A consumer tech company has scored one of the bigger equity financing rounds in the Portland area this fall. Beaverton, OR-based Avnera, a fabless semiconductor company that makes chips for wireless audio applications, has raised about $8 million in equity financing out of a total offering of $10 million, according to a regulatory filing with the SEC. The investors in the current round were not specified, and e-mails seeking confirmation of the deal sent to Avnera and previous investors were not immediately returned.

Before the latest round, Avnera had raised about $42 million in funding. Its original investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Jafco Ventures. Other investors joined in later rounds, including Intel Capital, DAG Ventures, Altien Limited, Panasonic Ventures, Polycom, and BestBuy. Most recently, Avnera raised a $14.7 million Series C round in September 2007.

The current filing lists as company directors Rob Chandra and Umesh Padval of Bessemer, John Walecka of Redpoint, and John Miner, formerly of Intel Capital (now with Pivotal Investments).

Avnera was founded in 2004, and is led by CEO, chairman, and co-founder Manpreet Khaira. Its technology involves advanced circuit design techniques to put things like radio frequency electronics, power management systems, audio data converters, and programmable signal processors onto a single silicon chip. That can help make audio accessories cheaper and have better sound quality in computers, iPods, home entertainment systems, and mobile devices. Avnera’s customers include Logitech, Creative, Panasonic, Vizio, and Sanyo.

Back in June, Eric Rosenfeld of Capybara Ventures and the Oregon Angel Fund told Xconomy that Avnera was one of the leading lights in Portland’s semiconductor scene. “They’re doing very well,” he said at the time. “Hopefully they’ll be the one that revives people’s confidence locally.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009’s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

Whether the fall is back-to-school season for you or not, there’s always more to learn. In last week’s column I outlined three fun weekend projects involving new technologies for digital self-expression. My suggestions covered art (digital “finger painting” with an iPhone app called Brushes), writing (”lifestreaming” with Posterous and Friendfeed), and photography (building three-dimensional photographic spaces with Photosynth). This week I’ve got two more digital projects in mind for you, this time in the areas of podcasting and computer animation. Next week, I’ll finish up with maps and virtual worlds.

I’m writing this three-part column because I think it’s an exciting time for anyone who’s interested in consumer-level digital media tools. Not only are we seeing a profusion of inexpensive new gadgets for capturing media—witness Apple’s announcement Wednesday that the new iPod Nano will have a built-in digital video camera—but there are also many new Web-based services where creators can edit, enhance, share, and promote their media creations. The only way to keep up with all these new technologies is just to jump in and try them. So let’s get back to it:

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo

When podcasting first took off four or five years ago, most podcasters tried to emulate radio hosts, kitting out their podcasts with fancy musical intros and outros and other audio goodies. Just to experiment with podcasting, you needed a pricey microphone and recording rig, audio editing software, and a working knowledge of RSS, iTunes, and other distribution methods. But thanks to a bit of good old technological progress, the barriers are now much lower. In fact, producing a podcast these days can be just about as easy as making a phone call. Which means that dictating a few off-the-cuff thoughts on your mobile device and uploading them to the Web is becoming a realistic alternative to blogging and other more familar forms of Web-based communication.

This is precisely the point of AudioBoo, a UK-based service that I profiled in July. If you live in the UK (or if you’re willing to splurge on an international phone call), you can call AudioBoo from any phone and record some thoughts, then publish the the recording straight to AudioBoo.fm, which is basically a giant community audio blog featuring recordings or “boos” from all AudioBoo users.

But if you have an iPhone, you can use the nifty AudioBoo app to do the same thing, without the phone calls or the attendant charges. The app has a voice recording function that lets you talk for up to five minutes. It then uses your wireless data connection to upload the finished boo to the AudioBoo.fm, along with a photograph and a map of your location, if you wish. Fans can listen to your boos at the site, or they can subscribe and get new boos delivered via RSS or iTunes. The AudioBoo site also provides some handy code that you can use to embed your boos in your blog.

In fact, by doing a bit of social media marketing to promote your boos, you could turn AudioBoo into your own personal audio publishing empire. Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

The human voice is making a comeback. For a while, it looked like e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, RSS, and all of the Internet’s other texty goodness might permanently eclipse the old-fashioned phone call and other voice-driven forms of communication. Even the spread of cell phones hasn’t halted the tide of text—more than a third of mobile phone owners use their phones primarily to send SMS text messages rather than making actual calls, according to research from Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo.

But a stream of new mobile-device applications designed for voice input might be restoring the balance. This month I’m excited about two examples in particular: the new Voice Memo app that showed up with Apple’s iPhone 3.0 operating system, and AudioBoo, a nifty audio recording app for the iPhone with a surprising origin: Channel 4, Britain’s publicly funded alternative television network. Along with several other programs, these apps are turning the iPhone into a handy platform for “personal podcasting,” an emerging genre of amateur digital publishing that’s as convenient and spontaneous as Twitter but, because it’s actually a person talking, feels more human.

[You can click here or skip to page 3 to hear an AudioBoo version of this article.]

No apologies, by the way, to non-iPhone owners. With iPhone 3G now priced at $99 and the 3GS starting at $199, there are fewer and fewer excuses for not trying out Apple’s marvelously powerful uber-gadget.

First, a word about Voice Memo on the iPhone. Many mobile phones come with a voice recording function these days, so it wasn’t a surprise to see Apple add one when it updated the iPhone operating system last month. It’s fairly basic: it lets you make new audio notes and review your old notes, all of which get copied to your iTunes library whenever you sync. There’s also a basic editing feature that lets you trim a voice memo by lopping time off the beginning or the end. Best of all, there’s a “share” button that lets you send out copies of voice memos via e-mail.

I really like the sharing feature, which is great for sending people quick voice messages, and has two advantages over conventional voicemail. First, the sound quality is far superior. Voice memos are monaural, but they don’t get compressed the way your voice does when you’re leaving a message for someone over a cellular voice network (compression that’s redoubled if the recipient is retrieving their voicemail from their own cell phone). Second, e-mailing a voice memo is a non-sneaky substitute for voicemail for those times when you want to leave a voice message but you don’t want to risk actually talking to the person. (Slydial offers a similar capability by connecting you directly to someone’s voicemail—but it’s not foolproof, as it sometimes makes their phone ring anyway.)

In a pinch, you can also use the iPhone Voice Memo app to record audio for publication on the Web. It clearly wasn’t designed for this purpose, as the app records memos using the relatively voluminous .m4a audio format, and doesn’t allow you to transfer memos over a certain size by e-mail. (I’m not sure what the limit is, but I was unable to send a 5-minute, 12-megabyte file.) Also, it buries the synchronized copies of your voice memos deep in the iTunes folder of your computer, where it’s difficult to find them. But as a test, I located one memo—a few thoughts that I recorded on a drizzly afternoon at the Japanese Garden at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts—and used iTunes to convert it from .m4a to the more compact .mp3 format, which made it small enough to post on my personal blog at Tumblr.

But if you really want to use your iPhone as a tool for audio publishing, there are much simpler options.

For a long time, my favorite iPhone audio recording app was iTalk, the coolest feature of which is that …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Thanks to ongoing advances in liquid crystal display and plasma screen technology, flat-panel TVs keep getting flatter. Sharp’s new 46-inch Aquos X model is only 1.35 inches deep—thinner than three iPhones stacked together. But while all this thinness may be sexy, it comes at the cost of decent sound: the less room a conventional loudspeaker has to resonate, the less volume and fidelity it can manage. So millions of people are taking home their giant new 1080p HDTVs, hooking them up to their Dish Network receivers and Blu-Ray disc players, and discovering to their discontent that the built-in speakers sound like tinny little laptops.

But what if the screen itself could double as a TV’s loudspeakers? Then manufacturers could build televisions as wide and as thin as their display technology allows without sacrificing a decibel of volume or a hertz of frequency range. And this, in fact, is exactly the idea that a startup called Emo Labs is pitching to the likes of Sony, Samsung, Sharp, LG, and Toshiba.

I went out to Emo headquarters in Waltham, MA a couple of weeks ago to meet the company’s executives and see (and hear) their prototypes, and I’m here to report that if the idea takes off, it could completely change the way we experience DVDs, cable TV, satellite TV, and console video games. You know how when you go to a theater, the dialogue and music sounds like they’re coming from the movie screen? That’s because the screen is perforated, and the loudspeakers are actually right behind it. You get the same effect from Emo Labs’ “Edge Motion” technology—except that the sound in Emo’s device is coming from a thin, transparent layer of plastic between you and a TV’s display. The plastic vibrates like a drumhead, driven by actuators on either side, producing bright, room-filling, and very loud stereo sound.

So far, the company has built prototype “Edge Motion” membranes that measure up to 42 inches diagonally. Allan Evelyn, Emo’s vice president of business development, says the company is six or seven meetings deep into negotiations with certain Asian consumer electronics companies, talking about ways to get Emo’s technology built into future flat-panel TVs. If Emo wins a contract, it could not only help TV manufacturers start to reverse the trend toward tiny, tinny speakers, but it could lead to a nice payoff for the five-year-old startup, which is backed by Polaris Venture Partners, the Venture Capital Fund of New England, and a handful of angel investors.

But it’s an uphill battle, especially at a time when manufacturers beset by price wars and economic crisis are averse to anything that would make their products more expensive. Emo estimates that building in its membrane would add 10 to 15 percent to the cost of a television, making a $1,000 device into an $1,150 one. “If you have a choice between a quarter-inch-thick TV that sounds like a notebook computer, or a TV that sounds really good, I know what most consumers will choose,” says Jason Carlson’s, Emo Labs’ CEO. “But in what [the manufacturers] are doing, from a product planning point of view, I wouldn’t say they have fully embraced that yet.”

Emo Labs has gone through its share of twists and turns to get to this point. The company is a 2004 spinoff of Natick, MA-based Manifold Products, a “venture engineering” firm that helps to build businesses around novel electromechanical technologies. Lewis Athanas, a 20-year veteran of the Boston-area audio technology companies like Boston Acoustics, had approached Manifold in 2003 with an idea for a transparent plastic sheet that would fit over the screen of a computer monitor, producing sound under the influence of piezoelectric actuators along the sheet’s left and right edges.

Piezoelectric materials produce electricity when a stress is applied—and conversely, they change their shape when an electric field is applied, which is why they’re widely used in loudspeakers. By vibrating in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the plastic sheet, the actuators in Athanas’s system cause the sheet itself to flex slightly, moving the air in front of the sheet and producing sound waves. By moving independently, the actuators on the left and right sides of the sheet can give rise to stereo sound.

Manifold helped Athanas turn his lab concept into a prototype, and raised angel funding for a company to commercialize the idea. As the startup’s original name, Screenspeaker, suggests, …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group has led a $4.4 million funding round for Animoto, a Web software startup based in New York that lets people automatically create professional-quality videos and slideshows from photos and music. Other investors in the round include Seattle-based Amazon, Palo Alto, CA-based SoftTech VC (run by Jeff Clavier), and Bruce Livingstone, the founder of iStockphoto.

The current round includes an undisclosed amount of financing already announced in May 2008, from Amazon and angel investors. Before that, Animoto had raised a $600,000 seed round from friends and family. So the company has raised an even $5 million since it was founded in 2006.

There’s a lot more to the story. The lead investors in the deal are from Seattle, but that’s only part of the local connection. It turns out that “based in New York” doesn’t really do justice to the roots of Animoto. The company was started by four friends who went to Bellevue High School in the Seattle area: Brad Jefferson, Jason Hsiao, Stevie Clifton, and Tom Clifton (the latter two are brothers). Jefferson, who is now Animoto’s CEO, went on to school at Dartmouth College and got his start as an intern at Bellevue, WA-based Onyx Software, where he began working full-time in 1998, and quickly moved up the ranks.

“He was a rock star,” recalls Onyx founder and Dartmouth alum Brent Frei, now with Bellevue-based Smartsheet. “He’s super smart but very humble. It’s amazing the things he does right naturally.” Frei notes that Stevie Clifton was also a superb Onyx intern. “They have assembled a fantastic team,” he says. (Interesting note: Jefferson was the only one of the four founders who didn’t play in an indie rock band around Seattle—he was more into sports.)

Jefferson got promoted at Onyx in 2000 to run a services team in San Francisco. There, he was roommates with Hsiao when Onyx was acquired by M2M Holdings in 2006. Jefferson opted for the severance package, and the very next day, Hsiao pitched him on the idea of Animoto. The basic concept was an online service to make it easy for people to create “animated photos” to capture the mood of events like weddings and graduations in customized slideshows. Animoto’s software creates moving slideshows that match the beat and feel of the accompanying music you select. A hip-hop track will make the picture movements and transitions fast and edgy like an MTV video, while a classical piece will make the slideshow more staid and elegant.

Animoto finished its first working prototype in December 2006, and started getting user feedback over the next few months. At the time, the company used a traditional hosting provider, but it couldn’t handle huge spikes in traffic. “As I started running the numbers, it was, ‘Oh crap, if we’re successful, we’re gonna fail,’” Jefferson says. So Animoto talked to Amazon Web Services about hosting its applications and data, and spent several months enhancing its product and “pushing everything into AWS,” he says, just in time for public beta trials in August 2007. “It was really a good decision from a capital expenditure perspective. From Day One, we were able to scale to the world.”

Meanwhile, Jefferson was sowing the seeds of future venture investment, even if he didn’t …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Last week I learned about a local music software company, iZotope, whose existence somehow escaped me back in 2007 when I was writing my story “Boston: The Hidden Hub of Music and Technology.” But the Cambridge, MA-based company has been making professional audio production software and digital signal processing hardware since 2001, and has gained special notice in the last year for a series of nifty music apps for the Apple iPhone.

The latest version of iZotope’s iDrum app, built around Depeche Mode’s new album Sounds of the Universe, came out May 11; the $4.99 program lets iPhone owners use touchscreen controls to assemble drum hits, synthesizer sounds, and vocal snippets from the album into original musical patterns or “instant remixes,” to use the company’s phrase. The remixes can’t be recorded or shared, but they’re fun the play with. (The whole thing is a little hard to explain—I recommend that you just watch the video below to see what I’m talking about.)

For Depeche Mode, the Sounds of the Universe edition of iDrum is an innovative way to market the electronica-heavy album to a tech-savvy audience of mobile device owners. For iZotope, it represents a new kind of foothold in the music industry, where labels are always looking for new ways to reach listeners and offset the seemingly irreversible decline in album revenues. Last week I interviewed iZotope’s content manager, Nick Dika, about how the project came about, and what it’s been like for an audio technology company to get into the mobile app business. A transcript appears below the video.

Xconomy: Tell me a little bit first about when iZotope was founded, and how your business works.

Nick Dika: We were founded in 2001. The founders, Mark Ethier and Jeremy Todd, came out of MIT. There are a few different elements to our business. The central part of it is professional audio—software and hardware for recording and broadcast studios and people making music at home. Meaning, music creation and audio production tools. However, we also do a lot of audio DSP [digital signal processing] licensing to companies like Adobe and Sony and Avid, for doing things like audio effects, time stretching, pitch scaling, and all of these under-the-hood things that people making multimedia software need these days.

X: How long have you been making mobile applications, and how did the Depeche Mode app come about?

ND: We launched our first iPhone app, the first edition of iDrum, in August 2008. We’ve had a number of editions and different releases. A few were our own branded editions—a hip-hop edition and a club edition, using sounds we created in-house. Our first licensed edition was with the Ministry of …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Bose, the Framingham, MA-based audio products firm, has cut 1,000 employees due to a decline in consumer spending, the Boston Herald reported this morning. The daily tabloid reports that the cuts equal about 10 percent of the firm’s global workforce and will impact areas of the organization such as manufacturing, yet the privately held company has declined to say how many workers are expected to be laid off in the Bay State. We’ve updated our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker accordingly.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Woodinville, WA-based Loud Technologies (NASDAQ: LTEC), a pro audio and music company, has announced it is delisting its common stock from NASDAQ, effective in February. Loud cited management time and costs to maintain the listing, limited trading, and its 2008 financial results as some of the reasons for the move.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

It’s a big week for Boston-area mobile software companies looking to leverage the reach of national telecommunications firms. Yesterday Waltham, MA-based Quattro Wireless announced that Cox Newspapers has hired it to produce mobile-friendly versions of the websites for 19 Cox newspapers. Today, AT&T announced that its wireless subscribers can access a library of video, audio, and live radio content provided by Bedford, MA-based Buzzwire.

When we last checked in with Buzzwire in July 2007, the company had just begun a beta trial giving free Web-based mobile access to a variety of streaming content, from news podcasts to videogame trailers, at m.buzzwire.com. The company said then that it expected to ink deals with national cellular carriers to offer subscription-based access to streaming media directly from an application on the home screens of subscribers’ phones, without having to go to a website. Its deal with AT&T is the first such agreement.

The Buzzwire mobile media application, which can be downloaded from the AT&T Media Mall, requires a $4.99-per-month subscription and works on most 3G handsets available to AT&T subscribers (but not the Apple iPhone). The application gives users access to “Today’s Buzz,” a list of the most popular video clips from the Web, and also lets them create personal media channels mixing their favorite video, audio, and live-radio content, all streamed over AT&T’s data networks.

Buzzwire users who signed up during the beta trial will continue to have free access to the Web-based content. But starting today, new visitors to m.buzzwire.com will be limited to a two-week free trial, according to Buzzwire. At the end of the trial, they’ll have the option to continue the service through AT&T at $4.99 per month. All of Buzzwire’s content will still be available free to Web surfers using laptop or desktop computers at app.buzzwire.com.

“Buzzwire is all about giving people snippets of time in their busy schedules to stay on top of the latest videos, find the information they need, steal a moment to connect with a friend over a shared interest or simply tune out the world and enjoy,” Buzzwire CEO Andrew MacFarlane said in a statement about the AT&T deal. “We’re excited to work with AT&T to deliver a compelling and relevant mobile application that allows its customers to stay connected to the people and things that matter most.”

Mark Collins, vice president of consumer data products for AT&T’s wireless unit, said in the statement that Buzzwire is “a nice complement to our extensive suite of social-networking and video applications.” Alongside the Buzzwire announcement, AT&T also said today that it’s working with Los Angeles mobile startup Juice Wireless to offer cellular subscribers access to a video- and photo-sharing system called Juicecaster.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Most radio stations these days have websites where you can listen to streaming versions of their broadcasts. But few have taken the added step of making individual shows available online—in part because there’s little financial incentive, unless they can sell online ads against that content. That’s where EveryZing of Cambridge, MA, thinks it can help—and the company said today that Cox Radio (NYSE: CXR) will use its software to make it easier for consumers (and search engines and advertisers) to find specific radio clips on the websites of all 68 of its FM and AM radio stations nationwide.

We profiled EveryZing, a BBN Technologies spinoff that uses speech-to-text algorithms to create transcripts of Web video and audio content that can then be indexed by search engines, last July and again in February. Up to now, EveryZing has mainly been working to help big media portals like Boston.com monetize their video content. But it has also had a long-running deal with Entercom Boston’s WEEI Sports Radio Network, where, according to EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde, the number of unique users listening to the station’s online clips has increased 16-fold over the last 18 months.

“The paradigm with radio on the Internet to date has been, bring it up in a streaming media player, minimize it, and listen,” says Wilde. “That’s not very interesting. It’s just another pipe. We’re trying to bring a ‘lean forward’ metaphor to the consumption of radio.” Once a company has installed EveryZing’s system, Wilde explains, customers can discover specific clips through web searches and jump precisely to the point of interest within those clips. “That’s what the Web is for and that’s what users want,” says Wilde.

The Cox deal is the biggest deployment to date for EveryZing’s software. “By partnering with EveryZing, we are able to leverage the unique content assets from our terrestrial broadcasts on the web and significantly enhance how that content is discovered, presented, and monetized,” said Gregg Lindahl, vice president of interactive technologies for Cox Radio, in EveryZing’s announcement of the agreement. Cox is in the process of acquiring an additional 18 stations that will give it a presence in 19 radio markets nationwide, including Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio, and Tampa.

Wilde says EveryZing is on a path to keep growing quickly. “As a company we’re having the right conversations and ultimately winning the right deals with established media companies, who are in great need of solutions to transition their businesses successfully into the Internet age,” says Wilde.

But only recently, says Wilde, has the company developed its software to the point where it can be scaled up to work across companies as big as Cox. “If they had come to us six months ago to do a 68-station rollout, it would have crushed us. But we’ve built out the platform with this use case in mind—conglomerates with dozens of units that need to be serviced.” Along with the Cox deal, EveryZing today introduced a new management interface called RAMP—for “Reach, Access, Monetization, and Protection”—that lets clients control how content is presented to search engines and consumers and how advertising should appear alongside that content.

Comments | Reprints | Share: