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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New York’s Producteev released on Tuesday the first Windows desktop version of its task management software in an effort to become more ubiquitous than its rivals. Producteev’s software lets users who work collaboratively organize, update, and see who is responsible for getting specific jobs done. The platform can be accessed via mobile apps, the Web, a native Mac desktop app, and now Windows. Producteev has raised close to $2 million since its founding in 2008 from investors that include angels and Palm Ventures.

Comparable to project collaboration software Basecamp, Producteev lets users communicate with each other about their shared tasks. The software gathers updates on tasks from e-mails, instant messages, and shared calendars. However, CEO and co-founder Ilan Abehassera says Producteev aims to be more streamlined than Basecamp by focusing on specific tasks rather than managing overall projects.

The Producteev platform is free for up to two people to use per organization. Producteev charges licensing fees for larger groups to use its software, which also connects with services such as Google Calendar, Google Apps, and Google Tasks. “We’re trying to consumerize productivity apps,” Abehassera says.

With the new Windows desktop app, he says, Producteev hopes to greatly increase adoption of its software. “Very few competitors have developed something for the Windows platform,” Abehassera says, “which is way bigger than the Mac platform.” He points to file hosting services Evernote and Dropbox as models he tries to emulate. “We’re trying to build the same kind of platform for tasks,” he says.

Also on Tuesday, Producteev introduced an Android version of its app. An iPhone app, which was already available, was updated as well. And a new feature is available across the various versions of Producteev: integration with San Francisco-based TaskRabbit, which hosts a marketplace for users to find people to complete … Next Page »

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Microsoft’s “Android isn’t free” campaign continues to roll along, with the Redmond software behemoth today announcing a patent licensing deal with handset maker LG to cover Google’s mobile operating systems.

With this deal, Microsoft says it’s got licenses covering more than 70 percent of all U.S.-sold smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. The LG deal also covers the Chrome operating system, a web-based system for laptops.

Prices were not disclosed, as usual, but Wall Street analysts have pegged previous licensing deals at $5 per handset or perhaps more—which means that with Android’s massive market share, Microsoft is making more on Google’s mobile phones than its own, which have a sliver of the market.

It’s the 11th licensing deal covering Google OS products—previous licensees who have paid up to Microsoft include major manufacturers HTC, Samsung, and Acer. “We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS,” Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez says in a statement.

As has become typical with these deals, Microsoft executives are on Twitter boasting about the deal. VP and general counsel Brad Smith announced the deal this morning on his feed, and quickly followed up with this gem, somewhat bizarrely inspired by the Occupy protests against concentration of wealth:

Microsoft claiming it’s the 99 percent by getting a patent licensing fee? Somewhere, a protester’s head just exploded.

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At his curtain call—for the moment anyway—at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hyped his company’s efforts to innovate and compete across multiple platforms. Microsoft announced previously that after 2012 it will no longer give the keynote at CES. As they waited for seats Monday evening, some members of the press corps voiced doubts about the weight of Ballmer’s anticipated final keynote. But the Microsoft boss still drew a throng that came to see if the company had any new tricks up its sleeve.

CES, hosted by the Consumer Electronics Association, is an annual conference held in Las Vegas where device makers, software developers, and others in the consumer technology world present their newest offerings and give a glimpse of what is in the works. Though many hopes are raised at each CES, not every gadget or promised innovation arrives on schedule or meets expectations.

For the past 14 years, Microsoft has delivered the keynote address that gets the week-long conference under way. But even though Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro said that Microsoft would “take a break” from the keynote stage, he added that the association would continue its relationship with the company. “I would be shocked if a Microsoft leader does not return to the stage in the next few years,” Shapiro said.

Ballmer, with some help from “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest, chatted about the development of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system and ways Microsoft wants to compete across phones, televisions, PCs, and other devices. “Nothing better than good competition,” Ballmer said.

Perhaps in an effort to shake up the stodgy feel and look of the Windows desktop, Microsoft is taking a new approach in its next version of the platform. “The Windows PC has constantly changed and reinvented and spurred other technology innovations,” Ballmer said. While he talked up the ubiquity of Windows among computers, he noted that users want new features and options. “With Windows 8, we’ve reimagined Windows from the chipset to the user experience,” he said.

Much of that change is being borrowed from the mobile world. It is called the Metro … Next Page »

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Mobile industry leaders are looking for big moves in 2012 from the Seattle area’s two technology heavyweights, taking the lead from a surge by Google’s Android operating system, according to a new survey from Issaquah, WA-based Chetan Sharma Consulting.

Sharma’s 2012 Mobile Industry Predictions Survey, compiled from about 150 responses through the consulting firm’s global mailing list of industry insiders, also predicts that mobile payments and commerce will remain a big focus for businesses and consumers alike, further roiling the waters for retailers.

When asked what the biggest storyline of 2012 would be, survey respondents put Amazon’s entry into mobile in second place, with a Microsoft and Nokia “resurgence” close behind in third (the top story was the continued growth of mobile data usage worldwide).

The interest in Amazon certainly owes a lot to the newness of the e-commerce pioneer’s move into mobile computing, with the late 2011 debut of the Kindle Fire tablet. So there’s clearly a lot more room for Jeff Bezos and company to grow.

The company is also pretty well-regarded for its focus, and it has shown an ability to execute very well with Amazon Web Services, another business not directly tied to its Internet retailing niche.

