When most startups reach a certain age—seven years, maybe nine; certainly, by the time they get acquired or go public—they stop being startups. They get slow and cautious. They lose the will to wow customers with unconventional ideas.

Evernote hasn’t reached that age yet. And CEO Phil Libin hopes it never does.

In a video released yesterday by Evernote, Libin says he wants the booming online-notekeeping company to be alive 100 years from now—but as a nimble, fast-moving competitor, not a museum relic.

Evernote made the video to help Xconomy spread the word about our February 7 event in Mountain View, “The 100-Year Company: An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia.” If you’re a Silicon Valley startup founder, engineer, product manager, or investor, this is a must-attend event where you’ll hear Libin, along with key Evernote investors Roelof Botha from Sequoia Capital and Gary Little from Morgenthaler Ventures, share the company’s secrets for staying young while getting big. Here’s Libin in his own words:

There are two passages in the video with particular potency for startuppers. If you’re going to throw yourself wholeheartedly into building a company around your idea, Libin asks, why settle for the standard Silicon Valley exit scenario of getting acquired by a bigger company?

“Making any kind of company is so much work, and you put so much time into it and so much energy, any kind of a startup, it becomes your main passion, it becomes your quest, your mission, for years, for you and your co-workers and for your founders. So I think if you do anything other than try to build for the long term, you’re frankly selling yourself short,” Libin says. “It’s going to be just as much work to make a company that you’re going to sell in three years as to make a company that’s going to last for 100 years.”

But Libin isn’t promoting longevity for its own sake. “Of course our big challenge isn’t just to make a company that’s around for 100 years,” he says in the video. “It’s to make a company that’s a 100-year startup.”

If you want to go long in this way, it helps to build a team of investors who believe in the 100-year philosophy—and it really helps to show the kind of explosive growth that justifies the big bets being put on the table. At the moment, Evernote is doing both. We’ll delve deeper into the company’s success strategies with Libin, Gary Little, and Roelof Botha at Microsoft Silicon Valley the evening of February 7. Register for the event now—while you’re still young.

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[Editor's note: Cross-posted from The Economist, 6/16/11]

As the G8 last month pledged $10 billion to aid the Arab Spring to support the building of economic and political institutions, the May 24th NASDAQ debut of Russia’s $10 billion Yandex was but one of many green shoots of an equally significant Entrepreneurial Spring blossoming out from Chile to China, and Israel to India. Led by two brilliant entrepreneurs who knew how to take native search engine technology and implant it in the emerging Russian marketplace, for over a decade, Yandex, a Moscow-based Internet venture, had been growing inside of its language-walled garden. Finally, after a planned 2008 IPO was foiled by the economic crisis, this ambitious venture burst onto a global stage with the largest NASDAQ Internet offering in recent history.

Like its Middle East counterpart, the Entrepreneurial Spring is a grass roots movement, and, although fertilized by innovations originating in the United States, it is fundamentally global and only loosely connected to America. China’s RenRen, Estonia’s Skype, Japan’s Rakuten, and Bangladesh’s GrameenPhone represent ripe fruits of the last decade’s entrepreneurial investments in environments outside the U.S.

Also similar to its Middle East counterpart, the global Entrepreneurial Spring can lead to the democratization of opportunity and increased control by citizens over their own economic fates. However, just as the Arab Spring is a first fraught step on a long, even treacherous, path, so is the Entrepreneurial Spring neither a panacea nor a fait accompli. Left unaided, exposed to the vicissitudes of climate and availability of resources, the fragile shoots can easily be stunted or trampled. To take root, they will require enlightened leadership and the patient cultivation of a rich environment of institutions and norms in order to become part of a self-sustaining ecosystem.

To sustain and spread these new ventures, like political democracy, leaders everywhere—not only publicly elected leaders, but a broad base of leaders of public and private, formal and informal, institutions—need to democratize the entrepreneurial choice without over-controlling it. That will require deliberately fostering an entrepreneurship ecosystem that (a) is conducive to increasingly broad numbers of citizens making the choice to take their economic futures into their own hands, and, (b) after that choice is made, facilitates the broad, merit-based access to the resources—capital, human, cultural, institutional, educational, and legislative—required in order to be successful. The helping hand and the invisible hand must clasp each other.

Fortunately, there are also green shoots of such enlightened leadership. Startup America, StartUp Britain, Startup Africa, and Start-Up Chile are but a few outward manifestations of the new national priority that leaders are assigning to entrepreneurship. Kauffman Foundation-initiated Global Entrepreneurship Week, launched less than three years ago, already conducts 100,000 discrete activities in more than 100 countries. In four years, Startup Weekend has spread to more than 100 cities in 30 countries with 30,000 participants. These two private initiatives, impressive by themselves, show that leadership of the Entrepreneurial Spring can and must go beyond government.

The bubbling up of the Entrepreneurial Spring shouldn’t be confused with the capital market bubble of social media valuations. Up-and-coming next generation stars from Lebanon (SABIS; management of K-12 schools in 15 countries), to Slovenia (Studio Moderna; multi-channel retailing in 20 countries), to Brazil (Tecsis; wind-turbine blades for the US and Europe) to Iceland (Actavis; generic pharmaceuticals in 40 world markets) show that entrepreneurship spreads far beyond the latest Internet technology. These rapidly growing, high potential ventures––and thousands like them––may still be under the public radar, but they are already having huge impact in their respective fields; no less importantly, they are making their economies more competitive, their citizens more prosperous, and they are creating jobs for many and inspiring further entrepreneurship in others.

For those countries not yet blooming with new ventures, get ready. As the successes become more visible and prove that value-creating entrepreneurship can and does happen anywhere and everywhere, the cultivation of a conducive ecosystem will not be a “nice-to-have” opportunity but a “must-have” necessity. Citizens everywhere will expect and demand the equal access to the possibility of prosperity that entrepreneurship can provide.

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The overnight consensus from the twittersphere is that Joichi Ito—a globetrotting Internet entrepreneur, investor, activist, and blogger with few academic credentials—was a daring and unconventional choice to lead the 26-year-old MIT Media Lab. And that, says search committee leader Pattie Maes, is exactly the effect the lab wanted to achieve.

The Media Lab “has always been a place that likes to do things differently,” says Maes, who directs the lab’s Fluid Interfaces group. “So almost everybody I talked to during the selection process found that [Ito's lack of college or graduate degrees] was a feature rather than a bug. The universal answer was ‘Yeah, let’s show them! We are still bold, we can do things differently.’ We are not going to pick somebody based on titles, but instead we will look at what they have accomplished.”

And Ito has accomplished a lot. He helped to start Japan’s first ISP and its first commercial search engine in the 1990s. He’s backed a roster of influential startups such as Twitter (where his handle is simply @Joi). And he’s won fame as one of the technology world’s most-traveled, best-connected people; in fact, he blogged back in 2003 that he was getting invitations every day to parties all over the world, “‘Just in case you’re in the neighborhood.’…The funny thing is, sometimes I am in the neighborhood.”

Those invitations and connections will come in handy as Ito begins to follow through on what Maes called the search committee’s number-one priority: building a more active profile for the Media Lab in the global community.

“We felt that the lab, while doing excellent work right now, has not done a good enough job being present on the world stage, talking about what we do,” Maes says. “Our story has been a little big vague and not front-and-center. So we decided that we needed somebody who would be very much an externally facing director, who is very much a global player with many connections.”

That’s certainly Ito. And he’ll have plenty to talk about: the Media Lab is not the place many outsiders may remember from Stewart Brand’s 1988 book or the dot-com era, Maes asserts. It now employs neuroscientists, artists, economists, and others who are using a variety of tools “to come up with the next generation of technologies that we think will really bring about revolutions,” she says. “The overall vision is still very much the same, in that the lab is about empowering people with technology, but we have evolved away from just looking at digital technologies.”

Fortunately for the lab, “Joi has always been a visionary, somebody who really lives in the future rather than just talking about it,” Maes says. “He really believes strongly that technology can unleash the creativity in people and give them more freedom to take their lives into their own hands.”

