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

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

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

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

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

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

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Well, this does nothing to change the downward trend of early-stage software financings, but it’s good news nonetheless. Seattle-based Redfin, the online real estate broker and information discovery service, has announced a $10 million Series D funding, led by new investor Greylock Partners, the Silicon Valley venture firm formerly based in the Boston area. Existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Vulcan Capital, and The Hillman Company also participated in the round, which brings Redfin’s total funding to $30.8 million.

Redfin says it will use the cash “to scale its infrastructure for delivering extremely high levels of customer service, to expand into new markets and to invest in research and development.”

By most accounts, the company has had a very strong year, even as the real estate market has contracted and valuations have fallen. Redfin has generated its first profits, shipped what it says is the highest-rated iPhone app for real estate, and increased its website visits by more than 200 percent.

Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s CEO, talked about the significance of the new funding, and hinted at a goal of taking the company public. “Greylock’s experience developing some of the Internet’s most recognized consumer brands as well as its appetite for building large-scale public companies are a perfect fit for our ambitions,” Kelman said in a statement. “We believe that our ability to invest in technology and our consumer-first commitment give us a shot at reinventing a very fragmented, sales-driven real estate industry.”

Redfin was founded in 2002 and serves home buyers and sellers with real-estate listings, maps, analytics, tax records, and other information. Besides Seattle, it has operations in California, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Virginia, Washington DC, and other metro areas. Redfin recently rolled out a new version of its website, which includes near-real-time data and photos of recent home sales, as well as links to blog discussions of listings, all on a national scale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have confirmed short presentations from four startups:

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

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

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

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

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

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There must be some new force pulling West Coast tech CEOs to visit Boston. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in town; yesterday it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

To mark the unusual occasion, Google invited a raft of journalists to its offices in Cambridge for an open, on-the-record roundtable discussion with Schmidt. Google’s Cambridge site director Steve Vinter served as moderator. Many of the questions tossed Schmidt’s way focused on specific Google projects such as Chrome, Wave, and Android 2.0, and when they’ll evolve into major consumer-facing offerings. While some of that was interesting, I thought Schmidt’s comments on a few of the bigger strategy and policy questions revealed more about the company’s outlook on the world.

Below are some of the high points from the discussion—including Schmidt’s thoughts on strategies for economic recovery, why people fear Google, and what role the company may play in the survival of journalism.

Google is growing fast in Cambridge.

Vinter said Google’s Cambridge office, which handles a variety of projects from Google Friend Connect to Google Book Search, has passed the 200-employee mark and will be “hiring very aggressively” in the coming months. (That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft, which reduced its headcount yesterday by some 800 people, including some here in Cambridge.) “Virtually every project we have is scaling up,” Vinter said. Schmidt (who attended both Princeton and Berkeley) said Google was attracted to Cambridge in the first place because it “likes cities with extremely good technical universities.”

Many more people will be getting a look at Google Wave in the near future.

Up to now, Google has been carefully parsing out invitations to Google Wave, its experimental real-time e-mail/chat/collaboration/document sharing platform. Schmidt said the company is “getting ready for a broader distribution very soon—weeks, not months.” He said feedback on the software from early users has been positive, but the company has been slow to invite in more users for fear of outages. “So far the experiment has yielded a very innovative model and a lot of buzz, and now we want to see if it can scale,” he said.

Google has very big plans for the Chrome browser and its bigger cousin, Chrome OS.

Adoption of Google’s Chrome Web browser is progressing “very well,” Schmidt said. But for Google, Chrome is “more than a browser,” he said. “It’s a platform for powerful Web-based apps that you can’t really deliver in cloud computing without having a browser that can support cloud apps.” Making Chrome work fast, maintaining a clean separation between applications running in different tabs or windows, and supporting the new HTML 5 standard “are central to making the apps model work,” Schmidt said. “And Chrome’s success is a necessary precondition to the success of Chrome OS,” he said, since the one is derived from the other. “We have a lot riding on Chrome.”