Sharma says the extension into tablets, and perhaps a mobile phone in the near future, is just part of Amazon growing to become a “super-retailer for everything. They are already into groceries. Electronics is very heavy—they sell a lot of phones online.”

Amazon’s newly unveiled business model with tablets, which (at least currently) sells the device at a small loss and makes up the margin on content sales, is very hard for other companies to replicate, Sharma says. And the company’s retailing expertise means it knows shoppers’ tastes better than almost any other company.

“Amazon is very, very well placed, and they’re just starting to show their hand as to what their ambitions are,” Sharma says. “I think they’re sitting very pretty for many years to come.”

Microsoft’s role in the future of mobile has a lot to do with the success of Nokia, its main hardware partner for the refreshed Windows Phone operating system. The immediate stakes are higher for the Swedish phone-maker than they are for Microsoft, Sharma says, because cash-rich Microsoft can afford to play a bit longer game with the mobile market. But he notes that initial response for new Nokia phones has been “tepid” in Europe so far, and needs to show much better response when devices start hitting the U.S. market.

“If they don’t do that successfully by Q4, then definitely they’re in trouble—some of the same trouble that RIM is in,” Sharma says. Without success selling newer handsets, he adds, ”Nokia might not survive, or it might have to morph into something else.”

That possibility was surely on the minds of survey respondents who placed Microsoft No. 1 among the companies expected to make the biggest mobile acquisitions of 2012, with more than a quarter of the responses. Google and network operators broadly grouped together were in second and third place, with Amazon thought to be the fourth most likely to make a big M&A splash.

Sharma said one response that surprised him was the low rank given to Windows in the tablet sector. The latest version of Windows for tablets isn’t a reality for consumers yet, but Sharma asked respondents to look out two years—and they still saw Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform taking most of the market.

“People still didn’t think Windows would make a big dent. That was surprising,” he says. “I think they can have a decent impact on the marketplace, because in the enterprise especially, there you have to have create tablets versus consume tablets,” the difference between filing out a spreadsheet and watching a YouTube video, for instance.

“Mobile is starting to become very important for Microsoft longer-term,” Sharma says. “Even if they are not doing that well today, five years out they have to be doing really well.”

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—Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), the IT software provider on the border between San Diego and Orange Counties, said today it acquired BitKOO, a North Hollywood, CA-based specialist in identity and access management technology. Financial terms were not disclosed. Combined with the recent acquisitions of e-DMZ (privileged identity management), Völcker Informatik AG (provisioning), and Symlabs (virtual directories), Quest says the BitKOO deal extends the strength of its Quest One Identity Solutions business.

—San Jose, CA-based EnVerv, a chip design firm with a San Diego office, said it raised $12 million in a Series B round for its power line communications technologies, which enable electric utilities to use their own power lines to serve as a smart grid communications network. Benchmark Capital led the new round, which was joined by existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Walden International.

—UC San Diego computer security researcher (and San Diego Xconomist) Stefan Savage talked with me about recent research into spam networks and hacking the automotive software used to control cars. Savage said he takes a more holistic approach to protecting computers and networks against malicious intruders. While a great deal of money and effort are devoted to technically “hardening” computer systems against spam, for example, Savage said the payment systems by which advertised goods and services accept consumer credit cards “is a huge weak link that has no cheap substitute.”

—Ford’s Dan Kapp came to San Diego to plug the carmaker’s new plug-in, the 2012 Focus EV. The electric vehicle will go on sale at San Diego Ford dealers during the first quarter of 2012. Ford said … Next Page »

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High school and youth sports teams may lack the deep pockets of the pros, but they can still take advantage of technology for tracking game stats thanks to a New York startup. Angel investor-backed GameChanger Media offers coaches of young athletes a mobile platform that evolves record keeping from pen and paper to smartphones and tablets. “Coaches and scorekeepers of youth and high school teams have incredibly archaic tools for managing what is the most painful and time-consuming part of their job,” says GameChanger Media CEO Ted Sullivan.

His company offers youth teams a free app that lets them log game information, which they can then share in real-time with local news outlets and the public. Rather than jotting down notes on a clipboard, the teams punch in the numbers with their mobile devices. Initially designed for use by baseball and softball teams, the app is available for Android phones, iPhones and the iPad. Sullivan says another version of GameChanger Media’s platform is under development for basketball teams and is due out in beta by midyear 2012 with the full release expected by next winter.

Thanks in part to $1 million raised in November from angel investors, Sullivan says he expects to grow his staff of sixteen by 30 percent by the end of 2012. GameChanger Media has raised $3.5 million to date in total from private investors.

Founded in 2009, GameChanger Media released its app to the public in January 2010. Sullivan says in 2011, some 30,000 youth and high school teams across country and around the world adopted his company’s tools to record game stats. Amateur baseball governing body USA Baseball, youth sports program Little League International, and high school baseball team tournament host Perfect Game USA all use the platform, Sullivan says. The app is also catching on internationally, Sullivan says. “Our product is only in English, but we have teams from Korea to Germany using it,” he says.

While GameChanger Media’s platform is free for teams to use, the company also … Next Page »

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Rolling out a game on two platforms at once is so passé. Why not three at once? That’s the target for Seattle game startup Zipline Games, which is showing off its new game today on iOS, Android, and Google’s Chrome Web browser.

“No one’s been crazy enough to hit three platforms, so we thought we’d put a stake in the ground,” says Zipline CEO Todd Hooper, who’s in Mountain View, CA today for a gaming announcement by Google.

