We’re starting to see fresh signs of life among the Internet software startups in San Diego. Check out this news.

—During a visit last week, TechStars CEO David Cohen talked with the leaders of San Diego’s grassroots Web startup community about the factors that help to create and sustain entrepreneurial communities. One crucial issue confronting San Diego is a crying need for savvy and experienced Internet entrepreneurs who are willing to “pay it forward” by mentoring a new generation of startups.

—A dozen seed-stage companies moved into the new EvoNexus incubator in downtown San Diego. EvoNexus, which was founded by the CommNexus non-profit industry group, will continue to operate its original incubator in University City, where eight startups are taking root. In both locations, EvoNexus provides office space, utilities, and other services free of charge and with no strings attached.

—Sigma Partners led a $10 million round in venture funding for San Diego-based MOGL, a Web startup that has developed a comprehensive customer loyalty program for restaurants and bars, to fuel its expansion into San Francisco and New York. San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and Austin, TX-based Austin Ventures joined in the round.

—San Diego’s MicroPower Technologies named two new board members after raising $6.5 million in Series C funding in a deal that was led by Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and joined by an undisclosed private fund. MicroPower Technologies, which uses wireless networking technologies to create low-cost surveillance capabilities, named PacketVideo CEO Jim Brailean and former DivX CEO Kevin Hell to its board. Hell, who is now chairman of San Diego’s EvoNexus incubator, will join as MicroPower chairman.

—San Diego’s StockTwits said it has established a partnership with Toronto’s Q4 Web Systems, which provides … Next Page »

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You wouldn’t throw a fancy dinner party in a 7-Eleven. You wouldn’t hold a symphony concert in a subway station, or teach a meditation class on a tilt-a-whirl ride.

So why does anyone expect readers to read long articles on the Web?

Call me a traitor to my kind, but I think the World Wide Web is a terrible medium for long-form writing, precisely because of the mismatch between content and venue. The basic problem is that browsers are for browsing. Today’s commercial Web, where no morsel of exposition is more than one saccade away from a link, a logo, or an ad, is an impossible place to do any deep thinking.

No one designed this outcome. It’s just that the medium grew up so fast, evolving in less than 20 years from a hypertext file-sharing system at a European physics laboratory into today’s infinite digital bazaar. There wasn’t much time to think about whether it really made sense to translate our collective creative output into HTML, dump it onto Web servers, and pay for the whole operation with hyperlinked ads that, by their very nature, take readers away from whatever they’re trying to read.

Fortunately, there are folks scouting for ways out of this mess. Over the last few years, programmer-entrepreneurs like Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, have come up with a series of clever applications for separating or “parsing” the Web’s text from its context. This new menagerie of minimalism includes browser-based apps that zap the clutter around Web posts and replace it with a peaceful white background. It also includes mobile apps that let you store these pared-down posts for on-the-go consumption whenever you choose. And in this general category, I’d also include a few new curation services intended to spotlight contemporary and classic long-form writing and make it easier to consume.

I’ve picked 10 of my favorite reading apps and services for quick summaries on the following pages. If you’re like me and you spend a lot of time using the desktop or mobile Web, yet you also love getting lost in a long, thoughtful non-fiction article, then you’ll find some of these services to be life-changing.

But I wouldn’t say that we’ve reached an apotheosis—not by a long shot. At best, the Zen approach to repackaging Web articles is only one element of the solution, and it’s not one that will scale up very well. Already, critics are arguing that this kind of republishing is impolite at best, copyright infringement at worst. As soon as the big online publishers realize how many people are bypassing ads by saving parsed text to Instapaper and the other reading apps, they’ll freak out, the same way broadcasters did when TiVo came along. (It’s no accident that people have called the reading apps “DVRs for the Web.”)

What’s needed now are business models that would make publishers happy about providing more content in these ad-free environments. But we’re a long way from finding payment mechanisms that appeal to readers—let alone equitable ways to split up reading-app revenue between publishers, authors, developers, and platform providers, as a tussle last year between Readability and Apple illustrated (more on that below).

For now, damn the torpedoes—here’s my list of the 10 most interesting and useful reading apps and curation services. I’m going to describe the apps first, because once you understand those, the curation services will make a lot more sense. (For a single-page version of this article that you can export to one of the reading apps, click here.)

First app: Clearly.

… Next Page »

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After previewing its expansion plans last summer, San Diego’s EvoNexus, the free startup incubator established by the non-profit technology group CommNexus, has opened a newly renovated downtown office space. A dozen early stage companies began moving into the incubator Monday.

CommNexus founded EvoNexus in 2009, when San Diego’s innovation economy was reeling from the Great Recession. The incubator has taken in 14 companies so far, including six that have moved out of the EvoNexus incubator in University City. Office space, utilities, and other services are provided to startups free of charge, and companies leave with no obligations to EvoNexus or CommNexus.

“As far as we know, we’re the only pro bono incubator in the country,” EvoNexus chairman Kevin Hell says in a statement issued late yesterday. “The goal is to grow sustainable tech companies and expand the industry here in San Diego.”

When the EvoNexus incubator first opened in Sorrento Valley, organizers said they wanted to host startups developing advanced communications technologies, including wireless life sciences and smart grid networking.

Since then, CommNexus moved EvoNexus to University City and broadened its criteria. The industry group established the new downtown EvoNexus to host startups that are focused primarily on developing Internet software, Web services, gaming, social networking, and cloud computing technologies. The privately held Irvine Co. made the 15,000-square foot space available to EvoNexus at no cost. The incubator takes up an entire floor of the building at 101 W. Broadway, known locally as the AT&T building.

Hell says he sees parallels in the downtown San Diego locale with San Francisco’s SoMa, the downtown neighborhood South of Market Street that has become a magnet for social media startups and mobile app developers. The nightlife, housing, and amenities available in San Diego’s city center should appeal to young entrepreneurs, Hell says.

CommNexus plans to continue to operate its incubator in University City. The 12 companies in the new downtown space are:

Antengo: Real-time mobile classifieds.

BigSho: Social webcam game show.

Chatmeter: Online reputation management.

Fashioning Change: Shopping experience for eco-friendly apparel.

Saambaa: Social media app for finding things to do.

SwoopThat: Online textbook shopping by course.

TapChow: Cloud-based restaurant experience manger.

Taphunter: Mobile app for locating places that serve craft beer.

UgliApps: Mobile apps focused on food.

Voluware: Saas healthcare information software.

Xpenser: Web-based tracking of business expenses, time, and mileage.

Zambig: Web-based service that provides online outlet for radio ads.

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San Diego’s StockTwits is developing a bit of a Canadian accent, eh, through a partnership being announced today with Toronto-based Q4 Web Systems, which provides online investor relations services for publicly traded companies throughout North America.

StockTwits is an online social media network that enables traders and shareholders to share their market insights, ideas, charts, and news in real time via Twitter. The startup structures financial and investor-related information from its Twitter feed by stock, user, reputation, and other criteria. StockTwits also enables users to save the stocks they follow to their own portfolios and to limit the comments tweeted about each stock to trusted sources.

As I reported last summer, the four-year-old startup has determined that its chief source of revenue also lies with the investor relations and public relations units of publicly traded companies.

By introducing a ticker tag symbol for publicly traded stocks, $(ticker), StockTwits makes it possible for public companies to sign up for a higher level of StockTwits’ Web service and to “claim” their stock tickers. Once claimed, a company’s IR and PR teams can use the ticker tag to distribute corporate information over the Web in real time.

By partnering with Q4, StockTwits plans to integrate its services with the subscription-based services that Q4 provides its corporate customers. Q4 says its website services include more than 30 IR “best practices” modules that help companies properly provide information and other services to investors and shareholders.

“We’re working with them to make it easier for people to use both of our products,” says Francis Costello, StockTwits’ chief operating officer. He tells me StockTwits has more … Next Page »

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San Diego’s MOGL, a Web-based customer loyalty and rewards program for restaurants and bars, says it has raised $10 million in venture funding to fuel its expansion into San Francisco, New York, and other markets.

The Menlo Park, CA, office of Sigma Partners led the Series B round, which was joined by San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and Austin, TX-based Austin Ventures. That brings total funding for MOGL to $12.4 million, according to a statement from the company. Entrepreneurs Jon Carder, Jarrod Cuzens, and Jeff Federman started MOGL in 2010.

The Internet startup offers its customers multiple incentives for returning to member restaurants and bars, using a mixture of technology, games, and psychology. The incentives include a 10 percent cash back each time a customer returns to eat at participating restaurants. A contest  offers monthly cash prizes to the top three most-frequent customers at each locale. Customers also can automatically donate a meal to someone in need every time they spend $20.

MOGL Homepage Screenshot

MOGL says it provides customer analytics and return-on-investment data for participating bars and eateries. In a statement from the company, Sigma partner Peter Solvik says, “The MOGL team has generated an explosive response from both consumers and restaurant partners, while effectively positioning itself as the most innovative loyalty platform of its kind.”

Since it was launched last April, MOGL has signed up nearly 350 Southern California-based eateries and bars, donated more than 27,000 meals to Feeding America, and has rewarded its members with more than $350,000 in cash back to date.

The company also offers a location-based mobile app for iPhone and Android, so MOGL members can easily locate participating restaurants while on the go. The mobile apps also help customers track their cash rewards and jackpot opportunities, as well as the number of meals donated in their name.

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—Peter Clarke of EE Times reported that San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has acquired Andover, MA-based Pixtronix, a startup founded in 2005 to develop Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) display technology. Qualcomm, which confirmed the deal with EE Times but provided no details or press release about the deal, reportedly spent between $175 million and $200 million for Pixtronix. The Massachusetts company founded by Nesbitt Hagood raised more than $53 million in venture funding, athough the Pixtronix technology has not yet been introduced to the market. Qualcomm has spent years working to refine its own MEMS-based display technology—known as Mirasol.

—More than 200 entrepreneurs turned out to hear TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen talk about the startup accelerator program he helped to launch in Boulder, CO, in 2007. Cohen told the rapt audience during a San Diego Tech Founders meetup that the Internet software community in Boulder “is just totally on fire” compared to five years ago. This was the night after Cohen met with local tech leaders to discuss the steps that helped boost the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Colorado college town. Xconomy San Diego arranged the dinner discussion, and I plan to have more about our conversation later this week.

—Meteorologist Stephen Bennett and investor John Plavan founded San Diego’s EarthRisk Technologies in mid-2010 with the idea of creating predictive analytics technology that could extend the range of weather long-term forecasts from two weeks to 30 or 40 days. They are now providing their Web-based technology to commodities and energy-trading firms on a subscription-basis. Bennett told me the core business at EarthRisk Technologies is focusing on extreme weather events—heat waves, frigid cold snaps, and storms because extreme events are the ones with the highest impact.

—Mark Heesen of the National Venture Capital Association gave a good-news, bad-news presentation to the San Diego Venture Group last week. Among the interesting bright spots: Corporate venture capital is growing and San Diego-based Qualcomm now ranks as the nation’s second-largest corporate venture outfit. The bad news? U.S. VC firms invested $28 billion in startups last year, but only … Next Page »

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About a year ago, RealNetworks said the elimination of about 10 percent of its workforce officially marked the end of a difficult restructuring period, one that saw nearly 400 layoffs since 2009 and left the digital-media pioneer more focused, efficient, and ready for the future.

Turns out that was just a prelude.

On Thursday, the dot-com era survivor announced it was selling a chunk of its video software and some patents to Intel for $120 million. The deal, which significantly boosts RealNetworks’ cash reserves, also sent its stock price (NASDAQ: RNWK) rocketing up by a third. And it’s a signal of things to come as new CEO Thomas Nielsen repositions Real to focus on a smaller set of businesses.

Nielsen, a former VP at Adobe, joined RealNetworks in November after what founder and chairman Rob Glaser called the most exhaustive hiring process he’d seen in his career. Since then, Nielsen says, he went through a “bottom-up” review of everything the company did, and came away surprised at the sprawling businesses the company had been chasing.

Thomas Nielsen

If he had to give an elevator pitch for RealNetworks’ businesses, Nielsen joked, it would have to be in a very tall building. That won’t be the story in the future, however—Nielsen says the next several months will showcase more changes that reflect his strategy to refocus RealNetworks. And there is very little that is off the table.

“I’m basically turning over all the rugs within the company right now and looking at where there is value in each of our businesses—which ones will be strategic moving forward, and which ones won’t,” Nielsen says. “It’s very unlikely that this is a one-time transaction. On the same level here, I’m not trying to sort of break up the company into little pieces … My job, and what I’m doing here over the next 12 to 18 months, is really to focus the company and be really good about not being in 26 businesses, but being really good about one vision and one mission.”

The stock price shows how welcome the approach is on Wall Street. But new signs of life at RealNetworks will also probably be welcomed within the overall tech and business communities in the Seattle area. Real has produced plenty of notable alums over the years—including a U.S. senator!—and was once among the calling cards of a vibrant tech scene in the Emerald City.

In more recent years, the company has been kind of a question mark. Its once widely used media player software was bypassed by competitors even as Web and mobile video and music consumption skyrocketed, its Rhapsody music joint venture was spun out, and consumer offerings in cloud services and gaming were getting a new focus.

The game unit, GameHouse, has been discussed as a spin-of candidate in the past. But under new president Matt Hulett, GameHouse has focused heavily on the rapidly growing social games business, as AllThingsD’s Tricia Duryee detailed recently.

Asked about GameHouse’s future, Nielsen first talked about the ways that gaming was going through massive transformations in audience, distribution, and business models with the spread of social and mobile platforms. He also said that the company was “firing on all cylinders on social and mobile, and we have several things coming out over the next few months that will fuel that.”

At the same time, he said it’s still too early to tell how that fits into the company’s long-term plans.

“If RealNetworks becomes a powerhouse in gaming, then GameHouse should belong there. And if we decide to take a very different direction, then we will explore options like—I do realize that previous management looked at spinning it off,” Nielsen says. “It’s not off the table, but nothing’s off the table right now. It goes back to focus. I don’t think we can be in the gaming business and the potato-chip factory business and the networking business.” (No, they don’t really own potato-chip factories).

The sale of the RealNetworks’ video codec software, which makes those files easier to stream, means seven employees from that unit will be joining Intel. Nielsen acknowledged that the rather large restructuring he’s talking about would result in cutting some jobs, but he said the idea is to grow the remaining businesses rather than just getting smaller overall.

“I don’t have a target, but what I do know is that you don’t cut your way to growth,” he says.

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This is a story about what goes on under the hood of your smartphone or tablet device. It’s also about Yahoo, the troubled Santa Clara-CA based advertising and information giant. But Yahoo doesn’t make a single mobile gadget of its own. So what’s the connection?

It turns out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has ambitious plans to help publishers get more efficient about how they push content out to mobile devices. Specifically, Yahoo wants to become the new middleman of the mobile publishing world, giving media companies software that they could use to reach users of iPhones, Android devices, Windows phones, and other gadgets without having to bow to the programming approaches favored by their powerful makers—namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

To show how the system might work, Yahoo launched a fancy personalized news app back in November called Livestand. The app lets you select feeds from Yahoo partners like Forbes and ABC News and browse their stories on customized, magazine-like pages. It’s full of nifty user-interface elements like a 3D sideways-scrolling publication gallery. So far Livestand only runs on the Apple iPad, and at first glance it’s pretty similar to Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, and a number of other social news reader apps. But Livestand’s true importance is as a demonstration of what’s coming. The unique and potentially revolutionary thing about the app is its software design: it may look and act like a native iOS app, but it’s mostly written in Javascript and HTML5, the languages of the Web.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

How Yahoo pulled this off, and what it could mean for content owners who don’t want to put all their eggs in Apple’s basket—or Google’s, or Microsoft’s—was the focus of a long Xconomy interview last week with Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect for Yahoo’s platform technology group in Sunnyvale, CA. I’d heard Fernandez-Ruiz speak before about how Yahoo is betting on HTML5—the next-generation version of the markup language underlying all Web pages—as an antidote to overreliance on proprietary operating systems like Apple’s iOS. “If you only work in iOS you are bound to the rules of iTunes,” he said at a December talk in San Francisco. “Publishers want pixel-precise, ‘Cupertino-like’ experiences—and we can do that, but also make layouts fluid,” he said.

I wanted to know more about exactly how Yahoo can do this, so I invited Fernandez-Ruiz to my office and quizzed him about the state of mobile software architecture, the role of the Platform Technology Group inside Yahoo, and the true significance of Livestand. The story he told will be eye-opening for anyone who was under the impression that the future of mobile apps is in Apple and Google’s hands alone. Those two companies may control the lion’s share of the smartphone market at the moment, but if Yahoo goes through with plans to share the tools behind Livestand with outside developers, it could help push the siloed mobile-app world back in the direction of the open Web, where no single company is able to dictate how online software and services should work.

The first thing you need to understand about Yahoo’s publishing vision is that it’s coming from the Platform Technology Group. This is the same part of the company that created and then open-sourced key technologies that are now part of the Web’s infrastructure, such as Hadoop, which allows companies to run big, distributed software systems, and YUI, a library of JavaScript tools for building rich Internet applications. Yahoo built many of these tools as part of an effort that began more than half a decade ago to reduce what Fernandez-Ruiz calls a “technical debt.” The company was weighed down by all of the separate technologies its engineers had built to support services like Yahoo Music and Yahoo Movies, and it needed a central platform. “There was a realization around that time that we had to switch the company from being vertical to being horizontal, and start creating reusable technology that we could deploy across the whole place,” he says. “That is how Hadoop got started, for example.”

Technologies created by the Platform Technology Group, such as Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), also help the company and its partners tailor content to appeal to specific users based on their demographics. Fernandez-Ruiz says click-throughs increased 300 percent after Yahoo applied C.O.R.E. to … Next Page »

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I’ve been taking in Google’s recent release of “Search, plus your world” (or SPYW as the cool kids say) over the last several days, reflecting on what it means for Wetpaint and other media companies; but perhaps even more importantly, deeply understanding what it indicates about Facebook and Google themselves. As we all know by now, these most recent changes are meant to make its search more personal by up-weighting social activity in its algorithm, and using each person’s own position within their circles to determine relevance.

You might think that I would be one of the first to jump in the game with Google. After all, my company Wetpaint has been making a massive investment in distributing our content via other social channels, particularly Facebook. We’ve been seeing massive returns. And, I’ve even gone on a limb to predict that Facebook should be implementing its own Web-wide search this year.

Still, when it comes to playing Google’s social games, so far I’ve advocated staying on the sidelines of all their social venues—even their recent business pages. That’s been because even though the stadium lights are on, no one is on the field. More specifically, even though Google has 90 million registered users of the service, we see very little activity of significance among our target audience. But with its new SPYW changes, the question is: Has Google indeed forced companies’ hands?

Unfortunately, they have. And, in doing so, it marks a milestone in the changing mentality of Google. The search company’s great innovation—using the signals of the Web to best determine what the audience really wanted—has now been subverted. The company’s originally unshakable-seeming ethos of mechanistic neutrality has slowly, slowly, slowly, and now all of a sudden given way, and the new precedent is to favor its own business interests over those of the audience.

The result, like it or not, is that companies that rely on search for traffic must hear and obey loud and clear Google’s message that Google will favor those that favor it. It’s a dirty truth, and one far more chilling than the other more technical biases of its algorithm before.

Google has already started infusing search with the content that’s been blessed via Google+. Do a search for “New York Times” and you’ll probably find the New York Times plus.google.com page as the second search result. Search for “Mark Zuc” and you’ll likely see Zuckerberg’s Google+ page (despite the irony) populate as an option in the Google Instant choices.

I haven’t seen this bleed over to news stories yet, but I believe that it’s coming. Soon you’ll do a search for the latest headlines and your search results will be chock full with musings from your friends and non-friends inside Google+.

Google+ may not take off as a real social network, but Google has indicated that it’s throwing its full weight behind it anyway to make the best of what it’s got. Even if consumers don’t adopt it en masse, whatever activity is present will pepper the famous algorithm’s search results.

The irony here is that Google’s pivot toward a social search belies how important that social data is. The company is putting its lock on search at risk to gain a chance at a foothold on social. But what really comes through to me is that a great social search can be a winning product—if it’s populated with the right social data. So far, Google’s is not.

The question is—if that’s what I’m after—won’t I still just go to Facebook, where all my friends actually are (and which Google has adamantly cut out of SPYW)?

While SPYW does force publishers to support Google’s social network, fortunately it will be a temporary sacrifice from publishers during this period of transition from these days of search to a socially wired world. And that forthcoming world looks increasingly like it will be wired not by Google, but by its arch-enemy Facebook. Indeed, by corrupting the quality of their search product, Google may have just opened up a clear product entry into search for their rival as well.

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Now that it’s got a very Apple-like system in place—tablet computer paired with digital media—Amazon.com appears to be cranking up the volume on its online music service as well.

The San Francisco office of Amazon’s a2z research and development subsidiary is chock full of job ads for people to work on the Amazon MP3 store and Cloud Player, the e-commerce giant’s challenger to Apple’s long-dominant iTunes music platform. The company says it’s looking to “rapidly grow this team,” and the 21 job ads listed paint a picture of that growth.

Amazon’s looking for a lot of different skills. The company’s got ads for developers and engineers to tackle both the front-end software and mid-level networking systems. It wants designers to help polish the user interface, engineers to specifically take on overseas products, and program managers to oversee things. And, of course, mobile developers with experience in both Android and Apple’s iOS—a system that doesn’t currently have a native Amazon music player application.

Amazon’s MP3 store has been lurking around for several years, but has really picked up steam with the broad adoption of Android-based smartphones, which often have the Amazon store pre-installed. Its Cloud Player, which debuted last year, is bundled with the Amazon MP3 service.

(Trying to become a default music player for Android is another clever way that Amazon is yanking parts of that mobile operating system away from its sugar daddies at Google, which was late to the game with a serious digital music competitor last year. The more prominent example of Amazon’s bigfooting is now the Kindle Fire itself, which runs on an extremely customized version of Android.)

I’m not sure how much people will use the new Kindle Fire to listen to music, but that would fit into CEO Jeff Bezos’ concept of the Fire as “a fully integrated media service.”

That’s a key distinction. While Apple got into the digital music business to drive sales of its hardware devices, Amazon is plainly coming at the tablet and mobile-app markets as ways to just sell more stuff, whether that’s music or e-books or streaming movies or groceries (still in Seattle only!) or tube socks, for that matter. The longer you stay in Amazon’s digital storefront, the more they know about you, and the likelier it is that you’ll buy something from them next time.

iTunes could certainly stand to face a strong competitor here—from a user’s perspective, the software can be very difficult to navigate and sometimes feels like it’s barely been updated in years (just ask one of the whiners on this “I Hate iTunes” Facebook page.) But even with an integrated MP3 store and attached Cloud Player that makes listening easier, Amazon still has a ton of work to do if it hopes to make a dent in Apple’s huge music-selling lead—especially now that Google also is also on the case.

At the moment, Amazon and other runners-up in digital music are still fighting over scraps. Market research firm NPD Group has estimated that Amazon accounts for about 14 percent of the digital song download market, with Apple claiming about 70 percent. From the look of these hiring plans, Amazon is hoping to get serious about changing that balance.

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Money pumped into San Diego’s regional economy by venture capital firms hit an eight-year low in 2011, with a total of $829 million invested in 104 startups throughout the year, according to the MoneyTree VC survey being released today. The 2011 deal count was the lowest seen in San Diego since 1997.

The 2011 numbers represent a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent decline in deals in comparison with the previous year, when VCs put a total of $871.7 million in 126 startups, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thomson Reuters.

The decline in San Diego’s venture activity ran counter to the nationwide trend in 2011, in which $28.5 billion was invested in 3,673 deals—and ranks as the third-highest total in the past decade. The U.S. numbers represent a 22 percent increase over the $23.6 billion in 2010 VC funding and a 4 percent rise over the previous year’s deal count, according to the MoneyTree analysis.

The overall U.S. trend depicted in the MoneyTree Report generally agrees with the rise in venture activity nationwide that CB Insights charted last week in its 2011 findings. CB Insights, the New York financial analysis firm, said the $30.6 billion VCs invested in 3,051 deals throughout 2011 was a 10-year high in terms of both dollars and deals. (The two sets of numbers don’t line up exactly because the firms use different methods to collect their venture data, and count dollars and deals in different ways.)

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the MoneyTree Report shows that venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area, with life sciences startups in diagnostics, drugs, and devices accounting for roughly two-thirds of the transactions. It represented a … Next Page »

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I have a lot of Apple gear, and I’m pretty happy with it. There’s just one problem. The better Apple’s stuff gets, the less patience I have for everyone else’s clunky hardware and software. Televisions and all the boxes we hook up to them are the worst offenders. No two TV manufacturers or set-top-box makers use the same remote controls or user-interface conventions, and they’re all painfully bad (except those developed for the hockey-puck-like Apple TV, which are decent but not great). That’s why I’m hoping that Apple will eventually follow through on Steve Jobs’ dying wish, in biographer Walter Isaacson’s words, “to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

While we await that glorious day, though, there are some existing technologies that can help ease the pain. In fact, there’s no lack of innovation in the area of video entertainment, as the acres devoted to new “digital home” technologies at this week’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attested. The problem is a lack of unification—meaning interfaces that would make it just as easy to find, buy, watch, and share great cable content on your TV as it is to find, purchase, consume, and share great book, magazine, or game content on your iPad.

For the last few months I’ve been following a TV technology startup called Dijit Media that’s both innovating and making an attempt at unification. They know Apple is coming, and that the Cupertinoids—unless they’ve completely lost their touch in the post-Jobs era—are likely to create a product that melds beautiful TV hardware, a slick and simple operating system, and a rich content marketplace. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based firm has built its own universal TV remote for iOS devices, and is using it to foster a new “second screen” culture.

Dijit's program listing and remote control on the iPad

The Dijit app, which controls your TV with help from a Griffin Technology gadget called the Beacon, marries channel listings from your cable operator with diverse Internet resources like Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix. It turns your iPhone or iPad into a kind of social command center for the living room—a place where you can browse listings, find out what your friends are watching, or rearrange your Netflix queue, all while sitting back in front of your big screen. It works with hundreds of models of TVs, DVRs, and set-top boxes, replacing the welter of remote controls and on-screen interfaces that come with those devices and moving all of the control and choice to the smaller but far more versatile touchscreen.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet fully integrate with Internet-TV boxes like the Apple TV and the Roku Player—and I’ll have more to say on that in a minute. But Dijit figures that the more progress it can make toward unification before Apple enters the market in earnest, the more Apple’s competitors will need to seek the startup out. “We think sooner or later Apple will come in, and it won’t be a ‘hobby,’ and it will show what’s really coming,” says Jeremy Toeman, Dijit’s chief product officer. “The Samsungs and Vizios of the world will need external technology to bridge the gap, and the only way to bridge it will be to go cross-platform. We think we can help the consumer electronics manufacturers adapt to a world where they are not as proficient at building the end-to-end ecosystem as Apple is.”

Dijit, originally known as UMEE, was founded in 2009 by former Nvidia and Riverbed Technology engineer Maksim Ioffe. It won funding in late 2010 from technology investor Alsop Louie, backer of streaming-video startup Justin.TV and mobile iOS game developer Smith & Tinker. The startup switched to its current name at CES in January 2011, which is also when it released the iPhone version of the remote-control app and announced its partnership with Griffin.

The $70 Beacon device, which is available at Apple Stores, bridges the communications gap between … Next Page »

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When Shawn Bercuson and his family went to Park City, UT, exactly one year ago, they may have been the only people not in town to attend the famous Sundance Film Festival, which is held there every January. “I do enjoy movies, but my family and I go skiing every year during Sundance,” he says. “If you go then, the mountains are empty. It’s unbelievable. And then at night, there are world-class concerts and movies. It’s a ton of fun.”

Still, it wasn’t to be a typical January for Bercuson. The former Chicagoan, who was one of the original employees at Groupon and a former principal with venture firm Lightbank, had just moved to San Francisco. He was thinking about his next career move. His friends knew that, and they were peppering him with ideas.

“I had some friends in the [film] industry who know me as their go-to tech entrepreneur, and everybody was talking about distribution and how DVD revenues are declining,” Bercuson recounts. “I started talking to producers and filmmakers and going to meetings my friends had set up. And it was amazing to me, number one, that this business was so antiquated, and number two, that it was such a huge opportunity. They really needed help.”

By “this business,” Bercuson means independent films—those where more than half the financing comes from sources outside the Hollywood studio system. For indie filmmakers, it’s a fiercely competitive world. Of the 4,000 films submitted to the Sundance festival in 2011, only 200 were accepted, and only 50 of those were acquired for theatrical distribution. “The good movies were getting financed,” says Bercuson. “The problem was distribution. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized how similar the problem was to Groupon.”

In a way, Bercuson suggests, indie movies are like coupons for local deals. There are a lot of coupons out there, but before Groupon they were harder to find, remember, share, and use. Similarly, “There were plenty of repositories for movies, like Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix, but they were still having a hard time finding an audience. The question is, how do you connect content to an audience that’s relevant when [the filmmakers] don’t have the money to market these titles?”

At Prescreen, the San Francisco startup Bercuson founded shortly after his Park City trip, the answer also looks a lot like Groupon’s. The company picks one independent movie per day to feature on its website and in its e-mail newsletter. People who rent a streaming version of the movie on that first day get 50 percent off the rental price ($4, as opposed to the usual $8).

As with Groupon, there’s a social and reputation-based element: if you’re among the first 5 percent of people to rent a movie, or if you can get at least three friends to rent on your recommendation, your next rental is free. And just like Groupon’s coupons, Prescreen’s offers are time-bound: once users start playing the movie, they have 48 hours to finish viewing, and most movies get booted off the site after 60 days to make room for new additions.

The only catch is that you have to watch Prescreen’s movies on your computer. The service doesn’t yet work with iPads, set-top boxes, or Internet-connected TVs. (That said, it’s not too hard to play streaming video from a laptop on a big-screen TV, if you have the right connectors. See my 2009 column Cutting the Cable: It’s Easier Than You Think.)

To tap into the excitement around this year’s Sundance Festival, which runs from January 19-29, Prescreen has gathered all of the publicly available trailers for Sundance-anointed films—so far that includes 86 of this year’s 112 features. You can’t stream the full version of these movies, but you might be able to after the festival. The whole point of Prescreen—and the reason Bercuson himself will be in Park City again this year—is to offer an outlet to the majority of filmmakers who, come January 30, won’t have distribution deals.

Also starting this week, Prescreen will spend three weeks promoting films from the previous three Sundance festivals that “didn’t get the love they deserved,” according to Bercuson. These hidden gems might even have turned up on Netflix or iTunes, but haven’t yet found their niche audiences. “We are going to show that there is a lot of great content out there that doesn’t have mass-market appeal but does appeal to me or you,” he says.

Bercuson launched Prescreen on September 14 with $1 million in Series A funding from a group of individual investors including former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya, CMEA Capital partner Saad Khan, Kauna Ventures chairman Ed Cluss, Rapleaf founder Auren Hoffman, and … Next Page »

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San Diego’s MicroPower Technologies, founded in 2008 to develop ultra-low power wireless video surveillance products, said it has landed the first installment of a $6.5 million round of funding from Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and an undisclosed private fund.

The Series C funding represents MicroPower’s first institutional investment. Motorola Solutions Venture Capital is the investment arm of Schaumburg, IL-based Motorola Solutions, the company that retained Motorola’s mainstay radio, bar-code scanner, and RFID business in last year’s separation from Motorola’s mobile business.

MicroPower was initially funded by Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels, and was one of the first startups in San Diego to take advantage of the free EvoNexus incubator program established by CommNexus, a local nonprofit industry group.

The company says it plans to use the funding to step-up marketing of its wireless surveillance camera and related technology. The company’s flagship product, the Rugged-i wireless video camera, eliminates data and power cables and substantially cuts installation costs, such as the expense of pulling cable.

MicroPower has targeted commercial and government customers, including border protection, retail, education, and public utility markets. The company also says its wireless networking technology could be incorporated into wearable video cameras by law enforcement, paramedics, first responders, and military personnel.

Last year, MicroPower was named as a high tech award winner in the communications products and services category by the San Diego chapter of Tech America and as 2011 new product of the year by Security Products magazine.

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—San Diego’s Active Network (NYSE ACTV), which provides online event registration and related services, acquired Philadelphia-based StarCite for about $51 million in stock and cash. StarCite, which provides Web-based event management services for companies around the world, has about 300 employees. The Active Network said StarCite will become part of its newly launched “Business Solutions” division, which will serve the events industry.

—San Diego-based Accelrys (NASDAQ: ACCL), which provides scientific enterprise research and development software and services, said it’s paying $35 million to acquire VelQuest, a Boston-area developer of systems that support good manufacturing practices for FDA-regulated industries. Accelrys said the VelQuest acquisition would expand its product line to include software used in pharmaceutical quality assurance and quality control.

—San Diego’s Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR), which specializes in Multimedia over Coax (MoCA) technology used in home entertainment systems, said it wants to purchase certain assets of Trident Microsystems’ set-top box and system-on-a-chip business. Entropic submitted its $55 million offer as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization that Sunnyvale, CA-based Trident filed last Wednesday. The bankruptcy court in Delaware must approve the Entropic offer, which could happen by the end of March if no other bidders step forward.

—Qualcomm Chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs is set to deliver the opening keynote address tomorrow morning at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Jacobs is expected to talk about Qualcomm’s vision for mobile computing as smart phones and tablets increasingly become a mainstay tool for consumer media and entertainment. The three-day show also will serve as a global stage for Sony Electronics, the San Diego-based arm of Sony’s U.S. business. San Diego’s Razer, Entropic Communications, Leap Wireless, Independa, Skin-It, and Marchon 3D, also are displaying products at the show.

—I profiled San Diego-based Verimatrix, a venture-backed company that develops encryption software and related security technologies for pay-TV networks. Verimatrix CEO Tom Munro told me the company has been successful in creating piracy protection software for Internet-Protocol Television (IPTV), and today more than half of the company’s business is in so-called unmanaged networks, such as Netflix, which provides streaming video “Over the Top” (OTT) of a cable- or satellite-based broadband Internet platform.

—The 2011 executive compensation survey showed a 3.7 percent increase nationwide in tech sector CEO pay over 2010. The annual CompStudy survey produced by executive search firm J. Robert Scott and law firm WilmerHale in collaboration with Noam Wasserman, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. The study found that non-founder technology CEOs brought in average base salaries of $242,000 in 2011, up from $233,000 in 2010.

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How will the media habits of families, especially those with young kids, evolve in the era of the tablet computer?

I got an interesting perspective on that question over the holidays, which I spent with my brother and his family in Alaska. Jamie and his wife Jen Athey have two loveable children, aged four (Kieran) and 13 months (Lucy). My parents were also visiting, so the Athey-Roush house on Moose Mountain, 15 miles outside of Fairbanks, was temporarily home to five adults and two children, plus two dogs and two cats.

The weather was standard for central Alaska in December—a frigid -10F to -40F—so there wasn’t a lot of outdoor activity. There is a TV in the house, but given that it’s located in the room where the toddler sleeps, it’s almost never used. In any case, there is no cable TV service that far from town, so there’s not much to watch besides DVDs and Netflix. (Internet data gets beamed in wirelessly from a transmitter on nearby Ester Dome.)

What we did have at hand, however, were four tablets (three iPads and a Motorola Xoom) and three smartphones (one iPhone and two Motorola Atrix Android phones). So conditions were ideal for observing how a high-density group of family members uses their mobile devices for entertainment, reference, learning, communication, and just goofing off.

It goes without saying that Kieran and Lucy already know their way around touch-driven devices. Kieran can’t read fluently yet, but he knows exactly which icons open his favorite apps. He can flip virtual pages, start and stop videos, and tap on words in lists. To his generation, non-touch interfaces will feel antique. Indeed, when we took the kids into town to visit the public library, Kieran had no idea how to use the trackballs attached to the ancient Windows computers.

He did, however, leave the library with three actual books. His favorite: The Z Was Zapped, a book of abecedarian mayhem by illustrator Chris Van Allsburg.

There is an idea circulating on the net that tablets somehow spoil kids for other types of media. You may have seen the video that surfaced on YouTube last fall called “A Magazine Is an iPad that Does Not Work.” The video, which been viewed about 3.4 million times, shows a 1-year-old girl deftly navigating an iPad, then trying futilely to interact with the pages of a paper fashion magazine using pinch-and-spread gestures like those pioneered for the iPhone. To the Apple-fanboy dad who made the video, it showed how “magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives.”

But if I could offer one conclusion based on my visit, it would be this: the notion that tablets will kill off older, more static media is poppycock. Kieran’s bedroom has shelves full of books, from Dr. Seuss to Richard Scarry to Roald Dahl to Dorling Kindersley’s obsessively detailed nature and engineering books. His parents read to him at least twice a day, at naptime and bedtime. And that’s not counting all the time they spend reading with him and Lucy, usually curled up on the couch or the easy chair with a physical book. When reading with Kieran, the only problem is finding books around the house that he doesn’t already know by heart. Lucy, who isn’t old enough to comprehend what books are, nonetheless loves to flip through them.

At the same time, tablets offer beginning readers elements that books can’t. Jamie and Jen bought the Xoom so that Kieran could use a Flash-based early reading program from Seattle-based Headsprout. (Flash doesn’t work on the iPad.) Headsprout uses cartoon games to keep kids motivated while they learn to recognize and sound out words. In the lesson segment Kieran showed me, he advanced a monkey character through a jungle by … Next Page »

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Since it was founded in 2000, San Diego-based Verimatrix has raised about $50 million in institutional venture funding and spent untold hours of software programming to address a relatively simple problem nagging the pay-TV industry for more than a decade. As Verimatrix CEO Tom Munro puts it, “We keep people from watching television without paying for it.”

These days, however, the security issues confronting Verimatrix and the pay-TV industry have only become more complex.

Munro estimates there are 110 million consumers in the United States who pay to watch television provided by cable, satellite, and other TV service providers (with an estimated market penetration of 90-plus percent). At the same time, the number of U.S. consumers who are watching TV online, using Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, and other Internet video services has exploded—with the fast-rising total estimated at somewhere between 40 million and 70 million, according to consultant Bill Rosenblatt of New York’s Giant Steps Media Technology Strategies.

Meanwhile, cable TV operators like Time Warner, Comcast, and Cox Communications are moving to offer their subscribers “Everywhere TV” that allows them to watch any digital video content on any device. And of course, electronic device-makers have been busy developing an estimated 1 million different types of gadgets that consumers can use to watch digital content anywhere.

Verimatrix fits into this industry maelstrom by developing encryption software and related security technologies for pay-TV networks. In some respects, Verimatrix’ task has gotten easier as ever-increasing bandwidth has enabled the industry to move increasingly to a “pure digital” format, and away from more specialized electronic devices, such as Blu-Ray players. Riding this trend, the company has been successful in creating piracy protection software for Internet-Protocol Television (IPTV), and today more than half of the company’s business is in so-called unmanaged networks, such as Netflix, which provides streaming video “Over the Top” (OTT) of a cable- or satellite-based broadband Internet platform.

“The nice thing about our solution is that it’s based on software, and not on a hardware, card-reader type of security technology,” Munro says. He describes Verimatrix as … Next Page »

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Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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Carlsbad, CA-based Razer bills itself as a maker of “professional gaming” hardware, which always struck me as an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp.”

Nevertheless, Razer just demonstrated how serious it is, raising $50 million in a Series A round venture round led by the IDG-Accel China Capital Fund, a global investment fund established by IDG and Accel Partners.

Razer was founded in 1998 by Min-Liang Tan and Robert Krakoff, and says its capital previously came from angel investors and the company’s own global operations. Over the past 13 years or so, Razer says its operations have grown to hundreds of employees in nine cities, including San Francisco, Hamburg, Seoul, Shanghai and Singapore.

“We took a long time raising our first VC round as games like Battlefield 3 kept us pretty busy recently,” CEO Tan says in a statement from the company. “More importantly, we took our time selecting an institutional investor as we wanted to find a partner that understood our commitment to gaming and our no-compromise attitude to designing products. Plus these guys didn’t freak out when we disappeared for a week in the middle of the deal when Skyrim launched.”

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Boston-based Skyword is moving up in the world. The startup, which makes a software platform for brands to create Web content, said today it has closed $6 million in financing from Cox Media Group.

The company says it helps publishers—which is marketing-speak for retail and industry brands, as well as media companies—create online content “for a search and social driven world.” In other words, Skyword farms out marketing content to writers with experience in everything from medicine to investing to parenting, and tries to make the content discoverable by consumers via search engines and social networks. (Depending on whom you talk to, this is either one of the savviest or most annoying ideas ever. Or possibly both, if you view marketing as a necessary evil.)

Skyword is led by founder and CEO Tom Gerace. The company started up about a year ago, out of the news and social-networking site Gather (which still exists). Skyword’s customers include Procter & Gamble, Everyday Health, and ImpreMedia.

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