Just one month after New York-based Buddy Media raised a remarkable $54 million to support its Facebook-management platform for consumer brands, another Big Apple company has started up with a Facebook marketing solution—this one for the book industry. Odyl, founded by veterans of HotJobs, rolled out a software platform today that’s designed to help publishers and authors connect with readers.

I was particularly interested to sit down with Odyl’s co-founder and CEO, Michael Taylor (pictured above), a few days before the official launch. That’s because I’m an author, and suffice it to say, I failed miserably to find an audience on Facebook for my book about the anti-aging industry, Selling the Fountain of Youth (Basic Books 2010). When I met with the Buddy Media folks in August, I learned that more than 200 brands were using the company’s software to put up impressively flashy Facebook pages—and attract thousands of consumers to them—in a relatively low-stress way. I kept thinking, “Someone should offer a product like this for book publishers.”

And now someone has done just that. Odyl, founded in late 2010, is marketing a software package that’s designed to make it easy for publishers and/or individual authors to put excerpts and reviews of their books on Facebook, along with special features, such as giveaways, reader quizzes, and rewards for fans. Major publishers such as HarperCollins, Penguin Group, and Random House have already tried the product. The parent company of my publisher, Perseus, is an early customer, as are authors Katie Couric, Suze Orman, and Janet Evanovich.

Taylor declined to reveal how much the company has raised in seed funding, except to say that angel financing was provided by John Corcoran, founder and CEO of Trinity Partners, a Waltham, MA-based life sciences consulting company. Odyl is taking in revenues from licensing fees, which range from $250 a month to $1,000 depending on the customer, Taylor says.

Taylor gave me a demo at Odyl’s platform at the company’s small offices in Soho. He pulled up the Facebook page for Harper Teen’s paranormal series Pitch Dark. The page includes … Next Page »

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Vivek Ranadivé is one of those CEOs who was born with a silver quote in his mouth. He’s great on television, he gives entertaining speeches, and interviewing him is like bathing in a river of aphorisms and metaphors. I enjoy visiting Ranadivé at his company’s Palo Alto, CA, headquarters not just in order to catch up on the news about his software firm TIBCO, but to hear which directions his thoughts have been taking him. Lately those thoughts have had a lot to do with books and basketball.

On September 5, Crown Business will release The Two-Second Advantage, co-written by Ranadivé and Kevin Maney, which, as its subtitle explains, is about “how we succeed by anticipating the future—just enough.” In the book, as in most of his public remarks, you can see Ranadivé taking the fundamental idea that unifies TIBCO’s software products—-the value of sharing information within and between computer systems in real time, the better to identify and act upon significant events and trends—and stretching it to see how it applies to a growing range of real-world problems, from telecommunications to macroeconomics to managing a professional sports team.

Which leads to Ranadivé’s other current obsession. Last year the software magnate became co-owner of the Golden State Warriors, the San Francisco Bay Area’s NBA basketball team, joining a new ownership group that includes movie producer Peter Guber, Kleiner Perkins partner Joe Lacob, and real estate investor Erika Glazer. Ranadivé was already known for his interest in basketball—see Malcolm Gladwell’s 2009 New Yorker article on underdogs, which largely focuses on Ranadivé’s strategies for coaching his daughter’s National Junior Basketball team—and it’s no surprise at all that his theories about the best way to run a professional team reflect his theories about the best way to run a business, i.e., gaining an advantage through data analysis.

Those subjects and others ran through my last conversation with Ranadivé in July. Here’s an edited summary.

Xconomy: So, what have you been thinking about lately?

Vivek Ranadivé: I’m really excited, because I have a mission, which is to say that if you get the right information to the right place at the right time and put it in the right context, you can make the world a better place. Every day I see more and more evidence of that. So the theme continues.

One of the things I like to say is that science is dead. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand why something happened, or you can just know that if A, B, and C happened, then D will happen. Examples of this are frequent. That plane that crashed of the coast of Brazil—if they had connected the dots, they would have known that the flight was going to end in disaster and made a turn and avoided the crash. In cybersecurity, you can try to build a better lock, but somebody will also find a way to pick it, or you can do what the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security have done, which is to … Next Page »

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Technology changes quickly, and sometimes, so does my own mind. In January, I wrote a dismissive column about two e-book titles tailored for the Apple iPad, Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters. My main beef was that the apps, which had been lauded by the New York Times as “superbooks,” contained more glitz than substance. With its rich multimedia capabilities, the iPad has the potential to transform the experience of reading, but these titles fell so far short of the mark that I feared they’d permanently turn off the growing number of people who would like to read books on this powerful tablet.

In the past few months, however, publishers have introduced at least three new titles that bolster my confidence in the future of iPad e-books. Ironically, only one of the three is by a living author: Al Gore’s Our Choice, a book in which the former vice president urges people to take action to combat climate change. The other two are multimedia reworkings of literary classics from the 20th century: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Together, they provide a great survey of the interactive techniques publishers can use to make a book’s core textual content much more interesting and memorable. In fact, these three titles are so good that I think the publishing industry can look to them for an early set of best practices for building tablet-based books, which I’ll attempt to outline below.