The game is Wolf Toss, a take on what’s known in the industry as a “physics game.” That’s the casual-game format popularized by Finnish developer Rovio’s hit Angry Birds, in which players launch little birds from slingshots to destroy the fortresses set up by a group of marauding pigs that have stolen their eggs.

In Zipline’s Wolf Toss, you’re firing a hungry wolf from a cannon to chase down the three little pigs. The game actually started out as a simple demo months ago—I remember Hooper showing me a proto-version on his phone—but Zipline decided to make it a full-fledged title.

“I handed my phone to a lot of people and said, ‘Hey, here, play it’—and I noticed they wouldn’t give my phone back,” he says.

Like many games of this genre, Wolf Toss is free to play and looks to make money by selling premium content. But it’s also more than a product for Zipline, because it was developed for iOS, Android, and Chrome at the same time using the company’s Moai game developer platform.

Moai is built around Lua, a common programming language for games, and offers a single open-source platform for both the front-end elements seen by consumers and the back-end infrastructure. It allows developers to build their products once and deploy them to multiple user platforms, rather than duplicating efforts for multiple different operating systems.

So if Wolf Toss were deployed to iOS, Android, and Chrome without that system making all the translations, “Then you’ve got three engineering teams and the game costs three times as much,” Hooper says. Moai previously made news by powering Crimson: Steam Pirates, the first release through Bungie Aerospace. Hooper says Moai now has about 3,000 developers signed up.

Even though a service like Moai can simplify the process, it can’t totally eliminate all of the headaches that come with putting a game on three different user platforms at the same time. Everyone has different payment mechanisms for the premium content, for example. There are different approval processes for the app stores. And even different screenshot specs for advertising the games within those stores—a thousand little things that add up for a small company.

“I think we’re unique, and probably also crazy,” Hooper says with a laugh.

Zipline is working on more games, both for itself and others. Check out the video for an idea of what Wolf Toss is like—I see some elements of both Angry Birds and maybe even some old-school Sonic the Hedgehog from the era of Sega consoles, if I’m not mistaken.

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Anti-theft technology for mobile devices just got smarter. Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced today that its location-finding software has been deployed by Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) in its new Norton Anti-Theft Web service. Financial details weren’t given, but the arrangement will put Skyhook’s software on more devices over a broader range of applications—namely, security.

The anti-theft Web service enables people to lock, locate, and, if all goes well, recover a lost or stolen laptop (Windows-based), smartphone (Android), or tablet (Android)—all from afar. Skyhook’s technology, which uses Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS signals to locate a given device, is already used by tens of millions of devices and applications, the company says.

Skyhook has been embroiled in two lawsuits against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) since last year. The suits allege that the search giant infringed on four of Skyhook’s patents and interfered with deals that Skyhook made with Motorola and Samsung. Those deals involved putting Skyhook’s location-finding software on Android devices.

Symantec’s deployment of Skyhook’s software is the latest example of how Skyhook has managed to maneuver its technology onto Android devices despite its feud with Google, which, like Apple, wants to own location technology for its devices itself.

Back in May, Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan talked about his company’s technology being deployed by MapQuest, Citysearch, Priceline, and other Web applications on Android (and other) devices. “We’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers,” he said.

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Contrary to what you might expect, the pace of tech news out of San Diego didn’t slow down much before the Thanksgiving Holiday. We still managed to round it all up, though, and our briefing begins here.

—As director of the UC system’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), Larry Smarr is an Internet pioneer who frequently offers his perspective on the future of IT technologies. Lately, however, Smarr has been providing a glimpse at the future of “quantified health” and digitally enabled genomic medicine. In a Q&A with Smarr, he told me he found he had one chemical marker (out of 60 that he regularly tracks) that was five times higher than the recommended upper limit—triggering a kind of detective story that illustrates the potential revolution in health IT and wireless health.

—In the U.S. Navy’s largest demonstration of alternative fuels, a decommissioned Navy destroyer refitted as a kind of ocean-going test facility completed a 17-hour transit from San Diego to Port Hueneme. The Spruance-class destroyer used a 50-50 mixture of standard Navy diesel fuel and algae-based diesel produced by San Francisco-based Solazyme.

—Mellmo, the four-year-old startup based in Solana Beach, CA, has been moving into overseas markets in Europe and Asia with Roambi, its Web-based business intelligence graphics service. Mellmo co-founder Quinton Alsbury also talked with me about Roambi Flow, a new service that enables corporate customers to wrap text around their Roambi graphics to produce magazine-quality reports for the iPad.

—The case of the 2010 murder of San Diego angel investor and retired life sciences executive John G. Watson came to a close when a San Diego jury convicted Kent Thomas Keigwin of first-degree murder, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. The prosecutor argued that Keigwin, who was working as a financial advisor, used Watson’s personal information to transfer some $8.9 million from Watson’s accounts.

—San Diego-based Next Autoworks, which was once known as V Vehicle, withdrew its … Next Page »

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Apple’s iPhone and iPad may be the hottest, most stylish gadgets out there—in fact, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has already enshrined the iPad 2 in an exhibit on industrial design. But inside, iOS devices use a programming language that’s truly antiquated. It’s called Objective-C, and it rose to prominence in the late 1980s as the language used by Steve Jobs’ NeXT to build the user interface for the company’s workstations.

