The boardroom windows at ON24 look out over San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the city’s largest convention complex. Every year, Moscone is home to giant events like Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Oracle OpenWorld, Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce, and the MacWorld Expo; in fiscal year 2009-2010, more than 919,000 registered event attendees visited the complex.

But as busy as Moscone is, the number of business people who travel to trade shows and conventions is actually dropping. Moscone’s 2009-2010 attendance was down almost 20 percent compared to 2007-2008 levels. The economy is partly to blame, of course—but so is technology. In 2009, Cisco Systems canceled two San Francisco events and said it would hold digital conferences instead, saving $50 million. And in the growing movement to replace big, expensive physical events with cheaper virtual ones—where the booths are made from bits and attendees let their mice and keyboards do the walking—ON24 wants to take the lead.

ON24 CEO Sharat Sharan

After surviving a brush with death back in 2002, ON24 emerged as one of the country’s leading providers of webcasting technology, which allows companies to stage live online presentations and webinars for employees, trainees, or sales prospects. On the strength of that business, which brings in at least $25 million in revenues every year, the 275-employee company became profitable back in 2009, and is still growing at 25 to 30 percent per year, according to CEO Sharat Sharan.

But whereas a webcast might last 45 minutes, a virtual event can go on for a day, a week, a month, or forever—providing many more opportunities for the host to collect leads that might turn into sales down the road. So ON24 is aggressively pushing its newer “Virtual Show” and “Virtual Briefing Center” technologies, which are both built on a newly overhauled back-end called Platform 10.

This month ON24 is gearing up for VUE2011, a virtual show about virtual shows. Slated for November 17, VUE2011 will be emceed by the San Francisco Giants’ shaggy-bearded relief pitcher Brian Wilson and will be set amidst 3D simulations of San Francisco landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chinatown Gate on Grant Street (see the video on page 3 of this story). In Wilson’s honor, the conference’s tagline will be “Fear the beard, not the technology.” (Of course, after the Giants’ lackluster 2011 season, the beard has lost a bit of its fearsomeness.)

“What we do better than anybody else in the world is live virtual events,” says Sharan. Webcasts are still “the foundation” of the business, he says, but ON24 is growing into a “one-stop shop for webcasting, virtual events, virtual briefing centers, demand generation, corporate communications, and training.” If the flying avatars, corporate islands, and virtual stores of Second Life represented a wild, uncontrolled experiment in virtual commerce and communication, ON24 is the company coming along behind with a broom, civilizing and detoxifying the virtual-spaces concept for business users and serious marketers.

But to someone from the dot-com boom years, when ON24 was founded, the current company would be unrecognizable. It started out in 1998 as a distribution hub for … Next Page »

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Sixth in a series of profiles of Y Combinator Winter 2011 startups.

I’m always on the lookout for technologies that have the potential to help us be better journalists and storytellers, and I find new ones pretty regularly—touchscreen video editing being my favorite recent example. But Xconomy is both a media company and an events company, and the technology of events seems to evolve a lot more slowly. If you took away PowerPoint for presentations and Twitter as an unofficial communications backchannel, most conferences today, even Xconomy’s, would look and feel the same as they did 30 or 40 years ago.

That’s why I’m so intrigued by Lanyrd (pronounced like lanyard, as in the string your ID badge hangs from at a conference). This Y Combinator-backed startup, which consists for now of the husband-and-wife team of Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, is building a user-generated conference directory that has the potential to transform the way we prepare for conferences beforehand and the way we learn from them while we’re there and after we leave. If it catches on, it could make the whole routine of conference-going radically more efficient and productive, in roughly the same way that LinkedIn has made it easier to network with peers or IMDB has made it easier to find information about actors, films, and TV shows.

Already, users have uploaded details on close to 10,000 conferences to Lanyrd’s database, stretching all the way from 1945 (the Yalta Conference) to 2014 (38 people have already signed up to attend the 100th Pub Standards Web meetup in London on March 1 of that year). Downe and Willison successfully battle-tested the site at the mother of all technology events, the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin this March—2,000 speakers, 10,000 attendees. And so far, users have uploaded more than 6,800 conference-related items, such as speaker slide decks, videos, photos, live blogs, and Web writeups.

The central feature of Lanyrd—the core on which everything else hangs—is its ability to show you who’s speaking at each event in its listings and who’s attending. It all revolves around an existing and very robust social network, namely Twitter. If you’re creating an event listing on Lanyrd, you add speakers according to their Twitter handles, and if you’re a user searching Lanyrd, the first events you see are those that the people you follow on Twitter are speaking at or attending. (But you don’t have to have a Twitter account to be listed as an event speaker. I’m pretty sure that Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill weren’t big Twitter users.)

Just as every event on Lanyrd has a list of speakers and attendees, everyone who’s ever spoken at or attended an event listed on Lanyrd has a profile page showing their conference history and all the materials they’ve uploaded. “For all intents and purposes, it’s like a LinkedIn profile for your speaking career,” says Willison.

Which is a brilliant but also forehead-slappingly-obvious idea; the wonder is that no one has done it before. There are, of course, sites that track events, such as Yahoo’s Upcoming, and sites that store event-related materials, such as Slideshare. But nobody before Downe and Willison had hit on the idea of organizing both conference listings and conference materials around the speakers themselves, and making it all discoverable via users’ existing social networks. The IMDB analogy is actually a pretty good one. In the same way that you can thread your way from a famous actor to a recent movie he was in to another actor in that movie to the TV show where that actor got her start in showbiz, Lanyrd exposes the whole tangled web of professional events and the people who seem to jet constantly from one to the next.

Lanyrd’s coverage, not surprisingly, is particularly strong for the world of technology conferences. It’s got oodles of material, for example, about the just-completed Google I/O 2011 conference in San Francisco. But there are also lots of listings in areas like … Next Page »

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Imagine a world where you can point your phone at the people you’re interested in talking to, and a message magically appears on their phones, regardless of whether you’ve ever spoken to them before or actually have their digits in your possession. (Heaven forbid you actually talk to them face to face.)

Now, imagine there’s an app for that. And it’s not just a flicker in some developer’s eye, but is live and approved on the Apple iTunes App Store. Thanks to Portsmouth, NH-based PoKos Communications.

Timo Platt, CEO and founder of PoKos, touts the mobile technology as less invasive and exhibitionist than the check-ins we’ve all become so accustomed to from providers like Foursquare and Facebook Places. He says the app could actually help deter creepy men from approaching women in bars, rather than the opposite, which is an initial concern from many when they first hear about the PoKos Chat app’s Point-and-Chat feature.

“You can make an overture without going up and saying hello in person,” he says. “If she’s going to block and ignore you, that’s going to deter you from going up to talk to her in person.”

Once recipients have been designated (using a phone’s camera), the app sends them a message saying the user name of the sender would like to talk to them. (Senders can choose to remain private, or identify themselves with a picture or short description.) Those who have been targeted can choose to engage the messaging, or ignore it and even block future contact. And the message sender doesn’t actually get your number unless you opt to give it to them. “We’re on the side of privacy for the recipient at all times,” says Platt, a telecom and mobile industry veteran who worked for ConTel, the firm that Verizon Wireless sprang from through a series of mergers and acquisitions.

For now, the recipient has to have the PoKos Chat app installed on his or her phone to receive the Point-and-Chat message and engage in other group chat features (more on those later), but Platt sees that changing in later versions of the software. He hopes that PoKos will eventually become firmware, where the technology comes preloaded on devices under the branding of a particular phone or carrier. (Platt also hopes the newly created word PoKos will become synonymous with mobile messaging.)

Platt is keeping pretty quiet on how exactly the PoKos technology picks up the phone of the person you want to point and chat with, saying that it relies on “about five component capabilities to discern” it’s the person you actually want to speak with, and that PoKos has invented and developed the processes and methods for making it work. A forerunner to this person-to-person style of communication is the technology Palm Pilot devices had in the late ’90s for exchanging contact info via a wireless beaming action between devices, he says.

“Some of our methods bundle a combination of current and historic signal capabilities and technologies, and we utilize IP, wireless, cellular, telephony and other networks to transmit our messages,” he says. PoKos has filed for U.S. and international patents protecting the Point-and-Chat feature it developed with these components, Platt says.

To backtrack, the PoKos Chat app has actually been available since November on the iTunes store, but the edgy Point-and-Chat feature was approved just two weeks ago. It started out by offering a feature called Zoom, which gives the ability to engage in public or private chats with PoKos users nearby, using just PoKos user names and without having to give away contact details like their actual phone number, e-mail address, or social network profile (unless users want to). Consumers can also use PoKos to text each other within the app, without having to chip away at the text messaging limits within their cell phone plans, and can text groups of people at once. “We tried to mirror a texting application that everybody uses and blend new features into a pure text app,” he says.

In Platt’s mind, the PoKos Chat app isn’t a high-tech stalking tool, but a platform for enhancing communications between users and helping brand sponsors better connect with consumers. Both the Zoom and Point-and-Chat features enable … Next Page »

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Overwhelming. Inspiring. Thought-provoking. These are all words that apply to the spectacle that was yesterday’s Mass Technology Leadership Council’s Innovation 2010 “unConference,” held at the World Trade Center Boston and organized by entrepreneur and investor Bill Warner, Matrix Partners’ Antonio Rodriguez, and MassTLC’s Tom Hopcroft. And one more word, ridiculous—that’s what it feels like to try to sum it all up in one post.

So I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll just give a few of the ideas and thoughts that my colleague Erin Kutz and I came away with from the discussions of the day. The basic format (or unformat): hundreds of entrepreneurs, tech executives, investors, and other business leaders broke out into about 100 organically created sessions on everything from customer development, startup resources, and how to generate social media buzz to alternative financing schemes, venture capitalist-entrepreneur dynamics, and education issues for engineers headed into industry and women in tech. I’d hazard a guess that a lot of strong connections were made during the course of the day, and we’ll be seeing the fruits of all that in the years to come.