And of course, they’re fun to read. With prices ranging from $4.99 for Our Choice to $13.99 for The Waste Land, these books might seem pricey compared to the typical 99-cent mobile game. But they deserve a place in any serious iPad aficionado’s app collection.

I’m thinking now that my January column was premature. It’s easy to forget that Apple’s remarkable tablet device is only 15 months old. It takes time for designers, developers, and publishers to figure out a new platform’s strengths—and when it comes to books, they’re competing with a medium that’s had half a millennium to mature. So I think it’s natural that we’re only now seeing some real innovation in the category of standalone, “appified” e-books (as distinct from the more conventional static texts that you can easily download and read using Apple’s iBooks app or Amazon’s Kindle app).

For sheer multimedia richness, Our Choice is the standout among these three e-book apps. The book is littered with “wow” moments right from the opening screen, which shows a spinning Earth, complete with the reader’s location as a pulsing blue dot. There are slick videos, arresting full-screen photographs, and extensive narration from Gore himself. One memorable information graphic shows 2,300 years of world population statistics; as you scroll forward through the years by swiping your finger from right to left, the chart’s y axis compresses to dramatize the exponential growth since 1800.

Nearly every image, chart, and graphic in the book includes similar interactive elements, and they’re all tied together by a long, scrolling ribbon of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen that functions in place of a table of contents. It’s a tour de force in interaction design the likes of which I haven’t seen since the golden era of CD-ROM edutainment titles in the mid-1990s.

It would be wrong, of course, to focus on the multimedia bells and whistles to the exclusion of the book’s message. The app’s main text is lifted directly from the print edition of Our Choice, which first appeared in late 2009. It’s a solution-oriented sequel to Gore’s alarming 2006 film/book/lecture An Inconvenient Truth. The main point is to survey the technology and policy steps governments and their citizens must take soon if we’re to have any hope of slowing greenhouse-gas emissions and heading off catastrophic changes in world climate. If the interactive elements actually got in the way of this critical story (as they do in Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters) I’d be worried. But in practice, … Next Page »

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Kno, the Santa Clara, CA-based e-textbook startup founded by Chegg co-founder Osman Rashid, today announced the release of a beta version of Textbooks, an Apple iPad app that will serve as one platform for Kno’s library of digital textbooks. The app includes social commenting features, higlighting and sticky notes, and other study aids, and Kno says the catalog of discounted e-textbooks accessible from the app includes 70,000 titles. In April, after abandoning plans to build its own e-book reading device to compete with the iPad, Kno raised $30 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Intel Capital, and Advance Publications.

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ThredUp, the San Francisco-based startup with an online platform where parents can swap kids’ toys, clothes, and books, said today that it has raised $7 million in new venture funding. Redpoint Ventures led the round, and Redpoint partner Tim Haley will join the company’s board. Trinity Ventures and former eBay CEO Brian Swette also participated in the round, which brings ThredUp’s total funding to $8.7 million.

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Seattle-based digital media and marketing company Smashing Ideas has been acquired by Bertlesmann AG, which is pairing the 15-year-old company with its Random House book publishing unit. Terms were not disclosed. The companies said in a release that Smashing Ideas would keep its Seattle headquarters, along with a branch in the United Kingdom, working with current clients and continuing to recruit new ones. The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley says that means Smashing Ideas’ 70 Seattle-area employees will stay on board. Smashing Ideas has been working with Random House since last fall to develop mobile apps for books, starting with two children’s titles. Paid Content’s David Kaplan notes that Smashing Ideas’ e-publishing unit “is headed by the co-creator and developer of the Alice for the iPad,” an interactive retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Xconomy’s Wade Roush reviewed that title and some other attempts at “superbooks” earlier this year.

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As we dive into a new week in Seattle, Amazon Web Services‘ big cloud computing crash is still reverberating. The server-farm failure took out countless small sites and apps that rely on Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) market-leading service, and the company got low marks for its communication while attempting to fix the problem over several days. I talked to a cloud-computing expert and an entrepreneur about one interesting element of the outage: Why some big-name companies, with enough resources to protect themselves, were still taken down by Amazon’s problems. It was also fun to see Seattle startup BigDoor quoted in a New York Times story on the Amazon outage.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech and innovation news:

—Zillow had been making public overtures toward an initial public stock offering in the past few months, and made good on those hints by filing paperwork for an IPO—the first by a Seattle-area tech company since mid-2010. I talked to investors and entrepreneurs in the region to see what they made of the move and of some of the idiosyncracies in Zillow’s preliminary pitch. There’s a long way to go before any Zillow stock actually hits Wall Street, but early stage tech folks were feeling pretty bullish about what the filing means for the near future and a warming investment market. Just a few days later, RFID maker Impinj filed its own papers for an IPO—at up to $100 million, it’s nearly twice the size of Zillow’s target. PopCap Games also has targeted this fall as its preferred time to go public.

—I took a closer look at some of the inventions being cooked up over at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention and patent company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Plenty of people already know about IV’s TerraPower nuclear reactor, Photonic Fence mosquito-killing lasers, and of course the cookbook on steroids, Modernist Cuisine. But in this tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab, we got up close with some under-the-radar projects—ones that haven’t generated big headlines (yet), but are still showing huge potential. Two of the projects are in the arena of global health, a topic that Intellectual Ventures investor Bill Gates knows well—lab head honcho Geoff Deane says Gates’ ideas on major problems inform some of the projects.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made sweeping changes to its pay system, including a bigger bonus budget and shifting more money into cash rather than stock. This was a clear response to all the Silicon Valley companies moving into the Seattle area with the express intent of hiring engineers and other tech talent— Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Twitter, and others have branch offices or … Next Page »

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Even in his hometown, Paul Allen can seem like an enigma. His influence is everywhere, from sports teams to politics to real estate development. But because of his famously private ways, Allen is only occasionally seen and very rarely heard.

That made last Friday’s long public interview at Town Hall an interesting event. It was part of the publicity tour for Allen’s new autobiography, “Idea Man,” which already has garnered significant national press coverage. With that backdrop, many in the audience surely had a good idea of the headline material from the book itself: High school and startup days with Bill Gates, and semi-shocking tales of his co-founder’s ruthlessness in business.

So perhaps the most revealing thing about this appearance was the sense you could get of Paul Allen as an actual person, not some impossibly rich abstraction who builds crazy-looking museums, owns enormous yachts, and loses vast sums of money on investments.

“As everybody knows, I’m a pretty private person and I don’t do a whole lot of this. So I may not be here next year,” Allen said with a faux-sarcastic tone, drawing laughs from the audience.

I did sense that people weren’t quite sure what kind of guy he’d be at the beginning. Would he be stilted and geeky? Off-putting and too private? But the audience warmed up to Allen pretty quickly, helped along by his humorous asides and generally relaxed bearing.

Seattle is forever stuck with a little-brother mindset, not wanting to rocket past its slower small-town roots but also carrying a chip on its shoulder about not quite measuring up as a great American metropolis. People who live here want their representatives to be world-class, iconoclastic, giving, and not too stuffy. I thought Allen gave them some of what they were looking for.

The main message that came through, one that others have found in the book, is that Allen sees himself as a big-picture creative thinker—I guess the title “Idea Man” gives that away pretty quickly. In his Microsoft days, he portrays that quality as the necessary leavening element to Gates’ hard-driving, relentlessly focused business sense and work ethic.

“I basically get very, very excited about the creative process and creating things and having ideas,” Allen told interviewer Todd Bishop, of GeekWire. “When you see those ideas realized, it’s just a wonderfully rewarding thing.”

Although the autobiography is pretty clearly aimed at getting more credit for the success and innovations of Microsoft’s early days, Allen acknowledged that big ideas aren’t much use without the right team of people to make things happen. He also said there was a bit of luck involved in Microsoft’s genesis, … Next Page »

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The Seattle tech scene got its first entrant in what looks like a coming wave of initial public offerings when Zillow made its intentions official, filing paperwork with federal regulators Monday for a future stock sale. In its filing, the online real-estate listing and mortgage database said it would seek about $52 million from the stock market—not a huge sum for an IPO, but significant for the area’s entrepreneurship and investing community nonetheless.

Zillow has seen increasing competition in the online real-estate sector, including vocal San Francisco-based startup Trulia, which recently boasted that it was assembling an “IPO-ready management team.” HitWise reported that Zillow’s traffic ranked No. 3 among real estate websites, one spot ahead of Trulia and just behind Yahoo—where Zillow’s listings appear under a partnership.

There was plenty more action elsewhere on the Seattle tech beat:

—PopCap looks like it’s also ready to hit the public markets. The Seattle casual game company recently went on a media and investor blitz in New York, talking up its growth, revenue, and position in the hot gaming market. We gleaned a lot of interesting bits from the various interviews that PopCap gave, including an assertion that it generated $100 million in revenue last year, an increase of about 20 percent from the year before. The company’s leaders also discussed difficulties in getting investors to understand the difference between its development compared to a console game publisher, and the attractiveness of hitting the public market before social-game giant Zynga.

—Speaking of Zynga, I headed over to the San Francisco company’s new Seattle office to look at the digs and hear some remarks from founder and CEO Mark Pincus on the company’s plans for its new Northwest beachhead. In one word: Hiring. The maker of addictive Facebook-based games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” was not shy at all about inviting techies in the packed crowd to send in their resumes—Pincus gave out his e-mail address and spent quite a bit of time talking one-on-one with people afterward about jobs.

—Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen continued drumming up interest in his new autobiography, “Idea Man,” with an interview on 60 Minutes that delved into some of the early Microsoft stories and Bill Gates arguments detailed in the excerpt published recently in Vanity Fair. For a guy who hasn’t … Next Page »

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When you’re one of the richest people in the world, your autobiography gets the deluxe publicity rollout. Exhibit A is billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, whose new book, “Idea Man,” is about to hit the market.

The first excerpt, adapted in Vanity Fair, caused tons of headlines, mostly for its depiction of a heated fight with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer—Allen accused them of trying to dilute his stake in the company while he had cancer, just before he left day-to-day duties behind.

Now comes the follow-up interview with 60 Minutes, which teased the segment today with a small story and video on its website. The interview was conducted by Lesley Stahl.

Among the glimpses we’re seeing now: Allen says the book was motivated not by revenge, but a desire to air his side of some major events in business and technology. “I just felt like it’s an important piece of technology history, and I should tell it like it happened,” he said.

Asked whether he and Gates will eventually have a bit of a showdown over what’s in the book, Allen said: “I don’t know about screaming, but I’m sure it’ll be a heated discussion.”

He also talks fondly about Gates visiting him while Allen was sick a second time with cancer. This goes to an element of the Vanity Fair excerpt that I thought was missed by a lot of the first-day coverage: Despite any sour feelings about old fights, it’s clear that Allen has some still-glowing feelings for his old partner. Like any good relationship, it’s complicated.

“There’s a bond there that can’t be denied, and I think we both feel that,” Allen said.

CBS said Stahl also digs into Allen’s recent wide-ranging patent suit against an array of big tech companies, and reports that Allen found the negative reaction “surprising, because I invested a huge amount to develop these ideas.” (60 Minutes also apparently got to check out the Octopus.)

Allen will be giving a live interview in his hometown as well, later this month at Town Hall Seattle. GeekWire’s Todd Bishop, who has covered Microsoft for years dating back to the days of the printed Seattle P-I, will do the questioning.

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A really interesting variety of startups made their initial pitches to the broader investing crowd yesterday at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum. The 12 presenters represented a wide array of sectors, from food to retail to software services and—seriously—nuclear fusion power. “I don’t think we could have imagined a more diverse slate, in every sense of the word, than what we have today,” NWEN executive director Rebecca Lovell said.

The event itself was the culmination of a long coaching process that readies a select group of companies and entrepreneurs for their turn in front of the investor audience. And there’s a real emphasis on showcasing many different kinds of businesses—which is notable in an investing scene (and media landscape) that can seem dominated by techies.

Each of the 12 companies on display had five minutes to give a pitch (with slides), and then five finalists were grilled by a panel of venture capitalist judges: Mark Ashida from OVP Venture Partners, Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners, and Bill McAleer from Voyager Capital.

The winner was Guide Analytics, a mobile-connected bracelet and monitoring system that keeps track of edema, a swelling that can lead to hospitalizations, particularly in heart patients. Chief executive Deborah Kessler’s previous work includes time at Rosetta Informatics and NASA—”My advisers tell me I’m supposed to say, ‘I am a rocket scientist,’” she quipped. The device itself boasts low manufacturing costs, even though it has a battery, transmitters, and sensors. Investors did question whether relying on elderly heart patients to have a new smartphone for transmitting critical medical data was asking too much. Kessler said it was possible, however, to work with patients who have a lower-end cell phone. The company won a year of free office space from Martin Selig Real Estate.

I put together these snapshots from the four other finalists, and you can check out the longer list of participants over at NWEN.

—Snuggle Cloud is a private, one-on-one social network for couples—especially those in long-distance relationships. Co-founders Emily Marshall and Kiran Gollu were actually in separate long-distance relationships themselves. Their idea is that, although Facebook is hugely popular, people are not going to post a bunch of lovey-dovey stuff in the wild where anyone else can read it. Snuggle Cloud is … Next Page »

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A juicy excerpt from billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen‘s new autobiography caused plenty of chatter around Seattle and the broader tech world this past week, and considering that he’s starting a book tour, I guess that’s the point. The stunning vignette, in the excerpt published in Vanity Fair, was a scene in which Allen writes that he caught co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer conspiring to dilute Allen’s stake in the company while he was undergoing cancer treatment.

That blow-up, in Allen’s retelling, basically sealed his departure from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Gates called Allen a friend in a reply statement, but did say he may remember events differently. In any case, I kind of thought the attention to that very noteworthy episode actually obscured the more nuanced, diverse portrait that Allen sketched of the two entrepreneurs’ relationship. Basically, it emerges as a complicated partnership—over the years traced in that writing, Allen is by turns amazed by, suspicious of, and angry at Gates. In any case, the whole book should be good reading.

—Amazon.com continued its march into new cloud-based businesses by rolling out a music player and storage service tied to Android devices. There was a lot of focus devoted to the spat that Amazon apparently kicked up by not securing licenses from the record labels. But the even more interesting angle may be that Amazon is leapfrogging ahead of other big-name competitors—especially Apple—by taking personal music collections up to the cloud for storage and playback in a variety of places. Basically, it looks like Amazon is trying to position its freemium service as iTunes for Android—which is a pretty nice market to pursue.

—I sat down with Don Merino from Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s unique patent-licensing and invention firm in Bellevue, WA, to get an inside take on how the company went about setting up a first-of-its-kind modern, large-scale middleman market for intellectual property. Merino was a pivotal player in this tale, having personally purchased about half of the first 1,200 patents that Intellectual Ventures secured—the portfolio is said to number above 30,000 at this point. This topic gets more energy every week, it seems, particularly in mobile—just this week, Google announced it was going big in a bid for Nortel patents in a bankruptcy auction.

—We also checked in with the folks at Seattle’s Zipline Games, which rolled out its new Moai development platform and cloud-hosting service for professional game developers. Moai’s main selling point is that it tries to bust down language barriers in game building by letting developers use Lua, a familiar game coding language, and translating that work into the different formats needed to make mobile games … Next Page »

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Vanity Fair got the first-excerpt scoop on Microsoft co-founder and Vulcan head honcho Paul Allen’s new book, “Idea Man,” and one element in particular is drawing most of the attention today: Allen’s depiction of a past rift with longtime friend and co-founder Bill Gates over Allen’s holdings in the company.

The Wall Street Journal has a nice follow-up story, based partly on a glimpse at the book provided to two of its reporters, that delves into the reaction among inner-circle Microsofties to that and some of the other Allen recollections.

The semi-sensational, rich-guy fight is doing its job in generating public relations buzz around Allen’s new book—after all, he’s setting off on a worldwide promotional tour. And I guess it makes perfect sense to choose a very Gates-centric portion for the first leak, because to the wider world, Paul Allen is often That Other Guy from Microsoft, who hasn’t worked at the company in a long time.

I do agree with other commentators that the vibe you get from reading today’s excerpted recollections is Allen seeing himself as a bit of a thinker and big-brother type to Gates’ hard-charging, brilliant entrepreneur: “Each time I brought an idea to Bill, he would pop my balloon … And he was right. My ideas were ahead of their time or beyond our scope or both.” But there’s also a bit of humility woven in there that I didn’t expect.

Allen clearly is still in awe of Gates’ mental prowess from their school days, even while he’s amused by the social oddities that Gates’ focus could produce.

I was particularly struck by Allen confronting his own intellectual limits at Washington State University, not exactly an Ivy League school, upon being totally perplexed by a blackboard full of equations: “It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was O.K. with being a generalist.” I guess it’s worked out for him so far.

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Chegg, one of the first movers in the online textbook rental business, has attracted some tough competitors like BookRenter, so it can’t afford to stop innovating. And this week the company is out to show that it hasn’t.

The Santa Clara, CA-based startup today unveiled an overhauled website that ties its rental business together with two recently acquired services, CourseRank and Cramster. Now Chegg’s collegiate customers will be able to peruse course catalogs, see ratings for professors, add classes to their schedules, and get homework help from the same site where they get their books. Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig says the overhaul is a bid to put the venture-backed company’s brand in front of college students every day, rather than just the “maybe four days a semester” when they’re ordering and returning books.

CourseRank, which offers a directory of courses at 600 college campuses, is free; Cramster, the tutoring site, is a freemium service with tiered pricing that kicks in after the first 14 days. By integrating the three services with its catalog of 4.2 million textbooks, Chegg has built “the beginnings of a platform to personalize around the student, the course, and the school,” says Rosensweig. “This is the beginning of the opportunity for us to be more relevant more often.”

As we’ve reported, archrival BookRenter also has plans to use turn its rental operation into a platform for reaching students with more products and services, including e-textbooks that might be available by the chapter. The San Mateo, CA-based startup just raised $40 million to beef up its operations and go after its larger competitor. Chegg is comfortably ahead in this race—its customer base is about five times larger than BookRenter’s, and Chegg has raised at least $150 million all told—but Rosensweig says the company must keep reinventing itself. “What I’ve learned in my 10 years in Silicon Valley is that if you don’t continue to innovation and build and invest, somebody else is going to come around and build something,” says Rosensweig, who has been CEO at Chegg for about 13 months.

While six-year-old Chegg may look from the outside like a textbook rental company, its larger mission has always been to help students “save time, save money, and get smarter,” Rosensweig says. The ability to rent a textbook for just one semester for a third or less of the cover price has “for obvious reasons become an extremely popular proposition,” he says. Most of the company’s capital so far has gone to buying books and building the Web-based platform that allows students to order them from the company’s Kentucky warehouse. But now it’s enhancing that platform with technology acquired last year from CourseRank and Cramster. Tabs for the two services appear at the top of the new Chegg website, right alongside the “Rent Textbooks” tab.

CourseRank was created by five students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “What they have built is a service that lets students rate their professors, read the ratings, actually schedule their class, and find out who else is in the class,” says Rosensweig. “It’s the beginning of a social education platform, if you will. So now Chegg is also in the business of … Next Page »

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You’re a technology entrepreneur—more power to you. You’ve built a great product that solves a real problem—congratulations. Unfortunately, that’s only half the battle. Maybe even less than half. Now you have to make the world believe in you and your product.

That’s the part of entrepreneurship that many innovators and startup founders aren’t prepared for. They’re far more comfortable whiteboarding and coding and QA-testing than pitching and persuading. Xconomy is a startup too—our code just happens to be human-readable—and I know how long it took me to come up with a brief, compelling way to explain our company’s vision. At first, I bridled at the task; I’d been brought up to think that journalists don’t market, they report and write. Eventually I realized that it takes something extra to win over busy readers who already have many information sources to choose from. These days, everyone is a marketer—and why shouldn’t they be? Only a monopolist is spared from selling.

If Guy Kawasaki had written Enchantment a few years ago, I might have been quicker to pick up this fact. Subtitled The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, the book reached stores on March 8, and it has already hit the New York Times bestseller list in the category of hardcover advice and how-to books. I think it’s a profitable read for anyone who cares about the way they, their company, or their product are perceived.

If you’re an entrepreneur and don’t already know who Guy Kawasaki is, you might want to rethink your dreams of tech-industry stardom. While working for Steve Jobs at Apple in the 1980s, he practically invented the profession of product evangelism. Those were the days before anyone knew what a Macintosh was good for—and one of the stories in Enchantment is about the way Apple, by staying close to its own customers, discovered the machine’s first true killer app, desktop publishing. Kawasaki went on to become a seed-stage venture investor through his firm Garage Technology Ventures, and his company Nononina created the news aggregator sites Truemors and Alltop.

It’s safe to say that Kawasaki’s previous business books—especially the dot-com tract Rules for Revolutionaries (2000) and the early-stage startup bible The Art of the Start (2004)—have inspired and guided thousands of fledgling entrepreneurs. But given the technological advances that make building products and starting companies even easier than in the recent past, and given the enormous hopes now hanging on small businesses as engines of economic recovery, both of those books feel a little dated now. I think Kawasaki picked a good time to revisit what is clearly his central passion: helping other entrepreneurs be more successful.

Enchantment, in a nutshell, is about selling your invention or cause without selling your soul. Kawasaki defines enchantment as “the process of delighting people with a product, service organization, or idea.” And while “delighting” people certainly sounds benign enough, Kawasaki acknowledges that there’s a dark side to this art, and that plenty of people get enchanted into doing things that are bad for them—in fact, there’s a whole chapter about how to resist other people’s efforts to enchant you. While I don’t want to oversimplify Kawasaki’s message, I think his secret for enchanting people in a good way is pretty straightforward: be a mensch.

What does that mean? Smile, for one thing. Don’t be judgmental or intimidating. Speak clearly. Say yes a lot. Pick a cause that you’re truly passionate about, because that passion will be contagious. Share what you have, listen to people, answer your e-mail promptly, and be a “baker” (somebody who works to make the pie bigger) rather than just an “eater.”

These are all fairly simple, even old-fashioned ideas (although it takes real commitment to live by them), and Kawasaki lays them all out in the first three chapters. People who’ve mastered such habits are probably 80 percent of the way to succeeding as entrepreneurs. If people like and trust you, after all, they’ll be far more willing to work with you or try out your products.

The rest of the book is a compendium of specific ideas about how to launch a cause, how to overcome skepticism, and how to … Next Page »

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Author, consultant, and venture capitalist Geoffrey Moore has written a half-dozen books—his latest comes out later this year—including the classic “Crossing the Chasm,” an analysis of how businesses can push through the deadly barriers to broad adoption.

This Friday, he’ll be a keynote speaker at the Washington Innovation Summit sponsored by the Technology Alliance. Booking him may not have been as difficult as you might expect, since Technology Alliance director Susannah Malarkey is actually a cousin of Moore’s.

We checked in with Moore ahead of the event to get a preview of his speech, the lowdown on his new book “Escape Velocity,” and some thoughts on how his chasm metaphor applies to today’s rapidly expanding tech world.

Moore says his speech for the summit focuses on the need to spread social network-type technologies into the middle management layer of business. He argues that business has relied for too long on the baseline computing power that undergirds modern commerce, without building up new systems that mirror those available to regular consumers.

Think of it this way: Jane the middle manager spends her weekend buying gifts on Amazon.com, reviewing restaurants on Yelp, getting a hotel deal on Priceline, drumming up better customer service through Twitter, and checking in with her high school friends via Facebook.

Then she gets back to work, and she’s armed mostly with some basic computers, e-mail, and some instant messaging or project-management software. There might even be a conference call or two.

“So the question at some point in the venture community was, ‘Well, are we just going to invest in cleantech and biotech, or is there another wave here for IT?’” Moore asks. “The next big wave of investment in enterprise IT will be around this consumerization of enterprise IT. And it’ll be around, in particular, helping companies communicate, coordinate, and collaborate across company boundaries.”

Why are the folks in the middle so important? Moore says it’s because the organizational model of business has been flipped on its side. Instead of operating as a cog in a vertical monolith, middle managers are now straddling huge, globally scattered processes and need information tools and connections to make things happen with their peers elsewhere. Some big companies and startups have begun to develop better stuff for people at this level, Moore says, but it’s still not getting the investment it deserves.

“We have not invested in technology for middle managers, really ever. A BlackBerry and a laptop have been the two biggest things we’ve ever done for middle managers,” he says. “In this new world, middle managers are the cartilage. They’re the ones who hold this whole thing together. The guys in the big office don’t do it, and the guys who are doing transaction processing don’t do it.”

In his new book, Moore tackles a bigger topic: How established companies can get new businesses to market without losing them in the mire of besting last year’s or last quarter’s … Next Page »

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Spend very long talking with Mehdi Maghsoodnia, CEO of San Mateo, CA-based BookRenter, and you might start to think that he’s an economist running some kind of commodities trading floor. He speaks of making markets, taking positions on inventory, liquidation demand, microlending, and managing financial risk. He says things like “I am capturing dispersed demand and matching it to dispersed supply.”

In fact, Maghsoodnia has a computer science background, and BookRenter simply rents textbooks to college students—much like its better-known competitor, Santa Clara, CA-based Chegg. But unlike Chegg, BookRenter doesn’t have warehouses. It doesn’t even have a standing inventory of books. Instead, the startup has developed a computational backend that constantly assesses textbook demand and supply and the risks of loaning out textbooks at low prices; it then directs the flow of books between publishers, bookstores, and students accordingly. The approach gives Maghsoodnia the luxury of thinking more like a banker than the CEO of an e-commerce company. In fact, he calls BookRenter “a very sophisticated microlending platform applied to a commodity that is in high demand.”

Now a syndicate of investors has placed a big bet on that platform. BookRenter announced today that it has closed a $40 million Series C financing round that includes new investors Comerica Bank, Focus Ventures, and Lighthouse Capital Partners. Also participating are return investors Adams Capital Management and Storm Ventures, who put $6 million into the startup’s November 2009 Series A round, and Norwest Venture Partners, which joined Adams and Storm for a $10 million Series B round last June.

BookRenter is growing so fast, according to Maghsoodnia, that the company was able to raise its third round against a valuation three times higher than the one in place for the second round just eight months ago. The company has partnerships with 560 campus bookstores serving six million students, and claims that business is expanding at an annualized rate of 600 percent.

Back in 2010, Maghsoodnia says, “there was a lot of concern” about how BookRenter could catch up with Chegg, which has raised nearly $150 million in debt and equity financing and says it reaches students on 6,400 campuses. “This year, we are growing faster than them, and our market is very robust, I would say better, in terms of our cost structure,” says Maghsoodnia. “We have gone beyond Chegg’s execution and we are looking at how to become a much bigger player in the overall market.”

But no matter how big it gets, BookRenter isn’t likely to surpass Chegg’s name recognition among students. That’s because it prefers to work through campus bookstores, which can use the service to launch their own branded textbook rental sites. Maghsoodnia says BookRenter is happy to forego brand recognition in favor of rapid growth. Given a low-cost, on-campus rental alternative to buying new textbooks or renting from Chegg, students will flock back to their campus bookstores, he says.

“My rental prices are the same as Chegg’s; the difference is that you can pick a book up and drop it off at school, and you don’t have to deal with finding a box and going to UPS and shipping it,” says Maghsoodnia. “On campuses where we are being adopted, Chegg is losing market share.”

To understand why investors are excited about BookRenter’s business model, it helps to think about Netflix’s DVD-rental business. To decide which DVDs to buy and avoid costly overstocking, Netflix has to … Next Page »

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The Boston-area technology scene is known for several mini-clusters: companies in mobile software, music software, robotics, online video, data storage, e-commerce, and Internet marketing, to name a few. But “mass customization” might be the most broadly interesting sector in town. The term refers to online companies that offer consumers personalized, custom-made goods—everything from clothing and jewelry to art and books—at relatively low prices.

The trend toward mass customization isn’t new—you can read about related startups here and here—but a critical, um, mass of local companies has formed that should make things fun to watch for years to come. They include Blank Label (shirts), FashionPlaytes (girls’ clothing), Gemvara (jewelry), Tikatok (children’s books, acquired by Barnes & Noble), F. Rock (bags), Artaic (mosaics), CustomMade (artwork and furniture), Loom Decor (home decorating), Vistaprint (printed goods, U.S. headquarters in Boston area), and Zyrra (bras).

I happened to be talking about this cluster with micro-VC David Beisel from NextViewVentures this week. Beisel also organizes the quarterly Web Innovators Group, and was previously with Venrock (he still serves on the board of BlogHer) and Masthead Venture Partners. In a previous life, he co-founded Sombasa Media, an e-mail marketing startup that was acquired by About.com for $35 million in 2000.

Beisel had an interesting take as to why the Boston area seems to be putting the “Mass.” in mass customization. He views the sector as “another upspring of the e-commerce mini-cluster. We [in Boston] are good at assembling—taking raw components and building blocks, and then fashioning them into something whole greater than its parts,” he said. “Mass customization is a natural extension of our strength because it’s assembling something new and doing it both systematically and repeatedly.”

I took this to mean also that mass customization startups are a natural outcrop built on top of more traditional New England tech strengths—things like building physical products and developing e-commerce businesses (e.g., CSN Stores, Shoebuy, Next Jump).

You can learn more about this burgeoning group of startups next week. The MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge (Beisel is on the board) has organized a panel discussion and networking hour around the mass customization cluster on Feb. 16 (rescheduled after the snowstorm). Katie Rae from Project 11 and TechStars Boston will moderate a panel of startup founders including Ted Acworth, Sharon Kan, Matt Lauzon, Sarah McIlroy, Sung Park, and Michael Salguero.

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Most readers will be aware that Vertex announced it is moving from 900,000 square feet of laboratories and offices in Cambridge to over a million square feet in Boston.

Some are asking if this spells serious trouble in Cambridge. This question surprises me. Cambridge is one of the world’s most important sources of next-generation technology and companies, and regularly exports them. A 2009 Kaufmann Foundation study showed that MIT spin-outs alone, if collected together, would rank as the 11th largest economy in the world. Vertex and its Telaprevir hepatitis C drug, which is on the verge of approval by the FDA, follow a time-honored tradition.

Once ideas are proven, those pursuing them should and do move into production mode. Sometimes that means taking larger, cheaper space elsewhere. When this happens, it makes room for another generation of new companies in Cambridge. While nobody wants to lose a taxpayer, Cambridge should feel proud of the contributions it makes to the rest of the world.

For nearly 400 years, Cambridge’s powerful blend of intellectual and entrepreneurial oomph has given the city an enviable self-renewing quality. Let’s look at the record. It starts with the book. Cambridge printed the first book in North America 370 years ago. About that time, it also became home to its first university, Harvard. The first computer (the Mark II) and the Internet (then called the Arpanet) came out of Cambridge. Thomas Watson placed the first two-way telephone call from his lab in Kendall Square, the wires stretching across the river to Alexander Graham Bell’s home on Beacon Hill. Some other Cambridge creations include the microwave oven, the sewing machine, instant photography, ship-to-ship radar, synthesis of penicillin and quinine, fractionation of blood, and deployment of vaccines. Many of Cambridge’s inventions today are so complex, the inventors win Nobel Prizes while most of us don’t even understand them.

(If you want the full background on these inventions and others, you are in luck. The Cambridge Historical Society is readying a comprehensive website on the history of invention in Cambridge. Send a note to innovation@cambridgehistory.org if you’d like to be notified when it’s up.)

Cambridge has launched some pretty interesting ideas in other departments as well. … Next Page »

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Throughout the two years Matt MacInnis spent working as senior manager in international education at Apple, he had plenty of opportunity to watch teachers integrate technology into their classrooms as a learning tool. And he found it wholly disappointing.

“If you walk into a classroom today, and then you roll back the clock and walk into a classroom 50 years ago, you’d see certainly some modernization, but it would not be remarkably different,” he said. Technologies like radio, television, and computers offered great promise in the classroom, but haven’t dramatically changed the learning experience, which is still stuck in a model where “we download information into somebody’s head and they’re supposed to march off into the world and manufacture cars,” in MacInnis’s words.

More interactive tools could engage students and fundamentally change the way they interact with their teachers—and each other—while they learned, he believes.

With the promise of Apple’s new iPad looming, MacInnis quit his job in 2009 and founded a company called Inkling, a San Francisco-based startup that has developed a software platform for digital textbooks on the iPad.

Electronic versions of books are nothing new—look at the Kindle—and other companies such as CourseSmart also offer e-textbooks. But Inkling’s product is more than a static PDF rendition of the bound text. Where most digital versions of a biology book would show the same diagram of the parts of the brain that appears on the printed page, for example, Inkling’s version can remove its labels and ask its user to identify the cerebellum by touching it. If the user gets the question wrong, the Inkling software can offer hints. Wonder what parts of a history text the professor thinks are most important? Students can check the professor’s own notes. Want to share notes with a friend, or take a quiz at the end of a chapter? Flip around a model of a molecule? Inkling allows students to do that too.

For MacInnis, it’s less about reproducing a book than creating an interactive experience a student can have with a book.

So far the company only has six texts available, four published by McGraw Hill, one from Cengage Learning, and one from Wiley. “The reason we don’t have 10,000 textbooks overnight is that we don’t just plug in to the database of the publisher and suck down PDFs or XML of their existing content and put it on a screen,” MacInnis says. “The iPad is not a book, and any attempt to shoehorn book content into the iPad in our mind is shortsighted folly.”

Developing a platform that allows this much interactivity required Inkling to create a whole new way to publish content. The company didn’t want its end product to be a book—it had to be a “whole new thing that has video and audio and interactivity and … Next Page »

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