Yesterday we ran the first part of our interview with Steve Bratt, the CEO of the new World Wide Web Foundation, which was unveiled on November 15 by Web inventor Tim-Berners-Lee. The foundation aims to empower people in developing regions to access “life-critical information” on the Web using mobile phones and other simplified interfaces.

Bratt, who leads the Geneva, Switzerland-based foundation from offices in Boston, talked in the first half of the interview about the origins of the group, how its mission differs from that of its sister organization the World Wide Web Consortium, and the gaps in content, research, and technology it hopes to address.

In Part 2, below, Bratt details the foundation’s initial projects in Africa and South America, the role of voice technology in broadening Web access, and the foundation’s plans for growth.

Xconomy: What can you tell me about your initial projects?

Steve Bratt: There are two: the Web Alliance for Re-Greening Africa, and Empowering Youth in Inner Cities. Both are in partnership with other organizations. With the first one, the goal is to provide Web systems that will help capture local knowledge about how to plant in very harsh desert environments. There is a group, the Africa Re-Greening Initiative, that has been working for 20 years to take local innovations in how to plant and conveying them to others. This is a great example because it’s not a case of foreign aid coming in and saying, “Let’s build a dam and here’s some chemical fertilizer and some genetically engineered corn.” It’s about what is working for the 1 percent and how to convey that to the other 99 percent. I met this farmer in Burkina Faso, Yacouba Sawadogo, who figured a different geometry for making trenches to grow seeds and plants that turns out to be much more productive—what size hole to use, when to put manure in. He didn’t have any training, he just discovered it. It’s a perfect example. They’ve been busing farmers into to see him; he might see 10 a month. We want to create a digital bus to allow all of the farmers in that area to have the knowledge.

We’re working with VU University in the Netherlands, and we’re going to see if the Web can empower the conveyance of information, and how to use voice to enable the Web. VoiceXML has been heavily used commercially in the West—every call center uses it—but it hasn’t been used as much for development. There are no new standards needed. We just want to work with local developers and local farmers so they can develop something that meets farmers’ needs.

The Empowering Youth project is in concert with the Center for Digital Inclusion, a fantastic organization started by Rodrigo Baggio in Brazil. They started in the poorest areas of Rio de Janeiro and they have close to 800 community centers in inner cities training kids on computers. We’re going in to help them develop a curriculum to teach youth how to develop content and Web applications. Again, we’ll focus on mobile and voice, because those are the predominant technologies available to people, even in poor areas. Even in the Sahel in Africa, we were told that every family has access to a mobile phone and a radio. It’s the same in Brazil and Latin America. So that will be a pilot project in five cities—one in Brazil, one in Latin America, one in the Middle East, and probably one in a Western city. But this is an unfunded project at this point, so we’re looking for partners to help fund it.

X: Do you ever worry that the voice-accessible Web that you’re describing will be an extremely slow, impoverished version of the Web that we enjoy here in the United States? I mean, just to keep things manageable, you’d probably have to limit menu choices at each level of a voice interface to four or five. How do you translate a complex Website into something that can be consumed that way?

SB: We are so spoiled. We have our iPhones and our high-speed Internet. Well, if you’re making a decision about what movie to go to and it starts in five minutes, you need a pretty fast answer. But if you’re making a decision about which direction to walk in when …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Managing a venture fund is hugely different from running a startup. Eric Paley told me that last year at this time his primary responsibility was at dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, the MIT spin-off that he co-founded and where he had served as general manager after its sale to technology giant 3M (NYSE:MMM) in 2006. Nowadays, as managing partner and co-founder of new seed fund Founder Collective, his much broader focus includes meetings with a whopping 30 entrepreneurs a week, he said.

Early this month Paley’s firm had an official launch after closing a first fund of about $40 million to invest in seed-stage startups, even though reports about the firm surfaced in June after its initial SEC filings became public knowledge. The firm is made up of a group of successful entrepreneurs who have been backing each other’s startups for ages before coming together as Founder Collective. David Frankel, the firm’s other managing partner along with Paley, was a seed investor in Brontes as well as partner Chris Dixon’s startups SiteAdvisor and Hunch, for example. Their experience as entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital and reached successful exits, along with their compelling investment strategy, could help them succeed in the struggling venture industry.

Founder Collective, which has offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York (where Frankel is based), is taking a much different tack than many funds have taken over the past decade. Paley says that the vast majority of funds closed over the past 10 years have been more than $100 million, while most of the funds were less than that in the previous decade. But the big knock on the venture industry is that it’s done a poor job of returning capital and returns commensurate with their risk profile to their limited partner investors. And large funds often aim to invest big amounts of capital ($10 million or more) in their portfolio companies, even when companies don’t really need that much money, Paley says. Founder Collective’s first fund is a lean $40 million or so, and that money is intended to be invested in capital-efficient businesses that aren’t taking on more investment capital than is needed to achieve their goals. Indeed, we’re seeing this movement toward smallish investments in lean teams, at least in software/tech, all around the country.

Another big downside of a startup raising more venture capital than it requires to execute its plan is the dilution of ownership for the entrepreneurs who founded the company. “We really created the fund out of frustration that there wasn’t a really good answer for the capital-efficient business in the early days to achieve major milestones and increase the value of the company before giving so much of it away to investors,” Paley said.

There are no banker-turned-venture capitalists at Paley’s shop. Many of the partners maintain operational roles at startups they’ve co-founded. Dixon, a founder of Web security firm SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee), is full-time CEO of his firm Hunch that provides an online decision-making tool. Also, Micah Rosenbloom, who co-founded Brontes with Paley, is now the general manager of the Brontes business for 3M. (Here’s a full list of the the Founder team on the firm’s website.)

The investment philosophy at Founder is to back startups led by committed entrepreneurs. And though Paley said the firm has no stated limits on sectors or geographic areas in which it invests, the firm will most likely invest, as it has done so far, in …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Here at Xconomy we may not be on the absolute bleeding edge of media technology—usually we’re too busy writing about the latest stuff to adopt it right away ourselves—but when there’s a cool new way to get our content out, we try to take advantage of it as soon as we can. In that spirit, we wanted to call your attention to a few of the features we’ve introduced lately to make Xconomy easier to use.

1. Social Media Sharing—including Twitter and Facebook

If you’re reading this story on our website and you glance at the upper right corner of the story area, just above the “Related Posts” section, you’ll see a new collection of widgets from ShareThis that make it easy to share Xconomy stories with your Twitter followers, your Facebook friends, and users of many other social bookmarking and sharing services. It’s also a snap to e-mail stories to your friends (or yourself). Just mouse over one of the widget icons and the ShareThis window will pop up.

We’re especially excited about the new Twitter button, which makes it really simple to tweet any story you like and was one of the most-requested features from our readers. Speaking of Twitter, you can sign up to follow us there at twitter.com/xconomy, twitter.com/bbuderi, twitter.com/ldtimmerman, twitter.com/ryan_mcbride, and twitter.com/wroush.

2. Single-Page View

Many Web users feel overwhelmed by long rivers of text, so we insert page breaks into our stories every 500 words or so. But we also realize that other readers dislike having to click the “next” link several times to get through our longer stories. So we’ve added a “Single Page View” option. You’ll find it at the bottom of each page of multi-page stories, near the “Page” link and the little orange arrow. Click on that link once, and you’ll be able to view even our longest columns and interviews with no further hassle. This is also a useful feature if you want to print out our longer stories.

3. Xconomy Kindle Edition

These days, there are as many ways to read digital content as there are digital devices. For readers who’ve joined the e-book revolution, we now offer a Kindle Edition of Xconomy, available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. To sign up, go to the Xconomy page on Amazon and click on the Subscribe Now button. Or, on your Kindle, click Menu > Shop Kindle Store > Blogs, then type in Xconomy and click Search Store. The Kindle version includes the full text of all Xconomy stories delivered to your device wirelessly and automatically, every weekday.

4. Xconomy Mobile

This one isn’t quite as new—we actually launched it back in August—but we thought we’d remind you about it. If you open a browser on your mobile phone and go to www.xconomy.com, you’ll automatically be redirected to the mobile version of our site, which is optimized by Mofuse for viewing on a small screen. (You can also get to the mobile site directly at m.xconomy.com.) If you click on the “All Stories” link on the main page of the mobile site, you can then click through to full-text versions of all of our stories (just like you’d get on the Kindle). You can also browse by city and topic.

5. E-mail and RSS

These really aren’t new—we’ve offered them since we launched Xconomy in 2007. But while our e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds are extremely popular (we reach at least as many people through these mechanisms as we do through the website), we still talk to many readers who aren’t aware of them. To sign up for daily e-mails with Xconomy headlines and stories, or to add Xconomy to your RSS readers such as Netvibes or Google Reader, just go to our Email – RSS page. You can choose newsletters and RSS feeds specific to our cities (Boston, San Diego, or Seattle) or key topics (life sciences, information technology, nanotechnology, energy, people, venture capital, and my World Wide Wade column) that most interest you. Or you can just sign up to get all of our stories. (That’s our favorite option!)

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Only 25 percent of adults around the world have access to a computer that they can use to reach the Web. But 75 percent have access to a mobile phone. So the simplest way to open up the wealth of information on the Web to more people would be to make it usable via voice connections—for instance, through some combination of speech synthesis and speech recognition technologies and voice-driven interfaces customized for each region.

