Yo, is there a ballplayer in the house? Well, there is a House playing ball—professional basketball, that is.

At the age of 33, Adam House, a serial entrepreneur (and shooting guard) who has successfully built and sold three companies—his most recent startup, Velocitude, was acquired by Akamai in 2010—has at least temporarily put aside the tug of entrepreneurship for his love of hoops. More specifically, House has decided to uproot his family from Boston to upstate New York to join the Rochester Razorsharks, a professional basketball team in the Premier Basketball League. Here is his player page).

True, it isn’t the NBA—but House describes the league as very competitive, with most players having come from Division 1 college teams, and several going on to the NBA’s D-League (development league) or playing pro ball overseas. So it’s pretty cool. I caught up with House by phone when he was with the team in Michigan, where they had finished a two-game sweep of the Lake Michigan Admirals. Here is a quick overview of his version of Hoop Dreams…

House grew up in Birmingham, MI, about 25 miles northwest of Detroit. He played basketball for nearby Brother Rice High School, a well-known Catholic school attended by the offspring of many of the Detroit area’s business leaders or auto execs.

But House also had a passion for entrepreneurship. He worked at Rock Financial, a Quicken Loans company, and was able to learn from Dan Gilbert who is now the main owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. So, bitten by the business bug, he left college (Centre College, a small liberal arts school in Kentucky) after his freshman year at age 19 to work for a direct marketing firm in Florida. He quit that after one year, and in 1998 formed a startup to do direct marketing for financial services companies with $500 of his own money. He built that into a multi-million-dollar business (an Internet lead generation startup he also founded merged with the company) and sold it in May 2007. A few years later, House launched his third startup, Velocitude, a mobile services platform company that enabled delivery of video and other content to mobile devices. He built that up as well, and sold it to Akamai in mid-2010 for undisclosed terms.

But let’s get back to hoops. As part of the Akamai deal, House and his family—wife and now three sons—moved to the Boston area. Among other things, he joined CommonAngels, the angel investor group that is the lead investor in Xconomy. After leaving Akamai, House was not quite ready for the grind of another startup, so he decided to train for a triathlon. “I saw myself in bike pants and a helmet, and I just looked in a mirror and said, … Next Page »

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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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When it comes to tech startups—especially in Internet software and app development—San Diego has been adrift in the horse latitudes. That’s the term Spanish mariners had for the waters where the trade winds died out for days and even weeks at a time. Becalmed sailors desperate to gain some headway would heave their horses overboard to reach the New World.

It hasn’t reached that point yet in San Diego, but you would never know that software was once a thriving entrepreneurial community here. Even now, the software sector accounts for more than a third of San Diego’s private technology companies. But as I’ve written previously, it feels as if the local software companies speak different languages. In contrast to the flourishing tech hubs in Seattle, Boston, and New York—not to mention Silicon Valley—San Diego’s software scene is sleepy and indifferent.

Still, there are signs of a freshening breeze.

David Cohen last week at UC San Diego

Scores of new seed-stage startups have begun to emerge throughout the region, including a dozen that just moved into the new EvoNexus incubator in downtown San Diego. These emerging companies are led by young entrepreneurs who view San Diego’s innovation establishment as old-school and irrelevant. They are turning out instead for informal “hackathons” and “meetups.” They tell me they’re yearning for real mentoring by real tech entrepreneurs, and for access to real tech investors who are really investing.

Last week, more than 200 people turned out to hear David Cohen talk at U.C. San Diego about TechStars, the early stage fund and accelerator program for Internet startups that he co-founded with three partners in Boulder, CO, six years ago. Cohen is the CEO, and by any measure, the startup program has been wildly successful.

TechStars enrolled its first 10 Internet startups in 2007, providing as much as $18,000 in seed funding and an intense, three-month mentorship program for each company in exchange for a 6 percent stake. Since then, TechStars has expanded to … Next Page »

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The Web, as we’ve known it, is all about velocity. It wants you to move along. Click here! Go there! Watch this! As a result, it’s never been a great place to settle down and focus for the 30 minutes it might take you to read an 8,000-word article—the sort of long, in-depth non-fiction that made magazines like The Atlantic, Esquire, and The New Yorker famous.

But the Web is still a great medium for circulating such content, especially to readers who might never shell out for a newsstand, subscription, or digital copy of a magazine. And with the emergence of a new class of mobile and browser-based reading apps, there’s finally a more comfortable way for Internet users to enjoy this long-form writing. I’m talking about services like Instapaper, Readability, and Read It Later, which parse Web pages, zeroing in on just the article text and zapping all the ads and other clutter.

In a column tomorrow I’ll look at these apps one at a time and share some pointers about fun ways to use them. But today I want give you a deep-dive look at the newest addition to this category: an iPad app from Longform.org. If you’re an Instapaper user, you’ve no doubt heard of Longform. Brooklynites Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky originally founded the service to help commuters like themselves who wanted to fill up their Instapaper queues with good long reads—2,000 words and above—before hopping on the 2 train into Manhattan. (The company later added support for Readability and Read It Later.) Well, this Wednesday the company released a dedicated Longform app, which iPad owners can use to access not only the usual feed of articles chosen by Longform’s editors, but a more complete panoply of long-form articles pulled from the websites of 25 top-flight publications, such as The Awl, The Believer, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, and Wired.

The $4.99 app is simple, elegant, and attractive—all prerequisites, if you’re promising readers a more serene reading experience. What sets it apart from the other reading apps is the way it fetches a supply of long-form articles from the chosen publications, so users don’t have to. With apps like Instapaper, by contrast, you do the curating yourself: if you find an article on the Web that you want to read later, you click on a special Instapaper bookmarklet in your browser, and it shows up in the app. But before you can do that, of course, you have to get the bookmarklet from Instapaper’s website. That’s two steps too many for most readers, according to Lammer. “I know that to the tech press this sounds ridiculous,” Lammer says, “but Instapaper is too complicated for some people to use. We wanted to create something that … works more directly.”

I talked with Lammer yesterday to get the Longform.org origin story and to find out more about the genesis and mechanics of the new app. An edited version of our interview follows.

For me, the critical question in our conversation was about how quickly the reading habits of Web and mobile users are changing, and what the rising popularity of the de-cluttering apps will mean for the business of publishing on the Web. The easier it gets to obtain ad-free renditions of Web content, after all, the more carefully publishers are going to have to think about whether to put that content on the Web at all—meaning the reading apps could inadvertently help to kill the very industry they feed on. But Lammer argues that the Longform app and its cousin are currently adding to overall page views, not subtracting—and that in any case, where readers want to go, publishers must follow. Read on for the nitty-gritty.

Xconomy: What possessed you and Max Linsky to get into the curation business?

Aaron Lammer: We were both Instapaper users. For both of us, getting the iPhone and starting to read on it was a pretty formative experience. I have a background in publishing and Web stuff, and Max has a background in journalism. We realized that you can burn through an Instapaper queue pretty quickly if you are commuting 45 minutes each way every day. I think it’s really a New York story, because New York is one of the few places where people spend over an hour a day underground, without a connection.

Both of us were hoarding stories, and passing them around internally in a small group. And we eventually said, … Next Page »

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Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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Here’s a quick update on the agenda for Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility, the annual half-day mobile conference we are organizing here at Xconomy Boston. The event is taking place on the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, MA. We are looking forward to a packed house and some outstanding talks, discussions, and networking.

I’m pleased to announce a few more startup participants:

—Apperian founder and chief strategy officer Chuck Goldman will join us for a discussion of mobile business strategies, along with Mobiquity founder and CEO Bill Seibel. Goldman is a former Apple exec who leads Apperian’s strategic and business development efforts in enterprise mobile apps. Seibel, for his part, was a founding partner at Cambridge Technology Partners and went on to lead ZEFER, Demantra, and Gumball; he currently leads Mobiquity’s efforts to help businesses develop mobile strategies.

—Fiksu CEO Micah Adler joins us to talk about his company’s approach to marketing mobile apps. My colleague Erin recently wrote about Fiksu’s consumer-facing service, which lets people try out apps from various brands and stores for free.

—Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner will be on hand to discuss his vision for the future of the mobile wallet—banking, shopping, and e-commerce via your smartphone.

Other confirmed speakers include Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Chris Lynch from Vertica/HP, Chuck Kane from One Laptop Per Child, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. We’ll also have a special panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” including Lars Albright (Quattro Wireless, Session M); Mike Baker (Enpocket, DataXu); Tom Burgess (Third Screen Media, Linkable Networks); Jeff Glass (m-Qube, Bain Capital Ventures); and Ryan Moore (GrandBanks Capital investor in Enpocket, Where, and Nexage, now with Atlas Venture).

There are more announcements to come, and I will be posting the detailed agenda soon, so stay tuned. Meantime, you can still grab the early bird rate if you register today.

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This week’s deal news covered a breadth of sectors: biotech, medical devices, mobile applications, software, and robotics. Not to mention a major venture capital fund raise.

—Waltham, MA-based drugmaker Avila Therapeutics was bought by New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) for $350 million, with as much as another $575 million available in milestones. Avila is a maker of “covalent” drugs that are designed to shut down the activity of disease-causing proteins for a prolonged period of time.

—Verastem, a young Cambridge, MA-based biotech working on drugs targeting cancer stem cells, completed its initial public offering, led by UBS and Leerink Swann. The IPO (5.5 million shares sold at $10 apiece) represented a strong showing among investors, as Verastem originally indicated it planned to sell 4.5 million shares priced between $9 and $11 each. The underwriters have a 30-day option to buy another 825,000 shares.

—Burlington, MA-based ConforMIS, a maker of knee implant systems, raised $89 million in a Series E funding from private equity investors and government investment funds abroad. The company said it will put the money toward sales, manufacturing, and expansion of its technology.

—Co3 Systems, a maker of data loss management software, received new funding from Fairhaven Capital. The Cambridge, MA-based startup said it will put the money (whose sum was undisclosed) toward sales, marketing, and engineering.

—Malborough, MA-based medical device startup Navilyst Medical will be acquired by Albany, NY-based AngioDynamics (NASDAQ: ANGO) in a transaction valued at $372 million, based on the company’s $14.20 per share closing stock price Monday. Navilyst, which focuses on … Next Page »

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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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The blow from getting a higher-than-expected bill from someone like your lawyer could be softened it if came attached to a 60-second video message explaining the special things he or she actually did in detail.

At least, that’s what Dave McLaughlin thinks—and he’s building his new startup Vsnap around the idea.

McLaughlin has been around the block before as an entrepreneur. He co-founded the mobile payments startup Fig Card, which was acquired by eBay last spring. Coincidentally, the 2011 application deadline for MassChallenge fell on the day that acquisition closed, so McLaughlin hurriedly finished the paperwork for the startup accelerator—and nabbed a spot. He’s also joined at Vsnap by chief technical officer Claudia Santoro, former vice president of engineering for the restaurant-focused software startup Exit41.

Vsnap didn’t take home one of the MassChallenge checks in October, but it’s now pulling in early customers—like Suffolk University and Schering Plough’s alumni association—to test out its alpha product and is readying itself to introduce its beta product sometime in February.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Users log into the Vsnap interface, record a 60-second video using their phone or computer camera, add descriptions, and can add attachments such as PDF files or Web URLs. Vsnap sends the package out through e-mail. Users can also record a video “signature” about themselves that will accompany all the messages they send. Currently the technology can be accessed via a Web browser, but Vsnap is developing iPhone and Android apps as part of the beta release.

The customer target for Vsnap is “any industry that has a low conversion rate but a higher price point,” says Joe Nigro, business development manager at the startup. That’s because lower priced products and services typically e-mail and communicate thousands of customers at once, and video messaging that many recipients could land you in a spam folder pretty quickly.

Vsnap was first thought up to fulfill a personal need, says McLaughlin. His cousin, Jim Joyce, lives in Ireland and is from the U.S., while his wife’s family lives in Italy. He started shooting video snapshots of his kids to send to his family in different time zones. When Fig Card sold, McLaughlin decided to join his cousin on this new idea rather than move on to PayPal, he says. Vsnap still offers a free consumer service, but business messaging has become its focus.

Vsnap is currently developing its pricing model, which will vary depending on the number of Vsnaps a user sends and their access to Vsnap analytics. The analytics can measure things like if and when the recipients viewed the video and how they interacted with the attachments. Currently, recipients of the video message have to view the video message in a separate link, but Vsnap is working with PowerInbox, another local startup, to build out the capabilities for video viewing right in the e-mail inbox.

Vsnap recently nabbed a $40,000 investment from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. MTDC had previously said it … Next Page »

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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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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … Next Page »

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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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The unsolicited $5.7 billion offer that Roche made for Illumina will no doubt dominate San Diego’s biotech news for weeks to come. We have it and more.

—Switzerland’s Roche offered $5.7 billion, or $44.50 a share, for San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN in a hostile bid disclosed yesterday. Roche’s bid to stake a claim in genetic diagnostics by acquiring the market-leading maker of DNA sequencing instruments would be the Swiss pharma giant’s biggest deal since its $46.8 billion buyout of Genentech almost two years ago. Roche is the world’s biggest maker of cancer drugs, which suggests its quest for Illumina represents a significant move to base cancer treatments on each patient’s genome.

—Venture capital investors sank $4.73 billion into 446 biotechs nationwide in 2011, according to the MoneyTree report from the National Venture Capital Association, PwC, and Thomson Reuters. But as Luke pointed out in his BioBeat column, there is an alarming drop in support for early stage life sciences startups. Only 153 biotech and medical device startups got their first round of financing in 2011, the lowest amount of seed investment activity in 15 years.

—At an Xconomy dinner discussion, former Amira Pharmaceuticals CEO Bob Baltera said insufficient access to capital is the biggest driver for decision-makers on both sides of biotech-pharma partnerships. So what are some other key factors? We asked some of San Diego’s life sciences leaders to explore the question in an “on the record” dinner discussion late last year.

—San Diego’s Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) completed its secondary public offering, raising roughly $62 million in gross proceeds (before underwriting costs) in the sale of 14.95 million shares, including additional allotments granted to underwriters. Sequenom said it plans to use the net proceeds for … Next Page »

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An acquisition and startup financings made up the New England deals news this week.

—Waltham, MA-based marketing software firm Constant Contact acquired the Boston startup CardStar, the developer of a mobile app for customer loyalty and rewards programs. The deal, whose terms were undisclosed, enables Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT) to expand its marketing offerings for small businesses.

—My colleague Greg rounded up the top 10 venture deals in the Boston area from the fourth quarter of 2011. Rapid7, Warp Drive Bio, and Agios Pharmaceuticals were at the top.

—Hewlett-Packard has spent more than $10 million to set up a new office near the Alewife train station in Cambridge, MA. The office serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the big data company HP acquired last winter (previously based in Billerica). The new facility will also serve as a center for technology development and local outreach.

—Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge-based startup focused on understanding social media conversation surrounding TV, nabbed $12 million in Series B financing. The deal was led by Time Warner Investments, and included new investor SoftBank Capital and return backers Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures. Bluefins says it will put the money toward sales and client services, as well as its social analytics technology and further R&D.

—Mevion Medical Systems, a radiation therapy company based in Littleton, MA, announced it had pulled in $45 million in funding from ProQuest Investments and existing investors Caxton Heath Life Sciences, Venrock, and CHL Medical Partners. The money will go toward development of its proton beam radiation therapy system, which is designed to be smaller and less expensive than existing X-ray radiation therapy devices.

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Detroiters often grumble about the relative lack of shopping options downtown compared to other cities of similar size. Sure, there are boutiques here and there, as well as a handful of stores in the Renaissance Center and the Millender Center, but there is no Urban Outfitters; no American Apparel; no Macy’s.

Somerset CityLoft, a pop-up shop along Merchant’s Row featuring outposts of stores found in the suburban Somerset Collection mall, drew enthusiastic reviews but it was hard to get excited about something so fleeting—CityLoft was only open during part of the summer and again around the holidays.

Downtown shoppers now have a new option: Virtual retail in formerly vacant storefronts at 1520 and 1528 Woodward. Quicken Loans, which also had a hand in opening Somerset CityLoft, has partnered on the new endeavor with Jeff Freedman, a Detroit native and the owner of Resultco, along with its umbrella companies Fathead and Bedrock Real Estate.

Instead of racks of actual merchandise, the group installed product images along with corresponding QR codes in buildings’ windows. Shoppers can stroll past at any hour of the day or night, pull out their smartphones, and scan the codes for more product information or to buy the items. As of now, custom watches from Detroit-based Watchwear are on offer, but Mullen says that the storefronts will feature products from Shoebuy, Clothesbuy, Bagbuy, and more in the coming weeks.

“As we build out our properties, we wanted something immediate,” says Bedrock real estate developer Dan Mullen, noting that his company has acquired nine buildings along Woodward between Jefferson and Grand Circus Park. “With the spiderwebs and the rats—ok, rats are an exaggeration, but there’s no question these vacant storefronts are an eyesore. We didn’t want them sitting there and collecting dust.”

Mullen says that though shoppers won’t be able notice, there is construction going on behind the virtual retail shop’s windows as Bedrock continues its plan to revitalize downtown Detroit. When construction is complete, Bedrock will simply pack up the signs and move the virtual retail operation to another of its nine buildings.

“Our thought was, let’s activate this street now,” Mullen adds. “We’re hoping we inspire real, lasting retail.”

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Boston has no place for “serious, venture-backed startups” to grow from five employees to 25 employees, akin to San Francisco’s RocketSpace, or New York City’s General Assembly, says Mark Kasdorf.

Enter Intrepid Labs, the co-working space he recently established in the former digs of another co-working space (Dogpatch Labs) at 222 Third Street near Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.

Intrepid Labs comes as the answer to a problem Kasdorf himself was facing. His mobile development company Intrepid Pursuits started with three people in the co-working unit (C3) of the Cambridge Innovation Center around the spring of 2010. It grew pretty quickly to eight people, so was kicked out of the C3. The building gave them an attractive “transition” rate to move into the more grownup office space, says Kasdorf, but they outgrew that, too, hitting about 15 employees last fall.

“We had to get real office space, which was more expensive than we could afford as a bootstrapped consulting company,” Kasdorf says. “As we started digging into commercial real estate, we realized how bad it is for startups.”

The Boston area has its share of coffeehouse-style co-working spaces for pre-seed companies with a few employees, but nothing for the more mature (revenues, funded, five employees and up) crowd, says Kasdorf. Traditional office spaces require three-year leases, a time period in which a lot could change for a startup, says Kasdorf. They also require companies to get their own furniture, printers and scanner, and the like. “This whole litany of things that CIC had been offering to us became obvious, but it was still really expensive,” Kasdorf says

In October he started checking out other office space in The American Twine Office Park at 222 Third Street, and saw the vacant fourth floor. “We walk in here and I’m blown away,” he says. “Everything about it screams, ‘This would be a fun place to work.’”

Inspired by General Assembly, he signed a lease for three years, with the intent of creating a co-working space for growing startups like his. Kasdorf and his team moved in during November. While Intrepid Labs has the long lease it originally wanted to avoid, it’s subletting to other startups on a month-to-month basis. So what about that big expense? Kasdorf says it is pre-paying some of the rent, while the “landlord has taken a real interest in what we’re doing and is really flexible with us.”

For startup tenants, a dedicated desk costs … Next Page »

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The cool thing about TechStars is that it is often surprising. The startup accelerator and seed-stage investment firm, which runs programs in four cities around the U.S., announced its newest class of Boston entrepreneurs (the fourth so far) last night. And while I’ve heard of a couple of the startups, most of them are brand new to me.

We’re looking forward to getting to know the teams as they evolve. Meantime, here’s a quick introduction to TechStars Boston’s lucky 13, with my interpretation of what each is doing (some names and approaches will probably change):

—Bison Alternatives (Web platform for raising alternative investments)

—Libboo (social/collaborative publishing)

—GymPact (mobile app for health/exercise)

—Psykosoft (creating art and music through software)

—Zagster (better bicycle rentals)

—Testive (adaptive educational testing)

—Simply Good Technologies (digital/mobile couponing)

—docTrackr (document tracking, metrics, and access control)

—Murfie (online music market)

—Mortar Data (Hadoop big data processing made easy)

—Ubersense (helping athletes through video analysis)

—Shopsy (social/personalized online shopping)

—Lessonsmith (collaborative lesson planning)

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The speaker list for Mobile Madness 2012 keeps getting better and better. I’m still plugging away at the agenda, but wanted to post a quick update here.

Boston’s premier conference on mobile software and devices, if I do say so myself, takes place the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. The theme for Mobile Madness 2012 (Xconomy’s fourth annual spring mobile event) is “total mobility”—the idea that mobile is finally everywhere in our lives, and is impacting a much wider swath of technologies, businesses, and industries than ever before.

To that end, we are assembling a cast of compelling characters the likes of which I haven’t seen before in one place. Already confirmed are folks like Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Lars Albright, CEO of Session M; Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; and many more.

Here’s a sampling of new speakers we’ve just recruited for the event:

—Tom Burgess, CEO, Linkable Networks. Burgess, the former CEO of Third Screen Media (acquired by AOL in 2007), will join our distinguished panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” which will discuss our region’s rich history in mobile software and the areas in which local companies can continue to lead the world. The panel also includes the founders and former CEOs of m-Qube (bought by VeriSign), Enpocket (Nokia), and Quattro Wireless (Apple), all recent success stories.

—Ernie Cormier, CEO, Nexage. Cormier previously ran mobile gaming startup Zeemote, and before that was chief commercial officer of Virgin Media. He will bring his deep perspective on advertising platforms to bear on the recent explosion of business opportunities in mobile ads and marketing. Nexage is an up-and-coming company that represents some of Boston’s strengths in this sector.

—Chris Lynch, CEO, Vertica (acquired by HP last year). Lynch will talk about the intersection of mobile software and “big data” analytics—a hot topic as pertains to the business of mobile apps and advertising/marketing platforms. Lynch, a veteran of DEC, ArrowPoint, and Acopia, sees big data as one of the trends that will lead a resurgence in the Boston tech scene—and he’ll tell us how mobile businesses can harness this trend.

—Chuck Kane, Director, One Laptop Per Child Association. Last but certainly not least, Kane (who is OLPC’s former president) will give a special demo of the new OLPC XO-3 tablet computer that made such a big splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this month. Kane says he’ll also show us the XO-1.75 model (also a tablet), which is shipping now.

We’ll have more updates on Mobile Madness 2012, so watch this space. If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate.

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