You wouldn’t throw a fancy dinner party in a 7-Eleven. You wouldn’t hold a symphony concert in a subway station, or teach a meditation class on a tilt-a-whirl ride.

So why does anyone expect readers to read long articles on the Web?

Call me a traitor to my kind, but I think the World Wide Web is a terrible medium for long-form writing, precisely because of the mismatch between content and venue. The basic problem is that browsers are for browsing. Today’s commercial Web, where no morsel of exposition is more than one saccade away from a link, a logo, or an ad, is an impossible place to do any deep thinking.

No one designed this outcome. It’s just that the medium grew up so fast, evolving in less than 20 years from a hypertext file-sharing system at a European physics laboratory into today’s infinite digital bazaar. There wasn’t much time to think about whether it really made sense to translate our collective creative output into HTML, dump it onto Web servers, and pay for the whole operation with hyperlinked ads that, by their very nature, take readers away from whatever they’re trying to read.

Fortunately, there are folks scouting for ways out of this mess. Over the last few years, programmer-entrepreneurs like Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, have come up with a series of clever applications for separating or “parsing” the Web’s text from its context. This new menagerie of minimalism includes browser-based apps that zap the clutter around Web posts and replace it with a peaceful white background. It also includes mobile apps that let you store these pared-down posts for on-the-go consumption whenever you choose. And in this general category, I’d also include a few new curation services intended to spotlight contemporary and classic long-form writing and make it easier to consume.

I’ve picked 10 of my favorite reading apps and services for quick summaries on the following pages. If you’re like me and you spend a lot of time using the desktop or mobile Web, yet you also love getting lost in a long, thoughtful non-fiction article, then you’ll find some of these services to be life-changing.

But I wouldn’t say that we’ve reached an apotheosis—not by a long shot. At best, the Zen approach to repackaging Web articles is only one element of the solution, and it’s not one that will scale up very well. Already, critics are arguing that this kind of republishing is impolite at best, copyright infringement at worst. As soon as the big online publishers realize how many people are bypassing ads by saving parsed text to Instapaper and the other reading apps, they’ll freak out, the same way broadcasters did when TiVo came along. (It’s no accident that people have called the reading apps “DVRs for the Web.”)

What’s needed now are business models that would make publishers happy about providing more content in these ad-free environments. But we’re a long way from finding payment mechanisms that appeal to readers—let alone equitable ways to split up reading-app revenue between publishers, authors, developers, and platform providers, as a tussle last year between Readability and Apple illustrated (more on that below).

For now, damn the torpedoes—here’s my list of the 10 most interesting and useful reading apps and curation services. I’m going to describe the apps first, because once you understand those, the curation services will make a lot more sense. (For a single-page version of this article that you can export to one of the reading apps, click here.)

First app: Clearly.

… Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

I don’t think there’s ever been a textbook that made it this easy to be a good student. —Roger Rosner, vice president of productivity applications, Apple

Whenever a company as powerful as Apple, Facebook, or Google announces a big new product push, it evokes wonder and acclaim from some observers, head-scratching and horror from others, and the usual FUD from competitors. So I wasn’t surprised when Apple’s press event last week at the Guggenheim Museum—where it said it will sell low-priced iPad textbooks to high-schoolers through its iBooks store and give away the software needed to make them—was followed by a flood of criticism. But I was definitely impressed by the range and vehemence of the objections. I’ve spent part of this week trying to figure out where all the discomfort is coming from.

Here are a few of the reasons Apple’s textbook plans are doomed, misconceived, or just plain evil, in the eyes of the blogosphere:

A page from E.O. Wilson's "Life on Earth" for the iPad

This is all about one media giant trying to grab market share from other media giants. Education publishing is the most profitable part of the book business these days—maybe the only profitable part. So experiments with digital publishing have been cautious, and hampered by the lack of a great delivery device. Apple thinks it can hasten the technological transition, just as it did with music on the iPod, and grab a big slice of the profits in the process. The only difference this time around, say some observers, is that giants like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson have decided to join ‘em rather than fight ‘em.

This is all about selling iPads. This point of criticism has two variants. The first says Apple’s textbook push will fail because it’s insincere: the company really just wants to hook teenagers on Apple hardware, so they’ll buy the iPad 7 (with direct neural interface!) when they grow up. The second says it will fail because iPads are too expensive: schools can’t afford to supply every kid with a $499 gadget that they’ll probably just break, lose, or misuse.

Schools will never buy e-textbooks if they can’t own them. Apple’s textbook program is dead in the water because the company wants schools to purchase books using “volume vouchers.” The vouchers would come with codes that students can redeem in the iBooks store; the textbooks would then be placed into the students’ personal iTunes accounts. The objection here is that schools won’t be able to grok the accounting math or the concept that the books will actually belong to the students, rather than being passed along from year to year.

Authors will never write textbooks for iBooks if they can’t sell them elsewhere. The biggest post-announcement hullabaloo has been over the terms of the end user license agreement for iBooks Author, the free program Apple built to help authors, publishers, and teachers create their own multimedia textbooks. Under the agreement, iBooks Author users who want to give away their textbooks free can do so by any means they like, but those who want to sell their books for profit may only do so through the iBooks store, where Apple gets its usual 30 percent cut. That might seem like simple business logic—there’s no reason Apple should help authors create content for competing platforms like Amazon’s Kindle. But critics screamed bloody murder about the provision, saying that it was like Microsoft taking a cut for every novel written using Word.

Nothing new here—iBooks textbooks are an inferior ripoff of existing technologies. Apple is obviously late to the consumer e-book party, where Amazon still has a commanding lead. The criticism here is that Apple, despite its boastful press releases last week, hasn’t really reinvented anything about e-textbooks. Companies like Inkling, Kno, Chegg, Vook, Flatworld Knowledge, and Cengage Learning already offer systems for creating and publishing multimedia textbooks, and most of these books work on multiple platforms, not just the iPad.

Apple is trying to kill open e-book publishing standards. Ahh, standards. Few debates are as bitter, partisan, and unending—it’s the tech world’s version of “The Blue and the Gray.” Apple is an ongoing supporter of the open ePub format. Books using this format work on devices from a variety of manufacturers (one exception being Amazon, but that’s another story). But critics are incensed that e-textbooks created using iBooks Author are … Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

This is a story about what goes on under the hood of your smartphone or tablet device. It’s also about Yahoo, the troubled Santa Clara-CA based advertising and information giant. But Yahoo doesn’t make a single mobile gadget of its own. So what’s the connection?

It turns out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has ambitious plans to help publishers get more efficient about how they push content out to mobile devices. Specifically, Yahoo wants to become the new middleman of the mobile publishing world, giving media companies software that they could use to reach users of iPhones, Android devices, Windows phones, and other gadgets without having to bow to the programming approaches favored by their powerful makers—namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

To show how the system might work, Yahoo launched a fancy personalized news app back in November called Livestand. The app lets you select feeds from Yahoo partners like Forbes and ABC News and browse their stories on customized, magazine-like pages. It’s full of nifty user-interface elements like a 3D sideways-scrolling publication gallery. So far Livestand only runs on the Apple iPad, and at first glance it’s pretty similar to Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, and a number of other social news reader apps. But Livestand’s true importance is as a demonstration of what’s coming. The unique and potentially revolutionary thing about the app is its software design: it may look and act like a native iOS app, but it’s mostly written in Javascript and HTML5, the languages of the Web.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

How Yahoo pulled this off, and what it could mean for content owners who don’t want to put all their eggs in Apple’s basket—or Google’s, or Microsoft’s—was the focus of a long Xconomy interview last week with Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect for Yahoo’s platform technology group in Sunnyvale, CA. I’d heard Fernandez-Ruiz speak before about how Yahoo is betting on HTML5—the next-generation version of the markup language underlying all Web pages—as an antidote to overreliance on proprietary operating systems like Apple’s iOS. “If you only work in iOS you are bound to the rules of iTunes,” he said at a December talk in San Francisco. “Publishers want pixel-precise, ‘Cupertino-like’ experiences—and we can do that, but also make layouts fluid,” he said.

I wanted to know more about exactly how Yahoo can do this, so I invited Fernandez-Ruiz to my office and quizzed him about the state of mobile software architecture, the role of the Platform Technology Group inside Yahoo, and the true significance of Livestand. The story he told will be eye-opening for anyone who was under the impression that the future of mobile apps is in Apple and Google’s hands alone. Those two companies may control the lion’s share of the smartphone market at the moment, but if Yahoo goes through with plans to share the tools behind Livestand with outside developers, it could help push the siloed mobile-app world back in the direction of the open Web, where no single company is able to dictate how online software and services should work.

The first thing you need to understand about Yahoo’s publishing vision is that it’s coming from the Platform Technology Group. This is the same part of the company that created and then open-sourced key technologies that are now part of the Web’s infrastructure, such as Hadoop, which allows companies to run big, distributed software systems, and YUI, a library of JavaScript tools for building rich Internet applications. Yahoo built many of these tools as part of an effort that began more than half a decade ago to reduce what Fernandez-Ruiz calls a “technical debt.” The company was weighed down by all of the separate technologies its engineers had built to support services like Yahoo Music and Yahoo Movies, and it needed a central platform. “There was a realization around that time that we had to switch the company from being vertical to being horizontal, and start creating reusable technology that we could deploy across the whole place,” he says. “That is how Hadoop got started, for example.”

Technologies created by the Platform Technology Group, such as Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), also help the company and its partners tailor content to appeal to specific users based on their demographics. Fernandez-Ruiz says click-throughs increased 300 percent after Yahoo applied C.O.R.E. to … Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Now that it’s got a very Apple-like system in place—tablet computer paired with digital media—Amazon.com appears to be cranking up the volume on its online music service as well.

The San Francisco office of Amazon’s a2z research and development subsidiary is chock full of job ads for people to work on the Amazon MP3 store and Cloud Player, the e-commerce giant’s challenger to Apple’s long-dominant iTunes music platform. The company says it’s looking to “rapidly grow this team,” and the 21 job ads listed paint a picture of that growth.

Amazon’s looking for a lot of different skills. The company’s got ads for developers and engineers to tackle both the front-end software and mid-level networking systems. It wants designers to help polish the user interface, engineers to specifically take on overseas products, and program managers to oversee things. And, of course, mobile developers with experience in both Android and Apple’s iOS—a system that doesn’t currently have a native Amazon music player application.

Amazon’s MP3 store has been lurking around for several years, but has really picked up steam with the broad adoption of Android-based smartphones, which often have the Amazon store pre-installed. Its Cloud Player, which debuted last year, is bundled with the Amazon MP3 service.

(Trying to become a default music player for Android is another clever way that Amazon is yanking parts of that mobile operating system away from its sugar daddies at Google, which was late to the game with a serious digital music competitor last year. The more prominent example of Amazon’s bigfooting is now the Kindle Fire itself, which runs on an extremely customized version of Android.)

I’m not sure how much people will use the new Kindle Fire to listen to music, but that would fit into CEO Jeff Bezos’ concept of the Fire as “a fully integrated media service.”

That’s a key distinction. While Apple got into the digital music business to drive sales of its hardware devices, Amazon is plainly coming at the tablet and mobile-app markets as ways to just sell more stuff, whether that’s music or e-books or streaming movies or groceries (still in Seattle only!) or tube socks, for that matter. The longer you stay in Amazon’s digital storefront, the more they know about you, and the likelier it is that you’ll buy something from them next time.

iTunes could certainly stand to face a strong competitor here—from a user’s perspective, the software can be very difficult to navigate and sometimes feels like it’s barely been updated in years (just ask one of the whiners on this “I Hate iTunes” Facebook page.) But even with an integrated MP3 store and attached Cloud Player that makes listening easier, Amazon still has a ton of work to do if it hopes to make a dent in Apple’s huge music-selling lead—especially now that Google also is also on the case.

At the moment, Amazon and other runners-up in digital music are still fighting over scraps. Market research firm NPD Group has estimated that Amazon accounts for about 14 percent of the digital song download market, with Apple claiming about 70 percent. From the look of these hiring plans, Amazon is hoping to get serious about changing that balance.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

The speaker list for Mobile Madness 2012 keeps getting better and better. I’m still plugging away at the agenda, but wanted to post a quick update here.

Boston’s premier conference on mobile software and devices, if I do say so myself, takes place the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. The theme for Mobile Madness 2012 (Xconomy’s fourth annual spring mobile event) is “total mobility”—the idea that mobile is finally everywhere in our lives, and is impacting a much wider swath of technologies, businesses, and industries than ever before.

To that end, we are assembling a cast of compelling characters the likes of which I haven’t seen before in one place. Already confirmed are folks like Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Lars Albright, CEO of Session M; Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; and many more.

Here’s a sampling of new speakers we’ve just recruited for the event:

—Tom Burgess, CEO, Linkable Networks. Burgess, the former CEO of Third Screen Media (acquired by AOL in 2007), will join our distinguished panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” which will discuss our region’s rich history in mobile software and the areas in which local companies can continue to lead the world. The panel also includes the founders and former CEOs of m-Qube (bought by VeriSign), Enpocket (Nokia), and Quattro Wireless (Apple), all recent success stories.

—Ernie Cormier, CEO, Nexage. Cormier previously ran mobile gaming startup Zeemote, and before that was chief commercial officer of Virgin Media. He will bring his deep perspective on advertising platforms to bear on the recent explosion of business opportunities in mobile ads and marketing. Nexage is an up-and-coming company that represents some of Boston’s strengths in this sector.

—Chris Lynch, CEO, Vertica (acquired by HP last year). Lynch will talk about the intersection of mobile software and “big data” analytics—a hot topic as pertains to the business of mobile apps and advertising/marketing platforms. Lynch, a veteran of DEC, ArrowPoint, and Acopia, sees big data as one of the trends that will lead a resurgence in the Boston tech scene—and he’ll tell us how mobile businesses can harness this trend.

—Chuck Kane, Director, One Laptop Per Child Association. Last but certainly not least, Kane (who is OLPC’s former president) will give a special demo of the new OLPC XO-3 tablet computer that made such a big splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this month. Kane says he’ll also show us the XO-1.75 model (also a tablet), which is shipping now.

We’ll have more updates on Mobile Madness 2012, so watch this space. If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Finland’s Playmysong said in a press release it raised a seed round, $350,000 according to a spokesman, led by startup accelerator Lifeline Ventures and opened a New York office this month. The company plans to also set up shop in San Francisco in February. Playmysong’s Apple iOS and Web app lets users request songs to play at participating bars, nightclubs, hotels, and cafés, and simultaneously checks in their locations via Facebook and Twitter. The venues let the app’s users connect over WiFi or 3G wireless with the in-house iTunes playlists to make their choices.