High on Ito’s to-do list, judging from what Maes told me, will be orchestrating a hiring binge at the lab. She says Ito turned the tables on the search committee during their interviews, quizzing them about how hiring works at MIT and whether he’d have free reign to … Next Page »

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology news office has confirmed a New York Times scoop today revealing that ubiquitous technology entrepreneur Joichi “Joi” Ito has been named the next director of the MIT Media Lab—an institution famed for giving its industry sponsors, and the outside world, a perpetual window into the future of computing and communications.

Though the Times deemed him an “unusual choice” due to his lack of academic credentials, observers say that Ito, 44, will likely infuse the Media Lab with a new spirit of youthful enthusiasm and global awareness—and, potentially, new funds. ”He’ll bring youth, globalness, social networkness, the world stage, fund raising resolve and a charmed personality of enablement,” says Media Lab founding director Nicholas Negroponte. “We could not have picked a better candidate.”

Ito is known as an early and avid proponent of the Internet and digital commerce. The company he founded in 1994, Eccosys, evolved into Digital Garage, one of the highest-flying Japanese Internet companies of the 1990s. He helped to start the first Japanese Internet service provider, PSINet, as well as Infoseek Japan, the country’s first commercial search engine. He founded a Tokyo-based venture firm called Neoteny (which is now a holding company) and has lectured and published widely.

Ito’s list of angel investments reads like a who’s who of pioneering social media companies, including Six Apart, Technorati, SocialText, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Kongregate, Rupture, and Kickstarter. Most recently, he served as CEO of Creative Commons, a non-profit promoting licensing schemes that foster greater sharing and reuse of digital media content. He is still a board member at Creative Commons, and also serves on the boards of the Mozilla Foundation, the human rights group Witness, and the blogger network Global Voices.

Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan, and spent his childhood in Canada, Michigan, and Tokyo. He attended Tufts University in Massachusetts and the University of Chicago but left both without a degree. He will be the Media Lab’s fourth director since Negroponte founded the organization in 1985. He succeeds Frank Moss, who took over in 2006 after a career in computing and pharmaceuticals. Moss announced his departure last summer.

Though the Media Lab recently expanded into a new $90 million building that roughly doubled its footprint on the MIT campus, its existence still depends on a network of … Next Page »

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The mobile company financings continue around town. Cambridge, MA-based Jumptap, a mobile advertising software firm, has raised about $20 million in equity financing out of a total offering of $27.9 million, according to an SEC filing today. The investors in the round were not disclosed, and Jumptap hasn’t confirmed the funding amount yet. We’ll update this story when we get details from the company. The news was reported earlier today by Mass High Tech and TechCrunch.

Jumptap, which makes software for delivering targeted ads to mobile devices through an advertising network, inked a partnership last year with Japanese firm cyber communications (cci). The deal included an unspecified strategic investment from cci.

Jumptap was founded in 2004. The firm raised a $26 million Series D round in 2008. Its previous investors include General Catalyst Partners, Summerhill Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Valhalla Partners, WPP, and AllianceBernstein. Last September, Jumptap announced it had brought on George Bell from General Catalyst as its new CEO, succeeding Dan Olschwang.

The latest financing news for Jumptap comes on the heels of significant venture rounds raised by three other Boston-area mobile firms, all announced in the past week—Apperian, Mobiquity, and Movik Networks.

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The Seattle area’s longstanding prominence in the wireless carrier sector was thrown into question this weekend with AT&T’s announcement that it was purchasing Bellevue, WA-based T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. It will take months to see how the feds handle this proposed acquisition.

But at least in the meantime, AT&T is saying all the right things: The combination will drive better broadband coverage, competition won’t be diminished, and of great interest locally, that it will maintain a significant presence in the Puget Sound region. It’s worth revisiting a great interview that Xconomy’s Greg Huang did with Tom Huseby for some of the history behind this big news.

—Another of this region’s tech heavyweights, Amazon.com, continues to make news for reasons it surely doesn’t like: The ongoing drive by state officials to make hay with the public by targeting Amazon’s reluctance to become a sales-tax collector. But a bit of news from Olympia points out that bringing Amazon to heel isn’t the salve politicians may be looking for. As illustrated by the state’s chief economist, even though Amazon collects sales taxes here in Washington, the state Revenue Department is still missing out on probably half the sales tax revenue it should be getting from Internet retail. Think about that: Even with the behemoth of online retail doing its bit, Washington state’s strapped budget is still not able to collect some $370 million each year—a figure that looks to continue growing at a steep pace.

—I had a chance to interview business consultant, author, and venture capitalist Geoffrey Moore (of the book “Crossing the Chasm”) ahead of his speech to the Technology Alliance’s Washington Innovation Summit, and he stirred up all sorts of interesting ideas. Check out the whole thing for Moore’s take on why middle managers are key in a flattened-out … Next Page »

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Intellectual Ventures, the invention lab headed by former Microsoft technology chief Nathan Myhrvold, says the technology behind its nuclear-energy startup TerraPower is vastly more advanced than the earthquake-damaged nuclear reactors currently making dire headlines from Japan.

In a blog post Wednesday, Intellectual Ventures said all of its employees based in the Tokyo office were safe, and said the Japanese government appeared to be “acting appropriately to protect the public’s health and safety.”

But with reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in trouble, Intellectual Ventures wrote that it had been getting “inquiries” about TerraPower’s technology. The company, which spun out of Intellectual Ventures in 2008, is developing a new kind of nuclear reactor called a “traveling wave” reactor. That system uses spent fuel or natural, unenriched uranium to produce the fission reactions necessary to generate power for 60 years or so without refueling.

“Comparing our design with the reactors at the center of the crisis in Japan is like comparing a Ford Model T with a Volvo S80. It’s important to remember Japan’s troubled reactors were designed in the 1960′s. However, even though the earthquake and tsunami exceeded their design basis, the reactors remain essentially intact,” Intellectual Ventures wrote.

The firm also noted two key points of TerraPower’s design—it doesn’t have holding pools for spent fuel and doesn’t use the “light water” technology employed at the troubled plant in Japan.

“These two features alone would avoid the major problems encountered with light water technology,” Intellectual Ventures reported. It also added: “Safety is our top priority and we remain committed to defining a simple fuel cycle that ensures our plants operate safely no matter the conditions.”

Go read the whole thing, which struck me as sensitive to the remarkably precarious situation in Japan while also making a pretty forceful case that TerraPower’s technology is of no real comparison.

This comes, of course, as the conventional U.S. nuclear power industry is facing a new round of public scrutiny. The New York Times was among those reporting Wednesday on congressional hearings in response to the disasters, and GigaOm also reported from a Cleantech Forum event in San Francisco where participants questioned whether the situation in Japan could delay the movement toward next-generation nuclear.

Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates is an investor, advisor, and key evangelist on the TerraPower project. TerraPower announced last summer that it had landed $35 million in venture financing. At that time, the company said it had about 40 full-time employees and some 75 technical consultants.

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San Francisco-based iPhone game developer Ngmoco confirmed today on its blog that it will be acquired by DeNA, Japan’s largest maker of mobile games. DeNA said it would pay $403 million for the startup, making it one of the most lucrative exits ever for an iPhone app developer. Ngmoco said it would introduce a Western version of DeNA’s Mobage social games network, and that it also plans to release Android versions of its popular iOS games, such as Freeverse, Miraphonic, and Stump Town. Ngmoco had raised about $35 million in venture and angel financing from Floodgate Fund, Institutional Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Norwest Venture Partners, according to VentureWire. Another investor: Google Ventures, where the acquisition is an especially big deal, as it represents the Google fund’s first exit.

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Big companies put on dog-and-pony shows for government officials all the time, but this one actually means something. A123Systems (NASDAQ: AONE), based in the Boston area, is officially opening a 291,000-square-foot lithium ion battery manufacturing facility in Livonia, MI, today. The plant already employs more than 300 people, and is part of a Michigan expansion that the company says will create a few thousand jobs in the state over the coming years.

It’s a big deal—for Michigan’s ecosystem, for U.S. competitiveness in manufacturing, and for A123’s business. The new plant in Livonia is the largest lithium ion automotive battery plant in North America, according to the company. It will produce lithium ion battery cells and packs, to be used in electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. The Watertown, MA-based company hopes to help transform Michigan into a global hub for the expanding market of batteries and electric vehicles.

The Livonia plant has been in the works for years, but is now a reality thanks to a $249 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) last year, and $125 million in refundable tax credits from Michigan’s 21st Century Jobs Fund. A123 also has a DOE loan application pending for $233 million.

For the opening ceremony, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will be on hand, as will Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, Senator Carl Levin, Senator Debbie Stabenow, and other politicians. A123’s CEO, David Vieau, will be joined by most of the company’s top brass, including co-founders Yet-Ming Chiang and Bart Riley, and chairman Desh Deshpande. Big customers like China’s SAIC Motor Corp., BAE Systems, Navistar, and GM will be present too. The emcee and host will be Jason Forcier, vice president of A123’s automotive group, who is based in Michigan and is overseeing the new facility. (Forcier is known within the company as the “wheels guy.”)

Attendees will see a working factory, and see how a lithium ion battery is made, Forcier says. Unlike some of A123’s competitors in the state (like LG Chem), he adds, “This is not a groundbreaking, this is a grand opening…We’ll show the world we’re making batteries right here in the state.”

That has special significance to Forcier. While many people around the country may have learned of the economic woes of Flint, MI, through Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary, “Roger & Me,” Forcier and his family—some of them GM employees—lived through it. Forcier himself has built … Next Page »

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A little less than two years ago I made the decision to enroll at MIT Sloan for an MBA. Shortly after getting to the campus, I made the decision to look at careers in the energy sector. Despite being armed with a technical degree and spending some time in the energy sector prior to enrolling at Sloan, I was green—no pun intended. A sequence of lucky associations and learning experiences exposed me to different aspects of the energy sector.

After 16 months and an MBA degree, I can safely say that it was a great learning experience trying to understand the business side of innovation in the energy sector. While it is unfair to characterize a sector into generic “boxes” to better understand it, I have attempted to do so regardless. I’ve read multiple documents and have heard investors and entrepreneurs talk about the risks involved in new ventures. I am not going to repeat them here. Instead I want to write about three crucial factors that one needs to appreciate when starting or investing in a new venture in energy: policy, people, and scale.

Policy

Everyone in the energy sector knows this: regulation and policy drive the adoption of a majority of energy technologies/services in the world today. Feed-in tariffs in Germany and the rest of Western Europe were (and are) responsible for the rise of solar and wind energy. Product and investment tax credits drove wind and solar manufacturing and installation, biomass, as well as geothermal project development in the U.S. in the last three years. Numerous states in the U.S. have extended multiple tax credits for energy-efficient appliances, homes, and offices.

China, India, and Japan have also joined the party and have aggressively included regulations to favor the adoption of new energy technologies. A day does not go by these days without a politician/activist/industrialist calling for the adoption of a renewable energy standard (RES) in the U.S.—some of the European nations have already either approved an RES or are in the process of approving one.

So what does this mean for you and me? Well, if you are thinking of starting a new venture or want a job in investing, you should keep in mind that success to a large extent currently depends on policy and regulations helping you out. Or if you don’t want to depend on regulations, try to work or invest in a business that does not use them as a crutch—there are a few of these if you look hard.

People

Quite a few intelligent people have already written about how the energy “renaissance” of the 21st century is very different from that of the Internet/high-tech boom of the 1990s. I will spare you the side-by-side comparisons here, but it is safe to say they are indeed sufficiently different. One important distinction is the background of the founders. You did not need an advanced degree, or to spend hours in a research lab, to come up with the business idea for Facebook, PayPal, eBay, or Amazon.com (Google is an exception). A majority of innovation in energy that will be successfully commercialized will originate … Next Page »

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What summer doldrums? The startup launches, venture financings, and M&A deals were flying about as fast as they come last week.

—I got the inside story on OpenAppMkt, a new marketplace for Web apps for the Apple iPhone, from co-founder Teck Chia. The service, which went live on Friday, is similar to the iTunes App Store for native apps, but is designed to help iPhone owners find free and paid apps that run inside the phone’s Safari Web browser.

—We profiled Triangulate, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup that recently raised $750,000 to work on its Facebook dating app for singles. The app, called Wings, makes matches based on personal details drawn from users’ social media streams, including Facebook, sparing them from having to fill out lengthy eHarmony-style questionnaires.

—I took a close look at LearnBoost, a startup at San Francisco’s Pier 38 that will soon release an online gradebook and other Web-based tools for teachers. The startup, which just raised $975,000 in venture and angel funding, hopes its software’s clean and easy-to-use interfaces will help it take market share away from big incumbent suppliers of student information systems like Blackboard and Pearson Education.

—There were two giant deals last week in the social gaming sector. Disney (NYSE: DIS) said it would acquire Mountain View, CA-based Playdom, maker of top MySpace and Facebook games like Social City and Sorority Life, for as much as $763 million. And Japan’s SoftBank invested $150 million in San Francisco-based Zynga, which makes the even more popular Facebook games FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Zynga and SoftBank plan to launch a new joint social gaming venture in Japan.

—I got a realistic, reasonably upbeat assessment of the venture industry’s near-term prospects from Scale Venture Partners co-founder and National Venture Capital Association chairperson Kate Mitchell and SVP general partner Rory O’Driscoll. Mitchell says venture funds will continue to shrink in resources over the next two to three years, but that it’s still a great time to invest.

—Xconomy founder Bob Buderi published a two-parter based on his interview with Henry McCance, chairman emeritus of San Mateo, CA-based Greylock Partners. Part 1 looked at why Greylock relocated its main office from Waltham, MA, to Silicon Valley, and Part 2 focused on McCance’s thoughts about the personality traits that go into being a great venture investor.

—At O’Reilly Media’s Maker Faire in Detroit, Menlo Park-based TechShop, a network of open-access hackerspaces, announced that it would work with Ford to open a TechShop branch in the Detroit area, as our Detroit correspondent Howard Lovy reported.

… Next Page »

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Zynga, the San Francisco-based maker of wildly successful Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has picked up a $150 million investment from Japan’s Softbank, the two companies announced last night. The companies also unveiled a joint venture, Zynga Japan, that will develop and distribute social games in Japan, a market where Zynga has not previously ventured. Zynga games have over 230 million monthly active users.

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Yesterday, we ran the first part of a wide-ranging conversation with Phil Libin, the CEO of Mountain View, CA-based Evernote. He talked about how he got recruited to the company two years ago by Esther Dyson, and how he has extended the company’s note-taking software across platforms to build a customer base that’s now 3.2 million members strong.

Today, in the second installment of our conversation, Libin talks about his strategy for growing the computerized note-taking service, which has been described as an “offboard brain,” and how Evernote stacks up in this increasingly competitive field. He also details Evernote’s business model; interestingly, Libin says that if too many people were paying for Evernote’s $45/year premium version, it would be a sign that something was wrong.

Xconomy: Here we are three years after you joined the company and rolled out a multi-platform version of Evernote, and you’ve got millions of users. You’ve spoken of it as a “cognitive prosthesis,” but do your users think of it that way?

Phil Libin: I think you know a technology is really going mainstream when people don’t think about what they’re doing as being particularly noteworthy. The vast majority of people who use Evernote don’t actually see themselves as pushing the boundaries of the human memory.They’re just using it to remember stuff. In fact, one of our big challenges is that people have such completely different ways of using it that it’s sometimes hard to unify around a consistent message about what you actually do with it. They are using it across platforms, and the vast majority use it on more than one type of device within the same day.

Adoption rates are very high. On a slow day we add 5,000 users and on a good day, 9,000 or 10,000. That has been sustained for the past few months now. We’re at 3.2 million users, and all of this has been done without any real social features. Evernote is not designed to be a viral product. It’s designed for you, not for your friends. There are definitely hooks in there for all sorts of sharing and collaboration, and a lot more of that is coming soon. But it’s meant to be your private, trusted, lifetime memory. But even though there are no viral features, it grows through word of mouth. We don’t do any formal advertising or marketing. It turns out that Evernote users talk about Evernote to their friends. So we’re growing at this incredible rate, as fast as Skype or Twitter were growing at a comparable stage, even though there are no network effects.

X: Not only do you have a lot of users, but you’ve got an increasing number of competitors. In fact, the whole idea of online notekeeping is hot right now, with companies like iCyte, Springpad, Snaptic, and Shelfster offering similar services. How many startups do you think this sector can sustain?

PL: There is definitely a lot of activity in this space, which is great.I want there to be as much stuff as possible. I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. We are partnering pretty closely with a bunch of people, where there is enough difference between what we are doing and what they are doing that there are ways to integrate the products.

There are a bunch of people actively, expressly going after Evernote—where their whole marketing pitch is that “we are a better Evernote”—which is entertaining. It’s not just the little guys, but there are big players as well. Microsoft is starting to make noise again with OneNote, and no one is really sure what Google is going to do.

Competition is good, but I don’t think anybody is doing quite as well as we do. I don’t think anybody else comes close to having nine different native clients and … Next Page »

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I spent an enlightening week in Tokyo earlier this month participating in the Kauffman Fellows Japan Summit. This summit was the brainchild of three visionary Kauffman Fellows who are on a mission to instill entrepreneurship into the Japanese culture. During the three days we heard about the current (dismal) status of venture capital and entrepreneurial success in Japan—especially in the life sciences—in contrast to the unbelievable track record of Japanese engineering and precision manufacturing, as well as the country’s output of patents, which rivals that of the U.S.

Walking around Tokyo and interacting with the many smart minds at the summit, I had to scratch my head—at first blush, the ingredients of great entrepreneurship in life sciences are there. But why is there no soup? One of the most staggering statistics presented at the meeting was that just $200M was invested in local life science companies in 2008, with one pharma spin-out venture taking half the total!

And then it started to sink in how privileged we are in the Boston area, where the next successful or aspiring entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, venture capitalist, IP or venture lawyer, skilled technician, teaching hospital, pharmaceutical company, or device company is just a door away. We are steeped in this culture of entrepreneurship and have been so for many years now. This Boston life science ecotope is as unique as Silicon Valley is for the techies, and it behooves us to make sure we take full advantage of this incredible competitive edge.

People outside of our unique Boston ecotope understand how powerful our “soup” is—Japanese investors searching for attractive opportunities in private equity and venture capital are looking first to the U.S., then checking out Europe and China, only to search their own home market last. How discouraging that must be for the few life sciences pioneers in Japan! I will make it a habit now to remind folks in our industry, as well as local government officials, that we should cherish what we have and work hard to keep things intact and healthy.

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In the past week, the Northwest has seen its share of debt financings in medical devices and bio-IT, small funding deals and partnerships in Internet software, and mounting interest in an impending IPO.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) rolled out a new mobile payments service that lets applications developers and distributors tap into the e-commerce giant’s one-click checkout system on mobile devices. As part of the rollout, Amazon has formed partnerships with mobile content distributors like Kansas City, MO-based Handmark, which sells games, apps, ringtones, and the like. Financial terms were not given.

—Seattle’s Theraclone Sciences formed a partnership with Tokyo-based Zenyaku Kogyo, worth up to $18 million over time, to discover antibodies that could protect millions of people in a flu pandemic, as Luke reported. Under the deal’s terms, Theraclone has given Zenyaku an option for exclusive rights to new flu antibodies in certain Asia-Pacific countries, while Theraclone gets an undisclosed amount of upfront cash and royalties on future product sales in Zenyaku’s territories.

—Seattle-based Omeros, the developer of anti-inflammatory treatments and other biotech therapies, is on the docket to go public this week and raise more than $80 million, as Luke reported. The company is also defending itself against accusations from its former chief financial officer that it filed false records with the National Institutes of Health and then wrongfully terminated him after he reported it to the board’s audit committee under the company’s whistleblower policy.

—Seattle-based Teranode raised $900,000 in debt financing, as Luke reported. The investors weren’t disclosed, although Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners has invested in the past. Teranode, a maker of software to organize life sciences labs, was founded in 2002 out of the University of Washington.

—Seattle-based Founder’s Co-op, a seed-stage investment organization, has backed two local Internet startups, Nearlyweds and BigDoor Media. Financial details of the deals were not announced, but Founder’s Co-op says it typically invests $250,000 or less in its portfolio companies.

—Redmond, WA-based Spiration raised $7 million in debt financing out of a $10 million offering, as Luke reported. The financing came from the company’s partner in Europe and Japan, Olympus Medical Systems. Spiration, which makes an implantable device to treat deadly lung diseases like emphysema and chronic bronchitis, has raised about $97 million since its founding in 1999.

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Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) announced today it has signed a collaborative agreement with UQ Communications of Japan and Yota of Russia to support international roaming between the three WiMax operators. Financial terms were not disclosed. WiMax is a next-generation wireless broadband service, which Clearwire is rolling out across the U.S. Clearwire also has partnerships with YTL Communications of Malaysia, wi-tribe of Pakistan, Vee Telecom of Taiwan, and Global Mobile of Taiwan.

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Taxes aren’t fun for anyone, but recent events have put online retail leviathan Amazon.com in a “Boston Tea Party” mood.  In the digital age, what does “physical presence,” the usual definition of a taxable company, really mean?

—Amazon may owe 14 billion yen, or about $119 million, to Japanese tax authorities according to the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. Accusations have been laid against Amazon since 2007, but now the situation is much more serious, with Japan accusing Amazon of making sales as though products bought in Japan are being purchased in the U.S. and are not subject to Japanese tax law—despite the presence of two Amazon affiliate companies in Japan. This, according to Japan, violates the rules of an American-Japanese tax treaty.  Amazon has so far rejected the claim and is negotiating a deal with Japanese authorities.

—Things stateside aren’t much better. Amazon may owe millions of dollars to Texas in uncollected sales tax, according to the Dallas Morning News, and is currently being investigated by the comptroller’s office. Since May, the state has been checking to see if Amazon broke the law allowing sales tax to be levied on companies with a physical presence in a state, but Texas didn’t even realize Amazon had a distribution center in the state until May. Ironically, Texas only began to investigate Amazon after Amazon cited the same law it may be breaking there as its defense in New York, where it brought suit against the state because of a new law charging the company for sales tax even though it had no physical presence in the state. In January, the suit was thrown out of court.

—Unhappy with the New York decision, Amazon announced in June the shutdown of its Amazon Associates program users in both North Carolina and Rhode Island after both states passed similar laws. Users of the program place ads for Amazon products on their website and receive a commission from Amazon for each product bought through the site.  Amazon called the law in Rhode Island “an unconstitutional tax collection scheme.”

And things may even get worse, according to the annual report released in April by Amazon that warns of similar investigations in the state of Kentucky, and in Britain, France, and Germany.

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Woodinville, WA-based Loctronix revealed a new alliance with Japanese company NEC Magnus Communications that will allow NEC to use the single-chip, multiple source GPS technology developed by the American company in its products.  The new products will be part of the effort by the Japanese government to create a “ubiquitous society,” where all of Japan will be able to quickly access information from a nation-wide network.  Financial details of the partnership were not released.  Loctronix was founded in 2006 to develop GPS technology.

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Seattle-based MOD Systems, a maker of digital media delivery technologies for retailers, announced today it has opened a subsidiary in Tokyo. MOD Systems Japan will work with the company’s strategic investors, Toshiba and NCR, to drive business development in Japan. MOD raised $35 million from its investors in September, in a deal that has come under scrutiny in an ongoing lawsuit against MOD and its top executives.

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Seattle-based MOD Systems, a maker of digital-media delivery technology, announced it is demonstrating its product at Retailtech Japan 2009 in Tokyo, the country’s largest retail IT event. Toshiba and NCR, which are investors in MOD, will jointly present MOD’s system for downloading videos from a touch-screen kiosk to SD memory cards.

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