Objective-C is considered less powerful and harder to learn than more modern programming and scripting languages like Javascript, Python, and Ruby, and it has nowhere near as many adherents. “Very few people in the world know Objective-C,” says Jeff Haynie. By contrast, “Eight to 10 million Web developers around the world know Javascript and HTML.” And if you think Google is in a stronger position with Android, think again—that operating system is based on Java, another finicky language with a dwindling following.

Haynie’s view is that developers shouldn’t have to learn Objective-C or Java just so they can write apps for today’s fastest-spreading computing platforms, i.e., smartphones and tablets. And that’s the whole business proposition behind Appcelerator, the company Haynie co-founded in Atlanta, GA, in 2007 and transplanted to Silicon Valley in 2008. The company, which just collected $15 million in new venture funding, specializes in software that takes programs written in the language of the Web and transforms them into mobile apps that will run equally well on iOS or Android, or even desktop Mac and Windows computers.

Comb through the 500,000 apps in the iTunes App store, and you’ll find that nearly one in five was built using Titanium, Appcelerator’s free, open-source development platform. One of the most prominent examples is NBC Universal’s iPad app, which lets users watch full episodes of NBC shows, play games, view broadcast schedules, and view behind-the-scenes photos from their favorite shows. “That app was built by one JavaScript developer in three months,” Haynie says. A previous attempt to build the NBC app in Objective-C, Haynie says, “took four people six months, and was a complete and very expensive disaster.”

Appcelerator co-founder and CEO Jeff Haynie

Appcelerator isn’t the only company offering ways to get around writing native (that is, Objective-C or Java) code for iOS or Android devices. Its biggest direct competitor is probably Rhomobile, a San Jose startup acquired by Motorola Solutions in October; Rhomobile is the creator of Rhodes, an open-source framework for turning apps written in Ruby into native apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone. But Rhodes is mainly used by developers of enterprise apps, while Appcelerator shines when it comes to making high-gloss consumer apps like the NBC app.

And Appcelerator may have a more worrisome competitor in HTML5, the next-generation Web language that includes more support for audio, video, and animation. Some developers are using the standard as a way to produce browser-based games and publications that have the look and feel of native apps, but don’t have to be approved by the app store authorities at … Next Page »

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What’s the best way to tell my mother-in-law that we’re not going to visit her at Thanksgiving?

My college friend has taken over my friendship with another guy, and now both are ignoring me. Should I ask them why?

What do you do if the girl you asked to marry you says no?

[Questions posed by Ask.com users, November 15, 2011]

Google, the Mountain View, CA-based search and advertising giant, may have a 66 percent share of the search market, but there are plenty of questions its Web crawlers and ranking algorithms just can’t answer. That includes squishy, emotion-laden questions like the ones above, as well as detailed, local queries like “what’s the best place for Mexican take-out in St. Cloud, Minnesota?” For those types of questions, there’s just no substitute for bringing real humans into the loop.

Across the bay from Google, in downtown Oakland, there’s a 15-year-old search company that’s now banking on the power of these human connections over algorithms. It’s called Ask.com, and it’s the perpetual fourth-place finisher in the search engine races, after Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing. Last year, Ask.com gave up on its long struggle—financed by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, which purchased the company for $1.85 billion in 2005—to compete with Google in traditional Web search. Under Doug Leeds, who became CEO in mid-2009 after a stint at the helm of IAC property Dictionary.com, Ask.com decided to transform itself into a question-and-answer service. And as of this fall, the transition is complete: in September the company opened the live Q&A portion of its site, previously in beta testing, to all 63 million monthly visitors.

Ask.com's iPhone app

The change marks a return, in some ways, to Ask.com’s heritage as Ask Jeeves. Early in its history, the company’s claim—symbolized by its butler mascot Jeeves—was that it could find definitive answers to natural-language questions such as, “Who was the world chess champion in 1956?” or “What’s the difference between a leopard and a cheetah?” The problem was that the claim didn’t always hold up; the computational problem was just too hard, often leaving Jeeves at a loss. (Even today, search utilities like Apple’s Siri can only answer natural-language questions reliably within restricted neighborhoods of knowledge, such as the weather.) In 2001, Ask Jeeves bought an algorithmic search engine called Teoma and started spewing out long lists of blue links just like Google’s.

The company continued to welcome questions phrased in natural English, and it tried to siphon traffic away from Google by marketing itself as a question-answering site. But “we started talking to users in a way that was different from the way they wanted to talk to us,” Leeds told me in an interview this summer. “What they really wanted was an answer at the top of the page, not a list of links.” Even the so-called “smart answers” that Ask.com offered at the top of a search result page weren’t addressing the need. “As good as we think we got at this, at least 60 percent of the questions that come in every day are things we can’t answer from the information we crawl,” says Leeds.

It turns out that people are really good at coming up with questions that have never been asked or answered before. So Ask.com decided to shift strategies again. “Toward the end of 2009 and through 2010, we built a platform not just for searching documents, but for searching people—to give them a chance to answer the questions,” says Leeds.

Today, when you arrive at the Ask.com website or fire up the Ask.com iPhone or Android apps, you see a big search box where you can type in your question. If the service can find a definitive answer somewhere in the database of 700 million question-answer pairs it has culled from the Web, it will simply show you the answer. (Question: Is a Granny Smith apple more tart than a Red Delicious? Answer: Yes.) If it can’t, it will show you a list of related Web results. And if those results don’t answer your question, you can click on the “Q&A Community” tab, where you can submit the same question for review by other Ask.com users.

There’s no guarantee anyone will answer your question, but in my limited experiments, I’ve always received at least one answer within an hour. “The biggest challenge for us is how to integrate these two services,” Leeds says—meaning the Web answers that arrive in milliseconds and … Next Page »

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When it decided to attack the smartphone market with a new version of its mobile operating system, Microsoft did something that might sound a bit counterintuitive: Starting in last place, it dug the hole a little deeper.

By tossing out the old version of Windows Mobile and starting anew, the company knew it would piss off developers who had been working with the previous versions. Which would make the job of growing a strong developer ecosystem—a live-or-die proposition for mobile platforms—an even bigger task.

But today, Windows Phone 7 is showing signs of progress, reflected in this fresh report showing Microsoft’s platform surpassing BlackBerry for the number three spot in developer interest. There’s still a huge gulf to bridge before Microsoft can truly challenge Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in the smartphone market—a role that, as my colleague Wade Roush has argued, will be a critical for the health of the entire sector.

Brandon Watson

So what’s the recipe for closing that gap? In a pretty revealing blog post, Windows Phone developer lead Brandon Watson lays out the roadmap his team has followed in the year or so since the software hit the market. The short version: keep it simple, be friendly, be generous, and the goodwill will be repaid—even if you’re from the Borg.

“Invest in the community. It’s very easy for someone to hate a company, but very hard to hate a person,” Watson writes.

That’s taken several forms, Watson writes, including a drive to shine the spotlight on developers.

“We don’t need any more web traffic. Any chance we can take to redirect web traffic to a partner/developer is one we should take. Same thing for speaking opportunities, inclusion in press, conferences, etc. People know who we are. They don’t know who the developers are. Investing in them early pays off huge dividends later,” he writes.

Ditching any bureaucratic “not my department” tendencies is also a huge key—one of several lessons Watson attributes to former boss Charlie Kindel.

“Yes I run the developer experience team for Windows Phone, but really, I work on Windows Phone, and that’s all customers care about. They don’t care about my title, or my org,” Watson writes. “They care about the problem they have in front of them, and not much else.”

And perhaps above all, being available and interested in the community. Watson has handed out his e-mail and phone number pretty freely, and says he spends lots of time answering mentions on Twitter. But it’s also extremely important to be available in real life—Watson points to an anecdote of some feedback he gave an Android developer, dropping any resistance to helping out a competitor.

“If I could help make him successful on Android, my hope is that when he considers his next platform, he puts Windows Phone first because one of us stopped to help him out,” Watson writes. “Trying to convince him he made a bad choice with Android can only end in tears, and he may walk away thinking that we are jerks.”

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The first thing Charlie Kindel wants you to know about the buzzworthy mobile sector is that it’s actually “old, dead, and boring.”

OK, so that’s kind of for shock value—Kindel, who recently left Microsoft after 21 years, will admit as much. After all, this comes from a guy whose last job was serving as a general manager on Windows Phone, and whose still-stealthy startup company is aiming for the mobile arena.

Charlie Kindel

Here’s what Kindel really means: The world of mobile apps revolving mostly around a specific operating system is coming to an end, quickly. Instead, platform providers will make it easier for developers to attack multiple platforms at once—making an OS something you plug into, rather than an existential question for small companies.

That will usher in a new era of cloud-based services that can be served up on any of the devices in a consumer’s life, Kindel says, from smartphones to tablets to laptops and smart TVs. Think about Twitter as an example—available just about anywhere a user might want it.

“The real value of the service is the connection it enables between the devices you have, the people you interact with, and the services that compose the experience,” Kindel says. “So what I see happening is an inflection point where the value and the emphasis that people have been placing on building mobile apps is shifting to an investment on the white space between the devices, the services, and the people.

“When I talk to startups and mentor other people investing money, I’m trying to get people to think about that, because that’s where the growth is going to be.”

Expect to hear more of those insights on December 6, when Kindel (on Twitter @ckindel) joins our all-star cast of presenters at Mobile Madness Northwest—a premier half-day Xconomy forum presented in partnership with the Washington Technology Industry Association. The afternoon-to-evening event at F5 Networks in Seattle will be packed with smart speakers, startup demos, and plenty of time to network. Here’s where to get your tickets.

Kindel’s point about the death of mobile OS wars is an interesting one, particularly since the battles for market share between Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the smartphone market have been dominating the tech headlines.

It sounds like a scary proposition for Apple, which defined the modern smartphone market, and threw in tablets for good measure, by exerting a huge amount of control over the operating system, app ecosystem, payment processes, pricing, and more.

But the writing is on the wall, since big companies already are doing this, Kindel points out. Say you’re at a big tech company with a Web service, and you want to build an app for it. The costs are getting low enough that it makes developing for several different platforms a no-brainer.

“You would be insane if you spent more than $250,000 per client platform. It’s likely closer to $100,000,” Kindel says. “It’s mouse nuts. It’s irrelevant in the scope of these businesses. And so these businesses are going to target all of the platforms.” And soon enough, that kind of efficiency is going to trickle down to smaller companies, startups, and individual developers, Kindel says. That’s why you see big investments in platform players like Portland’s Urban Airship, and the rise of startups like Seattle’s Buddy Platform, which Kindel has joined as an adviser.

“I think that there is very little value in client platforms moving forward. The real value is in the services that light up those devices and the services that enable people to interact across multiple devices,” Kindel says. “And so we’re in a period right now where there are these huge battles around what device operating system is going to ‘win.’ And my argument is none of them are going to win. It’s an irrelevant question. The real battle is what platforms developers are targeting to enable their cloud-based, service-based experiences.”

Kindel says he gets plenty of eye-rolls for these assertions, for some pretty big reasons—people see the billions of dollars being pumped through the current app-centric, operating system-based mobile ecosystems. That’ll continue for roughly another year or more, he says. But the end is coming.

“I think it’s obvious from their behaviors that all the big players are very conscious of this,” Kindel says—specifying Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon in that group. “In each case, they recognize that there are several assets that they have to have at their disposal to be successful in this new world. And I say that they have to have them at their disposal because I don’t think that they have to own them. They just have to have access to them—although owning them is better.”

—The Social Graph: This is the first and most important asset for the big players to have access to, Kindel says. “It’s all about the network effect,” he says. “This is why I believe Google is going to invest until the cows come home in Google Plus. They’re going to do whatever it takes to make Google Plus successful.”

—E-Commerce: “They have to have an ability to directly take and give money to end user consumers in very fine-grained amounts,” Kindel says, with Amazon and Apple the clear leaders right now.

—The Cloud: “They have to have a cloud platform asset that allows third parties to build on the core services they provide, and extend them and leverage them,” Kindel says. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and the Facebook Platform are all examples of this critical type of service.

There’s plenty more where that came from, and I’m psyched to have Kindel joining us for Mobile Madness Northwest. Our Early Bird rate expires November 15, so make sure you get your tickets now. We’ll see you on the other side of Thanksgiving.

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There are roughly 500,000 iPhone and iPad apps in Apple’s iTunes App Store, and almost that many smartphone and tablet apps in Google’s Android Market. That gives mobile consumers lots of choices, but it has created an untenable situation for mobile developers. Unless you get lucky and your app vaults onto the top-5 or top-10 charts, or is anointed as a “New and Noteworthy” or “Featured” app by a human curator at Apple or Google, it’s virtually impossible to get noticed amidst all the noise. As a result, there’s a very long tail of perfectly good apps that are failing to find their natural audiences, simply because mobile users have no way to discover them short of browsing page after page of poorly organized lists in the app stores.

I’ve been covering technology long enough to remember when there were 500,000 sites on the entire World Wide Web. That was back in mid-1996, when Yahoo-style guides and directories were still considered the best way to find new stuff. As the Web swelled—to 1.7 million sites by December 1997 and 3.7 million by December 1998—the directory model quickly became unworkable, and people started turning to first-generation search engines like AltaVista. But search results in these early days tended to be pretty random, and vulnerable to manipulation through spamdexing schemes. It wasn’t until Google came along with its Page Rank algorithm in late 1998 that Web surfers finally had a reliable way to locate high-quality content.

The app world hasn’t yet had its Google moment—which is more than a bit ironic, considering that Google itself runs one of the two largest app stores. Just try searching on the term “restaurant guide” in iTunes or the Android Market. The top result at iTunes is something called VegOut, and the top result at the Android Market is the U.S. Army Survival Guide. I kid you not.

In any rational universe, the top results for “restaurant guide” in both stores would be Yelp and Urbanspoon. But at iTunes, these apps don’t even appear in the first 180 results. Zagat, which would be a logical number 3 result, does turn up in the 17th position at the Android Market, but that’s probably just because Google now owns it. The overall rankings are so goofy that even AltaVista couldn’t have come up with them.

Chomp CEO Ben Keighran

Entrepreneurs aren’t waiting for Apple and Google to fix the mess they’ve created; several startups now offer alternative ways to find great mobile apps. The one with the biggest lead is probably Chomp, which is based here in San Francisco. Chomp’s own app for searching apps is available for both the iPhone and Android phones. In many ways, it’s what the iTunes App Store and the Android Market should be—a fact that Verizon recognized in September by announcing that it would build Chomp into the Verizon app store that ships with all Verizon Android phones.

Lately I’ve been getting to know Chomp co-founder and CEO Ben Keighran, an Australian-born programmer-entrepreneur who moved to the Bay Area about six years ago. “Search is really broken on both Apple and Google for searching for anything other than the name of an application,” Keighran says. “It’s just like the Web. Search wasn’t important at the beginning of the Web; what people needed was a curated directory. Search wasn’t important at the beginning of the app store revolution. And now it’s an incredibly broken feature.”

Before Chomp, Keighran was best known as the creator of a Java-based text messaging service called Bluepulse, which, at its peak around 2006, was handling 10 million messages per day for mobile subscribers in India, South Africa, and other countries. Bluepulse actually started out as an app store, so Keighran has been thinking about the problem for a long time. “Technically, it was a lightweight, 63-kilobyte browser, and it downloaded a list of apps you had said you wanted to use, and you would launch the apps within the browser,” Keighran recounts. “But it wasn’t used as much as the messaging feature, so it kind of got rolled into the messaging product.”

Keighran moved Bluepulse from Sydney to San Mateo, CA, in 2006 and raised almost $10 million in venture funding for the company in hopes of … Next Page »

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Score one for open source startups. Modo Labs, a Cambridge, MA-based mobile software company, is announcing today it has closed a $4 million Series A round from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures. The round includes $2 million that the startup raised last year; the new money ($2 million) comes from Silicon Valley-based Storm, led by founding general partner Tae Hea Nahm.

Modo Labs, which grew out of MIT’s Mobile Framework project, makes an open source software platform called Kurogo, which helps universities and other organizations put their information online and make it quickly available on devices like smartphones, tablets, and so forth. Lots of colleges are already using Kurogo for their mobile sites, including Boston College, Brown University, Harvard University, Middlebury College, University of Vermont, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Modo Labs says it wants to open up its platform to student developers.

But the 20-person company sees a big opportunity in enterprise apps as well. Specifically, big banks and hospitals need the kind of tech support Modo Labs provides, the company says. And it’s about more than making tools for developers.

“We have some really deep interest in making sure the users’ experience is the best they can be,” says Modo Labs CEO Andrew Yu. That means providing “solid and robust templates” so that enterprises can get their websites and apps up and running fast, he says.

Modo Labs is “aggressively hiring right now for developers” of native and mobile Web software (both iOS and Android), says chief technology officer Marshall Vale. He stresses that business customers “absolutely have to deal with multiple device types” across operating systems, handsets, and tablets, and that his company’s software is optimized for that.

Storm Ventures has a couple of notable companies in its portfolio that are complementary to Modo Labs: MobileIron (mobile device management for businesses) and Appcelerator (enterprise mobile development platform).

On a more human-interest note, Storm Ventures is a particularly apt name. Yu, Modo’s CEO, was scheduled to fly out to the West Coast to pitch the firm in August, but his flight was canceled because of Hurricane Irene. So he had to do the pitch by phone. While there was some concern about the geographic distance from a main investor, Yu emphasizes that Storm “really understood this space and was really willing to work with us.”

Let’s hope the unseasonably early October snow, and future storms, don’t wreak havoc for Modo and its investors. It could be a long winter in Boston.

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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Time for our irregular roundup of business and technology news. Some of this is today’s news, and some is catch-up from last week:

$1.5 billion—The approximate price fetched by Bozeman, MT-based RightNow, which was acquired today by Oracle, the Redwood Shores, CA-based database giant. RightNow offers cloud-based customer service and support software. Oracle executive vice president Thomas Kurian said the move was part of Oracle’s “aggressive” strategy to “offer customers a full range of cloud solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud.”

$1 billion—The size of a new private capital fund just closed by venture debt firm TriplePoint Capital of Menlo Park, CA. TriplePoint says the fund is “the largest private or public capital raise by any company in the 30-year history of the venture leasing and lending industry.”

$100 million—The amount of venture capital raised to date by Trion Worlds, a Redwood City, CA-based online game company. Trion Worlds told Reuters on Friday that it’s thinking about filing for an IPO.

$99 million—The price paid by Cisco Systems last week for Boxborough, MA-based cloud video management software maker BNI Video, as Xconomy’s Greg Huang reported.

$85 million—A Series F financing round announced today for Workday, the Pleasanton, CA-based provider of SaaS-based human resources management and payroll software. A group of new investors including T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus Capital Group, and Bezos Expeditions led the round.

$42 million—A Series A funding round for Redwood City, CA-based Dermira, which is developing small-molecule therapies for acne and other skin conditions. Investors in Dermira include Bay City Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Canaan Partners. The company also said that it has acquired competitor Valocor Therapeutics.

$15 million—New funding for Livermore, CA-based Bridgelux, which is developing gallium nitride-based LED lighting technology. Participants in the round include VantagePoint Capital Partners, DCM, El Dorado Ventures, Novus Energy Partners, IFA, Chrysalix, Harris & Harris Group, Craton Equity Partners, Jebsen Asset Management, and Passport Capital.

$14 million—The amount of a strategic investment round for Campbell, CA-based BlueStacks, announced October 20. AMD and Citrix Systems led the round. BlueStacks makes software that allows Android applications to run on Windows computers.

$9.3 million—The new projected size of a Series A funding round for San Francisco-based RentJuice, developer of an apartment listing platform for rental and real estate agents, according to an amended regulatory filing. Xconomy profiled Rentjuice in July; the company initially pegged its Series A round at $6.2 million, with Highland Capital in the lead.

$5 million—New funding announced last week for Palo Alto, CA-based Zoove, which maintains a registry of vanity “star star” numbers that let consumers reach major brands from mobile phones. Rogers Ventures, the investing wing of Canadian telecom giant Rogers Communications, provided the funds, which come on top of a recent $15 million Series D round.

$3.1 million—The amount of a new round of equity- and debt-based financing for San Jose, CA-based solar panel maker Integrated PhotoVoltaics, according to an October 19 regulatory filing.

$2 million—A Series A financing round announced today for Chartboost, a San Francisco startup operating a marketplace where game publishers can cooperate to cross-promote each others’ games. TransLink Capital, SK Telecom Ventures, and XG Ventures provided the funds.

1 million—The cumulative number of installs of apps from Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, according to a company blog post last week. The online app store, which features apps compatible with Salesforce.com’s cloud-based software, was introduced in 2005.

$399—The cost of the basic 8-gigabyte light field camera unveiled last week by Mountain View, CA-based Lytro. The camera doesn’t have a typical focus plane—instead users choose a focus point for their photos after the fact using software. The company says the gadget will be available in early 2012.