Making that happen will be the first mission for the new World Wide Web Foundation, officially launched November 15 by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web and the director of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Berners-Lee unveiled the foundation’s plans in a speech before the Internet Governance Forum, a non-governmental organization meeting this week in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. (Watch the video.)

It was 20 years ago this year that Berners-Lee proposed the Web’s basic markup language (HTML), its data protocol (HTTP), and its system of document addresses (URLs). “The thing that made the Web work then and the most important thing about it today is its universality,” Berners-Lee said in his speech. “Two Webs doesn’t work. It has to be one Web for all sorts of information, no matter what hardware you have, no matter who you buy your computer from, and now more importantly, no matter what sort of device you have.”

The basic tenet behind the Web Foundation is that the Web can empower people around the world to help themselves, if only barriers of language, literacy, location, and income can be overcome. The foundation’s first efforts in this direction will include support for an emerging discipline it’s calling “Web science,” as well as collaborations with VU University in Amsterdam and the Center for Digital Inclusion in Brazil focusing on the deployment of Web-based mobile communications technologies among farmers in Africa and schoolchildren in South and Central America and elsewhere.

A non-profit founded in 2008 and operating largely under the radar until now, the Web Foundation is subsisting for the time being on a five-year, $5 million seed grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The organization (which is not using the acronym WWWF, perhaps to avoid confusion with the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wrestling Federation) is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. But its CEO, Steve Bratt—formerly the CEO of the W3C—is working from a newly opened office in Boston’s downtown financial district.

Bratt met with Xconomy on Monday morning for his first detailed Q&A session about the creation of the Foundation, the philosophy of its early projects, and his and Berners-Lee’s ambitious plans for making the Web more accessible. Part 1 of our interview appears here; we’ll publish Part 2 on Wednesday.

Xconomy: What’s the mission of the World Wide Web Foundation, and how is it different from the mission of the World Wide Web Consortium?

Steve Bratt: Our overarching theme is empowering people through the Web—giving people the power through the Web to accomplish their own goals. It’s about helping people, not just having cool technologies. You never hear Tim Berners-Lee give a talk without …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Swipely, a Providence, RI-based startup that was quietly launched earlier this year, has raised $875,000 of a planned $1 million equity financing, according to an SEC document filed last week. Angus Davis—a co-founder of the voice-based Internet search and services provider Tellme Networks, which was sold to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and became a subsidiary of the Redmond, WA-based software giant in 2007—is listed as an executive and director of the startup. Davis told Mass High Tech in a story this morning that First Round Capital, of Philadelphia and San Francisco, led the financing in Swipely. He declined to describte to MHT, or when reached by phone this afternoon, what his startup is doing.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Here’s an iPhone application that could actually help people save lives. Zoll Medical, a maker of cardiac defibrillators and other products for the critical care market, says this morning that it has released a CPR training app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This isn’t the first iPhone app of this sort that I’ve seen—but it’s certainly the most advanced. Chelmsford, MA-based Zoll’s (NASDAQ:ZOLL) “PocketCPR” training app gives users visual and audio instructions on proper CPR technique, and the software makes use of the accelerometer built into iPhones to measure the rate of a person’s hand movements when he or she is performing simulated compressions on manikins. The app is selling for $5.99. (For free, iPhone users can download an app called iCPR, but it doesn’t make use of the accelerometer to provide real-time feedback on how well the user is performing CPR.)

There are way too many iPhone apps for us to cover each individual launch, but the CPR training apps are an important category because they address a major health problem. The American Heart Association estimates that about 294,851 Americans per year receive emergency medical treatment for heart attacks, and multiple sources estimate that there are more than 300,000 deaths from cardiac arrest in the U.S. each year. According to Zoll, 70 percent of people who suffer sudden cardiac arrest when they are with family members or acquaintances. It’s too bad most Americans aren’t properly trained to perform the potentially lifesaving measure.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Being journalists, we here at Xconomy try to refrain from bald political statements or endorsements. We’d never ask you to “vote early and often” for any candidate for office. But this week we can cheerfully recommend that you subvert the democratic process by going to www.google.com/trike and voting as many times as you can for Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace as the next U.S. pedestrian mall to be photographed by Google’s tricycle-borne Street View crew.

Street View, as most Google users know, is the Google Maps feature that gives you a panoramic visual preview of places you may plan to visit in person. Using a fleet of camera-equipped cars, Google has collected 360-degree, street-level views for hundreds of cities in all 50 U.S. states and quite a few countries around the world. But until recently, those views haven’t extended into pedestrian malls, parks, hiking trails, and other areas where cars are off limits.

That’s changing thanks to the Street View Trike, a contraption dreamed up a couple of years ago by Google senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner. The trikes are essentially pedicabs that Google has converted to carry the standard Street View camera and computer equipment. Ratner and his crew have already used the trikes to create Street View images of places like California’s Legoland (just north of San Diego), and in an October post on the official Google blog, Ratner invited users to say where they’d like to see the trikes go next.

