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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Eons, the upbeat web portal for those on the “flip side of 50,” has been feeling the vagaries of age—young age, that is. Despite amassing $32 million in venture capital, the 15-month-old (depending on how you count) startup has experienced severe growing pains and in September was forced to lay off a third of its staff—and it’s been busy reshaping its identity ever since. The company is now spinning off its original bedrock Obits section as a new business—Tributes.com—and Eons itself will formally debut anew in January as it evolves from a more general collection of resources into what might be thought of as Facebook or MySpace tailored for the baby boomer crowd.

Or, as founder Jeff Taylor puts it, “The epicenter for Eons is 50, whereas the epicenter for both MySpace and Facebook is teens, 20s, 30s. And so as we evolve, there’s the possibility of a peer-to-peer network for people in their 50s, people at similar life stage and experience, people that understand ‘me,’ and a place I can call my own. That’s our goal and our role, I think.”

I got the skinny on all this last Wednesday from Taylor when I visited the company’s funky fourth-floor headquarters in Boston’s Charlestown Navy Yard. The HQ is a quasi-attic space with sloped roofs, exposed brick walls, and worn leather chairs mixed in with newer stuff. The whole place, somewhat like Taylor himself, emits a fun, quirky, hip-yet-down-to-earth vibe. Everyone works late on Wednesdays—they typically have dinner together—so folks can call it a week at 1 p.m. on Fridays. “I always wanted to do that,” Taylor told me.

It was a wide-ranging conversation that covered Taylor’s career, his experience founding pioneering online job site Monster.com (where his title ran, “founder, president, CEO, chairman, and chief monster”), the ideas behind Eons, the travails of the site, and his plans for the future. The recent cutbacks had been hard, and Taylor was pretty candid about losing some of his core advertisers as well, but as usual, he was upbeat. “I am extremely bullish on where our company is today,” he told me. “But I’ll be the first one to say we don’t have all the answers. We just have an extremely interesting challenge, which is how to galvanize the baby boomer online energy.”

Eons, which debuted on July 31, 2006, grew out of a couple key observations Taylor had as the oldest baby boomers (the post-WWII generation born between 1945 and 1965) moved past the half-century mark in age. One, he explains, was that “there was no media focused on the 50-plus space. No radio, no TV, no print.” What’s more, hardly any businesses, on the Internet or otherwise, really focused on serving this economically powerful group. “About the only thing with traction that [had] existed in the marketplace for over 50 years was AARP,” says Taylor.

Enter Eons—or kind of. First there was a thing called raising money, lots of money, which Taylor ultimately did primarily from two giants of venture capital, Sequoia Capital on the west coast, and General Catalyst in Cambridge, MA. (Other investors include Intel, Charles River, and Humana). The funds came in two stages, a $10 million first round in January 2006 (the company actually formed in September 2005, nearly a year before the website debuted), and a $22 million Series B financing that closed in March.

A key to remember in this whole story is that Eons is largely a reflection of Taylor’s personality—energetic, enthusiastic, and, yes, optimistic about the future. Taylor himself is still only 47, and he’s been chided for being too young to use his own site. But when it comes to believing that hitting 50 is no reason to slow down, he’s got it right. He tells a story of visiting venture capitalists seeking initial financing. “I saw the folder for my idea on one of the VC’s desk here in Boston, and it said, ‘Golden Years’ on it. That was the broad perception of what I was working on. And there was no way it was ‘Golden Years’ to me.”

Instead, Taylor chose to celebrate aging. “Let’s Live to Be 100 (or die trying)!” is one of his slogans. And, of course, there’s his trademark “Boom, boom, boom” phrase, which you might have seen him belting out on TV ads. Another way he sums up Eons’ ethos: “If you’re interested in retiring and drying up like a raisin, we’re not the place for you.”

Optimistic energy spewed out of the site from the start. There’s been some fine-tuning over the last 15 months or so, but from day one Eons served up a tableau of broad categories that appeared as circles atop the home page, each bearing names like “fun,” “love,” “money,” “games,” and “obits.”

Inside these offerings users could find a variety of activities and tools tailored for the flip side set, including Boomer Trivia and brain games designed to stimulate (and I guess counter aging in) different lobes of the brain. There’s a popular Longevity Calculator that both calculates your current life expectancy (based on lifestyle and history) and suggests ways for you to extend it. And, at least in the first stage of its evolution, the site was populated by lots and lots of short 200- or 400-word articles, what Taylor calls “light touch editorial,” on things like quitting smoking, swimming with dolphins, or walking your way to good fitness.

And in some ways, at least, it worked. The site now has some 600,000 registered …Next Page »

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Microsoft has hired Eons chief technology officer and local software legend Reed Sturtevant to head a new development lab and innovation group that is expected to set up shop next door to the MIT campus.

“That’s true,” said Sturtevant when I asked him about the lab in a telephone conversation this evening. “It’s starting Monday with me.” Sturtevant says he was personally recruited by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie and Ozzie’s brother Jack, who also works at Microsoft. He’s known both since their days at Lotus together in the 1980s.

I’d been hearing rumors about Sturtevant’s planned move for a few days now, in bits and pieces. Sturtevant, who helped launch Lotus’s first Internet products and served as the Boston face of famed dot-com incubator Idealab (in addition to launching several of his own entrepreneurial endeavors), says that even he doesn’t know many of the specifics of the Microsoft gig yet. “It’s a new development group, and we’re really going to work out the details as we get started,” he says. “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.”

The lab is eventually expected to take root at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, a 17-story luxury office tower overlooking the Charles River. Microsoft has recently leased about half of the building. Employees in the company’s SoftGrid unit (the new name for Softricity, a Boston company acquired last year) plan to move into about a quarter of that space this week.

Sturtevant says it will be a while before his group sets up shop there, though. “At least in the beginning my plan is to be a little bit mobile,” he says. “I’ll probably spend a bunch of time out in Redmond.” That way, Sturtevant says, he can consult directly with Microsoft colleagues, most notably Ray and Jack Ozzie. “Ray has been my main contact out there, but I will be reporting to Jack,” Sturtevant says.

Sturtevant’s move to Microsoft will likely be seen as a further blow to Boston-based Eons, an Internet site for people over 50, which recently laid off a third of its staff. It also could signal the opening of yet another front in the Microsoft-Google wars. Earlier this year, Google launched its own research and development lab in Cambridge, just a few blocks away from the new Microsoft space in Kendall Square. A team there led by another local software legend, Rich Miner, may be working on the long-rumored Google mobile phone, according to a report several weeks ago in the Boston Globe.

The hiring of Sturtevant seems to be one piece of an ambitious plan for Microsoft’s Boston-area R&D expansion spearheaded by Ray Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in 2005, when the software titan bought his Beverly, MA-based company Groove Networks. The pace of our [R&D] growth has really picked up in the last couple of years,” Ted MacLean, Microsoft’s general manager for New England, told me in an interview last week. “It was underway before Ray got here…now we’ve got a chief Boston cheerleader in Seattle.”

Beyond Ozzie’s knowledge of the area and his belief in its potential, MacLean says there are several other reasons for the Boston R&D expansion. For starters, largely through acquisitions, Microsoft’s workforce in the area has gone from just shy of 200 employees two years ago to close to 600 today. In addition to Groove and Softricity, the company bought Desktop Standard of New Hampshire last year. “In the past we’d pick up those resources and assets and ship them to Redmond,” he says. “We’ve made a change in strategy to keep them here and continue to develop their products here.” That requires boosting R&D.

MacLean says that by expanding the number of R&D jobs in the Boston area, Microsoft also stands a better chance of retaining and attracting employees here, largely because it can offer a wider range of career opportunities in the area. “As you think about Massachusetts as a center of innovation, it’s important that there are jobs there, well paying jobs,” he says.

One Memorial Drive in Cambridge is destined to be the hub of a lot of this expansion. Microsoft has leased enough space to house up to 320 people, more than half its current workforce. “The number one attribute of that location that we want to be able to take advantage of is proximity to schools—principally MIT, but others as well,” MacLean says.

To pull off its ambitious plans, Microsoft will need a handful of well-known and respected leaders to manage R&D efforts, help attract talent, and build ties to the academic community. In that regard, Sturtevant seems a perfect choice. According to his Eons bio, he has been responsible for all of that company’s technology platform. Before joining Eons, Sturtevant served as managing director and VP of technology for Idealab, a prolific startup incubator founded in 1996 by entrepreneur and Caltech grad Bill Gross that in the heart of the dot-com boom times was launching a company a month. While still at Idealab, he became the founding CTO of several Idealab spinoffs, including Refer.com, Compete, Picasa, and Paythrough, and was also founding CEO of Newbury Networks, Pathspace, and Newbury Payments.

Chief Correspondent Wade Roush has assembled a detailed review of Sturtevant’s employment history.

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If anyone can bring a startup sensibility to a software giant like Microsoft, it’s Reed Sturtevant. The MIT dropout, who left his position as CTO at over-50 social networking site Eons on Friday to spearhead a new Cambridge-based development team for Microsoft, has been CEO or CTO of at least eleven technology startups. Some of those companies are thriving today, while others have gone the way of the sock puppet, as the following roughly reverse-chronological rundown of companies where he has worked illustrates.

Eons

Sturtevant is credited as the main technological guru behind this Boston startup, which runs a social networking site for people over 50. Members can create MySpace-style profiles that include biographies, blogs, photos, and friends lists; search for new friends; join discussion groups, learn about longevity-extending techniques, and play “brain-building” games. The venture-backed company laid off a third of its staff on September 10 and is reported to be refocusing on its social networking services while dropping costly features such as obituaries.

Idealab

This famous Pasadena-based startup incubator, founded in 1996 by entrepreneur and Caltech grad Bill Gross, launched dozens of companies during the dot-com boom years of 1998-2000. Its most famous spinoff was Goto.com (later named Overture), which invented contextual advertising for search engines, the foundation of Google’s fortunes. Idealab was hit hard by the dot com crash; eToys, eMachines, Z.com, and Utility.com were among its spectacular flameouts. The company “withered to a handful of employees,” to quote a 2002 Wired article, and refocused on industries with a high barrier to entry. But it’s still around today, still churning out startups.

Sturtevant was a managing director in charge of the product development team at Idealab’s Boston office, which opened in late 1999 at 181 Newbury Street, the former First Spiritual Temple and former location of Waterstone’s bookstore. The office, which was home to both Newbury Networks and Compete (see below), closed in May 2003. Idealab’s current Boston office is at 745 Boylston.

Refer

This Idealab spinoff, headquartered in Boston, peaked at 35 employees in 2000 and shut down in 2001. It was a fee-based job posting site where people could earn referral bonuses of $1,000 or more if they referred someone who ended up getting a job through the site. Sturtevant was founding CTO.

Compete

Based at Copley Place, Boston, Compete is a Bill Gross creation that offers a toolbar consumers can add to their Web browsers. For each site a user visits, the toolbar informs them about the site’s popularity and trustworthiness, as well as money-saving deals such as promotions and coupons. Data from user’s clickstreams powers the company’s search analytics and site analytics services, which it sells to other companies. Sturtevant was founding CTO.

Picasa

This Idealab company, where Sturtevant was CTO, was founded by Lars Perkins to commercialize PC and Web applications for editing, organizing, and displaying digital photos. Google acquired Picasa directly from Idealab in 2004. The latest version of the Picasa software, Picasa 2, is free and competes with Adobe Photoshop Elements and Microsoft Digital Image Suite (which both cost about $100).

Paythrough

This short-lived Idealab spinoff handled micropayments for Web-based content. The entire staff was laid off in 2002. Sturtevant was founding CTO.

Newbury Networks

Based in Boston, Newbury Networks sells software for tracking office assets tagged with wireless devices. The company’s graphical interface can show the location of a tagged machine or other piece of equipment on a floor map. Sturtevant was founding CEO.

Pathspace

Little information is available about Pathspace. In a 2003 article about the shutdown of the Newbury Street offices of Idealab, the Boston Globe called it a “stealth-mode Internet startup working on location tracking technology.” Sturtevant was founding CEO.

Newbury Payments

This Idealab spinoff, also now defunct, was created to develop an online payment system featuring prepaid accounts that consumers would fill up by buying retail gift cards. The system was targeted at consumers without credit cards or PayPal accounts. Sturtevant was founding CEO.

Radio AMP

The company, formed in the spring of 1999, also went by the name “Radioactive Media Partners.” It planned to offer ready-made, personalizable audio programming that Web users could launch from the pages of major Web portals. It was a promising time for such ventures, as Yahoo had just purchased Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion and AOL had purchased Spinner for $400 million. Part of the company’s funding came from Boston’s OneLiberty Ventures. Sturtevant was co-founder and CTO.

Radnet

Radnet made software called WebShare that helped developers build groupware applications for use with Microsoft BackOffice and Netscape SuiteSpot (both long gone). Sturtevant told the Wall Street Journal that this company “tried to compete with Lotus Notes in Internet-based collaboration software but found that difficult and switched to software for Web portals.”

Lotus

While working at a company called Graphic Communications, Sturtevant created a PC graphics and presentation software package called Freelance Graphics. After Lotus bought the firm in 1986, Sturtevant became a product development manager in the company’s Graphics Products Group. In 1991 he joined the team working on Lotus Notes and InterNotes—Lotus’s first Internet product, which became part of the Lotus Domino Server. Sturtevant remained at Lotus until 1995.

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It was a dramatic, sobering, but ultimately healthy and air-clearing scene on Monday when Eons founder Jeff Taylor called together his remaining staff and engaged in a moment of remembrance for the 24 colleagues he had just laid off.

That was the word from one of those present, a person who still has his or her job. And, according to the source, rather than demoralizing the remaining staff, as many layoffs do, Taylor’s one-fell-swoop cull of roughly a third of Eons’ employees is being taken as a positive sign. The perception is that the company—bloated in staff, with too many projects taking too many resources—is finally “focusing in on what works and jettisoning all the stuff that didn’t work,” according to our source.

Boston-based Eons is an Internet portal dedicated to “celebrating life on the flipside of 50,” as its trademarked slogan goes. Founded by Taylor, who also founded Monster.com, it was launched in 2006 and has attracted $32 million in two rounds of venture capital funding led by Cambridge’s General Catalyst and Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park, CA. The latest was a $22 million Series B round that closed this March.

As far as we can determine the layoff story was first reported on Tuesday in Mass High Tech. Senior vice president of strategic development Linda Natansohn last night confirmed the layoffs and also confirmed that the cutbacks were intended to help Eons focus its efforts on the areas of greatest traffic, mostly its social-networking and community-building activities.

In addition to the 24 laid-off staffers, according to our source, another dozen people “found different opportunities and chose this time to move on.” If correct, that would bring the total reductions to 36 staffers and might mean the ultimate cutbacks will be closer to half the company than a third. Eons officials declined to comment on our query about the additional 12 staffers.

When the layoffs were made on Monday, “it was kind of like Survivor,” says our source, who notes that staffers were privately told of “big changes going on at Eons today….If you don’t see somebody here, they’re gone.”

In a meeting that lasted more than an hour, the remaining staff was addressed by CEO Taylor and President and Chief Operating Officer Lee Goss. The two laid things out in straight-forward fashion, fielding questions candidly. The group was asked to celebrate their colleagues, and assured that both Eons and its venture capital partners were going to do all they could to ensure the former staffers found good jobs.

Despite any trauma of the layoffs, the retrenching seems to have been a much-needed move. Both General Catalyst and Sequoia reportedly pressed for the changes, saying the company was too big and unfocused.

Eons’ site right now has nine major categories: people, fun, love, money, body, lifepath, obits, games, and travel. According to the company and our source, it will no longer pursue areas like obits (offering online obits was a core premise of Eons at its founding) and travel, which are time consuming and costly to keep updated with fresh content. “Obits and travel, they’re just probably going to be spun off,” the source said. “They really need more investment, more concentrated focus.”

Going forward, Eons will focus on the community-building and social-networking aspects of the site, found mainly in its people section, which among other things hosts a collection of blogs and user groups dedicated to topics like games, romance, health, and investing. While Eons as a whole has been struggling, “The community is thriving,” our source says.

“A lot of really good people lost jobs,” the source says. At the same time, “we’re the right size company now for what we’re trying to do, assuming that we do in fact excise these parts of the site that are costing us, or have traditionally cost us, lots of extra energy.”

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