Successful businesses take pride in knowing their customers, listening to them, and exceeding their expectations. They evolve their products, services, pricing, terms, and distribution based on what the market is looking for and how the landscape is changing—not on what worked in the past. This quality has never been more important than in the past two years of jarring recession and slow recovery.

Yet most businesses are not prepared for a momentous shift in their customers’ behavior, one that transcends any particular product or industry. This shift affects not only customers but employees, suppliers, partners, and investors—in fact, every audience companies need to reach, motivate, influence, and satisfy in order to survive and thrive.

We are changing the way we consume information, more profoundly and rapidly than most of us realize. The explosion of online and mobile video is the catalyst, and the future of corporate communications clearly will hinge on the ability to exploit this shift smartly enough to gain and keep the attention of the people whose impressions, decisions and behavior determine a company’s fate.

“Enterprise Television” will be the 24×7 media identity of successful businesses. With video as the dominant vehicle for nearly all communications, Enterprise Television can significantly increase the ability to:

• Market and sell products and services;
• Increase employee engagement and commitment;
• Build and enhance brand identity and loyalty;
• Project and protect corporate reputation and image; and
• Pro-actively manage and contain all forms of crisis.

The numbers are astounding. In November 2010, 172 million Internet users in the U.S. spent an average of almost 30 minutes per day watching online video. That’s 40 percent more time per day than in 2009. Also during November, Americans viewed 5.4 billion online video ads, which reached 49% of the total U.S. population. YouTube, the most popular online video site, is experiencing more than two billion playbacks a day (150 million of those through smart phones and other mobile devices), as 35 hours of new content is uploaded to its site every minute. The number of people watching video on their mobile phones is growing at a 40 percent annual clip. As broadband pushes rapidly into even more homes, businesses and wireless communications networks, these trends will only keep rising. Cisco, the leading provider of the communications gear that keeps the Internet humming, estimates that within four years, 90 percent of the traffic moving across the Web will be video.

The opportunities for business leaders and marketers may sound familiar: reaching audiences on their terms, targeting them more narrowly and efficiently, and reaping the benefits of interacting with them constantly. Sounds like the call of the Internet, right? The dominance of online video will enable these benefits, to be sure, but also will introduce an entirely new level of possibilities—for good or ill.

Consider GE. An iconic brand with a history of polished marketing campaigns, GE wanted younger audiences (its future customers, investors, and employees) to relate to its Ecomagination green initiatives. Rather than producing slick ads and buying expensive spots on traditional … Next Page »

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There are two sides to Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based “invention capital” company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The revenue-generating side of the business is a stockpile of more than 30,000 patents, which Intellectual Ventures licenses and sells to other firms, including tech companies large and small looking to defend themselves in lawsuits. IV also isn’t shy about suing to defend its patent portfolio.

On the other hand—and in a different set of buildings, actually—is the invention lab. Tucked into nondescript space in outer Bellevue, the lab is stocked with a huge amount of equipment, from sophisticated laser arrays to really big band saws, sometimes purchased at fire-sale prices. This is the epicenter of the “make side” of Intellectual Ventures, which also includes a network of affiliated individual inventors who work on their own. That side of the business files about 500 patents per year on inventions that are cooked up in-house, not acquired from somewhere else.

You’ve probably heard of some of the biggest creations to emerge from the lab, including the TerraPower next-generation nuclear reactor, the “photonic fence” of lasers designed to keep malarial mosquitos at bay and “Modernist Cuisine,” a nearly 50-pound food-geek compendium that that is redefining the term “cookbook.”

But the lab staff also is working on plenty of projects you might not have heard of, including some interesting stuff in the arena of global health. Some of this work, no surprise, is being financed by Myhrvold’s old boss, Bill Gates.

On a recent visit to the workshop, I got a look at some of the interesting but under-the-radar things that the Intellectual Ventures crew is working on. Here’s a quick look, with details from Geoff Deane, the company’s VP of engineering and head of the lab:

—Malaria diagnosis. One of the problems in treating malaria in the developing world is finding an effective way to diagnose people.Today, blood tests might have to be strapped to the back of a motorcycle and driven 100 miles to the nearest health facility, making the economics of diagnosis not much better than the actual production of malaria drugs. So frequently, the path is just to medicate almost everyone, Deane says—and routine overuse of medication can eventually lead to drug-resistant strains.

The Intellectual Ventures team set out to build a quick, portable, durable screening system. There is a reliable marker in something called hemozoin, a blood byproduct that the malaria parasite excretes. So, the IV team set out to detect it, and wound up with a method that involved a complex-looking … Next Page »

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It takes a village to raise a startup. TechStars, and other mentor-driven accelerators, understand this. Experienced entrepreneurs understand this. Investors understand this. New entrepreneurs often do not understand this; and those new entrepreneurs that do understand it often don’t know who they need in their village or how to work with them once they figure it out.

The composition of a startup’s village will depend on the individual needs and personality of the startup, but a common thread will be a network of formal and informal advisors—business advisors, technical advisors, legal advisors, personal advisors. If you’re Andy Sack, Rich Barton, Dan Shapiro or Dave Schappell, then you are an easy phone call (probably speed dial) away from a beer with the top minds in startup ecosystem. If you’re new to the tech startup world, then you need to get busy building your network with folks who can help you. Whether you’ve already found someone willing to spend time with you or are still looking, here are some tips for making the most of their help. As both an advisor and an advisee, I hope to learn something new from your comments as well.

1) Know why a particular advisor is a good fit for you. Early on, it’s tempting to want to talk to any potential advisors who will listen. Resist that urge. Have an understanding of why, specifically, you think it’s valuable to talk to this person. What is it in their current for prior experience that makes them a good fit for you. Do they have relevant expertise within your market, with your technology, with your customers, with potential strategic partners. The person you want to talk to should agree with your assessment. Remember, too, that every good advisor won’t be a good advisor for you. It has to be a good fit on both sides and if it’s not, then don’t force it; close the loop and move on.

2) Go after the correct “tier.” This is corollary to number 1), above… and may sound elitist… but get over it. You may think you want an audience with a hotshot in your space but keep in mind a couple of important things. The nearer the stratosphere an advisor is, the less time (and patience) they’ll have for you. And, if you don’t have your ducks in a pretty straight row then your one chance to make an impression may be squandered. Coupled with the effort it will take to get a warm introduction into them and the long wait to get on their calendar (could be two months or more), this is often a losing proposition. And don’t be surprised when your top-tier advisor’s assistant e-mails you the day before your long-awaited meeting to reschedule because “something has come up.” Also, top-tier folks are just not gonna have much time to spend with you, so you’d do well to think of them as connectors to other people and resources. As such, they will likely be cautious about referring entrepreneurs that they hardly know and/or aren’t confident are ready to risk their reputation on. So keep your powder dry. Work your way up. As your startup (and you) progresses you’ll naturally be ready for more and more top-tier help. It’s not a literal hierarchy and it’s not a caste system, but there are circles of trust and circles of influence; as your network expands and you gain the confidence of experienced people, then your circles will expand and will eventually overlap with higher and higher tiers. In the mean time, you may be better served working with folks closer to earth but with more time and energy to spend with you.

3) Be respectful of time. Know what you want to get out of the time an advisor spends with you. Be concise and specific. It’s easy to spend an hour chewing the fat about your new sliced bread machine, but that’s not a good use of their time or your own for that matter. Ask for 30 minutes instead of 60. Pick a coffee shop within short walking distance of your advisor’s home or office, or ask them to choose the meeting place. As the scheduled end of your meeting or phone call approaches, offer them a graceful exit.

4) Don’t be disagreeable. You don’t have to agree with what an advisor has to say about you, your startup, your product, your market, or your strategy but don’t assume that they are … Next Page »

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Adriane Brown was the CEO of Honeywell Transportation Systems, based in the Los Angeles area, when she got a call from a headhunter last year. The next thing she knew, she was talking with Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA, company focused on the business of invention. One thing led to another, and Brown is now the president and chief operating officer at Intellectual Ventures, helping run the daily operations of the 600-strong firm led by co-founder and CEO Nathan Myhrvold.

Brown admits she was an outsider to the company, and new to its whole concept of supporting inventors, and investing in both new and existing inventions and patents. In fact, her outside perspective is probably one of her strengths. Brown says that when she first looked into Intellectual Ventures as a place to work, she thought, “This company has done something unique and could have a huge impact on the world.”

In her new role, Brown has responsibilities in “all of the key functions across the company,” she told me recently. She has about 10 direct reports, and the biggest adjustment for her has probably been the transition to a smaller, private company. But that transition seems to be going fine. “I just love this job. It is exactly as advertised,” Brown says. “It is a neat addition to my career.”

Brown’s experience is both broad and deep. She spent 19 years at Corning (NYSE: GLW), the materials and manufacturing giant, where she rose from the rank of shift supervisor to vice president and general manager of environmental products, and became an expert in the automotive industry. She then moved to AlliedSignal, which acquired Honeywell (NYSE: HON) in 1999 (the merged company is called Honeywell). There, she distinguished herself in the aerospace sector, becoming president and chief executive of Honeywell Transportation Systems, a $5 billion business unit. Before all of that, Brown studied environmental health at Old Dominion University (where she later received an honorary doctorate in humane letters) and got a master’s degree in management at the MIT Sloan School of Management as a Sloan Fellow.

I recently had a chance to speak with Brown and hear about her first 100 days on the job. She started on January 1, and this was, to my knowledge, her first media interview since joining. We didn’t have time to drill down into new details of the company’s strategy, but I got the sense that she is both a process person and a people person, and that she brings a unique worldview to Intellectual Ventures’ leadership. Here are some condensed and edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: You talked about having impact on the world. Can you give some examples of how your background fits with Intellectual Ventures’ broad vision?

Adriane Brown: My undergraduate degree was in environmental health. Over time, as I spent a number of years at Corning, I rose to lead the catalytic converter business. While it was the automotive industry, we were incorporating a technology that makes a difference in the world. When I traveled to Third World countries, the first thing I noticed was the pollution.

After Corning, I was looking to be uncomfortable. I find it exciting to step into a situation … Next Page »

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It has been a busy week indeed in Microsoft land. While the man on the street has been scrambling to file his taxes, the Redmond, WA, company has been making headway in smartphones, real-time search, and other important areas. Let’s get right to the highlights:

Microsoft talks up Kin “social phone”
This is a phone specifically designed for heavy social network users. (In other words, something I won’t be buying anytime soon.) The interface emphasizes your contacts and supposedly makes it easy to do things like share photos and Web information, and stream music and video. It’s coming out in May. You can read some local writeups of the Kin by the Seattle Times, TechFlash, and mocoNews.

Bing incorporates Twitter updates
Microsoft’s search engine is amping up its partnership with Twitter, providing up-to-the-minute results from the Twitter stream in its main search results. The Bing team is currently testing the new features with a subset of its users and search queries, so it’s not quite prime-time yet. But it’s the latest move in the increasingly important battle over “social search” between Microsoft and Google, which really only started last year.

Microsoft outsources IT to InfoSys
Infosys Technologies said it will be managing internal IT services for Microsoft worldwide. The three-year deal amounts to the Indian company providing employee help desk services and managing applications, devices, and databases for Microsoft in 450 locations across 104 countries. This seems like a pretty big deal, and probably is a way for Microsoft to save a lot of money. The impact on Microsoft’s inner workings and product development remains to be seen.

Microsoft Research dominates at CHI conference
At the big international human-computer interaction expo this week (CHI 2010 in Atlanta), Microsoft presented 38 technical papers, or about 10 percent of all papers accepted by the conference. They ranged from a telepresence project to help employees communicate with remote colleagues to efforts in interactive touch displays, pen and touch interfaces, and studying how changing Web content affects people’s interactions with the Web.

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Stop me if this sounds familiar. You work in a tight-knit team that has one or two colleagues who are located in a different office—across the street, across the state, or across the country. You’d like to communicate with them more regularly, but phone calls, e-mails, and video conferences have to do. Inevitably, you feel like you (and they) miss out on some day-to-day interactions that help all of you stay fully connected to the company’s goals and culture.

Microsoft feels your pain—and its researchers are trying to do something about it. That’s why a group from Microsoft Research, based in Redmond, WA, is presenting a paper tomorrow at CHI 2010, the big international conference on human-computer interaction in Atlanta. The team, led by senior researchers Gina Venolia and John Tang, has developed a prototype system that gives a satellite colleague a “telepresence” not just in meetings but in the daily workflow of the hub office. They pull this trick with basically a laptop, speakerphone, and webcams on a cart, plus software to coordinate it all. Their project is called “Embodied Social Proxy,” or ESP.

OK, it’s a pretty jargony name, but it addresses a real and growing need in companies that have satellite workers or that expand to new geographies. The researchers have tested the prototype in four different product groups at Microsoft in addition to their own research group. They’re reporting that it increased the “attention and affinity” of the hub towards the satellite, and that it improved the interpersonal social connections between team members. (Of course, this might be difficult to quantify—more on that below.)

In this globalized era in which teams are being spread over long distances and “virtual” businesses, a number of tech giants are trying to help companies stay culturally tight-knit as they grow larger. The list includes Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Cisco, and Skype, who have led the way in developing technologies for Web conferencing and remote communications. A whole slew of startups are working in related sectors such as social business software (like Jive in Portland, OR) and online project management (like Smartsheet and LiquidPlanner in the Seattle area).They all share the goal of boosting productivity in the face of complexity. Recently, notable technology and business leaders Kelly Jo MacArthur and Stephen Wolfram have emphasized the importance of remote communications in running an organization.

The Microsoft project builds on years of social science and communications research. It also seems decidedly old-school and low-tech. That is part of what makes it interesting, as a complement to social-media efforts to improve business collaboration (including Microsoft’s relatively new FUSE Labs led by Lili Cheng). Microsoft’s ESP effort began in 2008 when Venolia and Tang’s colleague, principal researcher George Robertson, a co-author on the study, moved to Maine to work from home. The team decided to test out a system that was “as simple as possible, to fix what was most broken,” Venolia says.

That meant daily interactions and face-to-face contact. So the team assembled a PC, monitor, some decent wide-view cameras, and a speakerphone, and mounted them on a cart that could be wheeled into meeting rooms (see photo above), or left in a dedicated office space that has become Robertson’s de facto “office” in Redmond. In meetings, the Redmond team can see Robertson’s face at the table and hear his voice, and he can interact with people in the room by controlling different cameras that allow him to focus on a particular person, or a whiteboard, or slides. The most interesting thing is … Next Page »

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Every once in a while, I sit down with a businessperson who brings a unique perspective to a huge global trend—and helps me see things in a profound new light. In this case, that person is Kelly Jo MacArthur, and the global trend is the explosion of social media and its broader impact on corporations.

MacArthur was the former general counsel, senior vice president, and chief of staff at Seattle-based RealNetworks—and she also did a stint at Linden Lab, creators of the virtual world Second Life—so she has her digital media and Internet technologies down cold. A 10-year veteran of Real, she left the company in 2007 and has been focusing on consulting work with startups, big companies, and other organizations across the fields of social media, networking technologies, cleantech and sustainability, traditional media, and arts.

We were talking recently about the future of companies like Twitter and Facebook, and what struck me was the way MacArthur thinks of social media as an inevitable—and inherently predictable—evolution of communication technologies on the Internet. That means smart entrepreneurs and executives should be able to anticipate how all of this is affecting societal behavior, and what the new opportunities will be. What’s more, she’s finding that these technologies are forcing big companies and organizations to completely rethink their core strategy and value proposition—indeed, their very existence.

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation:

Xconomy: So what are you hearing from companies out in the field?

Kelly Jo MacArthur: In my own work as a strategic advisor to CEOs, various boards, and executives on their corporate strategy, the inevitable conversation is, “What should we be doing with social media?” I’m not a marketing person—they work with their advertising and marketing agencies—but it leads you to the conversation that each business, especially in more traditional, entrenched industries, should be thinking about how they’re relevant in the future. And how we as citizens and consumers are demanding more, and also participating more, in the offerings and opportunities that these businesses have.

There’s a huge opportunity, no matter what business you’re in, if you’re constantly thinking ahead about how we as societies are shifting. Versus focusing on, “Should I be using this tool, or should I have a Facebook page?” You should be using these tools for your … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Thinking Phone Networks, a developer of hosted customer communication and relationship management platforms, has raised $1.17 million of a $1.67 million round of equity mixed with options and warrants, an SEC filing shows. President and CEO Steven Kokinos told Mass High Tech that the funding comes from Capstone Partners, a Boston investment bank, and that it will go to expanding the company’s sales department.

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It feels like the dawn of a new era. As of yesterday, Bill Gates is officially on Twitter, where he has already attracted more than 235,000 followers in the first day or so. Gates also just announced a new website, called the Gates Notes, where he will be sharing his thoughts (that extend greater than 140 characters) on what he’s working on and the societal issues he’s passionate about—global health, education, the environment, and so forth.

The Microsoft co-founder and chairman—also the co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—has always communicated extensively through memos, speeches, and books. Now he will be using social media and the Web to reach an even bigger, more mainstream audience, and to impart his message on a wide range of global issues he’s dived into since leaving his full-time job at Microsoft in June 2008.

To me, this feels like a big deal—like social media has passed another threshold. Gates being on Twitter means even the world’s richest man cannot hide from this mode of interactive communication. The world’s most influential people can no longer operate solely behind the scenes. I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily want to know what Gates is thinking about on a daily basis. Part of what makes certain leaders special is that you don’t know what they’re working on all the time. In any case, let’s hope his Web writings truly reflect his personal views and analysis, and are not just the product of a finely honed advisory staff and PR team.

The Gates Notes site is currently divided into a number of nevertheless intriguing sections: “What I’m thinking about” (including ways to deal with carbon emissions through innovation in transportation and electricity); “What I’m learning” (including references to books by Vaclav Smil, a global energy and population expert); and “My travels” (including his impressions of health care in India).

Gates says the site is an extension of the annual letter he writes for the Gates Foundation—this year’s will be posted on Monday, Jan. 25. “I decided to write an Annual Letter because in 2008, Warren Buffett encouraged me to find a way to share my thinking more broadly about the foundation’s goals and to assess as frankly as possible our progress toward achieving these goals,” Gates writes on his site. “I wrote my first Annual Letter in 2009, and I have to admit I was surprised by the outpouring of interest after it was published.”

For a little more context, Gates’s introductory note on his new site reads, in full:

“Since leaving my fulltime job at Microsoft to dedicate more time to our foundation, a lot of people have asked me what I’m working on. It often feels like I’m back in school, as I spend a lot of my time learning about issues I’m passionate about.

“I’m fortunate because the people I’m working with and learning from are true experts in their fields. I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through e-mail, so I can learn from them and expand the conversation.

“I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important. So, welcome to the Gates Notes.”

And welcome to a brand-new era of transparency in thought leadership.

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Seattle startup Gist announced today that its technology for connecting people’s e-mail inbox with the Web now works, in limited release, with Lotus Notes, IBM’s popular communication and collaboration software. Gist’s software will be made available to a select group of Lotus Notes customers in advance of a wider release still to come.

It’s part of Gist’s broader strategy to push information from the Web to business people, so as to make their daily work more efficient. Instead of looking up contacts and companies on the Web, for instance, Gist users can get updates delivered to them in whatever context they’re working in—e-mail, calendar, or spreadsheet. With Lotus Notes, wherever a name or e-mail address appears in a text document, say, Gist lists information about that person and their company.

So far, people can use Gist through Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce.com, social media like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and an iPhone application. The company says it has tens of thousands of users, and getting traction with Lotus Notes customers is the next big step.

“This gives us yet another enterprise-class partner,” says T.A. McCann, Gist’s founder and CEO. “It’s great to be working with IBM Global Services. It gets us to the other half of corporate e-mail in America.” Lotus Notes has more than 30 million users. It is particularly popular with consulting organizations.

McCann says the first half of this year will be about “continuing to refine the user experience.” After that, it will be time to go to market with some big corporate accounts. The company’s revenue model will be based on premium subscriptions, but it hasn’t given details about this yet. “Our strategy is to continue to integrate Gist into people’s daily workflow,” McCann says.

Gist has about 20 employees, and is backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Foundry Group. The company recently moved into new offices near Qwest Field.

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Every time I look at Gist, it’s a little different. Given it’s a scrappy startup trying to navigate the worlds of e-mail, social networking, business software, and Web search—each a huge market opportunity, each hugely competitive—this is probably a good thing.

The Seattle company, backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Colorado-based Foundry Group, is announcing today that its software, which has been in private beta trials for the past year, is now available to the general public. Gist bills itself as an online service that helps people manage their personal and professional relationships more efficiently.

The basic idea is to provide a Web dashboard that finds your contacts from your e-mail inbox and social networks (Outlook, Gmail, Twitter, Salesforce.com), and keeps you up to date about these contacts—even ranking their importance—through online information from blogs, articles, tweets, and updates on Facebook and LinkedIn. So, before your next business meeting, instead of having to Google around or search on Twitter to get up to speed on notable developments, Gist will surface any recent activity involving your contact, says Gist founder and CEO T.A. McCann.

It’s an ambitious product. Since the company’s $6.75 million Series A funding round from Vulcan and Foundry Group was announced in May, Gist has buckled down and focused on listening to customers (about 10,000 and counting) and improving its software and interface. It also moved into new office space near Qwest Field.

Among the new wrinkles in the software: Gist can filter information based on which people you’re meeting with this week, or which people you’ve exchanged new e-mail with; the software can also hook into customer relationship management through your Salesforce.com contacts; you can invite other people to try Gist, so there’s a viral component to the product distribution.

“There are probably a whole bunch of users who can get a lot out of Gist,” McCann says. “We think Gist is something people will want to talk about and share with other professionals.”

For now, the software is free, and will remain so for the rest of the year. But come early next … Next Page »

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I spent nine years working for a Customer Relationship Management software provider called Onyx Software. Our CRM systems were (at the time) largely implemented and run on-site at our customers’ locations. I ran the Professional Services team for the Americas—we were responsible for aligning business strategy with our software implementations, conducting business modeling, installing and customizing our software, performing training, and supporting our product.

Today I run Deneki Outdoors, a company that owns and operates fly fishing lodges in Alaska, British Columbia, the Bahamas, and Chile. We’ve got six year-round employees spread across those locations, and 40 folks who work for us seasonally.

What in the world could you learn at an enterprise software company that also applies to a fly fishing lodge business? Here are three big lessons.

—As a small business in 2009, you probably don’t need to own a single server.

Just a few years ago, running sophisticated business systems like CRM, financials, document management, and heck, even e-mail and calendaring, meant buying enterprise software packages, installing them on servers that you own and maintain, and paying a person or a team of people to keep things running smoothly. In 2009, the vast majority of small business functions can be supported by hosted applications that are simple, cheap, and close to zero maintenance.

Our business runs on Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and hosted Quickbooks. Other modern productivity tools like Skype help too, but our ability to run our core business functions on hosted platforms leads to a huge savings for us in terms of time and money. We don’t own a single server. We’ve never had to perform an upgrade. Customization is a piece of cake. Our “core systems” have been down for all of about three hours in the past five years combined.

If you run a small business, let the SaaS [software as a service] folks do the dirty work … Next Page »

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My favorite limerick of all time came printed on the bottom of a coffee cup:

All hail the goddess Caffeina!
She hangs out by the coffee machina.
We’re all on the run
But we get more work done
Since coffee came onto the scena!

Yes, this anonymous ditty breaks the rules of limericks, principally by mangling the meter and using made-up words like “machina” and “scena.” But it’s the sentiment that appeals to me. I do get more work done because of coffee. If the sprightly elixir was good for Voltaire, who is said to have consumed 50 cups a day, I figure it must be good for me.

I also get more work done because of e-mail. And because of the Web, and RSS feeds, and Google, and Twitter, and my iPhone and my MacBook and my Kindle—all of the tools, in short, that are melting our brains and impoverishing our communications, according to a circle of naysayers who have been very busy lately publishing books and articles with titles like Digital Barbarism and The Cult of the Amateur and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Technology criticism is an invaluable strain in our culture that stretches back to such brilliant writers as Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, Marshall McLuhan, and Jane Jacobs. But to tell the truth, I don’t give much more credence to the recent anti-digital jeremiads than I do to the periodic warnings—always swiftly overturned by medical authorities—that caffeine is bad for your health.

The latest addition to the curmudgeon’s club is John Freeman, the acting editor of the UK-based literary quarterly Granta, who published a so-called “manifesto for slow communication” in the August 21 Wall Street Journal. The essay, which was adapted from Freeman’s forthcoming book The Tyrrany of E-Mail, argues that living in such close and constant proximity to our e-mail inboxes stresses us out, cuts us off from the physical world, and undermines our communication skills. Freeman thinks that spending all day writing and answering e-mail amounts to “simulated busyness” rather than genuine productivity. And he believes that the only way to restore sanity is to “step off this hurtling machine,” jabber less, and think more. “We need to learn to use [e-mail] far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives,” Freeman writes.

There are certainly days when I’d love to ignore my e-mail. Thursdays, for example, when I’m supposed to be writing this column. As Freeman rightly notes, “We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean,” and it would be wonderful, on those days, to have a few uninterrupted hours to take his advice. But I know that closing the e-mail tab in my browser would be as unwise as … Next Page »

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Northwest software startups Evri (Seattle), Ontier (Portland, OR), and Kutano (Burnaby, BC) will be presenting at the DEMO technology conference in Palm Desert, CA, March 1-3. They are among 39 companies that each will give six-minute stage demonstrations of their new products.

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Seattle-based Jott, which provides free voice-to-text services for e-mail and text messaging, announced today it is moving to a paid model effective February 2. Jott Founder and CEO John Pollard cited the economy and ad market as reasons for the move. The startup, which was founded in 2006, is also rolling out a voicemail-to-text tool today.

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Portland, OR-based Jive Software, which makes social-networking and communication tools for businesses, announced it has signed up Bewag, the Austrian electric utility, as a customer. Since laying off a third of its staff in October, Jive has signed a number of new customers and partners, including United Business Media, Portland Energy Conservation, and Premiere Global Services.

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Portland, OR-based Ontier, a stealthy software startup, announced it has landed new board members and investors Les Fahey, of Fahey Ventures, and Paul Gulick, co-founder of InFocus. The amount of investment was not disclosed. Ontier was founded in early 2008 and is developing software for business communication that tries to fill the gap between e-mail and Web conferences.

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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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It must be the weather—or rather, the climate. How else to explain another tech startup with Seattle roots moving to the San Francisco Bay Area? Last week I heard from DocVerse, a collaborative-document software company, which relocated from the Seattle area to San Francisco this summer after raising a round of funding from Bay Area investors. This week it’s Chatterous, a “multi-channel communication” startup founded by two former Amazon developers. The story of Chatterous cuts across three familiar themes we’ve written about lately: the investment climate for early-stage startups, the role of incubators, and the challenge of helping people manage their daily communications.

I tracked down Chatterous co-founder Wilkins Chung yesterday. He and his business partner Kenshi Arasaki have been busy with the move to San Francisco—they’re setting up an office in the SoMa neighborhood that will officially be up and running in the next week or so. The idea behind Chatterous, which is about to start beta trials, is to let you communicate with a group of friends, co-workers, or other contacts across different channels like e-mail, text messages, instant messaging, and Web-based social networks—as smoothly and automatically as possible.

The idea was born from an experience many people can relate to. Chung says that on Thursdays or Fridays at Amazon, he would send out e-mail blasts to friends about getting together for happy hour. But some people wouldn’t get his message because they had already left or weren’t checking e-mail. So he’d have to call them or send text messages. “I became the aggregation point, and it’s really hard,” he says. Why not create a service to handle these different modes automatically, he thought. It just so happens, he met Arasaki at one of these happy hours, and the two started talking about possibilities.

They applied for the Y Combinator incubation program and got in. “We thought, let’s go for it,” says Chung. “Opportunities don’t come along often.” So he and Arasaki left Amazon—Chung had been there for two and a half years plus an internship—and spent the winter session at the beginning of this year in Silicon Valley, developing their product and making contacts.

When the time came to raise a round of funding, Chung and Arasaki talked to investors from Seattle as well as the Bay Area. “We did talk to people from Seattle, but mostly people in Seattle came down to San Francisco,” Chung says. “We were in Seattle for a short period of time, with the idea to move down to the Bay Area.” In the end, Chung says, they raised a round of angel funding (an undisclosed amount, but Chung says it was less than $1 million) from four investors in the Bay Area.

And that’s the main reason for the company’s move—to be a lot closer to its investors. “We’d like the ability to just call them up for coffee,” says Chung. “Especially in the angel round, it’s not just about money, it’s about their experience, and being networked to people in your space.” (As an aside, Chung is from Toronto and Arasaki is from Calgary, so they don’t really have local roots that would tend to keep them in Seattle.)

Chung also had some keen observations on the early-stage investment climate in San Francisco versus Seattle. “People are willing to meet if you get an intro. Even if an investor isn’t interested, they’re really willing to help you find others who might be,” he says. “Our investors came about through referrals. It’s a lot easier to meet investors that would be suitable. [There seems to be] a lot more investment opportunity in the Bay Area than Seattle. Even if your company is in Seattle, it’s probably a good idea to come to the Bay Area. The network of investors is stronger than in Seattle in scope and breadth… In the Valley, the investor network is big, but word gets around really quickly.”

“Another thing is,” Chung continues, “a lot of investors [in the Valley] used to have their own startups. That’s a really big difference. Sure, you have people who made a lot of money in the corporate world, but still, having investors who’ve started their own company, have been through the whole thing, is very important. They can advise us on how to get through it.” The implication is that Seattle has fewer of these—which is probably true, at least in raw numbers.

At this point, Chatterous is still two guys, but they’re looking to hire. And that’s something that’s not any easier in the Valley. “The talent in Seattle is also there, it’s just as good as the talent in the Bay Area. In fact, recruiting is a bit more challenging, because there are a lot more opportunities to work for cool startups,” says Chung.

Chatterous is in the process of adding new features for its beta run, such as more types of social-networking channels. “We’re trying to make Chatterous into a product that you use without changing your existing methods of communication,” Chung says. If you’re used to primarily using e-mail or instant messaging, he adds, the aim is for you to not even notice Chatterous. That’s as opposed to a service like Twitter, which competes in the same social communications space. “The concept of updating your status for everyone to see—a lot of people outside the Valley don’t understand it,” says Chung. “Whereas with Chatterous you’re just trying to reach [certain] people and communicate with them.”

It’s definitely a crowded space, and Chatterous has its work cut out for it to stand apart. Kevin Merritt of Seattle-based Blist recently had an interesting post about how he views all the different forms of communication and their best uses—from face-to-face to e-mail to instant messaging and Twitter—and how much he likes yet another service, Yammer (which just won best in show at TechCrunch 50).

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