It’s been a busy week around here for the big tech companies. At Xconomy, we don’t usually report on things like product releases from Microsoft or sales figures from Amazon—our main focus is on new ideas, models, and companies—but readers need to understand where the big players are heading so they can see the gaps and opportunities for new businesses. So, for each of these pieces of mainstream tech news, I’ll tell you why savvy innovators and business leaders should care.

—Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) demonstrated its Web-based Chrome operating system for the first time in public yesterday. It won’t be available for another year, but the tech community is scrambling to understand all the implications. (Google’s Seattle engineers have contributed technology to the Chrome Web browser, helping to boost security—one potential advantage of a cloud-based operating system).

Sure, a fully cloud-based OS is a direct threat to Microsoft’s business model and the ecosystem of companies that support Windows. But more than that, it could reshape the landscape of online advertising by providing a new platform for launching ads on mobile devices, video channels (YouTube), and Internet TV. Perhaps the only thing that can slow down Google’s dominance on the Web is the federal government. In other words, this could get ugly.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide info about your business contacts within Outlook e-mail. It’s all part of Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector, an add-in that feeds you data from your social networks. Integrating e-mail with social networks and search is a fast-growing area, with startups like Gist in Seattle (backed by Paul Allen and Foundry Group) helping lead the way. Gist’s CEO T.A. McCann told TechFlash that he’s known about Microsoft’s effort for a while and doesn’t see it as a direct challenge. Gist’s offering is more advanced, he said, and it includes features like integrating with Salesforce.com and the iPhone. But startups and investors beware: if you’re in this crowded space, you better have a product that cuts through the noise and has a way to attract customers fast.

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) is in discussions with Viacom’s MTV Networks to sell off at least some of its stake in the Rhapsody music service, as first reported by PaidContent. In a regulatory filing, prompted by a tender offer to issue new stock, Real said it is in talks to reorganize the management structure and/or corporate governance of the division, which might mean giving up its majority ownership stake (51 percent) in Rhapsody. Back in September, digital-media guru Bill Baxter (now at Seattle-based Cozi) wrote in Xconomy about Rhapsody’s fierce competition with Pandora, iTunes, and piracy. Message to startups: the world of digital music services is probably not where you want to be.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been busy ramping up operations ahead of the holiday shopping season. Its billion-dollar acquisition of Zappos is helping it expand into shoes and apparel, and its Kindle sales look poised to take off, especially now that Barnes & Noble’s competing e-book reader, the Nook, has sold out until January. Amazon has really become the business and technology model to follow in online retail and product search. While there is still room for e-commerce startups to compete in various niches, they would be wise to study how Amazon built its brand and customer relationships before branching out to the wider world of retail.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It wasn’t so much the predictions as the discussion that was most interesting at last night’s annual predictions dinner, organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association. Will Twitter be acquired in 2010, and why? Who will have the dominant cloud computing platform in the next couple of years? What kind of startup are you looking to build or finance, and which areas are you staying away from?

A panel of Seattle-area tech entrepreneurs and investors gamely took the bait and had some lively exchanges over the course of an hour. OK, these guys all know each other, and we’ll take what they say with a grain of salt since it’s a public forum—but here were some of the most interesting points they made. (You can read more comprehensive recaps of the panel on Brier Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times, and soon on TechFlash by moderator John Cook.)

The panel was split 3 to 2, with the narrow majority guessing Twitter will get bought next year. Andy Sack of seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op predicted Twitter will make more money than Facebook in 2010 (surprising, given the current disparity in the other direction). Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate firm, said Twitter should charge for search (as it has begun to do in partnerships with Google and Bing). Kelly Smith from Curious Office and the startup Pressplane argued that Twitter could be “absorbed by a big company,” but “it’s going to go nowhere.” By the end of the evening, Sack was predicting that Microsoft would buy Twitter next year.

There was a consensus that 2010 could be a big year for acquisitions. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson boldly predicted that Amazon will buy Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu, while opening brick and mortar “Amazon media stores.” Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group said Cisco might buy EMC (for VMware) and Seattle-based F5 Networks, while Microsoft might buy Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. Sack predicted Adobe would pick up Seattle photo-editing startup Picnik. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) would buy Seattle’s Cheezburger Network, and someone would buy Redfin.

Looking back on 2009 for a minute, the big deals that were questioned by the panel included Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture (Gottesman said it just didn’t make sense strategically) and …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace. Those companies’ products spread over the Internet like a virus. But why hasn’t there been a runaway hit like those in the mobile software world? Why does it take so much longer to build value, and a strong customer base, in mobile companies than in certain Internet startups?

Dan Shapiro had some entertaining thoughts on this yesterday, as he spoke to the Mobile Northwest 2009 crowd in Seattle. Shapiro is the co-founder and CEO of Ontela, a Seattle-based mobile imaging startup, and he’s a veteran of RealNetworks and Microsoft. I won’t do justice to his presentation, but here’s the gist.

Hotmail was one of the first examples of viral marketing. By appending the message, “Get your free e-mail at hotmail.com” (or some such) to the bottom of each e-mail, Hotmail helped pioneer a new method of promotion that was “basically free, highly measurable, and ridiculously effective,” Shapiro said. Its number of new subscribers jumped from hundreds to tens of thousands per day.

Maybe there’s something about the viral distribution model that doesn’t fly in the mobile world, Shapiro thought. In epidemiology, he pointed out, researchers use a parameter called the basic reproduction number to gauge whether a viral outbreak will spread or die out. The corresponding number in the Internet world tells you how many people a given user will “infect,” on average: Shapiro gave some estimates for Facebook (6), Gmail (5), MySpace (4), and Twitter (1.5). He argued that Twitter hasn’t been spreading virally; it has used more conventional marketing through word of mouth and the press.

“Heterogeneity in the target population is the best protection to keep you from being infected by viruses,” he said. That means some people have different levels of resistance, different behaviors, different types of contacts, and so forth, so not everyone will get infected by, say, the latest flu bug.

And that same kind of variety that makes individuals different is exactly why mobile isn’t viral, he argued. He cited some survey stats to explain how fragmented this market really is: There are roughly 500 different types of handsets, about 30 per carrier; about two-thirds of people (65 percent) don’t have a data plan; three out of four people (75 percent) are on a different carrier from you; almost that many (70 percent) don’t have a smartphone. And despite all the attention it gets, 98 percent of mobile users don’t have an iPhone. (iPhone apps are definitely not spreading virally, Shapiro said. He also argued that Tegic’s T9 predictive texting did not spread virally; it was pushed out by carriers and handset manufacturers in a dedicated partnership.)

“We will not see the Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo of mobile until this changes,” Shapiro said. He added that he’s not advocating one standard mobile platform; he’s just saying how it is right now.

So his advice for mobile entrepreneurs and investors was:

—Be skeptical of anyone peddling viral marketing in mobile.

—Build a business model that doesn’t require big adoption.

—Pick a market segment that’s homogeneous. (Examples: BlackBerry corporate users, Silicon Valley techies.)

—Use ubiquitous technologies like WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and SMS texting.

—Wait… (”Things are getting better,” he said.)

Afterward, Shapiro said he thinks “Europe holds the future of the U.S.” Over there, wireless carriers have influence, but only about half of consumers get their services directly from carriers, versus about 90 percent in the U.S. “I think you’ll see the carrier role diminish,” he said, when it comes to mobile software.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Just when I thought venture deals, especially for software and tech companies, had headed south for the winter (or longer), the Northwest erupted with a slew of financings in the past week.

—But first, some serious biotech. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $30 million Series B round for Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based stem cell company with ties to the University of Washington, as Luke reported. Existing investors Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates also participated in the funding, as well as three strategic corporate investors—Astellas Venture Management and Genzyme Ventures were named.

—Seattle-based DocuSign, a maker of software to automate and control the process of electronic signatures, received a strategic investment from Second Century Ventures, the VC fund of the National Association of Realtors. The funding amount was undisclosed, but the money will be used to accelerate and extend DocuSign’s efforts with real estate customers.

—Beaverton, OR-based Avnera pulled in an $8 million equity round from undisclosed investors, according to a regulatory filing. The company’s previous investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures, Intel Capital, and DAG Ventures. Avnera was founded in 2004, and designs novel chips for wireless audio applications.

—Seattle stealth startup Doxo raised $5.25 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing and media reports. The investors were not disclosed, but David Feinleib of Mohr Davidow Ventures was listed on the SEC form as a director.

—Bellevue, WA-based Enroute Systems, a developer of software that helps companies manage their parcel-shipping logistics, closed a Series A funding round worth $810,000 from Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society, Puget Sound Venture Club, and angel investors. Next up, Enroute is looking …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

[Updated 11/16/09 6pm. See below] Microsoft co-founder and renowned technologist Paul Allen has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer, as of early this month, according to an e-mail message sent from Allen’s sister, Jody Allen Patton, to employees of Seattle-based Vulcan and its affiliates this afternoon. The message was sent to Xconomy and other media outlets by a Vulcan spokesperson.

Doctors say Allen has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, which is a relatively common form of lymphoma, and he has begun chemotherapy, according to the e-mail. The message pointed out that Allen “beat Hodgkin’s a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too.” That form of cancer is different from Allen’s current diagnosis, which is classified as a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is an umbrella term for cancers in which white blood cells of the immune system start growing out of control, according to the National Cancer Institute. The disease is the fourth most commonly diagnosed cancer in the U.S. each year, following lung, bladder, and melanoma tumors, according to the American Cancer Society. About 66,000 new cases are expected to be diagnosed this year in the U.S., and about 19,500 people are expected to die from the disease. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is the most common subtype of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, accounting for 30 percent of all newly diagnosed cases, according to an expert review published by the Lymphoma Research Foundation.

Vulcan spokesman David Postman wouldn’t comment on any specific questions about the stage of Allen’s disease, how early it was detected, whether it is an aggressive or slow-growing form of lymphoma, or where he is getting treatment.

Those questions are key to determining what kind of prognosis Allen has. His form of cancer is generally considered an aggressive, fast-growing lymphoma and requires immediate treatment, according to the Lymphoma Research Foundation’s description, authored by Carol Portlock of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Julie Vose of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, NE, and Bruce Cheson of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington D.C. The first sign is usually when the lymph nodes swell in the neck, armpit, or groin—other symptoms include night sweats, unexplained fevers, and weight loss, according to the summary from Portlock and colleagues.

A common treatment for the disease is a regimen of chemotherapy combined with Roche and Biogen’s targeted antibody drug rituximab (Rituxan), which kills excess B-cells of the immune system. The combination treatment can lead to a cure in a large number of patients. “Even when a cure is not possible, treatment can often keep the disease away for many years,” Portlock wrote.

“Paul is feeling OK and remains upbeat,” the Vulcan message stated. “He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.”

Here is the Vulcan e-mail in its entirety [added 11/16/09 6pm]:

.

To employees of Vulcan and affiliates:

I want to let you know that Paul was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

He received the diagnosis early this month and has begun chemotherapy. Doctors say he has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common form of lymphoma.

This is tough news for Paul and the family. But for those who know Paul’s story, you know he beat Hodgkin’s a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too.

Paul is feeling OK and remains upbeat. He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.

We would ask you to respect Paul’s privacy and not discuss this outside of the office.

If you have any questions, please ask your EC member.

Thank you in advance for what I know will be all your good thoughts for Paul.
Jody

.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Swipely, a Providence, RI-based startup that was quietly launched earlier this year, has raised $875,000 of a planned $1 million equity financing, according to an SEC document filed last week. Angus Davis—a co-founder of the voice-based Internet search and services provider Tellme Networks, which was sold to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and became a subsidiary of the Redmond, WA-based software giant in 2007—is listed as an executive and director of the startup. Davis told Mass High Tech in a story this morning that First Round Capital, of Philadelphia and San Francisco, led the financing in Swipely. He declined to describte to MHT, or when reached by phone this afternoon, what his startup is doing.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It turns out that Don Dodge—famous among entrepreneurs for putting a personal face on Microsoft’s operations in New England, until his unceremonious termination earlier this month—was only in job limbo for about about an hour and a half. Dodge sends Xconomy word this morning that he has been hired by Microsoft archrival Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, was the first person to contact him with a job offer, “90 minutes after the news of the layoff hit” on November 4, Dodge says in a blog post about his move.

At Microsoft, Dodge was director of business development for the Emerging Business Team. In an e-mail, Dodge says he’ll have a similar role at Google: “My main job will be working with developers helping them build apps on Google technologies and platforms. Startups will always be my first love, so I will spend as much time as possible with developers at startups.”

Dodge says he will spend his “20 percent time”—the one day per week that Google employees are encouraged to spend on personal projects—working with Google Ventures, the venture funding wing led by Rich Miner from Google’s Cambridge office and Bill Maris from the company’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters. “There are some obvious synergies there,” Dodge writes.

Dodge’s job shift will ultimately take him away from Massachusetts. But he says he’ll be working from Google’s Cambridge office through the holidays, and that he will be “back in Boston so often people will think I still live here. It was the same after I left Silicon Valley…they think I still live there.”

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch broke the story about Dodge’s new job last night, and Dodge himself shared more details about it this morning.

In previous public statements about his departure from Microsoft, Dodge has been diplomatic to the point of saintliness. But in today’s post he takes the gloves partway off, writing that “laying off 5,000 people when you have $37B in cash and huge profits is not cool.”

He also takes a few jabs at Microsoft products—calling Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail management program “tired,” saying that his Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone “didn’t measure up,” and commenting that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is too slow. At Google, naturally enough, Dodge will be using Gmail to manage his e-mail, getting an Android-powered mobile phone, and using the Google Chrome browser. And it’s probably safe to assume he won’t be doing many searches on Bing.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Where is “the cloud”? It’s everywhere and nowhere; it’s the power of algorithms distributed across entire networks but concentrated down to the screen of your wireless laptop; it’s the sum of all the world’s on-demand computing jobs, churning away in big data centers in secure, undisclosed locations, flinging their inputs and outputs across the electronic ether. But for one day, at least, the nucleus of the cloud will be in a definite place: Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, the venue for Xconomy’s December 10 Cloud³ Forum and its companion event, CloudCamp Boston.

That 3 in the title of our event is an exponent, as in “Cloud Cubed.” The first time Xconomy organized a cloud computing seminar, back in June 2008, the urgent questions in cloud computing still centered around the basics—was the cloud secure? private? reliable? Today, vendors are on their way to solving most these fundamental technological challenges. But in their place, there’s a new welter of implementation-related questions.

Which cloud service model would your company be best off using—Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service? Should you build a private cloud, tap a public one, or think about hybrid models? How much money can you really save by turning to the cloud—and how much will you have to spend? Which cloud services are startups and big enterprises really using today, and which are still hype? Which cloud players do entrepreneurs need to know about beyond the Big Seven (Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, Sun, and VMware)? And where is the cloud heading—what new services and opportunities are being opened up for entrepreneurs?

When we sat down to design the agenda for this year’s cloud forum, we realized that there are so many of these important questions on the table that we couldn’t just call the event Cloud²—so we jumped straight to Cloud³.

We’re assembling a crack crew of industry experts for Cloud³, including representatives of big cloud infrastructure providers such as Akamai, Microsoft, and Iron Mountain; startups making the cloud more useful to other companies, such as Cloudswitch; and companies leveraging the cloud to provide services to their own customers, such as Allurent, Litl, Pixily, and Sonian. The half-day session (from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.) is designed especially for entrepreneurs, investors, and technologists, and our goal is to make sure that every attendee has a chance to learn from (and network with) the practitioners who are building and exploiting real cloud services.

We’ll release the detailed agenda for the event soon, but here’s the general picture:

• Keynote talks by Tom Leighteon, chief scientist at Akamai, and Yousef Khalidi, of the Windows Azure team at Microsoft.

• “Cloudbursts”—a series of presentations by six local startups offering innovative cloud services and/or making creative use of the cloud.

• An interactive “unpanel” exploring the nuts and bolts of how companies can best tap cloud services led by Sim Simeonov, a former partner at Polaris Venture Partners who now heads executive advisory service FastIgnite.

• A progress report from Eric Nakajima from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the Holyoke High Performance Computing Center in western Massachusetts.

You can see the full speaker list for Cloud³ here, and you can register for the event here. Early bird registration is available for $95—but we urge you to reserve your place now, because after November 23, the price goes up to $150. (We’ve also got a limited number of student tickets available for $30, and students can apply for event scholarships through the Stay in MA Program.)

We’re pleased to announce that we’re partnering with the CloudCamp organization to turn December 10 into a full day of cloud computing discussion and learning. CloudCamp Boston, an unconference for early adopters of cloud computing, will take place in the same space at Microsoft from 2:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. People who sign up for CloudCamp (registration is free) not only get discounted admission to Cloud3, but are welcome at a joint networking lunch from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m., which is hosted by Xconomy and Microsoft.

If you have questions about the event, please feel free to contact me at wroush@xconomy.com.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Early-stage tech financings are still chugging along, it seems. On the heels of yesterday’s news of a $5.25 million financing of Seattle stealth startup Doxo, I checked in with Keith McCall of Bellevue, WA-based Enroute Systems, a maker of parcel-shipping management software, to hear the latest on his company’s recent financing.

McCall, the company’s founder and CEO, says Enroute has closed an oversubscribed Series A round worth a total of $810,000. That includes more than $500,000 from Keiretsu Forum Northwest earlier this year, and a new investment (as of October) from W.R. “Ford” Smith, the founder of PetSmart. Other investors include Zino Society and Puget Sound Venture Club. (The Series A round also includes $60,000 that Enroute won in Zino Society’s investment forum this fall.)

Enroute makes a Web-based software platform that helps businesses choose the cheapest and fastest delivery service—international, national, or regional carriers—to ship their packages. McCall says the software reduces companies’ shipping costs by about 30 percent.

The startup has moved into new 4,500-square-foot digs in Bellevue—near the Burgermaster and Microsoft’s original offices—as of the start of November. It is now up to a dozen employees and has signed more than 50 business customers, including Zumiez, Natural Partners, Renton Western Wear, Theo Chocolate, BikeWagon.com, and Lumber Liquidators.

McCall, who previously founded Seattle-based e-mail and communications management firm Azaleos, says he expects Enroute to be profitable in the first half of next year, and is now focused on expanding its customer base.

With that in mind, he is already getting ready to raise more money. “For those investors who would like to join our existing angel investors today, we are immediately opening a $500K convertible note, which we anticipate converting to a Series B offering in 2010,” McCall says. He adds that the next formal capital raise “is targeted as a $3 million Series B.”

McCall says that next financing round will be focused on expanding the company’s shipping-management services to Asia and Europe. “We’re interested in continuing our momentum,” he says. “There’s huge opportunity for us to significantly reduce cost for businesses of all sizes.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Dossia is nearly three years from launching to provide electronic personal health records for major U.S. employers. And though the vision to provide employees of self-insured companies with a secure and portable electronic record of their health information is still alive, so far one company is offering the records to its workers.

The Cambridge, MA-based organization, which operates as a nonprofit, had a well-publicized launch in December 2006 and the support of founding members Applied Materials, BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes, and Wal-Mart. The hope was, and still is, that the personal electronic records would lower healthcare costs and improve health of users. But only one of the 10 major U.S. employers that have pledged to support the development of Dossia’s health records system, Wal-Mart, has actually adopted the technology for its workers and their dependents.

Dossia has recently solidified its leadership team recently as it takes steps to drive further adoption of the personal health record system, which is based on the Indivo personal health platform (PHP) developed at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Colin Evans, Dossia’s president and CEO, was put on the payroll last month, having previously served the nonprofit outfit while technically an employee of the digital health group of computer chip giant Intel. Evans’ former Intel colleague, Steve Munini, the chief operating officer of Dossia, has also transitioned from Intel’s to Dossia’s payroll.

Evans said last week that he expects Intel, where the idea for Dossia originated, to open the personal health record system to its employees in early 2010. A total of four other founding employers will be ready to deploy the system within the next three months, he says. “My major goal is to get everybody from the founder group to get implemented,” Evans said. There are now only tens of thousands of users of the Dossia record system today, most of them employees of Wal-Mart, which deployed the system for its workers in fall 2008, he said.

Why haven’t the other corporate members adopted the technology? “They really want to see Wal-Mart …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

The teams behind Microsoft’s Bing and Wolfram Alpha announced today they have teamed up to enhance Bing’s search results across topics like nutrition, health, and advanced mathematics. Financial terms weren’t given, but the partnership gives Bing users access to Wolfram Alpha’s advanced algorithms and curated data. The move fits with Bing’s goal of helping people make decisions more efficiently. Led by Stephen Wolfram, the renowned physicist and mathematician, Wolfram Alpha debuted in May with the goal of making “all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Online search and information discovery are being transformed before our eyes. It’s no longer just Google, or Google and Bing, or even Google, Bing, and Twitter—there are big problems in technology and business to solve across all areas of social media search, real-time news and information, mobile search, user interfaces, search marketing, vertical search (travel, products, people, video, you name it), and other related topics. Just imagine what the landscape might look like in another 10 years.

A lot of the action is happening around Seattle. If you want to hear what the big companies are doing to stay ahead of the curve, and where startups and venture capitalists have some real opportunities, you’ll want to join us for the Xconomy Forum on “The Future of Search and Information Discovery” on November 30 at the University of Washington. (Registration info is here—the early bird rate ends tomorrow, and tickets are going fast.)

Search touches almost every aspect of business today. So get your tough questions ready for our panel, which will feature Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast (acquired by Microsoft last year). Ed Lazowska will moderate the discussion, and I’ll be there to help stir up the crowd and make sure your questions are heard.

We’ll also have a series of startup “bursts”—short presentations from some of the most exciting young companies in the field. They include Evri, which is creating a smart index of the Web to help you browse for information more effectively; Gist, which sits at the intersection of e-mail, social media, and search, feeding you updates about your contacts; Sage Bionetworks, an effort to do for biology what open source did for software and Twitter and Facebook did for social networks; SEOmoz, which helps businesses do search engine optimization and online marketing; and Topsy, which is developing a new search engine for social media (starting with Twitter).

I can’t think of a better way to kick off the holiday season than to spend a couple hours being inspired and challenged by these guys. And, of course, some of the best stuff isn’t even in the program, it’s in the networking—besides our stellar panelists and speakers, you’ll be mingling with a first-rate crowd of entrepreneurs, investors, VCs, executives, researchers, technologists, and students.

Come to think of it, let’s get the discussion rolling right now. What do you really want to hear about at the event? What are your most compelling questions about search, information discovery, and online marketing? Leave a comment below, and we’ll address it.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It was big news here in New England last week when Don Dodge announced on his blog that he had been laid off from Microsoft as part of some 800 layoffs at the software powerhouse. Dodge had been a regular on the innovation scene here in New England—and around the world, really—and was known as Microsoft’s enthusiastic ambassador to the startup world.

In his initial post about being laid off, Dodge, who was based in New England with the formal title of director of business development for the Emerging Business Team, said being laid off was “a total surprise” and that his bosses “offered no explanation.” But he kept his comments at a high level.

Since being laid off, Dodge has reported that he has picked up more than 1,500 Twitter followers. But other than that, I haven’t spotted much from him. That all changed today. Dodge not only posted (turns out he posted it yesterday, but I didn’t see it until today) a thoughtful piece on his blog about leaving Microsoft, he did a roughly 11-minute videotaped “exit interview” with TechCrunch.

To me, the more interesting of the two was Dodge’s own heartfelt post, called “Pay It Forward, give and you shall Receive.” He talks about the many friends, old and new, who reached out, the job offers the poured in, and more. Some excerpts:

“I want to publicly say thank you to all my friends. You know who your friends are when times are tough. I heard from hundreds of friends last week and it meant a lot to me. Social media has created a whole new set of “friends” who know a lot about you and care about you, even though you may have never met in person. Hundreds of these friends took the time to write to me. Over 400 emails on my new Gmail account. There were also hundreds of comments on blogs and news sites that carried the story of my separation from Microsoft. It was almost like I had died, but got to read my obituary and hear the tributes. It was surreal, uplifting, humbling, and very gratifying. Thank you. I had no idea…really.”

“Then of course there were the job offers or offers to discuss opportunities. They came from everywhere. The big tech companies, the biggest names in the business, were very quick to reach out, within hours of the news. I was pleasantly surprised. VC firms wanted to talk about opportunities at their firms and within their portfolio companies. Startup founders were also quick to act. Thank you all. I appreciate every single one of you.”

TechCrunch has done nothing to disguise its opinion of Microsoft’s decision; founder Michael Arrington, who conducted the “exit interview,” has called it a “huge mistake.” You can find TechCrunch’s post here. I’ve embedded the video below.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

I was chatting with a couple of local investors at the TechStars (seed fund and mentorship program) event in Seattle on Wednesday. They thought the VC panel discussion of the startup climate and culture in different cities around the country was boring. If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, they said, that’s just where you are, and you deal with it.

But au contraire, mon frère—as a journalist and outside observer—I view those comparisons across different innovation clusters and their respective histories as a way to generate some good stories and insights. On the panel, there were certainly some constructive (and at times controversial) things said about the entrepreneurial climate in Seattle, Boston, and Boulder.

Here are a few edited highlights from the panelists, several of whom bring an outside perspective to their current cities:

Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group gave a brief history of the startup scene in Boulder, CO—useful for any city with entrepreneurial aspirations. “When I showed up in ’95, what I found was on the software side you had a lot of smart engineering talent but you didn’t have much else. A handful of entrepreneurial companies in storage and cable infrastructure. Not much in the way of entrepreneurial executive leadership other than from these pockets. In the mid-90s, because of the counter-culture community—and the Internet was purpose-built for places like Boulder—you had a lot of people who were independent, very smart, doing their own things suddenly intersecting with a medium that allows you to be anywhere. It’s 100,000 people plus 25,000 college students. A pretty small town, but it has the largest percentage, per capita, in the United States of computer scientists and PhDs. Yet there wasn’t a broad wave of entrepreneurial experience,” Feld said.

