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

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

And yet…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RockMelt, the Mountain View, CA-based maker of a “social browser” integrated with Facebook and other social media services, said today that it has collected $30 million in Series B financing. New investors Accel Partners and Khosla Ventures led the round, which was joined by existing investor Andreessen Horowitz. The company said it will use the cash to expand its team and “turbo charge new product development and fund marketing and partnership opportunities.” Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures have joined RockMelt’s board as observers.

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And now for something completely different: Jumio’s mock-shock video playing up the sanitary hazards of cash didn’t amuse some Huffington Post readers, but I got the company and its PR firm to talk about why they made the video and why they aren’t worried about a backlash. Animoto’s system for making slide shows from your videos and photos is cool, but now a lot more people can use it thanks to a partnership program rolled out this week by the San Francisco- and New York-based startup. Speaking of partnerships, StudentMentor.org is using the power of the Web to match budding entrepreneurs with business mentors. The Web and how fast you can get to it on Android and Apple phones was the subject of a study from Toronto-based Blaze this week; turns out the browser on Android phones can outrun the iPhone’s Safari browser like Speedy Gonzalez after guzzling a 5-hour Energy drink. On the energy front, Enphase Energy in Petaluma gave me a behind-the-scenes look at its microinverter technology for converting the direct-current electricity from home solar arrays into grid-compatible alternating current; by packing more smarts into the gadgets and ratcheting down the current and voltage they handle, the company has made it possible for general contractors and electricians to install solar panels without the help of specialists. If you’re trying to shine a light on your own startup, you might want to read Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, which I reviewed in my Friday column. Zediva isn’t enchanting Hollywood with its questionably legal method for letting customers watch new DVD releases online four weeks before Netflix and Redbox get them. Meanwhile investors were enchanted into filling or refilling the coffers of  Solopower, Pricelock, Jawbone, Doximity, CoolPlanetBioFuels, Zero Motorcycles, and the aforementioned Jumio, while Silicon Hive found a home at Intel and Zynga scooped up Massachusetts game startup Floodgate Entertainment. Hat tips to Phil Terry of The Councils and Sarah Kay of Project V.O.I.C.E. for inspiring me to try the stream-of-consciousness approach to this week’s news roundup.

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As if the smartphone wars weren’t fierce enough already, now comes an additional piece of ammunition for defenders of Google’s Android mobile operating system. On average, the Web browser pre-installed on Android phones loads Web pages 52 percent faster than the Safari browser on Apple’s iPhone, according to a study released today.

In other words, a Web page that takes 2 seconds to show up on an Android phone will take roughly 3 seconds on an iPhone. That may not sound like a big difference, but it’s a potentially embarrassing performance for Cupertino, CA-based Apple, which claims that improvements in the JavaScript engine built into Safari iOS 4.3, the new version of the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch operating system released last week, make the browser significantly faster.

The purported Safari speedup has “no material impact on real-world sites,” according to Guy Podjarny, chief technology officer at Blaze Software, the Ottawa, Ontario-based startup that carried out the tests.

Blaze specializes in technology that makes Web pages load faster in multiple browsers. The company collected the data in its own test laboratory, where it has racks of Samsung Nexus S and Galaxy S phones running Android 2.2 and 2.3, along with Apple iPhone 4 devices running iOS 4.2 and 4.3. In what Blaze claims is the largest study to date of smartphone browser performance, the company timed the Android and Apple phones on 45,000 visits to the public websites of all of the Fortune 1000 companies. About 84 percent of the time, the Android phones finished loading the visited page first, while the iPhones won only 16 percent of the time.

The Samsung and Apple devices all have similar amounts of processing power and memory, so the differences Blaze detected are likely rooted in software design issues in the browsers themselves. Google has said it designed the desktop version of its Chrome browser in part because it felt that older browsers deal with JavaScript and other rich Web content inefficiently, and the improvements it made supposedly carried over to the Android browser—which is why it’s not entirely surprising that Android came out ahead in Blaze’s tests. But the extent of the difference is surprising, especially given that Apple has been working on its own speed improvements.

“I was betting on Android to be a little faster. But 50 percent faster—that is a much more major difference than what I was anticipating,” Padjorny says.

Padjorny argues that smartphone software makers don’t test their browsers under realistic conditions, and wind up with data that exaggerates their actual speed. Apple’s statement that the improved mobile version of Safari performs 2.5 times as fast as the previous version is based on … Next Page »

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Flock, the six-year-old Redwood City, CA, startup behind the Flock social Web browser, has been acquired by San Francisco-based social gaming juggernaut Zynga. Flock CEO Shawn Hardin announced the deal in a blog post Wednesday. Funded by Bessemer Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures, Catamount Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, and individual investors, Flock attempted to popularize the concept of a Web browser with built-in hooks to social networking and media sharing services, but it lagged far behind other alternative browsers such as Opera in market share. It’s not clear what Zynga intends to do with Flock’s technology—Hardin said only that “Our team will help Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime—on any platform.” The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Sometimes Google gives the appearance of being a loose confederation rather than a single company, as if its product units are all vying to make news at the same time. That’s definitely the case this week.

Monday saw three big developments at the Googleplex in Mountain View. First came the launch of the Google eBookstore, along with dedicated e-reading apps for multiple platforms, including Android, Apple iOS, Web browsers, and Sony and Barnes & Noble e-book readers. Then, an hour later, Google announced the Nexus S, a new Samsung smartphone that’s the closest thing in existence to a “pure Google” phone, according to Google engineering vice president Andy Rubin. Coinciding with the phone’s debut was the public release of Gingerbread, the code name for the new version of the Android operating system, which powers the Nexus S.

And today, at a press event held three blocks from Xconomy’s San Francisco headquarters, the company took the wraps off a long-awaited Web app store—and shared a detailed look inside its vision for Chrome OS, which will power a line of notebook computers coming next year.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these developments, in reverse chronological order.

Chrome OS. For the first time today, Google shared its vision for a new generation of notebook computers powered not by Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, but by Chrome OS—the operating system modeled after its popular Web browser, which is now used by 120 million people worldwide. Google plans to distribute a limited number of Chrome notebooks (with the geeky name Cr48, after an isotope of the element chromium) to business partners, developers, journalists, and other early adopters almost immediately. Consumer versions are coming from Samsung and Acer starting in “mid-2011,” according to Sundar Pichai, the Google vice president of product management who emceed today’s event.

The guiding assumption behind Chrome OS is that everything PC users need to do today can be done from inside a Web browser. Chrome-powered notebooks will boot directly into the Chrome browser, and users will access the software and information resources they want either through the Web or through Web apps (i.e. browser plugins) that can be easily downloaded over the devices’ built-in 3G or Wi-Fi connections.

Chrome OS devices will cache applications and data for offline use, but they’ll be optimized for an always-on world. “Computers aren’t that useful when you’re not connected, so we’ve put in a lot of work to make sure users are always connected,” Pichai said. Google is partnering with Verizon to offer Chrome notebook owners no-contract 3G data plans, he said.

Google thinks Chrome devices will be more secure than traditional PCs since the operating system and all of a user’s Web apps will be updating automatically and seamlessly, protecting them from … Next Page »

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Companies offering new takes on social media and collaboration dominated the local business and technology news last week, as they seem to be doing an increasing amount of the time.

—After two years in stealth, a Mountain View, CA, startup called RockMelt began distributing a new Windows and Mac browser by the same name. In my Friday column I took a deep look at the browser, which is full of features designed to make life easier for heavy users of social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

—AngelPad, one of the newest venture incubators on the scene in San Francisco, graduated its first class of eight startups with a series of demos geared toward venture and individual investors. I summed up the companies’ pitches, which ranged from organizing social media streams (Curated.by, Snip.ly) to overhauling advertising and e-commerce (Adku, MoPub), simplifying online auctions (Egg Cartel), managing home energy consumption (HugEnergy), organizing meetups (RollCall), and aiding outdoorsmanship (AllTrails).

—Flowtown, a San Francisco startup with an online platform that helps other companies kickstart social media marketing campaigns, announced that it had acquired the technology of Who Should I Follow?, which combs Twitter users’ lists followers to suggest new people to follow. I took the occasion to write a full profile of Flowtown, which was co-founded in 2008 by former online video producer Ethan Bloch and IT consultant Dan Martell.

—BroadVision (NASDAQ: BVSN), a Redwood City, CA, company that achieved fame in the first Internet boom for its enterprise portals and e-commerce software, pushed forward with efforts to reinvent its product line around Facebook-style sharing and collaboration. I spoke with BroadVision founder and CEO Pehong Chen, who called the debut of BroadVision’s new “Clearvale Paasport” enterprise document exchange platform a bet-the-company moment.

—We published a report from the Women 2.0 PITCH Night on November 4, where VMware founder and former CEO Diane Greene spoke about how she started the company, and encouraged other women entrepreneurs to think big.

—In funding news, Gluster raised $8.5 million, Zuora raised $20 million, RealGravity raised $3.2 million, Social Gaming Network raised $2.5 million, Twilio raised $12 million, Rhythm NewMedia raised $10 million, and Airbnb raised $7.2 million.

—San Francisco-based event management startup Socializr was acquired by Punchbowl.com, a party planning website run from Framingham, MA.

—Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) sued Sunnyvale, CA, startup Cotendo for allegedly infringing on Akamai patents covering online content distribution.

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While nearly everything about the Web has changed since its emergence circa 1993—who’s using it, what types of content are available, how Web pages are constructed, how it’s all paid for—the desktop browser hasn’t. It’s still basically a big blank square that lets you navigate between Web pages, with a set of buttons and controls around the edges.

That’s not to say that browsers don’t evolve. Every few years some team of engineers comes out with a new one designed to address the perceived shortcomings of its predecessors. Thus we got entrants like Opera 4.0 in 2000 (a response to the need for browsers on non-PC platforms like mobile phones), Firefox in 2004 (a reaction to feature creep in Netscape’s Mozilla browser), Flock in 2005 (a reaction to the lack of social features in Firefox), and Chrome in 2008 (Google’s answer to the other browsers’ alleged performance and security problems). But the basic concept has remained the same: browser as vessel, designed to deliver Web pages and then stay out of the way.

Now there’s another new browser in town: RockMelt. The premise, this time, is that older browsers haven’t caught up to the new ways people are using the Web—in particular, the way they’re spending more time interacting with each other via social platforms like Facebook, and getting more of their information pushed to them in small chunks via channels like Twitter and RSS. Built for Mac and Windows computers by a venture-funded startup in Mountain View, CA, RockMelt was released to the public on Monday in limited beta form after two years of stealth-mode development. After using RockMelt as my default browser all week, I feel qualified to say that it represents the biggest departure yet from the old pattern of the Web browser as a big blank vessel. That’s a good thing—the browser concept needed some further shaking up, and after all, it was to encourage precisely this kind of innovation that organizations like Mozilla, Google, and Apple open-sourced parts of their browser code bases. (RockMelt is built atop Google’s Chromium and Apple’s Webkit.)

But while I like RockMelt—and will probably stick with it (sorry, Chrome)—I’m not persuaded that it fully delivers on the startup’s promise to build a browser “designed around you and how you use the Web.” That’s because how we use the Web is changing even faster than browser makers can keep up, and has less and less to do with the PC desktop and more to do with mobility and information appliances like smartphones, tablets, and Internet-connected TVs. Don’t get me wrong—I’m awed by all the work that’s gone into RockMelt. But I worry that the issue the startup chose to tackle is already out of date.

To put it another way: RockMelt doesn’t solve the problem that needs solving the most right now, which, to my mind, is the inconsistent way we experience the Web when we access it from different types of devices. The truth is that today’s mobile computing gadgets, and the plethora of apps available for them, are finally making it possible to spend less time sitting at your desktop PC, while still getting most of the benefits of the Web and social media. But RockMelt’s product is still solidly PC-centric. The startup’s implicit pitch is that your desktop browser should be both your main news-gathering conduit and your social media control center. Now that the Web is everywhere, though, I want to be able to switch fluidly between information devices depending on what I’m doing, and what I really need are tools that make that easier, lessening the sense of cognitive dissonance every time I close the lid on my MacBook and switch on my iPad or my Kindle or my Roku Player. RockMelt isn’t that, yet.

What is RockMelt? Before I get back to my lofty criticisms, let me spend a few paragraphs explaining what’s so interesting about the new browser. Mainly, it’s the elegant way RockMelt integrates with an individual user’s Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. Once you’re signed in—RockMelt may be the first case where you have to log in to the browser itself, in addition to the Web services or communities you visit—it provides a continuous yet unobtrusive picture of … Next Page »

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Change in the browser market, compared to newer areas like mobile apps, is truly glacial: the main trend over the past few years has been the gradual migration of Internet Explorer users (the Microsoft browser still has a 60 percent market share) to Mozilla’s Firefox (23 percent) and Google’s Chrome (9 percent). But if anyone can help shake up the browser market, it may be the guy who created it: Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. His venture firm Andreessen Horowitz is the lead investor in RockMelt, a Mountain View, CA, startup that released its new Mac and Windows Web browser in private beta today.

RockMelt, built using the same open-source Chromium code behind Google’s Chrome, is designed to let heavy users of social media services like Facebook and Twitter interact with their friends and followers from the main browser window, without having to switch tabs or pages or fire up separate client programs or widgets. So the biggest visual difference between RockMelt and other browsers is the presence of two “edges” down the right and left sides of the window—a Favorites Edge showing individual Facebook friends, and an App Edge showing how many new RSS news stories, Facebook news feed updates, or tweets are awaiting viewing. Appropriately enough, you need a Facebook account to use RockMelt, and even to request an invitation to download it.

In a press release, Andreessen described RockMelt as “the freshest, most innovative take on browsing since browsers were created.” Tim Howes and Eric Vishria, who co-founded the company in 2008, have “rethought the browser around the massive shifts in user behavior that will drive the Web over the next decade,” meaning social networking and media sharing, Andreessen said.

Howes, RockMelt’s chairman and chief technology officer, is the former CTO at server management software maker Opsware, where Vishria, now RockMelt’s CEO, was vice president of marketing. Both spent about a year at Hewlett-Packard after the Palo Alto computing giant acquired Opsware in 2007. They’ve built a team of 30 employees at RockMelt; to fund the effort, they’ve raised about $10 million from a group of Silicon Valley luminaries including Andreessen Horowitz, former Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, angel investor Ron Conway, former VMware CEO Diane Greene, and First Round Capital managing partner Josh Kopelman.

The association between RockMelt and Andreessen Horowitz (which closed fundraising on a second, $650 million fund last week) is deeply genetic: Opsware, originally called LoudCloud, was … Next Page »

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If you glanced at the software engineering job listings page for Google Boston, you might think that the company’s Kendall Square office has only two positions open. That would be wrong. Site director Steven Vinter says the office has been hiring aggressively since December.

The growth would have started sooner if it hadn’t been for the recession, which didn’t slow Google’s expansion much, but did seem to engender a kind of constipation in the local software community, with people unwilling to risk leaving their current positions, Vinter says. But conditions have eased and the company is now getting more resumes. In any case, the two positions described on the job page—software engineer and software tester—are just roles, Vinter says. The company is hiring many people to fill each one.

In fact, with more than 100 engineers and 100 business development staff spread across four floors at Five Cambridge Center—space the company occupied in early 2008 after outgrowing its cramped quarters at One Broadway—Google Boston has evolved from a mere outpost of Google’s Bay Area headquarters into a major engineering and sales center. I stopped by a couple of weeks ago to hear the latest about the office’s progress from Vinter, whom I last interviewed in depth way back in November 2007. (At that time, the office had half as many people.)

The main point Vinter made, as you’ll read below, is that Google Boston is now big enough to have what he calls “end-to-end” responsibility for major parts of the Google product lineup, including the Chrome browser and operating system, the YouTube server and client infrastructure, Google Book Search, and the Google Friend Connect social Web service. As Xconomy founder Bob Buderi has argued in his book Engines of Tomorrow and elsewhere, it’s crucial for corporate outposts to have this kind of responsibility and autonomy if they want to avoid becoming marginalized within their own companies. My impression is that Vinter has been working hard to make sure that Google Boston isn’t simply a vehicle for hiring talented New England engineers who don’t want to move to Mountain View, but that it builds teams that have a direct impact on Google’s bottom line and on the problems the company is trying to solve.

With major news about Chrome, Chrome OS, Friend Connect, and other products expected later this year, it’s likely that Google Boston’s profile within the company will keep rising. That may be true within the Kendall Square neighborhood as well: Vinter told me he admires Microsoft’s efforts to open up its New England Research and Development Center for tech-community events, and says he’d like Google to be more active in this area. Here’s a writeup of our conversation.

Xconomy: Other than your big move into the Cambridge Center space, what have been the biggest changes since we had that long talk back in 2007?

Steven Vinter: There are two big things. All throughout 2009 we were looking for more candidates to hire, and the thing we didn’t really understand was why there seemed to be so few people making it into Google. We didn’t understand why we wouldn’t have seen a continuous flow. Looking back, I think there were just a lot of people [who were] really uncomfortable with moving. The economic problems, in the same way that they affected consumer confidence, affected people’s concerns about wanting to go out and try something new. But that just disappeared around the December time frame, and we haven’t seen such an influx of talented people since I arrived here. So the challenge for us now is basically to make sure that the projects we have keep step with the level of the incoming folks.

X: During that lull, were you actually getting fewer resumes, or was it that the quality of the applicants was below what you wanted?

SV: More the former. There were just fewer people in the pipeline. One thing that’s helping is that we are aggressively seeking new college grads here. Obviously there is a huge wealth of talent in Boston, but in previous years I was more concerned about … Next Page »

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Woburn, MA-based Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE) has paid $1.9 million in cash to acquire the assets of Planetweb, a dot-com-era holdover based in Redwood Shores, CA, according to a Monotype announcement today. Founded in 1996, Planetweb had raised nearly $60 million in venture backing to develop Internet browsers for televisions and other devices; its current lead product is SpectraWorks, a graphical user interface embedded in digital cameras, cable set-top boxes, and DVD players. Monotype says it plans to build its font and layout engines into the SpectraWorks user interface.

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There must be some new force pulling West Coast tech CEOs to visit Boston. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in town; yesterday it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

To mark the unusual occasion, Google invited a raft of journalists to its offices in Cambridge for an open, on-the-record roundtable discussion with Schmidt. Google’s Cambridge site director Steve Vinter served as moderator. Many of the questions tossed Schmidt’s way focused on specific Google projects such as Chrome, Wave, and Android 2.0, and when they’ll evolve into major consumer-facing offerings. While some of that was interesting, I thought Schmidt’s comments on a few of the bigger strategy and policy questions revealed more about the company’s outlook on the world.

Below are some of the high points from the discussion—including Schmidt’s thoughts on strategies for economic recovery, why people fear Google, and what role the company may play in the survival of journalism.

Google is growing fast in Cambridge.

Vinter said Google’s Cambridge office, which handles a variety of projects from Google Friend Connect to Google Book Search, has passed the 200-employee mark and will be “hiring very aggressively” in the coming months. (That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft, which reduced its headcount yesterday by some 800 people, including some here in Cambridge.) “Virtually every project we have is scaling up,” Vinter said. Schmidt (who attended both Princeton and Berkeley) said Google was attracted to Cambridge in the first place because it “likes cities with extremely good technical universities.”

Many more people will be getting a look at Google Wave in the near future.

Up to now, Google has been carefully parsing out invitations to Google Wave, its experimental real-time e-mail/chat/collaboration/document sharing platform. Schmidt said the company is “getting ready for a broader distribution very soon—weeks, not months.” He said feedback on the software from early users has been positive, but the company has been slow to invite in more users for fear of outages. “So far the experiment has yielded a very innovative model and a lot of buzz, and now we want to see if it can scale,” he said.

Google has very big plans for the Chrome browser and its bigger cousin, Chrome OS.

Adoption of Google’s Chrome Web browser is progressing “very well,” Schmidt said. But for Google, Chrome is “more than a browser,” he said. “It’s a platform for powerful Web-based apps that you can’t really deliver in cloud computing without having a browser that can support cloud apps.” Making Chrome work fast, maintaining a clean separation between applications running in different tabs or windows, and supporting the new HTML 5 standard “are central to making the apps model work,” Schmidt said. “And Chrome’s success is a necessary precondition to the success of Chrome OS,” he said, since the one is derived from the other. “We have a lot riding on Chrome.”

The first public version of Chrome OS will be coming out by the end of 2009, Schmidt said. But the operating system won’t be a serious competitor for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or other operating systems until … Next Page »

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Shareaholic founder Jay Meattle was in touch today to say that his Cambridge startup has raised its first round of angel funding. Back in July, I reviewed Shareaholic’s popular browser plugin, which makes it easy to save or share material found on the Web via common social networking, social bookmarking, and news aggregator services.

Meattle wasn’t specific about the size of the round, saying it amounts to “a few hundred thousand” dollars. The list of funders, however, is a who’s who of Web 2.0 entrepreneurship and investing around Boston, including one serial entrepreneur, David Cancel, who worked with Meattle at both of his last two companies, Lookery and Compete.com.

The full list of Shareaholic’s angel investors includes:

—Ed Roberts, founder, MIT Entrepreneurship Center; co‐founder, Sohu.com
—Dharmesh Shah, founder and chief technology officer, HubSpot
—Eric Dobkin, Advisory Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.
—Brian Balfour, co‐founder, Viximo
—David Cancel, co‐founder, Compete
—Andrew Payne, investor in Care.com, Digium, HubSpot, and SmartFlix; co‐founder, FanSnap
—Brian Shin, founder and CEO, Visible Measures

Cancel, Payne, and Shin also serve on Shareaholic’s advisory board, along with Rob Go of Boston-based Spark Capital.

“I couldn’t think of a better group,” Meattle says. “They have deep knowledge and expertise in the space we’re playing in. We lean on them for advice all the time—they’ve all ‘been there and done that’ again and again.”

When I last talked with Meattle about Shareaholic, he said the company had spent a long time getting its browser plugin to the point where it’s comprehensive and easy to use, and that the coming months would be devoted to experimenting with different ways of monetizing the service. He confirmed that plan today. “We plan to spend the next few months determining what the best use of our data and user reach assets are,” Meattle says. “We have some pretty good hunches and have a lot of exciting stuff in the pipeline.”

Given the momentum the company has built up and the opportunities it has identified, “the time was right to raise some money to further accelerate and support our product roadmap,” Meattle adds.

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[Updated 9:20 p.m. EDT 7/10/09 with responses from Google; see the sections marked "Update" below]

Yesterday Google announced that the “My Location” feature familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps on a mobile device—the little blue button that shows you your position on a map—is now available to people accessing Google Maps from their laptop or desktop computers as well (as long as they’re using the latest versions of the Firefox or Chrome browsers). But there’s a problem: Users are reporting in large numbers today that the My Location feature is erratic, placing them in the wrong city and occasionally on the wrong continent.

Behind this phenomenon, it turns out, is a story about competing ideas on the best way to endow Web-based applications like mapping programs with an awareness of their location—and about the race between companies like Google, Microsoft, and Boston’s Skyhook Wireless to control the way location information is fed to these applications. Skyhook’s CEO, Ted Morgan, gave me his perspective on the Google Maps development in an interview this morning. (See below for our Q&A.)

You might think that all browsers would handle location-finding in the same way. And that’s the ideal—the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a draft Geolocation API (application programming interface) specification that spells out how browsers should pass the details about a computer’s location from the computer itself to the Web applications running inside the browser. But as Morgan explains, the W3C standard doesn’t specify where or how the browser should get this information from the computer—which leaves room open for competing approaches, and potentially for back-room deals.

Several years ago, Skyhook developed a browser plugin called Loki that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip, takes a reading of all nearby Wi-Fi access points, and uses Skyhook’s proprietary database of access point locations around the world to triangulate the device’s location. The Apple iPhone uses this Skyhook technology whenever its Safari browser or its built-in Google Maps application request location data.

But when Google rolled out the “My Location” feature for laptop and desktop computers, the company decided to use its own geolocation algorithms rather than Skyhook’s. That was possible because the Mozilla Foundation built Google’s algorithms into the latest version of its open-source browser, Firefox 3.5, which was released on June 30. (Google also built the algorithms, not surprisingly, into its own Chrome browser.)

Google’s geolocation technology is similar in principle to Skyhook’s—it also depends largely on information about nearby Wi-Fi access points—but the accuracy of the locations actually produced by the new “My Location” feature seems to vary wildly, as users have been discovering over the last day and half. Judging from posts on Twitter, the Google system is placing some people thousands of miles away from their actual locations.

An unusual number of people, for example, report that the My Location feature shows them as being in downtown Austin, TX, even if they’re half a continent away. “Google Maps’ new ‘Show My Location’ feature puts me in the middle of Austin, TX. I’m actually downtown Manhattan,’ PhoneTag.com co-founder Mark Dillon tweeted today.

While Austin may be the center of the tech world for some South by Southwest addicts, it clearly hasn’t experienced any actual jump in population since Thursday. The problem, according to Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan, lies in the way Google collects the data behind its Wi-Fi-based positioning system. For information about the locations of access points, Google relies on crowdsourcing—it quietly gathers local readings every time someone uses a Google app on an iPhone or a Blackberry, or some other mobile device.

Crowdsourcing is an inherently sloppy approach, according to Morgan. Skyhook’s own approach is to send Wi-Fi-sensing vehicles down every highway, street, and alley, methodically establishing the position and strength of every access point they pass (most are broadband routers owned by local businesses and residents). Morgan says Skyhook has also developed ways of correcting for the fact that access points sometimes move—for example, when someone relocates their home from Austin to Manhattan.

[UPDATE: Google offers a different reason for the inaccuracies. Reached by e-mail this evening, Google communications officer Elaine Filadelfo said users having issues with accuracy "are likely users who are not using Wi-Fi, for which we can generally provide a more accurate location. Without Wi-Fi, we base location on IP address, which can be inaccurate depending on your ISP and its location."]

Morgan would like to give every developer working on location-aware Web applications the opportunity to tap into Skyhook’s more accurate database through Loki. The problem is that … Next Page »

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ZeeVee, the Littleton, MA-based startup focused on helping people watch high-definition Internet video on their TVs, today introduced a new version of its free video browser. Formerly called Zviewer—and originally designed for the ZvBox, the firm’s PC-to-TV-over-coaxial-cable appliance—the browser is now called Zinc, and runs on any Windows XP or Vista computer. (A Mac version is coming soon.)

Zinc is designed for viewers who want to hook up their PCs to their televisions and then navigate large amounts of Internet video content from across the living room—the so-called “lean back” mode, as opposed to “lean forward” mode common when you’re watching video directly on your laptop or desktop computer. As such, the Zinc interface is dominated by big tiles and brief, simple command menus. Users flip through TV episodes or movies using either their computer keyboard or a remote control compatible with Windows Media Center software, such as ZeeVee’s own ZvRemote.

In concept, Zinc is very similar to Boxee, a popular Internet video browser for the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Zinc and Boxee don’t compete directly, at least for now, since the Mac version of Zinc and the Windows version of Boxee aren’t yet publicly available. But both are examples of an emerging genre of media browsers that make it easy for TV owners to access TV episodes and movies over their Internet connections.

The overt function of Zinc and similar browsers, says ZeeVee CEO Vic Odryna, is “presenting choice in a unified way,” as opposed to having to surf to each provider’s video portal on the Web. “This way I can check out what’s on Amazon using the same interface that shows what’s on Netflix or ABC or Fox, through a very clean interface that shows what episodes are available and what I’ve already watched. It’s very TiVo-like.”

But these browsers, along with Internet TV appliances such as Apple TV and the Roku Player, are also helping to change the economy of mass entertainment. By eliminating the technical and navigational barriers that once made it difficult to access Internet video from the big screens of conventional televisions, the new video aggregators threaten to further erode the cable networks’ historical stranglehold over home video entertainment.

And that’s finally starting to make the cable companies nervous, according to Odryna. “Even nine months ago, the viewpoint was ‘You kids can go play all you want, [Internet video on TV] is just a toy.’ Now the tone is changing really fast. ”

Zinc’s predecessor, Zviewer, was first released as a standalone piece of software last November. But Zinc improves on it in several big ways. It allows access to more content—including all CBS shows and instant Netflix movies—as well as more information about each show and simpler navigation between them. The company says the browser can be used to access more than 15,000 movies and tens of thousands of TV shows. Because it’s based on the Mozilla code base, users also have the option of installing Zinc as a plugin for Firefox, rather than downloading the stand-alone Windows application. (A Macintosh version could be out as early as next month, Odryna says. ZeeVee allowed me to test an early version on my own Mac, and it worked nearly flawlessly.)

The evolution of Zinc is itself an interesting case study in the fast-changing market for video technology. Originally, Zviewer was developed as the user interface for the ZvBox 100, introduced by ZeeVee in May 2008. The ZvBox 100 contained a sophisticated encoder/modulator that transformed streaming video output from a Windows PC into a radio-frequency HDTV signal that could then travel over the coaxial cables already installed in most households and be displayed on any television in the house. The idea was cool, but the implementation was flawed. I tested out the $499 ZvBox 100 at home last September, and ran into so many technical hurdles while trying to make it work that I reluctantly concluded the device just wasn’t ready for prime time.

Odryna told me this week that he more or less agrees with that assessment. “What did we learn? First, that the complexities of installation were really too much for a lot of people. Another problem was cost. Even though this was a piece of equipment that would bring $20,000 in the broadcast world, the $500 price tag was too high. Then there was the complexity of asking a PC to do what we wanted—to broadcast in 720-line resolution. It worked in a lot of cases, but not everywhere.”

The company ultimately abandoned the ZvBox 100 after selling fewer than 10,000 units, Odryna says. “Had we continued to ride that horse, we would probably be dead as a company,” he says.

But as the ZvBox 100′s prospects with consumers sank, something unexpected happened. “From the day we launched the product,” says Odryna, “we got a huge deluge of calls from the commercial world”—meaning institutions such as hotels, restaurants, bars, hospitals, and airports that need to supply TV programming to large numbers of consoles and are looking for a cheap way to get high-definition signals to them. “If you walk into a hotel today, they all have HDTVs, but … Next Page »

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Three quiet and unknown Finnish engineers in their late thirties, Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, have spent their working careers at the engineering software company Tekla in Finland. Their clients have used the software they created to model several well-known buildings, including Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, New York’s Hearst Tower, the famous ‘Bird’s Nest’ that is Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, and the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai.

But if matters had turned out a little differently, these men—and a former colleague named Kati Suominen (now Kati Borgers) who could not be present at the interview—might have become known as the Fathers and Mother of the World Wide Web browser.

[Editor's note: This article is our first from Juha-Pekka Tikka, Xconomy's new Fellow from Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program. "JP," a reporter at Ilta-Sanomat, a major national newspaper in Finland, will be based in our Xconomy San Diego offices.]

According to the trio, whom I met earlier this year in Finland, the Internet’s rise and emergence as a daily working tool might have happened a year earlier than it did had their group been able to complete their project.

The four Finns developed a graphical, point-and-click Internet browser a year before the pioneering Mosaic browser on which Netscape Communications was based: the historical Netscape IPO in August 1995 is widely credited with starting the Internet boom.

“Our 1991 X Window system browser, ‘Erwise,’ showed that a net browser was possible. We were ahead of the times. The next step, to commercialize it, did not happen,” Kim Nyberg says.

Aside from some local media, the Finns have never before been interviewed about this remarkable story. But Erwise has an important place in the Internet’s birth history. And its fate offers a case study of what happens when invention and innovation are not accompanied by funding, talent infusion, and a strong venture capital market or angel investor presence—all ingredients that Silicon Valley (where Mosaic was funded and developed) takes for granted.

In the U.S., commercialization of the browser, now so much a part of our everyday lives, began in 1994, after Marc Andreessen left the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where he and Eric Bina had developed the Mosaic browser the previous year. Andreessen had moved to California following his December 1993 graduation and teamed up with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, backed by venture capital powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to form Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape Communications. Europe was quickly left out in the cold.

But for a few key factors, it didn’t have to be that way. In 1991, Nyberg, Sydänmaanlakka, Rantanen, and Suominen were young IT undergraduate students at HUT, Helsinki University of Technology. The campus is actually located in Espoo, just a few miles from Helsinki and only half a mile away from the headquarters of Nokia Corporation. At that time, Nokia was not internationally known.

The four were about half-way through their studies when they met that September at a HUT course on designing and coding software.

In Switzerland, meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee had just laid the groundwork for the World Wide Web at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He thought the Web would be a useful tool for researchers and others but was frustrated at its pace of growth, which he partly attributed to the lack of a point-and-click browser. As he notes in his 1999 book Weaving the Web, “We were so busy trying to keep the Web going that there was no way we could develop browsers ourselves, so we energetically suggested to everyone everywhere that the creation of browsers would make useful projects for software students at universities.”

How did this project end up in Finland? It was largely because … Next Page »

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The Mobile Internet World trade show, produced in Boston in 2007 and 2008 by the Trendsmedia events division of Boston-based market research firm Yankee Group, will be transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009 and revamped as a “more intimate” conference focused on networking and education, according to a Trendsmedia announcement.

The announcement, e-mailed to 2008 conference attendees today, said the decision to move the convention from the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel and drop the exhibit-hall showcase aspect of the event was “based on popular demand,” but that it would also allow Yankee Group to avoid “supporting major trade show costs and resources.”

One mobile executive recently told Xconomy that the program, the size of the crowd, and the volume of business-development opportunities at Mobile Internet World 2008 were disappointingly slim. So the move to the Bay Area could well represent an attempt to repackage the conference—which is aimed at executives from wireless operators, application developers, and other companies involved in delivering services and information via mobile Web browsers—to have a bigger payoff for attendees.

In the Bay Area, the conference will also be closer to two new centers of power in the mobile applications business: Cupertino, CA-based Apple, whose decision to open up the iPhone to third-party application developers has created a huge new market for mobile software, and Mountain View, CA-based Google, whose open-source Android mobile operating system is expected to further disrupt the industry.

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Allegedly, surfing the Web is a leisure activity for a growing number of people. I wouldn’t know—my job as a technology blogger obliges me to surf the Web all day at work, so if I have to use the Web from home, it’s usually because I’m taking care of some task like paying bills, uploading photos, or getting driving directions. But for people who do use the Web as a hangout, there are more and more ways to make it a social experience. And one company, Hamburg, Germany-based Weblin, is optimistic enough about the future of its animated chat service—which gives surfers inch-tall avatars that can communicate directly with the avatars of other Weblin members visiting the same Web pages—that it has expanded to the United States, starting with an office outside Boston.

If you belonged to Weblin (I’m guessing the name is a combination of “Web” and “gremlin”) and you had downloaded the company’s Windows-based plugin, your customized avatar or small-w weblin would be standing on the status bar at the bottom of this browser window right now. If another Weblin member happened to be reading this Xconomy article at the same time, their weblin would also appear. You could then chat, joke, or flirt with that person via text balloons that show up above your weblin, the same way avatars communicate in virtual worlds like Second Life.

You can even make your weblin smile, wave, dance, or run. So what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did for horrible B-movies and what Lycos Cinema is doing for online video, Weblin does for the entire Web (although in practice, you’ll only run into other weblins at a small fraction of websites, since there are only about 10,000 to 100,000 Weblin users online at any given time).

“Even with social networking, the Web is not a social place; a typical website doesn’t allow you to chat with other visitors,” says Jan Andresen, Weblin’s co-founder and CEO, who’s based in Hamburg but was traveling on the East Coast when I reached him by phone last week. Yes, Andresen acknowledges, you can leave a text comment at your friend’s blog or their Facebook Super-Wall. But that’s like deciding you’re only going to communicate with your family by leaving sticky notes on the fridge, he says. “Why not interact instantly with other people, make jokes, and see their reactions? It’s so much more normal.”

Well, “normal” if you don’t mind a bunch of cartoon characters sauntering around your Web browser. And the 20- to 35-year-old users who are Weblin’s main target audience probably don’t. (Indeed, the system still bears the stamp of the virtual-classroom application, developed by CTO and co-founder Heiner Wolf, on which it’s based.) But for older or more mission-oriented Web users like me, Andresen agrees, a crowd of weblins might be a distraction. “If you have to book a flight or finish your spreadsheet, you don’t do it in a pub,” he says. “But maybe you’re at home, you’re bored, you have a glass of wine next to you, and you just want to be entertained. We call that moment ‘chilling.’ For that time, Weblin is ideal.”

Andresen and Wolf launched Weblin in 2006 and have raised $1.3 million in funding from a combination of private investors and the High Tech Grunderfonds, a public-private initiative that invests in early-stage technology startups in Germany. The startup’s technology is built atop XMPP, an open-source instant messaging platform formerly known as Jabber. Andresen says that Weblin hit the 1-million-member mark in September, and that about 10,000 people are downloading the Windows plugin every day. (There’s also a purely browser-based version of the system called “Weblin Lite” that works on Mac and Linux computers, but it assigns you a random avatar that does not persist as you travel from Web page to Web page.)

The company hopes to make money in two ways. The first, more predictable revenue stream will come from selling ads, which will pop up in the same transparent layer over the browser window that the weblins themselves inhabit. But while that may sound like another annoying distraction, Andresen says … Next Page »

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When you open the Google Maps application on the Apple iPhone and click the “target” button, the device pulls up a local map and shows your current position as a blue dot. You could easily do the same thing on your laptop—if, that is, your Web browser could communicate with a location-sensing device in your computer, such as its Wi-Fi chip.

And soon it will. Mozilla, the Mountain View, CA-based organization behind the Firefox browser, revealed yesterday that future versions of Firefox will be location-aware—meaning they’ll have built-in software that taps into a computer’s Wi-Fi chip or other wireless sensors, figures out the machine’s current latitude and longitude, and feeds that information (with the user’s consent) to any website that requests it. And to test the idea, Mozilla released an experimental Firefox plugin called Geode that does exactly that, using the Loki location-finding system developed by Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. Skyhook says the Mozilla deal could foreshadow a time when Loki is built into all browsers.

Loki, which determines a machine’s location by comparing the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi access points to Skyhook’s national database of Wi-Fi networks, was already available as a free download for Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. For Geode, according to Skyhook co-founder and vice president of business development Mike Shean, the company made some minor tweaks to comply with the World Wide Web Consortium’s draft geolocation specification and to add privacy-protection features requested by Mozilla. Loki also comes with a toolbar and a logo, whereas Geode, once installed, runs invisibly. But “under the covers it’s the same system,” Shean says.

Shean said talks between Skyhook and Mozilla began shortly after last January’s announcement of the deal between Skyhook and Apple that put Skyhook’s proprietary Wi-Fi Positioning System on the iPhone. “Since the launch of the iPhone and the ability that Apple has given to developers to leverage location, the market around location-based services has been on a pretty aggressive upswing, and that has also manifested itself in the browser world,” Shean says. “The browser folks and the laptop folks are looking at ways to incorporate location into what they do, and that’s the reason that Mozilla approached us—because we obviously are the only ones really offering Wi-Fi-based location in the Web world for laptops and other Wi-Fi devices.”

In its blog, Mozilla Labs, the organization’s R&D wing, said yesterday that Geode is intended to give Web developers an opportunity to experiment with “location-aware experiences” ahead of the official implementation of geolocation capabilities in Firefox 3.1, which is expected to be released in beta form later this year. So far, there are only three examples of websites that grab location information from Geode: a “Food Finder” page, developed by Mozilla Labs’ head of user experience Aza Raskin, that plots a user’s location on a Google map and shows nearby eateries; Fire Eagle, a Yahoo service that acts as a central registry for users’ locations; and the Pownce file-sharing/social-networking service, which can show members’ locations on their profiles by checking in with Geode or Fire Eagle.

But more examples are on the way, according to Shean. “We’re working with literally dozens of content providers and other companies that use maps,” he says. “Over the next several weeks you’ll see a whole slew of different websites rolling out with this technology.”

And in the long run, Skyhook would like to see the Loki technology built into all Web browsers, Shean says: “We’re very pleased to see Mozilla leading the way around location in the browser, but we are actually working with all of the browser providers to discuss opportunities to bundle our technology into their software.”

Update 10/8/08 2:00 pm: I just learned of another website using Geode for location-based customization: Outside.in Radar, a section of Brooklyn, NY-based hyperlocal news site Outside.in where users can see news, discussions, and alerts specific to their location.

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Over the last week, I’ve had several people tell me that the most interesting thing about Google Chrome isn’t the browser itself, but the way Google chose to present it to the world: via a comic book. Indeed, for at least a day or two, Scott McCloud’s Google Chrome comic—which was accidentally leaked to journalists over the Labor Day weekend, before Google’s official release of the software—was the only information available about the project. Which meant that thousands of Internet users, for perhaps the first time in their adult lives, found themselves reading an extended comic—a genre familiar to millions of adult manga readers in Japan but still mainly relegated to the kids’ sections of U.S. bookstores.

I wondered aloud in a column last week whether all that exposure might help put the comic genre back on the map as a vehicle for serious fiction and non-fiction work. On Monday, I got a chance to put that question to Scott McCloud himself. The author of a bestselling trilogy of comic books about the comic genre’s history, future, and practice—Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006)—McCloud is both the profession’s leading theoretician and one of its most versatile practitioners. He’s also a true geek, and has had his eye on the Web for more than a decade, writing and drawing about its potential as the medium for a new generation of comics that would be liberated from the printed page by emerging interface paradigms such as hyperlinking, zooming, and scrolling.

At its most basic, after all, a comic is just a sequence of pictures that tells a story. And computers and the Web offer many new ways to create and arrange these sequences and to move from panel to panel—they supply what McCloud called, in Reinventing Comics, an “infinite canvas.” Which helps explain how Google was able to interest McCloud in the Chrome project. McCloud says, as you’ll read below, that one of the aesthetic ideas driving the Chrome developers (though this idea didn’t make it into his 38-page comic about the browser) was to “sweep the path clean”—essentially, to get out of the way of content developers and Web users by reducing the software’s onscreen footprint, as well as its functional bells and whistles, to the bare minimum. That’s music to the ears of an artist like McCloud.

Here’s the full text of our interview.

Xconomy: Tell me how the comic came about. How did Google get you on board, and how did you do the research and gather the visual materials you needed?

Scott McCloud: I was first approached by Eric Antonow at Google. He had actually had me out to speak at the Googleplex in August of 2007, during the tour for Making Comics, my last book. He knew that Chrome was coming up—they had been working on it for a year and a half —and he had a sense that comics might be a good way to help explain the project.

But beyond that, it really only took shape when I came up to the campus and we started brainstorming about it. This was Eric, and another Googler, Anna-Christina Douglas, and we were joined by a third, Mark Sabec. In brainstorming we considered a lot of possible forms. Everything was up in the air. We didn’t know if it would be print or online. We didn’t know what sort of length. We weren’t sure what the focus would be. But gradually we came to agreement on what would be an effective strategy.

And then the research was primarily these video interviews that we did with about 20 engineers. These were substantial interviews, running on average about 30 to 40 minutes, some longer. And they had markers and a whiteboard and would occasionally use it, but that was about it for visuals. It was mostly just these explanations, which we then culled through and tried to find a common narrative. I took this sort of raw transcript and pared it down. But [it was] still pretty rough around the edges. And I tried to pound it into a coherent, connected story and then make it visual.

X: You must have had to wait around for the developers to finish certain things about the look and feel of Chrome before you could represent it in the comic.

SM: There were only one or two visual elements that we were hanging on—one or two icons that changed. But for the most part, its shape was concrete enough that I was able to work concurrently in that last couple of months. For example, they knew the shape of the tabs. I wasn’t drawing screen-shot-level detail. My cartoon version of Chrome was … Next Page »

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