[Corrected 2/9/12, 9:05 a.m. See below.] A few weeks ago, Dan Gilbert and the Detroit Venture Partners (DVP) crew welcomed reporters for a tour of the newly renovated Madison Building in downtown Detroit. Gilbert had recently spent $12 million to turn the former theater into a sort of fantasy workspace for budding entrepreneurs, and the results of his makeover didn’t disappoint.

The building features plenty of walls that function as whiteboards, a 150-seat auditorium that seems the perfect place to host an investor pitch meeting, and a stunning rooftop kitchen and deck that overlook Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers. Little flourishes, like the exposed brick and the fact that some of the graffiti found in the building during renovations has been preserved, give the space a young, slightly edgy feel. All of it is meant to transform the Madison Building into a destination for startups across the nation—and if the story of Quikkly‘s Shawn Geller is any indication, it’s working.

Geller, a native of Pennsylvania, graduated from Temple University in 2009. While in school, he was bothered by what he saw as a disconnect between the small mom and pop stores surrounding the campus and the students they sought as customers.

“It wasn’t just local stores, but even the national brands would only come on campus one day a year with student ambassadors,” Geller says, noting the cost and inefficiency of that strategy. “It wasn’t a good model whatsoever.”

Geller worked with local merchants in need of promotion to create a simple landing page where students could find coupons and send them to their phones via text message. They would then claim the coupon by showing the text message at the store offering the discount.

Word of mouth quickly spread, and Geller built up a database of about 3,000 Temple students. He then went around to different restaurants and stores and asked them what their slowest times and days were. Armed with that information, he created his first “flash deal,” where he sent a text out to his database offering the first 150 people who responded within a certain amount of time a large pizza for $5. When close to 100 students went in to the pizzeria to claim their coupons, Geller knew he was onto something.

“It was a very cool way of testing the market,” Geller says. “Groupon was less relevant then, so it was exciting to be able to drive student interest in such a short amount of time.”

Geller began incorporating Facebook social gestures into his platform and named his startup Student Coupons. Soon, friends who didn’t attend Temple were noticing the Facebook posts and asking how they, too, could take advantage of the coupons.

Geller starting working with Jason Lorimer, another Philly entrepreneur, to refine and scale up his business model. Lorimer had just begun spending time in Detroit first as a tourist visiting a friend, and then as an entrepreneur scouting for opportunities. Lorimer connected Geller with Josh Linkner, DVP’s managing partner, after he saw some common ground between the national brands Geller hoped to snag as clients … Next Page »

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Plans for IPOs and venture funding dominated the New England deals news this week.

—A new seed fund, backed by venture firm New Enterprise Associates and hosted by Harvard, came out of the woodwork last week. The Experiment Fund will invest up to $250,000 in seed funding in selected startups, with a focus on technologies that come out of Cambridge, MA. The news broke just a few days ahead of Facebook—the one that got away—revealing its plans to go public.

—Radius Health, a Cambridge-based startup working on treatments for osteoporosis, filed paperwork indicating its plans to raise as much as $86 million in an initial public offering.

—A PricewaterhouseCoopers and National Venture Capital Association report shows a mixed picture for life sciences investing in 2011, my colleague Arlene reported. Biotech companies raised $4.7 billion, showing a 22 percent increase over 2010, but the deal volume for the sector dropped 9 percent to 446 transactions. Medical devices companies also showed an increase in funding dollars but a drop in number of deals.

—Cambridge-based Brightcove set the price range of its initial public offering at $10 to $12 per share, according to an amended filing with the SEC. The video hosting startup plans to sell 5 million shares, and give underwriters the option to purchase another 750,000 shares. Brightcove first filed paperwork last August indicating it intended to raise $50 million in an IPO.

—Synchroneuron of Waltham, MA, nabbed $6 million in Series A funding from Morningside Technology Ventures. The startup is developing treatments for movement disorders such as tardive dyskinesia.

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We’re starting to see fresh signs of life among the Internet software startups in San Diego. Check out this news.

—During a visit last week, TechStars CEO David Cohen talked with the leaders of San Diego’s grassroots Web startup community about the factors that help to create and sustain entrepreneurial communities. One crucial issue confronting San Diego is a crying need for savvy and experienced Internet entrepreneurs who are willing to “pay it forward” by mentoring a new generation of startups.

—A dozen seed-stage companies moved into the new EvoNexus incubator in downtown San Diego. EvoNexus, which was founded by the CommNexus non-profit industry group, will continue to operate its original incubator in University City, where eight startups are taking root. In both locations, EvoNexus provides office space, utilities, and other services free of charge and with no strings attached.

—Sigma Partners led a $10 million round in venture funding for San Diego-based MOGL, a Web startup that has developed a comprehensive customer loyalty program for restaurants and bars, to fuel its expansion into San Francisco and New York. San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and Austin, TX-based Austin Ventures joined in the round.

—San Diego’s MicroPower Technologies named two new board members after raising $6.5 million in Series C funding in a deal that was led by Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and joined by an undisclosed private fund. MicroPower Technologies, which uses wireless networking technologies to create low-cost surveillance capabilities, named PacketVideo CEO Jim Brailean and former DivX CEO Kevin Hell to its board. Hell, who is now chairman of San Diego’s EvoNexus incubator, will join as MicroPower chairman.

—San Diego’s StockTwits said it has established a partnership with Toronto’s Q4 Web Systems, which provides … Next Page »

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When it comes to tech startups—especially in Internet software and app development—San Diego has been adrift in the horse latitudes. That’s the term Spanish mariners had for the waters where the trade winds died out for days and even weeks at a time. Becalmed sailors desperate to gain some headway would heave their horses overboard to reach the New World.

It hasn’t reached that point yet in San Diego, but you would never know that software was once a thriving entrepreneurial community here. Even now, the software sector accounts for more than a third of San Diego’s private technology companies. But as I’ve written previously, it feels as if the local software companies speak different languages. In contrast to the flourishing tech hubs in Seattle, Boston, and New York—not to mention Silicon Valley—San Diego’s software scene is sleepy and indifferent.

Still, there are signs of a freshening breeze.

David Cohen last week at UC San Diego

Scores of new seed-stage startups have begun to emerge throughout the region, including a dozen that just moved into the new EvoNexus incubator in downtown San Diego. These emerging companies are led by young entrepreneurs who view San Diego’s innovation establishment as old-school and irrelevant. They are turning out instead for informal “hackathons” and “meetups.” They tell me they’re yearning for real mentoring by real tech entrepreneurs, and for access to real tech investors who are really investing.

Last week, more than 200 people turned out to hear David Cohen talk at U.C. San Diego about TechStars, the early stage fund and accelerator program for Internet startups that he co-founded with three partners in Boulder, CO, six years ago. Cohen is the CEO, and by any measure, the startup program has been wildly successful.

TechStars enrolled its first 10 Internet startups in 2007, providing as much as $18,000 in seed funding and an intense, three-month mentorship program for each company in exchange for a 6 percent stake. Since then, TechStars has expanded to … Next Page »

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The Web, as we’ve known it, is all about velocity. It wants you to move along. Click here! Go there! Watch this! As a result, it’s never been a great place to settle down and focus for the 30 minutes it might take you to read an 8,000-word article—the sort of long, in-depth non-fiction that made magazines like The Atlantic, Esquire, and The New Yorker famous.

But the Web is still a great medium for circulating such content, especially to readers who might never shell out for a newsstand, subscription, or digital copy of a magazine. And with the emergence of a new class of mobile and browser-based reading apps, there’s finally a more comfortable way for Internet users to enjoy this long-form writing. I’m talking about services like Instapaper, Readability, and Read It Later, which parse Web pages, zeroing in on just the article text and zapping all the ads and other clutter.

In a column tomorrow I’ll look at these apps one at a time and share some pointers about fun ways to use them. But today I want give you a deep-dive look at the newest addition to this category: an iPad app from Longform.org. If you’re an Instapaper user, you’ve no doubt heard of Longform. Brooklynites Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky originally founded the service to help commuters like themselves who wanted to fill up their Instapaper queues with good long reads—2,000 words and above—before hopping on the 2 train into Manhattan. (The company later added support for Readability and Read It Later.) Well, this Wednesday the company released a dedicated Longform app, which iPad owners can use to access not only the usual feed of articles chosen by Longform’s editors, but a more complete panoply of long-form articles pulled from the websites of 25 top-flight publications, such as The Awl, The Believer, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, and Wired.

The $4.99 app is simple, elegant, and attractive—all prerequisites, if you’re promising readers a more serene reading experience. What sets it apart from the other reading apps is the way it fetches a supply of long-form articles from the chosen publications, so users don’t have to. With apps like Instapaper, by contrast, you do the curating yourself: if you find an article on the Web that you want to read later, you click on a special Instapaper bookmarklet in your browser, and it shows up in the app. But before you can do that, of course, you have to get the bookmarklet from Instapaper’s website. That’s two steps too many for most readers, according to Lammer. “I know that to the tech press this sounds ridiculous,” Lammer says, “but Instapaper is too complicated for some people to use. We wanted to create something that … works more directly.”

I talked with Lammer yesterday to get the Longform.org origin story and to find out more about the genesis and mechanics of the new app. An edited version of our interview follows.

For me, the critical question in our conversation was about how quickly the reading habits of Web and mobile users are changing, and what the rising popularity of the de-cluttering apps will mean for the business of publishing on the Web. The easier it gets to obtain ad-free renditions of Web content, after all, the more carefully publishers are going to have to think about whether to put that content on the Web at all—meaning the reading apps could inadvertently help to kill the very industry they feed on. But Lammer argues that the Longform app and its cousin are currently adding to overall page views, not subtracting—and that in any case, where readers want to go, publishers must follow. Read on for the nitty-gritty.

Xconomy: What possessed you and Max Linsky to get into the curation business?

Aaron Lammer: We were both Instapaper users. For both of us, getting the iPhone and starting to read on it was a pretty formative experience. I have a background in publishing and Web stuff, and Max has a background in journalism. We realized that you can burn through an Instapaper queue pretty quickly if you are commuting 45 minutes each way every day. I think it’s really a New York story, because New York is one of the few places where people spend over an hour a day underground, without a connection.

Both of us were hoarding stories, and passing them around internally in a small group. And we eventually said, … Next Page »

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Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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The explosion in incubators for early stage tech companies has spawned a familiar startup storyline: A team of bright founders hits on a promising idea, builds a prototype, and applies to one of the big-name programs. After they get accepted (or sometimes even if they don’t), it’s off to the races for a few intense months of coding, meetings, demos, late nights, long weekends, and camaraderie.

And when it’s over, a big demo day where everyone shows off their hard work—and hopefully lands some investment to really get things going. Not as much ink is spilled about that day-after reality, when the wunderkind founders get to work actually building a business.

That brings us to Seattle-based FutureAdvisor, a startup that graduated from the summer 2010 batch of Y Combinator—biggest of the big-name startup incubator programs. Among the other companies produced in that group are Hipmunk, the travel-booking site, and Contagion Health, which has since merged with another company to form Habit Labs, also based in Seattle.

FutureAdvisor is a Web-based software service for individual investors who want help maximizing their retirement savings, but don’t have enough money to get the attention of a traditional financial advisor who typically focuses on bigger fish—all the better to earn fees.

FutureAdvisor focuses on index investing, a growing trend that eschews professional mutual fund managers in favor of pegging investments to stock market indexes compiled by financial firms, like the S&P 500 or the Russell 1000. FutureAdvisor is still in a beta phase, but says it’s now able to offer services to employees at the 15 biggest companies in the greater Seattle area, with many more in the pipeline.

The company was founded by Bo Lu, 28, and Jon Xu, 32, who met while working at Microsoft on a “skunkworks” project called Catalyst, which eventually became part of the new Windows Phone system—Lu worked on the technology that would become the all-in-one social networking feature on Windows Phone 7, and Xu helped build the system that tied together instant messaging and text messaging.

Once they knew they worked well together, and felt they’d been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug after working on a 40-person team inside the behemoth of Microsoft, Xu and Lu ran through some side projects until hitting upon the idea that would become FutureAdvisor. It’s actually based on a problem that Lu, an active investor since the age of 16, had seen with friends: People wanted his advice on how to allocate their money, but didn’t have the time, patience, or acumen to keep up with the homemade spreadsheet he’d been using since he was a teen.

“Immediately, Jon and I were like, ‘That looks like a software problem,’” Lu says. “So we made something, and we applied to Y Combinator with a super-ghetto prototype that, at the time, had my Fidelity credentials in the code base.”

“But at least it was fast,” Xu says with a smile.

That was the spring of 2010, and the idea that would become FutureAdvisor was just taking off on its wild ride. Fast forward to today, with a team of eight people pretty evenly split between financial and technical expertise, working out of a historic building in Seattle’s Pioneer Square.

They’ve landed financial backing from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, although the amount and investors haven’t been publicly announced yet, and are advertising on social and professional networking sites to recruit more customers.

And they’re still working to add more companies to their database—a painstaking task that requires importing all of the retirement account options available to any given company’s employees, so that when new customers log in, their options show up automatically. (As they note below, FutureAdvisor recently added a big fish to the collection in their old employer, Microsoft.)

Here are Xu and Lu’s lessons from the first few months of living out in the wild.

BUILDING A BUSINESS
BO LU: ”You spend a lot of time in the incubator building a product … once you’re out of the incubator, you spend a lot of time on scalable economics. Which is not something that we as hackers ever did. So rather than staring at code all day, we felt like we stared a lot more at spreadsheets. How much it costs to acquire a customer, how would this channel do, and all of those things.”

HELP WANTED
JON XU: “Shortly after Y Combinator … we were faced with, ‘Well, do we come back here? What do we do? And I think we’d always thought that this was a good area to start a company, but also, more importantly, we knew our technical networks were pretty deep up here, having been from Microsoft.”

BO LU: “This is a unique vein of talent. And we found … after comparing notes with our batch-mates who stayed in the Bay, that it was easier for us to recruit here. We had a much higher accept rate of offers, and it just wasn’t as nuts. So over PG’s [Y Combinator founder Paul Graham] strident objections, we moved.”

JON XU: “Really, you’ve got to get down to actually building a team. Building a machine that generates the actual products.”

BO LU: “No one learns how to hire during the incubator. They all learn how to hire afterward. And they all learn it on their own. … And when you compare notes, some teams do really well and some teams do really, really poorly.”

HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT
JON XU: “A lot of times to get your business started, you need to do some hand-cranking. It’s not going to be a skyrocket all the way, but there’s definitely this grind of hand-cranking the engine to get it started.”

“Because we deal with retirement products, quite often it’s knowing what investment options are in people’s 401(k) plans. … So we’re hand-cranking, essentially company by company in the Seattle area, and we actually launched Microsoft—that was a big milestone for us.”

BO LU: “Every day’s just like every other day. You make your own progress, and you make your own headway. So there are great days, like when you launch to a new company, and there are not-so-great days, like when you launch to a new company and a bunch of bugs are discovered. So that’s where we are.”

STAYING CONNECTED
JON XU: “The way I’ve heard it put, from one of our friends who founded Posterous, was that quite often after the Y Combinator experience where you have such a deep network of like-minded entrepreneurs that you’re dealing with, you kind of go your separate ways to build your own teams, and you kind of have to establish a culture for your own team. So very much by design, you have to spend a lot of time building that up rather than being interconnected with various other companies.”

COMPETITION (OR NOT)
BO LU: “People are always like, ‘Oh, what’s it like competing against financial advisors?’ And the answer is, we don’t compete with financial advisors—financial advisors love us. Which I never thought—that was super-surprising.”

“We meet with a financial advisor, and they’re like ‘Oh my God, I wish that I could give some service to the people who come to me who don’t have enough money for decades. But I can’t do it, my friends won’t do it, no one will help these people, and so I end up doing pro bono work just to be nice and be part of the community.’ But he’s like, ‘Man, if somebody could help these guys cost-effectively, that would be awesome, because I don’t have a business model to do that with.’”

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After previewing its expansion plans last summer, San Diego’s EvoNexus, the free startup incubator established by the non-profit technology group CommNexus, has opened a newly renovated downtown office space. A dozen early stage companies began moving into the incubator Monday.

CommNexus founded EvoNexus in 2009, when San Diego’s innovation economy was reeling from the Great Recession. The incubator has taken in 14 companies so far, including six that have moved out of the EvoNexus incubator in University City. Office space, utilities, and other services are provided to startups free of charge, and companies leave with no obligations to EvoNexus or CommNexus.

“As far as we know, we’re the only pro bono incubator in the country,” EvoNexus chairman Kevin Hell says in a statement issued late yesterday. “The goal is to grow sustainable tech companies and expand the industry here in San Diego.”

When the EvoNexus incubator first opened in Sorrento Valley, organizers said they wanted to host startups developing advanced communications technologies, including wireless life sciences and smart grid networking.

Since then, CommNexus moved EvoNexus to University City and broadened its criteria. The industry group established the new downtown EvoNexus to host startups that are focused primarily on developing Internet software, Web services, gaming, social networking, and cloud computing technologies. The privately held Irvine Co. made the 15,000-square foot space available to EvoNexus at no cost. The incubator takes up an entire floor of the building at 101 W. Broadway, known locally as the AT&T building.

Hell says he sees parallels in the downtown San Diego locale with San Francisco’s SoMa, the downtown neighborhood South of Market Street that has become a magnet for social media startups and mobile app developers. The nightlife, housing, and amenities available in San Diego’s city center should appeal to young entrepreneurs, Hell says.

CommNexus plans to continue to operate its incubator in University City. The 12 companies in the new downtown space are:

Antengo: Real-time mobile classifieds.

BigSho: Social webcam game show.

Chatmeter: Online reputation management.

Fashioning Change: Shopping experience for eco-friendly apparel.

Saambaa: Social media app for finding things to do.

SwoopThat: Online textbook shopping by course.

TapChow: Cloud-based restaurant experience manger.

Taphunter: Mobile app for locating places that serve craft beer.

UgliApps: Mobile apps focused on food.

Voluware: Saas healthcare information software.

Xpenser: Web-based tracking of business expenses, time, and mileage.

Zambig: Web-based service that provides online outlet for radio ads.

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When Doug Orr first moved up to Google’s Seattle office in mid-2010, he found a lot to like. The infrastructure expert isn’t a California guy—he came to Google by way of Ann Arbor, MI—and found Seattle’s culture, and even its climate, a little more familiar than Silicon Valley’s. “People are pretty laid back here, and there’s a lot of interest in beautiful green things,” Orr says.

One thing that was missing, however, was a large contingent of Googlers working on the networking side of the business. “I spent six months doing video conferences in a very small room, eight hours a day,” he says with a smile. “That was not a pinnacle fulfillment experience. But it worked OK.”

Things have picked up since then. As we first reported last month, Orr is the new Seattle site director for Google, giving him a senior management role with the Mountain View, CA-based web advertising and search titan. He replaces former director Brian Bershad, who is now on a new assignment in Russia for Google. Orr works closely with Scott Silver, a manager in Google’s advertising unit who has been director of Google’s Kirkland office since mid-2009.

Google Seattle

The pair oversees more than 1,000 employees for the growing office, which is expanding further on its Fremont neighborhood campus in Seattle as it takes over space previously occupied by Getty Images. Googlers in the Seattle-Kirkland offices work on a large swath of high-priority projects, including the network user connections within Google Plus, the company’s new social service, and Hangouts, the video-conferencing service that’s also part of Google Plus.

Orr retains major responsibilities in Google’s infrastructure unit, where he’s in charge of the systems that manage, monitor, and plan capacity for the traffic that flows through Google’s vast network. In addition, Orr is closely involved with Google’s moves into the retail cloud-computing market—a market that crosstown tech giant Amazon.com has revolutionized with its Amazon Web Services division. Google’s offerings include a cloud storage service, a relational database service, and Google BigQuery, which lets developers analyze huge sets of data.

“The infrastructure team is definitely growing here. It’s incredibly important to me, and the projects are actually completely awesome. I’m very excited about what we’re doing here,” Orr says. “Between the networking and other infrastructure stuff I do, I have connections with all the major offices, and it’s a great source of interesting diversity.”

While Orr downplays his appointment as a pretty simple case of filling a need, Google Kirkland site director Scott Silver—who’s been in his job since mid-2009—says Orr’s ability to tackle big projects is well known.

“The process by which Doug became the site director here wasn’t just like he raised his hand and there was no one else raising their hand, or something like that,” Silver says. “Doug actually has an excellent track record at Google about building consensus among disparate interests, someone who can build a community out of a bunch of parts that don’t all look the same at the beginning.”

Site directors serve as the semi-public faces of Google’s Seattle-area operations. That means they play key roles in finding possible acquisitions, building connections with the University of Washington’s computer science department, and recruiting new Googlers to the team.

“The majority of our time is spent working in the areas in which we make software. But at the end of the day, the site needs an identity based on the projects it works on,” Silver says. “It’s really important, in concert with the recruiting team, to have people who are passionate about building stuff to attract people to work on their teams.”

The past few years have seen a flood of Silicon Valley tech companies, big and small alike, heading to the Seattle area to fill their rosters with talented people from Microsoft, Amazon, the University of Washington, and the startup scene. The grizzled veteran of that pack would have to be Google, which first established an engineering office in the region in 2004.

Even though recruiting in the area is a lot more competitive now, Google is still growing quickly. Along with the expanded Seattle offices, there’s a new facility up in the Bothell area, which GeekWire found could hold more than 800 workers. To visitors, the company is eager to show off its bright, colorful offices with all the tech-company bells and whistles you’d expect: Game rooms, massage therapists, full cafeterias, snacks everywhere, and even rentable kayaks hanging on a wall.

“We’re out there aggressively growing. You wouldn’t hear about space coming online if we didn’t want people to work in that space,” Silver says.

For his part, Orr says the range of skills on display in the Seattle area has been a pleasant surprise, with smart people running the gamut of experience from gaming and interactive media to hard-core infrastructure and systems backgrounds.

“There’s really kind of a shocking diversity,” Orr says. “And there are a lot of people that have overlap with the kinds of problems that we do. So we’ve had a lot of good luck in terms of getting very high-quality talent.”

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No journalist can resist a good horse race. That’s why most stories about Trulia, the San Francisco-based real estate search company with 17 million users per month, also mention Seattle competitor Zillow (NASDAQ: Z).

After all, both companies were founded in 2005, and both offer fancy map-driven interfaces for canvassing rental listings and houses for sale. Trulia is a bit larger than Zillow (300 employees versus Zillow’s roughly 275). But Zillow beat Trulia to the public markets. It raised $69 million in its IPO last July, while Trulia continues, for the moment, to make do on the $33 million it has raised from venture investors like Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital.

But from my perspective, there isn’t much point in trying to pick a winner in the real-estate search business. The truth is that it’s big enough for both companies. The real prize in this market is an ongoing share of the dollars real estate agents spend on advertising. There are more than a million licensed real estate professionals in the U.S., who earn about $50 billion in commissions annually. Traditionally they’ve plowed about 10 to 20 percent of that income back into marketing and advertising. Do the math, and that’s a $5 to $10 billion industry.

Before companies like Zillow and Trulia came along, the vast majority of this spending went to offline channels: newspapers, classifieds, billboards, direct mail, grocery cart advertising, and the like. But both companies have built thriving businesses selling online ads and related services, with real estate agents now waiting in line to get their glamor shots and phone numbers on the sites’ listing pages.

What really interests me, then, is how quickly the real-estate startups have changed the way people buy homes—and the way agents sell them—even in the midst of the worst downturn in the housing market in generations.

I’ve had a couple of conversations on this theme recently with Pete Flint, Trulia’s co-founder and CEO, and it sounds to me as if both companies are using roughly the same playbook. It involves identifying the most common frustrations plaguing house buyers and real estate agents, and easing the pain by changing the way information gets delivered—whether that’s information about available homes, which was traditionally hard for consumers to find, or qualified leads on home buyers, which is what agents always want more of. “What we are trying to solve for is not only a consumer problem but an industry problem,” says Flint (he’s the one on the left in the photo above). “We not only needed to get smart on consumer needs, but also on how the real estate industry operates-the economics, the personnel, the legal aspects, all of those things.”

British-born Flint got a master’s degree in physics at Oxford and spent five years as a business development executive at UK-based travel site Lastminute.com before arriving at Stanford Business School in 2003. There he met a Finn named Sami Inkinen, who had also studied physics and had done his own spin in the startup and consulting worlds before deciding to pursue an MBA. “We became pretty fast friends,” says Flint. “We had a similar passion for high-tech, and we spent the first year at Stanford bouncing around entrepreneurial ideas.”

As second-year students in 2004-2005, Flint and Inkinen had spend time searching for off-campus housing in Silicon Valley, which is when “the light bulb went on,” Flint says. “At the time there were a handful of regional brokerage sites, but they were not really consumer destinations, and there were some very disappointing national sites, like Craigslist. It hit us that this was a big opportunity that seemed completely obvious, and it was remarkable that no one had done anything that was particularly strong.”

Before they even got their Stanford diplomas, Flint and Inkinen had founded Trulia and built a five-person office in San Mateo, CA. Flint took the CEO role and supervised product development, while Inkinen became president and hit the sales trail, selling realtors on the system. (Six years and about 200 employees later, the company moved to its current quarters in the historic Rialto Building in San Francisco; as one of the only big downtown office buildings that survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, it’s a real estate landmark in its own right.)

Inkinen and Flint figured that if they could bring lots of consumers to their site, they would be able to start siphoning real estate advertising dollars away from newspapers. But it was a chicken-and-egg problem. To attract consumers, Trulia needed actual real estate listings, but the … Next Page »

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San Diego’s StockTwits is developing a bit of a Canadian accent, eh, through a partnership being announced today with Toronto-based Q4 Web Systems, which provides online investor relations services for publicly traded companies throughout North America.

StockTwits is an online social media network that enables traders and shareholders to share their market insights, ideas, charts, and news in real time via Twitter. The startup structures financial and investor-related information from its Twitter feed by stock, user, reputation, and other criteria. StockTwits also enables users to save the stocks they follow to their own portfolios and to limit the comments tweeted about each stock to trusted sources.

As I reported last summer, the four-year-old startup has determined that its chief source of revenue also lies with the investor relations and public relations units of publicly traded companies.

By introducing a ticker tag symbol for publicly traded stocks, $(ticker), StockTwits makes it possible for public companies to sign up for a higher level of StockTwits’ Web service and to “claim” their stock tickers. Once claimed, a company’s IR and PR teams can use the ticker tag to distribute corporate information over the Web in real time.

By partnering with Q4, StockTwits plans to integrate its services with the subscription-based services that Q4 provides its corporate customers. Q4 says its website services include more than 30 IR “best practices” modules that help companies properly provide information and other services to investors and shareholders.

“We’re working with them to make it easier for people to use both of our products,” says Francis Costello, StockTwits’ chief operating officer. He tells me StockTwits has more … Next Page »

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San Diego’s MOGL, a Web-based customer loyalty and rewards program for restaurants and bars, says it has raised $10 million in venture funding to fuel its expansion into San Francisco, New York, and other markets.

The Menlo Park, CA, office of Sigma Partners led the Series B round, which was joined by San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and Austin, TX-based Austin Ventures. That brings total funding for MOGL to $12.4 million, according to a statement from the company. Entrepreneurs Jon Carder, Jarrod Cuzens, and Jeff Federman started MOGL in 2010.

The Internet startup offers its customers multiple incentives for returning to member restaurants and bars, using a mixture of technology, games, and psychology. The incentives include a 10 percent cash back each time a customer returns to eat at participating restaurants. A contest  offers monthly cash prizes to the top three most-frequent customers at each locale. Customers also can automatically donate a meal to someone in need every time they spend $20.

MOGL Homepage Screenshot

MOGL says it provides customer analytics and return-on-investment data for participating bars and eateries. In a statement from the company, Sigma partner Peter Solvik says, “The MOGL team has generated an explosive response from both consumers and restaurant partners, while effectively positioning itself as the most innovative loyalty platform of its kind.”

Since it was launched last April, MOGL has signed up nearly 350 Southern California-based eateries and bars, donated more than 27,000 meals to Feeding America, and has rewarded its members with more than $350,000 in cash back to date.

The company also offers a location-based mobile app for iPhone and Android, so MOGL members can easily locate participating restaurants while on the go. The mobile apps also help customers track their cash rewards and jackpot opportunities, as well as the number of meals donated in their name.

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The blow from getting a higher-than-expected bill from someone like your lawyer could be softened it if came attached to a 60-second video message explaining the special things he or she actually did in detail.

At least, that’s what Dave McLaughlin thinks—and he’s building his new startup Vsnap around the idea.

McLaughlin has been around the block before as an entrepreneur. He co-founded the mobile payments startup Fig Card, which was acquired by eBay last spring. Coincidentally, the 2011 application deadline for MassChallenge fell on the day that acquisition closed, so McLaughlin hurriedly finished the paperwork for the startup accelerator—and nabbed a spot. He’s also joined at Vsnap by chief technical officer Claudia Santoro, former vice president of engineering for the restaurant-focused software startup Exit41.

Vsnap didn’t take home one of the MassChallenge checks in October, but it’s now pulling in early customers—like Suffolk University and Schering Plough’s alumni association—to test out its alpha product and is readying itself to introduce its beta product sometime in February.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Users log into the Vsnap interface, record a 60-second video using their phone or computer camera, add descriptions, and can add attachments such as PDF files or Web URLs. Vsnap sends the package out through e-mail. Users can also record a video “signature” about themselves that will accompany all the messages they send. Currently the technology can be accessed via a Web browser, but Vsnap is developing iPhone and Android apps as part of the beta release.

The customer target for Vsnap is “any industry that has a low conversion rate but a higher price point,” says Joe Nigro, business development manager at the startup. That’s because lower priced products and services typically e-mail and communicate thousands of customers at once, and video messaging that many recipients could land you in a spam folder pretty quickly.

Vsnap was first thought up to fulfill a personal need, says McLaughlin. His cousin, Jim Joyce, lives in Ireland and is from the U.S., while his wife’s family lives in Italy. He started shooting video snapshots of his kids to send to his family in different time zones. When Fig Card sold, McLaughlin decided to join his cousin on this new idea rather than move on to PayPal, he says. Vsnap still offers a free consumer service, but business messaging has become its focus.

Vsnap is currently developing its pricing model, which will vary depending on the number of Vsnaps a user sends and their access to Vsnap analytics. The analytics can measure things like if and when the recipients viewed the video and how they interacted with the attachments. Currently, recipients of the video message have to view the video message in a separate link, but Vsnap is working with PowerInbox, another local startup, to build out the capabilities for video viewing right in the e-mail inbox.

Vsnap recently nabbed a $40,000 investment from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. MTDC had previously said it … Next Page »

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—Peter Clarke of EE Times reported that San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has acquired Andover, MA-based Pixtronix, a startup founded in 2005 to develop Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) display technology. Qualcomm, which confirmed the deal with EE Times but provided no details or press release about the deal, reportedly spent between $175 million and $200 million for Pixtronix. The Massachusetts company founded by Nesbitt Hagood raised more than $53 million in venture funding, athough the Pixtronix technology has not yet been introduced to the market. Qualcomm has spent years working to refine its own MEMS-based display technology—known as Mirasol.

—More than 200 entrepreneurs turned out to hear TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen talk about the startup accelerator program he helped to launch in Boulder, CO, in 2007. Cohen told the rapt audience during a San Diego Tech Founders meetup that the Internet software community in Boulder “is just totally on fire” compared to five years ago. This was the night after Cohen met with local tech leaders to discuss the steps that helped boost the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Colorado college town. Xconomy San Diego arranged the dinner discussion, and I plan to have more about our conversation later this week.

—Meteorologist Stephen Bennett and investor John Plavan founded San Diego’s EarthRisk Technologies in mid-2010 with the idea of creating predictive analytics technology that could extend the range of weather long-term forecasts from two weeks to 30 or 40 days. They are now providing their Web-based technology to commodities and energy-trading firms on a subscription-basis. Bennett told me the core business at EarthRisk Technologies is focusing on extreme weather events—heat waves, frigid cold snaps, and storms because extreme events are the ones with the highest impact.

—Mark Heesen of the National Venture Capital Association gave a good-news, bad-news presentation to the San Diego Venture Group last week. Among the interesting bright spots: Corporate venture capital is growing and San Diego-based Qualcomm now ranks as the nation’s second-largest corporate venture outfit. The bad news? U.S. VC firms invested $28 billion in startups last year, but only … Next Page »

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About a year ago, RealNetworks said the elimination of about 10 percent of its workforce officially marked the end of a difficult restructuring period, one that saw nearly 400 layoffs since 2009 and left the digital-media pioneer more focused, efficient, and ready for the future.

Turns out that was just a prelude.

On Thursday, the dot-com era survivor announced it was selling a chunk of its video software and some patents to Intel for $120 million. The deal, which significantly boosts RealNetworks’ cash reserves, also sent its stock price (NASDAQ: RNWK) rocketing up by a third. And it’s a signal of things to come as new CEO Thomas Nielsen repositions Real to focus on a smaller set of businesses.

Nielsen, a former VP at Adobe, joined RealNetworks in November after what founder and chairman Rob Glaser called the most exhaustive hiring process he’d seen in his career. Since then, Nielsen says, he went through a “bottom-up” review of everything the company did, and came away surprised at the sprawling businesses the company had been chasing.

Thomas Nielsen

If he had to give an elevator pitch for RealNetworks’ businesses, Nielsen joked, it would have to be in a very tall building. That won’t be the story in the future, however—Nielsen says the next several months will showcase more changes that reflect his strategy to refocus RealNetworks. And there is very little that is off the table.

“I’m basically turning over all the rugs within the company right now and looking at where there is value in each of our businesses—which ones will be strategic moving forward, and which ones won’t,” Nielsen says. “It’s very unlikely that this is a one-time transaction. On the same level here, I’m not trying to sort of break up the company into little pieces … My job, and what I’m doing here over the next 12 to 18 months, is really to focus the company and be really good about not being in 26 businesses, but being really good about one vision and one mission.”

The stock price shows how welcome the approach is on Wall Street. But new signs of life at RealNetworks will also probably be welcomed within the overall tech and business communities in the Seattle area. Real has produced plenty of notable alums over the years—including a U.S. senator!—and was once among the calling cards of a vibrant tech scene in the Emerald City.

In more recent years, the company has been kind of a question mark. Its once widely used media player software was bypassed by competitors even as Web and mobile video and music consumption skyrocketed, its Rhapsody music joint venture was spun out, and consumer offerings in cloud services and gaming were getting a new focus.

The game unit, GameHouse, has been discussed as a spin-of candidate in the past. But under new president Matt Hulett, GameHouse has focused heavily on the rapidly growing social games business, as AllThingsD’s Tricia Duryee detailed recently.

Asked about GameHouse’s future, Nielsen first talked about the ways that gaming was going through massive transformations in audience, distribution, and business models with the spread of social and mobile platforms. He also said that the company was “firing on all cylinders on social and mobile, and we have several things coming out over the next few months that will fuel that.”

At the same time, he said it’s still too early to tell how that fits into the company’s long-term plans.

“If RealNetworks becomes a powerhouse in gaming, then GameHouse should belong there. And if we decide to take a very different direction, then we will explore options like—I do realize that previous management looked at spinning it off,” Nielsen says. “It’s not off the table, but nothing’s off the table right now. It goes back to focus. I don’t think we can be in the gaming business and the potato-chip factory business and the networking business.” (No, they don’t really own potato-chip factories).

The sale of the RealNetworks’ video codec software, which makes those files easier to stream, means seven employees from that unit will be joining Intel. Nielsen acknowledged that the rather large restructuring he’s talking about would result in cutting some jobs, but he said the idea is to grow the remaining businesses rather than just getting smaller overall.

“I don’t have a target, but what I do know is that you don’t cut your way to growth,” he says.

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An acquisition and startup financings made up the New England deals news this week.

—Waltham, MA-based marketing software firm Constant Contact acquired the Boston startup CardStar, the developer of a mobile app for customer loyalty and rewards programs. The deal, whose terms were undisclosed, enables Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT) to expand its marketing offerings for small businesses.

—My colleague Greg rounded up the top 10 venture deals in the Boston area from the fourth quarter of 2011. Rapid7, Warp Drive Bio, and Agios Pharmaceuticals were at the top.

—Hewlett-Packard has spent more than $10 million to set up a new office near the Alewife train station in Cambridge, MA. The office serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the big data company HP acquired last winter (previously based in Billerica). The new facility will also serve as a center for technology development and local outreach.

—Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge-based startup focused on understanding social media conversation surrounding TV, nabbed $12 million in Series B financing. The deal was led by Time Warner Investments, and included new investor SoftBank Capital and return backers Redpoint Ventures and Lerer Ventures. Bluefins says it will put the money toward sales and client services, as well as its social analytics technology and further R&D.

—Mevion Medical Systems, a radiation therapy company based in Littleton, MA, announced it had pulled in $45 million in funding from ProQuest Investments and existing investors Caxton Heath Life Sciences, Venrock, and CHL Medical Partners. The money will go toward development of its proton beam radiation therapy system, which is designed to be smaller and less expensive than existing X-ray radiation therapy devices.

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The vast majority of mobile applications in the marketplace aren’t coming from well-established businesses, but experimental developers. The apps can even accrue a good user following, but those developers don’t exactly have the skills or desire to build a business around their creations.

“It’s laughable how many times I’ve heard, ‘I didn’t get into this to answer support requests,’” says entrepreneur Jonathan Kay.

Kay is the chief operating officer and co-founder of Apptopia, a Cambridge, MA-based startup developing a marketplace that condenses the droves of similar, one-off app projects and puts them in the hands of people looking to turn them into real moneymakers. It looks like the lovechild of eBay and a Web domain brokerage, with hints of a mobile strategy consultancy.

As you can imagine, buying and selling source code for mobile applications is just a bit more complex than auctioning off your used electronics. “I’m spending more time than I’ve ever wanted to with lawyers,” says Kay, who I caught up with this week.

The company is the brainchild of co-founder Eliran Sapir, who jumped on early iPhone trends to create the mobile app GPush, which created push notifications for Gmail on the iPhone. Despite the paid app’s popularity in the iTunes app store, Sapir couldn’t quite figure what business to sell it to for an exit, Kay says. But he kept thinking about the problem, and later toyed with the idea of creating a mobile app brokerage while entrepreneur in residence at Cambridge-based Greatpoint Ventures. Last fall, Sapir connected with the boisterous Kay—a former brand evangelist for local startup the Grasshopper Group—and left the venture firm to work on Apptopia full time.

Apptopia’s first step is to formulate a target price range for app developers to sell at, using market knowledge and algorithms. Developers then must give Apptopia access to their apps that enables the startup to gather accurate, objective data on performance, user base, and other information that will inform prospective buyers.

“Much like in eBay, we provide a professional middle ground where a buyer and a seller can actually negotiate,” Kay says.

Sellers can list their apps to be purchased for a fixed price within that suggested range or set up an auction with a minimum starting point.

Connecting buyer and seller is just part of the challenge, though, says Kay. Apptopia continues to oversee that payment and transition process, and has developed contracts with lawyers outlining the details of the agreement.

“If you put the app up, you legally are bound to send us the source code,” says Kay of the developer responsibilities. Sellers also have to agree not to … Next Page »

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Money pumped into San Diego’s regional economy by venture capital firms hit an eight-year low in 2011, with a total of $829 million invested in 104 startups throughout the year, according to the MoneyTree VC survey being released today. The 2011 deal count was the lowest seen in San Diego since 1997.

The 2011 numbers represent a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent decline in deals in comparison with the previous year, when VCs put a total of $871.7 million in 126 startups, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thomson Reuters.

The decline in San Diego’s venture activity ran counter to the nationwide trend in 2011, in which $28.5 billion was invested in 3,673 deals—and ranks as the third-highest total in the past decade. The U.S. numbers represent a 22 percent increase over the $23.6 billion in 2010 VC funding and a 4 percent rise over the previous year’s deal count, according to the MoneyTree analysis.

The overall U.S. trend depicted in the MoneyTree Report generally agrees with the rise in venture activity nationwide that CB Insights charted last week in its 2011 findings. CB Insights, the New York financial analysis firm, said the $30.6 billion VCs invested in 3,051 deals throughout 2011 was a 10-year high in terms of both dollars and deals. (The two sets of numbers don’t line up exactly because the firms use different methods to collect their venture data, and count dollars and deals in different ways.)

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the MoneyTree Report shows that venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area, with life sciences startups in diagnostics, drugs, and devices accounting for roughly two-thirds of the transactions. It represented a … Next Page »

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Cloud-based notekeeping service Evernote found its first 20 million users through sheer geek appeal. Hardcore users (full disclosure: that includes me) love the ability to upload Web clips, documents, images, audio files, and other materials to Evernote’s online notebooks, then search and retrieve them at will, from virtually any device. They also like features such as Evernote’s ability to recognize and search the text in photos and scanned documents.

But to grow to its first billion users—and CEO Phil Libin thinks that’s a realistic goal—the company may need to stop thinking about features and start thinking about experiences.

“The mainstream isn’t looking for fantastically powerful solutions. They are looking for real, elegant, magical solutions. And it turns out it’s much harder to build those,” Libin says.

But the Mountain View, CA-based startup has begun to move in a more magical direction. In the last couple of months, the company has rolled out three mobile apps and one Web app that tie into its central notekeeping service but are designed to offer dedicated, simple solutions to common problems, such as remembering the people you meet (Hello), keeping a record of your favorite meals (Food), learning new subjects (Peek), and clearing away distractions for a more streamlined reading experience on the Web (Clearly). And last summer, Evernote hired the Australian creators of a drawing app called Skitch and came out with a free tablet version of the image-annotation tool.

It might seem to outsiders as if Evernote has taken a left turn, forsaking its identity as an online personal archive in order to go after the sexy new thing, i.e., mobile apps. But in fact, it’s all part of a deliberate strategy to “add structure, intelligence, and context” to the information people are already storing in Evernote, Libin says. “If Evernote 1.0 was ‘Whatever you put in you can get out in the same format many years later,’ the next phase is ‘Whatever you get back is better’—it has been illuminated, so to speak.”

Libin says he means that in the medieval sense of an illuminated manuscript, such as a Bible decorated with initials, miniature illustrations, and other marginalia. “We really want your memories to be better—to have additional context and beauty in them,” he says. “One of the first steps is to start creating beautiful experiences for certain types of memories. They all live in the central Evernote location, but there are custom experiences for capturing and recalling particular things, like food, and people, and other stuff in the future.”

How Evernote designs these new custom experiences will be one of the themes of a public Xconomy event in Mountain View, CA, on February 7, where I’ll be interviewing Libin on stage, together with Evernote investors Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, and Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital. The evening’s main point will be to dissect the idea of the “100 year company,” that is, Libin’s plan to keep Evernote independent and ensure its long-term survival through serial secondary fundraising rounds. But there’s so much to say about Evernote’s app strategy that this will be a big topic as well. (Register for the event before January 24 to get the saver rate.)

I didn’t want to wait until February 7 to learn more about the app strategy, so I connected with Libin (pictured above right) for a long conversation on Friday. I started off by asking whether Evernote ever expected to have 20 million users—a milestone it announced it had reached shortly after the new year. “Yes, in the sense that when we were raising money, our business plan has us getting to 20 million right about now, so it’s exactly what we told our investors,” Libin answered. “On the other hand, we never actually believed it, so getting there is quite shocking.”

But as mind-blowing as it can be to actually hit one’s business-plan projections, Libin says he keeps reminding himself that there are still 6.98 billion people on the planet who aren’t yet using Evernote. Even if you narrow that down to the people with some access to smartphones and the Internet, “that’s probably 2 billion people right now who are easily within reach, and in 10 years, more like 4 billion,” he says. “So having a couple of billion users is not … Next Page »

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Earlier today I grabbed some time with Gary Little, who’s been a partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures since 1998 and has led the company’s investments in Evernote, the fast-growing Silicon Valley startup that aims to help you “remember everything.” I’ve long been intrigued by CEO Phil Libin’s publicly stated ambition to make Evernote into a company that lasts 100 years or more (“We don’t want to exit, we want to build a permanently great company,” Libin has said). Little, who’s on the startup’s board, agreed to share his own thoughts about that in a live, public chat on Twitter.

Little tossed off some great insights, as well as a few funny lines. For readers who may have missed the live chat, I’ve embedded a curated Storify version below. And for those interested in continuing the conversation, I’ll be hosting Little, Libin, and another Evernote investor, Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha, in person at a February 7 event called “Xconomy Xchange: The 100-Year Company—An Evening with Evernote, Morgenthaler, and Sequoia.” (The event is set for 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm at Microsoft Silicon Valley in Mountain View, CA; to get a ticket at the early-bird rate, register before January 18.)

If you really want to help people store their memories online permanently, you do have to think about how to make sure your company, or at least its computer servers, will be around decades from now. But there’s a problem: venture capital funds, traditionally the only entities willing to invest in risky high-growth businesses at the early stages, generally want to earn their money back on a much shorter time scale—10 years at the most.

Libin’s strategy so far has been to raise multiple rounds of venture funding, each dramatically larger than the one before, and use part of the money to provide liquidity for early shareholders (including employees). That helps to stretch out the time before a company has to think about getting acquired or going public. And in fact, if you think of an IPO or acquisition as just another in a series of liquidity events, it can make a company “independent of exit” altogether, in Little’s words.

But it’s only a plausible strategy, he acknowledged today, if a company can justify much higher valuations in each funding round. Finding investors willing to buy in at those levels takes “either huge growth, or huge cashflow,” he said in the tweetchat. “Growth firms invest in growth. LBO [leveraged buyout] firms invest in cashflow.”

Fortunately, Evernote has been demonstrating such growth. When Morgenthaler first invested, the startup had fewer than 5 million users. When we started planning our February event last year, it had 16 million. Now it has 20 million. Word of mouth has been powering new sign-ups so far, with Japan emerging unexpectedly as Evernote’s hottest market. The main challenge for Evernote right now, Little says, is “continuing to recruit the world’s best people” to keep the growth going.

Here’s the Storify version of the chat. We hope you can join us on February 7 to keep the conversation going.

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