers, handsets, and operating systems can severely limit the distribution of their games. Which is why the iPhone and other app stores attract so many developers. Now, Seattle-based RealNetworks is trying to make the process of mobile game publishing faster, cheaper, and more efficient on a much broader range of mobile devices—all while advancing its own business in the sector.

RealGames, the gaming division of RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), is announcing today a new mobile publishing program, called Federation of Studios, that lets game developers quickly and cheaply port their games across 1,700 mobile handsets, 130 carriers, and eight different operating systems (J2ME, BREW, iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android, Nintendo DSi, and Flash) worldwide. Real is offering game studios a development platform—plus distribution, marketing, and customer service, with no upfront cost—in exchange for a split of the game revenues. The first studio partner Real has announced is New York-based Sonic Boom, maker of games like Puzzlings and Kill All Bugs for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

“We’ll give you the emerging technology to develop in, we will train you in it, support you in the development process, and once the game is finished, we’ll take it and run it through the handset creation process,” says Charles Harper, general manager of business development for RealGames. “The ideal partner is someone currently creating great, innovative, and compelling content without a direct route to get onto traditional mobile.”

The technology originates from Real’s 2005 acquisition of Mr. Goodliving, a mobile game studio in Helsinki, Finland. It makes the process of developing, porting, and testing mobile games for different platforms and handsets more efficient, by automatically adjusting for technical issues like the screen size and user input scheme. Real says it will also handle the localization of mobile games for other countries, as it has expertise in 10 languages (primarily European).

RealGames employs roughly 400 people, and is known for developing and publishing games in-house (including popular games for the iPhone, Facebook, and personal computers). This is Real’s first dedicated program for working with outside game developers. The program is non-exclusive, so developers can use Real to reach a broader range of handsets and carriers while still submitting an iPhone version, say, on their own.

But, as Harper puts it, the iPhone has 30 to 40 million users, while the size of the overall mobile market is something like 2 billion people. “If you look at iTunes now, there are amazing games that are not making it onto mobile, [except for] a limited number of handsets,” he says. “We’re trying to kick the doors open and throw it out to everybody.”

Today’s news fits into RealNetworks’ broader strategy of investing in mobile as an increasing focus of its business. “We are obviously trying to expand into marketplaces as best we can,” says Harper, a two-time Real employee who has also worked at Seattle-area gaming firms WildTangent and Screenlife. “Mobile is an extremely fast-growing area for us. Because we have this unique technology, this is the best methodology we can bring in to publish out to carriers. It is the next big step for our mobile strategy.”

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Burlington, MA-based Vela Systems, which develops software for construction firms, has completed a $10.5 million equity funding, according to an amended SEC filing made today. The investors were not disclosed. In July 2007, Vela raised $6 million, which is included in the $10.5 million total. The company provides software to allow construction companies to access, modify, and manage paperwork using mobile devices. Vela was spun out of mobile software research and development from the MIT Center for Real Estate and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. [A previous version of this story mistakenly implied that Vela had raised $10.5 million in new funding. We regret the error---Eds.]

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When I first wrote about Black Duck Software about five years ago (pre-Xconomy), the company was pitching its open-source code tracking system as a protective measure. Many software companies wanted to incorporate open-source code into their products—why reinvent an e-commerce module for taking credit card numbers, for instance, if there’s already a perfectly good open-source one?—but they were scared of exposing themselves to the licensing and copyright hassles that sometimes came along with using open source.

Black Duck tried to put companies at ease by developing a system that let software engineers compare their works-in-progress to a large database of open-source programs. If a match was found, that could be a sign that the developers would have to comply with the specific license governing the reused code—or it could mean that complying wasn’t worth the hassle, and that it would be easier to develop the component from scratch.

These days, things are a bit different. Companies can’t afford not to use open-source components in new business or consumer applications, given that it’s so much more economical than starting over. So now it’s more a question of figuring out which components are best—and then making sure they’re safely reusable. As a result, Waltham, MA-based Black Duck has had to recast and expand its business.

A few weeks ago, shortly after the company announced the closing of a $9.5 million Series D venture round, I spoke with Black Duck’s new CEO, Tim Yeaton, who says the company’s new identity is about “driving the acceleration of software development in general by enabling companies to fully exploit the economics and the capabilities of open source.” That means not just ensuring licensing compliance, but actually helping developers find components that could speed up their projects—something that’s easier to do when you own a database of more than 200,000 open-source software projects totaling tens of billions of lines of code.

The first time I spoke with Yeaton, back in November 2007, he was still chief marketing officer at EqualLogic, the Nashua, NH, network storage device maker that had just been purchased by Dell for a stunning $1.4 billion in cash. I don’t know whether Black Duck’s board was hoping for a similarly spectacular exit when they named Yeaton CEO back on February 10—but he does have a bullish outlook on the future of open source components in software development.

“The open, collaborative model and the things it’s created have fundamentally and irreversibly changed how software gets built,” says Yeaton. “Individual developers have already figured this out—they are far more productive when there are technologies out there that they can use and not reinvent the wheel. The opportunity for Black Duck is that when you are a company trying to take advantage of the wealth of open source and intermix it with your internally developed code, that introduces a lot of complexity that most companies haven’t found a way to manage.”

Black Duck’s core product, Code Center, is all about managing that complexity. Introduced in January 2008, the software includes a catalog of open source code pre-approved for reuse, along with search tools for finding just the right bit of code for the problem at hand. Code Center can also … Next Page »

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Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies announced today it has signed a strategic partnership and technology development deal with In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community. Financial terms were not disclosed. Elemental makes video processing software that takes advantage of existing graphics chips.

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