In enterprise data centers, servers and storage go together like hot dogs and buns. One isn’t much good without the other. But if your specialty is baking buns, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve the dogs. And that, in essence, is one of the limitations that Hopkinton, MA-based EMC has been trying to overcome lately.

The Hopkinton, MA-based company (NYSE: EMC) is one of the world’s leading vendors of storage arrays for enterprise data centers. Because it has always thought of itself as a storage company, it has never crossed the line into building components for servers. And that’s how, even though EMC was first to market with Flash-based memory technology for enterprises, a much smaller company, Utah-based Fusion-IO, was able to come out of nowhere in 2005 and take the lead in a burgeoning new market for solid-state Flash memory chips for servers. Today HP, IBM, and Dell all put Fusion-IO’s ioDrive cards in their servers; the company went public last year and is valued at around $2.1 billion.

But it’s a natural market for EMC, and it wants in, badly. At an event yesterday in San Francisco, EMC took the wraps off a competitor to ioDrive called VFCache. It’s basically a card full of Flash modules that fits into a “PCI Express” or PCIe slot in a computer server, where it provides an instant memory upgrade. That allows the CPU to get work done faster, without having to slow down to wait for data from the storage array.

EMC's Pat Gelsinger introducing VFCache, aka Project Lightning

How EMC came back from behind in the server-side Flash business is an interesting story of internal innovation. Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer of EMC’s flagship Information Infrastructure Products division, told me yesterday that to help EMC catch up with Fusion-IO, he authorized an unusual skunk works project, with most of the engineering team isolated in EMC’s facility in Tel Aviv, Israel. “We hired the very best people and treated it like an internal startup,” Gelsinger said. “We set incredibly focused goals for the team. We told them not to go to corporate meetings,” but to concentrate solely on “Project Lightning,” the code name for the VFCache product line.

That was the only way to get the job done once EMC had determined that it had to build, not buy, its own alternative PCIe Flash product, Gelsinger says. “Organic innovation is very hard in a big, successful company,” he says. “There are a lot of antibodies saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, we can’t go that fast.’ There are a thousand reasons these things can slow down in a company. So having a very hands-on, top-down focus, combined with a very maniacal, senior, aggressive team, is really what’s required.”

Flash memory, a technology pioneered by Toshiba, is far more expensive than hard drive storage, but it also works much faster. Companies have begun to put extra Flash-based “tiers” of memory between servers and storage arrays in order to address the gap created by ongoing improvements in CPU speeds. Hard drives just can’t read or write data as fast as today’s multicore processors can suck it in and spit it out, which means CPUs are often sitting idle, waiting for data to arrive.

To speed things up, EMC has been adding Flash memory to its storage arrays since 2008—in fact, it has shipped more Flash memory to enterprise customers than all other vendors combined. But before Project Lightning, it hadn’t tried putting Flash into servers themselves, where the benefits are … Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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With a kind of candor that speaks of the motivation in the startup and investment communities, angel investor Jerry Neumann talked bluntly Tuesday evening about the companies he backs. “All of my entrepreneurs are irritating,” he said jokingly during a panel discussion at the Digital Media Center event held at Times Square in New York. “They need to be smarter than me, they need to be more driven than me, they need to be people who can go the distance,” he said.

Neumann took the stage with Benjamin Wolin, CEO and co-founder of Everyday Health in New York, and moderator Dennis Kneale, senior media and technology correspondent for FOX Business Network. Wolin and Neumann spoke about the startup and investment scene during the third and final panel of Tuesday’s event, hosted at the Nasdaq Marketsite by Digital Media Center, a New York group formed in late 2011 that brings together investors, digital media startups, and other industry players.

Digital Media Center was formed by Cooley, CTPartners, Deloitte, Nasdaq, and Silicon Valley Bank.

The night kicked off with representatives from Facebook, Samsung, and EMC’s data storage division Isilon Systems discussing trends in social, local, and mobile technology—then continued with a look at the future of digital content through the eyes of Verizon and Heart Television. Wolin and Neumann later engaged in a lively conversation about funding and building up startups in the current clime.

