Sometimes the most interesting gatherings have the strangest names. What does “Boston Hadoop Meetup Group” say to you? To me, it says “future of big data in Boston.”

Hadoop is an open source data-analysis platform that is gaining popularity for helping companies and IT departments crunch huge amounts of information. The Hadoop meetup group in Boston, like those in other cities, has been around for a couple of years, but until now it hasn’t been very active. That’s about to change on February 15, from 6:00-9:00 pm, when the group is getting together at Fidelity in Boston to talk about the technology and how it can be used.

Spearheading the new effort is Hadapt, a big-data software startup in Cambridge, MA, that combines Hadoop with advanced database technology. Hadapt moved to the Boston area from New Haven, CT, in early November after raising a Series A venture round from Bessemer Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

Hadapt will join Cloudera and MapR, other players in the sector, in giving informal talks at the meetup, which is expected to draw upwards of 50 developers, entrepreneurs, and folks from big companies like Akamai, IBM, and EMC/VMware. “It’s important to build awareness about Hadoop and bring together people already working on it,” says Justin Borgman, the CEO of Hadapt. “We don’t yet have a community built around it in this city.”

The meetup is the latest sign of a critical mass of interest building around Boston in big data and analytics. Earlier that same day (the 15th), MassTLC is organizing an event around the impact of big data on the tech industry. Last month, startups Chart.io, Kinvey, and Session M organized a very well attended meetup around data analytics and visualization. And earlier this week, Vertica (acquired by HP last year) said it is relocating to Cambridge and setting up a center for big data analytics and community outreach.

Bryan Stevenson, chief technology officer at Cambridge-based startup InsightSquared, says he has just joined the Hadoop meetup group and that “there’s a lot of buzz around the technology in general.” InsightSquared, which helps staffing, recruiting, and software businesses analyze and display their data, has been experimenting with Hadoop. Stevenson, who’s relatively new to Boston, says it’s important to have a peer group so he (and others) can “ask the stupid questions.”

Hadapt, for its part, has grown to about 20 employees and is currently hiring. The Yale University spinout’s software is in late-stage beta trials now and will be generally available later this year, Borgman says.

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From cloudy Seattle to the vast suburbs of Silicon Valley, we covered a lot of ground on MIT Sloan’s recent technology trek, which concluded with a leg in Boston.

The first stop was Seattle where it was predictably raining. Visiting Amazon, Microsoft, and Adobe, we came away with an appreciation for how much tech activity is actually going on in that city.

At Microsoft, we got to talk to alumni about what it’s like to work there. Yes, it’s a large company and therefore bureaucratic, they confessed. But, the huge plus is that they have the resources to work on some very innovative projects. Amazon also was big, but the theme there was its quirkiness. In addition to all of the desks being made out of doors, they also have whiteboards everywhere, even in the elevators. I made sure to leave an “MIT Sloan was here” tag in one of the elevators!

Adobe seemed like a more typical office where they provide a pleasant work environment with lots of exposed brick and wood. Overall, I could really see myself enjoying working in Seattle.

Moving on to Silicon Valley, it was noticeably sunnier and warmer. It was also a lot bigger. In Seattle, you could probably get by with just a bike and public transit, but good luck to anyone who tries that in Silicon Valley. Here, you definitely need a car. Being settled with a family might help too, as the area is comprised of endless suburbs punctuated by large office parks where the tech companies are located.

If you want to live where the action is, you’d need to get a job in San Francisco or do the 40-minute commute each way and hope for no traffic. I guess I should point out that Palo Alto does have a downtown, but it’s just two or three streets and most people would still have to drive there.

As for the tech companies, most of the ones we visited were in Silicon Valley and all offered quite a lot of amenities compared to what we saw in Seattle. Free food, gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and acupuncture were just some of the perks you get at most of these companies. I guess they need these things to entice people not only to live away from the city, but also to work some pretty long hours.

For example, the employees at Facebook—who all seemed to be in their 20s—joked that working at some firms in the Valley is like working in a sweatshop. Employees are expected to work extremely hard, but they also provide an endless amount of food that includes a rotating candy of the week. Facebook keeps its employees well fed, caffeinated, and hydrated with the largest cafeteria of all the tech companies we visited.

Google had a similar environment with lots of … Next Page »

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What’s in a tech startup name? More specifically, is there a correlation between the type of name a company has and its success?

That’s a question every startup founder and investor should be interested in. Because if there is a correlation, then using a name-based strategy for picking winners would be, well, about as good as any other strategy. And much faster.

Consider the following companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. And more recently, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga. Or how about these biggies: Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm. These are all top companies, no doubt about it.

Notice anything about their names? None of them has a capital letter in the middle of its name—sometimes referred to as “camel case,” because an upper-case letter in the middle of a word looks like a hump. (Of course, there’s also plenty of startup name-ology around whether to use real words, made-up words, misspelled words, acronyms, and so forth, but we don’t have all day.)

Maybe I’m getting punchy as the holidays loom, but as an end-of-year exercise, I thought we’d play the name game and see where it leads. So let’s drill down into some specifics. What I’m really talking about are company names that are two words mashed into one, where each word or part could stand on its own. Because there are so damn many of them these days. Not just Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Rackspace, mind you, but also Admeld, Airbnb, Dropbox, Foursquare, Zipcar, Wayfair, Redfin, Evernote, Flipboard, Shopkick…and the list goes on.

Note that the above companies—all of whom are doing reasonably well, I think—spell their names without the camel case. It’s Facebook, not FaceBook. Salesforce, not SalesForce. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Historically, camel-case companies have had their share of difficulties. Consider the plight of AltaVista, the early search engine that lost out to Google. Or of struggling MySpace, which seems to have actually changed its moniker to Myspace—exactly my point, of course. More recently, GlassHouse, the cloud computing and virtualization company, withdrew its plans for an IPO earlier this month (for the second time). BlackBerry hasn’t done much to … Next Page »

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It’s not just the Silicon Valley giants of technology who are moving into the Seattle area to raid technical talent from Microsoft, Amazon, and others. These days, you’re just as likely to see some well-financed startups wooing the big-company guys with promises of changing the world.

A prime example is Nebula, a cloud computing startup that has about half of its roughly 30-person staff in Seattle. As Xconomy’s Wade Roush wrote in this detailed profile of the company, Nebula is selling a smarter version of a networking switch, one that is integrated with the open-source cloud computing platform OpenStack. Specifically, the Nebula device contains a 10 gigabit Ethernet switch along with access to the OpenStack software platform—a combination the company is calling a “cloud controller.”

Nebula’s device, which is just now being tested by potential customers, will allow companies to cheaply build private cloud computing systems. Nebula’s device uses customized OpenStack software and works with inexpensive, commodity servers, including hardware from the Facebook-sponsored Open Compute Project.

Chris Kemp, Nebula CEO

It’s worth mentioning that Nebula’s CEO, Chris Kemp, is one of the co-founders of OpenStack. He helped get the project off the ground when he was the chief technology officer for IT at NASA, working out of its Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

Kemp’s also no stranger to Seattle. He was a key employee at Classmates.com, and co-founded the vacation rental management startup Escapia before heading to NASA. Another veteran of Escapia and NASA, Devin Carlen, is a Nebula co-founder and its engineering vice president, based in the Seattle area.

When I visited Nebula’s temporary digs recently, Carlen and Kemp were in that tired-but-excited phase of developing a new company and getting the first versions of their product out to testing. Their conference room was peppered with notes and diagrams, piles of hardware, and the occasional wine bottle, as engineers worked intently in an office down the hall. The company’s current hiring plans will put it at about 50 people in the next six months or so, and a bit more than half of the team will probably be based in Palo Alto, CA. But “all the cool kids are in Seattle, of course,” Carlen says with a smile.

“Seattle’s actually been our secret weapon,” Kemp says. “We found it very difficult to bring folks on in the Bay Area. And, as it turns out, Amazon’s a great place to recruit from. Microsoft’s a great place to recruit from.”

Those hires include a pair that Nebula boasted about in a recent press release: principal engineer Tres Henry, a former lead in developing the Amazon Web Services Management Console; and Matt Gambardella, who … Next Page »

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Actifio is growing like a weed—just like the data it tries to help companies tame—and it has just raised one of the bigger Boston-area tech financing rounds of the year.

The Waltham, MA-based data management startup said today it has closed $33.5 million in Series C funding led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz. Previous investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures also participated in the round. The company says the money will be used to expand operations globally and increase awareness and sales of its products. The addition of a West Coast investor like Andreessen Horowitz indicates the startup is pretty serious about going big; whether it will succeed remains to be seen.

Actifio has been roughly doubling the size of its investment rounds over the past couple of years. It closed an $8 million A round in early 2010 and followed that up with a $16 million B round later that year. The startup has grown to about 100 employees, up from 50 in July 2010.

The big idea behind the startup is to virtualize data management—starting with backup, protection, and recovery services—for big companies. That means doing for data storage and protection what VMware, Cisco, and other giants have done for computing power and networking, via a unified software platform. “Virtualization” refers to the important IT trend of separating software from hardware—and applications from operating systems—in big, messy computer systems.

“This financing further empowers our team and clients to completely shift the way we think about traditional, legacy IT solutions and virtualizing the management of data-–-including eliminating backup software,” says Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh (a veteran of HP and AppIQ), in a statement. “This is a similar paradigm shift ushered in by VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and others, via server virtualization.”

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His last name means “forest” in Norwegian. Which is appropriate, because this guy sees the forest for the trees.

David Skok of Matrix Partners is one of the most talked-about venture capitalists in town, among young entrepreneurs and experienced ones alike. He is best known for his investments in JBoss, the open source middleware company (acquired by Red Hat for $420 million in 2006); AppIQ, the network and storage management firm (bought by HP in 2005); Diligent Technologies, a data protection company (bought by IBM in 2008); and CloudSwitch, a cloud infrastructure startup (acquired by Verizon this year). He currently serves on the boards of tech companies such as HubSpot, CloudBees, Digium, Enservio, and Solidworks.

Critics say he hasn’t had a big exit in a while. Supporters say he has a real knack for building companies and getting them acquired for good prices—and that what he touches often turns to gold.

Whatever you think of him, Skok has carved out a reputation as a hard-working investor with both technical expertise in business software and a deep understanding of sales and marketing from a customer’s perspective. For the past decade, he has been a general partner with Matrix. But when I sat down with him recently, I was more interested to hear about his previous life as an entrepreneur and five-time CEO, and how that shaped who he is today—both the decisions he makes as a VC, and the kind of mentorship he provides to startups.

It’s not quite Batman Begins or Casino Royale, but here is the David Skok origin story—and its lessons—in three parts.

Act I: A New Hope (Software)

The story opens in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Skok was born to an English mother and Norwegian father. His parents didn’t want him to grow up with apartheid, so they sent him to school in England, where he lived from age 8 to 20, in London. From there he went to college at University of Sussex, where he was part of the first class of graduates in England to be awarded computer science degrees. That was 1976.

His father made him come back and join the blue-collar family business, which involved machining equipment. He went to apprentice training school and survived his first week when all the tough guys tried to haze him. By the end of the course, he knew how to use a new tool for machining parts that followed a program stored on punched paper tape. The problem was, if there was a tiny error in the tape, the part would be ruined and “you’d have a huge wreck on your hands,” he says.

So Skok wrote a piece of software to get around this. “If you designed the part on the computer, you’d be able to do the machining without worrying about the geometry,” he says. That led him to start his first company, Skok Systems, which became a computer-aided design (CAD) firm.

“I’m accidentally an entrepreneur,” Skok says. “I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t have any training in it, I didn’t have any mentors to turn to to teach me how to be an entrepreneur. I’m trying to figure out all the sales and marketing stuff that’s going on.”

The company went through a few shifts, but the pivotal moment happened in … Next Page »

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Sunnyvale, CA-based Hotlink, maker of a “virtual integration” system that allows enterprise data centers to use virtualization technology from multiple vendors including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat, emerged from stealth mode today and announced that it has collected $10 million in Series A financing. Foundation Capital led the round, which was joined by Leapfrog Ventures. Former FastScale CEO Lynn LeBlanc founded Hotlink in 2010.

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How do you run a venture capital fund with $378 million under management with just four full-time partners? San Francisco-based True Ventures, a six-year-old early stage investing firm, has found a way: you crowdsource a lot of the work of shepherding your investments to the group of portfolio company CEOs themselves.

You can’t go far in Silicon Valley without bumping into True—they’ve invested in Automattic (maker of WordPress), BrightRoll, GDGT, GigaOm, Meebo, Plancast, Sifteo, and a passel of other up-and-coming startups. I’ve spent a fair bit of time recently speaking with True Ventures partners and portfolio companies, and if there’s one thing that sets the Internet- and mobile-focused firm apart from other Bay Area VCs, it’s the strength of the community it has built by encouraging portfolio CEOs to turn to one other for help and advice. It sounds sappy, but at True, “community” is more than just a motto; it’s the business model.

Indeed, the community is such a key part of the firm’s strategy that the partners call it “the platform,” as if it were a key piece of infrastructure software. “We are very much about the platform,” Phil Black, one of the firm’s three founding partners, told me when I visited the firm’s Pier 38 offices recently. “We really want the community to be the experts. Our style of venture capital imitates the open source community in many respects.”

In practice, that means that many of the key strategic and tactical questions that come up during a startup’s crucial early years get referred to other True CEOs, rather than to the partners. If you were an executive at a company backed by a traditional venture firm and this happened to you a lot, you might feel a bit shortchanged. After all, the big Sand Hill Road venture firms are always boasting about how they provide “smart money” and how their partners’ hands-on experience building companies is as important as their capital.

But at True, the situation seems reversed. The firm doesn’t claim to offer a ton of hands-on experience from its partners—and the portfolio CEOs rave about it.

“The part that has probably made me the biggest fan is the platform,” says Alex Bard, CEO of customer support software maker Assistly, which obtained Series A funding from True Ventures in 2010. “They have made a huge investment in connecting all the companies they invest in, and we are all connected in a real-time way.”

Bard shares an example relating to a recent product update that Assistly wanted to publicize. “Historically we haven’t had a ton of success with PR and getting multiple outlets to write about us,” he says. “I sent an e-mail out to the True founders mailing list and said ‘Hey, could anybody spare 30 minutes to chat with me and my head of marketing about how to optimize around product launches.’ Within two hours I had seven CEOs of other companies calling to say they’d be happy to take us through how they were successful. It was priceless.”

True opened its doors in 2005 after Phil Black and Jon Burke, co-founders of a $5 million super-angel fund called Blacksmith Capital, connected with Jon Callaghan, who’d been Black’s colleague at Summit Partners back in the early 1990s. The trio thought there was a need for a … Next Page »

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Big Blue celebrated 100 years of success in the tech industry earlier this month. It’s a rare feat in an industry where companies are often rendered obsolete in a decade, oftentimes sooner. In fact, IBM has managed to stay relevant while literally thousands of tech companies have come and gone. So, what’s its secret recipe? One reason for its success is its aggressive attitude toward buying companies with great technology that integrate well into its portfolio.

As an ERP (enterprise resource planning) market analyst at Software Advice, I was intrigued by all the fanfare that’s been showered upon IBM this month. I also wanted to know more about its mergers and acquisitions strategy and which companies it might buy next. So, to predict the future, I rolled up my sleeves and went digging into the past. Since IBM is an acquisition machine, I limited my search to the last decade of deals.

After I culled the data, it became obvious that there are three markets that IBM likes to go shopping: professional services, middleware, and business analytics. For anyone familiar with IBM’s company profile, this isn’t really a shocker, but the sheer volume of purchases is surprising. In the past decade, IBM bought 14 companies in services, 13 companies in middleware, and made a couple of multi-billion-dollar deals in business analytics.

The Massachusetts Connection

There’s one more trend that I noticed in its purchasing history: IBM loves to buy companies in Massachusetts. Since 2003, it has picked up some 18 companies in the Massachusetts area (these 17 plus Netezza). Massachusetts is an obvious place to shop, with world-class tech universities; it’s a hotbed of technology innovation; and there are dozens of successful companies. In thinking about the Massachusetts connection, there is one company in particular that I couldn’t help but think about IBM buying: EMC.

EMC is the Holy Grail of Massachusetts technology. Its data storage and warehousing business is a multi-billion-dollar operation, and it has one of the most successful virtualization companies on the market (VMware). IBM is already involved in data storage—and is a competitor of EMC—but it has yet to make an aggressive move into the virtualization market. An IBM-EMC combination would create an utterly dominant force in the data storage industry.

IBM’s strategy in the virtualization market has been to play it safe on the sidelines and funnel money and support into things like the Linux KVM hypervisor, hoping that it could compete with VMware. It hasn’t worked. Instead VMware has become the go-to name for all things related to virtualization technology. But that’s exactly what makes buying EMC such an enticing proposition.

Would IBM Buy EMC?

So, what would IBM have to give up? The short answer is: a heckuva lot. IBM’s market cap hovers right at $207 billion, and EMC’s sits at a comparatively modest $55 billion. That means that IBM would have to give up about 20 percent of its company and then some to land EMC. It’s a massive sum of money, but IBM is one of the tech companies that can actually pull off an EMC purchase. While it’s a huge investment, there are massive revenues to realize from a deal of this magnitude. In 2010, EMC brought in $17 billion. If you throw in IBM’s scale on top of that, there’s no telling what kind of revenue they could do together after a deal.

Personally, I think IBM could make it happen. But the move may be a bit too bold for a company that prides itself on focus and on being fairly conservative. On top of that, IBM has already said that it intends to spend “only” $20 billion on mergers and acquisitions in the next five years. An EMC purchase would tear through that and then some. In some respects, however, it’s a deal that might be too good, and pricey, to make happen.

But that’s just my opinion. What’s yours? I’m currently hosting a poll on my blog at Software Advice. Come vote and make your voice heard at: IBM Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Next? For reference, EMC is currently in third place. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Santa Clara, CA-based StorSimple announced it has closed a $10.5 million Series C financing round led by Ignition Partners, based in the Seattle area. The company’s other previous investors, including Index Ventures, Mayfield Fund, and Redpoint Ventures, also participated in the round. StorSimple, which has raised a total of $31.5 million to date, focuses on cloud-based data storage software for big companies using Microsoft Windows and VMware systems. The startup began in 2009 and is led by co-founder and CEO Ursheet Parikh, a veteran of Cisco.

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Last week’s Xconomy event Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021 (nicely summarized by freelancer David Needle) kept me pretty busy, but the news rolled on:

—The biggest buzz of the week, of course, was over the initial public offering by Mountain View, CA-based LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), which brought the company some $352 million in new funds. Now observers are arguing about whether the 110 percent pop in LinkedIn’s stock price in the first day of trading represented a scam by LinkedIn’s investment banks or just a buying frenzy.

—It’s getting easier for companies to test Web design changes that could improve sales, thanks in part to companies like San Francisco-based Optimizely that offer automated A/B testing software. I profiled the Y Combinator-backed startup, which was co-founded by Pete Koomen and Dan Siroker after Siroker’s experiences helping the 2008 Obama presidential campaign optimize its online fundraising strategy.

—Eventbrite raised a hefty $50 million in a Series E round led by new investor Tiger Global Management. Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz told me the company will use the new funds, which more than double its previous venture pot, to expand internationally, hire more developers and customer support representatives, and make acquisitions.

—In my Friday column, I explored the new iPad version of Apple’s Garageband, which one source called “the most capable music creation suite on the market.” I even shared a couple of songs that I wrote using the software.

—Xconomy CEO and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi tallied up a list of the Boston-area venture firms who have either moved to the San Francisco Bay Area or expanded their Bay Area offices in the last few years.

—The City and County of San Francisco selected Microsoft over Google and IBM for a long-term contract to supply e-mail software for government employees, as my colleague Curt reported.

—In the follow-up department: San Francisco-based Streetline Networks expanded its parking finder service from Los Angeles to the Marina District in San Francisco, and SF- and Seattle-based crowd commerce Zaarly opened for business.

—In acquisitions news, Autonomy bought Iron Mountain Digital, VMware bought Shavlik Technologies, and Symantec bought Clearwell Systems.

—In funding news, StackMob raised $7.5 million, Hara Software raised $25 million, Jobvite raised $15 million, nPario raised $5 million, Datameer raised $9.25 million, and MongoLab raised $3 million.

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Palo Alto, CA-based VMware (NYSE: VMW), the virtualization subsidiary of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC), announced today that it has agreed to acquire Shavlik Technologies of New Brighton, MN, a Minneapolis suburb. The company makes software that helps small and medium sized businesses track, manage, and install software security updates and other patches. Shavlik has assisted VMware with the deployment of its vSphere private cloud management software, and VMware senior vice president and general manager Raghu Raghuram said in a statement that the acquisition will allow his company “to provide simple to use and affordable management services developed to address the specific demands of SMBs.” The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Cambridge, MA-based IT startup Typesafe announced yesterday that it had pinned down $3 million in a Series A financing led by Greylock Partners, with participation from individual investors who have worked for Facebook, VMWare, Oracle, Google, and more.  Typesafe offers a platform for working on the Scala programming language, which is interoperable with Java and is designed for hardware and cloud infrastructures.

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Salesforce.com startled Silicon Valley techies last month by acquiring Heroku, a San Francisco startup born just three years earlier at Y Combinator, the venture incubator program. Heroku’s specialty is hosting Web-based applications written in Ruby, a programming language so powerful yet easy to use that it has become the tool of choice for developers building consumer-facing Web services. Heroku had won a rabid following among fellow Y Combinator companies and other startups, perhaps helping to explain how its founders—who had raised just $13 million in venture capital—persuaded Salesforce.com to fork over $212 million for the 30-employee property.

But just a few blocks away from Heroku in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood is another Ruby hosting company that’s been around longer than Heroku and has a lot more engineers, support staff, and paying customers. It’s called Engine Yard, and with almost $40 million in venture backing from Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Amazon, and other firms, it’s assembled a user base of more than 1,800 companies for its “platform as a service.” Its customer roster includes names like Bleacher Report, BuyWithMe, Get Satisfaction, MTV, Oneforty, and Path.

So why did Salesforce.com go after upstart Heroku rather than established Engine Yard?

The answer may have as much to do with Silicon Valley politics as anything else. I got part of the background from CEO John Dillon and chief technology officer Tom Mornini when I visited Engine Yard in mid-December. Dillon, I knew, has a history with Salesforce.com. He was its president and CEO from December 1999 to November 2001, when he was ousted by founder Marc Benioff. Salesforce.com said at the time that Dillon departed by mutual agreement, but the real story, Dillon told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002, was that “Marc decided that he wanted a turn at the wheel.”

Whatever the case, there’s no love lost between Dillon and Benioff. Dillon—who has what you might call an unguarded speaking style—has gone on the record as saying that Salesforce.com’s own Force.com cloud application platform is “crap” that “no self-respecting developer would use.” So once Salesforce.com decided it wanted to get into the Ruby hosting game, Heroku was likely the more palatable choice, Dillon told me. “There are only two companies you can buy to get this, and one is Engine Yard,” he says. “I don’t think Marc wanted to write a big check to me.”

Of course, there’s a lot more to Engine Yard’s story than its rivalries with Heroku and Salesforce.com. The rise of Ruby and the closely related tool Ruby on Rails, a package of open-source software that greatly simplifies the creation of database-driven websites, has transformed the way Internet entrepreneurs implement their visions. Ruby on Rails was designed specifically to allow rapid product iteration—the so-called “agile” development strategy—with the result that developers can release and test several versions of a Web-based service in a single week, sometimes even a single day. “Ruby on Rails is somewhere between 2 and 5 times more efficient for coding a website than anything previously—and we believe it’s closer to 5 times,” Mornini says.

Engine Yard has been contributing to this transformation since its beginning: Mornini and co-founder Lance Walley set up the company in early 2006, less than a year after Danish programmer David Heinemeier Hansson of Chicago-based 37signals released Ruby on Rails. It’s a classic story of … Next Page »

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Companies offering new takes on social media and collaboration dominated the local business and technology news last week, as they seem to be doing an increasing amount of the time.

—After two years in stealth, a Mountain View, CA, startup called RockMelt began distributing a new Windows and Mac browser by the same name. In my Friday column I took a deep look at the browser, which is full of features designed to make life easier for heavy users of social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

—AngelPad, one of the newest venture incubators on the scene in San Francisco, graduated its first class of eight startups with a series of demos geared toward venture and individual investors. I summed up the companies’ pitches, which ranged from organizing social media streams (Curated.by, Snip.ly) to overhauling advertising and e-commerce (Adku, MoPub), simplifying online auctions (Egg Cartel), managing home energy consumption (HugEnergy), organizing meetups (RollCall), and aiding outdoorsmanship (AllTrails).

—Flowtown, a San Francisco startup with an online platform that helps other companies kickstart social media marketing campaigns, announced that it had acquired the technology of Who Should I Follow?, which combs Twitter users’ lists followers to suggest new people to follow. I took the occasion to write a full profile of Flowtown, which was co-founded in 2008 by former online video producer Ethan Bloch and IT consultant Dan Martell.

—BroadVision (NASDAQ: BVSN), a Redwood City, CA, company that achieved fame in the first Internet boom for its enterprise portals and e-commerce software, pushed forward with efforts to reinvent its product line around Facebook-style sharing and collaboration. I spoke with BroadVision founder and CEO Pehong Chen, who called the debut of BroadVision’s new “Clearvale Paasport” enterprise document exchange platform a bet-the-company moment.

—We published a report from the Women 2.0 PITCH Night on November 4, where VMware founder and former CEO Diane Greene spoke about how she started the company, and encouraged other women entrepreneurs to think big.

—In funding news, Gluster raised $8.5 million, Zuora raised $20 million, RealGravity raised $3.2 million, Social Gaming Network raised $2.5 million, Twilio raised $12 million, Rhythm NewMedia raised $10 million, and Airbnb raised $7.2 million.

—San Francisco-based event management startup Socializr was acquired by Punchbowl.com, a party planning website run from Framingham, MA.

—Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) sued Sunnyvale, CA, startup Cotendo for allegedly infringing on Akamai patents covering online content distribution.

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EMC, the data storage giant, has lots of irons in the fire when it comes to innovation. The Hopkinton, MA-based firm (NYSE: EMC) pursues an interesting mix of acquisitions and “organic” in-house research and development.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with EMC’s chief technology officer, Jeff Nick, about the company’s broader innovation strategy—which can be a tough thing for an outsider to grasp, especially when you’re talking about a 45,000-person company. But one big piece of EMC’s approach is to acquire other companies in strategic market positions. So I wanted to drill down into the firm’s specific approach when it comes to these mergers and acquisitions.

One potentially huge deal has been widely rumored for the past month: the prospect of EMC acquiring Seattle-based Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN). A report in the Wall Street Journal late last week said EMC “has cooled its interest” in Isilon, but that an agreement is still possible. It sounds like Isilon’s high stock value ($27.95 at Friday’s close) has driven up its asking price (rumored to be over $2 billion). The companies aren’t talking publicly about any such deal, of course, but outside sources tell me it is still likely to happen, because Isilon’s technology fills an important hole for EMC (networked-attached storage) in its competition with other storage companies like Silicon Valley-based NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP).

EMC wouldn’t make any specific comments about Isilon, but the firm did speak with me about its M&A strategy more broadly—and about its acquisition of Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain last year, which also went for $2 billion. “EMC has a long acquisition history and track record,” says Matt Olton, vice president of corporate development at EMC. “We’ve learned our lessons about what works and what creates more challenges.”

A caveat: EMC is “often viewed as a very acquisitive company,” Olton says, “but you’ll see investments in R&D equivalent to our acquisition spend.” Not many tech companies can focus on both internally and externally driven innovation on a large scale, says Olton, an 11-year veteran of the firm who works with a core team of about a dozen members, plus a much larger virtual team that cuts across all business functions.

To help frame EMC’s approach, Olton says any successful M&A practice boils down to five points:

—A core strategy that works. It doesn’t have to be the best strategy in the world, so long as it can be executed, he says. (I took this to mean everyone needs to be on the same page, even if it’s not the perfect page.)

—Evaluation discipline. This means having the patience to pursue fewer transactions, … Next Page »

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[Corrected, see below] Female technologists and CEOs are still rare in Silicon Valley, but Diane Greene has been both—and she’s been far more successful at it than most males.

Trained at MIT and UC Berkeley, Greene was the co-founder and founding CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based VMware, which introduced a layer of virtualization between hardware and software that allowed computer users to do something new—run multiple operating systems on the same machine in a way that makes the machine run more securely and efficiently.

The idea was based on research done by her husband, Mendel Rosenblum, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and it turned into a multibillion dollar market for VMware. When the company went public in 2007, it was Silicon Valley’s biggest IPO since Google’s.

Greene left VMware abruptly in 2008 over an apparent disagreement with VMware’s parent company, EMC. She was replaced by Paul Maritz, a former member of Microsoft’s Executive Committee. (Xconomy’s Greg Huang has a piece today about EMC’s merger & acquisition strategy.)

But Greene has continued to invest in companies and to advise entrepreneurs, and she’s now considering starting another company, she said in last night in an interview with Xconomy. Lately she’s been clearing her calendar so she has more time to think.

Greene spoke in San Francisco on November 4 at Women 2.0 PITCH Night—an event for female entrepreneurs to pitch their startups. Her most important achievement at VMware, she told Xconomy, was to create a culture where every employee in the company understood how important their work was and felt compelled to excel—although she wishes she’d introduced employee training earlier.

Here are excerpts from her public conversation on how VMware got started, followed by remarks on what other entrepreneurs could learn from her experience.

Diane Greene: We started the company with some graduate students from Stanford, and right off the bat, one of the grad students was saying, we need a killer app. We need to build a virtualized web server, or get a consulting contract with a server vendor.

But we had this strong vision and knew we had to get to that. It’s a lot of small steps – we couldn’t just jump right to the server. So we explained why we had to start on the desktop.

And then I wanted to get validation from friends I respected. There was a guy I know who has a PhD from Stanford, who had built three companies, and I thought, … Next Page »

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The MassChallenge global startup competition is in full swing. The 110 chosen companies have been pitching their wares over the past few days, trying to make the cut down to the 26 or so that will advance to the next round and compete for a piece of the $1 million prize.

Architexa, a three-year-old company led by ex-Microsoftie and MIT alum Vineet Sinha, was slated to present yesterday at the competition. I caught up with Sinha beforehand to get a quick snapshot of his company and its progress through the program. Architexa’s story is not necessarily representative of all MassChallenge entrants, but it provides a window into the proceedings—and a look at how much work goes into a company before it even enters such a competition.

First, some background. In the early 2000s, Sinha was working at Microsoft and wishing he had better software design tools—better than IBM Rational software, at least, which has become the industry standard but which Sinha says can be “useless” for developers. He decided to work on building better software tools by going back to school as a PhD student in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. By 2008, he had graduated and also had been a semifinalist in the MIT $100K business plan competition. Over the next couple of years, he and a small team bootstrapped Architexa, did consulting work, and built out their product using technology based on his PhD research. The product has been commercially available for just over three months now.

I won’t get into the technical details, but basically the tool gives developers a new way of “understanding” how software works at a deep level, instead of being focused on code generation and design, Sinha says. It’s all part of the burgeoning field of “unified modeling language,” which is a method developers use to visualize and construct code using diagrams and other tools for managing complexity. The sector took off with IBM’s purchase of Rational Software in 2003 for $2.1 billion, and Borland’s acquisition of TogetherSoft in 2002 for $185 million. But, according to Sinha, there’s still plenty of room for innovation.

Architexa currently has four employees. Sinha says it has been getting a lot of interest from big companies—Disney, Google, Motorola, and VMware are some of the ones trying out Architexa’s software. He says the product has more than 900 users, but wouldn’t say who’s actually paying for it yet. The company’s revenue model is subscription-based, which is different from competing software products that have perpetual licenses. “We want to make sure the developer benefits on a day-to-day basis” and therefore will renew his or her subscription regularly, Sinha says.

A key benefit of participating in MassChallenge has been the mentorship, Sinha says. “It’s been great to get feedback to refine our pitch,” he says. The kinds of lessons that have helped most: branding, intellectual property, customer development, and, more generally, being inspired. Mentors like James Woodward, Alec Karys, and Michael Shumann have helped Architexa with its priorities and timing—things like “you’re not ready at this time for this, focus on these other things,” Sinha says—as well as understanding customers and sales channels.

It’s still early days for Architexa. The company doesn’t need venture capital yet, for instance. As it heads down the home stretch in the startup competition, what it needs is to gain traction, and to raise a little bit of money so it can afford to hire experienced sales and marketing people.

“We’re trying to do it slowly and carefully,” Sinha says. “We’re working hard, we’re building a company, and we’ve made a huge amount of progress.”

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Smartsheet, the Bellevue, WA-based collaborative project management software company, has raised $1.5 million more in a Series C round led by existing investor Madrona Venture Group.

The company, founded in 2005 by local entrepreneur Brent Frei, develops business software that helps companies oversee online project management, manage team-based collaboration, file share, and track outsourced tasks. The system, essentially, takes all of the components that go into different business processes—Excel spreadsheets, e-mails, computer files, to-do lists, discussion threads, customer information, schedules, workflow, etc.—and brings it all into one central management hub.

This latest round of funding brings the company’s financing total close to $7 million. Smartsheet’s last round, worth $1.25 million, was raised in January 2009 from Madrona and Frei himself, who said the money would help the company reach profitability in 2010. The privately-held company doesn’t disclose detailed financial numbers, but it has confirmed that it has started operating in the black.

“That’s the big milestone for us, busting through that cash flow positive,” says chief executive Mark Mader.

The most recent financing keeps Smartsheet on track to pursue its expansion plans, according to Mader. The company has maintained an 11-person staff over the last year, despite seeing its paid customer base nearly triple. And although he would not disclose the exact number of customers beyond being “in the hundreds of thousands” (the company reported having 65,000 registered users in 2008), he did say that its growth over the last year is a strong indicator of the business’s potential in years to come.

“Remarkably we’ve been able to scale the business and stay at that level. And our venture firm loves us because we’re very capital efficient. When you look at that early round, more than tripling the business and keeping the headcount the same is amazing,” he says. “A lot of fast companies send out releases on their traffic and what not, and that’s all fine and well, but I think the mark of paid customers is a more important indicator.”

The additional $1.5 million will be used to further expand the company’s app-making capability. Once those get developed, SmartSheet will continue pushing them through its proven distribution channels, such as the Google Application Marketplace, where it is currently ranked as the No. 1 app. While the Google App Marketplace has been a boon to SmartSheet, the company also has partnerships with other companies like Amazon, VMware, Intuit, and Jive Software, and expects to add Salesforce.com to the list in the coming weeks.

“This [round] leads us to a position where we can be confident and expand,” Mader says. He adds that the company is finally at a point where it can no longer manage its fast growth with such a small staff. He expects to hire as many as five new people over the next six months. “We’re not kidding ourselves—we’ve already started the hiring process,” he says.

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The holiday weekend hasn’t seemed to slow down deal-making in New England. We’ve seen acquisitions, funding rounds, and even an IPO registration for companies in the life sciences, software, and energy spaces.

—Drugmaker giant Pfizer said it had agreed to purchase FoldRx Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of drugs for rare diseases like the neurodegenerative disorder called TTR amyloid polyneuropathy. Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) didn’t reveal how much it paid for FoldRx, which has disclosed financing rounds that total about $88 million and come from venture backers such as Alta Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, Healthcare Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, Novartis Venture Funds, Novo Ventures, and TPG Biotechnology.

—Hopkinton, MA-based EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) virtualization business unit, VMware, scooped up two California startups, Integrien and TriCipher, to add to its cloud computing efforts. Palo Alto, CA-based VMware (NYSE: VMW) did not reveal how much it paid for the firms, though other media reports have said the Integrien deal was worth about $100 million. Integrien’s software is designed to add feedback and intelligence to virtual applications, while the TriCipher technology adds a layer of security to Internet cloud-based products.

—Human resources software and services company Kenexa (NASDAQ: KNXA) announced its plans to acquire Needham, MA-based Salary.com for a total of $80 million, or $4.07 per share, in cash. Salary.com makes on-demand software for managing employee pay and performance.

—Lebanon, NH-based biofuels technology company Mascoma bought the SunOpta BioProcess unit of food and mineral company SunOpta (NASDAQ: STKL) for about $51 million, according to Canada-based SunOpta. Mascoma will turn the SunOpta BioProcess business into a subsidiary called Mascoma Canada, and will use the technology to improve its process for converting raw, plant-based material into fuel for automobiles.

—Vela Systems, a Burlington, MA-based maker of software for managing construction, architecture, and engineering applications on mobile devices, said it raised $6 million in Series B equity-based funding, led by new investor Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK). The financing, which also comes from existing investors Commonwealth Capital Ventures, GrandBanks Capital, and individual investors, will go to … Next Page »

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