Playmysong charges venues for premium services, which include the option to send messages with discount deals to users of the app after they request songs. Playmysong says its New York office will handle business development and marketing in the region.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

I have a lot of Apple gear, and I’m pretty happy with it. There’s just one problem. The better Apple’s stuff gets, the less patience I have for everyone else’s clunky hardware and software. Televisions and all the boxes we hook up to them are the worst offenders. No two TV manufacturers or set-top-box makers use the same remote controls or user-interface conventions, and they’re all painfully bad (except those developed for the hockey-puck-like Apple TV, which are decent but not great). That’s why I’m hoping that Apple will eventually follow through on Steve Jobs’ dying wish, in biographer Walter Isaacson’s words, “to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

While we await that glorious day, though, there are some existing technologies that can help ease the pain. In fact, there’s no lack of innovation in the area of video entertainment, as the acres devoted to new “digital home” technologies at this week’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attested. The problem is a lack of unification—meaning interfaces that would make it just as easy to find, buy, watch, and share great cable content on your TV as it is to find, purchase, consume, and share great book, magazine, or game content on your iPad.

For the last few months I’ve been following a TV technology startup called Dijit Media that’s both innovating and making an attempt at unification. They know Apple is coming, and that the Cupertinoids—unless they’ve completely lost their touch in the post-Jobs era—are likely to create a product that melds beautiful TV hardware, a slick and simple operating system, and a rich content marketplace. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based firm has built its own universal TV remote for iOS devices, and is using it to foster a new “second screen” culture.

Dijit's program listing and remote control on the iPad

The Dijit app, which controls your TV with help from a Griffin Technology gadget called the Beacon, marries channel listings from your cable operator with diverse Internet resources like Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix. It turns your iPhone or iPad into a kind of social command center for the living room—a place where you can browse listings, find out what your friends are watching, or rearrange your Netflix queue, all while sitting back in front of your big screen. It works with hundreds of models of TVs, DVRs, and set-top boxes, replacing the welter of remote controls and on-screen interfaces that come with those devices and moving all of the control and choice to the smaller but far more versatile touchscreen.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet fully integrate with Internet-TV boxes like the Apple TV and the Roku Player—and I’ll have more to say on that in a minute. But Dijit figures that the more progress it can make toward unification before Apple enters the market in earnest, the more Apple’s competitors will need to seek the startup out. “We think sooner or later Apple will come in, and it won’t be a ‘hobby,’ and it will show what’s really coming,” says Jeremy Toeman, Dijit’s chief product officer. “The Samsungs and Vizios of the world will need external technology to bridge the gap, and the only way to bridge it will be to go cross-platform. We think we can help the consumer electronics manufacturers adapt to a world where they are not as proficient at building the end-to-end ecosystem as Apple is.”

Dijit, originally known as UMEE, was founded in 2009 by former Nvidia and Riverbed Technology engineer Maksim Ioffe. It won funding in late 2010 from technology investor Alsop Louie, backer of streaming-video startup Justin.TV and mobile iOS game developer Smith & Tinker. The startup switched to its current name at CES in January 2011, which is also when it released the iPhone version of the remote-control app and announced its partnership with Griffin.

The $70 Beacon device, which is available at Apple Stores, bridges the communications gap between … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

2011 was a very big year for natural language processing (NLP)—the science of teaching computers to communicate with humans in plain English (or French, or Japanese). First IBM’s Watson beat Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Then Apple captivated mobile consumers with the iPhone 4S, which included an enhanced version of Siri, the voice-driven assistant born at Menlo Park, CA-based SRI International. Suddenly, the idea that computers might be just as good as humans at carrying out certain types of requests seemed a lot less far-fetched.

For companies trying to win corporate and consumer adoption of their own NLP technologies, this is a long-awaited moment. And one of the firms that thinks 2012 could be the year this market really takes off is VirtuOz, a Paris-born company that moved its headquarters to Emeryville, CA, in 2009.

Fresh off a $7 million extension of its Series B funding round last June, VirtuOz wants to conquer the worlds of online marketing, sales, and support with its virtual agents—personal question-answering systems designed to help customers get the information they want faster. The company has already picked up a few big clients. If you go to Symantec’s support pages, for example, you’ll meet Nathan, an expert on installing and troubleshooting the company’s antivirus products. AT&T has Charlie, PayPal has Sarah, video game rental site Gamefly has Ryan, and Michelin has—well, the Michelin Man. All are powered by VirtuOz.

VirtuOz CEO Steve Adams

CEO Steve Adams says his aim is to double the company’s client base in 2012. That’s a plausible goal, if research firm Gartner is correct in its prediction that 15 percent of the Fortune 1000 will be using virtual agents on their websites within the next three years. “We think we can get the lion’s share of that business,” Adams says.

VirtuOz is the brainchild of Ecole Polytechnique graduate Alexandre Lebrun and co-founders Callixte Cauchois and Laurent Landowski. Back in the mid-2000s, Lebrun believed that the day was fast approaching when computers would be able to understand humans simply from their speech or writing. “Alex would tell you that the ultimate evolution of the technology is going to be the personal virtual assistant who drives both our business lives and our personal lives,” says Adams. But as a near-term commercial application, Lebrun decided to focus on a more limited idea, the virtual agent—a system that sits within a company’s website and represent its brand in real-time communications with consumers.

In its simplest form, a virtual agent isn’t much more than a fancy search engine that can parse natural-language queries and find preformulated answers, the way the original Ask Jeeves did. But Lebrun and his cofounders wanted to go a couple of steps farther. First, they thought a virtual agent should be able to detect and respond to a user’s actual intent. If an auction site visitor types “I want to cancel my bid,” for example, they thought the agent should be able to deduce that they’re talking about a specific bid in an active auction, and show them what to do. That meant designing virtual agent software that could be tied deeply into a company’s knowledge bases and website functions.

Second, Lebrun and his co-founders wanted interactions with their agents to feel like conversations, with a personality at the other end who can recognize tone and mood and ask clarifying questions. That’s why VirtuOz gives most of its agents names and faces. Sometimes they’re photos of models, as with Symantec’s Nathan (see upper right), but usually they’re cartoon renditions. If this brings to mind images of Microsoft’s infamous Bob and Clippy, forget that comparison—VirtuOz’s characters are much less nosey.

For the first four years of its life, VirtuOz focused on the French, German, and U.K. markets. Travel companies and wireless carriers … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

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 »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

What is the future of electronic books and digital publishing in Boston? We might be getting a glimpse of it today.

The news is that Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, is acquiring Threepress, a Boston-area software and consulting shop specializing in tools for digital publishing. Terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but it’s probably fairly modest in size.

What makes it interesting is that it’s a story of homegrown, bootstrapped talent in a burgeoning field—e-book reading and publishing—that has finally come of age.

Safari (not to be confused with the Apple browser) provides an on-demand digital library of thousands of books and videos on software, IT, professional development, and other techie and business topics. The 10-year-old company, which has just under 100 employees, is headquartered in Sebastopol, CA. But it started in Boston, and some of its leadership team, including CEO Andrew Savikas, is based here.

As part of the Threepress acquisition, Safari is planning to move into a new office space in Boston that will have about 10 employees. “We are looking at space with room to grow,” says Savikas, an O’Reilly Media veteran. “I expect we’ll be hiring in Boston, especially on the technology side.”

Threepress is a profitable, four-person tech shop founded by Web developer Liza Daly in 2008. Daly previously worked at Digitas and iFactory, and she originally started Threepress to do consulting and build tools for academic publishers and websites. As is often the case for startups, she found an unexpected niche. [Disclosure: Daly is married to Dan Schmidt, my longtime Honest Bob bandmate.]

Daly entered the e-book world by writing Bookworm, an open-source, browser-based reading system for e-books using the EPUB format. At first, she saw books as just part of the content of academic websites. But her work got the attention of Savikas at O’Reilly Media, which decided to host Bookworm on its site in 2009. That year Savikas also recruited Daly to speak at a big … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

How will the media habits of families, especially those with young kids, evolve in the era of the tablet computer?

I got an interesting perspective on that question over the holidays, which I spent with my brother and his family in Alaska. Jamie and his wife Jen Athey have two loveable children, aged four (Kieran) and 13 months (Lucy). My parents were also visiting, so the Athey-Roush house on Moose Mountain, 15 miles outside of Fairbanks, was temporarily home to five adults and two children, plus two dogs and two cats.

The weather was standard for central Alaska in December—a frigid -10F to -40F—so there wasn’t a lot of outdoor activity. There is a TV in the house, but given that it’s located in the room where the toddler sleeps, it’s almost never used. In any case, there is no cable TV service that far from town, so there’s not much to watch besides DVDs and Netflix. (Internet data gets beamed in wirelessly from a transmitter on nearby Ester Dome.)

What we did have at hand, however, were four tablets (three iPads and a Motorola Xoom) and three smartphones (one iPhone and two Motorola Atrix Android phones). So conditions were ideal for observing how a high-density group of family members uses their mobile devices for entertainment, reference, learning, communication, and just goofing off.

It goes without saying that Kieran and Lucy already know their way around touch-driven devices. Kieran can’t read fluently yet, but he knows exactly which icons open his favorite apps. He can flip virtual pages, start and stop videos, and tap on words in lists. To his generation, non-touch interfaces will feel antique. Indeed, when we took the kids into town to visit the public library, Kieran had no idea how to use the trackballs attached to the ancient Windows computers.

He did, however, leave the library with three actual books. His favorite: The Z Was Zapped, a book of abecedarian mayhem by illustrator Chris Van Allsburg.