“In the mid-to-late 90s, there was huge activity around the Internet. Anybody with a pulse could get a company started. The predictable thing eventually happened, there was a lot of wreckage. But from ‘95-2001, Boulder had imported a lot of executive talent—CEOs, VP sales, engineering leadership. We also had a lot of entrepreneurs who had one or two companies in that cycle. So by 2003, people were starting to come back and get re-engaged in entrepreneurial activity. There were probably 50-plus people that made $10 million or more, so there was enough of an angel community. There was critical mass around this. But what was missing was something that tied the community together. There was the endless cocktail party circuit of entrepreneurs. Eventually people got bored and stopped going.”

That led David Cohen, Feld, and others to form TechStars in Boulder. “It cemented this notion of first-time entrepreneurial activity is the core of the ecosystem. What was needed was fresh meat into the system. We got a lot of new, young people into the community,” Feld said. “The other thing was that one of the hardest things for first-time entrepreneurs is to have an engaged relationship with an experienced entrepreneur. We found we were creating this thing that integrated the whole value chain of entrepreneurs. It really energized the existing entrepreneurial activity around a thing.”

Chris Sheehan of CommonAngels then gave his thoughts on the Boston innovation scene. [Disclosure: Chris is on Xconomy’s board.] “In the IT ecosystem in Boston, there are a number of things going on,” Sheehan said. “It’s a wonderful place for universities and colleges. MIT has been the granddaddy in terms of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. But what I’m seeing is a fresh set of energy coming …Next Page »

Comments (8) | Reprints | Share:        

Want to know what the real opportunities are for startup companies and investors in the field of Web search and information discovery? Or what happens when you put Google and Bing in the same room? You’ve come to the right place.

We’re putting the finishing touches on the program for our next Xconomy Forum, on the future of search and information discovery. It’s all happening on the evening of November 30 in Seattle, at the University of Washington (Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room). You can see the writeup and program here.

In addition to our panel—which includes Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from the UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast—we’ll have a series of “bursts” from some of the most exciting startups working in information discovery today.

We have confirmed short presentations from four startups:

—Evri, led by CEO Will Hunsinger. This Seattle company is trying to reinvent Web browsing by understanding the content of Web pages and the connections between entities on the Web, using semantic algorithms.

—SEOmoz, led by CEO Rand Fishkin. This Seattle-based firm focuses on search engine optimization and Internet marketing, helping companies around the world boost their Web traffic and expand their business.

—Topsy, led by CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. This San Francisco startup is working on a novel search engine for social media, starting with Twitter. It’s what people call “real-time search,” and it’s based on Internet conversations, not documents.

—Sage Bionetworks, led by CEO Stephen Friend. This Seattle-based nonprofit is trying to do for biology what Twitter and Facebook did for social networking, and what Linux did for open-source software. It’s a tall order, but search technology is key to allowing biologists to find and share results in a common global database.

We’re really looking forward to the discussions on Nov. 30, and hope to see you there (registration info here).

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

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 »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Don Dodge, admired by many technology entrepreneurs as Microsoft’s enthusiastic ambassador to the startup world, is one of those swept up in today’s big round of layoffs at the software giant. Dodge was director of business development for the Emerging Business Team, working from Microsoft’s offices in Cambridge, MA.

Dodge revealed the news in a post on his own blog today. He said the termination came as “a total surprise” and that his managers, who include corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development Dan’l Lewin, “offered no explanation.”

As Greg reported earlier, the layoffs announced today affect some 800 people across the company, including employees based in Washington and Massachusetts. The company hasn’t revealed specifics about which locations were affected most severely, so it isn’t known whether Dodge is part of a larger contingent of Cambridge-based Microsoft employees being let go.

Dodge is a veteran of Web and software companies Forte, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove, who joined Microsoft as a result of its acquisition of Groove in 2005. He is extremely well known in the technology community in Boston and around the country as a booster of startup-based entrepreneurship.

Dodge was philosophical in his blog post about getting a pink slip. “Today I start thinking about the next chapter in my life,” he writes. “Being totally consumed with my job and traveling every week has left no time to think about other opportunities. That changes today. I couldn’t be more excited about the future….I will be blogging more often now, and that excites me. There are lots of topics that I have wanted to dive into but just haven’t had the time. I will be seeing more friends too. Again, I have been so busy traveling that I haven’t had time to connect with friends all over the world. It’s all good.”

Reaction to Dodge’s dismissal from the blogosphere has been swift, incredulous, and angry. Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, is calling the decision “a huge mistake for Microsoft,” since Dodge was “the face of Microsoft” to many in the startup community. “He travels constantly, speaking at events whenever he’s asked, and makes a big effort to give young startups the attention they deserve. This is a guy who gives a heck of a lot more to the community than he ever takes back…Don invested years of his time making Microsoft seem more human. He wasted all that time, apparently.”

Dodge said in a Twitter post today that his “phone has been ringing off the hook” since he posted the news.

Dodge has been a guest blogger for Xconomy, contributing a piece on the Web 2.0 investing bubble in June 2008 and a piece on venture capital fundraising in September 2008.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Microsoft has confirmed it is cutting 800 positions across the company today, in its third round of layoffs this year. About a quarter of the jobs are in the Seattle area, and an unspecified number of employees in Massachusetts are impacted, among other regions. It is not yet clear which product groups and divisions will be most affected. The news was first reported by TechFlash, and confirmed by PaidContent.

Back in January, Microsoft announced 1,400 layoffs and a plan to eliminate up to 5,000 jobs over the course of 18 months. That was followed by a second round of cuts (an unspecified number) in May. But today’s cuts seem to push the total number of job losses beyond the originally stated 5,000—though with the company continuing to hire in some areas as it cuts in others, it is hard to track the exact number. The latest round of layoffs comes on the heels of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) announcing an 18 percent quarterly decline in profits as compared with the third quarter of last year.

Microsoft is also leaving the door open for additional cuts—a move that seems honest, but could be demoralizing to employees and prospective hires. In a statement given to Xconomy (and to PaidContent first), a Microsoft spokesperson wrote: “Earlier this year, we announced that in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and prioritize our focus areas, we would eliminate approximately 5,000 positions by June 2010. Today, we are eliminating around 800 positions spread across multiple businesses and locations and have completed our reduction plan sooner than we had anticipated 11 months ago. At the same time, we continue to hire in priority areas, but also understand that continuing to manage our businesses closely, as we always do, can mean additional headcount adjustments.”

The spokesperson added, “We are not breaking out figures by location, but I can confirm that Massachusetts was impacted by today’s job eliminations. We are working with the individual employees to assist them through this transition.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

For Mik Kersten, it all started when he saw Maria Klawe speak at the University of British Columbia. It was the mid-1990s, and Klawe, a distinguished mathematician and computer scientist—now the president of Harvey Mudd College and recently appointed to Microsoft’s board of directors—was giving a lecture to students and faculty. “She talked about her hippie days traveling in India, and it convinced me to switch to computer science,” Kersten says.

Kersten was an undergrad at UBC studying anthropology. Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of Tasktop Technologies, a Vancouver, BC-based startup that is working to reinvent user interfaces for software developers and other knowledge workers so they can be much more productive. It is one of those quiet Northwest success stories you probably haven’t heard much about yet, but you will—Tasktop is profitable, and has recently signed a number of important deals with the likes of IBM and Microsoft.

The company’s basic idea is to organize work around tasks, instead of files, folders, or Web pages. Kersten’s “task-focused interface” builds tools and information around the specific task you are trying to accomplish—writing code to import digital media into a library, say, or analyzing trends in a database. Tasktop’s software automatically gathers screenshots, notes, e-mails, and other information related to the task at hand and puts it on your desktop in a single handy spot for reference. If you come back to the task an hour later, or a week later, your desktop is returned to where you left off.

It’s a far cry from the way most people work on tasks today, using tools that are glorified Windows Explorer or Mac Finder applications, or Outlook or Google search tools that make you scroll through tons of results, Kersten says. As a software engineer himself, he had felt quite a bit of personal pain. “I was getting bad RSI [repetitive strain injury] in my forearms,” he says. “I was spending more time looking for the information I needed to write code than actual coding.”

Kersten’s early career path took him to Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) in Silicon Valley, where he worked on user interfaces until 2003. There, he was exposed to a technology called “degree of interest trees.” This is a type of interface that lets you navigate large, branching structures of information. The amount of detail displayed is based on your level of interest in each item, so you don’t get swamped with lots of information about low-priority matters. As Kersten explains, this “makes it easier for programmers to work with very complex systems”—like having to refer to millions of lines of code, or search through 100,000 files. “Programmers get completely overloaded with information,” he says. “It’s extremely difficult to find what they’re looking for.”

After a six-month stint at Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software (billionaire Charles Simonyi’s company), Kersten decided to quit industry to do fundamental research on how to improve …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: