You know the type. He’s at every tech startup event, every investor event, and every incubator and early-stage mentorship session (at least every good one). He’s talked to every entrepreneur in the area and has had a hand in the development of many of their companies.

He has been a fixture of the local software scene for some 30 years, even though he doesn’t look nearly old enough for that. Worst of all, he comes across as a genuinely nice guy and doesn’t seek the limelight or talk a big game.

That would be Reed Sturtevant—and his reputation is as distinguished as his name. He is one of the Boston area’s most active and respected techies, known especially for his technical prowess and product experience. He’s also an Xconomist—one of our informal advisors who helps keep Xconomy plugged in to the innovation scene—so I wanted to take some time to catch up with him in more depth.

Sturtevant grew up outside of Washington, DC, and is a self-professed MIT dropout (we need more of those, don’t we?). He started his career as a programmer at Strategic Planning Institute in the late ‘70s and went on to work at Graphic Communications, maker of Freelance Graphics—which was bought by Lotus Development, where he stayed for about 10 years. During the ‘90s, he co-founded Radnet and RadioAMP before taking a senior role in 2000 with Idealab, where he was responsible for new company development in Boston. There he helped start six companies: Refer.com, Compete, Picasa (bought by Google), Newbury Networks, Paythrough, Pathspace, and Newbury Payments.

After Idealab, he became chief technology officer for Eons, the Jeff Taylor-led social networking site, and stayed for almost two years. He left Eons and helped found Microsoft Startup Labs in 2007, where he directed a team that developed the user experience for Bing Twitter search, among other projects. He left Microsoft in late 2009 to focus on startups and investing—which brings us to what he’s doing today.

Sturtevant currently co-runs Project 11 Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund (co-founded with Katie Rae) that works together with angel investors to back young tech startups. He tells me that since last fall, Project 11 has invested in seven companies—Locately, Scriptpad, peerTransfer, GreenGoose, and three undisclosed startups. In his spare time, he is a mentor for TechStars Boston, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a founding member and trustee of the Awesome Foundation.

I caught up with Sturtevant over e-mail this week, asking him a variety of questions ranging from the state of the economy to the challenges of building a consumer-focused tech company (especially in Boston), to the most important trends to watch in computing. Here are his answers:

Xconomy: Let’s talk about the broader economic backdrop for what you do: startups and investing. How does the bleak macro-outlook for jobs and the stock market affect your strategy?

Reed Sturtevant: Obviously we’re all better off in times of economic tailwinds, but I’m seeing a couple of effects on the very early stage startup arena.

First, job security in established companies and industries is clearly an illusion. I teach at MIT and this week I asked our students whether they expect to work in, or found, a startup. Two-thirds of … Next Page »

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After three years in stealth mode, San Francisco-based BlueStacks debuted today with an announcement that it has collected $7.6 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Ventures, Helion Ventures, Radar Partners, and Redpoint Ventures. The startup, founded by former McAfee chief technology officer Rosen Sharma, is developing software that promises to allow owners of x86-based PCs to run applications written for the Google Android mobile operating system. Ignition partner Frank Artale and Radar partner Kevin Compton have joined BlueStacks’ board as a result of the investment.

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[Updated 5:15 pm. See below] Ken Olsen, the co-founder and former CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), died on Sunday. He was 84. The news was confirmed yesterday by Gordon College in Wenham, MA, where Olsen was a longtime trustee. There has been an outpouring of commentary about Olsen’s career and the impact of DEC on the computer industry. (You can read obituaries in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and CNET.)

Olsen, an MIT alum, started Digital with Harlan Anderson in 1957 with $70,000 in seed funding from Georges Doriot of American Research and Development. The Maynard, MA, company went on to dominate the minicomputer industry (as opposed to mainframes), employing more than 125,000 people in 86 countries and becoming the second-largest IT company behind IBM. Through the 1970s and ‘80s, DEC anchored the burgeoning Route 128 tech corridor and was joined by Data General, Wang, and other computer companies.

But DEC was famously slow to embrace the desktop computer market, and the company struggled through the late 80s and early 90s. Olsen resigned from DEC in 1992, and the company went on to be acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett-Packard. And as DEC went, so did the Route 128 ecosystem.

In a letter, Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates called Olsen “one of the true pioneers of the computing industry.” Gates added, “He was also a major influence in my life and his influence is still important at Microsoft through all the engineers who trained at Digital.”

Some of those engineers are weighing in with their remembrances. Gordon Bell, a principal researcher at Microsoft who spent 23 years at DEC as vice president of R&D, wrote in a post on Xconomy today, “I tend to remember all the humor and moments of irony that we shared while building computers at DEC.”

Yuchun Lee, the co-founder and former CEO of Unica (now part of IBM), worked at Digital from 1989-1992. He writes in an e-mail, “DEC was an organization with a terrific culture: one of intellectual honesty, meritocracy, and a desire to win. All of this can be directly attributed to Ken Olsen and his vision as the founder and leader of the best days of Digital. I’ve learned much of what a great and significant company ought to look and feel like as one grows up and am very fortunate to have cut my teeth there right out of school.”

History is made, and then it’s gone unless we pay attention. Olsen was the prototypical Boston tech entrepreneur. He leaves behind a legacy of thousands of employees who have gone on to new endeavors. DEC also provides a well-known case study of a hugely successful venture-backed company that failed to adapt to a changing market. Then again, not very many tech companies last more than 30 years.

I’ll update this space with any more unique comments or stories I hear from the innovation community.

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For years, Carbonite has been one of the compelling stories of the Boston-area tech scene. That story is about to get more compelling in 2011.

The online data-backup company, which launched its consumer service in 2006, has talked openly about its plans to file for an initial public offering later this year. In an in-depth profile last January, my colleague Wade wrote about Carbonite’s approach and history, as well as its broader business and marketing strategy and competition with Mozy (part of Hopkinton, MA-based storage giant EMC).

A year later, it seemed like a good time to check in with Carbonite to see how things are progressing—particularly in regard to the company’s proposed IPO, and its relatively recent move to focus on small businesses as well as consumers. The firm is led by serial entrepreneur and CEO David Friend, who co-founded five previous tech companies: ARP Instruments, Computer Pictures Corporation, Pilot Software, FaxNet, and Sonexis.

“We’re in the final stages of banker selection,” Friend told me a few weeks ago about Carbonite’s IPO progress. “We’re just marching ahead. We’re in no huge rush; we have quite a bit of money. We want to have top name bankers. We just have to continue to execute, continue to bring out new products, and expand internationally.” The prospective IPO, he says, depends mostly on Carbonite’s “ability to show we can do more of what we’re doing.”

Indeed, cash is not an issue for the company, which most recently closed a $20 million Series D venture round about a year ago, and has raised more than $67 million to date. More importantly, Carbonite has been doubling its revenue every year since 2006. The firm has about 160 employees in Boston, plus around 200 other full-time equivalents, Friend says.

Yesterday the company announced a series of promotions and hires to go along with a reorganization around its two main kinds of customers. Swami Kumaresan, formerly vice president of marketing, is now general manager of Carbonite’s consumer group, while Peter Lamson, formerly senior vice president at NameMedia, has joined Carbonite as general manager of its new small business group. And, rounding out the personnel moves, Bill Phelan from Intuit and Richard Surace from PlumChoice have joined Carbonite as vice presidents of product and services, respectively.

Carbonite’s focus on providing online backup for businesses (in addition to consumers) has grown over the past year or so. The significance of yesterday’s news is that the company’s business … Next Page »

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The somewhat lurid circumstances surrounding Mark Hurd’s resignation Friday as chief executive of Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard have left plenty of room for gossip. Hurd stepped aside after a board investigation into a sexual harassment claim by a former marketing contractor; the board cleared Hurd of the harassment allegation, but found that he’d fudged expense reports to hide payments to the woman, who, it emerged over the weekend, is a former actress named Jodie Fisher.

For HP insiders, the episode must feel like a painful echo of previous executive departures, notably that of former board chair Patricia Dunn, who stepped down after a corporate espionage episode came to light in 2006. Now employees and shareholders must wait while interim CEO Cathie Lesjak, formerly the company’s chief financial officer, works to contain the damage and find a replacement.

But more significant than the scandal and the gossip, in the long run, will be the market’s assessment of Hurd’s record as a promoter of growth, innovation, and strategic change within HP. And the biggest lesson here—one that Hurd’s successor would be wise to learn—may be that vertical integration pays. The company’s biggest successes in recent years have come from taking manufacturing, software, and services—components of the computer industry that have been largely scattered since the 1980s—and tying them back together.

Certainly, Hurd leaves HP in a much sounder financial state than when the former NCR executive was chosen in early 2005 to rebuild the company after years of disappointing performance under former CEO Carly Fiorina. Net revenue grew from $86 billion in 2005 to $115 billion in 2009, increasing through the recession and helping the company to surpass even longtime rival IBM to become the world’s second-largest information technology company by revenue (trailing only Korea’s Samsung). While HP’s stock dipped nearly 10 percent on Friday following the announcement of Hurd’s departure, that same stock had more than doubled on Hurd’s watch, from a low of around $20 per share in April 2005 to the $43-$53 range this year.

In the market for consumer PCs, long the foundation of HP’s business, the company bounded forward under Hurd’s leadership, regaining the No. 1 spot in global market share from Dell in 2006. It’s held on to that ranking ever since, despite a major dip in PC purchasing in 2008-2009. In 2009 the company also became the leading supplier of PCs to the U.S. enterprise market, and it’s consistently in close competition with IBM to supply the most enterprise servers.

Between 2004 and 2009, HP spent $17 billion on research and development and $20 billion on acquisitions, capping off a buying spree with the purchase of infotech giants Electronic Data Systems (EDS), 3Com, and Palm. “The corporation is exceptionally well positioned strategically,” Hurd said in a statement announcing his resignation. “HP has an extremely talented executive team supported by a dedicated and customer focused work force. I expect that the company will continue to be successful in the future.”

To the extent that Hurd’s prediction comes true, some observers believe, it may be thanks to his own aggressive effort to extend HP’s product lines, making the company into a one-stop shop in many of the markets where it plays.

In the realm of corporate data centers, for example, the acquisition of Opsware in 2007 and of 3Com this year brought the company networking software and switches to layer atop its server and storage technology. In corporate computer services, the acquisition of EDS in 2008 brought HP an enterprise IT outsourcing division to help big companies run the same hardware and software that it was selling to them. And while competitors like IBM have exited the PC market, HP has … Next Page »

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PatientKeeper has worked fast to make its physician software available on whichever smartphones or mobile devices doctors like to use. So it makes sense for the Newton, MA-based firm to expand its menu of mobile applications this month to the iPad, Apple’s hot new tablet computing device.

The company develops software that automates a physician’s duties, such as viewing patient data from electronic records systems, ordering prescriptions or lab tests, and recording charges for services. Some 23,000 clinicians use the software, which they can access on smartphones, laptops, PCs, and now the iPad, says company CEO Paul Brient.

The company, founded as Virtmed in 1996, was renamed in 2001 after the mobile app called “Patient Keeper” that a Texas physician developed for Palm Pilots, Brient says. The firm purchased that Palm app, which he says had an early “cult following,” about a decade ago. The firm has since gone on to support apps for smartphones such as BlackBerry devices, Windows Mobile phones, and the iPhone.

When developing software, PatientKeeper targets areas that make a physician’s workday easier and more productive, Brient says. This physician-centric product strategy sets PatientKeeper’s programs apart from most healthcare software systems, which are usually designed to automate tasks for a specific unit of a hospital such as a radiology lab, emergency room, or billing department. The firm’s unique approach in healthcare, which has changed and evolved over its 14-year history, has attracted about $84 million in venture investments.

Traditional healthcare software—including electronic health records (EHR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE)—have failed to gain mainstream adoption among U.S. physicians. Many complain that the software makes them less productive than standard paper-based systems, and that doctors themselves don’t get rewarded for spending the time and money to adopt the technology. Brient says PatientKeeper has focused on software that not only makes doctors more productive but also improves their use of healthcare IT systems like CPOE.

“Our approach has been that if you want to get someone to adopt technology, you have to … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Verdiem is announcing today a new partnership with San Jose, CA-based Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO). Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will market and sell Verdiem’s energy management software for PCs and networked devices under Cisco’s “EnergyWise Orchestrator” brand, through its worldwide distribution network. Financial details weren’t given, but it’s an original equipment manufacturing deal, so Verdiem’s software will be built into Cisco’s products—which could make it a very promising sales strategy for Verdiem.

Verdiem makes software to help big companies, government agencies, and universities control and manage energy usage by PCs on their network. The software includes features like automatically turning off computers when they’re not in use, and turning them back on when they need to install software updates. It also includes sophisticated dashboards for monitoring energy use. The partnership with Cisco extends Verdiem’s reach to other networked devices such as Cisco IP phones, wireless access points, and edge switches.

“Extending the capabilities of Verdiem’s enterprise platform for PC power management, Cisco and Verdiem are delivering to market the first energy management solution for PCs and networked devices,” said Jeremy Jaech, Verdiem’s CEO, in a statement. Jaech added that the agreement will give businesses and organizations “a trusted, holistic solution to measure, manage and monitor both their energy consumption and carbon footprint.”

Verdiem was founded in 2001 and is venture backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and NCD Investors, among others. Jaech, the co-founder of Aldus, Visio, and Trumba, joined the company in late 2008. Last summer, Verdiem said more than 300 corporations, government agencies, and universities had used its software, and had slashed their PC energy costs by 30 to 60 percent.

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If you watched last night’s NCAA men’s basketball championship game on the Web, or followed any of Major League Baseball’s opening day action via video on your mobile phone, then you have an idea of the market that Elemental Technologies is trying to tap.

Elemental, a Portland, OR-based video processing startup, is announcing today its most ambitious product to date: a real-time video encoding system that will let broadcasters, media companies, and cable networks stream live video to any type of device across any network. It could be a significant step toward the company’s ultimate goal of letting consumers watch video on any device. That means watching live events as the action is happening with a smooth and seamless experience, instead of getting a jittery picture or waiting for the video to load.

The new product is based on Elemental’s core approach of using off-the-shelf graphics processing units (GPUs) and smart software to do video processing much more efficiently and cheaply than conventional systems that use central processing units or specialized hardware. The difference between this and its two previous video products—a post-production system and an on-demand server—is that “Elemental Live” works in real-time as the video is being sent from a camera to the viewer’s device. The company has filed five patent applications on its technology.

“We spent a ton of time building an interface that’s really easy for anyone to use,” says Sam Blackman, the CEO and co-founder of Elemental. “The product line is fleshed out now.”

Of course, the Major League Baseballs, Turner Broadcasting Systems, and NBCs of the world already have streaming video systems in place. But they don’t always work that well, and they tend to be costly. So the question is whether Elemental can deliver much better live-video performance, such that it immediately drives up traffic and advertising revenues for these big networks. One promising sign: CBS Sports has reported that its ad revenues from streaming video are increasing without … Next Page »

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As Don Corleone said in The Godfather, “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” If that’s true, then a Seattle company called Cozi should help quite a few people become real men.

Cozi is a tech startup focused on family-related software for the home. That includes things like online calendars, shopping lists, to-do lists, message boards, and family journals for sharing family memories and photos. These are the kinds of things, the company reasons, that busy families want to have to keep the trains running on time, and which most still do with paper and pen, or a physical bulletin board. Cozi puts it all online.

But there’s something deeper here. Cozi’s mission statement is to help family members improve their relationships with each other, through its software. I’m paraphrasing, but this is essentially the company’s 10-year “audacious goal.” It’s posted on the wall of Cozi’s meeting room at its headquarters in the Smith Tower near Pioneer Square. The place feels like a comfortable living room, as CEO and co-founder Robbie Cape pointed out when he showed me around. I came away with a strong sense that Cozi is a family, not just a company. And that if Cape were in a Godfather movie, you’d call him Don Cozi. (I’m kind of hoping that sticks.)

In any case, a sweeping mission to help families is all good—and atypical of tech startups, where 80-hour weeks and product focus are the norm. But it’s one thing to have a noble mission, and another to deliver on it. That’s why Cozi is interesting right now: for the first time, it can see a viable path to achieving its mission. “We are only now starting to see signs that the vision we had when we started the company can become a reality,” Cape says.

Cozi seems to have surged ahead of most startups in family organization software, including Fircle, Famundo, and Nesting.com. Seattle-based Trumba started as an online calendar service for families, but has switched to focusing on businesses and other organizations. Meanwhile, most big companies like Microsoft and Google don’t focus on family software because to them, the market is too small.

Being privately held, Cozi doesn’t disclose its financial performance and growth rates. But here are some hints of success. Cozi’s software now comes pre-loaded on all Dell machines. It has … Next Page »

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Startups almost never end up doing what they started out doing. The key is, can they adjust to the market and find enough paying customers before they run out of money? Here’s an interesting case study in the making: Napera Networks.

The computer-network security startup, based in Mercer Island, WA—are there any other startups there?—is announcing a new product direction and strategy today. Napera is rolling out network management software that is based entirely in the Internet “cloud,” and will be sold to small-to-medium-sized businesses through a software-as-a-service model. The software, called PC Security Informer, helps IT administrators efficiently manage the security of employees’ computers—dealing proactively with things like anti-virus updates, spyware removal, and firewall breaches.

It sounds pretty straightforward, but the key opportunity is that most smaller companies (with a couple hundred employees or fewer) don’t want to spend a lot of money on complex security systems from Microsoft, Cisco, or Computer Associates (CA), for example. Napera says it offers an easier and cheaper solution to the basic problem of businesses’ machines being insecure.

“We’ve wrapped it in a very Web 2.0-like wrapper,” says Todd Hooper, the CEO and co-founder of Napera. “If you can use Facebook, you can use our apps.”

Hooper, an expert in network security, co-founded Napera in late 2006. Before that, he had co-founded Momentum Pty, an Internet security consultancy in Australia, and audio software firm Trillium Lane Labs, and had been vice president of business development at Seattle-based WatchGuard Technologies.

What’s interesting is not necessarily whether Napera’s technology is really better than that of its competitors, but that the company has found a way to evolve from a … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Amazon.com announced today that its Kindle Digital Text Platform can now be used by authors and publishers to upload their electronic books in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian to the Kindle Store. The service is already available for English, French, and German books. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) also said yesterday that its Kindle application is now available as a free download for BlackBerry devices. That extends the reach of Kindle e-books beyond Kindle devices, iPhones, iPod Touch, and PCs.

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Maybe online advertising revenues are coming back—at least in certain markets. That’s what I thought after catching up yesterday with Robbie Cape, the founder and CEO of Seattle-based Cozi. Earlier this week, the family-focused software company disclosed in an SEC filing that it has raised $5 million in new equity funding. The news was first reported by paidContent and then TechFlash.

Cape declined to give details about the new investment, other than to say it comes from a new strategic investor. He said the deal does not reflect any shift in the company’s strategy or revenue model. “We’re still fanatically focused on families, and we’re very bullish on the advertising business model,” Cape said. He added that in terms of advertising, the company was oversold in five of the last six months of 2009, and it has “significantly expanded” its reach over the last several months. (I took this to mean it has brought in a bunch of new advertisers as well as end users.)

Cozi now has about 2.5 million registered family members (representing 1.3 million families). That’s up quite a bit from 1.5 million people (and half a million families) last June. The company makes Web-based software to help busy families coordinate their schedules, organize their activities and chores, and communicate with each other. Its software runs on PCs, laptops, touchscreen devices, and smartphones. Cozi currently has 23 employees.

The company has benefited from strong partnerships with companies like Dell, MeadWestvaco, Meredith Corp., Nestle, and Gannett. It previously had raised about $16 million from angel investors, Gannett, and others.

“The best news is we’re consistently seeing more and more companies coming to talk to us, about assisting them with their strategy in the home,” Cape said. “We’re poised for an incredibly exciting 2010.”

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After a steady crescendo over the last several years, the talk in the mediasphere about a new tablet computer from Apple has reached deafening proportions. With an actual product announcement now expected on January 27 (at least, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cites “sources in a position to know”), Apple may finally be on the verge of providing some official data to quell the many and oft-conflicting rumors.

I’m as curious as all of my tech-journalist colleagues about what Apple will reveal. And my inner gadget freak is impatient, too. Speaking purely with my consumer hat on, I’ve long been budgeting mentally for an “iSlate” purchase sometime in 2010. There’s only one company where I’d commit sight unseen, years in advance, to dropping a grand on the next new thing, and it’s Apple.

But what’s really been catching my interest, as we wait for news from the horse’s mouth, is the apparent strength of the market pull for Apple’s hypothetical tablet. Everybody, it seems, desperately wants the iSlate rumors to be true: bloggers, journalists, publishers, mobile application developers, generic geeks, and even average consumers. Indeed, the expectations have built up to such a pitch that if the January 27 event doesn’t materialize, or if it’s not about a tablet device, Apple’s PR team will have global-scale disappointment to deal with.

The details don’t seem to matter. Whether the device is called the iSlate or the iPad or the MacBook Touch; whether its screen measures 7 inches diagonally or 9 or 11; whether it costs $600 or $1,000; whether it’s primarily designed as an e-reader or a gaming pad or keyboardless netbook—most observers seem to agree that the Apple tablet will be über-cool, that the company will sell millions of units, and that 2010 will be the year of the tablet.

Whether or not you buy into that consensus (and I do, more or less, though there are also a few dissenters), you have to admit that all this enthusiasm is a little strange, given that the market has shown so little interest in tablet computers up to now.

Tablets are a very old idea—in fact, the first computer that can rightly be called a PC, Alan Kay’s 1968 Dynabook, was a tablet device. (The Dynabook concept evolved into the Xerox Alto, which inspired the Apple Lisa and the Apple Macintosh, which eventually spawned the Apple iPhone, which paved the way for the alleged iSlate—so in a way, personal computing is now coming full circle.) But it’s a product category that has never quite matched up with an identifiable consumer need.

Apple’s Newton was essentially a small tablet, and Steve Jobs himself killed the product in 1997 after disappointing sales and embarrassments over the device’s suboptimal handwriting recognition capabilities. Full PCs with touchscreens and pen interfaces have been on the market since 2001, when Microsoft introduced a tablet version of Windows, but they’ve never sold more than a few hundred thousand units a year, and have never caught on outside a few specialized habitats, such as hospitals, shipping and logistics operations, surveying and mapping, and the military.

So, what accounts for the dissonance here? Why are the same consumers who have been so apathetic about the tablet form-factor in the past suddenly so excited about a possible Apple version? I think there are several things going on.

First, as Pen Computing Magazine founder Conrad Blickenstorfer has pointed out, most of the tablets built to date have suffered from the same set of fatal drawbacks. On the input side, if you’re going to dispense with a physical keyboard, then you’d better have either perfect handwriting recognition, an efficient virtual keyboard, or … Next Page »

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Seattle knows green—green trees, green ideas, and green innovation. As businesses rush to become more environmentally friendly, organizations like New York and London-based 1E and Seattle-based Verdiem have emerged as leaders in green-IT management. They offer systems that allow companies to cut off power to their computers remotely, saving energy and IT costs, and make decreasing a company’s environmental footprint as painless as possible. But only Woodinville, WA-based Adaptiva has built a system that integrates directly with the biggest software company in the world: Microsoft.

Adaptiva’s centerpiece is a product called Companion, a software extension that allows companies to control power usage based on when an individual computer is being used. It is run directly through Microsoft’s existing System Center Configuration Manager, which is a software product for managing large groups of Windows-based computers.

“Because we plug deeply into Microsoft’s management infrastructure, we didn’t have to build a management framework into our product,” Adaptiva chief technology officer and co-founder Deepak Kumar said. That means the product is cheaper, and easier to maintain, because as long as the Microsoft System Center software is working, Adaptiva’s product will work.

Powering down a computer may not sound like the cure for climate change, but in a company with hundreds of thousands of desktops, it takes a huge slice out of the carbon footprint. The trick is how to manage the green master switch. “Turning off computers remotely is very easy. The challenge is to detect which computers are actually not doing anything useful and turn them off selectively,” Kumar said.

Many companies wait until after hours to perform their maintenance tasks, so as not to disrupt their employees. This creates a Catch-22 when machines have been powered down and are unable to be updated with the rest of the network—something Kumar sees as a fundamental flaw. “The goals of IT are somewhat contrary with green-IT,” he said. “The second missing piece is the ability to turn on computers when those maintenance tasks are required.”

Adaptiva’s software gives administrators the ability to set parameters for automatically powering up and down, as well as network-wide maintenance schedules, without interrupting anyone’s work and risking the loss of data. There is also an add-on, called Green Planet, which allows individual users to customize their computer to save energy around their personal schedule.

“Users see value in it because now when they come in, the machine is already powered up and they don’t have to wait. And when they go away, the machine turns off safely,” Kumar said. “If they [admins] want to deploy a patch to 1,000 machines, they go create a policy in System Center to do that. We’ll read it from there and we figure out which 1,000 machines are required at what time and we’ll turn on those machines automatically.”

Adaptiva’s plug-in abilities make the system cheaper than others, but also limits its … Next Page »

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Redmond, WA-based Sammsoft, which makes security and privacy software for personal computers, has been acquired by support.com (NASDAQ: SPRT), an online technology firm based in Silicon Valley, for $8.5 million in cash. The assets of Sammsoft’s parent company, Xeriton, were also acquired in the deal. Sammsoft was operated by former Microsoft employees, most of whom will be joining support.com.

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It was a big week for big companies. Amazon’s stock soared, and the e-commerce giant made a deal with Microsoft that should make Kindle e-books even more popular. There was also interesting deals news from Bing and a few Northwest venture firms and startups.

—Kennewick, WA-based Infinia has raised $3.25 million in debt and options out of a total financing round worth as much as $10.5 million, as Luke reported. The investors were not disclosed. Infinia, which (before this latest round) has raised $84 million from a syndicate that includes Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Vinod Khosla, is developing novel solar power systems.

—Seattle-based Bezos Expeditions, the venture firm run by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, re-upped with an investment in Aviary, a design software startup based in Long Island, NY. The $7 million Series B round was led by Boston-based Spark Capital. Aviary makes cloud-based software for graphic design, audio editing, and other creative digital services.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is teaming up with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to release Kindle for PC, a software application that will let people read Kindle electronic books on Windows personal computers. No financial terms were announced. The free application will be released next month.

—Revolution Computing, which has offices in Seattle and New Haven, CT, raised $9 million from North Bridge Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, and Intel Capital, based in Santa Clara, CA, as Wade reported. The startup, which provides software and support for the statistical programming language known as “R,” also announced that Norman Nie, a veteran of the data mining software firm SPSS, is its new CEO.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $12 million investment in RedSeal Systems, a security software firm in San Mateo, CA. Existing investors Venrock Associates, Jafco Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures also participated in the deal, which brings RedSeal’s total funding to more than $43 million. OVP managing director Mark Ashida has joined the company’s board.

—Bellevue, WA-based AudienceScience confirmed it has raised $20 million from Silicon Valley investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Meritech Capital Partners, and Integral Capital Partners. The online advertising firm said it will use the funding to hire new staff, do R&D in targeted advertising, and expand internationally. Luke previously reported that AudienceScience (formerly called Revenue Science) had closed a $15.1 million funding round involving equity, debt, and preferred stock, which had the potential to go up to $20 million, based on an SEC filing.

—Microsoft is integrating real-time status updates from Twitter and Facebook into its Bing search engine, as Thea Chard reported in her first freelance story for Xconomy. The Redmond, WA, software company has formed non-exclusive partnerships with the two social media networks, as part of Microsoft’s plan to fuse the “real-time Web” with its search engine to create a new kind of social-media focused reader. Bing’s access to tweets is now in beta form, while the Facebook deal, which will grant the search engine access to all publicly shared information from the social network’s users, will be effective at a later date, according to Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi.

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Seattle-based Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced today a new “Kindle for PC” application that will let people read Kindle electronic books on Windows personal computers. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) demoed the free app at its Windows 7 release event in New York. It will be available worldwide next month.

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In case you missed it yesterday, the New York Times ran a sweeping review of Microsoft’s position in the tech world on the eve of its Windows 7 rollout this week. That’s the latest version of Microsoft’s iconic operating system for personal computers. But the article smartly goes beyond the company’s strategy for PCs, and examines its near-term prospects in areas like search, mobile, entertainment, and cloud computing.

It’s arguably the most challenging time in Microsoft’s 34-year history. The Times piece points out the company’s revenue declined for the first time ever in its 2009 fiscal year, and it faces increasing competition from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com. Nevertheless, top Microsoft execs like CEO Steve Ballmer and chief software architect Ray Ozzie continue to defend the company’s position in the market, reiterating its focus on phones, PCs, and TVs—the idea of “three screens and a cloud” that Ozzie talked about back in May. Microsoft also has earmarked nearly $10 billion for R&D spending over the next year, according to the piece.

The conclusion? The Times calls the overall forecast for Microsoft “partly cloudy.” It’s a bit of a letdown, but the story does cover a lot of ground in terms of different technology areas, and competitors coming from different angles.

The story also includes critical comments from a couple of former Microsoft veterans who have strong ties to the Seattle tech scene. Bruce Chizen, the former CEO of Adobe Systems—and now a venture partner with Seattle-based Voyager Capital—is quoted as saying about Microsoft, “They are not the company they once were in terms of market position…They no longer have a monopoly that is critical to the future of computing.”

And Bryan Trussel, the former head of Xbox Live Arcade and now CEO of Glympse, a Seattle-area mobile startup focused on location sharing, is quoted in the context of Microsoft’s recent efforts to work with developers, students, and cloud-computing startups— crucial audiences that company execs have worried about losing touch with. “They got scared,” Trussel says in the piece. “I think they get it now, but the question is how far behind they are.”

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PlumChoice, a Billerica, MA-based company that provides remote technical support to home and business computer users, announced today that it has raised $14.7 million in Series E funding from existing investor Edison Venture Fund and others. An unnamed limited partner at Edison also provided “a substantial first-time investment,” according to the company. PlumChoice most recently raised $2.8 million in April 2008 and $2 million in January 2009.

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When we last checked in with Verdiem back in June, the Seattle energy-IT firm was reporting encouraging results from its product trials in Seattle, Chicago, and Honolulu. Today, Verdiem is announcing that its personal computer power-management software has reached a new milestone, having been installed on more than one million desktops. What’s more, the company says its business customer base has doubled in the past 12 months.

Verdiem’s software helps big companies and organizations control and manage energy usage by PCs on their network. The product includes simple features like automatically turning off computers when they’re not in use, and turning them back on when they need to install software updates, as well as dashboards for managing energy use. The company says more than 300 corporations, government agencies, and universities have deployed the software, and have typically reduced their PC energy costs by 30 to 60 percent. The latest announced customer is Atlanta, GA-based Cox Communications, which has outfitted 15,000 of its networked PCs with Verdiem’s energy-saving software.

“Business and IT leaders are searching for solutions to tangibly reduce costs and protect the environment,” said Brett Goodwin, Verdiem’s vice president of marketing, in a statement. Companies see PC power management as “low hanging fruit” in the growing effort to make everyday computing greener, he said.

Verdiem was founded in 2001 and is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and NCD Investors, among others. Since December, the company has been led by chief executive Jeremy Jaech, the co-founder of Aldus, Visio, and Trumba.

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