There is an idea circulating on the net that tablets somehow spoil kids for other types of media. You may have seen the video that surfaced on YouTube last fall called “A Magazine Is an iPad that Does Not Work.” The video, which been viewed about 3.4 million times, shows a 1-year-old girl deftly navigating an iPad, then trying futilely to interact with the pages of a paper fashion magazine using pinch-and-spread gestures like those pioneered for the iPhone. To the Apple-fanboy dad who made the video, it showed how “magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives.”

But if I could offer one conclusion based on my visit, it would be this: the notion that tablets will kill off older, more static media is poppycock. Kieran’s bedroom has shelves full of books, from Dr. Seuss to Richard Scarry to Roald Dahl to Dorling Kindersley’s obsessively detailed nature and engineering books. His parents read to him at least twice a day, at naptime and bedtime. And that’s not counting all the time they spend reading with him and Lucy, usually curled up on the couch or the easy chair with a physical book. When reading with Kieran, the only problem is finding books around the house that he doesn’t already know by heart. Lucy, who isn’t old enough to comprehend what books are, nonetheless loves to flip through them.

At the same time, tablets offer beginning readers elements that books can’t. Jamie and Jen bought the Xoom so that Kieran could use a Flash-based early reading program from Seattle-based Headsprout. (Flash doesn’t work on the iPad.) Headsprout uses cartoon games to keep kids motivated while they learn to recognize and sound out words. In the lesson segment Kieran showed me, he advanced a monkey character through a jungle by … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Ever since Xconomy added New York to its stable of cities on April 1, we have found plenty of companies to write about that are making waves in tech, biotech, and cleantech. We’ve met tech entrepreneurs who’ve caught the fancy of New York’s thriving venture capital scene, and scientists in the bowels of Big Pharma laboring to invent the next blockbuster drugs. We’ve visited with CEOs in the rapidly growing biotech sector in and around NYC, and profiled so many new startup incubators we’ve lost count of them all.

To wrap up our first (partial) year in the Big Apple, we’re counting down the top 10 Xconomy topics, as measured by traffic. Why topics as opposed to stories? You’ll have to read all the way to the end to find out.

Our most popular topics of the year were….

10. Arno Therapeutics
Arno (OTCBB: ARNI), based in Parsippany, NJ, is what’s known as a “virtual biotech,” because it’s developing three drugs with just a handful of full-time employees who outsource almost every step of the research and development process. But it’s a mighty qualified handful—Arno is staffed by veterans of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, and Medimmune.

9. IncubateNYC
When New York’s leaders put out a request for proposals for a tech incubator in Harlem, entrepreneurs Marcus Mayo and Brian Shields responded with IncubateNYC, a multifaceted plan to bring technology startups to an area of the city that could use an economic revival.

8. BioLeap
The pharmaceutical industry is desperate for new technology to improve drug discovery. Pennington, NJ-based BioLeap believes it has a solution in a tech platform designed to predict how tightly experimental drugs will bind to their disease targets.

7. Lenddo
What do you get when you combine social media with financial services? Lenddo believes you get a great way to market small loans to the developing world’s emerging middle class.

6. Delcath
NYC-based medical device maker Delcath Systems (NASDAQ: DCTH) has endured endless hassles from the FDA over its drug-device combo to treat liver cancer, and investors have been bailing out … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Our partnership with the folks at WGBH continues as we join forces again this week to bring you the Xconomy Report. In this week’s innovation news, TripAdvisor goes public and independent, breaking ties with Expedia. Seattle-based Amazon.com makes plans for a Boston-area office, which will open in Cambridge early next year. And much more, including news from Akamai, Nuance, and Metamark Genetics.

In case you missed it this morning, have a listen below. The Xconomy Report airs every Friday at 7:49am on 89.7FM.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Much has been written on the battle between Apple and Amazon. Certainly Steve Jobs’ passing has made us all reflect, and perhaps on a much deeper level than before, on the man and the empire he created.

In many ways, the companies are more alike than they are different. What makes them both remarkable players is their ability to take the long view. Their business strategies focus on what customers will want a decade from now, not just next holiday season. Because they look at the future this way, both companies are comfortable breaking big rules along the way. And to date, they’ve both delivered, in ways that have exceeded even what their biggest supporters expected. Which is perhaps what makes this next round of battle most interesting.

No doubt both Apple and Amazon each have amassed an increasing share of the consumer wallet over the last few years.

Apple’s strategy has been to focus on a specific type of consumer: one who is comfortable with a higher price point, is keen on sleek design, and is drawn to an integrated software/hardware solution that’s easy even for your mother to use. Not to mention that along the way Apple built a brand cachet that started with its Think Different campaign and remains unmatched today. All of this means that Apple might be losing the bottom 30 percent of the market. But do they care? Recent figures confirm that Apple is capturing more than 50 percent of the profits with just 5 percent of the computer market. Next quarter’s projections have them snapping up even more with 60 percent. And that’s without even trying to account for the value of Apple’s extended ecosystem.

Amazon’s strategy, on the other hand, is to redefine entire markets, like books. In its software and its irresistible services, it takes a steady, go big or go home approach. They’ve created the world’s biggest electronic marketplace and are counting on the investment its consumers have made in the Amazon ecosystem: their Kindles, their Amazon MP3s, their Prime subscriptions, and their streaming movies.

Enter the Kindle Fire, the first real competitor to the iPad.

How will the Kindle Fire launch affect Apple’s 80 percent share in the tablet market—and could it in the end only help to spur interest in the iPad? In the short term Amazon will face big losses—as much as $20 per tablet—but the move will spur sales and help win over the low-end segment of market. It’s a gamble, but one Amazon is smart to make if it wants to compete with the iPad—and start-ups like Spotify—on music and movie downloads.

But is the tablet the important thing, or is it the services to which the device connects you? In the end I believe the digital economy is about … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

The iPad 2 won’t be the only tablet turning up as a holiday gift this year: it’s finally got some real competition in the form of the more affordable Kindle Fire. But let’s face it: you don’t buy (or give someone) a Kindle Fire because of the apps. The device is designed primarily as a portal to Amazon’s digital content, including books, music, and movies.

The iPad 2, on the other hand, continues to be the ideal tablet for app lovers, and the iTunes App Store still boasts the largest collection, by far, of apps optimized for the tablet form factor.

Last holiday season, I brought you a list of 10 paid apps to consider as gifts for new iPad owners. I decided to make it a tradition this year, so I’ve come up with 15 new recommended apps, most of them published within the last year. To make my list, an app has to be absorbing and well-designed, and must make especially good use of the iPad’s multimedia capabilities and touch-driven interface.

If you know someone who’s going to need to load up their iPad with apps starting December 26, you can get them an iTunes gift card, or pre-pay for specific apps using the “Gift This App” option in the iTunes App Store. (You’ll find it under the down arrow next to the “Buy App” button.)

A note for current or future iPhone owners: several of the apps in my list are also available for the iPhone, including Fahrenheit, all of the Fotopedia apps, Naturespace, Our Choice, Scrabble, Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP, and Wunderlist.

	NEXT APP >>
	1. Da Vinci HD — Overdamped, $0.99 — A bare-bones but inexpensive app for browsing more than 100 paintings, studies, and notebooks by the original Renaissance Man. Overdamped publishes similiar apps collecting the works of nearly 70 other artists, from Cassatt to Velazquez.

… Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Acquisitions and IPO announcements dominated the deals news in New England this week.

—Boston-based Third Rock Ventures put $34 million in Series A funding into Ember Therapeutics, a startup that’s developing drugs to fight obesity in a new way. Ember, also of Boston, is harnessing new understanding of the bodily tissue known as brown fat, which can help mammals burn off the more commonly known white fat tissue.

—Cerulean Pharma inked a $15 million Series D investment from new investor CVF, an affiliate of Henry Crown and Company, as well as existing backers Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock, Lilly Ventures, Lux Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Cambridge, MA-based Cerulean’s lead drug is a so-called nanoparticle, a tiny chemical package designed to work its way into cancer cells and kill them.

—IBM made its 20th acquisition in the Bay State since 2003, with the purchase of Burlington, MA-based Emptoris, a maker of supply and contract management software. Emptoris has 725 employees across the globe and will become part of IBM’s software group. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

—Coronado Biosciences  (NASDAQ: CNDO) started trading on the Nasdaq on Monday at an opening price of $6.50 per share. The formerly New York-based biotech, which moved to Burlington, MA in August, took an unconventional path to going public, by registering its private shares as common stock, rather than undergoing an IPO.

—Coskata, a cellulosic ethanol developer backed by Boston-area venture firms Advanced Technology Ventures and Greatpoint Ventures, filed documents with the SEC indicating its intent to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. The Warrenville, IL-based startup has raised $80 million in venture funding since founding in 2008, and is also backed by GE, Khosla Ventures, and Blackstone Group.

—Woburn, MA-based Excelimmune took in $12 million in financing from an undisclosed private investor to help fund the development of its molecules focused on fighting infectious diseases, like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

—And in the week’s more shocking news, two speech software makers that had been battling in court over allegations like patent infringement and commercial bribery announced they would become one force. Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is acquiring Cambridge-based startup Vlingo for an undisclosed sum. The deal enables the two to team up as players like Apple and Google and are focusing more on voice-enabled applications for mobile phones.

—A deal that had been talked about for more than half of this year finally went live. Newton, MA-based online travel company TripAdvisor officially began trading on the Nasdaq on its own (NASDAQ: TRIP), after being spun out by Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE).

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

It’s hard to believe that two companies that have spent the last three years suing each other really mean it when they say that together they will be stronger. I’m talking about speech recognition competitors Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo and Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications.

The two software makers announced Tuesday that Nuance would acquire the younger, smaller Vlingo. It came as a shock, just months after Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo hit Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) with a lawsuit that included allegations like commercial bribery and unfair competition.