The company got 25,000 nominations, and on Monday it announced that it had picked 24 finalists in five categories. Faneuil Hall is a finalist in the pedestrian malls category. It’s pitted against Chicago’s Navy Pier and San Francisco’s Pier 39.

Now, without insulting our friends in the Windy City and the Golden Gate, I think it’s fair to say that Faneuil Hall is the only historically significant place on that list. Pier 39 is a mall-on-stilts built in the 1970s that owes most of its fame to the sea lions who have adopted it as their home, and Navy Pier was basically an abandoned eyesore until its redevelopment in the 1990s. So Boston’s historic “cradle of liberty”—the site of fiery oratory by the fathers of the revolution—should clearly be the first of these locations to get the Google Trike treatment.

Google users get to vote for the winners in each category. According to the company, you can vote as many times as you like—but you’ve only got until midnight on Monday, November 30. So stop reading this now and go vote!

To get the whole scoop on the Google Trike and how it’s changing the face of Google Street View, I talked with Dan Ratner himself on Tuesday.

Xconomy: Do you think the Google Trike helps to put a human face on Street View, which has sometimes run into public skepticism and misunderstandings?

Dan Ratner: Let me put it this way. Every time I’ve been out there on the bike—which is quite a number of times now—there’s been a lot of excitement. People are like, “Wow, this is Google Street View? I’ve seen that, but I didn’t know how you get the data!” Seeing a bicycle does seem to put a human face on it, literally, because …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Mark Underhill says he was doing Web design and applications development for Clear Channel Communications when the San Antonio, TX-based media company announced plans to sell 448 of its 1,150 radio stations, along with its 42-station TV group. That was in November 2006.

Underhill, who had initially been hired in San Diego six or seven years earlier to run 11 Clear Channel websites, says he remembers thinking at the time, “I’ve learned so much doing this. But I could do better than this. I could build a better mousetrap.”

The following year (just a few months after Clear Channel completed its $1.5 billion sale), Underhill and his longtime friend Claudio Canive started Platformic, a San Diego startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites. The company, which acquired its first customer by the end of 2007, has targeted the broadcast industry and now counts Comcast, the Tribune Co., and Fox Broadcasting among its biggest customers.

Platformic-based Web design

Platformic’s software-as-a-service model provides simple point-and-click tools that do not require users to learn Adobe’s Dreamweaver Web design software or to write computer code. The company says its hosted system enable customers to “come up with any look and feel” for their own websites by empowering people who know what a website should look like, but who don’t necessarily know how to create it. Websites using Platformic’s technology include Los Angeles TV station KTLA and San Francisco’s AM sports radio station KNBR and its San Mateo sister station, KTCT. Last week, Platformic helped launch 12 Fox regional sports websites throughout the country.

Platformic’s roughly 200 customers also include what Underhill describes as small “mom and pop” businesses operating …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It was a busy week for local technology news.

—Two teams from San Diego and a third from Northern California demonstrated their development of advanced chemical sensor prototypes that are tiny enough to be found inside ordinary cell phones. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is funding the Cell-All program, with a goal of basically creating an anti-terrorism app for cell phones that would enable authorities to crowd-source chemical detection.

—MaxLinear has filed for its initial public stock offering. The Carlsbad, CA-based fabless chipmaker, which specializes in designing semiconductor-based television receivers, intends to raise about $100 million through its IPO. The market may be de-frosting a bit, with 47 IPOs so far in 2009, compared with 45 last year, and 272 in 2007.

—ProQuo, a San Diego-based Web 2.0 company that was founded in 2007, was quietly shut down after taking in a total of $15 million in venture capital from Menlo Park, CA-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson and San Diego-based Mission Ventures. ProQuo was never able to validate its business model; its website offered consumers a way to remove their names from mass-mailing lists for free, and the company planned to sell its optimized lists back to mass marketing companies.

—San Diego’s wireless industry group, CommNexus, celebrated the opening of EvoNexus, its free high-tech incubator, by announcing the selection of three more startup companies: EcoATM, MicroPower Technologies, and TetraVue. CommNexus CEO Rory Moore says EvoNexus is believed to be the first incubator that is completely free for startups—that is, it doesn’t even require an equity stake in participating companies, as most incubuators do.

—Jitterbug, the San Diego wireless provider that puts an emphasis on simplicity, has acquired MobiWatch, a Waltham, MA-based startup developing mobile personal emergency response services. A regulatory filing shows that Jitterbug’s parent, GreatCall, provided 630,000 shares of common stock to MobiWatch and its shareholders in a deal valued at $107,100.

—San Diego-based Networkfleet is using its technology to help companies that operate fleets of vehicles go green by monitoring engine emissions and ensuring that vehicles are operating efficiently. Co-founder Diego Borrego told me the company also expects to be a player as consolidations sweep through the fleet tracking industry.

—EcoDog, a Vista, CA, cleantech startup that has developed a device that helps homeowners sniff out savings in their electric utility bill, was named best of show at GadgetFest, the annual fall competition sponsored by CommNexus, the San Diego wireless industry group. EcoDog founding CEO Ron Pitt won over the crowd when he declared, “My product is the only product up here tonight that saves you more money than it costs.”

—San Diego-based cleantech startup EESG is looking to raise $1.2 million to expand the 10-employee company’s sales staff, purchase inventory, and ramp up public relations and marketing. The company’s founders told me they have raised about half so far, including $300,000 from Longboard Capital Advisors, a green investment firm based in Santa Monica, CA.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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

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

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

Google is growing fast in Cambridge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Somebody forgot to tell John Chuang that it’s impossible to create a new kind of home computer these days.

Either that, or he didn’t listen. Because Chuang, a serial entrepreneur who made his first fortune in the staffing industry with Boston-based Aquent, has built a gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. From the hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by Chuang’s Boston-based startup, Litl, rejects three decades of convention and makes the Web, not the computer and all its software and operating-system encrustations, into the real show.

Litl took the lid off its so-called “Webbook” computer today after more than two years of top-secret development work. The device’s purpose, Chuang says, is to take advantage of the Web’s newfound maturity as a medium for digital entertainment and productivity and make it far simpler for people at home to access all those goodies—including photos, videos, news and weather, and Web apps—without having to manage files or desktop applications.

“We didn’t want to build anything that already existed, or something with just marginal improvements,” Chuang says. “PCs have served a great purpose, but we wanted to take a crack at a different type of computer that would be for and of the Net.”

I visited Litl’s offices yesterday and had a chance to try out the Webbook, which goes on sale today at Amazon and at Litl’s website. (The price is $699, and Litl expects to ship the first units to consumers next week.) Beyond its laptop-like appearance, there isn’t much that veteran computer users like me will find familiar about the device. There’s no desktop, no windows or menus or files or folders, no multitasking, no long lists of third-party software applications to buy. There isn’t even a hard drive or a CD/DVD drive.

While the Webbook is definitely a computer—with a 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom processor, a gigabyte of RAM, a Wi-Fi card, a Webcam, and a nice graphics chip inside—it’s also got a good dose of TV mixed into its genome. It has a separate remote control, its display can be folded almost all the way back so that it stands up on a table or countertop like an easel, and it has a cord that connects it with no fuss to your flat-screen TV, so you can see what you’re doing on a really big screen.

In other words, the Webbook breaks all the rules of personal computing. And while it may be the perfect machine for consumers who just want to get on the Internet and have no use for all of a traditional PC’s bells and whistles, Chuang is likely to face an initial wave of skepticism from heavy computer users and technology industry insiders. They probably won’t grok how a machine that doesn’t even have software, the way we’re used to thinking of software, could still be useful.

But Chuang doesn’t seem to care much about what the digerati think; his device isn’t designed for them. Or to put it more accurately, it’s designed for their coffee tables and kitchen counters, rather than their offices or their backpacks. “We’re about shared processing, not local processing,” he explains. For tasks that require lots of local processing power, like video editing, power users are still going to want and need a traditional multipurpose computer. But if they just want to …Next Page »

Comments (7) | Reprints | Share:        

It’s not that I thought Vermont and New Hampshire were technological backwaters, because I knew from my years of working in Boston that the local venture capitalists were pumping millions of dollars into startups in the two northern New England states. But what I’ve found over the past year or so of living in both Vermont and the Boston area is that the only thing that really separates the startups in Kendall Square from those in Barre, VT, and Lebanon, NH, is that the former are way closer to good seafood. The level of innovation and sophistication among the entrepreneurs in both camps is pretty much equal.

While attending a business and innovation event called Vermont 3.0 in Burlington, VT, last week, I thought it would be fun and interesting to take a look back at all the northern New England innovation I’ve covered over the past year. Indeed, a perk of working north of the Massachusetts border is that I’ve visited the laboratories and research facilities of many exciting startups up here. I’ve had a chance to visit with faculty and researchers affiliated with innovation hubs such as Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont. I’ve also talked shop with venture capitalists at firms such as Borealis Ventures, based in Hanover, NH, and FreshTracks Capital in Shelburne, VT.

What follows are summaries of the northern innovation stories I’ve written for Xconomy in the order in which they were published. For each story description I dug into my notes and tried add something that wasn’t in the original piece (but I’m not one to withhold interesting details from my posts, so the supply of previously unreported material was a bit thin).

My plan is to dig deeper into the pockets of innovation north of Boston over the next year. But make no mistake, the majority of my stories will still emanate from the Hub.

—In northern New England, there are no technology clusters as dense as those found in Boston, but I found an emerging innovation cluster in Dartmouth College and environs earlier this year. My trip to Dartmouth in February resulted in a post about the key labs, people, and concerns that contribute to the startup ecosystem there. (I also learned that parking is as difficult to find on the Dartmouth main campus as anywhere in Cambridge, MA.)

—People may assume startups in New Hampshire operate in small buildings nestled in the woods, and in the case of Lebanon-based antibody discovery firm Adimab, those people would be right. I met the founder and CEO, Tillman Gerngross, at the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, an incubator that hosts Adimab and other firms with ties to Dartmouth College. Gerngross, an engineering professor at Dartmouth, pointed out that a firm called GlycoFi that he co-founded and sold to Whitehouse Station, NJ-based drug giant Merck (NYSE:MRK) in 2006 was operating in separate labs in the same building.

—One of the first stops that startups make to find money in Hanover is Borealis Ventures. Borealis has done well investing in Dartmouth spinouts; its investment in GlycoFi alone made its first fund a big success, firm co-founder and managing director Phil Ferneau told me during a meeting. While there are many angel investors in New Hampshire, Borealis may be the only venture capital firm in the state. So, as you’d imagine, Ferneau and his partners are very popular among entrepreneurs in the state.

—After meeting with Gerngross and Ferneau, I wondered what exactly was under the hood at GlycoFi that would persuade Merck to maintain its operations in New Hampshire. It turned out that GlycoFi’s technology—which involves the use of bioengineered yeast to produce human proteins with lower structural variability than mammalian cell lines typically yield—is a centerpiece of Merck’s recent strategy to develop copies of biotech drugs. And many of the scientists who are developing the GlycoFi platform still reside in northern New England.

—Apparently, I’m not the only Boston-area innovation junkie who’s working in Vermont. John Danner, the CEO of Northern Power Systems in Barre, VT, told me during a meeting at his office that his primary residence is still in Massachusetts even though he spends most of his weeks in the Green Mountain State. Danner, a former engineer aboard nuclear submarines, is now engineering a turnaround at the Vermont-based wind turbine manufacturer. (The latest on Northern Power is that it’s aiming to …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It seems like every few days since Labor Day weekend we at Xconomy get invited to attend or cover an entrepreneurship competition. This is a good thing. It means there are more and more opportunities for innovators in New England to gain exposure to the business community and investors—as well as a chance to win some cash and other prizes to help get their ventures off to a strong start.

Indeed, many startups in the Boston area have cut their teeth in the business plan competition circuit before raising rounds of venture capital or achieving other milestones. Take some of the past winners of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition: Cambridge, MA-based video game developer Harmonix Music Systems, creator of the hugely popular Guitar Hero franchise, and the dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, which was acquired by 3M for $95 million three years ago. And Wilbraham, MA-based FloDesign, which won both the $200K MIT Clean Energy Prize and $100K Ignite Clean Energy competition last year, recently learned that it has been tentatively awarded $8.3 million from the U.S. government to advance development of its next-generation design for wind turbines.

There will no doubt be many more successful startups to emerge from entrepreneurship contests in the region in the years ahead. Some of these contests have been around for years. Others are brand new. But even for those that have been around for a while, schedules and prizes can change from year to year. So we thought it would be a good idea to round them up in one place with the latest information about them we could find.

So whether you’re an investor interested in new companies or an innovator searching for opportunities to transform your ideas or inventions into a startup, here is a list—not a ranking—of entrepreneurship competitions in New England that cater to ideas for businesses in the life sciences, clean-tech, and IT sectors. (Please note that the information came from the contest websites or organizers, and in all but one case I didn’t separate cash from in-kind services factored into the value of each prize):

—Babson College business plan competitions

Babson College holds annual business plan competitions for undergraduate and graduate students. In fact, this year the Massachusetts business college held its 22nd competition for graduate students, making it one of the oldest business plan contests in the state.

Undergraduate Track:

Deadline: Dates for the 2010 competition weren’t available online, but last year the deadline for entries was in winter and the finals were in spring.

Top prize: $5,000 (2009)

Graduate Track:

Deadline: Not dates specified for 2010 competition.

