San Diego semiconductor designer Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR) says today it has formed a strategic partnership with Zenverge, a Cupertino, CA-based chip design firm to work together on the next generation of multimedia products for home entertainment systems.

In a separate release, Zenverge says it has closed a $20.5 million Series D round of financing led by Entropic, which disclosed that it has invested $10 million in Zenverge. Both companies specialize in advanced media chips, and Entropic is a co-founder of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA). As part of their strategic partnership, Entropic and Zenverge plan to align their technology roadmaps and co-develop products developed for high-definition TV quality video and other multimedia products for the MoCA 2.0 home network.

In addition to Entropic, Zenverge says the CID Group and Woodside Fund also participated in the latest round as new investors. Existing investors DCM, Northwest Venture Partners, and Motorola Mobility Ventures all joined in the round as well. Zenverge says it will use the capital to expand and meet market demand for new and existing products. Entropic CEO Patrick Henry also joined Zenverge’s board of directors.

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Push Pop Press, the San Francisco digital media production house behind the acclaimed iPad version of Al Gore’s climate change primer Our Choice, said today on its website that it has been acquired by Facebook. “Although Facebook isn’t planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories,” co-founders Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris explained in the post. The startup said that its publishing platform, which had been in private beta testing, will be shut down, and that future profits from sales of Our Choice will be donated to The Climate Reality Project.

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It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … Next Page »

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There’s a slew of tools like Apple’s iMovie for turning your raw photos and videos into fun multimedia slide shows that you can share with friends and family. The problem is that none of them are drop-dead simple—except perhaps Animoto’s. The startup, which is based in San Francisco and New York and backed mainly by Seattle investors (and led by Seattle natives), offers the easiest tool I’ve found for uploading photos and short video clips and setting them to music.

A lot more people are likely to stumble across that tool now that Animoto is making the technology available to outside partners such as photo-sharing sites. Kodak Gallery, American Greetings, and Aviary.com are the first three companies participating in Animoto’s new partner program, announced today at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX.

Up to now, the only way to create an Animoto project was to go to the startup’s website or download its iPhone app. But thanks to the new software bridges Animoto has built to partner sites, people who store their digital photos and videos at Kodak Gallery, make free e-cards at American Greetings, or use Aviary.com’s editing tools will be able to make full Animoto videos from their own media without leaving those sites.

That could eventually translate into a lot more visibility—and income—for Animoto. “I think it’s conceivable that in the future, not only will the majority of Animoto videos be created outside of Animoto.com, but also the majority of our revenue will be driven from outside Animoto.com,” says Brad Jefferson, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

Building the application programming interfaces, or APIs, needed to pull this off preoccupied half of Animoto’s developer staff for most of 2010, Jefferson says. The company has been testing the service since last September; it was rolled out today at Kodak Gallery and will be available within a few weeks at Aviary.com and American Greetings.

Partners are interested in adding Animoto to their sites in part because it offers them a way to make money from consumers’ video clips for the first time, says Jefferson. “At least one in five online photo albums has at least one video clip,” he says. “But there’s not a lot of products that allow [photo-sharing sites] to monetize video clips. Their products are mostly tangible things like photo books and prints. Animoto gives photo-sharing sites the ability to offer a product that incorporates video clips and creates a lot of value.”

At Kodak Gallery, users can create their first high-resolution Animoto slide show for free during the month of March, and after that Kodak will charge users for each show they make. That’s similar to the arrangement at Animoto.com, where it’s free to … Next Page »

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Surprise: we’re writing about an incubator. (OK, it might not come as a surprise. There’s been no shortage of news surrounding programs designed to create and accelerate tech startups across the nation, as my colleague Greg recently noted.)

The Education Ventures Program, which will kick off later this month, is a bit different, though. It’s not necessarily looking for the next billion-dollar Web or software startup, but is entirely focused on developing businesses and technologies out to improve education.

This one comes from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and naturally it lines up with the organization’s vision of spurring economic growth. “Through our entrepreneurship education program, we hope that we can catalyze more founders of high growth, scalable business,” says Sandy Miller, director of Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation, which runs Education Ventures. “The reason for the explicit focus on those types of businesses is that data has come out showing that the majority of net new job creation comes from firms less than five years old.”

The 25 entrepreneurs selected for the inaugural four-month program will work at Kauffman Labs in Kansas City, MO, for the first month, will be closely matched with a business to work alongside for two months, and will finish the last month back at the Kauffman. In addition to fostering the growth of new companies, the foundation has another aim for the program: to learn what helps startups take off.

“It’s really important while we’re delivering this entrepreneur education program to really study this activity, and make inroads into better understanding the science of startups,” Miller says.

Education Ventures is the pilot version of a new crop of entrepreneurial education programs from Kauffman Labs. Two more will be announced this year, each targeting ideas in different sectors. The next one will focus on the food and nutrition market, Miller told me, but she’s keeping the focus of the third one a surprise for now.

The narrow industry focus is one quality that sets the Kauffman programs apart from other early-stage startup incubators like TechStars or YCombinator, which accept a range of Web and IT startups. The program is also taking on ideas on the non-profit and services side, as well as entrepreneurs who are very early on in developing their concept, rather than requiring formally developed business plans. And Miller describes the Kauffman Foundation as “the most benign investor or cofounder you can imagine,” meaning it won’t take an ownership stake in its participating startups in exchange for the support it provides. Instead, it’s providing a payment directly to the entrepreneurs, prorating a $70,000 annual salary across the four-month duration of the program.

Kauffman has picked entrepreneurs from a trio of Xconomy regions for its inaugural class of the Education Ventures Program. We highlighted participants from Massachusetts, Michigan, and the Bay Area. Read below for details and comments from the entrepreneurs I was able to connect with. (Information on the full class of the Education Ventures Program can be found here.)

Michigan

—Ann Arbor, MI-based Bhargav Sri Prakash and Dmitry Tarasev are developing 3D simulation games for education. Prakash previously … Next Page »

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Alameda, CA-based Vook, which publishes multimedia-enhanced e-books for the iPhone, iPad, Kindle devices, and the Web, has raised $5.25 million in Series A financing, Dow Jones VentureWire is reporting today. Founder and CEO Brad Inman told the publication that the funds came from VantagePoint Venture Partners and Floodgate Fund, and will be used to expand sales efforts and technology development. The 23-employee startup, which Xconomy profiled in August 2010, previously raised $2.5 million in seed funding from individual investors.

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Every month we take some time to look at the deals Washington tech and biotech companies inked in the month prior, and compare them to recent trends. Unlike our weekly investment deals roundups, these monthly features give us the opportunity to look back through both the large investment that made big headlines when they broke, as well as the smaller “under the radar” deals that may have gone unnoticed. As October comes to a close (can you believe it’s gone by this fast?), it’s time to take a look at the tech and biotech deals Washington companies closed in September. As always, the information is based on data provided by our partner, New York-based private company intelligence firm CB Insights, and our own past coverage.

Since we first started these monthly deals roundups back in June, the healthcare sector has been the dominant deal-maker, hands down, bringing in $41.1 million in June, $62.5 million in July, $21.8 million in August, and serving as the bulk of Washington’s startup financing over any other sector each month.

In September, the healthcare sector was still the top contender for financing, bringing in $17 million. But much like in August, the Internet and software sectors came in second and third in September, bringing in $13.6 million, and $12 million respectively.

Computer hardware and services startups came in fourth, with $8 million in financing, and the mobile and telecommunications sector trailed behind for the bottom rank, with just $1.1 million in deals.

Some of the more notable deals from September include Bothell, WA-based business software company Winshuttle’s $12 million financing from Summit Partners, which singlehandedly carried the software sector to the top of the financing list in September. Others include DataSphere Technologies’ $10 million Series C, led by Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, MOD Systems $6 million Series B (which the company inked despite a rather public indictment of its co-founder Mark Phillips), and Stratos Genomics’ $4 million Series A for low-cost DNA sequencing.

One big deal somewhat surprisingly squeaked by our coverage: Pathway Medical Technologies raised $10 million in equity, according to a regulatory filing, and somehow we missed it. Seattle-based video optimization company Opanga Networks raised $600,000, as did Bellevue, WA-based cloud-based IT services startup, Doyenz, both of which flew under our radar.

Here’s the full list of September’s equity-based deals, both under the radar and on it:

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“Why not have a high-tech company in Michigan?”

This is the question Bill Hamilton asks of those incredulous of the possibilities of success of a software company based in Okemos, MI. Hamilton, an Ann Arbor native, started TechSmith in 1988, and the company, best known for its screen-capture software, has weathered the challenges of a startup from the rust belt state.

“We see a lot of positives being here in Michigan,” Hamilton said in an interview last week. “The one problem we have is more of a psychological problem than a real one. And that is when we go to recruit people from outside of Michigan, the press is so bad on Michigan right now, so we get people who have a lot of pause.”

Working in a state known more for blight than innovation hasn’t seemed to hold TechSmith back. Hamilton expects the company will end the year with about $41 million in sales.

TechSmith first introduced its flagship product, Snagit, in 1991. And since then, the technology—which allows users to take a shot of their PC screen, save the snapshot, manipulate it, and share it with others—has taken off. But it hasn’t always been steady success for Hamilton and the company. TechSmith has faced challenges common to many startups. The company developed a variety of products, some commercially successful, some not, before finding a viable business model.

Hamilton and a business partner co-founded TechSmith in February 1988, knowing they wanted to develop and sell software products, but they had to start by focusing most of their time on consulting, instead of developing software. “Mostly what we did was help people get PCs to talk to many computers and mainframes,” he said. “We did that for some time. It was partly to put food on the table, but it was also partly to understand what people were looking for.”

After the founders consulted for a few years on the side, they were able to develop their first product—a gateway for local area networks to connect to databases—and were selling it with some success. But an unfortunate partnership stalled the company’s trajectory, at least temporarily. “I made a bad business decision and got into a business relationship with a company that turned out we didn’t have a level of compatibility that we thought,” Hamilton said.

As part of the “divorce,” as Hamilton calls it, TechSmith gave the other company the technology for local network interfaces and was forced to start from scratch, about seven years after the … Next Page »

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Seattle-based MOD Systems, a developer of digital-media delivery systems, has had a rocky couple of years, but now it has found a new lifeline in the form of a $6 million investment.

The company, which develops technologies that allow consumers to purchase digital movies, TV shows, and music, and load them onto SD cards portably through touch-screen kiosks, raised an impressive $35 million Series A in September 2008, led by Toshiba, NCR, Deluxe Entertainment Services, and private investors. But the company drew less glowing attention after its co-founder and then CEO Mark E. Phillips was sued by an investor for fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation, and breach of fiduciary duty in February 2009.

However, despite the public and drawn-out case—resulting in Phillips being charged in a federal wire fraud case in March—the company has found a way to regain confidence of investors, through a $6 million Series B round being announced today.

“When we raised money two years ago, the purpose of that money was to do what we’re doing now—relaunch the company and implement the technology we’re doing now,” says MOD co-founder, chairman, and chief executive Anthony Bay.

The new round of financing is being used to deploy the company’s digital entertainment download kiosks in the market. MOD’s first commercial customer, InMotion Entertainment, rolled out around 20 of the 57 kiosks it will deploy at InMotion stores in airports nationwide—including SeaTac International Airport, which was the first to host a kiosk—two months ago. Bay says the company expects to install the rest before the end of the year.

MOD chose airports as the first locations to host kiosks because of the large market for travelers who are looking for entertainment while they’re traveling by plane. Through one of these kiosk systems, consumers will be able to browse, rent, or purchase digital movies and TV shows, and load them onto an SD card (or purchase one on the spot) before boarding a flight.

“This is the first real commercial deployment of major studio content through kiosks,” Bay says. “With movies and television shows, the studios are very, very picky about content protection. SD cards are the only format that allow you to protect the content on the card—SD cards are standard secured digital. Using SD cards, we can protect the movie or the TV show, and then essentially either make it permanent use so you can keep it, or you can rent it, so you have 48 hours to watch it.” This capability means the studios don’t have to worry about content protection, and consumers still have the ability to watch a movie or TV show streaming right from their computer, without an Internet connection.

“There’s a lot of buzz about the world moving to digital content distribution. Most companies are focused on content delivery system to the home. MOD is focused on content delivery outside … Next Page »

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If a book can be made from something other than paper—say, pixels on a screen—then why can’t it consist of something other than plain old words and pictures?

It can. Companies like Eastgate Systems in Watertown, MA, have been publishing PC-based interactive “hypertexts” for almost 30 years. Thanks to the built-in speech synthesis software on Amazon’s Kindle, every e-book can also be an audio book. And now a few publishers are experimenting with video books.

That phrase, video book, is where Emeryville, CA-based startup Vook gets its name. Since launching its first titles last fall, Vook has come out with 19 video books, in a variety of genres from cookbooks to adult fiction to children’s books to fitness and self-help. Most are available in two formats—a Web version for consumption on a laptop or desktop and an iPhone/iPod Touch version for people with Apple devices.

This week I’ve been exploring two Vook titles (I refuse to refer to them using the company’s lower-case noun “vook”—it’s just too ugly). I’m pleased to say that they have exceeded my expectations.

I went into this as a skeptic. While I’m not someone who needs to be persuaded about the power of multimedia technology, I’ve seen enough poor-quality multimedia concoctions to know that the “multi” is only as good as the media. Simply throwing in a random video or making certain words into Wikipedia hyperlinks does not automatically enhance a text. In fact, adding digital goodies will more than likely detract from the simple pleasure of reading, unless the new material meets a few important criteria.

First, it must be relevant to, but different from, the text itself—providing information in a way that truly exploits the capabilities of the additional medium. Second, it should have high production values. I’m not asking for Emmy-winning quality here, but at least show me where you’ve put as much thought and work into your video as the author put into his words. Third, the added material should be both balanced with the text (I’m talking about volume—neither too little nor too much; let the main text do the driving) and smoothly integrated into it (meaning, for example, that it should be easy to switch back and forth between the text and the added media).

I’ve read two Vook titles so far, and I’d give both of them decent grades on my scorecard. (By the way, my three criteria are purely personal. There are plenty of other critics with their own definitions of what makes good multimedia.)

The video books I picked were The Sherlock Holmes Experience, a double feature including the Arthur Conan Doyle stories “The Man with the Twisted Lip” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” and Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time To Cash In on Your Passion, by wine impresario Gary Vaynerchuk. The Holmes title goes for $2.99, and the Vaynerchuk costs $6.99. I read both books on my iPhone.

I’ll comment first on the Sherlock Holmes book, since it’s the less successful of the two and shows some of the pitfalls inherent in multimedia projects. If I were a producer at Vook, I’m not sure I would have dared to tackle the Holmes stories, given that they are, in a sense, multimedia artifacts to begin with. Conan Doyle published most of his stories in The Strand Magazine, an illustrated monthly sold mainly to London’s burgeoning class of rail commuters. From the very first story (“A Scandal in Bohemia,” 1891), the Holmes tales were accompanied by … Next Page »

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RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) confirmed it has acquired Seattle startup Varia Mobile for an undisclosed price. The news was first reported by TechFlash. Varia makes content distribution and publishing software for mobile phones. The startup was founded in 2007 and already has a strategic alliance with RealNetworks. The deal also fits with Real’s increasing focus on the mobile market.

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Kirkland, WA-based Digeo, a 10-year-old home entertainment company backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has been sold to Arris, a broadband communications firm based in Suwanee, GA, for about $20 million in cash.

Digeo is known for its high-definition digital video recorder, called Moxi. The acquisition gives Arris expertise, intellectual property, and talent in video networking and multimedia services delivery. Arris will gain about 75 Digeo employees (mostly engineers) in Kirkland, which will raise its R&D costs by about $3 million per quarter, the company said.

“Arris delivers the market position necessary to take the Moxi vision to the next level,” said Digeo’s CEO, Greg Gudorf, in a statement. “I am extremely pleased that the Digeo team will continue to drive the evolution of the Moxi platform.”

But observers point out that the purchase price means a substantial loss on the investment for Allen. PaidContent reports Digeo’s total funding was more than $110 million. In an interview with TechFlash, Gudorf said fewer than 10 Digeo employees would lose their jobs in the acquisition, and that he will stay with Arris during the transition. The news of Digeo’s layoffs was first reported by the Seattle Times.

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Whether the fall is back-to-school season for you or not, there’s always more to learn. In last week’s column I outlined three fun weekend projects involving new technologies for digital self-expression. My suggestions covered art (digital “finger painting” with an iPhone app called Brushes), writing (“lifestreaming” with Posterous and Friendfeed), and photography (building three-dimensional photographic spaces with Photosynth). This week I’ve got two more digital projects in mind for you, this time in the areas of podcasting and computer animation. Next week, I’ll finish up with maps and virtual worlds.

I’m writing this three-part column because I think it’s an exciting time for anyone who’s interested in consumer-level digital media tools. Not only are we seeing a profusion of inexpensive new gadgets for capturing media—witness Apple’s announcement Wednesday that the new iPod Nano will have a built-in digital video camera—but there are also many new Web-based services where creators can edit, enhance, share, and promote their media creations. The only way to keep up with all these new technologies is just to jump in and try them. So let’s get back to it:

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo

When podcasting first took off four or five years ago, most podcasters tried to emulate radio hosts, kitting out their podcasts with fancy musical intros and outros and other audio goodies. Just to experiment with podcasting, you needed a pricey microphone and recording rig, audio editing software, and a working knowledge of RSS, iTunes, and other distribution methods. But thanks to a bit of good old technological progress, the barriers are now much lower. In fact, producing a podcast these days can be just about as easy as making a phone call. Which means that dictating a few off-the-cuff thoughts on your mobile device and uploading them to the Web is becoming a realistic alternative to blogging and other more familar forms of Web-based communication.

This is precisely the point of AudioBoo, a UK-based service that I profiled in July. If you live in the UK (or if you’re willing to splurge on an international phone call), you can call AudioBoo from any phone and record some thoughts, then publish the the recording straight to AudioBoo.fm, which is basically a giant community audio blog featuring recordings or “boos” from all AudioBoo users.

But if you have an iPhone, you can use the nifty AudioBoo app to do the same thing, without the phone calls or the attendant charges. The app has a voice recording function that lets you talk for up to five minutes. It then uses your wireless data connection to upload the finished boo to the AudioBoo.fm, along with a photograph and a map of your location, if you wish. Fans can listen to your boos at the site, or they can subscribe and get new boos delivered via RSS or iTunes. The AudioBoo site also provides some handy code that you can use to embed your boos in your blog.

In fact, by doing a bit of social media marketing to promote your boos, you could turn AudioBoo into your own personal audio publishing empire. Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t … Next Page »

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Verivue, the Westford, MA-based maker of multimedia distribution switches for cable and telecom operators, has raised $20.1 million in an equity offering, according to regulatory forms filed yesterday. PE Hub, citing a Venture Wire report, says new investor Sigma Partners took the lead in the round. Verivue raised a $40 million Series B round in March of this year, on the heels of a $25 million Series A round in 2007.

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Hillsboro, OR-based TriQuint Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TQNT) announced today it has acquired TriAccess Technologies, based in Santa Rosa, CA. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TriAccess makes integrated-circuit amplifiers for audio, video, and HDTV applications. TriQuint Semiconductor, founded in 1985, makes wireless communication technologies for mobile manufacturers, cellular base stations, and defense and aerospace contractors.

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“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way—by rote or something,” physicist Richard Feynman once said. “Their knowledge is so fragile!”

Maybe Feynman’s brain was big enough to simply “learn by understanding”—sucking in and comprehending complex realities in a single glance. But what I think he actually meant was that people should learn by exploring and investigating, rather than just memorizing. Only then would their knowledge be useful and durable.

What makes Microsoft Research’s new Project Tuva website so wonderful is not just that it puts some of Feynman’s most famous physics lectures online, but that it invites viewers to explore the subject matter in exactly the way Feynman would have recommended. The Caltech scientist was famous in part for for his lucid way of explaining things like gravity and quantum mechanics—so the lectures certainly stand on their own as educational set-pieces. But the transcripts, note-taking tools, and multimedia “extras” that now show up alongside the videos make the material even more entertaining, accessible, and, well, explorable.

Project Tuva was unveiled last week. It’s named after the central Asian country Feynman famously and somewhat quixotically wanted to visit before he died. (He never got permission from the Soviet Union, of which it was then a part, as his friend Ralph Leighton chronicled in his 1991 book Tuva or Bust!) The site uses Microsoft’s Silverlight software, a Web-based multimedia player similar to Adobe’s Flash platform, to showcase a series of lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell University in 1964. The lectures were filmed by the BBC for broadcast in the United Kingdom, and weren’t available to Web viewers until Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, a longtime Feynman admirer, purchased the rights and asked Microsoft Research to find a way to host digital versions online.

“I said we could host them, but we could also do something much more interesting with it,” says Curtis Wong, who leads a small division of Microsoft Research called the Next Media Research group. I’ve known Wong for years and I make a point of following his work, because he’s always got some great new idea about how to take a cultural resource and increase its value through multimedia technology.

For the concepts behind Project Tuva, Wong told me by phone this week, he reached back to three projects he led in the mid-1990s. The first was an interactive tour, published on CD-ROM, of the Barnes Foundation’s collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings outside Philadelphia. The second was another CD-ROM about Leonardo da Vinci, built around a digital facsimile of one of Leonardo’s notebooks, the Codex Leicester, which also happens to be owned by Bill Gates. (See this May 2008 column for more on those two projects.) The third was an interactive video documentary, developed as a demonstration for PBS but never aired, in which the program’s closed-captioning information was interspersed with hyperlinks that led to related articles in Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia.

Each project represented a step in the development of what Wong calls his information learning model for interactive media; it’s also been called the “contextual pyramid” or “ECR,” for engagement, context, and reference. It’s a simple idea: first, you hook someone—whether they’re using a CD-ROM, watching a video, or visiting a website or a museum—with a story or an object that produces an immediate emotional impact. Then, at the very moment they’re most engaged and curious, you offer them context that broadens their understanding. Finally, you provide a deep reference layer, for the people who get so intrigued that they want to know a lot more.

I’d love to explain all the lovingly crafted ways in which the Barnes and Leonardo CD-ROMs and the PBS demo implemented this model, but it would take too long. Jump back to 2008 or so: as soon as Wong found out about Bill Gates’ quest to put the Feynman lectures online, he realized that … Next Page »

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Seattle-based RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) announced today the first new version of its RealPlayer media software since May 2007. This beta version of RealPlayer SP lets you download video in any format and quickly put it on your mobile phone or portable media player—whether you have an iPhone, iPod, BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, or any of the latest devices. It also lets you share videos with friends on social websites like Facebook and Twitter. Both of these are new capabilities for Real. The software is now available for free download.

It’s a major release, and a big deal for the company. When most people think of RealNetworks, they think of media delivery software, multimedia formats, music, and gaming services (and also its recent dispute with Hollywood studios over digital rights management with its RealDVD product)—not necessarily mobile devices and social networks.

That could be changing. Although its push into mobile and social media is not new, today’s product launch seems to fit within Real’s strategic belief that mobile is increasingly central to how people enjoy digital entertainment. (The division that houses Real’s mobile business, Technology Products & Solutions, accounts for 34 percent of the company’s revenues, and that percentage has been growing.) The launch is also central to turning around Real’s media software and services business, which has been flat or declining in recent years.

The field of online video formatting and converting is crowded, of course. But what seems to separate Real’s software from the competition, at least initially, is how fast and easy it is to use. With just a couple of clicks, you can grab videos from YouTube, say, and put them on your phone automatically without worrying about what format they’re in and whether it matches your device’s settings. “This is a product for everyone,” says John Schussler, senior program manager at RealNetworks. “We make the experience really, really simple.”

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Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group has led a $4.4 million funding round for Animoto, a Web software startup based in New York that lets people automatically create professional-quality videos and slideshows from photos and music. Other investors in the round include Seattle-based Amazon, Palo Alto, CA-based SoftTech VC (run by Jeff Clavier), and Bruce Livingstone, the founder of iStockphoto.

The current round includes an undisclosed amount of financing already announced in May 2008, from Amazon and angel investors. Before that, Animoto had raised a $600,000 seed round from friends and family. So the company has raised an even $5 million since it was founded in 2006.

There’s a lot more to the story. The lead investors in the deal are from Seattle, but that’s only part of the local connection. It turns out that “based in New York” doesn’t really do justice to the roots of Animoto. The company was started by four friends who went to Bellevue High School in the Seattle area: Brad Jefferson, Jason Hsiao, Stevie Clifton, and Tom Clifton (the latter two are brothers). Jefferson, who is now Animoto’s CEO, went on to school at Dartmouth College and got his start as an intern at Bellevue, WA-based Onyx Software, where he began working full-time in 1998, and quickly moved up the ranks.

“He was a rock star,” recalls Onyx founder and Dartmouth alum Brent Frei, now with Bellevue-based Smartsheet. “He’s super smart but very humble. It’s amazing the things he does right naturally.” Frei notes that Stevie Clifton was also a superb Onyx intern. “They have assembled a fantastic team,” he says. (Interesting note: Jefferson was the only one of the four founders who didn’t play in an indie rock band around Seattle—he was more into sports.)

Jefferson got promoted at Onyx in 2000 to run a services team in San Francisco. There, he was roommates with Hsiao when Onyx was acquired by M2M Holdings in 2006. Jefferson opted for the severance package, and the very next day, Hsiao pitched him on the idea of Animoto. The basic concept was an online service to make it easy for people to create “animated photos” to capture the mood of events like weddings and graduations in customized slideshows. Animoto’s software creates moving slideshows that match the beat and feel of the accompanying music you select. A hip-hop track will make the picture movements and transitions fast and edgy like an MTV video, while a classical piece will make the slideshow more staid and elegant.

Animoto finished its first working prototype in December 2006, and started getting user feedback over the next few months. At the time, the company used a traditional hosting provider, but it couldn’t handle huge spikes in traffic. “As I started running the numbers, it was, ‘Oh crap, if we’re successful, we’re gonna fail,’” Jefferson says. So Animoto talked to Amazon Web Services about hosting its applications and data, and spent several months enhancing its product and “pushing everything into AWS,” he says, just in time for public beta trials in August 2007. “It was really a good decision from a capital expenditure perspective. From Day One, we were able to scale to the world.”

Meanwhile, Jefferson was sowing the seeds of future venture investment, even if he didn’t … Next Page »

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San Diego’s NextWave Wireless (NASDAQ: WAVE) said today its Chairman, CEO, and President Allen Salmasi “has transferred the day-to-day operating role” of CEO and President to James Brailean, who heads NextWave’s PacketVideo subsidiary. The company’s COO and CFO have both resigned. NextWave Wireless, founded in 2005, develops embedded multimedia software for mobile devices,and has had approximately 1,000 employees in 27 worldwide locations. The company says it will now focus on PacketVideo as its sole remaining operating business.

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At a luncheon that followed the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit on Friday, I sat with Bob Dynes, the former President of the University of California system, who began talking about the formation of CalIT2 (Cal-IT-squared) almost a decade ago.

These days, the research center also known as the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology is playing an increasingly central role in multi-disciplinary advances that span academic departments, campuses, and even industries. The prevalence of CalIT2′s influence was evident throughout presentations made at the summit, which was organized for venture investors as a showcase of San Diego’s innovative capabilities. Sony Electronics, for example, used an algorithm developed at CalIT2′s machine perception lab as the basis for the “shutter smile” technology in the company’s latest generation of consumer digital cameras.

“Who would ever have guessed that CalIT2 would look the way it does today!” exclaimed Dynes, who spent 22 years at Bell Labs before arriving at UC San Diego as a physics professor in 1991. Dynes became UCSD’s chancellor in 1996, and told me he began working to create the institute—and to recruit founding director (and Xconomist) Larry Smarr—in 1999.

CalIT2 is one of four institutes for science and innovation that California Gov. Gray Davis officially launched in 2002 by signing legislation that provided $308 million in lease-revenue bonds. Since then, CalIT2 has come to embody Smarr’s ambitious vision for tackling daunting, large-scale problems.

“What we’ve succeeded in is this idea of institutional innovation,” Smarr said in an interview. By using the power of high-speed networks and high-performance computing, Smarr said CalIT2 can take on seemingly intractable problems in everything from molecular biology to atmospheric science by assembling multidisciplinary teams of the best minds, whether or not they are on UC campuses. He calls it a “persistent framework for collaboration.”

New buildings for CalIT2 were built at … Next Page »

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