On the surface it looks like a potential last resort option for the smaller startup after years of costly legal battles (covering patent infringement, false advertising, and more). But the marketing machines of Apple and Google and their newest voice-controlled smartphones, such as the iPhone 4S, could mean a host of new threats in the speech software space, causing the formerly embattled companies to join forces to survive, a number of Boston mobile experts have said.

All pending lawsuits between the companies are now “stayed,” Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan told me, meaning that they’ll be put in limbo until the acquisition closes, at which point they’ll be officially dismissed. Grannan has previously said he’d be open to an acquisition by Nuance if the terms were favorable. In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Grannan declined to discuss how much Nuance paid for Vlingo, but did want to talk “the timing of the transaction.”

The shotgun marriage of Nuance and Vlingo comes two months after Apple introduced its iPhone 4S with the built-in voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri, which can handle everything from searching for weather information to calling a cab.

“That has caused just a legion of new competitors to enter the space,” Grannan said. His company makes voice-recognition software that exists as a standalone application sold in the Google Android, Blackberry, and Apple iTunes app stores, and built into devices like Samsung mobile phones.

Facing other voice recognition startups doesn’t seem as menacing, but confronting one major Internet giant does. “It’s more scary for us that Google is going to double down its investment to try to catch Apple’s Siri,” Grannan said. “Both sides realized that we’ve long since passed the value of competing. If we’re going to survive in this marketplace we need to cooperate.”

Mountain View, CA-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) recently acquired Clever Sense, the maker of a mobile assistant app called Alfred that makes recommendations on nearby bars and restaurants. The purchase has been pegged as part of Google’s strategy to take its share of the voice-enabled virtual assistant space.

“Rather than spend the next year in legal battles, [Nuance and Vlingo] decided to join forces on this,” said Mark Lowenstein, managing director for the consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem. The acquisition … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

The United States seems stuck with a two-party political system. We don’t always have the same two parties—the Whigs were replaced by the Republicans in the 1850s, for example—but there doesn’t seem to be space in the American psyche for a third major player to take root.

Could something similar be true of the Web browser market? For a long time, the two main competitors were Netscape and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Then it was Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox. Now Google’s Chrome browser is rapidly displacing Internet Explorer—and while we’re technically in a three-browser market at the moment, IE’s user numbers are declining so steadily that it seems only a matter of time before we’re back to a two-browser world, probably defined by Firefox and Chrome.

And yet…

And yet there have always been second-tier browsers, beloved by small factions of users. There’s Apple’s Safari, of course, and Opera. For years, my favorite browser was Flock, which was acquired and discontinued by Zynga in early 2011. And about a year ago, another new player came onto the scene, with ambitious plans to be the new “social browser.”

It’s called RockMelt, and it’s loaded with features that let users tap directly into their social networks, especially Facebook, and communicate with friends. The Mountain View, CA-based startup behind the new browser has direct ties to people who laid the Web’s foundations: it has raised $40 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, as well as Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures.

So far, about 1.4 million people have downloaded RockMelt, and several hundred thousand are active users, according to CEO Eric Vishria, who stopped by Xconomy San Francisco yesterday (see video below). Those numbers are small even compared to Safari and Opera, let alone Chrome, Firefox, and IE. But Vishria says the company’s aim is to give Web surfers so many unique and useful features that RockMelt will eventually displace one of today’s Big Three browsers. “While there have been, historically, two and right now three players that have massive market share, the players have changed a lot,” he notes. “Every few years someone new comes along: IE, Firefox, Chrome, and now us.”

To leapfrog Safari and Opera and displace IE or Firefox or Chrome, RockMelt needs to do two things, Vishria says. One is to create “a massively differentiated product” that “looks different than anything else.” It’s already well on the way to doing that: RockMelt’s distinguishing features are its “Friend Edge,” which shows which of your Facebook friends are online and instantly reachable, and its “App Edge,” where users can quickly access favorite outside websites and services. It’s also unusual in that it sports big buttons that let users compose Tweets or Facebook status updates, or share the pages they’re viewing with followers or friends.

The other mission is to turn RockMelt users into evangelists. Already, two-thirds of users have recommended the app to at least one friend, but Vishria says the company is planning features that will make it easier for users to tell more friends about the browser.

I’ve been using RockMelt as my default browser since November 2010, when it was first released in a private beta test. The company opened the beta to the public in March, and tomorrow it’s rolling out a new “Beta5″ release containing a bunch of new features. Most software updates these days don’t mean much—in the cloud era, almost every piece of consumer-facing code undergoes constant revision. But taken together, the elements in tomorrow’s release show how RockMelt intends to compete in the coming year.

In the video below, Vishria gives a quick tour of the new features in RockMelt Beta5. Story continues after video.

In Vishria’s world view, the giants of today’s Web are Google and Facebook, and RockMelt is “an ambitious mouse dancing between these elephants.” Over the next 12 months, he believes, Google and Facebook will square off in three main areas: identity, information consumption, and communications. “For us, it’s really exciting to see this happening, because on all three of those we were first,” he says. “We were the first to have a … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: