Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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Boston has a pretty well-known cluster of tech companies—young and old—that are focused on aspects of travel like booking flights and hotels. Kayak, TripAdvisor, and ITA Software (now part of Google), just to name a few, fit that mold. But there’s another area player that’s helping customers to experience a city once they get there, via an interesting marketing proposition.

That would be Boston-based Smart Destinations, which is looking to provide a Disney World-esque experience to hitting tourist and historical sites in 12 cities such as Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. It’s not a new idea, as you’ll see, but it has a modern twist.

For Boston, adult travelers can buy a three-day “Go Card” from Smart Destinations for $109, and gain admission to more than 70 attractions, like the New England Aquarium, Salem Witch Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and even Cape Cod activities like whale watching. That price can be adjusted in wintertime (when people don’t want to be out on a boat), and, naturally, a kids’ Go Card costs less. The card also enables users to skip lines at tourist attractions, says CEO and founder Kevin McLaughlin. That, and the one-stop-shopping aspect give it the amusement park pass feel.

“It makes it really easy for families to go to big cities,” he says.

McLaughlin recognizes that not every customer may be looking for a 72-hour-straight, nonstop tourist-attraction-hopping vacation, though. Smart Destinations also offers a Go Select pass, with which consumers can pick certain spots they’d like to see. For each attraction they add to the pass, the amount of the discount at each individual spot grows.

McLaughlin started the company with travel industry veteran Cecilia Dahl in 2003. The inspiration came from a Paris tourist service, which sells a card giving visitors access to all of the city’s museums. This is McLaughlin’s sixth tech startup. His past ventures include Delphi Internet (acquired by News Corporation), Netspoke (acquired by Premiere Conferencing), and exchange.com (acquired by Amazon). Smart Destinations is now up to around 32 employees, and has raised three rounds of funding from investors such as North Hill Ventures.

Smart Destinations is now making a bigger push into the mobile sphere, says McLaughlin.The company started by selling physical cards with a smart chip through its website. Consumers can get still get that card via snail mail or participating kiosks in their destination cities, or they can access it via their mobile phones. Starting first quarter of this year, consumers can also create, purchase, and customize the Go Select pass right from their phones, adding tourist destinations and racking up discounts as they make their way through a city. A small … Next Page »

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[Update: Noon ET, 12/9/11] We’re less than a week away from Xconomy’s biggest event of the year for the Boston biotech community, “The Genetics Institute Impact.”

This is shaping up to be a truly special reunion for the people who built one of Boston’s pioneering life sciences companies, and who are still making waves in the industry today. [Update] More than 270 people have registered, and we are sold out for the festivities next Wednesday evening, Dec. 14, at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

The agenda will be a little different from some other Xconomy events. We’re going to start off by inviting a handful of Genetics Institute alumni to share a favorite anecdote from their days at GI. These could be tales about ups and downs, thrills, horrors, or just plain funny or embarrassing moments that revealed a lot about what made GI such a great adventure. I don’t know what the speakers plan to say, but I’m sure it will be short and sweet and memorable.

Once those remembrance talks are done, I’ll moderate a 20-minute keynote chat with GI’s longtime CEO Gabe Schmergel and the company’s scientific co-founders—Tom Maniatis and Mark Ptashne.

I’m sure these guys could carry on all night. On yesterday’s prep call, Maniatis and Ptashne started jogging each other’s memory banks, revealing tales about former Harvard University president Derek Bok and legendary former CBS chairman Bill Paley (a GI investor). I could have listened for hours, but the goal is to ask just a few questions, and keep the program brief. That way there will be plenty of time for catching up with old friends.

Besides the talks, we will have a cool memorabilia display to check out thanks to contributions from Dale Blank, Gina Nugent, and others. If you have photos from GI in some kind of electronic format like jpeg or gif, now’s the time to send those my way so I can make this display even better. Just shoot me a note at ltimmerman@xconomy.com. And if you have some favorite music that people at the company used to like to listen to—and it’s on CD, Pandora, or at least something other than vinyl or cassette tapes—let me know. I’m taking suggestions for what ought to be on the GI soundtrack.

Here’s the actual program, which we will print up for those of you there at the event. If you couldn’t tell, I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of fascinating people at this event and learning a bit more about a special time and place in the history of the biotech industry. Those of you who show up early at 4:30 pm can get a jumpstart on networking before the program starts at 5:30 pm. See you there Wednesday evening.

4:30 pm—Registration/networking

5:30 pm—Host welcome, Koch Institute

5:35 pm—Introductions, Xconomy

5:40 pm—Remembrance talks

Adelene Perkins, CEO, Infinity Pharmaceuticals

Tuan Ha-Ngoc, CEO, Aveo Pharmaceuticals

Tony Evnin, partner, Venrock Associates

John Knopf, CEO, Acceleron Pharma

Abbie Celniker, CEO, Eleven Biotherapeutics

Sha Mi, Distinguished Investigator, Biogen Idec

5:55 pm—Keynote chat

Gabe Schmergel, former CEO, Genetics Institute

Mark Ptashne, co-founder, Genetics Institute

Tom Maniatis, co-founder, Genetics Institute

Luke Timmerman, national biotech editor, Xconomy (moderator)

6:15 pm—Networking

7:30 pm—End

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Big video games studios are a bit old school, with everything from game design, production, execution, and financing done in house, says Boaz Sender, a JavaScript programmer at the Boston-based Web consulting firm Bocoup. But they’re about to go the way that the old Hollywood movie studios did, he says, by outsourcing many of the operations they once tightly controlled.

Sender says that’s all going to happen as a result of traditional video games moving to the open Web, which is a set of standardized, royalty free, HTTP- and HTML-based technologies for building network software. The software design principles and content policies behind it focus on consumer empowerment and third-party integration, he says.

“When you move to the Web, one thing that becomes a lot cheaper is distribution,” says Sender. This enables younger, scrappier startups to get involved in building games, and encourages other startups to sprout up that are developing related games software, for functions like game authoring, payment, advertising, and managing player identities.

Bocoup is looking to seed this trend via Game Lab, a small games incubator it’s running with Cambridge-based Atlas Venture with the “goal of funding companies that help the games industry move to the open Web.” It’s particularly focused on HTML5, the emerging new standard for programming Web pages and services.

Bocoup’s 15-person team has spent two years helping companies develop and adopt open Web technologies, through events, evangelism, and consulting for customers like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Sender founded the firm, which consists of a group of (“especially elite,” according to Atlas) JavaScript programmers. They work closely with other Web design-focused consultancies.

Game Lab’s funding model varies from startup to startup, but it could potentially invest in seed rounds for existing companies, help new companies form and seed those, and participate in Series A rounds, says Sender. Atlas is supplying the capital and Bocoup is bringing its expertise in open Web technology to the teams. Entrepreneurs in the Game Lab also get close mentoring from Atlas, and the option of working out of Bocoup’s open source hacker space.

“It’s about how we’re going to fund the building blocks of the open Web games industry,” says Sender. Bocoup is also working with its … Next Page »

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“The time to invest in social media was two years ago.” That was a quote—or the gist of it, anyway—from Todd Dagres, co-founder and general partner of Spark Capital, during the venture panel at XSITE, Xconomy’s innovation summit last month.

Dagres ought to know, since Spark is an investor in both Twitter and Tumblr, the white hot mixed-media blogging platform—and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone recently became a Spark strategic advisor. So his quip seemed a perfect setup for me to ask the obvious follow up: What’s next?

I sat down with Dagres last Friday in Spark’s offices on Newbury Street in Boston to get the skinny on what he sees as the emerging new areas for investing that might take off the way social media has the last few years. “I can’t tell you that,” was his first reaction, but he wilted, as you’ll see. We also covered some other interesting ground—such as his views on what has made New York tech so hot and how it compares to Boston, why Groupon doesn’t get his investor juices flowing, why tech investing is better than making movies (Dagres had a stint as a Hollywood producer and still does it on the side), and more (Governor Patrick—read on, because there’s some stuff for you, too).

We started with New York, since late last month Spark closed its 19th deal in the Big Apple—joining in a new $50 million round for Foursquare—out of a total of 43 the firm, which was founded in 2005, has done. And Dagres says Spark has signed two more term sheets with NY companies. That’s a whopping percentage, almost half the total. The rest, he says, break down as a dozen in Silicon Valley, seven or eight in the Boston area, and a few others scattered around.

Here are the take-homes from our conversation:

Boston vs. New York—Dagres says New York surpasses Boston on some key parameters for entrepreneurship. “It really is a vibrant community of entrepreneurs. It’s a very creative environment. It’s an environment where there’s a sense for the customer. And it’s also a community where there’s a lot of sharing going on.” What Dagres calls “a powerful mixture of factors” has led to the ascendance of New York entrepreneurship. “I think it grew out of the Wall Street bust and also the transition from traditional media to digital media. Kids grew up in a media hub and an environment of a lot of risk-taking. That all mixed together. The other thing I will throw in there is the artistic element.” All these things previously existed in pockets around the city. “Now, it’s kind of come together into one big vibrant, collaborative community.”

Todd Dagres of Spark Capital participated in a discussion of the social media bubble, among other things, at XSITE 2011.

Boston, says Dagres, now falls short of New York on at least two of the factors listed above: collaboration and sense for the consumer. When it comes to venture firms, he says Boston VCs have traditionally invested in enterprise-focused software companies-and see consumer-oriented startups as too risky. “It’s all risky,” he counters, and meanwhile the unprecedented ability of small companies today to reach billions of consumers is “incredibly powerful.” Besides Spark, Dagres could only name one other Boston-based firm he felt was comfortable investing in consumer plays and taking big risks (another, oft-cited critique of Boston venture firms, which Dagres agrees with)—and that was General Catalyst.

But Boston’s shortcomings vis à vis New York don’t stop with venture firms. Dagres says as a whole, Boston’s entrepreneurs lag New York startups when it comes to collaboration and sharing—and that, in turn, has prevented Boston from matching the spirit of the entrepreneurial community in New York. “We don’t quite have the critical mass in the community,” he says. “And we don’t have … Next Page »

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David Vivero, the co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based RentJuice, was raised in the real estate business. His family owns and manages several apartment buildings in Miami Beach. He grew up fixing air conditioners, traipsing up and down the stairs collecting rent checks, and negotiating with tenants over security deposits. Even after he went off to Harvard College to study economics, he’d spend every school vacation back in Miami, helping with the family properties.

So when Vivero says landlords and rental brokers are in pain, he knows whereof he speaks. The problem, he says, is that the convenience brought to the consumer side of the market by Web services like Craigslist, Zillow, and Trulia never filtered back to rental offices.In some ways, the new demand for up-to-date online listings has actually made owners’ and brokers’ lives harder.

It’s not that brokers don’t have computerized databases of apartment listings—they do. They’re just not integrated with anything else. Vivero paints a picture of the process that sounds as if it were coming straight out of 1992. “It would start with a property owner trying to understand what units might be vacant on September 1,” says Vivero. “They produce a document. They transmit those listings to apartment-finder services and brokerages. Each broker gets stacks of these and processes them into their database. By the time they finish that, a new one has already been sent, so they’re always playing catch-up. They’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just on data entry. The whole supply chain suffers. And the reason there is a lot of unreliable information on Craigslist is because even the most genuine broker trying to market a listing may not have the latest info.”

David Vivero

Even before he’d finished his MBA at Harvard Business School, Vivero had decided that what the real estate world needed was a single online platform where landlords and brokers would be able to manage the entire rental process, from a vacancy to a signed lease. “I walked up and down Newbury Street and Commonwealth Avenue and Brighton Avenue [the main loci for rental offices in Boston] and spent time in the offices of brokerages and real estate management companies and listened to their issues,” Vivero says. “I didn’t have a computer science background, so I taught myself Python and started programming.”

The result was RentJuice, which opened its doors in San Francisco in 2010 and collected $6.3 million in Series A financing this spring from Lexington, MA-based Highland Capital, Boston, MA-based NextView Ventures, and a group of high-profile individual investors, including Tim Draper, the co-founder of venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In March, RentJuice acquired its main competitor—Boston-based Kahoots—and its only real rival now is yougotlistings, a much smaller startup, also based in Boston, that emerged from the Y Combinator venture incubator this spring.

Vivero describes RentJuice as a “virtual rental office” that landlords and brokers can access at any time from any Web browser. It includes a whole lot of features. There’s a database for storing and searching apartment listings; interfaces for publishing these listings on the broker’s own website or Facebook page; an ad-builder that automatically sends listings to 35 outside rental sites such as Craigslist, Rentbits, and Rent Jungle; and a “lead management” area for responding to inquiries from potential renters and scheduling apartment showings. There’s even a tool that and spawns instant background checks and credit reports on rental applicants and generates ready-to-sign lease paperwork.

The system, Vivero says, eases the three biggest pain points for any rental broker: tracking apartment availability and pricing, maintaining listings across dozens of websites, and playing both lawyer and banker during the application process. But he hastens to add that … Next Page »

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Updated, see below—The January 2009 announcement by Y Combinator that it was leaving the Boston area and moving full-time to Silicon Valley gave a real jolt to the local innovation community. Then, only a few months later, Greylock Partners dropped a similar bombshell. The storied venture firm, arguably in the elite of the elite alongside Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sequoia Capital, and the only one based in New England, said in May that it was shifting its headquarters to the San Francisco Bay Area, where it had long had an office—though, unlike Y Combinator, Greylock said it would keep its Boston area office open.

Since then, while no other Boston-based venture firm that I know of has moved its HQ west, several have opened offices in the Valley, joining others, like Advanced Technology Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, that had already opened digs there.

Meanwhile, another group of venture firms—encompassing some of the same companies—began moving into Boston or Cambridge from the Route 128 burbs (usually, though not always, from the famed Winter Street office park that has long constituted the Sand Hill Road of Boston).

You can point to several factors for the moves, from leases coming due to the shrinkage of some funds and the need to quit big office spaces. But whether heading west to California or east into Cambridge and Kendall Square, the bottom line was the same: the desire to shimmy up closer to deal flow and the entrepreneurs on whom the venture capitalists’ jobs depended. In some sense, it was back to the future here in Boston, since many venture firms were originally based downtown and moved out to Waltham and environs as the Route 128 corridor sprang to high-tech life.

These comings and goings have been noted in each instance, sometimes with a lot of commentary, angst, and even applause. If you’re like me, though, you’ve had trouble keeping track of it all—including what has already happened and what is still planned. So here is my timeline of venture capitalists on the move—in two groups. One is for those who have opened offices in the Bay Area, the other for firms who have moved operations closer to the action here in Cambridge. The starting point is January 2009, when Paul Graham announced Y Combinator’s Cambridge pullout.

Venture Firms Head West

—January 2009: Y Combinator, which previously alternated between summer programs in Cambridge, MA, and winter camps in Mountain View, CA, announces it will stay in Silicon Valley year round.

—May 2009: Greylock Partners says it will shift headquarters to Silicon Valley. As of August 2010, the firm has been based on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.

2010 — I can’t find any firm moves that took place last year. But that September, … Next Page »

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By the time you read this, I’ve probably already wrapped up my work as a correspondent for Xconomy, turned in my key to office on Rogers Street in Cambridge, MA, and taken a deep breath in anticipation of my exciting new role as an executive editor for the life sciences group at FierceMarkets.

I’m really not being modest when I say that I don’t expect my departure from Xconomy to qualify as anything close to an event [Editor's note: Ryan is, indeed, being modest---we're going to miss him like crazy!], and Xconomy has a great life sciences reporting team in place with or without me. But I spent about 33 months at Xconomy, mostly covering the biotech and healthcare IT scenes in the Boston area, and I thought a proper goodbye post would be appropriate. It’s also an opportunity for me to brag a bit about some of the cool stories that we did during my stint with Xconomy. (Still, I promise to keep this farewell relatively brief.)

Before I talk about those stories, I want to say thanks to Xconomy. I feel plain lucky that Bob Buderi, Xconomy’s founder and editor-in-chief, called me on my cell phone in late July 2008 to ask me if I was interested in working for his startup media company. I got that call while I was literally carrying my box of personal stuff out of a building on Federal Street in downtown Boston after my last day as the biotech reporter for Mass High Tech, and I was still wondering at the time whether I was crazy for moving with my wife to Vermont, where I would try my luck as a freelancer. Thanks to Bob and Xconomy co-founder and executive editor Rebecca Zacks, I was given a shot to stay on the Boston biotech beat.

In those first few months at Xconomy, I chased down a news tip from Bob and broke a little story about the big $400 million endowment that philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad gave to their namesake research center, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. (The experience told me that my sources still worked, even when I was up in Vermont.) Around the same time, I started working more closely with Luke Timmerman, Xconomy’s National Biotech Editor, who joined Xconomy via Bloomberg several months before my arrival. Luke writes terrifically detailed and compelling news copy at speeds that would rival fictional Clark Kent’s fastest work at The Daily Planet. Luke also never hesitated to share tricks of the trade with me, and I’ll try to never forget those lessons. I learned a bunch from the other editors as well.

I don’t have a “top 10″ stories list or anything to share with you, but I’m very proud to have had the opportunity to be the first reporter to provide what I would call in-depth coverage of many healthcare-related startups in the Boston area. Some examples include stories about KEW Group (most recently), Seventh Sense Biosystems, Life Image, Momelan Technologies, and Vedanta Biosciences. I also got to do some memorable stories that involved big companies such as Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB), Genzyme, GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:GSK), and Novartis (NYSE:NVS). The only regrets I have are getting beat on certain Boston biotech stories, yet I feel like I did about as much as I could while covering the beat mostly from my home office in a little college town some 200 miles from Kendall Square.

If you’re still reading this nano-memoir, then perhaps you’ll be interested to know that I’ll still be following the Boston biotech scene as well as the life sciences industry in other geographies in my new role at Fierce. I’ll also be in Boston and other major hubs of the biotech industry to cover stories and attend meetings. And I plan to continue to provide Twitter updates under my @ryan_mcbride handle.

So perhaps this isn’t really a goodbye as much as a note of thanks to the editors at Xconomy and to you the audience, with whom I aim to keep in touch through my work at Fierce.

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It’s moving week for the companies launching Greentown Labs, the new cleantech incubator in the seaport area dubbed Boston’s “Innovation District” by Mayor Tom Menino.

The space at 337 Summer Street still looks more or less like a construction site, but the companies helping to get the incubator off the ground will be moving in this week, “ready or not,” says Jason Hanna, president and founder of Coincident and a founding entrepreneur of Greentown Labs.

Other media outlets reported that last fall, Promethean Power Systems co-founder Sam White launched a grassroots cleantech incubator near the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall. In December, the group of companies working there alongside Promethean—Coincident, OsComp Systems, Altaeros Energies, and AirVentions—found out that the owner of the building sold it to be redeveloped as a biotech facility. The group incorporated as a nonprofit in January as it searched for a new home.

Boston and Cambridge have their fair share of co-working spaces offering Wi-Fi and desks, but Greentown Labs is designed to have enough room for the physical equipment—and mess—required to build hardware that goes into these cleantech startups.

“It’s going to be dirty,” says Pedro Santos, CEO of OsComp Systems, a startup quietly working to develop a cheaper, more efficient method of producing natural gas after drilling, which is said to cut the cost of gas compression by 50 percent. “It will be safe and clean, but we want it to feel like a machine shop.”

The roughly 14,000 square-foot incubator consists of a large open space for startups to split up and build their products in, at a monthly rent of $25 per usable square foot, says Hanna. Companies can pay another $75 per month to access Greentown’s impending electronics lab and machine shop. Meanwhile, OsComp plans to run its prototype system in the basement. A dedicated desk in the main area costs $275 per month and includes Wi-Fi and access to the conference room; closed-door offices will run about $950 per month, depending on the size.

Dynamo MicroPower, a developer of a sub-microturbine for power generation, and SolSolution, a nonprofit working to get solar installations in schools, will be joining the five Greentown charter companies who moved from the Cambridge incubator space, says Jeremy Pitts, OsComp’s vice president of product development.

And as far as the charter member companies go: Promethean is working on solar-powered refrigeration systems; Coincident is developing a software- and hardware-based system for better integrating cleantech elements and optimizing energy use in the home; and Altaeros is making … Next Page »

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New York is famous in the business world for its large companies in a variety of industries. For the partners at the seed-stage venture fund Founder Collective, however, the focus is on the small tech startups in the city and beyond that have the potential to rapidly grow in value.

In fact, managing partners David Frankel and Eric Paley, among other partners of the fund, formed Founder Collective in 2009 as a continuation of their success in backing each others’ startups and other young companies for several years. And while the firm’s $50 million fund might seem small to the bigwigs on Wall Street, we’re living in a world where tech upstarts are launching products and gaining real customers on budgets of less than $1 million.

Founder Collective, with offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York City, has made more than 50 investments in tech startups around the country, and its partners have made bets on 20 or so firms in New York, according to Paley and Frankel. Though Frankel and Paley have been involved in firms outside of tech, their fund focuses on software and Web startups that make efficient use of capital and for which relatively small investments can carry the companies to major jumps in value. (So, obviously, this excludes capital-intensive businesses like drug developers.)

While Frankel and Paley both keep homes in the Boston area, they have partners in New York, like Hunch co-founder and CEO Chris Dixon, who spend most of their time in operational roles at startups. (Hunch, a New York City-based startup, says that it personalizes the Internet by helping people find recommendations on all sorts of topics.) Frankel and Paley, who are the only partners who are full-time dedicated to Founder Collective, each serve on multiple boards of directors in New York, giving them a close view of what is happening on the ground in the city’s startup scene.

“There’s been, and I think Chris (Dixon) has been very involved in this, a renaissance in … Next Page »

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The United States is investing billions of dollars to get doctors to use electronic health records for patients at their practices. Why then, Phreesia CEO Chaim Indig asks, are patients being handed the same old clipboards with papers to fill out when they arrive for appointments?

New York-based Phreesia, which Indig co-founded in 2005, aims to replace the clipboard with a wireless tablet computer called the PhreesiaPad. With about $17 billion allocated to boost the adoption of electronic health records made available through the the passage of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan about two years ago, doctors have had new incentives to make the jump from paper-based recordkeeping systems to digital health records. Though the federal incentives don’t apply to Phreesia’s technology, the overall theme of using information technology to better engage patients in their healthcare has worked in the company’s favor.

The way Indig sees it, healthcare has some catching up to do with other industries such as retail and financial services. Many of us pay for gas with a credit card at the pump, and we use ATM machines to deposit and withdraw cash, but such levels of automation are rarely seen when we step into a doctor’s office. The vast majority of doctors’ offices still give patients papers to fill out at check-in and employ office staff to process payments and check for valid insurance. This despite the fact that these practices are investing in electronic health records systems. “They’ve invested all this money in technology but they still haven’t enabled their patient,” Indig says.

PhreesiaPads present forms and questionnaires to patients on a touch screen. The devices come equipped with card swipes and can process insurance copayments, check and validate insurance, and enable other transactions. Phreesia doesn’t disclose specific financial figures or customer numbers, but Indig says the pads are now used by thousands of doctors in all 50 states and have handled millions of patient intakes.

Indig and co-founder Evan Roberts, the firm’s chief technology officer, learned about the need for data in health care while working in the Boston area for a software analytics firm called Spotfire (which was later sold to TIBCO Software in 2007 in a deal valued at $195 million). They both moved from Boston to New York City in 2005 to form Phreesia, initially running the company out of a small apartment on the Upper East Side.

While the co-founders left the Hub for Manhattan, the firm has won heavy support from Boston-area backers including HLM Venture Partners and Polaris … Next Page »

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VBrick Systems, a Wallingford, CT-based provider of technology for the live streaming of video content online, is expanding its footprint in New England. The company, founded in 1998, is adding an office in Boston, where it hopes to have 10 employees by the end of the quarter and 20 employees by the end of the year, says chief operating officer John Shaw.

“The Boston market is obviously one of the epicenters of high technology in the United states,” he says. “Our major motivation is to tap into the talent pool here.”

VBrick, which will keep its roughly 125-employee office in Connecticut as well, started out offering a platform for broadcasting online video to hundreds or thousands of recipients at a time. The technology converts and compresses video files for the Web, integrates other content like PowerPoint slides, distributes the video over IP networks, and adjusts the content for viewing on different devices. The company’s main focus was to deliver content, such as executive broadcasts, within company networks; it has since accrued more than 9,000 customers, including 100 of the Fortune 500 companies and every branch of the U.S. military. U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan use the technology to communicate with embassies and the like, and also to keep up to date on TV shows.

There are plenty of technologies focused on broadcasting video to internal networks and wide open audiences—VBrick has a software-as-a-service product called VBoss for the latter—but not much unifying both worlds, Shaw says. That’s where he’s hoping the Boston VBrick team will come in.

The big goal with the Boston office is to smooth out the process for users who do both types of broadcasting. Streaming video for a company’s employees shouldn’t look any different than does posting video marketing material on a website outside the corporate firewall, Shaw says. “The team that’s in Boston is largely responsible for bringing those things completely together,” he says.

VBrick recently acquired Emeryville, CA-based video hosting technology firm Fliqz for an undisclosed sum to focus more on the external broadcasts. And we can expect more acquisitions in the future from VBrick as it plans to expand and diversifies its technology for streaming online video. “Definitely part of the strategy is to take advantage of some good products and talent developed in companies, and bring that into VBrick as we enlarge the offering,” Shaw says.

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RelayRides, a San Francisco-headquartered person-to-person car-sharing startup with an office in Boston, has raised $5.1 million of an equity-based funding round that could total $5.9 million, according to an SEC document filed yesterday.  The company, which started in Cambridge and last year participated in the Boston incubator program MassChallenge, announced in December that it had nabbed an undisclosed amount of funding from Google Ventures and August Capital and was relocating its headquarters to San Francisco as it launched its car-sharing service there. Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital and Google Ventures’ Joe Kraus are listed as RelayRides directors on the SEC filing, which also notes that the funding comes from 19 investors.

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Boston has been vocal about its intent to transform its Seaport District into an “innovation district” for fueling job creation and attracting cutting-edge companies. Just last month, the city’s odds of making this vision a reality seem to improve, with the news that two Cambridge, MA-based companies—Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) and Heartland Robotics—would be relocating to the waterfront neighborhood. (The Vertex move is contingent on the company nabbing FDA approval for its hepatitis C drug telaprevir.) And last year, the $1 million state startup competition MassChallenge set up shop in the Fan Pier area of the district.

I’ve been hearing word around Cambridge that Boston’s moves in promoting itself as a home to innovation have created a bit of good old inter-city competition, so I informally polled folks working on each of side of the river to see if the Vertex and Heartland transplants mean that Beantown is gaining some serious ground.

The rivalry is real, says Tim Rowe, founder and CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square. “I think Boston probably feels that way more than Cambridge,” he says. “But there is a sense of competition, and, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think its good for both Boston and Cambridge. Competition pushes us all to be at our best.

Actually, the Cambridge City Council seems a bit bent out of shape by Vertex’s move, if you ask me. Massachusetts offered the drugmaker $50 million in public infrastructure financing to construct its new $800 million facility in the state, and $10 million in life sciences tax incentives from 2010 to 2014. In return, Vertex has pledged to create 500 new full-time jobs from 2011 to 2015 and to retain its existing 1,350 jobs. The offer letter from the state doesn’t peg the incentives to a certain Massachusetts city in which Vertex should construct its new facility, but notes Vertex’s plans to build in Boston. According to reports in the Boston Herald and the Boston Business Journal, Cambridge city councilors slammed Boston politicians for drawing Vertex across the Charles, and even voted 7 to 1 for a resolution to name the incentives for Vertex’s new office space, “especially egregious.”

Vertex—which just this week announced it its cystic fibrosis drug had passed a pivotal clinical trial—didn’t jump ship from Cambridge because of a particular penchant for the city of Boston, but because the space is there, many people tell me. And that space is a result of a decade of planning, says Boston Redevelopment Authority spokeswoman Susan Elsbree. “Physically it’s very different: buildings are already built, planned, and permitted,” she says of Boston’s Seaport District. “As the economy begins to take off again, there’s room for growth—significant room for growth. Cambridge has historically been for the smaller startups. They need room physically to grow.”

Companies starting out in Cambridge and leaving is nothing new, says Travis McCready, executive director of the Kendall Square Association. “People come from all over the world to participate in this uniquely Cambridge culture…we grow companies, commercialize innovation, and quite frequently see companies ‘graduate’ to other environments,” he says, noting that just under a quarter of the 25,000 active companies in the U.S. founded by MIT alumni have remained in Massachusetts.

Elsbree also has a bit of a friendlier outlook on the dynamic between the two cities. “We really don’t see it as two cities divided by a river, but rather what is the economic impact,” she says. “We’re looking at the state as a whole and … Next Page »

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What do Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area have in common today? Certainly not the weather. Tech news is a different story, though. We spotted a trio of headlines involving firms with a strong presence in both regions:

—Sunnyvale, CA-based storage and data management firm NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) announced it is buying Akorri Networks of Littleton, MA, in an all-cash transaction expected to close in NetApp’s fourth fiscal quarter. The firm did not reveal how much it paid for Akorri, which provides analytical software for data management in shared IT environments.

—Greylock Partners, a venture firm with offices in Cambridge, MA, and Menlo Park, CA, announced it is adding Frank Slootman as a partner at the firm. Slootman was previously CEO of Data Domain, a Santa Clara, CA-based data storage company acquired by EMC (NYSE: EMC) in 2009. He’ll work with entrepreneurs and will invest in data infrastructure deals for the firm, particularly in the virtualization, networking, storage, cloud, and enterprise application sectors, according to the announcement.

—There are conflicting reports on CPTN Holdings—a consortium of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and EMC—that formed to buy intellectual property from Waltham, MA-based networking management software maker Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) for $450 million, alongside Seattle-based Attachmate’s $2.2 billion cash acquisition of the firm in November. (Attachmate is owned by a private investor group with a strong San Francisco presence.) PCWorld reported yesterday that a filing to form the CPTN consortium was withdrawn late last year, but a statement Microsoft sent to InformationWeek and other media outlets said the deal is still moving along. Open source software advocates are concerned that CPTN will gain patents that include open source software elements that could shut out competitors.

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There’s probably nary a Web entrepreneur who hasn’t had a forehead-slapping “Why didn’t I build Groupon?” moment at some point in 2010. Well, I had an experience like that this week, reading Devin Friedman’s superb article “The Viral Me” in the December issue of GQ. It’s all about the Y Combinator venture incubator in Mountain View, CA, and the peculiar species of brash, young, hyper-optimistic entrepreneurs who build companies there. Given that I know most of the startup founders Friedman talked with—heck, I’ve profiled a bunch of their companies—I’d like to think I could have written a piece that good.

I urge you to read it for yourself. But it’s even longer than most of my articles, so I’ll summarize the point that I thought was most perceptive. It was about friction. The entrepreneurs Friedman hung out with, such as DailyBooth CEO Brian Pokorny, talked about how they strive to build Web services that are frictionless—that is, very easy to join and use—or that even have a kind of negative friction, so that it becomes harder to not use them than to just give in (e.g. Facebook).

Friedman dutifully lists the merits of frictionlessness, but toward the end of the piece he cleverly turns the idea around. He suggests that most young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seem so happy about what they’re doing precisely because of friction: they’ve been given the resources to build stuff, “and the act of creation is maybe the most frictive thing going.” From this point of view, you need a certain amount of difficulty to keep life interesting; otherwise, nothing would be a challenge.

(As a quick side point, there may actually be a benefit to preserving friction on the Web, too. Andres Glusman, vice president of strategy at New York-based Meetup, told me recently that his company actually saw an increase in usage after it added a checkbox to its group creation page saying “I pledge to create real, face-to-face community.” The added step seemed to cause users to slow down and think about why they really wanted to use Meetup in the first place.)

Now, what happens if you take this idea of friction up one level, from the things technology entrepreneurs build to the environments they’re building in? I’ve asserted in this column before that the geography isn’t such a big issue anymore for startups, since cash, talent, and the other resources fueling innovation are increasingly liquid. And I still think that’s the direction things are going. But by my argument, you’d be able to build a tech startup in Fargo, ND, just as easily as you can in Mountain View—which clearly isn’t yet the case.

From Friedman’s point of view, the only way to make Fargo as attractive as Mountain View—the only way to massively scale up Silicon Valley, in other words—would be to remove all friction from entrepreneurship. But not only is this impossible, it would defeat the whole point of being an entrepreneur. You need some friction to keep things interesting, and to weed out the bad ideas. The question is how much.

And that’s the point I want to riff on today. Because Xconomy observes key innovation hubs so closely, we’ve got a fair amount of data, at least of an anecdotal sort, about what’s working for technology entrepreneurs and what isn’t. My own sense is that in New England, where Xconomy was born, startup founders encounter too much friction. In Silicon Valley, by contrast, they probably encounter too little.

Let me expand on both points. I spent three years covering the innovation scene in Boston before moving to San Francisco last summer. So I know there’s an ongoing discussion among entrepreneurs, investors, and government officials about how to strengthen the ecosystem supporting Massachusetts technology startups and how to keep young entrepreneurs from fleeing to Silicon Valley. There have been positive developments—for example, the MassChallenge startup competition, the opening of Kendall Square’s Venture Cafe as a community hub, and the Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week effort (which actually spread across most of October). But these changes haven’t plugged the startup leak.

The latest case is RelayRides, a car-sharing service that was born earlier this year in Cambridge, MA, and won the $50,000 grand prize in the MassChallenge competition in October. The startup revealed this week that it’s moving to San Francisco, having secured an undisclosed amount of … Next Page »

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In 2009, employment at high-tech companies either declined or stayed essentially flat in all of the cities Xconomy calls home, according to a study of the nation’s top 60 “cybercities” released this week by TechAmerica, a Washington, D.C.-based trade association for the information technology industry.

Though the underwhelming job data certainly accords with most people’s subjective experiences of the recession, there is a glass-half-full way of looking at it: the job losses weren’t as bad in Boston, San Diego, and Seattle as they were in most other places around the country. Between 2008 and 2009, high-tech employment nationwide fell by 195,607, or 3.2 percent. The decline in Boston was far milder—just 1 percent—and tech employment held steady in Seattle (though it declined slightly in neighboring Portland). The TechAmerica report found that San Diego actually added a small handful of jobs—500, an increase of 0.4 percent.

The situation was much worse, however, in Xconomy’s other two home regions, Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area. Of all U.S. cities on TechAmerica’s top-60 list, Detroit was by far the hardest hit: an alarming 16,737 tech jobs evaporated there, representing nearly one-sixth of all tech employment in the region. The Bay Area lost almost as many jobs–16,147—but that represented only a 3.9 percent decline, thanks to the region’s much larger base of technology workers.

Keep in mind that these are 2009 figures, and don’t take into account any gains in employment that may have occurred in 2010. (It takes about 11 months for TechAmerica to compile its annual cybercities jobs report.) But with high unemployment endemic across the country—and likely to persist for years, according to economists—it’s likely that the trends called out in the report are still being felt.

Continue reading for some analysis of the city-by-city data from the TechAmerica report. Because the report sometimes counts cities within a cluster separately, I’ve recombined some of the numbers into aggregate statistics that represent Xconomy’s home cities more accurately. Specifically, TechAmerica counts San Francisco, San Jose/Silicon Valley, and Oakland as separate cybercities; I’ve recombined them into one. Similarly, the report gives separate statistics for Providence, RI, Worcester, MA, and greater Boston. I’ve put those numbers back together into something more representative of the New England technology cluster. And I’ve combined the Seattle and Portland, OR, statistics into a single Northwest category.

If you do all that, then some of TechAmerica’s rankings begin to make more sense. The report claims, for example, that New York City is the country’s leading center for high-tech employment, with 316,971 people working in areas like computer manufacturing, communications, software, engineering, technical services, and biotech R&D in 2009. But in aggregate, the Bay Area is larger, with 394,290 jobs, and so is the Washington, D.C-Baltimore area, with 369,782.

TechAmerica represents some 1,200 U.S. technology companies and was formed in 2009 from the merger of AeA (the American Electronics Association), the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, the Government Electronics & Information Technology Association, and the Information Technology Association of American. As part of its effort to highlight the importance of high-tech jobs to the overall economy, the organization has long produced an annual “Cyberstates” report contrasting high-tech industry growth in the 50 states. Three years ago, it also began publishing a sister “Cybercities” study focusing on the places within states where innovation is concentrated.

To their credit, TechAmerica’s analysts recognized that high-tech cities often spill across state lines—Boston, for example, extends all the way into southern New Hampshire, by the report’s reckoning, and New York City extends all the way into Pennsylvania. But I’d have argued for an even more liberal interpretation of cybercities, combining neighboring cities that have close ties. There’s obviously enormous interdependence, for example, between innovators and investors in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Oakland/Berkeley.

Here’s a look at how the country’s top 15 regions stack up in high-tech employment, after recombining individual cities:

1. Bay Area (Oakland + San Francisco + San Jose/Silicon Valley) 394,290
2. National Capital Area (Washington, DC + Baltimore) 369,782
3. New York City (including Long Island, Westchester County, northern NJ, and Pike County, PA) 316,971
4. Greater Los Angeles (including Orange County, Riverside, and San Bernardino) 289,847
5. New England (Boston + Worcester + Providence) 262,920
6. Northwest (Seattle + Portland) 211,005
7. Dallas-Fort Worth 174,848
8. Chicago 161,799
9. Philadelphia 134,235
10. Houston 127,760
11. Atlanta 123,582
12. San Diego 110,985
13. Minneapolis-St. Paul 98,583
14. Detroit 95,042
15. Denver 88,936

Continue to the next page for selected details on Xconomy’s home regions.

… Next Page »

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A few friends have asked me how my life has changed since I moved from Boston to San Francisco to open Xconomy’s Bay Area bureau. Do you want to know the real answer? I drink more.

A lot more.

In the Silicon Valley technology startup world that I cover, there’s at least one cocktail party, private dinner, coder beerfest, pre-conference gathering, post-conference gathering, movie screening, gallery opening, or other excuse for the alcohol to flow every freaking night of the week. Usually more than one. (If you don’t believe me, just subscribe to the Silicon Valley edition of StartupDigest, a guide to startup events curated by a cool guy here named Chris McCann.)

It’s like living in an infinite Mad Men episode. Raymond Carver, the American short story writer and poet, once wrote that wine is the worst drink to get drunk on—”hangovers you don’t forget”—and I’m learning that he’s right. I should probably switch to beer. San Francisco, after all, is home to at least 11 breweries and innumerable brewpubs. But when you live so close to Napa…

All kidding aside, I think there’s a real lesson here about the differences between Silicon Valley and other major hubs of technology innovation. In a column a few weeks ago headlined The Real City of Innovation is Everywhere, I argued that the Internet and the outsourcing revolution make it possible to build a startup just about anywhere these days. And it’s true. But when you look at where the startup founders really congregate, and where the angel and venture dollars are flowing to, Northern California still dominates. There’s obviously something in the water here. And I think that something is alcohol—or, more to the point, the schmoozing that alcohol facilitates.

Laura Fitton, aka @pistachio, the founder of the Cambridge, MA-based Twitter app store Oneforty, sent me an interesting note recently. She’d just visited the Bay Area, where several of Oneforty’s investors and advisors are based, and I had commented to her that I was overwhelmed by the number of startup stories that are begging to be written here (as this peek inside my story pipeline illustrates).

“I struggle so hard with how to bring that ‘steeped in startups’ feeling back home with me every time I fly back from SF,” Fitton commented from Cambridge. “We’re just too siloed here as startup teams—makes it even lonelier and prevents a hell of a lot of product innovation…We HAVE to overcome that isolation and siloing if we’re going to be inspired and energetic and passionate, not just in our founders but our entire teams.”

I’ve heard the same lament from other Boston-area entrepreneurs. I don’t have as much data from Xconomy’s other home cities of San Diego and Detroit, but I’m guessing that the siloing feels just as bad, if not worse.

Well, here in Silicon Valley and San Francisco they have this cool invention for overcoming isolation. It’s called getting together for drinks after work. From what I hear, this invention has spread to some circles in New York City, especially the Wall Street crowd. But it has yet to catch on in Boston’s startup community, where it seems that every weeknight is still a school night.

The thing is, you don’t necessarily have to leave work to drink. The beer flows freely at Google’s TGIF, the Friday afternoon gathering where … Next Page »

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In William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer, the hero Case lives in a near-future place called BAMA—the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, aka the Sprawl, a giant city that has spread Coruscant-like across the whole eastern seaboard. (If it had extended to Orlando, maybe Gibson could have called it OBAMA.) But while this part of Gibson’s sci-fi dystopia may have seemed plausible in the 1980s, it’s a little less so today. Yes, cities are still dealing with the consequences of the mid-20th-century’s automobile-driven sprawl—but if anything, the big metropolitan regions in the U.S. today are contracting around the edges, not blurring into one another.

And once the cheap oil runs out, analysts like James Howard Kunstler argue, cities will have to get smaller yet. The future “will be much more about staying where you are than about being mobile,” Kunstler predicts. Unless there’s a miraculous advance in solar-electric vehicle technology, or the government suddenly decides to invest a couple trillion dollars to build a serious passenger rail network, it’s hard to see how he might be wrong.

But that’s just one side of the picture—the physical reality of freeways and suburbs and Wal-Marts. There’s another trend at work that’s erasing what I would call the mental boundaries between cities. That trend, obviously, is digital networking.

It’s a tired cliché to say that telecommunications technology is breaking down the meaning of geographical distance. People have been pointing this out since the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s. What I’m saying is a little more radical. Given today’s work styles and networking tools, information workers can be anywhere. It makes very little difference whether your software engineers or QA testers or telesales representatives are in Boston or Burlingame or Bangalore. In fact, it’s easier to send an e-mail or an instant message to a colleague 3,000 miles away than it is to get up and walk a hundred feet across your office.

Which means distributed teams can get the same amount of work done as concentrated ones—probably more, thanks to the planet’s rotation and the single most important invention of 1883-84, the division of the globe into 24 standard time zones based on Greenwich Mean Time. In effect, the world’s information workers all live in one giant city—a mental space where Gmail and Twitter are more important than parking garages and subway tunnels.

Which makes one particular strain of inter-city bickering all the more inane. Over the last few years, I’ve listened to endless arguments about whether New York or Silicon Valley or Boston or insert-your-favorite-city- here is the best place to be an innovator, find investors, hire engineers and salespeople, and grow a technology company. In Boston, people still wring their hands over why Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook to Palo Alto. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, people glance nervously over their shoulders at New York. Recently, in fact, there’s been an extended and entertaining kerfuffle over New York’s merits as a startup hub, involving, at various points, SpeakerText CEO Matt Mireles, Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham (see 2:30 in this video), and AdGrok co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez. Dixon, Fake, and Graham think New York’s tech scene is exploding with cool startups and “ambitious ass-kickers,” and that it’s becoming an easier place to find angel or venture financing and engineering talent. Mireles and Garcia-Martinez, on the other hand, think that New York is expensive and elitist, that the angels and tech-focused venture firms are still few and far between, that Wall Street sucks up all the talent, that the city lacks decent engineering schools, and that New Yorkers are generally hustlers rather than builders.

It’s all beside the point. Regions have their distinct flavors, of course, but in the end, none of this affects the global pace of innovation, which depends on people and their ideas much more than their locations. Does anyone seriously want to argue that Google would not exist if … Next Page »

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Kate Imbach, long the vice president of marketing for Skyhook Wireless in Boston and a key leader of the Mobile Monday movement in the United States, is departing Skyhook to take on the same title at San Francisco startup 8tracks, an Internet radio startup where users craft and share their own playlists. At Skyhook, Imbach helped to promote the company’s location-finding technology for mobile devices; at the same time, she assumed a coordinating role for Mobile Monday chapters in Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley. “I will continue to be involved with Mobile Monday Silicon Valley and Matt Gross will continue to run with Boston,” Imbach said in an e-mail to Xconomy.

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