“It’s a lot easier to raise small amounts of capital,” Wolin said, “certainly to get started it’s a lot easier than it was ten years ago.” Everyday Health operates websites for brands such as South Beach Diet.

“It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur,” said Neumann. He has been investing in … Next Page »

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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A lot has happened in the technology world in the past year. So let’s take a minute to reflect on the defining moments of 2011 and where we stand now, as a local tech community with increasingly global impact.

This is by no means comprehensive, or even a summary of the most important stories of the year. It’s just a select few of the biggest highlights and lowlights, organized in spaghetti western fashion (cliché alert).

The Good: Oracle Buys Endeca

Some might argue this wasn’t necessarily “good” for the local tech scene, but Oracle’s $1B+ purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Endeca, the enterprise search and business intelligence firm, was one of the biggest deals of the year, and was kept under wraps pretty well. It will be interesting to watch whether Endeca’s technology and talent give Oracle a leg up in its competition with IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and Google. Endeca, which started in 1999, stands as a testament to the notion that billion-dollar tech companies can be built—and are being built—in Massachusetts. (See Acme Packet, Progress Software, Wayfair, and others on their way.)

Honorable mention: Carbonite, TripAdvisor, and Zipcar each went public with successful IPOs in 2011. That’s three more publicly traded tech companies in Boston that seem to be thriving in a tough market. Who will join them in 2012?

The Bad: RSA Gets Hacked

No one would argue this isn’t bad—and not just for local companies. In March, RSA Security reported a data breach involving its authentication products, which are widely used by big companies and government agencies. The Bedford, MA-based division of data storage giant EMC said it had … Next Page »

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I didn’t know the full extent to which the Boston area has a thriving data and analytics startup scene.

I had always associated the city primarily with biotech innovation. My company, Chart.io, provides hosted business dashboards to help companies visualize their database data. We’re based out in San Francisco (we were part of the 2010 Y Combinator class), but our investors, Avalon Ventures, call Boston home. When my friends at Avalon-backed Kinvey (mobile backends as a service) and Boston-based SessionM (a platform to spark deeper consumer engagement with mobile content and ads) and I decided to co-host a data visualization and analytics meetup for the local community, we expected to get 20-30 RSVPs at most. Instead, we broke 100 in a flash and saw a steady torrent of emails from data enthusiasts pleading for admission.

In fact, a deeper look into the Boston tech scene reveals quite a rich history of data and analytics companies, including Netezza, Endeca, ITA, EMC, and other giants. And it turns out, the startup scene is equally rich, with companies innovating around NoSQL, data storage, search, healthcare, and a variety of cloud computing ventures. Here’s a quick tour of the Boston- data landscape. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

As data volumes have exploded in the past decade, so have the number of companies building tools to store, retrieve, analyze, and generally manage the deluge of data.

Two Boston-area companies, Cloudant and Basho, are tackling the big data problem through non-relational databases (NoSQL), designed to handle hundreds of gigabytes and even terabytes of data and enable applications to elastically scale out to meet the demands of millions (or hundreds of millions) of concurrent users. In this vein, Cloudant offers tools to help companies use Apache CouchDB, while Basho developed its own data store called Riak.

Meanwhile, other local firms are focusing on the next generation … Next Page »

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[Updated 12/9/11 at 11:45 am. See below.] LifeImage, a Newton, MA-based startup that develops technology for sharing digital medical images via the Internet cloud, has taken in $8 million in new equity-based funding, according to a document filed with the SEC.

In January LifeImage boosted its Series B financing to $12 million, with money from Stamford, CT-based Galen Partners and Princeton, NJ-based Cardinal Partners. The company’s earlier investors include Long River Ventures, Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, and Partners Innovation Fund. The newest round of financing came from 13 investors, according to the SEC filing.

LifeImage was started in 2008 with the aim of giving physicians across different locations the ability to share and access diagnostic medical images, which previously lived on CDs in individual hospitals.  In 2010 LifeImage and Hokpinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced that they were partnering on a cloud-based storage system, with LifeImage’s software running atop EMC’s “Atmos” cloud storage and computing system.

The company could not comment on the financing at this time, but said it will be issuing an update next week. [Updated at 12/9/11 at 11:45 am]

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Waltham, MA-based VMTurbo, a maker of virtualization management software, said today it has closed $10 million in Series B financing led by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. The company says it will use the new money to expand its product development, customer support, sales, and marketing. It has raised $17.5 million to date.

VMTurbo gives businesses and IT departments real-time performance metrics and analytics tools to help them run their applications and virtualized/cloud environments efficiently.

The company, which also has an office in Valhalla, NY, was founded there in 2008 by EMC and IBM veteran Shmuel Kliger. It is now led by CEO Lou Shipley, formerly of Citrix and Avid.

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Serial entrepreneur Ric Calvillo had planned to stay away from enterprise customers with his newest venture. He’s now CEO of Nanigans, a Boston-based startup that offers a Facebook advertising platform for enterprise customers with a couple thousand dollars to spend a day on online ads. Oops.

“We’re scaling right now with large accounts,” he says. “That’s exactly what I didn’t want to do”

Calvillo has twenty-plus years starting and running infrastructure software companies, like Conley, which sold to EMC in 1998. His last venture before Nanigans was Incipient, a company that sold its data storage virtualization and migration software largely to enterprise customers in the financial services space. “I picked financial services at the worst possible time,” says Calvillo. The startup, which raised $95 million in venture capital, struggled to gain traction and sold its intellectual property assets to Texas Memory Systems in 2009. Hence his resistance to the enterprise world.

Nanigans’ big customers aren’t huge financial firms, but companies in the fashion e-commerce, social gaming, and deal-a-day spaces, says Calvillo.

After getting out of Incipient, Calvillo says he spent time thinking about the next software space to play in. Cloud, SaaS, and social all came to mind, he says. Nanigans starting buildings its ad platform code (off of the Facebook Ads application programming interface) in November 2009 and incorporated in 2010.

“There’s a lot of room for innovation in the advertising optimization area in social,” he says.

Part of that optimization is “closed-loop feedback,” says Calvillo. Online ads can be tracked to see how they lead to actions like attracting new fans for a brand’s Facebook page or prompting customer purchases. But that feedback wasn’t being used to inform and adjust future ad spend on Facebook, says Calvillo. And that’s what Nanigans is looking to change.

Nanigans’ product, called Ad Engine, first measures the success of an ad campaign, then uses that information to automate decision making, like how much to spend on an ad bid and which audiences to target. The software can use historical data to determine how much a click on an ad should be worth in the future. And it can decide which Facebook users to put ads in front of based on variables like age, location, and likes on users’ Facebook profiles.

Nanigans is looking to take the human grunt work out of monitoring and optimizing Facebook ads. The engine only requires a person to input the ad graphics, their total budget for a campaign and daily maximum spend, and a genre for their product. “The system knows similar campaigns we’ve run, what are good audiences, and what audiences do we have that are known to work for those genres,” says Calvillo. It uses this information to plug the ad into the feedback loop and constantly optimizes based on the information and predictions it generates.

And Nanigans isn’t just making those predictions and changes based on how many clicks an ad gets, but how … Next Page »

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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[Updated 12:20pm. See below] A buzz-worthy New England tech startup is relocating from Connecticut to the Boston area after raising a sizable venture capital round, Xconomy has learned.

New Haven, CT-based Hadapt has closed a Series A financing round, according to two sources with knowledge of the company. One source puts the round at $8 million. The other source says that, as part of the deal, the company will move to the Boston area (probably Cambridge)—which it may have wanted to do anyway. I don’t know who the investors are yet, but I’m betting at least one Boston venture firm is involved (and I have my guesses). Hadapt is planning to release the information soon, but declined to speak with Xconomy about any details yet.

[Updated] A new report in GigaOm says the round is $9.5 million—but that might include earlier seed money (see below). The lead investors are Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, according to the report.

Hadapt (pronounced “huh-DAPT”) spun out of Yale University in 2010. It specializes in combining advanced databases with an open source data-analysis platform called Hadoop. The goal is to allow business customers to analyze huge amounts of data, both structured (like spreadsheets) and unstructured (like free text), in a very fast and efficient way. (Hadapt’s name is a play on Hadoop and the startup’s “adaptive analytical platform.”)

The company is led by CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman, a Yale MBA who did his undergraduate work at UMass Amherst and started his career in the Boston area as a software developer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Raytheon. Borgman told me back in March that Hadapt had raised an initial funding round, mostly from angel investors. The company had seven full-time employees back in the spring, but that is bound to increase significantly now.

The move to Boston makes a lot of sense, as Hadapt wants to position itself as a business-intelligence and analytics company among some big players in “big data” and data warehousing like Netezza/IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Vertica/HP, all of which have roots or significant operations in Massachusetts. In the short term, there is plenty of talent and customers to be found here that will help Hadapt build what could be a very solid business.

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Big-data company EMC plans to add 200 jobs at its Seattle-based Isilon branch through 2012, filling out spacious new offices in the city’s Pioneer Square neighborhood—and leading to another hunt for office space in the not-too-distant future.

Add those 200 new jobs to the 430 Isilon workers already in Seattle, and some additional people from other divisions of EMC (NYSE: EMC) in the area, and the new 140,000 square-foot offices just north of the Seahawks and Mariners stadiums will fill up fast, EMC Isilon president Sujal Patel said Wednesday.

“Certainly, more space is already on our mind,” Patel said. “Our intention is to build out this facility and our Pioneer Square presence. For us, this is an ideal hub for building great technology and there’s lots of innovative companies in this area. It’s a great place to be.”

The jobs announcement, which also featured comments from EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, also served as a bit of an update to Hopkinton, MA-based EMC’s blockbuster $2.25 billion acquision of Isilon, which was officially announced late last year.

Isilon would have reported about $200 million in revenue last year if it had remained a standalone company, Patel said, and recently doubled in size year-over-year as a unit of EMC.

When the acquisition closed, Patel said, Isilon had just over 500 employees, mostly based in Seattle. Now, Isilon has more than 850 people, with 430 in the Seattle office. And the 200 new jobs on the table for Seattle over the next 15 months “is really just a fraction of the jobs that in the Isilon division we’ll be adding worldwide,” Patel said.

Tucci said the ramp-up of EMC’s Seattle center fits with the company’s strategy of building large tech hubs around the country. It already has major centers in the Boston area, the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle will probably be the fastest-growing of those centers, he said.

“Our model is to take the great things that Isilon is doing and invest more cash,” Tucci said. “It’s a terrific city, and you can count on that we’ll continue our expansion here.”

McGinn said the Isilon expansion was emblematic of a makeover of the Pioneer Square area, and the city government’s drive to provide a strong base for high-quality, innovative companies to locate and expand in the city.

On that note, Isilon’s Pioneer Square offices are actually just one floor down from the Seattle headquarters of Nuance Communications, which just announced the acquisition of Seattle touchscreen-input startup Swype. (And Swype itself was also in the neighborhood).

“One of the things that Sujal told me … was he wasn’t the only person with the idea that having new ways to manage large amounts of data was going to be a growth industry. A couple hundred companies had that idea. Not many are left,” McGinn said. “So it’s a highly competitive environment out there.”

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New England area security, consumer Web, database, and medical device tech startups have been acquired by firms near and far at a feverish pace in the last week.

—CustomMade, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of an online marketplace for connecting consumers with artisans, raised $2 million in funding from an unnamed group of investors.

—A trio of area Web startups inked financing deals late last week. Cambridge-based education-focused startup BetterLesson nabbed a $1.6 million investment from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, New Markets Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel investors. Wikets, a recommendation technology startup, took in $1.5 million in seed funding from from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and angel investors. And Newton, MA-based online video delivery startup PeerApp added $8 million in financing from a group of investors that included Summit Partners. Cedar Fund, Evergreen Partners, and Pilot House Ventures Group.

—This week we’ve seen a slew of acquisitions. Boston-based Localocracy (developer of community platforms) was picked up by AOL’s (NYSE: AOL) Huffington Post Media Group, for a price tag of less than $1 million, according to tech media reports. Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NASDAQ: EMC) bought Concord, MA-based Zettapoint, a database management technology developer, for an undisclosed sum. In the medical devices space, Hudson, NH-based Atrium Medical will be acquired by Sweden-based Getinge Group.

—More on that: (NYSE: IBM) announced its acquisition of Waltham, MA-based security software developer Q1 Labs, marking Big Blue’s 19th acquisition of a Bay State company since 2003. Financial terms weren’t disclosed for the deal, which is expected to close this quarter. Q1 CEO Brendan Hannigan will lead IBM’s newly formed Security Systems Division, which includes Q1 and other security technology IBM has acquired in the last decade.

—And still more: Portsmouth, NH-based NitroSecurity will be acquired by Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) subsidiary McAfee for an undisclosed sum. Nitro makes technology enabling organizations to much more quickly protect their IT infrastructure from cyber threats and other intrusions.

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Here a merger, there a merger, everywhere a merger merger… Some small, medium, and large acquisition news today around New England.

—Localocracy, a Boston-based online town common and community platform, has been acquired by the Huffington Post Media Group and will join the AOL (NYSE: AOL) content unit. The news was first reported by All Things D, which said the deal price was less than $1 million. Localocracy is a finalist in the MassChallenge startup accelerator program.

—Zettapoint, a database management firm based in Concord, MA, and Israel, has been acquired by Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) for an undisclosed sum. Israel-based news site Globes, which first reported the deal, puts the price at around $10 million and says Zettapoint’s 15 employees will join EMC Israel. (EMC has an R&D center in Beersheva.) Xconomy reported on EMC’s broader acquisition strategy and plans for growth last fall.

—Atrium Medical, a Hudson, NH-based maker of medical devices for cardiology and radiology, said today it is being acquired by Swedish giant Getinge Group (STO: GETIB) for $680 million. Atrium says it will operate as an independent business unit of Maquet Cardiovascular, a Getinge subsidiary, and will be led by current Atrium president Trevor Carlton. The deal is expected to close later this quarter. Atrium was founded in 1981 and has made a name for itself in healthcare device areas such as catheters, artificial heart components, and soft tissue repair.

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On a dismal day in Boston, here are a few tech-related company financings worth mentioning (one in mobile/social, one in video, and one in education):

—BetterLesson, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that helps teachers organize and share lesson plans and curricula online, has closed a new $1.6 million financing round from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, New Markets Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel investors. BetterLesson says it has built up a Web community of tens of thousands of K-12 educators. Any education company led by a Teach For America alum (founder and CEO Alex Grodd) is worth paying attention to, I say.

—Earlier this week, Wikets, a social commerce and recommendations startup, said it raised a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and angel investors, according to TechCrunch. (Xconomy reported on the round back in June, but without information about the investors.) The Boston-area startup, which is working on its mobile app, is led by founders Andy Park, Vijay Manwani, and Ravi Reddy.

—PeerApp, a Newton, MA-based online video delivery firm, raised $8 million in growth financing led by Summit Partners. Cedar Fund, Evergreen Partners, Pilot House Ventures Group, and other investors also participated in the round. PeerApp started in 2004 and is led by CEO Robert Mayer, a former EMC exec.

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Is there anything worse than a Silicon Valley VC coming to Boston to poach talent from the startup ecosystem?

OK, that’s not really what Greg McAdoo is about. The Sequoia Capital partner was in town last weekend, in part for the Startup Bootcamp event at MIT (and related meetups), which featured talks by a number of founders backed by Sequoia, including Drew Houston of Dropbox (an MIT alum), Paul English from Kayak, and Nathan Blecharczyk of Airbnb.

McAdoo is a busy guy, serving on the boards of Airbnb, Bump Technologies, Clustrix, Greplin, Loopt, Achates Power, and other firms. He has been with Menlo Park, CA-based Sequoia since 2000 and is involved with the Y Combinator seed-stage startup program. He was also involved with Sequoia’s investment in Isilon Systems, now part of EMC, the whole story of which we know well.

We met for coffee on Saturday, and I got a download of McAdoo’s thoughts about the startup ecosystem and what he was hearing from local entrepreneurs—ideas on everything from smartphone security for enterprise to the prospects of nuclear fusion for energy production. I also took notes on his advice to entrepreneurs (which I found particularly insightful), and some important trends in consumer-tech and cleantech startups in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and beyond.

While Sequoia isn’t about to open an East Coast office, McAdoo says, there is certainly enough going on—think raw talent, ambitious entrepreneurs, and a few company investments—to draw its partners out here regularly.

Here are some highlights from our chat:

Xconomy: People talk about the consumer tech ecosystem, or lack thereof, in Boston and other cities vs. Silicon Valley. But you’re telling me there’s a bigger trend going on than whether or not we have enough role models here.

Greg McAdoo: There are a host of applications that appeal to folks that live in dense urban centers. The big shift is towards a startup community in urban centers. That, by the way, affects the San Francisco Bay Area every bit as much as the New York metropolitan area or the Chicago area. Whereas the suburbs of the Bay Area have a very well established startup community, I think everybody’s on equal footing to some degree in that major urban centers don’t really have that startup community. They used to many years ago.

If you wanted to get a consumer Internet startup off the ground in 1995 or ’96, you needed to have fabulous product sensibilities and a wonderful front end engineering and design team. But if you were building anything at scale you also had to have some hardcore technologists in the back end and be able to rack and stack servers. Fast forward to 2011, and much of that back end expertise is provided by service providers—cloud guys like Rackspace or Amazon. Also some of the hardcore back-end technology is open source software now. So you don’t have to worry about being in SoHo in New York and trying … Next Page »

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Some amazing, and potentially disturbing, things could happen when scientists are able to sequence a person’s entire genome for $1,000 and in less than a day’s work. The technology is heading in that direction, fast. So I’m excited to announce today that a few more big thinkers on DNA sequencing technology and its societal implications have agreed to join Xconomy San Francisco for our next big event on Oct. 24.

Here are the new speakers that have agreed to join this half-day showcase we are planning, called “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome.”

—Thomas Goetz, executive editor, Wired; author, “The Decision Tree.”

—David Ewing Duncan, columnist, Fortune.com; author, “Experimental Man.”

—Doug Bassett, chief scientific officer, Ingenuity Systems

—Ilya Kupershmidt, co-founder, VP of products, NextBio

—John Wilbanks, vice president, Creative Commons

These new speakers will be matched up in a series of interactive chats throughout the day with the other speakers who were originally announced a couple weeks ago. I’ll have more to say about how these folks will be paired up as we get closer to the event. For now, here’s the rest of the lineup.

—Hugh Martin, CEO, Pacific Biosciences

—Cliff Reid, CEO, Complete Genomics

—Atul Butte, Associate Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

—Sue Siegel, General Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures

—Ashley Dombkowski, Chief Business Officer, 23andMe

—Sujal Patel, President, Isilon Storage Division, EMC

—Andreas Sundquist, CEO, DNAnexus

—Jim Karkanias, Senior Director, Applied Research and Technology, Microsoft Health Solutions

—Rob Arnold, General Manager, Geospiza business unit, PerkinElmer

—Tim Hunkapiller, Consultant, Life Technologies

This event will take place from 2 pm to 6:30 pm on Monday, Oct. 24. QB3, the group that spurs commercial applications of research from UCSF, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, has agreed to host this event at the Byers Auditorium on UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. The best deal on advance discount tickets is still available through tomorrow, and here’s where to go to get your tickets. See you there Oct. 24.

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Lean startup, schmean startup. There’s more than one way to build a Web company.

Just ask Coach Wei, the founder and CEO of Yottaa, a two-year-old tech startup in Cambridge, MA. Yottaa (pronounced sort of like the green Jedi master) makes software tools to help business websites run faster, monitor their performance, and generate sales more efficiently—a field known as Web performance optimization. In a previous life, Wei worked at data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) and founded business software firm Nexaweb Technologies. He is a graduate of MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, which foreshadows the approach he is taking with his current startup.

Over lunch recently, Wei talked in depth about what he’s doing with Yottaa. You might call it the “anti-lean startup” (my description, not his). In some ways, it is the opposite of the lean startup model, coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries, which involves having a small team, creating software prototypes quickly, and using customer feedback to rapidly iterate code. The process is much faster than traditional software engineering and uses methods such as “agile” software development and “customer development.”

As Wei explains, that approach works well for some social media and Web startups, but not all. In particular, he says, if you’re trying to build a company that will be able to grow from, say, $1-5 million in revenue to $50 million, you could run into difficulties with the lean startup model. If you start small and local, ramping up to hire a team of 100 people in Boston or San Francisco will be almost impossible because of the current talent crunch and skyrocketing cost of good developers. “There’s a huge scalability gap,” Wei says.

So he’s trying something different at Yottaa—and he’d probably be the first to acknowledge that it might not necessarily work. The idea, he says, is to be “global from day one and have scalability built in.”

Translation: hire most of the team in Beijing and the rest in the Boston area, from the start. “We try to integrate the best of here, and the best of China, to build a company,” he says.

This is different from offshoring, he says, because it’s not about cost, and the Beijing employees are not seen as second-class citizens. “You don’t do it for the sake of cost saving,” Wei says. “You have to think of building a scalable growth engine into your company. You have to build it into your DNA.” More specifically, he says, it’s about “how to leverage the global workforce.”

Here’s how I see it. Plenty of U.S. tech startups—and big companies—make use of developer talent in other parts of the world like Brazil, China, and Eastern Europe. But few are building their … Next Page »

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In Baltimore, a “hopper” is a young, street-level drug dealer (as devotees of The Wire can tell you). In Montreal, Hopper is a young travel search company. In Boston, well, we’ll see what happens in Boston.

Hopper is announcing today an $8 million financing round led by Atlas Venture, with previous investor Brightspark Ventures also participating. The company started in Montreal in 2007 but says it is moving its headquarters to Cambridge, MA, soon. The reason?

“We’re making a big bet on the talent pool,” says co-founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde. The company is currently scouting office spaces around Kendall Square and Central Square, and is looking to hire about 15 people, mostly engineers, he says. With a local ecosystem that includes online travel companies such as Kayak, TripAdvisor, Goby, and Google/ITA Software, and “big data” firms like IBM/Netezza, HP/Vertica, and EMC, (my examples, not his), Lalonde hopes to find a “particular kind of programming geek” well-suited for Hopper’s technology challenges.

The idea behind Hopper is to take natural language travel-search queries—things like “best beaches in Spain” or “scuba diving in the Caribbean”—and return a list of places, as well as flight and hotel options for each place, ranked according to measures of quality, convenience, and cost. It’s a more open-ended, “discovery” type of search than what has become standard on itinerary comparison sites like Kayak, Bing Travel, Orbitz, and newer sites like Hipmunk, InsideTrip, WaySavvy, and Yapta.

In other words, if you’re looking for a flight from A to B (and a hotel to stay in), there are plenty of other sites to help you do that. “Travel is a complex discovery process,” says Lalonde. “We’re working on the depth, quality, and intelligence of the search.”

He certainly knows the sector. Lalonde and co-founder Joost Ouwerkerk came from travel firm Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), which bought Lalonde’s previous company, Newtrade Technologies, in 2002. Together with co-founder Sebastien Rainville, the Hopper team plans to move to Boston, but they aren’t saying exactly when yet. They will also keep some operations in Montreal—notably the technical infrastructure and servers that crunch the firm’s travel data—because it’s much cheaper to do it there, Lalonde says.

Here’s a little more about how Hopper works. Say you type in “scuba diving Caribbean.” The site will access a “giant statistical grid of user information” that takes into account all mentions of relevant scuba spots—from articles, blogs, forums, reviews, social media, and so forth—and returns a list that’s ranked according to those mentions, but also things like distance, flight costs, and time of year, Lalonde says. The goal is to do all of that in less than a second, he says.

The whole approach requires some serious computing power. Hopper’s database includes … Next Page »

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