The first public version of Chrome OS will be coming out by the end of 2009, Schmidt said. But the operating system won’t be a serious competitor for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or other operating systems until …Next Page »

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

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

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

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

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Well, we can’t all be Amazon. While the Seattle-based e-commerce giant (NASDAQ: AMZN) raked in a $199 million profit for the third quarter of 2009—a 68 percent increase in net income over the same period last year—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) posted an 18 percent decline in its profits (still $3.57 billion, better than analysts expected).

But beyond these giants of the global tech scene, Seattle has some mid-market public tech companies that we’ve been paying closer attention to lately. That’s because they provide a much more complete picture of what’s going on in the public markets, as well as the mood across different industries like digital media, data storage, and high-performance computing.

Of these local bellwethers, two companies announced modest quarterly profits this week, and two others posted losses but are on the long-term comeback trail. It’s clearly still tough times out there, but here are the highlights:

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), the Seattle digital media and entertainment company, managed to post a surprising profit of $1.5 million for the third quarter of 2009, its first profitable quarter since the first three months of 2008. That’s despite posting quarterly revenue of $140.3 million, a decrease of 8 percent from $152 million in the same period last year (when the company posted a net loss of $4.5 million). RealNetworks reduced its operating costs and formed partnerships with Facebook and Apple over the past few months.

—Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY), the Seattle-based supercomputing company, reported a net loss of $2.1 million for the third quarter. But its revenue was $58.6 million, a 7 percent increase over the same period in 2008. In the second quarter of this year, Cray posted a surprise profit of $3.4 million on the strength of large government contracts and a broader customer base.

—InfoSpace (NASDAQ: INSP), the meta-search company based in Bellevue, WA, posted a profit for the second straight quarter (following three consecutive quarterly losses). Its net income for the third quarter was $1.8 million, based on revenue of $54.4 million, an increase of 38 percent over its revenue from the same period a year ago.

—Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN), the Seattle-based data storage firm, reported a net loss of $4.9 million for the quarter. The company’s quarterly revenue was $30.5 million, up 1 percent over the same period a year ago, but its net loss increased from $3.7 million in the previous quarter this year. I wrote about nine-year-old Isilon’s efforts to bounce back from some tough times in a profile last week.

On October’s last trading day, the stock market plunged. As Scott E. Marcouiller, a senior equity market strategist at Wells Fargo Advisors in St. Louis, told the New York Times today, “The market is focusing on the glass is half empty…We just needed to let some of the air out of the balloon.”

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My head is exploding trying to keep up with all the tech-business events going on around Seattle these days. Here’s a quick guide to the most prominent ones on my brain, in the hopes of saving you some stress (and keeping you up to date):

—Last night’s “Women in Tech” event from TechFlash was a smash hit, with a first-rate panel and networking. You can check out recaps of the event here and here. Yes, the crowd was predominantly women. I’m surprised more tech guys weren’t there to soak up the diverse perspectives and add their own input (or to get a date).

—Tonight’s panel on “the changing face of venture capital” at the University of Washington (computer science and engineering) should provide some spirited discussion of the unique challenges that investors and entrepreneurs are facing in the current climate. It’s an all-star lineup of local VCs: Mark Ashida from OVP, Greg Gottesman from Madrona, Ron Howell from WRF Capital, Bill McAleer from Voyager, and Cam Myhrvold from Ignition.

—Also tonight is the Clean Tech Open’s Pacific Northwest Regional Awards gala at the ACT Theater in downtown Seattle. Gov. Chris Gregoire is giving the keynote address, and will be followed by the announcement of three Northwest finalist winners (cleantech companies) who will then move on to a Western regional competition.

—Next week brings NWEN’s “Entrepreneur University” on Nov. 5 at the Bellevue Hyatt. It’s an all-day extravaganza about starting, growing, and managing your own company. Don’t miss the talks by Jennifer Mintz Clark, Andy Sack, and the Bacon Salt guys, or the “Entrepreneur Idol” pitch competition. (I’ll be there as one of the judges.)

—That same afternoon, on Nov. 5, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie is speaking at UW, as part of the computer science and engineering department’s Distinguished Lecturer Series. Mundie will talk about how software and information technology can help solve our most pressing global challenges and reshape scientific exploration. (I’ll need to go quantum so I can be in two places at once that day.)

—On Nov. 6, the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association (WBBA) is holding its annual meeting at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, is giving the keynote.

—A bit further out, Nov. 18 is the night of the Washington Technology Industry Association’s annual “predictions” dinner event at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle. John Cook of TechFlash will put some of the usual VC/entrepreneur suspects on the spot about their thoughts on 2010. On a separate note, WTIA recently announced that applications are now open for its 2010 Industry Achievement Awards, which will take place on March 4.

—Last but not least, Xconomy is organizing an evening on “The Future of Search and Information Discovery” (and Seattle’s role in shaping it) on Nov. 30, at the University of Washington (Walker-Ames Room in Kane Hall). We’ll get Google and Microsoft to share the stage, and surround them with some compelling VCs and startups, to talk about the technical problems and business opportunities in Web search, real-time information discovery, social media, and user interfaces.

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This morning I checked my e-mail, powered by Google, and then used Google Maps to find my way to the Google Kirkland open house. It reminded me a little bit of the scene in “Being John Malkovich” when Malkovich, the actor, finds a portal into his own brain and sees that everyone looks like him and says nothing but, “Malkovich, Malkovich.” OK, I guess the analogy would fit better if I also worked for Google and uttered “Google, Google” all day—but that might even happen sometime, if Google’s pace of hiring keeps up. (Just kidding.)

Engineering and site director Scott Silver, who’s been on the job since June (succeeding Peter Wilson, who left the company), introduced the new Kirkland facility, which has been officially open since August 31 and employs more than 350 people in a unified campus setting. He gave a little history of Google’s Kirkland operation—the first office was at Carillon Point in 2004, Google’s first major presence in the Northwest—and how it has grown and contributed to the company’s products. Google Talk, which does Internet telephony and instant messaging, was born and raised in Kirkland, for instance.

Other areas of focus for the Kirkland office include:

—Search: Webmaster tools, and instant indexing for real-time news.

—Advertising: AdPlanner (see below), AdWords Opportunities (helping advertisers optimize search ads), Google Analytics, and Campaign Insights (a new service released last week that’s around making brand ads more effective).

—Applications: Google Talk, Google Talk Video (within Gmail), Google Maps (including a new application for directions on mobile phones), the Chrome Web browser, YouTube video clips, and Google Sync (for synchronizing your mobile phone).

—Infrastructure: system and corporate billing software for supporting applications at huge scales.

Silver, a former Amazon and Netscape veteran, said he’s “quite proud of what we’ve done here, and immensely happy to come to this day,” and to be able to say Google is here to “create great products and find great engineers.”

I followed up with Silver afterwards, and he confirmed Google Kirkland is actively hiring software engineers, but he didn’t say how many positions are open at the moment. He said his team is doing hundreds of interviews per month, “and we’d love to do more.” I asked him about the 800-pound gorilla down the road, Microsoft, and whether Google is recruiting much talent from …Next Page »

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Search is hot again. Just when you thought Google had it all figured out, the Internet landscape has changed. Microsoft’s Bing has debuted to a generally positive reception, and signaled that the search war is far from over. The rise of Twitter and social media has spawned intense competition in the emerging field of “real-time search.” Advances in semantic understanding of the Web have led to new opportunities in Internet search for startups and big companies alike. Indeed, the world of online information discovery is being transformed dramatically—and much of the action is happening here in Seattle.

So I’m pleased to announce that Xconomy’s next Seattle event, on November 30, will tackle some of the most compelling questions in this exciting field. What are the most disruptive new technologies, interfaces, and business models in Web search? How is the proliferation of social media and smart mobile devices influencing companies’ strategies in information discovery? How should entrepreneurs and investors discern the real problems—and the most promising opportunities—in this industry? What lies beyond the current state of the art in search, and how will the field evolve in the next five to 10 years?

For one evening, we are bringing together some of the world’s experts in search and information discovery—and some of the deepest thinkers in computing, software, and entrepreneurship. This group includes Brian Bershad, Google’s Seattle site director; Harry Shum, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of search product development (Bing); Oren Etzioni, professor of computer science at the University of Washington, the founder of Farecast, and a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group; and Steve Hall, managing director of Vulcan Capital, who has put seed capital to work in a number of intriguing search-related startups, including Evri and Gist.

The moderator of the discussion will be Ed Lazowska, the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. We will also be adding to the program in the coming weeks with short presentations (“bursts”) from startups working in the search and information discovery space.

This star-studded event will take place on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle. We’re still finalizing the exact room location, but will keep you updated. I’ll be the emcee, and will be passing around the microphone to elicit a bunch of good questions from the audience, for what we intend to be a highly interactive conversation. We’re looking forward to having a great crowd on Nov. 30.

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Microsoft announced the integration of real-time status updates from Twitter and Facebook into its Bing search engine this morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi and Online Services Group president Qi Lu confirmed the company’s non-exclusive partnerships with the two social media networks on stage, followed by a short demo, discussion, and audience Q&A.

According to Mehdi and Lu, the new deals are part of Bing’s ongoing plan to join “the emerging hot area of real-time information” with search engine technology to create a new kind of socially focused reader.

“We think about search holistically,” Lu said. “It’s about user intent…You are trying to build a mind-reader.”

During his speech, Mehdi demoed Bing.com/twitter, which went live in beta form only minutes after the announcement. “We are going to get access to all the Twitter information in real time,” he said, while organizing the tweet index by quality, relevance, and social significance to make searching easier and more efficient.

“We look at the people who are tweeting and we assign a social relevance score,” Mehdi said. The tweets are ranked by relevance, range, popularity, and interest, with stronger emphasis on tweets that are considered to be the most trustworthy and prolific. “If a particular tweet is being re-tweeted several times, you know it’s hot,” he said.

The new Twitter integration also includes a spam filter to improve searchability in the Twitter stream, a “tag cloud” of hottest Twitter topics, tweet ranking abilities, and top tweeted links. Bing will also automatically expand shortened URLs, like bit.ly and tinyurl, so that searchers will be able to see where the links will take them before clicking.

Meanwhile, the Facebook deal will allow Bing access to all publicly shared information from the social network’s users. According to Mehdi, this will launch “at a later date.”

The deals, described by Mehdi as “strategic partnerships,” come at the height of the “real-time search” competition between Microsoft and Google—efforts to help consumers get up-to-the-minute information about the world around them. In the last several months, Bing also has been on a partnership blitz, making a deal with PayScale to edge into the job search market, and signing a 10-year, $150 million agreement with Yahoo that gives Microsoft control of both companies’ search engine technologies.

And this is not Bing’s first attempt at going social, either. With Google now infiltrating what was Microsoft’s core client base—corporations—and dominating personal Web browsing and e-mail, Bing has been running a campaign to outpace the search giant in other areas. Both companies have been actively developing social media capabilities—Google using iGoogle to integrate content sharing, games, and communication tools into its users’ individualized homepages, and Bing utilizing already established social media. Facebook now employs Bing for the site’s search feature, and back in July, Bing began including popular Twitter feeds—like those of Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest—into its search results, in an attempt to get a leg up on the competition.

Google is said to be in similar partnership talks with both Twitter and Facebook. And although Microsoft’s deals are non-exclusive and do not preclude any future deals between the two social media groups and Google, it was clearly a sprint on the part of Microsoft to get in first in the social media race.

Passing over financial and operational details, Lu made it clear that this was not the last we’d hear of Microsoft’s forward-thinking, social media push. “A real-time corpus like Twitter…is still evolving and emerging,” Lu said. “This is just the beginning.”

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Bellevue, WA-based Visible Technologies has formed a strategic partnership with In-Q-Tel, the investment firm run by the CIA. The deal includes a technology development agreement, but financial terms were not given. Visible makes software that helps companies and organizations monitor the social media landscape (and Web sentiment towards specific topics and brands), as well as manage their online reputations. Last week, Visible said it had raised an additional $2 million from existing investors, bringing its total funding to $23.5 million. The company also said it had achieved more than 60 percent year-over-year revenue growth, and signed up 24 Fortune 1000 customers in the third quarter of 2009, including Xerox and Autodesk.

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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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Call it the iPhone “2G.” Two Seattle-area startups that start with the letter “G” are rolling out new iPhone apps today. OK, this would not normally make significant news for us, because new apps appear on a daily basis, but each of these cases provides an interesting update to the company’s mobile strategy, so here we go:

—Glympse has been on a tear since May, when co-founder and CEO Bryan Trussel said the Seattle-area company first started offering its location-sharing service on mobile phones. The idea of the software is that your friends and business contacts can get an immediate “glympse” of where you are on a map, automatically, for a certain amount of time that you set. Today’s announcement that Glympse is available as a free download on the iPhone is no surprise. Last week, the startup’s service was named a showcase application in Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and the company has been working on its iPhone app for some time. It’s all part of Glympse’s strategy to build a mass-consumer audience based on a free service, before working up to paid models and location-based ads.

—Gist has also been picking up steam, in a very different market. The Seattle-based company, led by founder and CEO T.A. McCann, focuses on giving consumers and business customers information about their e-mail and social-network contacts in a quick and easy way. The goal is to help people manage their relationships more efficiently, for example, by feeding them updates from all over the Web about their contacts. Gist opened up to the public last month, and McCann told me then that the company had done some optimization for the iPhone and was more broadly improving its mobile version. The new iPhone app, which is free, makes sense for busy professionals who want to scan the latest info on whoever they’re meeting next, from blogs, articles, and social media, right before their appointment. It also fits into Gist’s strategy for bridging e-mail, search, and social media in order to help people manage all that information.

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Online reputation management is hot these days. Today, Seattle-based Marchex, the online advertising and search company, is announcing a new thrust in its strategy for connecting local consumers with restaurants, florists, and other businesses. The firm is releasing software that helps small, local businesses monitor and understand what people are saying about them and their competitors—and make sure information about the businesses online is accurate.

Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) says the product is the first of its kind, but the news fits into a broader trend of Seattle-area companies offering reputation management and “Web sentiment” software. The idea is to sell software tools that automatically collect what people are saying about brands and products in blogs, articles, and social media like Twitter, and then summarize the positive and negative feedback so businesses can quickly respond to customers. Visible Technologies, Appature, and Evri are some of the other Seattle companies working in the space.

“This is a really important product if you think of the next generation of performance advertising,” says Peter Christothoulou, the chief operating officer and a founding executive of Marchex. “It’s about not just acquiring new partners, but communicating with them.” Christothoulou adds that the new effort acts like the “front of the funnel” in Marchex’s strategy for helping businesses find new customers and maintain relationships with them.

While other offerings provide insights into how a company name or brand is represented online, Marchex is focusing specifically on the local aspect of small businesses, says Matthew Berk, the company’s executive vice president of product engineering. In addition to monitoring the sentiment of local customers, that means making sure a restaurant’s phone number and address are listed correctly in various places online, and that the special features of a Petco store in one neighborhood, say, are differentiated from those of other Petco stores at different locations.

But connecting these local stores with feedback from social media and other sources is the main advance here. “Businesses know things are being said about them online,” adds Ryan Fritzky, a senior product manager at Marchex. “It’s an important first step to provide them with a service where intelligence is brought to them in one place.”

Marchex isn’t selling the product directly to small businesses. Rather, it is going through its big partners like AT&T, Comcast, the Cobalt Group, and Yellowbook.com, who will in turn resell the software to local businesses for a monthly fee.

Strategically, it sounds like reputation management could be an important new revenue stream for Marchex, which reported a 44 percent drop in revenues in the second quarter of this year ($21.1 million) compared to the same period in 2008 ($37.4 million). “This is the first of many forward-looking products we’re delivering to the [small and medium-size business] channel. It can be significant for us over time,” Christothoulou says.

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It’s been a very busy week for news in the mobile industry. First, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) rolled out a one-click mobile payments service that promises to shake up the world of mobile-app developers and distributors. Then it seems like all hell broke loose, courtesy of the massive CTIA wireless expo going on in San Diego through this Friday.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s happening in mobile-device interfaces, iPhone apps, and other mobile news from the Northwest:

—In the area of speech interfaces, Seattle-based TravellingWave announced today at CTIA its “voice-powered text prediction” application for mobile phones. The idea is to combine keyboard-based text input prediction with speech recognition so you don’t need to press as many buttons, while keeping the text-entry process accurate and simple to use. TravellingWave was founded in 2004 and is backed by its founder, angel investors, and grants from the National Science Foundation.

—Not to be outdone, Microsoft’s Bing and Sprint said today that the upcoming Samsung Intrepid smartphone (available Oct. 11), which runs on Windows Mobile, will incorporate Microsoft’s Tellme software to enable consumers to use their voice to dial contacts, compose text messages, and search the Web for business listings, cafes, weather and traffic reports, maps, and directions. It’s the first mobile device to use Tellme, as far as I can tell.

—Seattle-area startup Glympse, which focuses on mobile location sharing, announced yesterday it has been selected as a “showcase” application within Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft’s recently announced mobile app store. So Glympse is now available on Windows phones with GPS, and is in private beta trials on the iPhone. Back in May, Glympse first launched its service on T-Mobile phones with Google’s Android operating system, and CEO Bryan Trussel talked with me about the company’s strategy.

—Who knew that developers in Portland, OR, had put out so many iPhone apps? Silicon Florist reported yesterday that the region is responsible for making more than 40 apps in the iTunes store, including prominent ones from Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods, and Zipcar. The list also includes Stanza, the hit e-book app developed by Lexcycle, which was co-founded by Portland resident Marc Prud’hommeaux. Lexcycle has since been absorbed into Amazon. (Don’t mess with Seattle.)

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Seattle-based Appature announced late yesterday that it now provides “sentiment analysis” that lets healthcare marketers understand people’s feelings (positive or negative) about their brand, or other topics in their industry, from blogs and social media. Together with the rest of Appature’s marketing software, companies can do things like search against information in their Appature database about customers and prospects. Back in June, Appature released a Twitter search engine called Chatterfly. The company was founded in 2007 and is currently bootstrapped and profitable.

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It’s Friday, the weekend is beckoning, and you’ve got your Web browser open. As much as we’d love it if you spent the weekend reading Xconomy, there’s now a less sedentary option, from a Boston startup called Goby. It’s a search engine designed specifically to help you find fun things to do out in the real world—assuming, that is, that you already have some inkling of what kinds of activities you enjoy, where you’d like to do them, and when you have time free.

In fact, the Goby.com website—which goes public today after more than a year in stealth mode—features a row of three search boxes that ask you for exactly that information: What, Where, and When. Once you’ve given Goby those clues, the MIT-bred software behind the site goes to work, using what the company calls “deep Web” technology to scour some 500 data sources, from Yelp to to BedandBreakfast.com. Using the context it’s gleaned, it then organizes the results in a way that’s designed to be easy to explore.

Say you’re thinking about going hiking this weekend north of Boston. Goby will show you nearly 200 options culled from sites like The Trustees of Reservations, mntnLife.com, LocalHikes.com, and Wildernet.com, and arrange them in order of distance from a central point. Buttons within each result let you instantly view additional details like driving directions and photos. Every location is also displayed on an interactive map.

There are plenty of links to the original sources—this is a search engine, after all—but the information is compiled so cleverly that you can finish a lot of your research and activity planning without ever leaving Goby. And that’s part of the point.

“Our belief is that today, information and choices on the Web are very fragmented, and people don’t have a good sense for how to browse it,” says Mark Watkins, Goby’s CEO and co-founder. “We thought there was an opportunity to pull that information together in a consistent framework and interface, where people will have a much more robust sense of their choices. We’re kind of halfway between a search engine and a destination site, in that respect. It’s not just about getting people through as quickly as we can. Product design and user experience are very important to us.”

By “us,” Watkins is referring to the small group of experienced, New England-based database researchers and search industry executives who started Goby in the summer of 2008. Watkins himself is the former director of R&D and professional services at Endeca, the Cambridge, MA-based enterprise search provider. Chief technology officer and co-founder Vince Russo, a PhD computer scientist who designed Goby’s core search functionality, is a former chief architect from …Next Page »

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Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is growing faster than its rivals, including Google, according to Nielsen Online. The report says Bing’s share of the Web search market was 10.7 percent in August, up from 9.0 percent in July, representing a 22 percent increase in its total number of searches. Google’s market share increased slightly to 64.6 percent, while Yahoo’s dropped to 16.0 percent. Bing was launched at the beginning of June, and has received generally positive reviews. Earlier this week, Bing rolled out a “visual search” feature, which lets you browse results by pictures instead of text.

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