$188—The total cost of the materials inside Apple’s new iPhone 4S, according to a tear-down analysis reported last week by El Segundo, CA-based iSuppli, a division of IHS. Apple charges $199 to $399 for the device, depending on its internal memory and the wireless service plan consumers choose.

150—The new head count at San Francisco-based location-based security software provider Location Labs, which announced today that it has acquired two other startups: Wirkle, a mobile product development company, and Volly, a mobile group messaging company.

7—The number of companies named last week by Menlo Park, CA-based DCM as the first beneficiaries of its A-Fund, which is focused on supporting developers of Android applications. The companies receiving investments from the A-Fund include Appia, Billing Revolution, Papaya Mobile, Happy Elements, Kanbox, Loki Studios, and Kakao.

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Wayne Chang is a man of mystery. Everyone knows him, yet no one knows him. Even his LinkedIn picture is mysterious. He’s a big-time hacker but not a big talker. He has a handful of secret tech projects and investments going at any time. He’s also been involved in a major lawsuit with the Winklevoss twins of Facebook fame, but he can’t talk about that either.

What he can talk about is that his new startup, Cambridge, MA-based Crashlytics, recently raised $1 million in seed financing, led by Flybridge Capital Partners and Baseline Ventures. A bunch of Boston-area angel investors also participated, including David Chang, Lars Albright, Chris Sheehan (an Xconomy board member), Ty Danco, Jennifer Lum, Roy Rodenstein, and Joe Caruso (all the usual suspects).

Crashlytics is trying to solve a big emerging problem in mobile-app development. When apps crash, the developers usually don’t know about it. They might get a crash log—or rather, thousands of crash logs—or get flooded by crash-report e-mails and be able to deal with it within a few weeks. (Apparently that’s how long Apple’s built-in system takes.) But that’s not fast enough when you have thousands of frustrated users, Chang says.

So what his startup does is takes those crash logs and distills them down to the top few issues the developer needs to fix—the most crucial ones. Crashlytics’ “secret sauce,” Chang says, is “we tell you the exact line of code where the issue happened,” as well as exactly what the user was doing on his or her phone when the app crashed.

Sound like magic? Well, for the whole thing to work, developers have to insert a line of code from Crashlytics into their app. But Chang emphasizes that the extra code is smaller than other crash-reporting options (and much easier to use). So far the company’s beta software works for Apple iOS apps, with a version for Android coming soon. Crashlytics is in talks with some very big companies, Chang says, and plans to use a freemium business model.

I asked Chang whether Apple knew about his startup yet. “I’m sure they do now,” he says.

Crashlytics just got started earlier this year. The five-person company’s founders are Chang and Jeff Seibert, the co-founder of Increo Solutions (which was bought by Box.net in 2009). Seibert has a fair bit of experience with Apple operating systems, having contributed to various Apple projects over the years. Chang, for his part, started his first company when he was 11 or 12, came of age during the dot-com years, and has worked on everything from Napster to Dropbox to i2hub, a collaboration network for colleges.

The two met over coffee at Voltage Café near Kendall Square, back in February. Seibert told Chang about a crash reporting problem he had encountered while fixing a bug at Box.net. Chang was hooked. So the two started working on their new mobile tech venture, with an eye toward cashing in on what has become a huge industry.

“We’re deep and passionate about the crash space,” Chang says. “We think [mobile software] is the 1998-99 of the Web.” There is “an explosion” in mobile tech going on, he adds, “but the infrastructure and tools are not as mature.”

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Bruce V. Bigelow in San Diego contributed to this story.

With $11 million from a Series A that was announced yesterday, New York-based Enterproid is moving closer to a full release of its app, which allows users to set their smartphones for business or personal use. Comcast Ventures (NASDAQ: CMCSA) led the round, with participation from Google Ventures (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Qualcomm Ventures, the CDMA investment arm of San Diego wireless giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM).

Andrew Toy, CEO and co-founder of Enterproid, says his company has raised more than $13 million to date, including a seed round with investors that included NYC Seed, Genacast Ventures, and High Peaks Venture Partners. Toy says the latest funding will go towards expanding the current staff of 30—which is spread among offices in New York, Hong Kong, and London—and technology development.

Enterproid, founded in early 2010, created the Divide Platform, which lets users switch their mobile devices from personal to business roles. When in business mode, smartphones and tablets can be monitored and controlled by employers’ IT departments to only operate authorized apps and services. That allows employees to use their own devices on the job rather than rely on company-supplied smartphones. The user can switch back to personal mode at any time and resume full use of their devices.

“More people already have smartphones that they prefer to use on the job,” Toy says. “However, IT departments still have risk management and data-loss prevention needs.” In other words, employers can control the sensitive company information their employees can access from their devices by using the Divide Platform. The app can also restrict the use of functions that are not business-related. Translation: No more Angry Birds while on the job. “The company might turn off [certain] apps and SMS messaging because they are not used for work,” Toy says. Employees can opt-in to a feature that allows their employers to monitor when they switch back and forth between personal and business mode.

Enterproid has so far tested its app with companies in enterprise trials, Toy says, and plans to announce the full release for Divide Platform on Android devices in the coming weeks. An Apple iOS version of the app is in the works, but Toy would not give any timetable for its release.

Earlier this year, investor Qualcomm also named Enterproid as the grand prize winner of its second QPrize international venture investment competition. The incentive prize competition awarded a total of $250,000 to the year-old startup founded by three former Morgan Stanley IT managers.

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