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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Incubator, schmincubator. The innovation community has had its fill of incubators and accelerators, hasn’t it? Well, this one is a little different.

As echoes of Commencement speeches die down around town, it’s fitting that the 12-week startup bootcamp known as TechStars Boston is graduating its newest class of companies tomorrow. What’s interesting about this group—compared with the two previous Boston classes, and indeed, other TechStars classes from Boulder, Seattle, and New York—might be its diversity across industry and geography, and its potential to bring fresh talent to the area.

The 12 companies presenting to investors and media at tomorrow’s Demo Day in Boston range in sector from mobile/social gaming (The Tap Lab), online promotions (Promoboxx), and alumni networking (EverTrue), to health and wellness (Ginger.io) and medical devices (Strohl Medical). Their founders come from Israel (Senexx), England (Memrise), and Estonia (GrabCAD, which just announced a seed-financing round); as well as Wisconsin (Student Spill), Tennessee (Help Scout), Texas (Kinvey), and the Boston area (the rest). I’m hearing that several of the teams from outside are planning to stay local, which should help Boston’s talent pool.

The group’s diversity is notable because tech incubators tend to draw most of their talent from founders who are already based locally—and they tend to focus on Web and social/mobile software to the exclusion of other fields like healthcare or hardware. There is still plenty of Web and mobile in this year’s crop, but its variety of startups stands out for a small incubator.

As does the group’s camaraderie, if you listen to the program’s leader. “The amount of support and help they’ve given each other, that’s really been fun for me to watch,” says Katie Rae, managing director of TechStars Boston. She calls the group “stunningly close.”

The narrative arc of a TechStars company is a classic hero’s journey—complete with a call to action, meetings with mentors, a series of tests and conflicts, and a resolution and reward. Yet this year’s companies did not enter the program as a wide-eyed or naïve bunch.

“We were skeptical about incubator programs. There’s a ton of them popping up everywhere,” says Karan Singh, co-founder of Ginger.io, which develops software for tracking people’s health and wellness by interpreting communication and movement patterns gleaned from their mobile phones. The algorithms are based on research done at the MIT Media Lab. While Ginger was already in Boston prior to TechStars (at Dogpatch Labs), Singh, an MIT Sloan MBA, is another example of imported talent—he came from the Bay Area after graduating from UC Berkeley.

Partly through TechStars, Singh says, he has learned that the key to building a business … Next Page »

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Does the world really need another seed-stage technology investment fund? Maybe not—but Boston entrepreneurs can use all the expertise they can get.

That’s where Project 11 Ventures comes into play. In the increasingly crowded field of early-stage tech investing, Project 11, which is co-led by Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae, is taking a very hands-on approach to mentoring startups. That means helping founders (especially first-timers) refine their product, test it, think through business models, recruit talent, and work together effectively, among other things. Project 11 has announced a couple of investments already, in Boston-area startups Locately, which provides location-based information for advertisers, and peerTransfer, which focuses on international money transfers and payments.

I recently sat down with Sturtevant and Rae to talk about their investment themes and philosophy—and what really distinguishes them from other seed-stage tech investors in town. They couldn’t talk about any progress in raising their fund yet (rumored to be in the $5 million range), but they did shed some light on their unique background and their approach to working with entrepreneurs.

Sturtevant and Rae have been fixtures of the local startup scene for years. They previously worked together at Eons and Microsoft Startup Labs—in each case incubating startup ideas and testing numerous Internet businesses in parallel, rather than being more traditional “serial” entrepreneurs. Sturtevant is the tech guy, while Rae’s expertise is products and customers. Project 11 is their first fund together. (Rae was also recently tapped to be the new head of TechStars Boston.)

Becoming successful investors is a long road, of course, and lots of people will try and fail to make money as angel investors, “super angels,” or “micro-VCs.” It will take years to establish a track record of successes, and Rae and Sturtevant face a steep learning curve. Nevertheless, they are confident as they dive into the investing fray.

Here are a few nuggets from our chat:

—On their personal motivation for Project 11:

After leaving Microsoft last year, the two decided they liked working together, so they explored different startup and investment ideas. “I love making things real,” Sturtevant says. “If I step over to be an investor and coach, can I have more impact on more companies and more products than what … Next Page »

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Another busy week in Boston-area tech news. Here are a few items I didn’t have a chance to properly digest yet:

—Startup wars: Punchbowl founder and CEO Matt Douglas stirred the pot a little with a blog post calling out SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch for what Douglas considers his self-promotional bravado and unhealthy work-life balance, and telling him to “get a life.” Douglas also called out the media and some unnamed VCs for glorifying Priebatsch’s behavior. (I think it’s all just a good story, Douglas’s post included; we need more people in the innovation community willing to speak their mind publicly.)

As for actual news from Punchbowl: Last month, the party-planning company formed an interesting partnership with Cozi, a Seattle maker of online software to help families manage their busy schedules. Reached by e-mail, Douglas said the deal is important as an example of Punchbowl’s co-branding strategy, and that it has “lots of upside for both companies” as traffic grows. He added that Cozi is “the leader in the space in terms of family calendars and organization.”

