It can be pretty dizzying to tally up the scope of Amazon Web Services, a potentially $1 billion business that serves up critical cloud computing infrastructure for a big slice of the digital economy. Even keeping up with the number of individual services the company offers can be a challenge—and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels wants you to know that he’s sorry about that part.

“That might make it seem somewhat chaotic at times, and I apologize for that,” Vogels said last night, prompting chuckles from the crowd at an open house in Seattle. “But as an advantage, you get stuff really fast.”

That rapid-fire release of services is one of the three key elements that, in Vogels’ view, makes Amazon Web Services so successful.

Amazon is not known for releasing meaningful statistics, but you can get a sense of AWS’ reach from the huge reaction to last year’s multi-day crash of some AWS offerings. And, of course, the number of tech companies big and small in the market continues to grow.

Werner Vogels

In that crowded and competitive environment, Vogels said, Amazon hopes to stand apart with a “relentless focus on very fast, iterative innovation.”

“We will not build a thing with the whole kitchen sink, with all features in it,” Vogels said. “We will put something in your hands really quickly with a new feature set, and work very closely with customers to actually iterate really fast in a direction where the customers want the product to go.”

“That’s why you don’t see massive marketing events from us where, in one big thing, we will just announce everything that’s going to happen,” he said. “As soon as we have features ready, teams have the mandate to get it into the hands of their customers as quickly as possible.”

Vogels also said he thinks AWS has found success by being flexible: “You could be on any operating system, any programming language, any interface—whatever you want. We do not lock anybody in,” he said.

And sharing the price-conscious DNA of a retail company doesn’t hurt either. Vogels said a recently announced price cut for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service was the 18th price reduction for AWS offerings, with more to come. “Some of our customers are getting 12 to 13 percent lower bills in February and we’ll continue to focus on that,” he said.

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A young Canadian software startup with Boston investors is now part of a big Boston-area company. Ottawa-based Blaze Software has been acquired by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) for an undisclosed cash sum.

What’s interesting here is that Akamai, the Web content delivery and networking giant, is making a move into Web performance optimization—basically tackling Web performance at the browser level (what some call “front end”), rather than the network level. Akamai has been positioning itself as a one-stop provider of a secure platform for businesses to reach customers via the Web, mobile, and cloud. That approach also includes, among other things, speeding up Web and mobile applications, as evidenced by the company’s recent acquisition of its California-based rival Cotendo for $268 million.

Today’s deal is no doubt smaller than that, but it could be an important sign of things to come—especially around Boston. Blaze started in 2010, and its seed funding came from local investors CommonAngels and Boston Seed Capital. So why sell now?

“You always have a choice of how you want to grow the business,” says Chris Sheehan, managing director of CommonAngels. “It made a lot of sense for the guys to partner up with Akamai, who’s so strong in the [content delivery network] space. When I made the investment, [Web performance optimization] was just beginning. The timing was sooner than I expected. But in the last 12 months, this whole thing has really started to take off.” [Disclosure: CommonAngels is an investor in Xconomy, and Sheehan is a board member at Xconomy.]

Blaze’s approach is to optimize the code on Web pages so as to speed up the transmission of content and render pages faster on whatever device the customer is browsing on—PC, tablet, or smartphone. This is particularly useful for e-commerce and media sites, which tend to get gummed up by lots of different pieces of code loading on them. The company’s technology (and team) will be integrated into Akamai’s cloud platform, said Rick McConnell, executive vice president of products and development at Akamai, in a statement.

In speeding up websites, Blaze competes directly with Boston-based companies Yottaa (which is also in Boston Seed’s portfolio) and SiteSpect. Google’s team in Kendall Square also released a free tool for Web page optimization in the fall of 2010.

It’s not just about making websites faster, however. All of the above companies have been trying to combine Web optimization with business analytics so as to help businesses track things like sales and customer behavior more effectively. Now Akamai is firmly in the game, and we’ll see how that affects the competitive landscape.

“It’s going to make it a lot harder,” Sheehan says. “It puts a lot of pressure on the other startups.”

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After previewing its expansion plans last summer, San Diego’s EvoNexus, the free startup incubator established by the non-profit technology group CommNexus, has opened a newly renovated downtown office space. A dozen early stage companies began moving into the incubator Monday.

CommNexus founded EvoNexus in 2009, when San Diego’s innovation economy was reeling from the Great Recession. The incubator has taken in 14 companies so far, including six that have moved out of the EvoNexus incubator in University City. Office space, utilities, and other services are provided to startups free of charge, and companies leave with no obligations to EvoNexus or CommNexus.

“As far as we know, we’re the only pro bono incubator in the country,” EvoNexus chairman Kevin Hell says in a statement issued late yesterday. “The goal is to grow sustainable tech companies and expand the industry here in San Diego.”

When the EvoNexus incubator first opened in Sorrento Valley, organizers said they wanted to host startups developing advanced communications technologies, including wireless life sciences and smart grid networking.

Since then, CommNexus moved EvoNexus to University City and broadened its criteria. The industry group established the new downtown EvoNexus to host startups that are focused primarily on developing Internet software, Web services, gaming, social networking, and cloud computing technologies. The privately held Irvine Co. made the 15,000-square foot space available to EvoNexus at no cost. The incubator takes up an entire floor of the building at 101 W. Broadway, known locally as the AT&T building.

Hell says he sees parallels in the downtown San Diego locale with San Francisco’s SoMa, the downtown neighborhood South of Market Street that has become a magnet for social media startups and mobile app developers. The nightlife, housing, and amenities available in San Diego’s city center should appeal to young entrepreneurs, Hell says.

CommNexus plans to continue to operate its incubator in University City. The 12 companies in the new downtown space are:

Antengo: Real-time mobile classifieds.

BigSho: Social webcam game show.

Chatmeter: Online reputation management.

Fashioning Change: Shopping experience for eco-friendly apparel.

Saambaa: Social media app for finding things to do.

SwoopThat: Online textbook shopping by course.

TapChow: Cloud-based restaurant experience manger.

Taphunter: Mobile app for locating places that serve craft beer.

UgliApps: Mobile apps focused on food.

Voluware: Saas healthcare information software.

Xpenser: Web-based tracking of business expenses, time, and mileage.

Zambig: Web-based service that provides online outlet for radio ads.

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When Long Island, NY-based Kemp Technologies revealed on its blog on January 24 that it had raised $16 million in venture capital, it might have been easy to overlook the funding as just another sign of the latest tech boom. But this was no ordinary funding: Kemp is an 11-year-old company with revenues and profits that’s entering the venture capital market for the first time. The company, which makes equipment to help small and medium-sized businesses manage traffic on their computer servers, was funded by Edison Ventures, with participation from Kennet Partners, and Orix.

Why did Kemp’s founders jump into the VC game now when their company was fully self-sustaining and on a fast growth path? Peter Melerud, Kemp’s co-founder and executive vice president of product management, got on the phone recently with Xconomy to explain the reasoning behind the funding round and to provide insight to other business owners who are weighing an entry into the VC game.

Xconomy: As a profitable, self-sustaining company, why did you feel you needed to raise venture capital?
Peter Melerud: We started the company in 2000, and in 2003 we launched our very first product. Our revenues and profitability started to happen not too long after the time we launched our first product. We were able to quickly start re-using the profits for seeding growth. But obviously it was slow and deliberate, with an eye towards the bottom line, because we were self-funded.

Over the past three years, we experienced dramatic growth. In 2011 we saw 116 percent growth in revenues and we have 8,000 deployments worldwide. We realized that in order to take advantage of that growth and keep up with it, we needed to aggressively step up every area of the company, from R&D to tech support, to marketing and sales. To do that, we realized, we needed external funding.

X: What made you optimistic it was a good time to raise capital?
PM: The relative environment for VCs and fundings didn’t really have a big impact on our decision. We are a New York-based company—not a Silicon Valley-based company. Even though there was VC activity happening in this area, we were a little off the beaten track. We got engaged in the process with the current investors a pretty long time ago—almost a year and a half ago. It was definitely a getting-to-know-you process between us and the investors. We needed to be comfortable that we were really going to be working with good partners, not just VCs.

X: What will your group of VCs bring to the table, beyond the money, of course?
PM: Our roots are in product R&D and marketing. That’s what our expertise is. What the investors bring to us is more of a strategic growth-management capability that we’ll certainly be able to leverage.

We’re planning significant international growth. In the past, we relied on developing a channel network internationally. In 2010, we established a subsidiary in Ireland. We’re definitely looking to staff that up, but also to expand into other European territories, perhaps Central and Eastern Europe. We’re also going to be growing our support infrastructure. Support is a very key element of our business model—we don’t outsource it. We have to grow support capabilities internally, and we can do that more aggressively now. We’re going to be increasing our marketing and sales capabilities, too.

X: The poor IPO market makes exit strategies difficult, but now that you have VCs on board, it’s something you have to think about. How are you looking at the exit strategy at this point?
PM: Looking forward, we see our technology as becoming more and more core to a lot of other parallel areas, certainly in the cloud space. Being in the position to take advantage of those opportunities as they come up makes sense.

Looking at potential exits, I think there’s a broader set of options than just an IPO. It’s not something that we’re looking at short term though. It’s more of a three-to-five year plan. How will the market look at that stage? No one has a crystal ball, but certainly everybody thinks it can only get better.

X: What advice would you pass along to other late-stage companies thinking about raising venture capital for the first time?
PM: My first suggestion is to be clear with yourself as to why you’re doing it. There are lots of reasons to bring VCs in, so you need to understand the market, the opportunity, and where you fit within your space. How will the additional capital help the organization grow, assuming growth is driving the decision? Having that clarity is very important.

Also you have to match yourself to the right investor. Investors can vary dramatically based on their investment criteria. Make sure there’s a match, and make sure there is a match in personalities, as well. An investor is someone you’ll work very closely with, so you need to be sure that’s something you can do. Hopefully the two of you together will make a much stronger entity.

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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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“Money is money, anyone can do that,” says Brian Zimmerman, managing director of Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners.

Go on.

“We have this idea of providing real value to our portfolio companies. If we’re going to call ourselves partners, we really need to be partners.” he says. Plenty of venture capitalists say they like to take that partner approach to their investments. But OpenView is backing that statement up with staff and infrastructure dedicated to sales growth and more.

That comes in the form of what the venture firm calls OpenView Labs. At first mention, OpenView Labs sounds like it would be the name for an incubator arm at the firm. But, as my colleague Greg has written, OpenView brands itself as an “expansion-stage” venture firm, eyeing investments in the more complex business-to-business and cloud computing software spaces. Its target companies already have annual sales between $2 million and $20 million, so, no, its Labs aren’t about helping young mobile or consumer software startups develop their technology or roll out a beta version of their product. Instead the unit is focused on helping its startups tackle the more grown up challenges of recruiting and hiring talent, identifying key markets, and generating sales leads.

To that end, the company has four full-time recruiters, who have filled about 100 jobs across OpenView’s portfolio companies in the last few years, says Zimmerman, who oversees the Labs operation. The goal is to fill another 200 this year.

We said the OpenView Labs is past helping startups toy with their technology. But sales and marketing strategy are another story. Startups at the expansion stage need to work in refining exactly which market their targeting as their customer base, says Zimmerman.

“They’ll say, ‘we sell to small businesses.’ That’s not enough,” he says. So Labs has an entire research and analytics team focused honing and refining exactly which sub-markets and customer segments portfolio companies should be targeting. It starts with Internet research and goes all the way through calling and surveying customers in the potential markets, says Zimmerman.

Once the Labs gets the companies primed with staff and a market to go after, it helps them build their marketing message around those customers, and then find specific sales leads. That third component is what Zimmerman calls the Labs’ “go-to-market” team.

Zimmerman puts companies in three categories: startup (figuring out the technology and idea), expansion (building revenue and refining a target market), and growth (preparing for an exit). “We’re focused on everything it takes for … Next Page »

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For all of you who’ve felt like cloud computing is some kind of foreign territory that you might never visit or fully understand, take heart. Ignition Partners managing director Frank Artale, who specializes in the sector, says everyone else has spent most of the past two years just figuring out what in the hell is going on.

“2011 really rounded out the year of the transition in terms of cloud computing from ‘What is it?’ to ‘How do I do it?’ Artale says. “2012 and beyond … is really, ‘Now I know what this is. I know how to do it. So what are the first projects?’”

That’s where the venture capitalist, who led a rapid-fire series of investments upon joining the Bellevue-based firm last year, sees the next round of opportunities in cloud computing.

Frank Artale

For me and you, that could mean some tangible benefits, as application developers start putting to use assets like the cloud-based database infrastructure that’s been building up over the past few years.

There are some obvious areas where this will probably be brought to bear first—finance and healthcare, two industry “verticals” that draw lots of money and produce or track tons of data.

Artale says the less obvious applications, ones that will be more apparent to the wider business world, might include some powerful ways of pulling together knowledge and expertise. As I prepare for my next story, for example, maybe I’d send an e-mail to other people at Xconomy to help generate a list of smart questions or good sources. But a smart software service might be able to extract data from contact lists, old stories, and other sources to give me a head start on my research (without pestering everyone with yet another e-mail).

“I think the investments in the infrastructure—those bets have been placed. Now you’ll start seeing bets on companies taking advantage of this,” Artale says. “You don’t see too many people talking about the applications yet. The noise, the buzz is still around the infrastructure itself.”

“I also believe that in this year, and also into 2013, we’ll see a more general acceptance of platforms as a service,” Artale says, pointing to the Ignition portfolio company AppFog as an example. “The bets are largely being placed right now in various platform as a service startups.”

You probably won’t see quite as many investments from Artale himself this year—he had his six main 2011 deals on a list from existing relationships when he joined Ignition, and ticked those off once he got going. Exceptions included AppFog, which was a new relationship, and Cloudera, a big deal that he called an “upside surprise” for Ignition.

When they do come, Artale says the deals he’s involved in for 2012 might be earlier in the lifespan of startups, depending on which fund the money is drawn from. “Ignition IV is an older fund,” Artale says, which means his deals were trending toward Series B or later in some cases last year. “We’ll start investing out a of a new fund sometime in 2012, and I’ll probably favor more early (deals) at that time.”

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The Ford Motor Company announced Friday that it plans to open its first-ever dedicated R&D center on the West Coast in Silicon Valley early this year—a move in line with the automaker’s vision of becoming a company that builds mobile computers on wheels.

K. Venkatesh Prasad, senior technical leader for open innovation with Ford Research and Innovation, the company’s advanced engineering arm, says the idea of opening a research lab in the Bay Area has been percolating for some time, waiting for the technology that facilitates programmable interaction between devices and cloud computing to mature.

“We’re ready to be in the Valley to shape and accelerate the delivery of automotive features,” Prasad says. “The timing is appropriate now.”

Ford intends for the lab to serve as a hub for independent technology projects, as well as a base from which to seek new research and investment partners located throughout the region. Prasad imagines that the Silicon Valley location will link the existing supply base with “new friends—not the people who would typically show up here in Detroit.”

“The most exciting thing is the potential for really interesting interactions with startups,” Prasad says, adding that if a startup has a particularly compelling idea that’s not up to scale, Ford is willing to step in and co-create.

The ultimate goal is for the new Silicon Valley lab to create an “innovation network” connecting Ford’s Advanced Design Studio in Irvine, CA, and Ford employees working with connectivity-platform partner Microsoft in Redmond, WA. Ford also plans to partner with Stanford and other Bay Area universities.

Competitor General Motors opened an “advanced technology” office in Palo Alto, CA, in 2006. Numerous European and Japanese carmakers also have outposts in Silicon Valley.

Prasad says that, like a typical startup, the Ford lab currently has two employees. He expects to have an infrastructure in place by the middle of the year. Ford plans to recruit local employees in addition to rotating in employees from other existing Ford locations.

Prasad emphasizes the Silicon Valley office will be dedicated to “new experiences in the marketplace,” whether they involve mobility, connectivity, safety, energy storage, or affordability.

“We don’t want to duplicate efforts in other areas, but to look and learn from Silicon Valley,” Prasad says. “There’s a whole new opportunity in consumer demand. Now we have a passport to enter a new frontier and explore together.”

Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally will elaborate on the new areas of focus for the Silicon Valley lab, plus Ford’s latest technologies, in Las Vegas at the consumer electronics tradeshow International CES on Wednesday.

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Amazon Web Services has opened an eighth global center to serve cloud-computing customers, expanding to South America for the first time with a new computing region in Brazil.

The company says the new region, known as Sao Paulo, will improve speeds for end users in South America. On his blog, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says the new region “has been highly requested by companies worldwide,” and will help serve a fast-growing economic region.

“Local companies have not been the only ones to frequently ask us for a South American region, but also companies from outside South America who would like to start delivering their products and services to the South American market,” Vogels writes. “Many of these firms have wanted to enter this market for years but had refrained due to the daunting task of acquiring local hosting or datacenter capacity.”

The choice of Brazil for AWS highlights that country’s rise globally—it has designs on becoming the world’s fifth economic power. Vogels noted that “over the past 10 years, IT has risen to become 7% of the GDP in Brazil.”

This is the second addition in two months for AWS—the company added a new computing region in Oregon in November, pricing it at 10 percent lower than the Northern California region. That pricing put the Oregon region on par with the Viriginia-based AWS computing region, the site of an epic crash earlier this year.

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Video editing software is way too hard to use.

At least, that seems to be what most consumers think. It explains why most of the videos you’ll find on YouTube and other video sharing sites are so raw, with no cuts, titles, or other effects. Apparently, people have a hard enough time just getting video off their smartphones or videocams and onto the Web; they can’t be bothered to whittle their footage down to just the best parts, or to jazz it up with music, graphics, and the like.

Well, you know what? Consumers are right. Video editing is too hard, especially if your first exposure to the craft is through Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Avid Studio, or one of the other professional-level video editing packages. These programs are powerful, but they’re also finicky, time-consuming, difficult to learn, and hard on your computer. (Don’t even bother trying to run them if you don’t own the latest, greatest Mac or Windows machine.) Even entry-level video editing tools such as Apple’s iMovie and Avid’s Pinnacle Studio force users up a pretty steep learning curve.

At the opposite extreme from the professional editing programs are the automated video creation tools from startups like Animoto. To make a slick music video at Animoto, all you have to do is upload a collection of still photos and video clips and select a theme and a soundtrack tune. The startup’s cloud servers do the rest. It’s a great boon for busy people whose videos might otherwise languish on their cameras or hard drives; the only downside is that it takes all the creativity out of the process.

Now there’s a startup that’s trying to stake out some middle ground, by offering a freemium, cloud-based video editing tool that’s full-featured but easy to use, and doesn’t tax your computer. It’s called WeVideo, and it’s led by a Norwegian serial entrepreneur named Jostein Svendsen. If you follow the tech scene in Silicon Valley, you might have heard of these guys—they won a DEMOgod award at the Fall 2011 DEMO conference in Santa Clara, CA. But you probably didn’t know that the software was originally designed for schoolchildren in Scandinavia, or that the startup follows the same principles as the video game business—i.e., if it’s easy enough for kids to use, then at least a few adults should be able to figure it out, too.

I met with Svendsen last month and got the whole story behind WeVideo. I’ve also been trying out the system myself—the video below, made up of clips from a recent weekend trip to Mendocino, CA, is my first attempt. I spent about two hours making it, plus another hour to upload the original clips to the Web. (Story continues below video.)

Now, if you’ve done any video editing at all, you probably did a double-take two paragraphs back where I mentioned that WeVideo runs in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2 compute infrastructure and S3 storage infrastructure, to be precise). Traditional video editing involves such large files that it’s almost the archetypal desktop application—it’s the last thing you’d expect to see migrating to the cloud. But that’s the whole point of WeVideo, and it’s the factor that Svendsen hopes will allow the company to pull ahead of the other consumer-level video editing providers.

“We’ve found a process which is extremely fast, easy to use, and efficient by utilizing the cloud to take away the bottlenecks on the desktop that have limited people, especially when they’re working with high-definition video,” he says. “Just like YouTube represented a new way of distributing video, we represent a new way of producing it.”

But is cloud-based video editing really ready for prime time? My experiments indicated that it’s close enough to be a decent alternative for non-professionals who might otherwise turn to … Next Page »

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Waltham, MA-based VMTurbo, a maker of virtualization management software, said today it has closed $10 million in Series B financing led by previous investors Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. The company says it will use the new money to expand its product development, customer support, sales, and marketing. It has raised $17.5 million to date.

VMTurbo gives businesses and IT departments real-time performance metrics and analytics tools to help them run their applications and virtualized/cloud environments efficiently.

The company, which also has an office in Valhalla, NY, was founded there in 2008 by EMC and IBM veteran Shmuel Kliger. It is now led by CEO Lou Shipley, formerly of Citrix and Avid.

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In a remarkable test of will, I’m going to avoid any Thanksgiving-related puns and just dive straight into this wrapup of the past week in Xconomy Seattle’s tech headlines, covering everything from Black Friday shopping apps to the latest rumblings of possible doom from a local wireless company.

—The crew at Seattle startup Decide made the obvious leap into a full mobile app, released just as bargain-hunters were warming up for the holiday shopping frenzy. Decide is among several sites that help consumers decide whether to buy electronics, or wait for a better price. But the company, co-founded by University of Washington search expert Oren Etzioni, takes things a significant step further by employing a sophisticated price-prediction technology.

—I profiled Avalara, a Bainbridge Island-based company that sells web-based software to help merchants calculate and pay sales taxes. That’s a complicated task, with some 11,000 taxing districts of all shapes and sizes littered around the country. Avalara’s been posting impressive growth numbers, and the trend could continue as Congress, Amazon, and traditional retailers try to hash out a deal over charging sales tax on more online purchases.

—Xconomy’s Greg Huang brought us the scoop on a speech by all-star investor Brad Feld, who told entrepreneurs and angel investors at Microsoft‘s NERD Center in Cambridge, MA, that product and people should be their main focus. Feld is the co-founder of TechStars, a startup bootcamp program with a branch in Seattle. He’s also a board member and investor, through the Foundry Group, in Seattle startups BigDoor Media and Cheezburger Network.

—I looked at a recent tactical shift made by MiNeeds, a Seattle-based site that pairs users up with local service providers who bid for their business. It’s a relatively active area for Web companies to target, but MiNeeds thinks it found a significant edge in the wedding market when it decided to break those services out from the plumbers and carpenters and house painters on the main site. That was something the co-founders resisted—but, as good data geeks, they changed their minds after testing showed it was the right move.

—PaperShare opened up its doors to the public—or at least the cloud computing and virtualization slice of the public. The startup, headed by longtime server computing consultant Doug Brown and former Microsoft virtualization director David Greschler, is a new twist on the sometimes ancient websites that many professionals still use to spread technical info and industry insights.

—And finally, we had some contrasting bits of news: Clearwire, which is trying to simultaneously slow its losses and raise money for a network overhaul, publicly said it would consider delaying a big debt payment. Shares, of course, took a beating. On the other hand, Ignition’s Frank Artale led a $15 million investment in ServiceMesh, a cloud platform company in Santa Monica, CA.

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Box, the Palo Alto file-sharing startup that recently snagged another $81 million in venture funding, has started to throw around the “E” word: ecosystem. At a media event in San Francisco last Thursday night, the company announced the formation of a community program called the Box Innovation Network—abbreviated /bin, a clever reference to a common name for a Unix directory containing executable files.

The bottom line here is that Box wants more outside developers and companies to build apps that take advantage of Box’s own cloud-based file storage system. So it’s getting serious about creating and sharing the application programming interfaces, or APIs, needed to do that. And it’s ready to put some money behind the program—Box said it has set aside $2 million to support faster software development by selected /bin members.

Box CEO Aaron Levie calls /bin an “open ecosystem,” in contrast to supposedly closed systems, such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint, that aren’t as easily accessible to third-party developers who want to add their own features. “Slow-moving enterprise software giants have produced very little innovation in recent years, and their closed ecosystems have made it all but impossible for outside players to create compelling experiences for customers on legacy systems,” said Levie, who never misses an opportunity to criticize Microsoft, Oracle, and other big incumbents.

But what kinds of “compelling experiences” does Box think its own partners will create using the company’s APIs? To find out, I talked Friday with Chris Yeh, whose title at Box is vice president of platform. Yeh joined Box this summer from Yahoo, where he spent four years running developer programs and managing community products such as Yahoo Groups and the Delicious social boomarking tool. Here’s an edited writeup of our chat.

Xconomy: At what point did Box start to think of itself as a platform or an ecosystem, not just a service?

Box Vice President of Platform Chris Yeh

Chris Yeh: I think Aaron has been talking about Box as a platform company for quite some time now, whether internally or externally. I think what Aaron realized is that Box’s core business has a long runway of growth, but you look at what the company really needs to do in the long run to become dominant, it needs to evolve toward being a platform company. Now is the right time to invest in this part of the business.

If you think about what we do at the very lowest level—storage of files for sharing purposes in the cloud—that is a function that is fairly low on the stack of functions that people need. We think there is a real opportunity to bring in third-party developers in a way that grows the ecosystem around us and drives business value for the company. When I came aboard, the mission was to push the pedal to the floor. That means my responsibility at Box is to do a few things. First, I own the product roadmap for our platform. We’re hiring engineers as fast as we can into the platform team. We have grown by 3x or 4x already. So we are starting to add some muscle. The other side of my job is to get out into the ecosystem and meet as many people as possible and make people aware of what we are doing and how they can integrate. So you are seeing the push within Box to start doing this.

X: How are companies using Box in their applications? Give me some of your favorite examples.

CY: The first /bin member we announced is a company called LiveOffice. They are an e-mail and file archiving company down in L.A., and they have built a legal e-discovery solution against Box. E-discovery isn’t everyone’s favorite example, but it’s one of my favorites, and somebody really needs this. We had a pharma customer who, when they heard this was even possible, asked if they could … Next Page »

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Three quick items from around the Seattle-area tech scene this week:

—Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) shares have fallen sharply again on word from new CEO Erik Prusch that the Kirkland, WA-based wireless provider could skip an upcoming debt payment. Prusch discussed that possible step in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

The Associated Press and ZDNet quote separate industry analysts’ reports with somewhat contradicting takes on the news: Optimism that majority shareholder Sprint could kick in much-needed cash, and skepticism that Sprint would pay up unless there’s some sort of restructuring.

The math is pretty clear: At the end of the third quarter, Clearwire had about $700 million in cash and about $4 billion in long-term debt. The $237 million payment in question is due Dec. 1, although there is a 30-day grace period.

—Frank Artale of Ignition Partners led a $15 million investment in ServiceMesh, a provider of cloud-computing platforms for businesses. As VentureBeat reports, Santa Monica, CA-based Service Mesh had been self-funded up until the Ignition-led investment.

It’s one of many cloud-computing investments we’ve seen this year from Artale, who has long experience in the sector as an entrepreneur, executive, and investor. Check out this profile I did in July, just before the flurry of announcements about Artale’s investments started hitting the news.

—Seattle-based startup Zoomingo, a new venture by the co-founders of language learning service Livemocha, raised $1.3 million from Naya Ventures, Benaroya Capital, and angels. Zoomingo is building an application and retailer platform that can deliver advertising and sales to consumers on mobile devices.

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Perminova, a San Diego startup developing Web-based software for use in cardiology centers, says today it has raised $7 million in a combination of equity and credit financing. The company says it is pioneering healthcare’s move from outdated client-server technology to secure cloud-based computing.

The company was founded several years ago by Gregory Feld, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and director of UCSD’s cardiac electrophysiology program. What began as a database for tracking electrophysiology procedures and patient care, though, has evolved into a more comprehensive workflow system provided as software-as-a-service for everything from patient scheduling to post-procedural documentation and billing.

The company’s first product, Perminova EP, is being used by the UC San Diego Health System and at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital.

In a statement this morning, the company says its financing includes $3 million in Series A equity funding and a $4 million credit facility that can be accessed by the company as needed. Perminova CEO Craig Collins declined to identify the company’s investor, saying, “We have a large institutional investor and they don’t want to have their name out there.” He characterized the investor, though, as a super angel.

Collins says the funding will be used to expand product development, and for working capital, product development, sales, and marketing. “This round of funding provides us with an ample runway to gain market traction and market acceptance while creating a clear path to sustainable growth,” Collins says in the statement from the company.

“We now have the resources to expand our product offering, which will ultimately establish Perminova as the market standard in web-based software and cloud computing in healthcare,” added Collins. “This round of funding provides us with an ample runway to gain market traction and market acceptance while creating a clear path to sustainable growth.”

Perminova has been based at EvoNexus, the free startup incubator operated by CommNexus, the San Diego nonprofit technology industry group, since mid-2010. Securing financing, however, usually signifies that a fledgling EvoNexus company is ready to move out on its own. Collins indicated the company would likely move into its own commercial office space sometime in January.

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In advance of his appearance at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference on Dec. 1 in Boston, I did a live tweet chat with Kabir Shahani, the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Appature, yesterday. Thanks to all who tuned in and sent us their thoughts; we had a great audience.

Appature is a four-year-old startup that makes Web software tools to help healthcare, pharma, and medical device companies reach hospitals and doctors and build important relationships with them. The big idea, as I see it, is to allow brands to drill down into a huge customer relationship database and quickly target the right people to sell to—and for the right reasons, namely, patient health. Yes, it’s big data, analytics, cloud, marketing, and healthcare, all wrapped up in one.

Which is why I think Boston-area tech companies like HubSpot, Buzzient, Constant Contact, SocMetrics, Kyruus, Ginger.io, Athenahealth, and others should be interested. And young entrepreneurs, who can really relate to Shahani. Plus I hear there are a few pharma and medical device companies (and hospitals) around town…

While some things don’t necessarily come across in tweets (like Shahani’s youthful charisma and CEO hair), other things do. Here are my top takeaways from the chat:

1. Appature knows more about Boston than Boston knows about Appature. “There are some incredible companies in Boston,” Shahani tweeted. “We have customers there and I absolutely love being out there to spend time with them.” Sure, Appature has customers and partners around town (and soon, employees—see below), but the general Boston tech and health-IT community doesn’t talk about this company very much. I’m telling you to pay attention, because Shahani and his crew are potentially on to something big. Whether they’ll execute and take full advantage, we’ll see.

2. The cutting edge of marketing tech for niches like healthcare is moving fast. “The dynamic has changed dramatically in the past 12-18 months,” Shahani wrote. He was talking about pharma companies trying new ways to reach and target customers, rather than just pursuing traditional approaches with their sales reps. It’s no surprise that cloud-based analytics and social technologies are transforming the way most industries work.

3. Growth is challenging for any startup, especially one based on relationships. Shahani, who bootstrapped Appature to profitability before taking a venture round, tweeted that his biggest mistake was “not getting an [East] coast office sooner.” (The company has employees around the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border, presumably to work with lots of pharma customers. It also has people in San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago.) And here’s a news flash on its expansion: “Stay tuned on news about a Boston team in [January],” he wrote.

For the record, here’s the full live chat stream, via Storify (thanks to my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty for this).

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His last name means “forest” in Norwegian. Which is appropriate, because this guy sees the forest for the trees.

David Skok of Matrix Partners is one of the most talked-about venture capitalists in town, among young entrepreneurs and experienced ones alike. He is best known for his investments in JBoss, the open source middleware company (acquired by Red Hat for $420 million in 2006); AppIQ, the network and storage management firm (bought by HP in 2005); Diligent Technologies, a data protection company (bought by IBM in 2008); and CloudSwitch, a cloud infrastructure startup (acquired by Verizon this year). He currently serves on the boards of tech companies such as HubSpot, CloudBees, Digium, Enservio, and Solidworks.

Critics say he hasn’t had a big exit in a while. Supporters say he has a real knack for building companies and getting them acquired for good prices—and that what he touches often turns to gold.

Whatever you think of him, Skok has carved out a reputation as a hard-working investor with both technical expertise in business software and a deep understanding of sales and marketing from a customer’s perspective. For the past decade, he has been a general partner with Matrix. But when I sat down with him recently, I was more interested to hear about his previous life as an entrepreneur and five-time CEO, and how that shaped who he is today—both the decisions he makes as a VC, and the kind of mentorship he provides to startups.

It’s not quite Batman Begins or Casino Royale, but here is the David Skok origin story—and its lessons—in three parts.

Act I: A New Hope (Software)

The story opens in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Skok was born to an English mother and Norwegian father. His parents didn’t want him to grow up with apartheid, so they sent him to school in England, where he lived from age 8 to 20, in London. From there he went to college at University of Sussex, where he was part of the first class of graduates in England to be awarded computer science degrees. That was 1976.

His father made him come back and join the blue-collar family business, which involved machining equipment. He went to apprentice training school and survived his first week when all the tough guys tried to haze him. By the end of the course, he knew how to use a new tool for machining parts that followed a program stored on punched paper tape. The problem was, if there was a tiny error in the tape, the part would be ruined and “you’d have a huge wreck on your hands,” he says.

So Skok wrote a piece of software to get around this. “If you designed the part on the computer, you’d be able to do the machining without worrying about the geometry,” he says. That led him to start his first company, Skok Systems, which became a computer-aided design (CAD) firm.

“I’m accidentally an entrepreneur,” Skok says. “I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t have any training in it, I didn’t have any mentors to turn to to teach me how to be an entrepreneur. I’m trying to figure out all the sales and marketing stuff that’s going on.”

The company went through a few shifts, but the pivotal moment happened in … Next Page »

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A crop of New York startups is growing by providing other companies niche software via the Internet cloud. By leveraging the lower cost of offering Web-based software, these technology companies are out to attract new business customers and please their investors.

In recent weeks, sales and marketing software firm GramercyOne closed $14.5 million in Series A funding led by Steve Case’s Revolution Ventures, with participation from Grotech Ventures, Jubilee Investments, and TDF. The new cash will go toward technology development and new hires, according to GramercyOne CEO Josh McCarter. His company, as well as other cloud-based software providers such as Profitably and Erply—bred in Estonia with its U.S. office in New York—are building their businesses by offering flexibility to their clients. This is an interesting trend worth a closer look.

For GramercyOne, which was spun off in October 2010 from SpaFinder, the demand for software over the Web marks a sea change, particularly in the sales industry. “Three years ago being a cloud-based solution was a detriment in the sales process,” says McCarter. “Now it’s almost a requirement.” His company offers such services as point-of-sale software, appointment booking with customers, and mobile payment processing. McCarter says cloud-based software providers gain more new business because of the flexibility to deliver upgrades and the lower costs compared with software installed on computers. “It has made the … Next Page »

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It was 1993 when the San Diego chapter of the American Electronics Association organized its first high tech industry awards to recognize local companies for their business excellence, technology innovation, community involvement, and sometimes simply for persevering in the face of adversity.

Since then, the nationwide organization that HP founder David Packard helped form in 1943 as the West Coast Electronics Manufacturers Association has morphed into the AeA, (in 2001) and TechAmerica (2009). Recently Tech America San Diego named the winners of its Eighteenth Annual High Tech Awards. The industry group handed out 10 awards in nine distinct categories:

—Software: Oceanhouse Media

—Internet/Web Commerce: Sorenson Media

—Computers and Related Products (two awards): AgigA Tech and One Stop Systems

—Communications Products and Services: MicroPower Technologies

—Software as a Service/Cloud-based Computing: ServiceNow

—Semiconductors, Industrial & Analytical Instrumentation: Creative Electron

—Cleantech: EcoATM

—Outstanding Emerging Growth: FieldLogix

—IT Service/Contract Services: Outsource Manufacturing-Made in San Diego

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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