Top prize: $20,000 (2009) …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

ScanScout, a Boston-based provider of in-stream online video ads, said it has completed its $8.5 million Series B round of venture capital with an investment from EDB Investments, a firm that invests on behalf of the government of Singapore. ScanScout is also establishing an office in Singapore as part its expansion into the Asian market. The firm’s previous investors include General Catalyst Partners, Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), First Round Capital, and Baseline Ventures, according to its website.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Polaris Venture Partners, which has its main office in Waltham, MA, has tapped former Google employee Jon Steinberg to be an executive in residence at the venture firm, VentureWire reports. VentureWire writes that Steinberg, a former strategic partner development manager at Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), will be based in the New York office of Polaris. Polaris also has an office in Seattle.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Raytheon Company (NYSE:RTN) said yesterday that it has wrapped up its buyout of Cambridge, MA-based BBN Technologies for about $350 million. The amount of the purchase was not disclosed when the Waltham, MA-based provider of defense systems first announced the deal last month. Wade put the buyout in perspective and explained what BBN has meant to the development of the Internet and the Boston innovation scene over the past several decades.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The inventor of the World Wide Web has arrived, somewhat belatedly, in the Twitterverse. Tim Berners-Lee, head of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium, set up a Twitter account shortly before making an appearance at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday.

Normally it wouldn’t be news when Twitter gains a new user—somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people already use the microblogging service, which makes it easy for users to share short, 140-character messages with anyone who signs up to follow their tweets. But Berners-Lee is a special case.

People follow the man who came up with the idea for a network of hyperlinked, consistently formatted electronic documents—and who still oversees its evolution—as if his every move were prophetic. As TechCrunch put it, Berners-Lee joining Twitter is the kind of event (at least in the blogosphere) that “could potentially rip a hole in the time/space continuum.”

So, how is Sir Berners-Lee making use of the new medium? As of this writing, he’s tweeted only twice—once to complain that Twitter’s user interface is confusing, the second time to say that he was “following the teens.” We gather that this wasn’t a reference to Twitter’s popularity among teens, but to the Web 2.0 summit talk that preceded his appearance, a session called “What Do Teens Want?” led by former Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy.

Berners-Lee is gaining Twitter followers fast—when we checked at 5:00 a.m. Eastern time this morning, he had 218. As of this writing, that number had zoomed up to 1,849. But the father of the Web still has a ways to go to catch up with Ashton Kutcher, who has more than 3.8 million followers.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Lots of venture news this week, with more than the usual number of software and Web companies making appearances.

—Flexion Therapeutics raised $33 million in a Series A round led by Versant Ventures and joined by 5AM Ventures and Sofinnova Partners. The Woburn, MA-based startup believes it can cut the shepherd drugs from early development into clinical trials in half the time it normally takes and for as little as $3 million to $5 million, compared to the usual $15 million to $40 million.

—Newton, MA-based Jackpot Rewards raised just over $12 million in the form of convertible debt. The startup, which runs cash-back rewards programs and sweepstakes for online shoppers, has previously raised at least $16 million in equity financing.

—Marketing-technology firm HubSpot of Cambridge, MA, raised a $16 million in a Series C financing round. New investor Scale Ventures led the deal and existing investors General Catalyst Partners and Matrix Partners participated as well.

—Augmenix, a medical-device startup in Waltham, MA, closed a $6.1 million Series B financing round led by Ascension Health Ventures and joined by Versant Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures, Catalyst Health Ventures, and private investors.

—Currensee, an operator of an online community for foreign currency traders, closed its $6 million Series A funding round. North Bridge Venture Partners provided the backing for the Boston-based startup.

—Waltham-based drug developer Synageva BioPharma raised $12 million, completing a $45 million round of financing. New investor New Leaf Venture Partners, as well as return investors, participated in the deal.

—Acton, MA-based optical-switch developer Mintera raised $4.1 million of a potential $5 million round of equity and options financing, according to an SEC filing.

—Illume Software of Concord, MA, added $1 million to its Series A round of financing, which previously totaled $2.4 million. Illume is developing an application to prevent drivers from texting or chatting on cell phones while they’re operating their cars.

—New Haven, CT- and Seattle-based Revolution Computing raised $9 million from North Bridge Venture Partners and Intel Capital. Revolution provides software and support for the statistical programming language known as “R.”

—STR Holdings of Enfield, CT, set the terms of its proposed IPO: 12.3 million shares of common stock at a price of $13 to $15. STR makes sheets and film to encapsulate solar cells.

—Genomic test maker Nuclea Biotechnologies of Pittsfield, MA, raised $3.4 million in new equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. Nuclea has collaborations with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

For 15 years now, we’ve all thought of the World Wide Web as a near-literal web of connections between millions of servers in different locations, with each machine hosting just a tiny slice of the Web’s overall content. But that’s not the new shape of the Web, according to Arbor Networks of Chelmsford, MA. Today, a startling amount of Web content and traffic is controlled by just a handful of large Internet companies.

“As of 2009, 60 percent of all Internet content comes from, or terminates within, just 100 to 150 companies,” says Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist. “That’s a very dramatic change in where the data is coming from.”

What that means in practical terms is that if you surf to the website for, say, the Pretty Good Car Company, more than likely the data is no longer stored on servers at Pretty Good itself, but on machines owned by a centralized infrastructure provider that Pretty Good has hired to handle its site, such as Akamai, Limelight, Rackspace, Amazon, Equinix, GoDaddy, or Verizon.

Arbor released data on this and other trends yesterday at the North American Network Operators Group conference in Dearborn, MI. The company makes software that helps companies detect and prevent denial-of-service attacks against their Internet servers.That software is installed on the Internet routers of 70 to 80 percent of the top content providers and Internet service providers in North America, which allows Arbor to collect vast amounts of information about Internet traffic.

Indeed, Arbor’s view of network traffic rivals and in some ways surpasses that of Cambridge, MA-based Akamai, whose “State of the Internet” reports we’ve covered frequently here[link]. Only about 20 percent of global Internet traffic passes through Akamai’s content distribution network.

In a trend that Arbor calls the “rise of the hyper giants,” most Web content and traffic is moving to a small number of very large hosting providers and cloud services companies. The world’s Internet addresses are controlled by about 35,000 network operators, and as recently as 2007, the majority of Internet traffic was smoothly distributed across these operators. But today, 60 percent of all Internet traffic is generated by just 100 companies, according to Arbor, which conducted its study in collaboration with the University of Michigan and the non-profit Merit Network in Ann Arbor, MI.

There is concentration at the very top: 30 percent of all traffic comes from just 30 companies. And Google alone generates about 6 percent of all Internet traffic, Arbor found. Akamai, Microsoft, Limelight, Yahoo, and GigaNews (which hosts Usenet newsgroups) are also on the list of “hyper giants.”

“Basically, 150 to 200 companies are now generating the majority of Internet content, at least as measured by traffic,” says Labovitz. It’s an inevitable and, in some ways, unsurprising trend, given the rising popularity of cloud-based hosting models for both content and software, and in view of the huge investment required to build data centers with the processing and communications capacity to handle today’s most popular forms of content, especially bandwidth-hogging video. But one implication, of course, is that outages and other snafus in a single location can affect many more Internet users all at once.

“Ensuring availability used to mean backing up your mail server or your laptop,” says Labovitz. “Nowadays, what does it mean if all your e-mail is on Google and Google is down for the day? If it wasn’t true before, it is very quickly becoming true: the network is the computer.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

It was a cold and drizzly night (how’s that for original writing?) last Thursday, and I was running late. But Dogpatch Labs Cambridge was holding its housewarming party across the street from Xconomy World Headquarters, so I braved the elements to stop in.

I walked into a crowded house of 70 folks or so, boxes of pizza, ice tubs of beer, and a lot of energy in the funky space, which is nestled inside the offices of e-retail infrastructure company Allurent in the American Twine Building on Third Street here in Cambridge, MA.

Dogpatch is a workspace/incubator run by Polaris Venture Partners. I profiled the original Dog Patch Lab in San Francisco earlier this year, and then wrote about Dogpatch Cambridge when it was announced last month. There’s enough desk space for 15 or so people in a big open area. The idea is that entrepreneurs will come for a few months, work on their ideas, and hopefully emerge ready to take things to the next level. Polaris provides the space, Internet connections, and no doubt some advice free of charge, but takes no equity in the companies—trusting that good things will happen if the companies grow and need funding.

I grabbed a brew just in time for a short welcome by Polaris’ Dave Barrett, who told the crowd his firm was trying to create the same kind of nurturing atmosphere for nascent companies as in the heavily Internet-oriented San Francisco offices—except that Dogpatch Cambridge is meant to reflect the diversity of the local innovation community, with its expertise in energy and life sciences, as well the Web space. The lab will “pull on that” wider expertise, is how he put it.

I then had a great time catching up with folks I knew, and meeting new entrepreneurs and other guests. Here are some notes and impressions:

—There are 16 Dogpatchers in what Barrett calls the “first pledge class.” (See the end of this story for a list of the current roster). Ten have started already, the rest are coming in this week. Over 100 teams have applied!

—Dogpatch keeps changing its name! It was originally Dog Patch Lab (singular). Then when the Cambridge branch opened, it became Dog Patch Labs. Now it is Dogpatch Labs. This is bad, because it makes it look like we journalists got things wrong in previous stories. (The Dogpatch website’s About page still says Dog Patch, by the way.)

—I also met Sami Shalabi, co-founder of Zingku, which did “supercharged” mobile text and picture messaging. Zingku was acquired by Google two years ago, and Shalabi works at Google in Kendall Square. He and Polaris’ Amir Nashat were college roommates at MIT.

–One of the newest Dogpatchers is Raj Aggarwal, of Localytics, which does analytics for mobile apps. Localytics was part of TechStars’ first Boston graduating class last month and just moved into the kennel last Wednesday.

—Speaking of TechStars, one Dogpatcher who wasn’t …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: