Wails of lamentation spread across the local tech community every time an entity like Zendesk or Greylock or Y Combinator departs Boston for parts west. But today we have a different tale to report. Day Software (SIX: DAYN) a Zurich, Switzerland-based content management software specialist that builds interactive websites for Fortune-1000 giants like Adobe and General Motors, is about to move its U.S. headquarters from Newport Beach, CA, to Boston.

When it comes to the software platforms and interactive content that define the world of Web 2.0 commerce, the Hub is the emerging capital, says Kevin Cochrane, Day’s chief marketing officer. “It’s inefficient for us to be anywhere other than Boston,” Cochrane says. “The majority of the partners we need to work with today in the Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 universe are in the Boston area, and Boston is ideally located for all of the major customers we’re securing up and down the Northeast corridor.”

Day’s new office, at 320 Congress Street in the booming Fort Point Channel area of South Boston, will open December 1, according to Kellie Snyder, a native Bostonian who is Day’s vice president of professional services. The office will initially employ 12 to 15 people and has room for up to 30. The company is “aggressively hiring” in all areas, including consulting and tech support, Snyder says.

Day Software was founded in 1994 as an interactive marketing agency but quickly evolved into a maker of software platforms for companies managing large websites. It’s been a public company on the Swiss Exchange since 2000. But last year, it brought in a new CEO, Erik Hansen, and rewrote its software from scratch to make it easier for clients to design, develop, and host customer-centric websites with interactive features such as blogs and wikis. The company counts GM, Adobe, Newsweek, the United States Army, Boston College, Ingersoll Rand, Rosetta Stone, Virgin Media, and the governments of Singapore and New Brunswick, Canada, among its big clients.

It will be much easier for Hansen, who is based in Zurich, to reach the new Boston headquarters than the company’s current Newport Beach digs. But that was “by no means the driving factor” behind the move, Cochrane says. “First and foremost, Boston is the hotbed for technology partners and interactive agencies, all of the companies that are critical to us as we look to build up our ecosystem,” he says. Boston offers the nation’s best pool of job talent for all departments of enterprise software companies, Cochrane adds. It’s also home to plenty of potential customers in higher education, a market Day has begun to penetrate, and it’s closer to the press and industry analysts who follow the content management sector, he says.

Another incidental benefit to the move, which has been in the planning stages for about 9 months: Day’s board chairman Barry Bycoff, a former Pequot Ventures partner who is also executive chairman at Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), is based in Boston. Day’s planned grand-opening party at its new Boston headquarters on December 1 will coincide with a board meeting, according to Cochrane.

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For the fourteenth year in a row, the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange—far better known as MITX (pronounced my-tex)—handed out its Interactive Awards tonight, in a sold-out ceremony at the Marriott Copley Place Hotel in Boston. The awards honor the most creative digital advertising and marketing campaigns devised by companies and agencies in the New England region.

The evening’s spotlight shined with extra sparkles on Dunkin’ Donuts, which won the title Interactive Marketer of the Year. The award was partly in recognition of “Create Dunkin’ Donuts’ Next Donut,”  a website where donut lovers can literally design potential donut shapes, flavors, and decorations for next-generation pastries. (The 2009 winner: “Toffee For Your Coffee,” a classic toroid donut with sour cream dough, a glaze covering, and a chopped Heath Bar topping.)

Dunkin’ Donuts also won in the “Best Cross Media Campaign” category of the MITX awards. “Being named MITX Interactive Marketer of the Year is wonderful honor and a great thrill,” said Cynthia Ashworth, Dunkin’ Donuts’ vice president of consumer engagement, in a prepared statement. “Along with our loyal fan base, we’re excited about the seemingly endless possibilities within interactive and are intent on continuing to make strides in this area.”

Of course, many other companies and interactive marketing agencies also took home awards, in categories ranging from “Best Use of Social Media” to best biotechnology/pharmaceutical campaign. The full list of honorees is below.

We asked MITX Presidentt Kiki Mills to sum up some of the trends she perceived in this year’s awards, especially the technology-related changes. She sent along the following thoughts:

“Social networks are not a discrete category anymore. Social functionality is now showing up in the most mundane applications, reinforcing the notion that marketers of every stripe recognize that the days of the one-way conversation are over. While many are still unsure how to effectively leverage social technologies to effectively support their messaging, there is a clear realization that there is some evolving role for this fast moving area.

“Video and other rich media are also an increasingly large component of many sites (supporting yesterday’s announcement from Brightcove of their lower cost Brightcove Express solution).

“Campaigns have matured in that they are much more user/use-case driven than in the past. Moving forward, we’re more likely to see analytics framing the creative—focusing campaigns on critical behaviors to influence, shaping what the costs and execution have to be to justify themselves in the face of the likely numbers.

“There is an increasing willingness of companies to experiment and include these technologies. Particularly with tech now so much [more] affordable, it’s easy to work a variety of things into a campaign.”

And finally: “The interactive industry in general has matured to the point where even small companies with (presumably) modest budgets are delivering high quality Web experiences.” (Thanks Kiki!)

Continue to page 2 for the full list of MITX Interactive Award Winners (including project, agency/creator, and client). …Next Page »

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To make it easier for small Web publishers to host videos on their sites, Cambridge, MA-based Brightcove will announce today that it is rolling out an “Express Edition” service starting at $99 per month.

The company’s previous lowest-end offering cost several hundred dollars per month. At the new $99 monthly level—which doesn’t require a monthly contract, as previous Brightcove packages did—users can store up to 50 videos on Brightcove’s servers and use up to 40 gigabytes of download bandwidth. (For $199 per month, they can store 200 videos and use 100 gigabytes of bandwidth; $499 per month will get them space for 500 videos and 250 gigabytes of bandwidth.)

“Nearly every sector of industry and society is embracing online video for marketing, education, and communications, so there is a huge opportunity” for a cheaper video hosting service, says Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s senior vice president of marketing. “Based on the research we’ve done and the demand we’ve seen from organizations of all sizes and scope over the past year, we’re confident Brightcove Express will be a success.”

Brightcove argues that free video-sharing sites like YouTube aren’t adequate for serious publishers because they limit videos to 10 minutes or less and don’t allow live streaming or control over advertising.

The Express Edition pricing is part of the new Brightcove 4 video platform being introduced today, just 13 months after the company rolled out its Brightcove 3 service. In recognition of the growing number of devices that consumers use to access video, the platform includes improvements such as support for developers who want to build video-driven iPhone applications.

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[Corrected 11/11/09, 3:15 pm. See below] Qualcomm chief operating officer, Len Lauer, says the San Diego wireless chipmaking giant is working across a broad front of technology development to accommodate a surge in wireless data traffic.

“The mobile Internet has arrived,” Lauer says in the opening keynote talk yesterday at the 2009 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference. With more than 4 billion wireless subscribers around the world now—including 885 million 3G phone users—Lauer says the growth in wireless data is reflected by a roughly one-third increase in revenue reported over the past year by Verizon, AT&T, and other major carriers.

[Corrects to say Lauer was comparing monthly data traffic in 2014, not monthly growth in data traffic] By 2014, or just five years, Lauer says  worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed total mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

Qualcomm founder and former chairman and CEO Irwin Jacobs and his son Paul Jacobs, who is Qualcomm’s current chairman and CEO, sounded a similar theme when they warned of capacity constraints last month during a keynote appearance at the CTIA Fall 2009 conference in San Diego.

In addition to the increasing demand for mobile data from smart phones and netbooks, Lauer says the trend can only accelerate as new wireless device categories proliferate, especially in what he calls machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Examples of M2M technology developers include CardioNet, a Pennsylvania wireless health company that uses wireless sensors to continuously monitor heart patients for irregular heartbeats; wireless smart grid technologies being deployed by electric utilities (including San Diego Gas & Electric), and eBook devices like Amazon’s Kindle.

“Other operators are seeing this as a viable market, but it is going to take awhile to develop,” Lauer says, citing estimates that 229 million M2M cellular connections are forecast for 2013. “We do see from Qualcomm’s standpoint this being a very large opportunity for our chips.”

To cope with the surge in wireless data traffic, Lauer outlined a range of technology advances that Qualcomm has underway:

—The latest generation of advanced wireless receivers, which include updated revisions to the EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) telecommunications standard (part of Qualcomm’s CDMA2000 family), operate …Next Page »

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Mark Underhill says he was doing Web design and applications development for Clear Channel Communications when the San Antonio, TX-based media company announced plans to sell 448 of its 1,150 radio stations, along with its 42-station TV group. That was in November 2006.

Underhill, who had initially been hired in San Diego six or seven years earlier to run 11 Clear Channel websites, says he remembers thinking at the time, “I’ve learned so much doing this. But I could do better than this. I could build a better mousetrap.”

The following year (just a few months after Clear Channel completed its $1.5 billion sale), Underhill and his longtime friend Claudio Canive started Platformic, a San Diego startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites. The company, which acquired its first customer by the end of 2007, has targeted the broadcast industry and now counts Comcast, the Tribune Co., and Fox Broadcasting among its biggest customers.

Platformic-based Web design

Platformic’s software-as-a-service model provides simple point-and-click tools that do not require users to learn Adobe’s Dreamweaver Web design software or to write computer code. The company says its hosted system enable customers to “come up with any look and feel” for their own websites by empowering people who know what a website should look like, but who don’t necessarily know how to create it. Websites using Platformic’s technology include Los Angeles TV station KTLA and San Francisco’s AM sports radio station KNBR and its San Mateo sister station, KTCT. Last week, Platformic helped launch 12 Fox regional sports websites throughout the country.

Platformic’s roughly 200 customers also include what Underhill describes as small “mom and pop” businesses operating …Next Page »

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There must be some new force pulling West Coast tech CEOs to visit Boston. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in town; yesterday it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

To mark the unusual occasion, Google invited a raft of journalists to its offices in Cambridge for an open, on-the-record roundtable discussion with Schmidt. Google’s Cambridge site director Steve Vinter served as moderator. Many of the questions tossed Schmidt’s way focused on specific Google projects such as Chrome, Wave, and Android 2.0, and when they’ll evolve into major consumer-facing offerings. While some of that was interesting, I thought Schmidt’s comments on a few of the bigger strategy and policy questions revealed more about the company’s outlook on the world.

Below are some of the high points from the discussion—including Schmidt’s thoughts on strategies for economic recovery, why people fear Google, and what role the company may play in the survival of journalism.

Google is growing fast in Cambridge.

Vinter said Google’s Cambridge office, which handles a variety of projects from Google Friend Connect to Google Book Search, has passed the 200-employee mark and will be “hiring very aggressively” in the coming months. (That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft, which reduced its headcount yesterday by some 800 people, including some here in Cambridge.) “Virtually every project we have is scaling up,” Vinter said. Schmidt (who attended both Princeton and Berkeley) said Google was attracted to Cambridge in the first place because it “likes cities with extremely good technical universities.”

Many more people will be getting a look at Google Wave in the near future.

Up to now, Google has been carefully parsing out invitations to Google Wave, its experimental real-time e-mail/chat/collaboration/document sharing platform. Schmidt said the company is “getting ready for a broader distribution very soon—weeks, not months.” He said feedback on the software from early users has been positive, but the company has been slow to invite in more users for fear of outages. “So far the experiment has yielded a very innovative model and a lot of buzz, and now we want to see if it can scale,” he said.

Google has very big plans for the Chrome browser and its bigger cousin, Chrome OS.

Adoption of Google’s Chrome Web browser is progressing “very well,” Schmidt said. But for Google, Chrome is “more than a browser,” he said. “It’s a platform for powerful Web-based apps that you can’t really deliver in cloud computing without having a browser that can support cloud apps.” Making Chrome work fast, maintaining a clean separation between applications running in different tabs or windows, and supporting the new HTML 5 standard “are central to making the apps model work,” Schmidt said. “And Chrome’s success is a necessary precondition to the success of Chrome OS,” he said, since the one is derived from the other. “We have a lot riding on Chrome.”

The first public version of Chrome OS will be coming out by the end of 2009, Schmidt said. But the operating system won’t be a serious competitor for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or other operating systems until …Next Page »

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The moderators of San Diego’s 9th Annual GadgetFest kept saying during Tuesday night’s showcase for new technology products that past winners have gone on to even greater glory and success. That may or may not be good news for the Motorola Droid that goes on sale tomorrow at Verizon stores nationwide. After making a cursory appearance at CTIA and perhaps elsewhere, the Droid debuted its impressive features and ended the evening as runner-up.

GadgetFest moderators Ken Rutkowski and Andy Abramson reminded the audience that Grand Central, a GadgetFest winner three years ago, was acquired shortly after the 2006 event by Google (and has since been transformed into Google Voice). They also pointed to Motorola’s Q Phone, Sling Media’s Slingbox, and the Truphone as paragons of GadgetFest virtue. All three devices were introduced at GadgetFest instead of the CTIA or other major trade shows, according to CommNexus, the San Diego wireless industry group that sponsors the event.

So expectations were high. But the Droid, with all its iPhone-slaying hoopla, finished the GadgetFest competition in a dead-heat with EcoDog, a local cleantech startup that trotted out Fido—a device that helps homeowners sniff out savings in their electric utility bill. The GadgetFest judges ultimately proclaimed EcoDog this year’s best in show after the Vista, CA-based company received perceptibly more-boisterous applause from the audience in the Irwin M. Jacobs Qualcomm Hall at Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters.

At the end of the show, while the judges were deciding how to resolve the tie, one of the moderators asked EcoDog founder and CEO Ron Pitt if he had anything more to say. He replied, “My product is the only product up here tonight that saves you more money than it costs.”

So what are the up and coming gadgets that got previewed at GadgetFest? Here’s a rundown, just in time for the Christmas shopping season:

—TelCentris, the San Diego-based provider of unified communications services, presented an update to its VoxOx system, which aggregates voice over Internet technology, text messaging, instant messaging, serial conferencing, file sharing, and e-mail onto one user interface. As TelCentris executives explained to me in July, the company makes most …Next Page »

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Somebody forgot to tell John Chuang that it’s impossible to create a new kind of home computer these days.

Either that, or he didn’t listen. Because Chuang, a serial entrepreneur who made his first fortune in the staffing industry with Boston-based Aquent, has built a gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. From the hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by Chuang’s Boston-based startup, Litl, rejects three decades of convention and makes the Web, not the computer and all its software and operating-system encrustations, into the real show.

Litl took the lid off its so-called “Webbook” computer today after more than two years of top-secret development work. The device’s purpose, Chuang says, is to take advantage of the Web’s newfound maturity as a medium for digital entertainment and productivity and make it far simpler for people at home to access all those goodies—including photos, videos, news and weather, and Web apps—without having to manage files or desktop applications.

“We didn’t want to build anything that already existed, or something with just marginal improvements,” Chuang says. “PCs have served a great purpose, but we wanted to take a crack at a different type of computer that would be for and of the Net.”

I visited Litl’s offices yesterday and had a chance to try out the Webbook, which goes on sale today at Amazon and at Litl’s website. (The price is $699, and Litl expects to ship the first units to consumers next week.) Beyond its laptop-like appearance, there isn’t much that veteran computer users like me will find familiar about the device. There’s no desktop, no windows or menus or files or folders, no multitasking, no long lists of third-party software applications to buy. There isn’t even a hard drive or a CD/DVD drive.

While the Webbook is definitely a computer—with a 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom processor, a gigabyte of RAM, a Wi-Fi card, a Webcam, and a nice graphics chip inside—it’s also got a good dose of TV mixed into its genome. It has a separate remote control, its display can be folded almost all the way back so that it stands up on a table or countertop like an easel, and it has a cord that connects it with no fuss to your flat-screen TV, so you can see what you’re doing on a really big screen.

In other words, the Webbook breaks all the rules of personal computing. And while it may be the perfect machine for consumers who just want to get on the Internet and have no use for all of a traditional PC’s bells and whistles, Chuang is likely to face an initial wave of skepticism from heavy computer users and technology industry insiders. They probably won’t grok how a machine that doesn’t even have software, the way we’re used to thinking of software, could still be useful.

But Chuang doesn’t seem to care much about what the digerati think; his device isn’t designed for them. Or to put it more accurately, it’s designed for their coffee tables and kitchen counters, rather than their offices or their backpacks. “We’re about shared processing, not local processing,” he explains. For tasks that require lots of local processing power, like video editing, power users are still going to want and need a traditional multipurpose computer. But if they just want to …Next Page »

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In a presentation at the Boston Book Festival last weekend, Jon Orwant, a Google engineer involved in the company’s Book Search project, made a memorable and, I thought, quite perceptive remark about the e-book business.

“Think about the books you have at home and how you organize them,” Orwant said. “Some of you may not organize them at all. Some of you may organize them based on the person who reads them—Mom’s books, Dad’s books, the kids’ books. Some may organize by subject or genre. I’ll tell you one way you don’t organize them: you don’t say, ‘Here are the books I bought from Barnes & Noble, here are the books I bought from Amazon, and here are the books that were given to me as gifts.’ We need to be very careful to make sure that we don’t create an environment in which digital books end up that way.”

What Orwant was talking about, of course, is the siloing going on in the nascent e-book industry—the fact that if you buy an e-book for your Amazon Kindle, you can’t read it on a competing e-book device such as Barnes & Noble’s new Nook, or vice-versa. That’s because book publishers, who are understandably spooked by the music industry’s implosion, are worried about losing revenue if people can copy, transfer, and share their digital content too easily. It’s also because many of the companies getting into the e-book market aren’t happy just selling you a gadget or a couple of megabytes of digital content—they want you to buy into a whole ecosystem (i.e., the Kindle family of devices and the 360,000 books formatted for them, or the Nook and its claimed one million titles).

And so far that plan is working, at least on early adopters like me. I bought a Kindle 2 in May, and since then I’ve purchased about $120 worth of books for the device, plus subscriptions to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and multiple Sunday editions of the New York Times. All of this content is protected by digital rights management (DRM) technology that would prevent me from opening it on, say, a Nook or a Sony Reader device—and that quite likely will prevent me from reading my books 10 or 20 years down the road, when my Kindle will be dead or obsolete and reading technologies and content formats will undoubtedly be completely different. But those restrictions haven’t kept me from scarfing up more e-books: since I became a Kindle user I’ve bought about 20 Kindle editions and exactly four physical books (two that weren’t available as Kindle editions, and two that were gifts for other people).

But while I’m not particularly concerned about the fact that my Amazon e-books are tied to my Amazon hardware (hey, I’ve also bought hundreds of songs and videos from Apple’s iTunes Store that only play on my Apple MacBook and my Apple iPhone), a lot of people are more skeptical toward the Amazon model. As e-books gradually catch up to and surpass physical books as the main way many people access book-length content—which they will, mark my words—continued reliance on proprietary formats and DRM could wind up fragmenting our common literary inheritance in exactly the way that Orwant warned about.

But I have a feeling the story isn’t over, and that market pressures may eventually push all of the big players in the still-young e-book business toward a more open future. The day before the Boston Book Festival, I had a long conversation with Steve Haber, president of the Digital Reading Division at Sony, and I got an earful about …Next Page »

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San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says it has established a separate wholly-owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Innovation Center, (QuIC), to ensure that certain open source software operates seamlessly with Qualcomm technology.

The company says it has transferred experienced software engineers to the innovation center, where they will focus on open source initiatives such as Linux and Webkit, and on open source operating systems like Symbian, Android, and Chrome. Job postings on the company’s website indicate the center is based in San Diego and Boulder, CO. In a statement released early today, Qualcomm did not say how many engineers its QuIC subsidiary will employ

The company’s initiative is aimed at consumer products that run open source software, enabling Qualcomm-based technologies to keep pace with shifting opportunities in open software as they emerge by optimizing the performance of mobile operating systems and the software applications that run on them.

The wireless technology giant said QuIC’s board of directors has named Rob Chandhok, senior vice president of software strategy at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, as QuIC president. Chandhok plans to address the Symbian open source community at a conference in London Wednesday.

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[Updated 10/24/09 5:30 p.m. with additional interview material] All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC), Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle announced today at the Boston Book Festival in downtown Boston.

Kahle said the announcement capped a year-long collaboration between the Internet Archive and the OLPC, which was founded by MIT computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte. “We’ve been working for the last year, since Nicholas invited us, to show that we can do this,” Kahle said. “We took all of the one million, six hundred thousand books and reformatted them to work with the OLPC laptop.”

The little green laptop, called the XO, “makes a really good reader,” said Kahle, an MIT-educated computer engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Internet Archive in 1996.

The Internet Archive operates 20 scanning centers in five countries, where hundreds of workers are manually scanning books from public and university libraries, mostly public-domain works for which the copyright term has expired. It collects these books at its Open Access Text Archive. It also makes them available to people in developing nations via a network of satellite-connected print-on-demand “bookmobiles.”

Now the books will also be available to the roughly 750,000 to 1 million schoolchildren in developing countries who have XO laptops.

The announcement came as part of a Boston Book Festival panel session on electronic books, entitled “The Future of Reading: Books Without Pages?” The session, held at the Boston Public Library, was part of a day-long celebration of books and reading funded by Boston’s State Street Bank and organized by Deborah Porter, a freelance book reviewer who is Negroponte’s significant other, according to the Boston Globe.

OLPC and the Archive have been working together for a year to get the books ready for display on the XO Laptop’s screen, which was designed to be visible in full sunlight and to use less energy than existing commercial LCD screens. The books are being converted into the open EPUB format, which will be cleanly readable on an XO after a coming update to the devices’ operating environment.

“We set a date of this meeting, a year ago, to say let’s get our books in really good shape,” Kahle told Xconomy after the panel session. “We were first going to do it in PDF, because the screen is a really a beautiful screen ,but we found that if we were really going to make it work for people in developing countries—if you want to get this to kids in Uruguay—then having a 10-kilobyte file beats the heck out of a 5-megabyte file. So we went and converted our books such that it would work. And the One Laptop Per Child guys went and made it so that those worked well on the XO. They are working very hard to make it so that …Next Page »

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One advantage of attending a presentation at the San Diego MIT Enterprise Forum is that the people who ask questions are a lot smarter than I am. And so it was Wednesday night, when MojoPages founding CEO Jon Carder laid out the strategy of his three-year-old San Diego Internet startup.

MojoPages, which got $5 million in a Series A venture round almost four months ago, is Carder’s third Internet startup. “Mojo has that kind of sexy sound to it,” he told the audience. “Either Austin Powers or The Doors, depending on your generation.”

The Internet company’s core business combines a searchable online business directory with a social network that provides consumer reviews of local merchants, restaurants, service providers, and other businesses. In addition to collecting reviews, Carder says MojoPages’ “people-powered” technology provides rankings for local businesses by analyzing the reviewers and using an algorithm that weights each reviewers’ credibility.

Carder told the audience that “local search” already is a $7 billion market in the U.S., and just over half (54 percent) of Americans now use the Internet instead of a Yellow Pages phone book to search for everything from dentists to hair stylists and mechanics. Like Google and other search engines, MojoPages makes money by selling pay-per-click “sponsored ads” that highlight the top three business listings under various search terms. Carder says MojoPages also generates revenue from $40-per-CPM advertising (click per 1,000 impressions), and generates revenue from advertising partners like Citysearch and Ingenio, a pay-per-call advertising network owned by AT&T. According to his business plan, MojoPages will reach profitability in 2011, with 766 websites generating revenue of almost $1.3 million.

Carder said he views Yelp, the San Francisco-based Internet business founded in 2004, as MojoPages’ main competitor, but he adds that MojoPages is differentiating itself in a variety of ways. One significant difference is that …Next Page »

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Cheezburger Network (formerly Pet Holdings) retained its No. 1 position in Seattle 2.0’s monthly rankings of local startups’ Web traffic. The rest of the top five were Zillow, Picnik, BuddyTV, and Wetpaint. Survey Analytics made a strong jump to No. 6. Other strong gains were made by Smith & Tinker, Gist, GlobalScholar, and Seattle 2.0 itself. Marcelo Calbucci, Seattle 2.0’s creator and publisher, now says he will be spending 90 percent of his time on the site, with the goal of growing it into a bigger media company.

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The big story out of the International CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment expo in San Diego last week could perhaps be summed up in one word: “spectrum.” We also have reports from the Algae Biofuels Summit and other big news, so read on.

—Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and his son Paul, who is now chairman and CEO of the San Diego wireless giant, told CTIA goers that Qualcomm’s labs have reached the limit in terms of optimizing the efficiencies of wireless devices within current radio bands. Yet demand continues to accelerate for mobile data services. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a different session that finding more spectrum is the agency’s No. 1 priority. “Spectrum is oxygen,” Genachowski said.

—In a report that preceded the CTIA conference, Seattle-based Ontela released a survey that shows people still have problems doing simple things like transmitting photos on their mobile phones, even as the popularity of mobile data plans and services such as text messaging continue to grow in the U.S.

—Denise gave us a preview of the 3rd Annual Algae Biomass Summit, which also was held in San Diego last week. Cleantech San Diego president Lisa Bicker said more than 625 cleantech companies are now based in the region, including more than 30 algae biofuels companies.

—At a time when investment capital has been pouring into the development of algae-based biofuels, Bill Barclay of Columbia, MD-based Martek Biosciences said it could take a decade or more for commercial-scale algae biofuels production to become reality. Scientists still need to identify the best algae strains, optimize production processes, and find the best ways to convert “green crude” to fuels.

—San Diego-based Achates Power has raised $12.1 million out of a $20 million venture round, according to a regulatory filing. The company has been developing a radical new design for a high-efficiency two-stroke automotive engine.

—We’ve been too busy to do much celebrating, but Xconomy’s San Diego website officially marked its one-year anniversary last week. In the past year, we’ve published more than 1,400 news stories, briefs, and commentaries about the innovation leaders, businesses, technologies, and trends that make up the “exponential” part of the San Diego economy. Thanks to all our readers for their great comments.

—While the Obama Administration continues to push its plans for healthcare reform, Gary West is refining his own plans for using the new San Diego-based West Wireless Health Institute to catalyze innovations in wireless health that help deliver healthcare equivalent to what’s generally available today at lower cost. The non-profit institute, which was funded in March by a $45 million donation from the Gary and Mary West Foundation, ranks as one of the first organizations in the world to seek improvements in healthcare specifically through advances in wireless technologies.

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I’ve been predicting for a while that the marketing agencies and website developers that don’t have deep technical capabilities in search engine optimization will be left by the side of the road. Now we’re seeing it come to pass with Adobe’s $1.8 billion buyout of Omniture. [Adobe Systems announced the acquisition on Sept. 15, and U.S. antitrust regulators recently granted an early termination of their review.]

When Adobe’s chief marketing officer, Ann Lewnes, says marketing is the new finance, she’s not talking Orwellian double-speak. She means the digital age is driving the corporate marketing function to become accountable for spending in a far more rigorous and precise way than the “Mad Men” days of estimating “reach and frequency.” And that’s what Adobe’s Omniture acquisition is really all about.

This merger is intended to develop creative content in a holistic way and to measure the value of that content—whether it is video, web pages, mobile content, or social media content. This deal represents a way to “close the loop” in terms of creating digital content and measuring its impact.

Precisely measuring how people use a website is what we do at San Diego-based Covario. We view this deal as a brilliant strategic move for Adobe—one that could change the rules of the game for digital media, from creation to measurement to monetization. It represents changes in technology that will finally and irreversibly mark the end of an era.

This is what we see coming in the new Adobe media world:

—Video developers and agencies will build Adobe Flash creative content with Omniture tracking codes implanted from the beginning. This will enable them to track online views of that content across the web, and perhaps even begin to …Next Page »

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A lot of fingers were crossed behind the scenes at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference, which ended today at the San Diego Convention Center. Many extraneous factors can affect attendance at big industry shows, but organizers did not want a repeat of the last time the CTIA came to San Diego, when the opening day for the conference was Sept. 11, 2001.

About 15,000 people attended this week, the same turnout as last year’s conference in San Francisco, according to spokeswoman Cheryl Delgreco. The highlight on the final day was the “Fund Fest,” in which entrepreneurs from Seattle, Washington D.C., and other cities made five-minute presentations to an onstage panel of three judges. Five finalists, including two from Seattle, emerged from a group of 50 companies that were screened by event organizers.

All five finalists received a complimentary exhibit and marketing package for a 2010 CTIA event valued at more than $25,000, and a block of public relations consulting time. All five finalists also will make encore presentations, along with 15 additional companies at the MobiTechFest in Santa Clara, CA, on Oct. 29, according to a spokeswoman for MobiTechFest.

The companies are:

—Mjedi, based in Seattle, is developing a software platform for mobile social commerce that enables people who are out shopping to consult with their friends by using their cell phone to send product images to their home page on Facebook. Founding CEO Chander Chawla says the company’s target market is composed of “teen-agers and women who like to talk before making a purchase.”

—ParkVu, based in Sunnyvale, CA, has developed software that enables users to wirelessly download their entire iTunes library, photos, and other files from their computer to their BlackBerry and other smartphones. Co-founder and CEO Terry Goertz says their technology “frees your smartphone from your desktop permanently.”

—Billing Revolution, based in Seattle, presented technology that enables mobile phone users to buy pizzas, ski lift tickets, and other merchandise directly from merchants. Founding CEO Andy Kleitsch says the company’s software is “a layer that sits on top of merchants’ existing credit card processing system. Kletsch says his company, which raised $2 million earlier this year from a South Korean telecom, is currently preparing to raise another $4 million in Series B funding.

—Chyngle, a San Francisco-based startup, develops custom white label mobile applications for shopping malls, amusement parks, and sports and concert stadiums. Chyngle, which is developing its application initially for Major League Baseball stadiums and other professional sporting venues, says its technology provides background information and statistics about teams and players and enables users to buy sports merchandise and other items. It also serves as a social networking tool that enables friends to meet, share rides, and exchange messages. For each stadium, CEO Todd Sullivan says, “We are that venue’s in-pocket marketing tool.” The presentation wowed the judges, who gave Chyngle the Champion award.

—TelCare, based near Washington D.C., has developed a wireless device for diabetics that enables them to both test their blood sugar and transmit the data to their doctor or caregiver. Founder Jonathan Javitt says the real-time connectivity maintains a more accurate record of tests, and makes it unnecessary for patients to keep their own test paperwork. Javitt says the wireless connectivity also can improve compliance by sending reminders to patients, and that according to one study, using the device reduced amputations, strokes, blindness and other complications of diabetes by 37 percent. TelCare received the CTIA’s People’s Choice award from attendees in the audience who voted by text message.

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The co-founders who introduced San Diego-based Qualcomm’s wireless digital technology in 1989 envisioned from the early days that it would be ideal for the Internet. But Irwin Jacobs says now even he’s amazed at how many things a cell phone can do today.

A new generation of innovators is now using Qualcomm’s proprietary technology to develop new cellular devices and services in such fields as healthcare, transportation, and energy—and “None of that was quite obvious to us in the early days,” Jacobs said in a presentation at a wireless conference in San Diego yesterday. Yet the Qualcomm co-founder and his son, Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs, also say the wireless industry is pushing the limits of cellular networks by cranking out ever-faster wireless devices that feature more and more mobile data services. Many of the new products just over the horizon are driven by Qualcomm’s own advances in technology—including 4G smartphones, netbook computers, and palm-size wireless TVs.

Rapid changes in cellular technology and the potential for network constraints became part of a wide-ranging keynote address at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference in San Diego. Unlike most keynotes, though, Qualcomm’s father-and-son dynasty appeared together onstage for what was intended to be a living-room discussion with CTIA president Steve Largent, the former Oklahoma Republican Congressman and Hall of Fame pro football receiver.

Irwin Jacobs

One of their most interesting revelations came while Irwin, who turns 76 later this month, was discussing the technology advances that led to the current generation of smartphones. Despite rapid technology advances, the market for mobile Web-based services was slow to develop, and Irwin observed, “The iPhone was really a major breakthrough, in terms of developing a simple interface.”

Paul added, “We always used to talk about developing the killer app, and the killer app ended up being a simple user interface,” and he says most advances in computing capabilities and graphics technologies are now focused on making the interface even simpler to use. Paul, who was named Qualcomm’s CEO in 2005 and chairman earlier this year, says he envisions a future in which wireless technologies are “increasingly embedded in everything,” enabling a homeowner to use their cell phone to remotely control their TV, stereo, and lights.

According to Irwin, wireless networks provide cellular coverage for roughly 80 percent of the world population today, and he estimates there are …Next Page »

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Those of us who are lucky enough to work as journalists (and who get to write the first draft of history) often remember the dates when the important and even not-so-important events went down. After 30 years in the news business, it’s become almost second nature for me. Today marks a special day, both personally and professionally, because it’s been exactly one year since we officially launched Xconomy’s San Diego website.

My Xconomy debut began with “San Diego 92037,” a curtain-raiser that sought to explain why the prestigious La Jolla zip code that encompasses Torrey Pines Mesa represents the epicenter of technology innovation here—and it’s been more-or-less non-stop ever since. In the past year, we’ve published close to 1,415 news stories, briefs, and commentaries about the innovation leaders, businesses, technologies, and trends that make up the “exponential” part of the San Diego economy.

With the launch of our San Diego website last year, Xconomy founder and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi wrote: “Smart, in-depth local coverage of an innovation community is, we think, central to the health and vitality of that community. But we also believe that good local stories—the ones we aim to tell in each of the three cities we now cover—can yield important insights into national and global trends.” Bob likes to say that the focus of our coverage is on local stories that have a global impact.

Hindsight isn’t always 20-20, but looking back over the past year certainly can add some perspective to the stories where the impact has become more apparent.

This week, for example, the Algal Biomass Association will convene in San Diego for its annual biomass summit at least partly because this region has become a global hub for algae-based research, technologies, and industries. For Xconomy readers, this became clear as we got an exclusive interview with the CEO of San Diego’s Sapphire Energy, charted the formation of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, and chronicled the partnership that San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics struck with ExxonMobil, which plans to spend $600 million to develop algae biofuels.

A few other stories from our first year also exemplify Xconomy’s mission of pursuing local stories with global impact:

—The ouster last week of Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) CEO Harry Stylli, along with several other top executives and employees, followed a five-month internal inquiry that has left …Next Page »

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Charlestown, MA-based Spring Partners announced today that it has relaunched Springpad, its online personal organizer, to include a number of new features that help users find, personalize, and share content.

For example, Springpad now comes with a “Web clipper” tool that makes it easier for users to add material discovered at websites, such as restaurant or product information, to their personal notebooks. The company has also partnered with selected Web publishers to include special “save” buttons adjacent to the publishers’ most relevant content—say, the shopping list for a specific recipe—so that users can copy the the information directly into their Springpad accounts. (See the YouTube summary of Springpad’s new features below.)

The company also announced that Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of popular wine site Wine Library TV and CEO of Vaynermedia, has joined Spring Partners’ board of advisors. Vaynerchuck is using Springpad himself and has integrated Springpad’s “save” button into the Wine Library TV site.

“I’m a big believer in Springpad’s vision that content from publishers and brands can be made even more useful to help people organize their lives, get things done and share their knowledge,” Vaynerchuk said in a statement from the company. “When I saw what Springpad could do I loved the fact that my viewers could do anything they wanted to do with the data, not what I might have thought they wanted, I quickly and easily integrated my winelibrary.tv site with Springpad and created several Springpad apps, including a Wine Notebook and Thunder List.”

Xconomy profiled Spring Partners in November 2008 and July 2009.

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Maybe you’d like to have a sleek, attractive blog or website for yourself or your business. Maybe you’ve looked around at some of the free blogging or lifestreaming platforms like Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, TypePad, and WordPress.com and you’ve been underwhelmed by the cookie-cutter sameness of the sites you see there. If either of those things are true, today’s column is for you.

The free platforms used to be the only way for a beginning blogger to take advantage of Web publishing technology. But it’s now possible to set up a good-looking, full-featured, highly personalized blog, simply by buying a customizable site template and setting it up on an independent hosting service. It’s much easier and cheaper than it sounds. In fact, I did it last weekend, and I’m going to walk you through it.

First, though, a word about the pluses and minuses of the free platforms. I’ve used quite a few of them. What’s great about them, of course, is that they’re free, and that they let you set up an account and start blogging instantly. Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and TypePad all make it extremely easy to create posts—in most cases all you have to do is write an e-mail. And they let you post several kinds of material, including text, photos, videos, and audio.

What’s most dismaying to me about the free blogging platforms, though, is that all of their blogs tend to look alike, with a style that’s curiously Web 1.0. Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress.com are the worst offenders: you can pick from a range of templates or “themes,” but most of them look like they’re straight out of 2004. Innovation is much more alive at Posterous and especially Tumblr, which allow more customization, but those platforms lack many of the extra features—such as integration with photo-sharing or messaging tools—that bloggers need to keep up with today’s social media explosion.

If you want a full-featured blog with a spiffy, up-to-date design, the truth is that you need professionally designed theme running on top of a powerful content management system like WordPress. The good news is that you can get these things quickly and easily. I saw a bumper sticker on I-93 yesterday that said “Websites designed for $500.” Buying a WordPress theme and setting it up on a hosting service yourself will cost you far less than that.

A quick but important distinction: WordPress is a free, customizable, open-source Web publishing software system, created by San Francisco-based Automattic, that anyone can download from WordPress.org and run on their own Web server (that’s what Xconomy does); WordPress.com is Automattic’s hosting service, where you can start a bare-bones WordPress blog and the company will host it on their servers for free. Xconomy, FYI, is built on a WordPress theme that we designed from scratch.

Last weekend I relaunched my personal blog, Travels with Rhody, using a “store-bought” WordPress theme and an independent hosting service. The whole process took less than 12 hours and cost me $70 (plus moderate hosting fees down the road). Here are the simple steps I followed.

1. I went shopping at WooThemes. Stumbling across this super-cool South African Web design company a few weeks ago was what started me thinking about replacing my old Tumblr blog. The specialty of the house at WooThemes is premium WordPress themes. They’ve got dozens to …Next Page »

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