—Checking-in is out. Pre-check-in and checkout are in. Follow me? OK, me neither. But this week, Boston-based Where.com released a new “local discovery” app that makes personalized recommendations for restaurants, stores, and so forth on mobile devices—the goal being to own the “pre-check-in” space and reinvent local search. Not to be outdone, Boston-based Aislebuyer released a new app that allows shoppers to check out—that is, buy merchandise—at certain retail stores using their Android smartphones (or iPhones). Apparently, both of these ideas are hotter at the moment than “checking in” through location-based social networks, once popularized by Foursquare.

—Lots of deals happening in mobile applications and advertising. Localytics, a mobile analytics startup based in Cambridge, MA, has signed up to help the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Turner Broadcasting track the performance of their mobile apps.

And Cambridge-based mobile ad startup Jumptap has formed a strategic alliance with Japan-based Cyber Communications; this arrangement includes an undisclosed investment in Jumptap by Cyber. Jumptap’s other investors include AllianceBernstein, General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, Summerhill Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and WPP.

—Katie Rae succeeds Shawn Broderick as managing director of the Boston chapter of TechStars, the seed-stage fund and startup mentoring program. Rae is an accomplished tech executive and startup advisor, so it sounds like a good fit. She also co-runs Project 11 Ventures with Reed Sturtevant, which can’t help but gain from plugging into TechStars’ network of investors and entrepreneurs. (You can read more about Rae’s appointment in the Boston Globe and Mass High Tech.)

—Lastly, a bit of self-promotion. We have a few tickets left for the Xconomy Forum next Wednesday (Dec. 8), “5×5: Five Cities, Five Big Tech Ideas.” Come hear Bill Warner speak on how to build a startup from the heart. And catch Bob Metcalfe on his farewell tour before he departs for Austin, TX. You can register here, or talk to me if you’re interested in attending. See you all next week.

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TechStars, the seed-stage investment fund and startup mentoring program, announced today it has selected tech executive and startup personality Katie Rae as the new managing director for its Boston installment. She’ll take over for former managing director Shawn Broderick, who announced earlier this month that he would be leaving his role to focus more closely on his gaming startup, play140, and a professorship position at Boston University.

Rae, who has most recently been working on a new startup accelerator and micro-investment fund called Project 11 Ventures with Reed Sturtevant, will help TechStars find new digs in the Boston area (it’s currently housed in Central Square), and add to its roster of startup mentors and early stage investors.

She has been active in the startup and investment scenes in Boston, having served as a judge and mentor for business plan competition MassChallenge and an organizer of the Boston Open Angel Forum. Rae’s resume also includes executive positions at Eons.com and Microsoft Startup Labs, as well as a guest lecturer slot at MIT.

As things pick up with TechStars, she’ll be backing away a bit from Project 11, which has invested in Boston-based analytics startup Locately and financial services software startup peerTransfer. Rae’s blog post on her new position notes that Sturtevant will be taking on more of the Project 11 responsibilities in the spring months when TechStars Boston is in session. Applications for the 2011 program are now open.

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Boston-area-based peerTransfer, a financial services software startup, said today it has raised its first financing round from an impressive list of venture capitalists and angel investors. The news was reported by the New York Times and other media outlets.

This financing is news because of the core idea and who the investors are, more than the dollar amount per se. The Web startup closed $1.1 million from Spark Capital, John Landry, Dave McClure, Jim Hornthal, Ken Morse, Roy Rodenstein, Project 11 Ventures (run by Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae), and Spanish investors Marek Fodor, Pablo Carrallo, and Raul Aznar.

PeerTransfer specializes in online international money transfers and global payments. Its software matches up the transactions going between any two countries—money flowing from the U.S. to the U.K. and vice versa, for example—so as to figure out the net flow between customers, and to keep the money effectively moving only within each country. The idea is that customers save money on international transfer fees and exchange rates. The startup was incorporated in July 2009.

Back in June, founder and CEO Iker Marcaide, a native of Spain, spoke with me after peerTransfer won the 20,000-Euro prize in the HIT Global Entrepreneurship Competition in Barcelona.

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Sometimes all you need to do is look at where former Microsoft executives are going, to piece together some interesting trends in the tech industry.

In recent months, a number of high-profile leaders from very different divisions of the Redmond, WA-based software firm (NASDAQ: MSFT) have departed. This might be true in any given year at a company with roughly 90,000 employees, of course, but what’s interesting here is where these execs are going—and what their moves say about their respective industries. (Also noticeably absent are any publicized moves to hated competitors like Apple, Google, or Oracle.)

I posit that the following six personnel moves say more about the near-term future of industries like mobile, gaming, online services, and automotive than about Microsoft itself, although there might be some intriguing partnerships with Redmond in the works:

—Stephen Elop to Nokia (CEO)

The former president of Microsoft’s business division (and member of Steve Ballmer’s senior leadership team) officially starts as chief executive of Finland-based Nokia (NYSE: NOK) next week. Look for Elop to bring more focus to the U.S. smartphone market, where Nokia has seriously lagged, and for Microsoft and Nokia to work together more closely (and perhaps even merge) to take on Google and Apple in mobile.

—Andre Vrignaud to Amazon (gaming exec)

Microsoft’s former director of game platform strategy, who helped build Xbox Live, is taking on a new, unspecified role at Seattle-based Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). Presumably it will be to help lead the online retail giant’s emerging efforts in video games and entertainment. In the past few years, Amazon acquired casual game distributor Reflexive Entertainment, and the firm and its CEO Jeff Bezos invested in startups such as Atomic Moguls and Social Gaming Network. Look for Amazon to develop a unique strategy in social gaming as the casual games sector continues to evolve and become more deeply embedded with social media.

—John Matheny to Yahoo (senior VP, communication products and communities)

The former general manager of Windows Phone App Studio (he worked on the ill-fated Kin) has moved on to become senior vice president of Yahoo’s communications products and communities unit. Matheny is the latest in a string of former Microsofties who have joined Silicon Valley-based Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), including senior product execs Blake Irving and Bill Shaughnessy. What this means … Next Page »

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Normally, we wouldn’t get too excited about a $300,000 tech startup financing in Boston. We might write a brief, or save it for a deal roundup. But today’s news that Locately, a Boston-based location analytics firm, has raised a seed round touches on several important local innovation themes and organizations. Consider the following:

—One of the key relationships in this investment deal came about thanks to Angel Boot Camp, the June event in Cambridge, MA, built around angel investing and entrepreneurship. Techie and angel investor Gabriel Weinberg writes on his blog that he hung out with Locately co-founder and chief technology officer Drew Volpe for most of Angel Boot Camp, and that this “really kicked things off.” Weinberg and three others from Hacker Angels, a recently formed group of individual investors, participated in Locately’s financing round. (I had been wondering what tangible deals have come out of Angel Boot Camp; this is Exhibit A.)

—This is the first announced investment from Project 11 Ventures, the “accelerator program” and investment fund run by former Microsoft and Eons veterans Katie Rae and Reed Sturtevant. Project 11 focuses on early-stage Internet startups, and is raising a small first fund of under $5 million, according to the Boston Globe, which has further details in a profile from last month.

—Oh yeah, so what Locately does is provide GPS-based location data from mobile phones to national brands, market researchers, and advertisers. The company says it does this in a way that protects consumer privacy. Mobile analytics and location-based advertising seems to be picking up steam, as everyone wants to figure out how to cash in on consumers’ online and offline behavior, via mobile devices.

—Last but not least, Locately (previously known as Cadio) is a finalist in the $100,000 MassChallenge startup competition. You can read all about the upcoming reality TV show here.

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The usual sequence for high-tech entrepreneurs is to study, get a degree, get a job, then start a company and build a product. But a star-studded team of instructors for Linked Data Ventures, a graduate-level class premiering at MIT this fall, hopes to mix that up a bit. They envision the course as a direct launching pad for commercial efforts around linked data, a technology that World Wide Web inventor and course instructor Tim Berners-Lee is hoping will transform the way we glean meaning from the Web.

“It’s not about theory,” says K Krasnow Waterman, another member of the Linked Data Ventures teaching team. She says the class is designed to really force students to get practical—and commercial—in a hurry. ”We are just really excited to see people get out on the forefront and lead the way.”

Linked data is the idea of assigning Web addresses to individual chunks of information, rather than just to documents, so that these chunks can interlink and lend meaning to one another. (Wade wrote about one example, True Engineering’s “truenumbers,“ last summer.) It’s an offshoot of the effort to build the semantic Web, which Berners-Lee has also championed vigorously, where more data would be described with metadata that automated agents or other software can use to interpret or re-use the information more intelligently.

The linked-data ethic hasn’t quite caught on yet in the marketplace, which is why it makes a great subject for this style of class, says Waterman, who will be teaching alongside a team of instructors heavy on Internet, IT, and entrepreneurial experience. In addition to Waterman and Berners-Lee, who has emerged as a primary force behind the linked data movement (as he was for Internet standards such as HTML and HTTP), that includes Lalana Kagal of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, as well as Reed Sturtevant, and Katie Rae, both Microsoft Startup Labs veterans who have since co-founded business accelerator Project 11 Ventures.

“We seem to be at a really great tipping point,” Waterman says. “As the demand [for linked data] is rising in the marketplace, you’ll need some way that more people know what it is.”

The teaching team did a weeklong, condensed version of the program during MIT’s January Independent Activities Period (which offers ad hoc, sometimes off-the-cuff sessions while school is out for winter break) that resulted in seven teams producing prototypes rooted in linked data technology. One company came out with graphing software that culls numbers from any published data source to create graphs on the fly, Waterman says.

The instructors judged the finished products on their potential to play a part in the real world, and be sustainable as an independent business or open-source code. The champion team from the January session was … Next Page »

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Microsoft’s latest reorganization, which involves labs in both the Seattle and Boston areas, has a new face. It’s Lili Cheng, a 14-year Microsoftie with experience in both research (social computing) and products (Windows Vista user experience). Cheng now officially leads three separate groups that are being rolled into one: her Creative Systems Group within Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Rich Media Lab led by Kostas Mallios, also in Redmond; and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA, led by Reed Sturtevant.

Yesterday, chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced the creation of the new entity, called FUSE (Future Social Experience) Labs, which will focus on social computing as applied to Microsoft products in entertainment and business. Sturtevant, the founding managing director of Startup Labs, is leaving the company, while Mallios will continue to report to Ozzie and is taking on business development duties involved with technology incubation.

But back to the lab’s new head, who spoke with me from Cambridge yesterday. Cheng, after inheriting about 70 staff members from Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab, now manages about 80 people in FUSE Labs, and says she will be splitting her time between the Seattle and Boston areas. She said the employees of Startup Labs (there are 30-some staff members) will be staying in Cambridge.

As Cheng explains, the goal of FUSE Labs is to “bridge the gap” between research and products—an oft-heard refrain at Microsoft (and most big companies)—by working on projects that are two to five years away from commercialization, and interacting closely with product teams.

The specific focus of the lab is social computing—applying social media (things like Twitter, Facebook, and other social-network technologies) to problems in business collaboration and entertainment. The high-level strategy here is to “embed social activity into business scenarios” for Microsoft, Cheng says. She didn’t say anything more specific about Microsoft’s plans for social media, or about how the employees in Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab will be integrated into the social theme. But she adds, “Interacting with other people is so personal and emotional to every single person out there. It’s important for every company out there.”

Cheng’s team has previously built applications like Kodu, which lets kids create games and stories using an Xbox controller and share them on a community games channel; and Salsa, a prototype that connects your e-mail inbox with social networks. (The latter sounds a lot like what the Seattle startup Gist, led by ex-Microsoftie T.A. McCann, has built and is actively testing.)

Asked what her greatest challenge is in the new job, Cheng said it’s addressing how to “take best advantage of this amazing opportunity.” Having been in the social computing space for many years, she says, now it’s time to “just go for it.”

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Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, announced today the company is forming a new laboratory called Future Social Experience Labs, or FUSE Labs, which will focus on aspects of “social computing” beyond just communication and collaboration. The move is part of a wider restructuring of Microsoft’s labs: FUSE Labs is a merger between the Creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Rich Media Labs; and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA. As part of the announcement, Ozzie said Reed Sturtevant, the founding managing director of Startup Labs for the past two years, is leaving the company to pursue other interests.

FUSE Labs will be led by Lili Cheng, a 14-year Microsoft veteran who most recently headed the Creative Systems Group and previously managed the user experience teams for Windows Vista. Before joining Microsoft, Cheng worked at Apple Computer in the human interface-advanced technology group, where she worked on QuickTime VR and QuickTime Conferencing products. Cheng is now general manager of FUSE Labs (in Redmond) and will report directly to Ozzie. “I’ve known Lili for many years, and have long been impressed by her vision and ability to create; to engage yet to also inspire; to lead; to make tough choices; to deliver,” Ozzie said in a memo to Microsoft staff.

Ozzie said he has “refined the missions” of Microsoft’s labs, in part because of “changing business conditions.” From his memo, it sounds like the goal of the new lab is to apply research in social computing (things like user interfaces, social networks, and human behavior) to help develop new products in the areas of entertainment, productivity, and teamwork—as well as to explore how Microsoft can extend the ways people use computer operating systems.

“The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices,” he said. (See more on Ozzie’s three-screen vision here.)

It also sounds like the reorganization is meant to focus the impact of social computing research more immediately on the company’s product pipeline. “FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they’re already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with ‘leapfrog’ efforts,” Ozzie said in his memo. “Working closely with [Microsoft Research] and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company’s extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity.”

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Barely two years after he joined Microsoft here in Cambridge, MA, to launch its new Startup Labs, Reed Sturtevant is leaving the company to “pursue other interests,” Microsoft announced today.

Sturtevant’s departure was part of a broader announcement that Ray Ozzie, to whom Sturtevant reported, had reorganized his group to create the new Future Social Experience (FUSE) Labs, which will be focused on social computing. The lab will be headed by Lili Cheng, and will take the Microsoft Startup Labs in Cambridge under its auspices, along with another group previously part of Ozzie’s organization, the Rich Media Labs.

“FUSE Labs’ team will explore new social, real-time and media-rich applications and services that add value to existing products, or could be released on their own,” Microsoft said in a statement. “By combining these teams under a single leader and mission, Ray believes FUSE Labs can achieve greater impact through tighter focus and a more holistic approach. “

Sturtevant is a well-known and highly respected figure in New England computing, and beyond. He was most recently CTO at Eons before joining Microsoft to start the Startup Labs, an advanced development lab meant to help explore new ideas and speed them to market.

Sturtevant declined to comment on his departure, but you can read a lot about his background here.

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Flame-thrower enthusiasts and giant dinosaur puppet-makers of the world, rejoice. The Awesome Foundation for Arts and Sciences wants to support your efforts. Starting in July, the new Cambridge, MA-based “microtrust” will be giving out one grant each month in the spirit of supporting creations that evoke “surprise and delight.” The application process is simple: explain your activity, project, or research idea in 500 words or less. Sufficiently awesome ideas will net their creator $1,000 and a month’s workspace in Beta House, the creative and technological work co-op in Cambridge’s Central Square.

But what lends an idea awesomeness? “It’s something ambitious. Outlandish. Unexpected,” says Tim Hwang, the founding member of the Awesome Foundation. The winning idea could be a computer program, an art project, a machine, or some unforeseen combination of the three. “We’re intentionally keeping it vague,” says Hwang. The foundation is reluctant to define “awesome” too rigidly, he says, for fear of restricting grantees’ creativity.

Ideas do not have to include a business model, though the Awesome Foundation is not averse to supporting a for-profit project. “We’re agnostic as to whether or not you’re going to make money off your idea,” Hwang says.

A researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Web Ecology Project, Hwang came up with the idea for the Awesome Foundation while immersed in the grant application process. Applying for funding, he says, “is a really depressing thing. People get really excited about their idea, but run up against the bureaucratic nature of grants.” He hit upon the idea of creating a “microtrust” where a group of people would commit to donating a small amount of money—$100 a month. The money would be given free of any stipulations or strings. In early June, Hwang announced on his blog that he was looking for 10 people to contribute and form the first board of the Awesome Foundation.

Reed Sturtevant is one of Hwang’s “microtrustees.” When not funding awesomeness, he manages Microsoft’s Startup Labs in Cambridge. He sees his involvement with the Awesome Foundation as a way of giving back and encouraging entrepreneurial spirit. $1,000 might not seem like much, Sturtevant says, but “so many people just do amazing things for no reason. There are great creative people and ideas that just need a little spark to help them come forth.”

The application form for an Awesome Grant went online last Friday. By the end of the first day, the foundation had already received 30 prospects, Hwang says. Aside from a few joke applications (such as this one from “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad”: “I need funds to help fix an election in my country. Funds will go to paying people to vote for me, changing votes, lashing out at Western media, and getting my snazzy beard trimmed”), the ideas have run the gamut from technical to artistic. The first winner will be announced near the end of July. Hwang says the only thing the foundation asks of the winner is to show off their work at the end of their month at Beta House.

“We’re thinking of ordering a big checkbook,” Hwang said, “and some of those big scissors to do a ribbon-cutting.”

Awesome.

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We just got another great prize to give out to one lucky attendee of our upcoming XSITE 2009 event: a Garmin Nuvi 310 GPS unit, courtesy of the generous souls at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. Only the next 10 folks to buy tickets for XSITE—the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship—will be eligible to win the system, which includes a car mount kit, car charger, carrying case, USB cable, and map software for North America. So if you head to the registration site quick enough, that means you’ll have a one in 10 chance to recoup almost the whole value of your XSITE ticket, which is already a great value.

Indeed, XSITE—which will be held at Boston University on June 24—will be chock full of leading innovators, executives, and investors. We’ll have keynotes by Dean Kamen and Juan Enriquez and panels and presentations from the likes of Yet-Ming Chiang of MIT and A123Systems, Boston-Power’s Christina Lampe-Onnerud, Reed Sturtevant of Microsoft Startup Labs, Dartmouth’s Tillman Gerngross, Alnylam CEO John Maraganore, Sirtris CEO (and GlaxoSmithKline SVP) Christoph Westphal, and EMC CTO Jeff Nick.

Then there’s the unveiling of two stealth companies, one of which, Taris Biomedical, we are giving an early sneak peak of today. And the day will be capped off by the XSITE Xpo, which will feature rapid-fire presentations from a dozen of New England’s most potentially transformative companies in cleantech, life sciences, and information technology.

You can check out the whole agenda here, and you can register here. Register quickly to secure your chance to win the GPS system (as always, Xconomy employees, underwriters, and investors are not eligible to win). Then you will have no problem navigating to XSITE 2009. We hope to see you there.

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In case you haven’t noticed it, the recovery is underway. The economy is affecting all aspects of business, of course. But every day here at Xconomy we write about the unrelenting pace of innovation and see firsthand how, if anything, the pace has picked up during the recession—nothing like hard times to get the creative juices flowing, it seems. The current outpouring of new products, ideas, and companies spans many fields, from biotech to computing, mobile devices, robotics, energy, and more—with the potential to affect all aspects of our lives. And it’s this torrent of innovation, not any bailouts or stimuli, that will drive us out of recession and ensure future U.S. competitiveness.

Because New England is a world leader in high-tech innovation, we’ve decided it’s high time to move past all the doom and gloom surrounding the economy and highlight and celebrate innovation in the region in a new, and bigger, way. To that end, we are extremely pleased today to announce XSITE 2009—the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, a full-day event that will be held on June 24 at Boston University. We have partnered with BU’s Office of Technology Development to hold XSITE 2009, the first of what will become an annual conference focused on innovation in New England. The event will take place at BU’s School of Management on Commonwealth Avenue. And we are honored that BU President Bob Brown will be giving the welcoming address.

XSITE will bring together innovators from every sphere of the innovation community—across all the disciplines I mentioned above and more, and across institutions including universities, venture firms, startups, and the biggest public companies operating in the region.

We are thrilled with how well the idea of this summit has resonated with leaders in all these areas and institutions. Just a sampling of the many luminaries who will be taking part in XSITE includes: Juan Enriquez of Biotechonomy, who will deliver a keynote address; Nobel Laureate Phil Sharp of MIT; Jeff Nick, chief technology officer of EMC; Reed Sturtevant, managing director of Microsoft Startup Labs; Alnylam Pharmaceuticals CEO John Maraganore; Boston Power CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud; Boston Scientific co-founder John Abele; Mohamad Ali, IBM’s senior state executive for MA; Yet-Ming Chiang, co-founder of A123Systems; and Mick Mountz, CEO of industrial robot maker Kiva Systems.

Startup aficionados, meanwhile, will have lots to love about XSITE, which will feature some of the coolest and most promising young companies in New England. In addition to Kiva, these include black silicon developer SiOnyx, fat-busting firm Zafgen, “roadable” airplane maker Terrafugia, Web video audience tracking firm Visible Measures, and Satori Pharmaceuticals, which is developing a pill to fight Alzheimer’s disease. We will also lift the curtain on several stealth-mode startups at the summit (of course we aren’t naming them yet).

And summit attendees will have a chance to share their own ideas about innovation in a variety of ways, including during the XSITE Xpo, a dynamic session in which a dozen of New England’s most promising startups will tell their stories and audience members will pick which firms will likely be the most transformative in the years to come.

We will be revealing more about the event in the next few weeks. On Twitter, follow us at @XconomyXSITE (hash tag #xsite09) and see our current lists of speakers and get registration details at www.XSITE2009.com. We look forward to seeing you on June 24.

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A standing-room-only crowd gathered yesterday for Xconomy’s Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England, hosted by Microsoft at its gorgeous new New England Research and Development Center (or NERD, as Microsoft’s Reed Sturtevant called it). Google’s Rich Miner, MIT’s Sandy Pentland, and two panels’ worth of mobile entrepreneurs were on hand to share their latest thinking about the best ways for startups to gain and maintain a foothold in the mobile industry.

If there was a single takeaway message from the event, I’d say it was this: It’s a time of great ferment in the mobile industry, with carrier restrictions on the distribution of consumer-oriented mobile applications finally breaking down. But it’s very difficult to build a sustainable business around a single application or a single mobile platform—so companies need to think flexibly about the audiences and platforms they develop for, the amount of capital they really need (and the sources from which they’ll raise it), and the combinations of revenue opportunities they’ll pursue.

Next week we plan to post some video outtakes from the event, but today we’ll round up some of the highlights:

—Xconomist Mark Lowenstein, the managing director at consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem, set the scene with a few statistics and observations. Mobile companies raised $500 million from New England venture investors last year, and have raised $5 billion cumulatively, he noted. The traditional barriers to entry in the mobile industry—the wireless carriers’ traditional protectiveness about giving access to cell phone “decks” or top-level menus to third-party application developers, for example—are falling fast. New England companies, with their longtime focus on good user interface design, are well positioned to take advantage of this change, Lowenstein said.

—Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, said his company has just added the 100 millionth access point to its global database of Wi-Fi network locations, part of its WPS location finding system. He said getting WPS onto the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch platforms was the key moment in Skyhook’s progress—but that, ironically, he dismissed Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ first call about the deal back in 2007 as a prank.

—Jamie Hall, the president of MocoSpace, said the mobile social network has grown to 6 million members, who view 2 billion pages every month. The key to MocoSpace’s success in mobile social networking—a business in which several other companies have dabbled without much success—was circumventing the carriers by doing everything “off-deck,” creating room for constant innovation and upgrades.

—Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile, said that even though Microsoft is the mobile device provisioning company’s sole investor, “If it’s a debate between Microsoft and the customer, the customer wins.” While the company specializes in deploying Windows Mobile devices into enterprises, it also works with other platforms, because customers demand it. And while the fragmentation of mobile technology across dozens of major devices from several large carriers is a bugaboo for most mobile companies, it’s actually what Enterprise Mobile thrives on. “An enterprise does not want a free-for-all,” Rosenthal said. “We [give them] one throat to choke.”

—Dave Grannan, CEO of vlingo, said his company realized early on that the mobile ecosystem wasn’t yet open enough to get vlingo’s mobile speech recognition system out to lots of users without a major strategic partner with existing carrier relationships. That partner turned out to be Yahoo—and while Grannan called landing the deal to get vlingo’s voice-driven interface built into Yahoo’s mobile platform “luck,” he also said it took persistence. It wasn’t until the fourth meeting with Yahoo that vlingo was able to convince the company to take a look at its technology. (And then Yahoo suddenly wanted to buy vlingo—but the startup was “not for sale,” Grannan said.)

—Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper, said there have been 300,000 downloads of his startup’s RunKeeper GPS fitness application for the iPhone 3G, with a surprisingly high percentage of users (he intimated 4 or 5 percent or more) of the free app converting to the paid “RunKeeper Pro” app. That’s creating enough revenue to cover the company’s current burn rate—which is low, because many of the FitnessKeeper team members are being paid in equity and the only full-time employee is Jacobs himself. The trick for FitnessKeeper, Jacobs said, will be to … Next Page »

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Back in September, we talked to former Eons chief technology officer Reed Sturtevant just before his first day on the job as the head of a special Microsoft advanced development lab opening in Kendall Square, right next to MIT and a stone’s throw from Google’s own lab. An update late last year brought the news that Sturtevant was set to make his first hires, but since then we’ve heard little else. Today, there is a bit more news from a Boston Globe article that says Sturtevant has hired roughly a dozen workers—on his way to 30 in the near term and much more if the lab proves a success—that are working on a variety of advanced concepts in areas including social networking, search, and organizing and prioritizing e-mail.

The lab, called the Boston Concept Development Center, is housed at One Memorial Drive, a 17-story luxury office building in which Microsoft has leased five floors. The building, for instance, already houses employees of the company’s SoftGrid unit (the new name for Softricity, a Boston firm acquired in 2006). It will also play host to the new Microsoft Research lab that Wade wrote about in February, which will be opening later this summer. (The facility will be the company’s first East Coast research lab and its third in the U.S.) Sturtevant’s team will be based on the 10th and 11th floors, which will be connected by a large staircase.

While Sturtevant still isn’t giving out a lot of detail, he told the Globe one of his team’s projects will focus on developing social-networking software to help families communicate and interact (speaking as the parent of two teenagers, I’ll take a dozen). Such software reportedly would work across computers and cell phones and, among other things, be able to track family members via GPS technology (not sure I want to know). The project seems to be part of a broader effort at the lab to investigate multi-device applications that improve social networking.

Another effort is aimed at e-mail overload—creating new ways of prioritizing e-mail, I gather so you don’t get too bogged down in what’s not that important. A third focus, according to Rob Weisman in the Globe, “will look for ways to improve search and ‘crowdsourcing,’ the same technologies that have been driving the growth of Google and Facebook.”

As we have previously noted, Microsoft has three large business divisions. Sturtevant’s lab will not be part of any of them, nor will it be part of the worldwide Microsoft Research organization. Instead, it will serve as a unit of chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s group. New Englander Ozzie and his brother, Jack (to whom Sturtevant reports), personally recruited Sturtevant. The three have known each other since their days at Lotus together in the 1980s.

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There isn’t any shortage around here of potential collaborators and job seekers eager to work with Jennifer Tour Chayes, managing director of Microsoft’s newest research outpost, Microsoft Research New England. Chayes tells Xconomy that by 11:00 am Eastern time today, less than five hours after news of the lab’s creation hit the New York Times and the Boston Globe, she had already received more than 100 e-mails from the East Coast—about 80 percent of them from researchers at MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Brown, and Yale “telling us how excited they are and that they want to interact with us,” in her words.

Microsoft already has a major presence in Cambridge and greater Boston: in addition to the Boston-area employees of recently acquired companies such as Groove Networks, Softricity, and Fast Search & Transfer, the company is hiring staff for a new product-oriented “concept development center” adjacent to the MIT campus under the leadership of former Eons CTO Reed Sturtevant. But when Microsoft Research (MSR) comes to town, the academic world pays attention.

Chayes, 51, is the first woman appointed to lead a Microsoft Research lab and is a pioneer in areas of mathematics and theoretical computer science—such as network and graph theory, recommendation systems, and search filtering—that have increasing relevance in a world of Web-based communication and commerce. Chayes and her husband and close collaborator Christian Borgs, who will be the lab’s deputy managing director, have already begun to outline a vision for an interdisciplinary research center that will link experts in economics, psychology, and sociology with computer scientists who can translate their insights about human behavior into algorithms that will improve the growing range of products that Microsoft delivers over the Web.

“I think that putting the basic mathematics together with basic research in sociology, psychology, and economics will allow us to come up with the insights that we need to deliver a much better experience to our customers online,” says Chayes, who was formerly the research area manager for mathematics, theoretical computer science and cryptography for MSR Redmond and has been named as the Cambridge lab’s managing director.

The new group, to open in July in newly renovated space at One Memorial Drive, will be only a few stair-steps away from the product development groups that can translate its research findings into real software features—and from the new concept-development group headed by Sturtevant. “We’re really excited about that,” says Chayes. “We do long-term research and we come up with basic insights, but if there is some of that that can actually be turned into products, there is nobody better in the world to do it than Reed.”

Sturtevant, for his part, says the decision to open a Cambridge branch of Microsoft Research is “a real step forward for our emerging ‘vertical campus’ in Kendall Square…Having basic research, concept development and incubation, and full product development together at one site will bring great creative energy.”

To ensure communication between the groups, Chayes says the construction plans at One Memorial Drive include a space large enough for MSR staff and Sturtevant’s group to gather every afternoon for tea. “I’m a big believer in breaking bread,” says Chayes. “Probably a quarter of the projects in our theory group have started over our daily teas. People who wouldn’t ordinarily talk to each other start talking to each other, and before you know it they are writing on the walls and modeling.”

Chayes says she and Borgs haven’t yet identified the exact projects the new lab will pursue—that’ll have to wait until they can brainstorm with new staff members face-to-face. But it’s fair to predict that some of the work will reflect … Next Page »

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Last September Bob broke the story that Reed Sturtevant, the longtime chief technology officer at Eons, Boston’s social networking site for the 50-and-over crowd, had accepted a job heading up a new Cambridge, MA-based development lab and innovation group for Microsoft. Sturtevant’s departure came shortly after Eons had laid off a third of its staff and cut several under-performing sections of its website.

But Eons has now filled the CTO vacancy, hiring Eric Golin, a “serial engineer” who has held the CTO posts at Content Objects, a compliance and risk management support company in Cambridge; Argo Technology, a Newton, MA, company that developed unified information management tools for consumers; and Broadvision, an e-business software provider based in Redwood City, CA.

“I’m getting very close to 50, and the baby boomer social applications space we’re after is very exciting for me,” says Golin, who will have responsibility for Eons’ technology platform. “A lot of the people I talk to have a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn, but those are communications tools, not really environments where people of my age group want to connect and engage outside the work environment, or to really find something that energizes them and adds to their life. There is a huge opportunity to build that kind of online community focused on spirited baby boomers.”

Golin says he was already doing consulting work for Eons when Sturtevant announced his departure for Microsft and has been handling parts of the CTO role ever since. He says the technology team at Eons has been focused on building up the community-networking aspects of the site, which customers said were more important to them than now-defunct features such as obituaries.

“One of the things that was very critical back in September was recognizing that what the customers really wanted was this online community, the social networking aspect, so we’ve been working very hard to focus all of our efforts and resources into that area,” says Golin. “I’m excited about the applications we’re building, we’ve got a great team, and I like having the chance to do something that feels meaningful to people. And with 700,000 users, we’re at a very good starting point.”

At the same time, Eons announced the appointment of a new design director, Tom Churchill, who will provide creative direction for the Eons website. Churchill is a veteran of Boston social media site Gather.com and travel distributor World Travel Holdings, where he led efforts to build e-commerce software for travel brands such as Expedia, Orbitz, and Yahoo Travel.

“It’s really exciting to have Eric and Tom as part of our team at Eons,” Jeff Taylor, Eons’ founder and CEO, said in the company’s announcement about the hirings. “They both know what it takes to create a fun and fulfilling experience for online users. Their combined talent and knowledge will play a key role in the next phase of Eons as we continue to deliver the best platform for boomers who want to keep in touch with their friends, rekindle old relationships, and create new connections with like-minded adults who share their passions, interests and experiences at this stage of life.”

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Got this photo in an e-mail from Reed Sturtevant, who’s creating a new Microsoft advanced development lab in Kendall Square. He was walking to lunch in the square yesterday with another former Lotus legend, Bob Frankston, when an unusual sight stopped them in their tracks. As Sturtevant described it: “a hawk eating a pigeon in the middle of the sidewalk while about a dozen people stood around and watched. Bob had his camera and took this pic.”

Frankston is an Internet pioneer who, along with Dan Bricklin, co-founded Software Arts, where he implemented VisiCalc. In 1986, he joined Lotus Development and went on to create Lotus Express. Sturtevant, whom we most recently wrote about a couple days ago, was brought into the Lotus fold around the same time and worked on LotusNotes, among other things. Before joining Microsoft in September, he most recently worked at Eons, IdeaLab, and Refer. You can find a litany of the companies Sturtevant has been involved with here.

But the important part—what caption to put on the picture? Frankston’s suggestions:

—Early Exit

—Typical VC Lunch in Cambridge Center

—Who says East Coast investors are wimps?

Feel free to chime in with your own suggestions by adding a comment below. Who knows, there could be a prize for our favorite one…

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