Keas has an online platform that gives patients interactive software for improving their health. But the San Francisco-based startup has had to change its strategy to find customers to pay for its technology.

In October 2009, Keas made its first big public debut, with articles in the New York Times and on a Wall Street Journal blog. It also rolled out its online system to the public for free. Founded by former Google Health head Adam Bosworth and Boston-area tech veteran George Kassabgi, the startup originally set out to create an online marketplace of care plans for consumers.

The vision was for health experts, like physicians from outside the company, to design online care plans for use on the Keas website, and then for people to choose the care plans that best suited their health goals (such as losing weight, reducing cholesterol, or controlling blood sugar). The envisioned online marketplace functioned similar to the iPhone App Store. To date, the company has succeeded in getting 30,000 people to register to use the site and health providers like Joslin Diabetes Center and CVS MinuteClinic to design care plans. But what has worked for Apple didn’t take off for Keas.

Keas, which has raised venture capital from Atlas Venture and Ignition Partners since its founding in 2008, was disappointed to learn late last year how little consumers would actually be willing to pay for its service and menu of care plans. At the same time, the physician community was slow to warm up to the idea of providing patients online care plans, since most doctors make money by seeing patients in their offices. In December, the startup figured out that it needed to revamp its business model that relied on consumers to buy its services for the business to make money, Bosworth said, the firm’s chief executive.

“We said ‘Aha, this might not … Next Page »

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Lexalytics, whose text-analytics software can measure, among other things, whether a digital document is full of praise or insults, did not get off to a superlative start back in 2003.

To begin with, its investors almost closed the company down. Lexalytics got started when the venture funders behind a Woburn, MA-based content management startup called LightSpeed Software decided to consolidate that company on the West Coast. “They were going to close the East Coast operation, so I basically convinced them to give it to me to avoid the shutdown costs,” says Jeff Catlin, a former LightSpeed general manager who, together with a LightSpeed engineer named Mike Marshall, salvaged the Woburn operation, moved it to Amherst, MA, and renamed it Lexalytics.

But three months later, a wrinkle cropped up. Marshall, a UK citizen working in America on a green card, was deported. “They shipped him back, and we didn’t see each other for about three years,” recalls Catlin, Lexalytics’ CEO.

Marshall remained as chief technology officer, working remotely, and the company worked through its rough patch. Today, business is booming. In fact, the startup has outgrown its Amherst location—it’s already hired everyone it could recruit out of the UMass Amherst computer science department, Catlin says—and this month it opened a new headquarters office here in Boston.

The startup’s current momentum was a long time building, and was partly the result of some long-overdue luck, according to Catlin. Sentiment extraction, the ability to measure the emotional tone of a news story or a product review or a customer complaint, has long been one of Lexalytics’ specialties. But only in the last 18 months or so has demand for sentiment extraction software become red-hot, as companies in many industries have realized how the technology might help them with tasks like brand reputation monitoring and algorithmic investing.

“Looking back from a historical perspective, we were brilliant,” says Catlin. “We were the first vendor to do sentiment analysis, which landed us a number of big clients like … Next Page »

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The news today out of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) is that Documentum, the company’s massive software suite for managing business content from e-mail to HR forms to press releases, is getting the beginnings of a Web 2.0 facelift, with new features such as tagging, ranking, groups, Twitter-like messaging, and a vastly improved user interface on the way. And the company says even more Web 2.0 features, such as wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, and social networking are coming in 2009. It’s pitching the improvements as a way for companies to tap into the innovative spirit of the Web 2.0 world without giving up control over security and workflow.

Depending on what kind of person you are, you can see this as an ironic co-opting and watering-down of the Web 2.0 movement’s ideals of open collaboration—many Web 2.0 technologies were born, after all, in direct opposition to the rigid communication structures of big-company bureaucracies—or as an encouraging vindication of those ideals, and as a sign that corporate America is finally listening to its workers. (Who are, by the way, flocking to the new technologies whether companies want them to or not: just look at the millions of workers who’ve installed third-party desktop instant-messaging software from Google, Yahoo, or AOL rather than use their company’s own e-mail systems to exchange quick messages).

“It’s critical that we come out with something like this, just to keep people engaged,” says Karin Ondricek, an EMC senior manager for product marketing who recently walked me through today’s “6.5″ release of Documentum. “You can have the world’s greatest content management system but if people aren’t using it, you have a lot of great information not getting into the system, and a lot of checks and balances not getting used, and a lot of human error and waste.”

The core of Documentum 6.5 is a new Web-based client or central user interface—formerly code-named Magellan and now called CenterStage—that includes features such as smarter search tools, group workspaces, and new ways of organizing documents visually, such as an iPod-style “image carousel” and sneak-peek thumbnails. A simple version of the interface, called CenterStage Essentials, will be available to existing Documentum users for beta testing starting September 4, according to EMC’s Developer Network blog. An advanced version called CenterStage Pro, expected to be available in early 2009, will include now-standard Web 2.0 features such as wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, a search box that allows employees to search both internal and Web resources simultaneously, and Web-based access to the system from outside corporate networks.

Even EMC is acknowledging that the company needed something like CenterStage Essentials to function as a dashboard for the powerful but sometimes unwieldy machine that is Documentum. “We have been known as having the best platform but not the best client,” says Ondricek. “If you need to bank your business on something, Documentum is where you go—the SEC, the FDA, all of the major regulators use us, because the backend has always been our expertise. Our client has been a weak spot. But with the new client, people are immediately going to be able to pick it up and know how to work it. If you have an iPod and you know how to use the cover flow wheel you are going to know how to navigate through our search results.”

CenterStage is also designed to help Documentum compete with other Web-based enterprise collaboration systems, such as Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server, that are also being souped up with social-computing capabilities. But at the same time, EMC is trying to reassure managers who may fear that bringing these wacky Web 2.0 approaches into their business is tantamount to unleashing hordes of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter users in the halls. “The Web natives of the world have come up with ways of collaborating and organizing and authoring content that the enterprise can benefit from—but the enterprise isn’t really suited to the raw Web 2.0 tools, because it needs some amount of structure, control, and security,” says Ondricek. “So what our 6.5 release is all about is taking all of the innovation that we’ve seen in the Web 2.0 world and bringing it into the enterprise and supporting it on an infrastructure that still gives control.”

By control, Ondricek is referring to the work flow procedures and rights-management technologies that have long been part of Documentum. The system can make sure, for example, that all the right people have seen and signed off on a press release—and in the proper order—before it leaves a company’s walls. It can also prevent copying and forwarding of confidential documents, and provide companies with the backup copies and audit trails they need to comply with modern legal and accounting requirements.

Under the hood, Documentum 6.5 has a new XML database that allows the system to store, search, and repurpose XML documents; a new “Media Workspace” tool that lets users upload, view, and annotate media assets such as photos and video; and a new Web page building tool based on Adobe’s Flex framework for interactive Web applications.

All of which may sound like stuff you’ve been using on the open Web for years. In fact, the whole “Web 2.0″ theme is getting old enough to start attracting some derision.  But there’s a good reason why you don’t see the latest social networking fads showing up as part of an EMC product right away: EMC only wants the good stuff. “As a content management systems, we may lag what’s happening out in the Web 2.0 world,” says Ondricek. “But having a two year lag is actually okay in many cases, because we are taking best practices and incorporating them into the system.”

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Citizens depend on their governments for documents and information ranging from driver’s licenses to tax forms to maps. And the more of this information is stored on the Web using open formatting standards such XML, the more people will be able to access it and re-use it for the public good. At least, that’s the argument being made by the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which launched an “eGovernment Forum” today with the aim of creating new guidelines for using the Web to enable better access to government.

The forum is open to the public and is expected to meet via teleconference roughly twice a month and face-to-face once or twice a year, with the first in-person meeting slated for October. In an announcement about the new body, MIT professor and World Wide Web originator Tim Berners-Lee, who directs the W3C, urged government agencies to send representatives to these meetings.

“Open standards, and in particular semantic Web standards, can help lower the cost of government, make it easier for independent agencies to work together, and increase flexibility in the face of change,” Berners-Lee said. “Publishing linked data on the Web enables creative re-use of it—citizen mashups, and commercial mashups, which combine the data from many sources to stunning new uses.”

In some ways, government agencies are being forced into modernizing their approaches to information management. In an age when people can go online to find a job, buy a car, or even get a college degree, citizens are demanding the same kind of online, 24/7 responsiveness from government agencies that they get from most consumer-facing online businesses. “Exposure to the rapid evolution of services and functionality on the public Web has led citizens to expect and ask for improvements ranging from basic provisioning services to more advanced solutions, and cooperation between the commercial and public sectors,” the W3C announcement observed.

The W3C is an international consortium—headquartered in Cambridge, but with offices in 17 countries—where dues-paying members, full-time staff, and public representatives work together to set unofficial (yet widely accepted) formatting and technology standards for the Web. In essence, it wants more government agencies to adopt standards it’s already developed in areas such as XML, the Semantic Web, languages and internationalization, and accessibility for people with disabilities and people using mobile devices. By doing so, the consortium argues, government agencies will not only save money and collaborate more easily with other agencies, but will be able to deliver existing information to citizens in innovative new ways.

For example, using Semantic Web standards, the United Kingdom’s Office of Public Sector Information, the University of Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science school, and the city council of Camden, a London suburb, were able to combine data from Ordnance Survey maps and local government records of restaurant hygiene inspections. The resulting mashup showed eateries on a map of Camden, color-coded according to their hygiene score. “The ability to reuse and remix enables a third party to take various set of data from the public sector, combine it with data from the private sector, and generate new value,” the W3C observed in the summary report for a 2007 workshop on transparent government.

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The Extensible Markup Language, or XML—a way of structuring data inside semantic tags that allow it to be interpreted consistently across disparate information systems—is the key to many types of business software today, not to mention the entire Web 2.0 revolution. And on Sunday, the critical Web standard turned 10 years old.

The Cambridge-based World Wide Web Consortium, which approved XML 1.0 as a recommended standard on February 10, 1998, is collecting “XML stories” or personal reminiscences from Web luminaries and plans a series of birthday-celebration events throughout 2008, according to a press release issued by the non-profit organization today. Befitting the geekiness of the anniversary, the W3C has also published an online guest book where netizens can leave their thoughts about XML.

“There is essentially no computer in the world, desk-top, hand-held, or back-room, that doesn’t process XML sometimes,” Tim Bray, director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems and a major contributor to (and co-editor of) the XML 1.0 standard, said in the W3C’s release. “This is a good thing, because it shows that information can be packaged and transmitted and used in a way that’s independent of the kinds of computer and software that are involved. XML won’t be the last neutral information-wrapping system; but as the first, it’s done very well.”

Bray has already published his own XML recollections, and Uche Ogbuji, principal consultant for Fourthought Inc., has published a paper on IBM’s DeveloperWorks website calling the last 10 years “the XML Decade.” Ogbuji tells an interesting story about the COBOL programming language, a business-oriented language that had nearly gone extinct until the late 1990s. That was when hundreds of companies still using decades-old legacy COBOL software realized that the Y2K problem could sink their systems—resulting in a huge new demand for COBOL programmers who could write around the problem.

Ogbuji calls the crisis “an extraordinary waste in resources spent agonizing over past assets rather than productively developing new ones”—the main lesson being that “it is extremely valuable to develop data so that it outlives the applications that presently operate on it. XML, used properly can help prevent such crises in productivity as the artificial COBOL boom of the 1990s, and even better, it can be a building block rather than a stumbling block for productivity by pointing the way to new applications in the constant quest for competitiveness.”

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