When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that …Next Page »

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[Updated 9:05 a.m., 11/16/09, see below] David Cohen, the co-founder of Boulder, CO-based venture incubator program TechStars, sent Xconomy a note this morning to say that the Boston version of TechStars is coming back to town a bit earlier than expected. The 2010 session of TechStars Boston will take place in the spring, rather than the summer, as it did this year.

For teams considering applying for TechStars’ increasingly renowned startup mentorship bootcamp, that means applications for the Boston program are open and due pretty soon—on January 11, in fact. The Boston program will run from March 2 through June 2. As in the past, about 10 companies will be selected for the session. (Applications for the Boulder program are due March 22, and the program will run from May 10 to August 6.)

[Update] We e-mailed TechStar’s Boston executive director, Shawn Broderick, to ask about the reasons for the switch in timing. Broderick says there are several. “We realized that running the Boston and Boulder programs simultaneously during the summer this year spread a bunch of our shared resources thin—mentors, staff, investors, etc.,” Broderick writes. “We also wrestled with the traditional ’silent summer’ of Boston that happens in July and August. It made it tough for some of the mentors to be as involved as they wanted to be.”

“I’m sure we’ll learn a few interesting things we didn’t expect, but I’m also sure it’ll be a net positive as we optimize our resources for the new teams,” Broderick continues.

I also asked Broderick whether he’s located new office space in town—as Bob wrote recently, Broderick has taken up temporary residence in Polaris’s Dogpatch Labs after TechStars vacated last summer’s Central Square digs. “Not yet,” he answers, “but I’m working on it!”

Here’s David Cohen’s entire note, which contains quite a few interesting TechStars tidbits:

“TechStars will now run the Boston program in the Spring instead of the Summer. As such, applications are now open. We would love it if you’d help us get the word out to entrepreneurs.

Some thoughts for this story:

- TechStars Boulder will still operate in the summer as it has for the past 3 years.

- Three TechStars startups from the first year of the program were recently acquired: Socialthing (by AOL), Brightkite (by Limbo), and Intense Debate (by Wordpress).

- TechStars has now run the Boulder program for 3 years, and the Boston program for one year (it was added last year).

- Hundreds of investors attended the first TechStars demo day in Boston in September. The program has been very well received there, with some 60 mentors participating.

- TechStars was started by David Cohen and Brad Feld.

- Shawn Broderick is the Executive Director of the Boston program.

- Bill Warner instigated bringing the program to Boston.

- The Boston program last summer produced 9 new companies, about 5 of which look like they’ll end up closing additional outside funding. oneforty is perhaps the most well known so far. See techstars.org/companies for a complete list of companies we’ve funded historically.

- The Boulder program recently completed its third year, and 6 of the 10 companies are funded by VC firms (not all disclosed by the companies yet, but more should be soon). 1 (or perhaps 2) others will be angel backed shortly.

- TechStars is mentorship driven. What sets us apart is the fantastic mentors that participate in the program and meaningfully help each company. We also think our focus on quality over quantity has led to such a high rate of follow on funding for 75% of our companies.

- Because the Boston program is now operating in the spring, applications are now open at http://www.techstars.org/apply – apps will automatically roll over from Boston (spring) to Boulder (summer).”

[Update] I asked Broderick to clarify Cohen’s last point. He says teams that aren’t accepted for the Boston session will automatically be considered for the Boulder session, if they are so inclined.

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Being journalists, we here at Xconomy try to refrain from bald political statements or endorsements. We’d never ask you to “vote early and often” for any candidate for office. But this week we can cheerfully recommend that you subvert the democratic process by going to www.google.com/trike and voting as many times as you can for Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace as the next U.S. pedestrian mall to be photographed by Google’s tricycle-borne Street View crew.

Street View, as most Google users know, is the Google Maps feature that gives you a panoramic visual preview of places you may plan to visit in person. Using a fleet of camera-equipped cars, Google has collected 360-degree, street-level views for hundreds of cities in all 50 U.S. states and quite a few countries around the world. But until recently, those views haven’t extended into pedestrian malls, parks, hiking trails, and other areas where cars are off limits.

That’s changing thanks to the Street View Trike, a contraption dreamed up a couple of years ago by Google senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner. The trikes are essentially pedicabs that Google has converted to carry the standard Street View camera and computer equipment. Ratner and his crew have already used the trikes to create Street View images of places like California’s Legoland (just north of San Diego), and in an October post on the official Google blog, Ratner invited users to say where they’d like to see the trikes go next.

The company got 25,000 nominations, and on Monday it announced that it had picked 24 finalists in five categories. Faneuil Hall is a finalist in the pedestrian malls category. It’s pitted against Chicago’s Navy Pier and San Francisco’s Pier 39.

Now, without insulting our friends in the Windy City and the Golden Gate, I think it’s fair to say that Faneuil Hall is the only historically significant place on that list. Pier 39 is a mall-on-stilts built in the 1970s that owes most of its fame to the sea lions who have adopted it as their home, and Navy Pier was basically an abandoned eyesore until its redevelopment in the 1990s. So Boston’s historic “cradle of liberty”—the site of fiery oratory by the fathers of the revolution—should clearly be the first of these locations to get the Google Trike treatment.

Google users get to vote for the winners in each category. According to the company, you can vote as many times as you like—but you’ve only got until midnight on Monday, November 30. So stop reading this now and go vote!

To get the whole scoop on the Google Trike and how it’s changing the face of Google Street View, I talked with Dan Ratner himself on Tuesday.

Xconomy: Do you think the Google Trike helps to put a human face on Street View, which has sometimes run into public skepticism and misunderstandings?

Dan Ratner: Let me put it this way. Every time I’ve been out there on the bike—which is quite a number of times now—there’s been a lot of excitement. People are like, “Wow, this is Google Street View? I’ve seen that, but I didn’t know how you get the data!” Seeing a bicycle does seem to put a human face on it, literally, because …Next Page »

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Microsoft is adjusting to a “new normal” with levels of demand for information technology that may be permanently lower than in the past—but it will still vie aggressively with competitors such as Apple for the dollars of consumers and enterprises, CEO Steve Ballmer told an audience in Boston today.

In a rare visit to New England, the famously competitive Microsoft exec met with a group of local technology-community leaders assembled by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council at Microsoft’s own New England Research and Development (NERD) Center this morning, then headed downtown to give a luncheon speech to the Boston College Chief Executives’ Club of Boston.

Ballmer said he was optimistic about the prospects for economic recovery, but he said the country, and especially the computer and software industry, have reached a plateau in which IT expenditures by both consumers and enterprises are likely to stay 15 to 25 percent lower than they were before the recession began. “We see stability at this stage and the chance for real growth, but it’s a tough climate,” Ballmer said.

He noted that much of the U.S. economy’s growth prior to the recession was built on debt, and as that debt is gradually unwound, “we are going to have to generate more productivity and innovation in order to drive more job growth.”

Fortunately, Ballmer said, there’s still plenty of room for innovation. Holding up the paper on which his speech was printed, Ballmer exclaimed, “this is Gutenberg-generation technology! Our industry has a long way to go.” Within five to 10 years, he said, computing devices will be as flat and as flexible as paper, and all aspects of business and entertainment will grow more connected and interactive.

Ballmer also predicted that software will gradually take over more and more of the mundane aspects of information gathering. “When I say to my secretary, ‘Get me ready for my trip to Boston,’ she has to go to the same calendar, look at an agenda, go to all the websites of the customers I’m visiting, download data about them, go to the CRM software…why can’t I have a computer do that? It’s not rocket science—it is within the realm of the possible.”

Microsoft will invest $9.5 billion this year on research and development to tackle problems like this one, Ballmer said. And about 700 of the company’s R&D personnel work in New England, he noted, counting both NERD and Microsoft’s offices in Beverly, MA.

“For Bill [Gates] and I particularly, going to Harvard in the 1970s, I’ll tell you, the world of computing was route 128 and DEC,” Ballmer said. “There is still a lot of talent in this area, because of Boston College and Harvard and MIT and all the other universities, and there is also a fine culture of …Next Page »

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I spent an enlightening week in Tokyo earlier this month participating in the Kauffman Fellows Japan Summit. This summit was the brainchild of three visionary Kauffman Fellows who are on a mission to instill entrepreneurship into the Japanese culture. During the three days we heard about the current (dismal) status of venture capital and entrepreneurial success in Japan—especially in the life sciences—in contrast to the unbelievable track record of Japanese engineering and precision manufacturing, as well as the country’s output of patents, which rivals that of the U.S.

Walking around Tokyo and interacting with the many smart minds at the summit, I had to scratch my head—at first blush, the ingredients of great entrepreneurship in life sciences are there. But why is there no soup? One of the most staggering statistics presented at the meeting was that just $200M was invested in local life science companies in 2008, with one pharma spin-out venture taking half the total!

And then it started to sink in how privileged we are in the Boston area, where the next successful or aspiring entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, venture capitalist, IP or venture lawyer, skilled technician, teaching hospital, pharmaceutical company, or device company is just a door away. We are steeped in this culture of entrepreneurship and have been so for many years now. This Boston life science ecotope is as unique as Silicon Valley is for the techies, and it behooves us to make sure we take full advantage of this incredible competitive edge.

People outside of our unique Boston ecotope understand how powerful our “soup” is—Japanese investors searching for attractive opportunities in private equity and venture capital are looking first to the U.S., then checking out Europe and China, only to search their own home market last. How discouraging that must be for the few life sciences pioneers in Japan! I will make it a habit now to remind folks in our industry, as well as local government officials, that we should cherish what we have and work hard to keep things intact and healthy.

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What would you think if I told you that a 20-year-old with an iPhone could turn hundreds of Boston’s sharpest entrepreneurs, business leaders, and students into human game pieces on a life-sized game board? Last Friday, that is exactly what happened as The Quest for Innovation put the spotlight on Boston’s history of entrepreneurship and innovation with a high-tech twist on the classic scavenger hunt.

The Quest, organized by Michael Gaiss of Highland Capital Partners and Seth Priebatsch of Boston-based startup Scvngr, brought together over 100 teams (and some 350-400 participants) from leading Boston-area startup companies, university entrepreneurship programs, industry organizations, and services firms for a mobile phone-enabled scavenger hunt through downtown Boston. The teams each had two key goals: raise funds for local non-profit organizations and entrepreneurship programs (the amount raised has not yet been announced) and secure the Boston technology scene’s ultimate bragging rights. Pulling the strings was the 20-year-old Priebatsch, “chief ninja” of Scvngr, which provided the technology behind the Quest. While the Quest was created using Scvngr’s Web-based game design platform, Priebatsch was able to kick-off and manage the event on site, right from his own mobile phone.

When I decided to assemble a team from my company, Westford, MA-based startup Virtual Computer, I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble finding volunteers. The Virtual Computer team is an extremely competitive bunch. Our office bulletin board is covered with everything from competitor trash talk to disputed scorecards from “friendly” mini-golf outings, and during our recurring trips to the F1 Boston race track it is not uncommon for at least one employee to put victory over career prospects by introducing a company executive to the track wall. Sure enough, within five minutes of sending out an e-mail about the Quest, I had my roster filled.

The organizers of the Quest were fairly tight lipped about how the event would work, so we arrived on Friday afternoon ready to quickly assess the game and develop a winning strategy on the fly. As the team “pilot,” I would be responsible for submitting our team’s answers to each challenge, so I downloaded the Scvngr iPhone application, hoping it would provide even the slightest advantage over the standard SMS text message method of game play. I used the application to officially register our team and then provided my team members with a special code that would allow them to see the game challenges and clues simultaneously as they were delivered to my phone. This way, we could “divide and conquer” as necessary.

As the game kicked off, the teams dispersed in various directions, with the Scvngr system starting the various teams with different clues to avoid a pileup at any given location. Our team quickly …Next Page »

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Apparently, social media services like Facebook and Twitter aren’t everything they’re cracked up to be, even for the twenty-somethings who are supposedly their most devoted users. Here in Boston, there’s a new group for young startup types who prefer to talk about their entrepreneurial ambitions in person at actual bars, of all places. It’s called Dart Boston, and it’s now going into its sixth month, with its 22nd meeting planned for this Thursday night.

You don’t have to be under 30 to attend a Dart Boston event—in fact, co-founder Cort Johnson says “people of all ages and backgrounds” are welcome at the weekly meetings, which take place at a different bar or restaurant each Thursday. But you do have to be in your twenties to be a presenter or panelist on “Pokin’ Holes,” the podcast/video/live-streaming show that is the centerpiece of each gathering.

With Johnson as moderator, the show gives one guest entrepreneur each week the opportunity to describe his or her startup and collect feedback from the panelists and the audience. Last week, for example, guest Fan Bi described Blank Label, an online “mass customization” service for men’s dress shirts that will launch at the end of this month. (Bi, 21, is Blank Label’s chief evangelist.)

The show is “really an opportunity to give kids who wouldn’t otherwise be asked to speak their minds a voice, and to give these entrepreneurs who wouldn’t have an opportunity to promote their company the opportunity to share with our community what they’re working on,” says Johnson, who is 24.

Johnson and two fellow twenty-somethings, Jake Cacciapaglia and Alexa Scordato, told me they dreamed up Dart Boston over dinner one night last spring. “Jake and I had been working on a company before this, living out in Foxborough, and we would be driving into the city all the time and meeting all these cool young people,” says Johnson. “We finally decided to get an apartment on Dartmouth Street, and we started inviting all these people over to chat about what was going on. Jake had met Alexa, and we had dinner one night and we thought, ‘Why not turn these conversations we were having about the business ideas that kids were executing upon into a more formal atmosphere?’”

The club was originally called Dart 102, after the address of Johnson and Cacciapaglia’s Dartmouth Street digs, but the gatherings quickly grew too large for the apartment, which sent the group barhopping and led to the name change. A typical Dart Boston evening starts with “Pokin’ Holes” at 6:45 p.m. and includes a couple of hours of cocktails and networking after the show. (You can watch or listen to the recorded shows here.)

Scordato, a former employee at Burlington, MA-based social software startup Mzinga who recently took a job in New York with public relations giant Porter Novelli, says she thinks Dart Boston fills a troubling vacuum in the Boston area. She notes that there’s a ton of young talent coming out of the regions’ universities—she calls Boston an “academic Acropolis”—but she says that …Next Page »

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We’re happy to announce that there’s now an easier to way to read Xconomy on your mobile phone. Go to http://m.xconomy.com for the new mobile-friendly version of our site, which we’ve simplified for easy navigation on small screens.

All the usual content is there: our Boston, San Diego, and Seattle news stories, along with Xconomist Forum posts from all three cities, not to mention subject-specific pages for our infotech, life science, startups, energy, and deals stories. But it’s all designed to look super-clean and load quickly on a mobile device.

The truth is that no website designed with desktop browsing in mind fares well on the screen of a mobile phone. iPhone owners might demur, but even with the iPhone’s Safari browser, you have to do a bunch of zooming and panning to make your way around a regular Web page. If you’re on the go and you just want to catch a few blog posts, you don’t want to mess with all that, or with the nifty tabs, menus, and image maps that make many sites more functional in full Web browsers but just get in the way on mobile devices.

That’s why there’s a crop of companies—some of them in Xconomy’s own home towns—devoted to helping publishers optimize their content for mobile devices. We found a great one in Providence, RI, called Mofuse. Funded in part by the Slater Technology Fund, which uses money appropriated by the Rhode Island legislature to help promote technology entrepreneurship in the Ocean State, Mofuse is already helping thousands of organizations go mobile, including Fox News, Harvard Business School, Chicago Public Radio, as well as great blogs like Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. (See Mofuse’s press release about our partnership.)

We hope you enjoy the mobile site, and welcome your feedback, suggestions, and bug notes. Because our office mobile armory is limited to a few iPhones and Blackberrys, we’re especially eager to hear how the site looks and functions on other platforms. Please post a comment below, or write me at wroush@xconomy.com.

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Behind the stubborn economic clouds, there may be a few hints of blue sky. A few companies, in other words, are hiring rather than firing—and a new report from StartUpHire, a Vienna, VA-based job board that specializes in advertising open positions at venture-backed startups, has the lowdown on which ones (see the lists below).

As measured by the number of open positions tracked by StartUpHire, Xconomy’s home regions are among the top six fastest-growing job markets in the country. (The San Francisco Bay Area is at the top of that list, followed by Boston, New York, Southern California, the Washington DC-Baltimore region, and Seattle.) There are more than 700 positions open at venture-backed startups in the Boston area, according to the company. The number of openings tops 500 in Southern California, and in Seattle there are 258 positions open.

“This information from StartUpHire is a strong indicator that even in the current economic climate startups continue to provide tremendous growth opportunities and are a collective force in regional and national job markets,” Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, said in a StartUpHire announcement. Nancy Saucier, executive director of the New England Venture Capital Association, added that she expects venture-backed companies “will help lead the way to a robust job growth recovery.”

The fastest growing companies, as measured by job openings in the second quarter of 2009:

Boston
Acceleron Pharma
Acquia
CambridgeSoft
E Ink
Gomez
ITA Software
Kronos
Senior Whole Health
Turbine
Zipcar

[lists continue on next page]

…Next Page »

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Let’s say you live in Boston and you’ve just hit on a great concept for a cross-media property, with all the attendant merchandising tie-ins: a special-effects-laden movie, a console video game, a comic, a kids’ cartoon, action figures, a novelization, a persistent online world—in other words, the next Matrix or Transformers or Harry Potter. To make it happen, you’d probably need to hire filmmaking talent from Hollywood, writers and publishers and marketers from New York, programmers and game designers and media network providers from San Francisco and Seattle and Los Angeles, and so forth, right?

Actually, no. Most, maybe all, of the talent and technology you’d need to build your dream media empire is right here in New England.

While the rest of us weren’t looking, and without consulting one another, thousands of creative types have been flocking to the Boston area over the past decade. They’ve built a critical mass of game studios, film production companies, graphics software houses, 3-D modeling companies, digital marketing agencies, online hangouts, and the like—what amounts, in fact, to a self-sufficient digital entertainment ecosystem.

Of course, there would be no particular reason to build your media property using only New England talent. You don’t get green laurels or political-correctness points for restricting yourself to creative services from within a 100-mile radius, the way you arguably do if you buy locally farmed food. And in an age of Friedmanian flatness, your investors will probably force you to offshore as much of the work as you can anyway. My point is that you could find the services here if you wanted to. And that’s something new and remarkable.

We’re going to explore this emerging sector in depth during a panel discussion that I’m moderating on June 24 as part of the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship. (This full-day event, featuring more than 50 speakers altogether, will be held at Boston University’s School of Management; the full agenda is here and registration information is here.) My panel is entitled “The Digital Entertainment Cluster: Boston’s Best Kept Secret,” and I’ve lined up participants from local companies and organizations that represent the whole spectrum of digital media production and delivery. Not coincidentally, these are all companies I’ve written about for Xconomy—just follow the links below to go deeper.

First, we’ll have Brett Close, CEO of Maynard, MA-based 38 Studios, which was founded by local baseball hero Curt Schilling and is building a cross-media property very much like the hypothetical one I outlined above; it’s based around a massively multiplayer online environment with the cheeky code name Copernicus. Then there’s Chris Gardner, chief marketing officer at Newton, MA-based Extend Media, which sells software that media companies can use to distribute a single piece of digital content to multiple devices, including PCs, televisions, and mobile phones.

Kyle Morton, vice president of product at Cambridge, MA-based EveryZing, will also be on hand; EveryZing is a spinoff of local engineering powerhouse BBN, and has turned its original speech-to-text technology into the core of a universal search engine that helps media companies catalog the digital content they own, facilitate consumer access, and monetize it through advertising. We’ll also hear from Brian Shin, the CEO of Boston-based Visible Measures, who will talk about his company’s project to index and track all the world’s viral videos, the better to help clients measure the success of their marketing campaigns.

Finally, we’ll be joined by Jason Schupbach from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Office of Business Development, who has the coolest title of all the panelists: “Industry Director, Creative Economy.” Schupbach’s job is to connect people in the creative industries to the extensive resources offered by the state government. He’s one of the main people in the Patrick Administration promoting services like export planning, equipment loans, affordable housing programs for artists, and the 25 percent film tax credit. (That tax incentive, available to anyone who creates at least 70 percent of a film or digital media project in Massachusetts, is one of the main forces behind the state’s sudden emergence as a film-industry outpost; no fewer than four major movie studios are planned for construction in Massachusetts over the next two years.)

I’m very excited (or XSITEd, as we’ve been saying around here all month) to be gathering these particular panelists at one event, because I think they can tell a compelling story about why it’s useful to have so many elements of the digital media production and distribution pipeline available in one place; why Boston is an attractive place to build a digital media company; how having all of this talent in one place creates opportunities for projects that weren’t …Next Page »

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New England technology and business newspaper Mass High Tech is moving from a weekly to a biweekly print publishing schedule effective in September, publisher Michael Olivieri said yesterday. The Boston Globe reported that MHT laid off four employees in the restructuring, which will see the paper shift from 24 pages a week to 32 pages every two weeks. In the story in MHT, Olivieri described the change as a natural step in enhancing the “web emphasis we have been working toward for some time.”

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Hopkinton, MA-based EMC is throwing its weight behind a massive social media campaign to find a bone marrow donor for one of its employees, 28-year-old Nick Glasgow. The “donor drive” arrived in the Boston area today with events at EMC locations in Cambridge, MA, and Franklin, MA, where potential donors can visit to see whether their own marrow might provide a match.

Glasgow, a California resident, was diagnosed with leukemia nine weeks ago, according to EMC. Initial treatments have proved ineffective, and no matching bone marrow donor has been identified in national databases. The search is complicated by the fact that Glasgow is of mixed Caucasian and Asian heritage, making the pool of potential donors much smaller. (Glasgow’s story and the challenges of blood-marrow matching for mixed-raced patients are the subject of this AP article.)

Companies in the technology business, including EMC, Cisco, Salesforce.com, and NetApp, have been rallying to Glasgow’s cause, publicizing the national donor drive through Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and the like.

Potential donors who are themselves of mixed ethnicity, are healthy, and are between the ages of 18 and 60 can visit these EMC locations today to be screened:

11 Cambridge Technology Center, Cambridge MA (4th Floor)
9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

50 Constitution Blvd, Franklin, MA (Johnson Conference Room, 3rd Floor)
12:30 pm – 2:30 pm

The donor drive is being hosted by EMC and the Be The Match Foundation. Readers outside the Boston area can sign up to receive a testing kit from the Asian American Donor Program.

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Almost by definition, anyone who gets to the point of submitting an online help request to a software or services company is frustrated, possibly even angry. Responding to a flood of help requests constructively takes calmness and strength—and that’s what Zendesk, a help desk management outsourcing company, tries to supply to its own customers, including big names like Twitter, MSNBC, and Rackspace.

The provider of Web 2.0-style help request tracking software announced today that it has collected on some of that good karma, raising an unspecified amount of Series A venture funding from Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA. The startup, originally founded in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2007, also announced it has opened its U.S. headquarters near South Station in Boston.

Many of Zendesk’s 1,000-plus customers are themselves Web 2.0 or software-as-a-service companies such as JungleDisk, SlideRocket, Viddler, CakeMail, and WebExpenses.They have all gravitated to Zendesk’s Web-based system for managing help requests because it’s based on Web standards and is therefore easy to integrate with their own services. They may also like the company’s reasonable prices, which range from $19 to $475 per month (depending on how many support agents will be using the software) and are considerably cheaper than competing help-desk software such as BMC’s Remedy. Then there’s the matter of convenience—help tickets created by Zendesk users can be accessed and managed remotely from any Web browser.

Zendesk “has provided us with a platform that works really well for remote teams like ours,” David Abrahams, chief software architect at Sydney, Australia-based Web application design company KMS Systems, says in a testimonial on Zendesk’s website. “Zendesk provides the perfect central point, so we all know what our customers need, who from our team is looking after them and the history of previous communications in case we need to pick up where someone left off.”

Zendesk supplies customers with “help portals”—branded to look like part of their own sites, but actually operated from Zendesk’s own servers—where users can browse troubleshooting FAQs, submit support requests, and check on existing requests. And that’s about it. The company’s interface is employs a clean, no-frills design that reminds me of programs built by 37signals, the Chicago Web software firm known for its “less is more” philosophy.

“Beautifully simple. That is all you need to know about Zendesk,” says Zendesk co-founder and CEO Mikkel Asger Svane in an announcement today about the Series A funding. “This financing will help us build on our success and bring good help desk karma to any organization seeking enlightenment.” (As its name suggests, the company takes the Buddhist theme pretty seriously; among its innovations is an online “Buddha Machine Wall” consisting of 21 simulated FM3 Buddha Machine players, each programmed to play a different loop of droning New Age music.)

Of course, all is not bliss is the land of technical support. Here at Xconomy, we spent quite a bit of time using Zendesk’s system back in February, and March, and April, as we attempted to get Twitter—probably Zendesk’s highest-profile customer—to evict a squatter who was using the “Xconomy” name. We’ve written about the gory details here and here so I won’t repeat them. Suffice it to say that a help-desk support system is only as effective as the people administering it.

When I learned about the financing, I felt compelled to share my Twitter story with Zendesk. Svane replied as follows: “As you can imagine, Twitter Support may very well be one of the world’s largest online support organizations right now, providing support to millions of free users. While we cannot control individual response times, the nice thing about Zendesk is its ability to scale to support that tremendous task. But we also know it’s a colossal support process that won’t be nailed from one day to the other.”

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If you’re out watching the Boston Marathon on Monday and you see a giant iPhone limp past, chances are it’s Jason Jacobs inside.

Jacobs is the hyperkinetic founder and CEO of Boston-based FitnessKeeper, which makes a highly popular run-tracking application for the Apple iPhone 3G called RunKeeper. (He was also a panelist at Xconomy’s recent Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England.) As of yesterday, the free version of RunKeeper was the 17th most popular free health and fitness program in the iTunes App Store, and the $9.99 Runkeeper Pro was the 34th most popular paid fitness app.

But after Monday, the app’s ratings may go even higher, thanks to a fascinating publicity stunt—sorry, “social media campaign”—that Jacobs and his high-school pal David Gerzof, who teaches a social media class at Boston’s Emerson College, described to me this week. It’s actually a cool case study in the power of Web video, charitable giving, a group of ambitious college students, the Twittersphere, and a guy in a funny costume to build excitement around a piece of software. But whether Jacobs himself will still be walking on two feet by the time the stunt is over is an open question—as this YouTube video, published today, explains.

First, a bit about the software: The RunKeeper app uses the iPhone 3G’s built-in GPS chip to measure how far and how fast a jogger (or hiker or biker) has traveled on each outing. It also creates a map, accessible on the RunKeeper website after your run is completed, showing the exact path you followed, complete with little mile or kilometer markers. It’s a great tool for tracking the distance you covered on each run and the pace you kept.

And because the RunKeeper website makes it easy to share the data on your runs with friends via Twitter, e-mail, or your Facebook or MySpace profile, the app also helps you tap into a network of friends or fellow fitness enthusiasts who will, in theory, cheer you on. (Although they might just be disgusted at how much exercise you’re getting while they sit at home reading Twitter.)

The paid version of RunKeeper differs from the free version in only two respects: it’s ad-free, and if you’re wearing headphones on your run, a voice will tell you how far you’ve gone every mile, every kilometer, or every five minutes. The voice is female and sounds dauntingly fit—like a somewhat mean aerobics instructor, which is probably the perfect tone to strike in this context.

Jacobs, a Babson College MBA graduate and longtime runner, has been operating FitnessKeeper on the cheap. He’s the only full-time employee, and most of his team (he’s outsourced a lot of the programming work to Boston-based Raizlabs) is working for equity rather than cash. That means he hasn’t had a lot to spend on marketing and public relations.

Enter Gerzof, who runs Brookline, MA-based public relations firm Big Fish Communications, got his master’s degree in marketing communications from Emerson, and has been teaching two classes a year there since 2002. “We work mainly with startup companies, and often times I find companies way early, before they have the resources to take on Big Fish,” Gerzof told me this week. “FitnessKeeper happened to be one of those companies.” Gerzof knew all about RunKeeper, since Jacobs, who’d gone to high school with Gerzof, had called him a couple of times for advice on marketing.

Gerzof says he recently persuaded the Marketing Communication department at Emerson to let him start a course on social media and Web marketing. Through the Google Grants program, he’d obtained funding for a class project in which teams of students helped local non-profits design free keyword-based advertising campaigns using Google’s AdWords service. “But I also wanted to give them some real-world experience with for-profit companies, since that’s where most of them are going to go to work,” says Gerzof. “These scrappy startups are happy to get whatever help they can get. So I went through my contacts, and Jason instantly popped off the page.”

Jacobs agreed to let a team of five Emerson students in Gerzof’s class—Sam Citron, Cassie Kling, Alleigh Marre, Carly Narvez, and Greg Townsend—turn RunKeeper into their capstone project for the spring semester.

Says Marre: “We bounced around a bunch of ideas. Our biggest challenge wasn’t necessarily getting Jason a fan base, since he already has a ton of followers on Twitter, and he does a really good job of staying in contact with users. We decided that we needed to figure out a way to connect with brand evangelists, and get them really excited about something that RunKeeper was doing. So we ultimately decided to do a promotion around the Boston Marathon.”

The team’s idea was to have Jacobs run the marathon in an iPhone costume—while, of course, wearing an actual iPhone with the RunKeeper app going—and to chronicle the preparations, the race, and the Emerson project itself in a series of edgy Web videos, the second of which is out today. (Click to page 3 of this article to watch the videos. A third video will come out shortly after race day. [Update, April 21, 2009: the third video is now up as well.])

Jacobs committed to the project about three weeks before marathon day. Which is where the story starts to get really wild. Jacobs says he ran in the 2007 Chicago Marathon and finished “in a pretty decent time,” despite the 90-degree weather. But he had to pull out of the 2008 Chicago race because of …Next Page »

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The damage to Bay State technology employment rolls was far greater in January than in any month since the downturn began. By Xconomy’s count, New England tech firms laid off at least 5,675 workers as 2009 began, compared to 2,028 layoffs in November and 1,428 in December, the two worst months prior to January.

Massive job cuts at two firms at the foundations of the local technology economy were the prime contributors to January’s grim statistics. Hopkinton, MA-based EMC announced January 7 that it would lay off 2,400 workers, and Bose in Framingham, MA, said it would let 1,000 workers go on January 20.

But other major area employers weren’t far behind: Brooks Automation in Chelmsford, MA, announced 550 layoffs on January 26; Sepracor, the Marlborough, MA-based maker of Lunesta sleeping pills, announced it would eliminate 530 jobs on January 29; and Teradyne in North Reading, MA, closed out the month on January 30 by announcing it would cut its workforce by 532 positions. (Not all of these reported cuts will affect Massachusetts employees—in most cases, companies don’t break down their reduction-in-force announcements by region.)

The cuts at local firms were merely a reflection of the national trend, of course. In 2008, technology companies laid off nearly 187,000 people altogether, according to a count last week by Chicago-based employment agency Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. While the company hasn’t finished compiling January figures, it said “technology firms appear to be continuing their job-cutting spree in 2009,” with giants like Sprint/Nextel, Microsoft, Motorola, IBM, Intel, and AMD leading the way.

We’ve been tallying up the local job losses on our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker, which we’ll continue to update as the layoff reports come in. Here’s what the January figures looked like, in the end:

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In early January, students from MIT’s Sloan School of Management fanned out to companies in Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Seattle on the school’s annual Tech Trek. The student-organized job-prospecting event puts budding business moguls soon to receive their MBAs into the same conference rooms with technology entrepreneurs for a download on each company’s business focus and its hiring outlook. On January 12, Greg talked with one of the trek organizers visiting Seattle-area companies, who reported that Amazon and Microsoft are hiring, but Google and Yahoo aren’t. And this week, two Sloan students who toured startups here in Boston are making guest appearances in our Xconomist Forum.

John Marcus III, who’s in his second year at Sloan, supplies a nice explanation of the intent behind the Trek—to meet face-to-face with local executives. But he says these meetings are only the beginning of the connection-building process that all job hunters must tackle today, even those with MIT credentials.

“I think the most critical traits for getting a job in this economy are being creative and being assertive,” Marcus writes. If you want to work for a specific startup, he suggests finding out what kind of help it needs and offering it. “Is your dream startup running out of cash? Come in the door with a list of alumni VCs or maybe a few sales leads for their flagship product. Your imagination is the only bound to what value you can bring.”

Meanwhile, Mahesh Konduru, a first-year Sloan student, dives into the details of the local startups he visited, focusing on each company’s mission and business outlook. You’ll recognize the names of most of these companies, which were part of the Trek’s energy track, from our coverage here in Xconomy: A123 Systems, GreatPoint Energy, Ze-gen, and others.

“Leaving the classrooms to witness innovative technologies in person was a rejuvenating experience,” writes Konduru—who is clearly eager to contribute to that innovation after he finishes school.

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One of the big reasons we launched Xconomy in 2007 was to remind the incredibly talented, enthusiastic people who make up Boston’s innovation community that what they do is not just important and (hopefully) profitable, but fun. And from watching so many tech-biz folks happily getting down and chatting each other up at last night’s Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands 2, it seems that we’re succeeding—at least in a small way.

The four-hour competition at the Middle East Night Club in Central Square, Cambridge, included five bands with members representing local technology companies, plus special guests Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, starring Xconomy’s own Greg Huang on bass. The event attracted a capacity crowd of more than 400 attendees, whose ticket purchases helped us assemble respectable donations for two local non-profit groups, the Community Music Center of Boston and Science Club for Girls.

Suspense mounted through the evening as listeners’ votes rolled in via a text-messaging system provided by Cambridge, MA-based Aerva. In the Audience Favorite voting, the crowd eventually settled on The Dirty Truckers, a hard-driving country-rock-soul band representing American Well and Sophos. The Jamaica Plain, MA-based band, which wrapped up its set with a rousing rendition of “Boston Wrangler,” includes Tom Baker and John Brookhouse on guitar and vocals, Jamie Griffith on bass, and Brian McElroy on drums and vocals. As their prize, the group walked away with $1,050 in free studio recording time and engineering help, generously donated by Bristol Recording Studios of Boston.

The award for Most Innovative Band was chosen by Xconomy staffers, together with guest judges Giles McNamee, co-founder of Boston-based investment banking house McNamee Lawrence & Co., and Helen Greiner, co-founder of Bedford, MA-based iRobot. The award went to Anomopoly, an offbeat indie/rock quartet representing TekScan and Nano-C. The Brighton, MA-based band includes vocalist Toni Ferreira, guitar player Brian Joyce, bass player Tom Lada, and drummer Bill Anderson, and stirred up the crowd with their rhythmically surprising original “Angel Hair,” among other great tunes. For their efforts, Anomopoly took home our other grand prize, a year of free online band promotion services, generously donated by Boston-based Nimbit.

The other three competitors turned in such fantastic performances that we wished we’d had five awards to hand out. EneROCK, a power-rock quartet representing Boston-based EnerNOC, got the competition off to a rollicking start with expert covers of classics like Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” The Main Drag, an indie-electronic band whose members hail from Cambridge-based video game pioneer Harmonix Music, impressed the crowd with their colorful, fast-paced arrangements of original songs like “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter” (one of the featured songs on the Harmonix game Rock Band 2). And Seymore Willie, a six-piece R&B ensemble representing AMAG Pharmaceuticals, LSI, and ARCON, definitely delivered on the “energetic, sophisticated raunchy style” promised by its website.

We’re grateful to all the bands for participating. For the record, the final tally …Next Page »

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EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC), the Boston-based company that pays factory operators, store owners, and local governments for the right to dial back their electricity usage during times of peak demand, announced today that the City of Boston is finally diving into the local “demand response” pool. Under a new agreement negotiated with the office of Mayor Thomas Menino, Boston City Hall, the Boston Public Library, and Boston Police Headquarters will be equipped with remote-controlled meters that allow EnerNOC to reduce non-essential electricity usage whenever local utilities need a buffer. In return, the city will get periodic payments—whether or not it’s ever called upon to cut usage—plus additional money for every actual demand response event.

EnerNOC had previously landed clients seemingly everywhere on the Eastern Seaboard except its home city. As we’ve reported, the State of Rhode Island, the State of Vermont, the State of Connecticut, and even the Pentagon have joined EnerNOC’s pools, whose willingness to contribute “negawatts” by cutting electricity consumption during heat waves or other emergencies means utilities don’t have to build additional fossil-fuel plants. But Boston wasn’t a participant, until now.

“The City of Boston is a hub of clean tech innovation, and EnerNOC is a shining example of Boston-based companies that are making an impact on the way the world uses energy,” Mayor Menino said in a statement released today. “Demand response allows the City to implement smart energy saving measures and make an immediate contribution to the overall reliability of our region’s electric power grid. This is a win-win strategy that puts dollars back into our budget.”

EnerNOC chairman and CEO Tim Healy says the Boston contract has both practical and symbolic importance for the company. “There’s a lot of great discussion and dialogue about what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Boston can do to create green jobs and green initiatives, but the fact that the city has decided to step forth and participate and find innovators right here in its backyard, while putting more revenue back into the city’s pockets, is important to us,” Healy told me last night.

“Also, we have so many people who work for us who live in the South End or the North End, and they like the fact that the very city they live in has chosen us—it’s another testament to them being at the right company at the right time.”

Like all EnerNOC clients, the city will get free access to a proprietary EnerNOC software package called PowerTrak. Using data collected by the monitoring and metering equipment installed at each EnerNOC client site, PowerTrak helps business and institutions identify ways to cut energy use.

How much money the city will get back through the demand-response payments and the efficiency monitoring depends on …Next Page »

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Harvard University today released a report from New York-based research firm Appleseed detailing the university’s impact on the regional economy. The Boston Globe points out that the report, which credits Harvard with directly and indirectly accounting for some $4.8 billion in Boston-area economic activity in fiscal 2008, comes just as “Boston officials seek to squeeze more money out the city’s tax-exempt nonprofit sector to help offset a budget shortfall estimated at more than $100 million.” A pdf of the report is available here.

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Want to know who’s hiring the top young business talent around town? Just ask Saleem Hussain, an MBA student from Boston. In a brutal market for tech industry jobs, he gave me a fresh perspective on the next-generation talent pool and where it’s headed, in terms of both big companies and startups.

Hussain is a first-year MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, MA. He is one of the organizers of a 16-student Sloan contingent that made a “tech trek” to Seattle last week, on Thursday and Friday. It’s part of an annual program that takes 150 Sloan MBA students to companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the Boston area to make job and internship contacts and learn about the respective markets.

In the Seattle area, the group visited Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, Adobe, Starbucks, and Digeo. The students met with recruiters and executives to ask about business challenges the companies are facing, and to learn what MBAs need to do to land jobs in the current market. “As far as internships go, there are lots of opportunities at big companies,” says Hussain.

Despite the economy, he says, Amazon and Microsoft “seem to be really hiring in full swing” on the MIT campus. Adobe has a lot of openings in Silicon Valley, he adds, but not as many in Seattle. Interestingly, Google and Yahoo usually host the Sloan students (in Silicon Valley), but did not this year. “A lot of companies are delaying,” says Hussain. “They’ve held back interviews, putting hiring on hold.”

I also asked Hussain about Sloan’s contacts with Seattle-area startups. If there’s one hiring issue I hear about in the innovation community, it’s the relative dearth of top management, sales, and business development talent—so tapping programs like Sloan’s seems like an obvious way to address the matter. The Sloan tech trek focuses on bigger companies that tend to hire on campus, but Hussain says organizers would embrace meetings with startups as well. “In Boston, we have a lot more access to small companies and strategy consulting firms, because of neighbor relationships,” he says.

As for broader impressions, some in the Sloan group were expecting a wary market for new jobs and internships, given tightening budgets and the prospect of layoffs seemingly around every corner. But the Seattle companies were very receptive, Hussain says. “They seemed surprisingly welcoming in talking to MBA students.” As for any wariness or uncertainty (about internships anyway), he says, “we didn’t see any of that.”

“A lot of people in business school are excited about coming out in this economy,” Hussain says. “For companies, it’s very pivotal for them. It’s such an important time to be working at these companies. That’s what makes it so exciting, and that’s what drives our visits.”

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