You know the type. He’s at every tech startup event, every investor event, and every incubator and early-stage mentorship session (at least every good one). He’s talked to every entrepreneur in the area and has had a hand in the development of many of their companies.

He has been a fixture of the local software scene for some 30 years, even though he doesn’t look nearly old enough for that. Worst of all, he comes across as a genuinely nice guy and doesn’t seek the limelight or talk a big game.

That would be Reed Sturtevant—and his reputation is as distinguished as his name. He is one of the Boston area’s most active and respected techies, known especially for his technical prowess and product experience. He’s also an Xconomist—one of our informal advisors who helps keep Xconomy plugged in to the innovation scene—so I wanted to take some time to catch up with him in more depth.

Sturtevant grew up outside of Washington, DC, and is a self-professed MIT dropout (we need more of those, don’t we?). He started his career as a programmer at Strategic Planning Institute in the late ‘70s and went on to work at Graphic Communications, maker of Freelance Graphics—which was bought by Lotus Development, where he stayed for about 10 years. During the ‘90s, he co-founded Radnet and RadioAMP before taking a senior role in 2000 with Idealab, where he was responsible for new company development in Boston. There he helped start six companies: Refer.com, Compete, Picasa (bought by Google), Newbury Networks, Paythrough, Pathspace, and Newbury Payments.

After Idealab, he became chief technology officer for Eons, the Jeff Taylor-led social networking site, and stayed for almost two years. He left Eons and helped found Microsoft Startup Labs in 2007, where he directed a team that developed the user experience for Bing Twitter search, among other projects. He left Microsoft in late 2009 to focus on startups and investing—which brings us to what he’s doing today.

Sturtevant currently co-runs Project 11 Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund (co-founded with Katie Rae) that works together with angel investors to back young tech startups. He tells me that since last fall, Project 11 has invested in seven companies—Locately, Scriptpad, peerTransfer, GreenGoose, and three undisclosed startups. In his spare time, he is a mentor for TechStars Boston, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a founding member and trustee of the Awesome Foundation.

I caught up with Sturtevant over e-mail this week, asking him a variety of questions ranging from the state of the economy to the challenges of building a consumer-focused tech company (especially in Boston), to the most important trends to watch in computing. Here are his answers:

Xconomy: Let’s talk about the broader economic backdrop for what you do: startups and investing. How does the bleak macro-outlook for jobs and the stock market affect your strategy?

Reed Sturtevant: Obviously we’re all better off in times of economic tailwinds, but I’m seeing a couple of effects on the very early stage startup arena.

First, job security in established companies and industries is clearly an illusion. I teach at MIT and this week I asked our students whether they expect to work in, or found, a startup. Two-thirds of … Next Page »

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Acquisitions and financing headlines were prominent this week for companies in the Web, mobile, and enterprise IT spaces.

—TA Associates and Summit Partners, growth equity firms with offices in Boston and Silicon Valley, nabbed a controlling share of the Germany-based online gaming company Bigpoint, by investing $350 million in recapitalization financing. Previous Bigpoint shareholder Comcast Interactive Capital’s Peacock Equity Fund sold its holdings. GMT Communications Partners and GE sold a majority of their Bigpoint stake.

—Wellesley Hills, MA-based AppNeta officially launched its cloud-based network management technology and announced it had raised $6.2 million in new funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures, Egan-Managed Capital, JMI Equity, and Business Development Bank of Canada. The company’s technology and staff come from Apparent Networks.

—Watertown, MA-based WiTricity, a developer of a wireless charging system for electric cars and plug-in hybrids, inked a technology partnership with Toyota Motor Corporation. The deal also includes a Toyota investment in WiTricity, in the single digit millions of dollars, according to a Boston Globe report.

—Dassault Systémes, a maker of product lifecycle management software with its U.S. headquarters in Lowell, MA, said it acquired Enginuity PLM of Milford, CT, which makes software for developing formula-based products like cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

—Sedo, a Cambridge, MA-based company offering an online marketplace for domain names, said it brokered its third largest deal ever, with the sale of the “gambling.com” domain for $2.5 million to an unnamed British firm.

—Waltham, MA-based marketing research software maker Invoke Solutions nabbed $3.8 million in equity-based funding from two investors, a SEC filing showed.

—SMTP, a Cambridge-based emailing software firm, went public on the over-the-counter bulletin board (OTCBB: SMTP). Eighty-one shareholders paid … Next Page »

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I’ve been flat-out for the past week or so. Here are three pieces of Boston-area tech news that are worth catching up on, and a few thoughts on each:

—Fig Card, the mobile payments company that just started last year, was acquired by eBay, via its PayPal division, for an undisclosed sum. Co-founders Max Metral and Hasty Granbery (one of the better names around town) have joined PayPal’s mobile division. My colleague Wade profiled another one of Metral’s and Granbery’s creative projects, Povo, back in 2008, introducing it thusly: “Mix one cup of Wikipedia with one cup of Google Maps, add a generous dollop of MIT-bred geekdom, and bake for about 14 months. Serves 600,000.” These guys look like a great addition to PayPal, which is increasingly focused on mobile commerce (see its recent acquisition of Boston location-based services firm Where).

It’s a fairly small deal, but it raises a couple of big questions on both coasts. Is PayPal getting ready to split off from eBay? And who’s the next mobile company to get bought in Boston? (I have my guess, but I’m not telling yet.)

—Eons, the social networking site for baby boomers launched in 2006 by Jeff Taylor, was scooped up by San Francisco-based Crew Media for an undisclosed price. Eons has been shrinking in recent years, and it spun off its more successful obituaries business, Tributes.com, in 2008. Former Eons employees have told me that the company failed for a number of reasons, ranging from “50 year olds are not viral” to classic startup mistakes like “taking too much money and hiring too fast before you get traction.”

—Audio firm Bose announced on Friday that founder Amar Bose has given MIT the majority of the stock in the company, in the form of non-voting shares. Financial details weren’t given. Professor Bose is an MIT “lifer” who served on the Institute’s faculty for 45 years, retiring in 2001. MIT, which is now the majority owner of Bose Corporation, will receive annual cash dividends on those shares, but has no control over the company and its operations and cannot sell the shares.

A story in the New York Times raised tax questions about the gift, but didn’t resolve the issue. The Times quotes Nate Nickerson, an MIT spokesman (and a former editor at Technology Review), as saying the gift was “very significant” and that the dividends will be “used broadly to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission.”

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The local technology news last week was all over the map, ranging from mobile devices to crowdfunding to public broadcasting. There was also an interesting little flurry of acquisitions, with two San Francisco firms getting scooped up by outsiders and one merger going the other way.

—As a preview of Xconomy San Francisco’s May 17 forum Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, I reported on a conversation with scheduled speaker Bill Mark, head of SRI International’s Information and Computing Sciences Division. It turns out researchers in Mark’s division are investigating a range of technologies that will shape tomorrow’s computers and interfaces, including dialogue-based software, robots that understand the scenes around them, and meeting rooms and classrooms with enough embedded smarts to assist their occupants with work or learning.

—I profiled Life360, a San Francisco startup whose family tracking app for iPhones and Android phones has been winning new adopters at a frenzied pace. Founder and CEO Chris Hulls said the company is looking for ways to get out its message about the role of smartphones in family safety without preying on exaggerated parental fears about child abductions.

—On a recently announced list of new contributors to the Startup America Partnership—a private-public initiative to muster resources for entrepreneurs—one of the interesting standouts (because of its relatively small size) was IndieGoGo, the San Francisco-based crowdfunding platform. I talked with CEO Slava Rubin and Startup America head Scott Case about the growing connection between crowdfunding and job creation.

—In an experiment that could have reverberations at public radio stations around the country, San Francisco’s KQED announced that it will offer a pledge-free streaming version of its broadcast to donors who contribute $45 before its spring pledge drive begins. I talked with officials at KQED and elsewhere around the public radio community about whether the station’s move is tantamount to offering a premium, paid version of its broadcast, an idea that might not comport with public radio’s original mission.

—Frank Slootman, the former CEO of Santa Clara-based Data Domain, has been tapped to lead Service-now, a San Diego-based software-as-a-service-based IT management company, as my colleague Bruce reported.

—In M&A news, New York-based YouCast acquired San Francisco-based Halogen Media, Seattle-based PopCap Games acquired San Francisc0-based social game maker ZipZapPlay, and San Francisco-based media services firm Crew Media acquired the assets of Eons, the Boston-based social network for baby boomers.

—TA Associates and Summit Partners refinanced German online game maker Bigpoint, which has a development team in San Francisco, to the tune of $350 million.

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When is an eon only half a decade? When you’re talking about Eons, the social networking site for baby boomers launched in 2006 by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor. San Francisco-based media services company Crew Media, which operates a boomer-focused advertising agency called Continuum Crew, said today that it has acquired Eons and its associated advertising network, Eons BOOM Media, for an undisclosed sum. After raising at least $32 million in venture backing from Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst and Menlo Park, CA-based Sequoia Capital, Eons proved unable to attract large audiences to its Internet portal, which was dedicated to “celebrating life on the flipside of 50.” The company spun off its more successful obituaries business, Tributes.com, and ultimately shrank to just five employees after a round of layoffs last November.

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Does the world really need another seed-stage technology investment fund? Maybe not—but Boston entrepreneurs can use all the expertise they can get.

That’s where Project 11 Ventures comes into play. In the increasingly crowded field of early-stage tech investing, Project 11, which is co-led by Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae, is taking a very hands-on approach to mentoring startups. That means helping founders (especially first-timers) refine their product, test it, think through business models, recruit talent, and work together effectively, among other things. Project 11 has announced a couple of investments already, in Boston-area startups Locately, which provides location-based information for advertisers, and peerTransfer, which focuses on international money transfers and payments.

I recently sat down with Sturtevant and Rae to talk about their investment themes and philosophy—and what really distinguishes them from other seed-stage tech investors in town. They couldn’t talk about any progress in raising their fund yet (rumored to be in the $5 million range), but they did shed some light on their unique background and their approach to working with entrepreneurs.

Sturtevant and Rae have been fixtures of the local startup scene for years. They previously worked together at Eons and Microsoft Startup Labs—in each case incubating startup ideas and testing numerous Internet businesses in parallel, rather than being more traditional “serial” entrepreneurs. Sturtevant is the tech guy, while Rae’s expertise is products and customers. Project 11 is their first fund together. (Rae was also recently tapped to be the new head of TechStars Boston.)

Becoming successful investors is a long road, of course, and lots of people will try and fail to make money as angel investors, “super angels,” or “micro-VCs.” It will take years to establish a track record of successes, and Rae and Sturtevant face a steep learning curve. Nevertheless, they are confident as they dive into the investing fray.

Here are a few nuggets from our chat:

—On their personal motivation for Project 11:

After leaving Microsoft last year, the two decided they liked working together, so they explored different startup and investment ideas. “I love making things real,” Sturtevant says. “If I step over to be an investor and coach, can I have more impact on more companies and more products than what … Next Page »

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[Updated with additional information, Nov. 18, 2010]–-Boston baby boomer and social networking site Eons, which has raised $32 million in two rounds of financing led by two venture capital giants—General Catalyst Partners and Sequoia Capital—yesterday laid off nearly its entire remaining staff, founder Jeff Taylor said tonight.

Taylor, who previously founded Monster.com, revealed the layoff news during his keynote talk tonight at a VIP dinner leading up to tomorrow’s MIT Venture Capital Conference. We could not directly follow up with Taylor but will report back as we gather additional details. The fate of Eons itself could not be confirmed.

Eons launched in 2006. Its latest venture round was a $22 million Series B round that closed in March 2007. Since then Eons has struggled to reinvent itself. Originally founded as an Internet portal for the aging Baby Boomer crowd, it had the slogan “Lovin’ Life on the Flip Side of 50.” But after spending a lot of money with little traction, it removed its over-50 age limit early in 2008 as part of a bid to remake itself as a more general social networking site.

Update, November 18, 9:40 pm—

We caught up with Taylor briefly after his talk tonight. He says he laid off seven of the 12 remaining Eons employees, leaving it with just five staffers. He said the intent behind the move was to focus his remaining resources on Meetcha.com, an Eons-developed dating site for people over 40 that launched in December 2009.

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Sometimes all you need to do is look at where former Microsoft executives are going, to piece together some interesting trends in the tech industry.

In recent months, a number of high-profile leaders from very different divisions of the Redmond, WA-based software firm (NASDAQ: MSFT) have departed. This might be true in any given year at a company with roughly 90,000 employees, of course, but what’s interesting here is where these execs are going—and what their moves say about their respective industries. (Also noticeably absent are any publicized moves to hated competitors like Apple, Google, or Oracle.)

I posit that the following six personnel moves say more about the near-term future of industries like mobile, gaming, online services, and automotive than about Microsoft itself, although there might be some intriguing partnerships with Redmond in the works:

—Stephen Elop to Nokia (CEO)

The former president of Microsoft’s business division (and member of Steve Ballmer’s senior leadership team) officially starts as chief executive of Finland-based Nokia (NYSE: NOK) next week. Look for Elop to bring more focus to the U.S. smartphone market, where Nokia has seriously lagged, and for Microsoft and Nokia to work together more closely (and perhaps even merge) to take on Google and Apple in mobile.

—Andre Vrignaud to Amazon (gaming exec)

Microsoft’s former director of game platform strategy, who helped build Xbox Live, is taking on a new, unspecified role at Seattle-based Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). Presumably it will be to help lead the online retail giant’s emerging efforts in video games and entertainment. In the past few years, Amazon acquired casual game distributor Reflexive Entertainment, and the firm and its CEO Jeff Bezos invested in startups such as Atomic Moguls and Social Gaming Network. Look for Amazon to develop a unique strategy in social gaming as the casual games sector continues to evolve and become more deeply embedded with social media.

—John Matheny to Yahoo (senior VP, communication products and communities)

The former general manager of Windows Phone App Studio (he worked on the ill-fated Kin) has moved on to become senior vice president of Yahoo’s communications products and communities unit. Matheny is the latest in a string of former Microsofties who have joined Silicon Valley-based Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), including senior product execs Blake Irving and Bill Shaughnessy. What this means … Next Page »

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Jon Pierce is an unassuming young man who just might hold the keys to the kingdom. The Boston tech startup kingdom, that is.

OK, that’s the kind of bluster he probably hates to see, especially in the media. Pierce is about community first—and that’s why he’s particularly important. He is the founder of Betahouse, a co-working communal space for entrepreneurs, techies, and creative types in Central Square in Cambridge. The 1,800-square-foot space has been going strong since April 2007, making it (as far as we know) the oldest co-working space for entrepreneurs in the Boston area. There are about 25 members at any time, and they pay a monthly fee to work in the space for a few days a week or full-time. The idea is to provide a community and support structure for people to network, create relationships, share knowledge about their field, and sometimes collaborate on projects.

“You don’t get that out of your home, or out of a Starbucks,” Pierce says.

Some 75 people have come through Betahouse over its three-year lifetime, Pierce says. They include entrepreneurs who have since gotten venture funding, like virtual goods and social-app startup Viximo (which reminds me a bit of Seattle’s BigDoor Media), and a few former Y Combinator companies, as well as freelance developers and consultants.

Now Betahouse is looking to expand into a new space—which will be double its current size, and maybe more—in the next few months. As part of the planned expansion, the group also will look to host bigger events for the startup community, which it hasn’t been doing as much of lately because of its residential locale. (It’s hard not to disturb the neighbors.) “A big part of our culture is events,” Pierce says.

Pierce says Central Square will still be the preferred location, because of its relatively low cost and its proximity to MIT, Harvard, tech companies like Harmonix, Conduit Labs, oneforty, and dozens of others, and cafés and eateries like Andala (home to Open Coffee every Wednesday morning). He is currently scoping out office space and making sure there’s enough demand for the expansion. “The challenge is it’s a pretty soft economy still,” he says. “And there’s a growing amount of free space available.” There are now about … Next Page »

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Monster.com and Eons.com founder Jeff Taylor thinks entrepreneurs are bluffing when they cite Boston’s harsh winter weather as the reason for fleeing the city for operations elsewhere, such as California’s Silicon Valley.

“The real objection is that it’s hard to get discovered in Boston, and that our resource-rich community feels like it’s locked behind closed doors,” he says. In January, to help open more of those doors, Taylor quietly launched a startup incubator out of his Charlestown Navy Yard offices. He named the incubator Deep Snow. “I thought to go right in the face of that objection,” he says, explaining the name.

Taylor charges entrepreneurs $200 a month for their own designated desks at his open workspace, and between $250 and $350 a desk in closed-door offices. The incubator, which Taylor refers to as “scrappy entrepreneurial space,” also features a conference room seating 16 that entrepreneurs can rent for $75 an hour. Internet access and shared kitchen space are also included in the price.

“I call it a bare bones incubator,” he says of Deep Snow, which lives on the fourth floor of the updated warehouse-style building that houses two of Taylor’s other businesses, online community site Eons and dating site Meetcha.com, both targeted at the baby boomer age group. His third company, an online obituary database called Tributes.com, is located in another neighborhood of Boston.

Taylor, who works out of the first floor, said he plans to swing by the Deep Snow space every few days for casual consulting with the startups, and will help introduce founders to venture capitalists and other members of the community with resources. He’s also using his connections at area business schools to match Deep Snow startups with interns.

“I wanted to do my part to help keep local IP in this town and create some jobs,” Taylor says. Deep Snow currently houses two companies, RetireLife, a web directory targeting those taking care of elderly parents, and a PR firm that Taylor couldn’t yet reveal the name of.

“I moved into this incubator to surround myself with other startups and to get a new set of blood to bounce ideas off of,” said RetireLife founder Megan Shea, who previously worked out of Babson College’s incubator space. Shea’s website, which launched to a Massachusetts audience last May and opened last month as a national elderly care directory, targets the same baby boomer group as Taylor’s businesses.

“He gives you a couple of ideas in a few minutes and leaves you chewing on them for a few hours,” she says of Taylor’s on-the-fly consulting approach at the incubator. Taylor does not have an equity stake in RetireLife, though, Shea said.

Taylor is working on getting a few new high-tech startups at Deep Snow and is slated to have about six companies in the space by the end of March. He isn’t involved in investment discussions with any of the tenants, though, he said. The goal is to get 20 startups this year into the incubator, which has about 10,000 square feet, he says. Space at Deep Snow will be doled out on a first-come, first-serve basis, and interested companies can contact Eons CFO Matt Fuller.

We’ve also updated our X Lists list of technology coworking spaces to include to include Deep Snow.

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[Updated 12/8/09 2:30 p.m. with comments from Taylor, see below] Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster Worldwide and the founder/CEO of the boomer-focused online community Eons, is up to something new. Xconomy has learned that Taylor is about to launch a dating site, Meetcha.com, designed for people 40 and over.

In an e-mail obtained by Xconomy, Taylor says he is in search of singles to try out the site during its alpha testing phase, and that Meetcha “will offer a less pressured, more fun way to meet new people.” The Meetcha website calls Meetcha “a new dating experience for grown-ups.”

At the moment, the site consists mainly of a sign-up form for those who would like to receive information about the service. Visitors who supply their addresses then see a notice saying the company will be in touch in mid-December with an official invitation to join the site.

We reached Taylor about the new site this afternoon just as he was about to board a flight. He says Meetcha is “an Eons product.” He noted that although Eons has never an area explicitly dedicated to matchmaking, many people have used the site for that purpose. “We’ve basically been an undating dating site for almost our entire existence,” Taylor says. “We have never hung a dating shingle out, but some of our most popular groups are for singles, and if you look at the people who spend the most time on the site, they have tended to be singles.”

Meetcha will capitalize on that interest, Taylor says. A small alpha test of the service, limited to over-40 singles in the Boston area, will run through January, Taylor says. “The idea is to run a control group through our innovative profile builder,” he says. “We have a number other product offerings that are really targeted toward this age group, and we’re excited about it.”

Eons itself has been in transition over the last couple of years. The company attracted venture capital from big-name firms like Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst, Intel Capital, and Sequoia Capital, but went through a big round of layoffs in September of 2007. In early 2008, the site—which had originally been marketed to people over 50—removed its age limit in an attempt to attract more users. Around the same time, the company spun off the obituary section of the Eons community in the form of a new company called Tributes.com. Tributes has since raised at least $5.4 million from Boston-area tech investors and funeral companies.

“Eons didn’t start out as an incubator exactly, but it did start out with the idea that there would be a number of different products, and that we would see what stuck in the marketplace,” Taylor says. “One of my hypotheses was around the idea of an obituary product and life celebrations, and that became Tributes.com, which is going great. So now we have, really, four products: the original Eons, which is a gathering place for the boomer generation; Eons Boomer Media, an advertising network which is complete dedicated to boomers, with over 4 million uniques [impressions per month]; Tributes.com; and now Meetcha, which is really responding to what we see as a clear need on the Eons site.”

Taylor said Eons has been surveying over-40 singles around the country to find out what dating-site features they’d like—but he had to get on his plane before he could describe them. It’s clear that to succeed, Meetcha will need to distinguish itself both from the dozens of existing dating sites that specifically cater to people in middle age or older, such as SeniorFriendFinder and MatureSinglesOnly, and from general dating services such as Match.com and eHarmony that have strong over-40 followings.

I didn’t get a chance to ask Taylor how Meetcha will earn revenues, or whether it might become a separate, venture-funded spinoff like Tributes.com. But both Eons and Tributes.com are both advertising-supported, and a section of the Meetcha privacy page on third-party ads suggests that Meetcha will be as well, with ads supplied by major online ad networks such as Collective Media and Google’s DoubleClick.

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Boston-based obituary listings site Tributes.com, a spinoff of boomer social networking site Eons, has raised a $1.2 million second round of funding, the company said today. That brings the total venture pot for the startup, which earns revenues on partnership with media groups and funeral services companies, to $5.4 million. The company didn’t name the backers, saying only that the include a “strategic group of both existing and new investors representing both funeral service and the Boston tech community.”

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After losing its second chief technology officer in seven months, Eons is looking to revamp the position by creating a new chief product officer job that combines technology and product development responsibilities, according to CEO Jeff Taylor. On a related front, Taylor says the company is eyeing moving some of its storage—so far done on its own equipment—to the cloud, and that he is evaluating services from both Amazon and Google.

Yesterday, we broke the news about CTO Eric Golin’s recent departure in a management split. We couldn’t get hold of Taylor until relatively late in the afternoon. But while not speaking of the particulars of the split, Taylor was forthcoming about the future.

“I have an opening, and we’re looking for a chief product officer,” he told me. “That person is going to combine social networking and customer engagement experience with technology.” He adds, “What we’ve discovered [is] rather than have product people pushing up against developers, we need to have a singular head here.”

Taylor says he is looking far and wide for the new CPO. That’s partially because there aren’t a lot of top people experienced in social networking in New England and he’s had to look more to the West Coast. However, he says, Eons has “a very good pipeline of people that we’re talking to,” and that the company expects to make an announcement before too long.

Whoever the new person is, he or she will be overseeing an Eons technology landscape that will likely tap cloud computing services for a growing portion of its offerings. It’s no surprise that a Web company looking to pare expenses—Eons laid off a third of its staff in September—and get more efficient is looking to the cloud. But this still marks a big departure for Eons, which has previously run its own servers and bought its own storage (which is managed by a colocation provider).

However, Taylor says, the time is right for the cloud, especially with Eons getting close to new product releases encouraging users to store and share more photos and, presumably, other media—activities that require the scalable and reliable services cloud computing promises. Taylor says he has always looked at technology as an important core competency for Web companies. Monster.com, which he also founded, has huge data farms and has found success in managing its own systems, he says. “But that said, it seems like there’s a new world where all of a sudden the [in-house] computing power to run a big branded organization is headed toward zero.” Taylor says Eons is looking at both Google Shared Storage and Amazon S3 (for Simple Storage Service), but our sources indicate Amazon is the likely winner.

Taylor also took a few moments to update me on Eons’ transformation from an over-50 Web portal to a social networking site mainly for baby boomers. The company sparked a mini-user revolt in February when it dropped its over-50 age limit. But Taylor says things have calmed down dramatically. “Our prediction was that we would lose a thousand people that were really kind of steadfast around the idea of 50-plus,” he says. “My estimate would be that about 600 people left and about half of those people have come back.”

He said that people returned as it became more apparent that Eons had not changed its focus on baby boomers, and that by dropping the age limit it facilitated social networking among friends and peers who fall on both sides of 50. “There was an unnatural line in the sand,” he says, adding, “our brand position hasn’t changed.”

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Barely three months after it announced the hiring of new chief technology officer Eric Golin, some four months after the firm’s previous CTO Reed Sturtevant left to head a new Microsoft lab in Cambridge, Boston baby boomer and social networking site Eons has parted ways with Golin. The CTO left quietly last week, with no announcement made.

At the time of Golin’s official hiring in January, Eons founder and CEO Jeff Taylor touted him and new design director Tom Churchill as knowing “what it takes to create a fun and fulfilling experience for online users.” But, according to Xconomy’s sources, Eons and Golin weren’t finding fun and fulfillment themselves.

“It was a bad fit, basically. That’s what I would say,” Golin confirmed this morning, when I reached him at his Newton home. “I enjoyed working there, they’ve got a high-quality team. But it wasn’t a good fit in terms of myself with the rest of the management team.” Golin said that he had been working with Eons as a consultant dating back to late 2006 and had actually taken over full time as CTO last fall, well before the formal announcement of his hiring in late January.

Two phone calls to Taylor, and an e-mail to the Eons CEO and SVP Linda Natansohn were not answered at the time of this post.

Yet another management shakeup can’t be good news for Eons as it seeks to revamp operations and revitalize its image. Launched on July 31, 2006,as a multipurpose Internet portal and website targeted at the over-50 boomer crowd, the company has been seeking to regain its balance after a series of cutbacks and changes that began last September, when it laid off a third of its staff. That was followed by Sturtevant’s departure later that month.

Then, in February, just a few weeks after hiring Golin to replace Sturtevant, the firm sparked a user outcry by abandoning its over-50 age limit in a bid to facilitate a new focus on social networking. A few weeks after that, Eons unveiled a major redesign—the first stage of a series of planned changes focused on bringing people together individually and around special-interest groups.

Golin, billed as a “serial engineer” who had served as CTO for at least three other IT companies, was presumably essential to that ongoing overhaul. Now, he says, he is evaluating new options.

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Turn your attention for a moment from the Bear Stearns debacle to the Web 2.0 world, where the news isn’t quite as depressing, but where investment may be peaking, according to a new report by Dow Jones VentureSource. The company bases this assessment on the fact that there was only a 25 percent increase in the number of deals between 2006 and 2007, from 143 deals to 178. From 2002 through 2006, by contrast, the number of deals was doubling every year.

On the other hand, the total amount of dollars invested in 2007 was up nearly 88 percent over 2006, to a whopping $1.34 billion. The only caveat there is that 22 percent of that money, at least $300 million, all went to one company, Facebook. The company raised $240 million in a corporate fundraising round, plus at least $60 million more from individual investors. The next largest Web 2.0 deal was for Ning, a company that allows users to create their own social networking site. Ning, like Facebook based in Palo Alto, raised $44 million.

But much of the action was outside of Silicon Valley, with a big chunk here in New England (meaning, essentially, Massachusetts, plus one company in Connecticut). VentureSource lists 20 deals in 2007, up from 15 in 2006, for a total investment of $158 million (see list below for regional totals), exactly double the previous year. The New York Metro area had more deals—25, up from 9 the previous year—but those only amounted to $58 million. And the total number of deals in the San Francisco Bay Area actually dropped from 74 in 2006 to 72, including Facebook. Take Facebook out of the picture, and investment dollars in Silicon Valley were down 3 percent.

Of the top three Bay State companies—and this definitely puts a pall on the local news—one is struggling and one is out of business. N2N Commerce, of Cambridge, MA, raised $30 million from General Catalyst Partners and Limited Brands, the biggest chunk of venture capital locally. But the ecommerce company, which aimed to let retailers manage their sales across the Internet, their catalogs, and physical stores, went belly up over the holidays. The number three fundraiser, Boston-based Eons, which was at the time a web portal for the over-50 set, pulled in $22 million (much of it, incidentally, also from General Catalyst), but wound up laying off a third of its staff and redesigning its social networking site to appeal to a wider—younger—audience. (The top 10 New England deals are also listed below).

VentureSource didn’t say that the second largest deal in New England last year was Sermo, also of Cambridge, which runs an online community of doctors, but we figured it out. Sermo closed a Series C round for $26.7 million in September. The company also had the sixth biggest deal, a $9.5 million Series B back in January ’07.

Web 2.0, by the way, refers to those companies that offer some sort of user participation through a dynamic interface and include user-created content, networking, or collaboration. Examples would be podcasting, tagging, blogs, social networking, mashups, and wikis. Xconomy is a Web 2.0 company and was ranked in a tie for 17th-19th place on VentureSource’s list, with about $1 million raised.

Jessica Canning, director of global research for Dow Jones VentureSource, says Web 2.0 companies are relatively inexpensive investments, which makes them attractive to venture capitalists. With just a few million dollars, they can have web presences attracting users and advertisers. But she adds that 2008 could be the make-or-break year for companies that rely on advertising. “The slumping economy, coupled with a slowdown in click-through rates for online advertising, is going to pose a real challenge to their ability to generate revenues and position themselves for an exit,” she said in a press release.

Here’s VentureSource’s list of 2007 Web 2.0 investments by region:

Bay Area — $721 million, 72 deals

New England — $158 million, 20 deals

Pacific Northwest — $140 million, 13 deals

Southern California — $115 million, 14 deals

New York Metro — $58 million, 25 deals

Southeast — $47 million, 7 deals

Mountain (CO, AZ, UT)—$31 million, 7 deals

North Carolina — $10 million, 2 deals

Texas — $4 million, 2 deals

And here are the top 10 deals in Massachusetts in 2007:

1. N2N Commerce, Cambridge, MA — $30 million, first round
2. Sermo, Cambridge, MA — $26.7 million, third round
3. Eons, Boston, MA — $22 million, second round
4. uLocate Communications, Framingham, MA — $11 million, later stage
5. EveryZing, Cambridge, MA — $10.5 million, first round
6. Sermo, Cambridge, MA — $9.5 million, second round
7. Awareness, Waltham, MA — $7 million, first round
8. Acquia, North Andover, MA — $7 million, first round
9. RatePoint, Needham, MA — $6.5 million, first round
10. Peermeta, Acton, MA — $6 million, first round

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Venture deals continued to be slow heading into the long weekend, and things will be slow here at Xconomy today—but here’s the action from the past week. Happy Birthday, Misters President!

—Boston’s Vaultus raised $6 million in a round led by Point Judith Capital and joined by Susquehanna International Group and IDG Ventures. The new round brings the total raised by the firm, which makes “mobile middleware,” to $70 million.

—Tizor Systems, a data auditing and protection firm in Maynard, MA, raised $8.3 million in a third round of financing led by Longworth Venture Partners and joined by Masthead Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Navigator Technology Ventures, and CommonAngels.

—Dyax (NASDAQ:DYAX) of Cambridge, MA, inked two licensing agreements with French drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis potentially worth $500 million.

—Online video and advertising firm Maven Networks, also of Cambridge, was acquired by Yahoo for some $160 million in cash.

—As part of an ongoing effort to regroup and refocus, Eons announced it has raised $4.3 million in funding to spin off its obituaries business. The new site will be called Tributes.com.

—Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:VRTX) braved a scary market to sell more than $400 million worth of common stock and convertible notes; over allotments were exercised in full for both offerings. Much of the company’s spending is focused on its experimental hepatitis C treatment, telaprevir, which is entering Phase 3 clinical trials.

—Waltham, MA-based Novell announced it’s acquiring Maynard, MA-based SiteScape, which makes software for online collaboration

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The folks over at Eons, the web site for the baby boomer crowd, must have aged a lot in the last few months. Back in September, the struggling Boston company laid off a third of its staff. Then, in a pretty full-out public relations disaster, the firm early this month dropped its over-50 age limit in a bid to facilitate its new focus on social networking, sparking outcry from hundreds of people (including quite a few who posted on Xconomy), many of whom feared the site would be overrun by teenagers or launched personal attacks against Eons founder Jeff Taylor.

Today, continuing its efforts to reinvent itself as a social networking business, Eons announced a major redesign—set to go live at 9 a.m. eastern time—focused on bringing people together individually and around special-interest groups. At the same time, the company revealed more details of its previously stated plans to spin off its classified Obits section as a separate business called Tributes, which it said has received funding from investors that include Dow Jones & Company.

The core of this morning’s announcements, though, is the rejuvenated website, which Eons has been working on for the last several months. The company launched its beta site in mid-January and has been testing it through focus groups and adding updates since then. “What’s really reflected here is Eons’ full commitment to social networking, and so the navigation, the look and feel of the UI [user interface], is all oriented to a really robust community experience,” says senior vice president Linda Natansohn. This kind of social networking, she told me, is “what users told us they want.”

To that end, Eons has removed the circles that previously ran atop its pages to identify the broad subject areas it covered—”fun,” “love,” and so on. Instead, there’s a traditional navigation bar with tabs labeled, “my eons,” “profile,” “explore,” “groups,” “people,” and “games” that is more geared toward social networking. Natansohn says many Eons users go to their profile pages every day, and so the company wanted to better configure the site and navigation around their more personal view of things. For instance, she notes, when users sign in, they can see which groups they’re in and which friends are online.

Eons’s much-ballyhooed custom collaborative-filtering-like (I shudder to think how much the company spent on this) search engine, cRANKy, is also being put out to pasture. Rather than being presented with a long list of items when they searched on a given term, boomers would see a few items other boomers felt were most relevant. New chief technology officer Eric Golin says cRANKy will still be used for general Web searches, but the Eons site itself will be served by an open source search engine that makes … Next Page »

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Eons, the web portal for aging Baby Boomers with the famous slogan “Lovin’ Life on the Flip Side of 50,” removed its age limits last week as part of a bid to remake itself—and revitalize the business—by becoming a more general social networking site. It was a dramatic and controversial action for the company “as we turn the business inside out,” founder and CEO Jeff Taylor told me over the weekend. The new slogan reads simply, “Lovin’ Life on the Flip Side.”

Just what that means is a bit obscure without the “over 50″ part, but the over-arching question for Eons is whether the flip in its age policy will put the company on more solid footing or turn out to be a flop. Early observations have not been kind, with many user comments on our site, its site, and elsewhere running against the move, and the blog TechCrunch putting the Boston, MA-based Eons in its deadpool.

Taylor, who founded Monster.com and built Eons with $32 million in venture funding from giants such as Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst (most of it in a $22 million Series B financing that closed last March), says the change is needed because it reflects human nature. As the company shed its professional editorial content, obituary and travel sections, and other aspects of its resources-oriented origins and ramped up its social networking focus, which was increasingly driving its traffic, he says it made no sense to have an artificial age limit because people don’t set age limits on their friendships and interactions. “You have a 53-year-old person who’s in the social network, and their 48-year-old best friend can’t join,” he observes. “The idea of having a kind of invisible gate didn’t make sense.”

But despite the big turnaround—and despite being derided by some constituents and outside observers for ostensibly opening up the site to teenagers and other young people—-Taylor insists that the company will retain its focus on baby boomers. “Our brand positioning is not changing at all,” he told me. “I have no intention of marketing the site to teenagers or 20-something or 30-somethings.” He also maintains that the business is “solid and healthy.” The company is “adding to staff now,” he says. “We have at least two years of runway with our current cash, and that doesn’t count sales—and sales are good.” And he says that more big changes are imminent to position Eons even better in its transformation to a social networking site.

So far, most Eons users don’t seem to be buying it. Taylor says Eons dropped the age gate officially last Tuesday, but didn’t put up a notice about the move—here’s a letter he wrote—until the next day. “And we started getting the comments from people,” he says. That prompted a second notice, “A Message From the Eons Team,” which went up on Thursday. “I had more names called at me, directed toward me, in the last 72 hours than I’ve probably ever had in my life,” Taylor told me. Yet, he says, before the changeover, the “number one complaint at the help desk was ‘I’m a boomer, but you don’t let me in.’” (That from the big batch of boomers born between 1947 and 1964 who haven’t yet hit 50.)

Still, Eons’ two letters together had generated nearly 700 comments by Saturday afternoon. Many of them, Taylor acknowledges, were against the move. “There’s a spirited kind of massive pounding happening at the site right now, … Next Page »

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Last September Bob broke the story that Reed Sturtevant, the longtime chief technology officer at Eons, Boston’s social networking site for the 50-and-over crowd, had accepted a job heading up a new Cambridge, MA-based development lab and innovation group for Microsoft. Sturtevant’s departure came shortly after Eons had laid off a third of its staff and cut several under-performing sections of its website.

But Eons has now filled the CTO vacancy, hiring Eric Golin, a “serial engineer” who has held the CTO posts at Content Objects, a compliance and risk management support company in Cambridge; Argo Technology, a Newton, MA, company that developed unified information management tools for consumers; and Broadvision, an e-business software provider based in Redwood City, CA.

“I’m getting very close to 50, and the baby boomer social applications space we’re after is very exciting for me,” says Golin, who will have responsibility for Eons’ technology platform. “A lot of the people I talk to have a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn, but those are communications tools, not really environments where people of my age group want to connect and engage outside the work environment, or to really find something that energizes them and adds to their life. There is a huge opportunity to build that kind of online community focused on spirited baby boomers.”

Golin says he was already doing consulting work for Eons when Sturtevant announced his departure for Microsft and has been handling parts of the CTO role ever since. He says the technology team at Eons has been focused on building up the community-networking aspects of the site, which customers said were more important to them than now-defunct features such as obituaries.

“One of the things that was very critical back in September was recognizing that what the customers really wanted was this online community, the social networking aspect, so we’ve been working very hard to focus all of our efforts and resources into that area,” says Golin. “I’m excited about the applications we’re building, we’ve got a great team, and I like having the chance to do something that feels meaningful to people. And with 700,000 users, we’re at a very good starting point.”

At the same time, Eons announced the appointment of a new design director, Tom Churchill, who will provide creative direction for the Eons website. Churchill is a veteran of Boston social media site Gather.com and travel distributor World Travel Holdings, where he led efforts to build e-commerce software for travel brands such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Yahoo Travel.

“It’s really exciting to have Eric and Tom as part of our team at Eons,” Jeff Taylor, Eons’ founder and CEO, said in the company’s announcement about the hirings. “They both know what it takes to create a fun and fulfilling experience for online users. Their combined talent and knowledge will play a key role in the next phase of Eons as we continue to deliver the best platform for boomers who want to keep in touch with their friends, rekindle old relationships, and create new connections with like-minded adults who share their passions, interests and experiences at this stage of life.”

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Reed Sturtevant is building a Microsoft development lab and innovation group here in Cambridge, but I caught up with him in Redmond, WA. I gather the former Eons chief technology officer and local tech legend has logged a lot of miles between Seattle and Boston since being plucked away from Eons in late September. And, in fact, one of his chief occupations—in some ways taking precedence over building the lab—has been learning about his new employer. “What I’ve been up to is really a crash course in Microsoft itself,” he told me in a telephone call yesterday.

We broke the news of Sturtevant’s move to Microsoft shortly before he started work on September 24, reporting that he had been hired to open the lab next door to the MIT campus, not far from the Kendall Square offices of a Google lab that has also been expanding fast this year. And now, with some two months under his belt, we thought it was a good time for an update.

“It’s been fun,” Sturtevant says. “Not a whole lot to show for it in terms of building out the team, or this group, if you will.” But he has made a lot of progress behind the scenes—and reports that he is getting set to make the first hires, and that a core team should be in place by year’s end. “I have a number of folks that I’m talking to for certain positions, inside Microsoft [and] outside Microsoft,” he says.

Sturtevant is currently occupying a corner of the first floor at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, a 17-story luxury office tower overlooking the Charles River. Microsoft recently leased about half of the building, and the same week Sturtevant started work, employees of the company’s SoftGrid unit (the new name for Softricity, a Boston firm acquired last year) also moved into space on the building’s first two floors. Sturtevant reports that once his group is in place—he declined to disclose its intended size right now, noting “I need to be stealth about that”—it will set up shop on the 10th or 11th floor.

It still hasn’t been determined what, exactly, the lab will work on. “It’s a new development group, and we’re really going to work out the details as we get started,” he told me in September. “At this point it’s wide open. So all I’ll say is the intention is to try new ways to innovate and bring some fun products to market.”

Microsoft has three large business divisions. Sturtevant’s lab will not belong to any of them, nor will it be part of the large Microsoft Research organization. Instead, it will serve as an arm of chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s group, which is focused on special innovation projects. It was New Englander Ozzie and his brother, Jack (who also works at Microsoft), who personally recruited Sturtevant, whom they’ve known since their days at Lotus together in the 1980s.

Sturtevant has been meeting with people from around Microsoft to get ideas for what to work on—and says that there’s been a “hugely positive reception to the idea of having a footprint in Boston.” (Google evidently feels the same way: as Wade reports today, the search giant is staffing up its Cambridge operation quickly and will soon take over a space at Five Cambridge Center that’s three times as large as its current office at One Broadway.)

Microsoft’s new Boston tech guru also says that not everyone who works with him will actually be a part of his lab. He’s been meeting with folks from the advanced development arms of the various business divisions, and at least some think they will hire people who live in Boston to work directly for them. Sturtevant says a fair number of senior technical people work remotely from other areas, and that offering a physical space for them here could be a means of attracting talent in the Boston area—or retaining Microsoft people who need to move east for personal reasons.

Having representatives of the product groups in Cambridge might also facilitate transfer of technology from Sturtevant’s group to the business divisions. “The expectation is that successful projects that get traction, as they grow will find a home inside one of the existing business groups,” Sturtevant says.

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