Just a few of the people I saw as I flitted from room to room during the morning sessions: Shawn Broderick from play140 and TechStars, Mike Chin from Baydin, Ed Crawley and Ken Zolot from MIT, Wade Appelman from Harvest Automation, Carl Calabria from iRobot, Paul English from Kayak.com, Eric Paley from Founder Collective, Susan Hunt Stevens from Practically Green, Chris Sheehan and James Geshwiler from CommonAngels, John Landry from Lead Dog Ventures, Sim Simeonov from FastIgnite, Ziad Sultan from Marginize, Vineet Sinha from Architexa, Bettina Hein from Pixability, Gus Weber from Microsoft, and, of course, Bill Warner himself.

Here’s our top 10 list of observations:

1. MassTLC’s innovation conference, in its third year, has become a premier business event for tech entrepreneurs in New England. It has gained a critical mass of elite attendees, such that people now feel they have to be there. It has also found a way to blend the concerns of entrepreneurs, startups, and venture capitalists with those of big companies and other organizations to a degree that I’m not sure I’ve seen before. Kudos to the organizers and participants.

2. The World Trade Center Boston is a pretty good venue for this sprawling event. Although the day was fairly chaotic, that’s by design. The layout of the rooms and floors made it easy enough to find what you were looking for quickly. One logistical suggestion that might help things get started more smoothly—some advance prep and communication of what a few of the key topics will be (maybe this happened at the pre-party and I just missed it).

3. You’ve heard about co-working spaces; how about co-living? Cambridge Innovation Center founder and CEO Tim Rowe prompted a discussion on dorm-style entrepreneur co-living spaces, where a bunch of startups share common kitchen and bathroom space. The idea is to … Next Page »

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For many Seattleites, Labor Day weekend is a time to take refuge in the outdoors. Some 50,000 people will spend the holiday weekend wandering around the Seattle Center grounds listening to live music, cooling off in the International fountain, and filling up on $5 elephant ears (for those of you who’ve missed the phenomenon, these are essentially slabs of fried dough dipped in cinnamon and sugar) at the city’s largest music festival, Bumbershoot. Those wanting to avoid the crowds, the parking lot that will become of Lower Queen Anne, and the high ticket prices, will spend the weekend elsewhere—hiking, barbequing, boating, or participating in some other summertime activity, most likely—a last sunny hurrah before fall arrives, and the gray skies creep back into the city.

And then there is Seattle’s self-proclaimed ‘geek’ population. The techies of the Pacific Northwest will spend their three-day holiday participating in another local tradition—the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). Over the years, PAX has become one of the biggest trade shows in North America, if not the biggest, come video and computer games. The conference, which kicked off this morning in downtown Seattle, will draw tens of thousands of techies and video game enthusiasts to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center over the course of the weekend for countless game exhibitions, demos, panel discussions, tournaments, concerts, and parties.

The three-day conference, like last year, was sold out before opening. But for those of you who reserved your badge early, here’s a look at my top 10 most interesting sessions. (These predictions are purely subjective, and based entirely on what piques my particular gaming interests.)

—The Myth of the Gamer Girl: True Demographic or Anthropological Hooha? (Friday, 12:00 pm)

This panel will dissect the myth of the girl gamer, and attempts to answer the question of whether or not there is something unique about women who play video games, or if the distinction is “just a bunch of hogwash” being sold by game marketers.

—Movin’ on Up: How to make It (Or Not) in Videogames Journalism (Friday, 4:30 pm)

In this session experts will “drop knowledge” on videogame website owners and aspiring gaming journalists on how to get game writing noticed by “the right people,” and get started in the world of videogames reporting.

—Of Dice and Men: The Play (Friday, 7:30 pm)

Get ready to laugh until your abdomen hurts, and wind up brought to your knees, with tears streaming out of your eyes at this play about “friendship, what it means to be grown-up, and why gaming matters.”

—Raising Geek Generation 2.0: Roll For Parenting Ability (Saturday, 11 am)

Talk gaming-meets-parenting shop with Wired.com’s GeekDad blog and other geeky parents, to share stories and give advice on to how to raise your kid to be a geek like you. One of the many questions to be tackled at this geek-tastic panel: “How can I control my disgust if my child tells me he likes Jar Jar?”

—Game Writing & Rabid Badger Combat (Saturday, 1:30 pm)

“Do you want to be a game writer? Do you like single handedly fighting rabid badgers while building a miniature version of the Eiffel Tower in a glass bottle? If you answered yes … Next Page »

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When you’re a cartogeek like me and a conference on location-based services is going on six blocks away from your own home, you sort of have to go. So I spent part of my Wednesday at Geo-Loco. This was a gathering of entrepreneurs and developers debating how to build profitable businesses around the petabytes of information piling up about consumers’ real-time locations in the physical world.

Organized by market intelligence firm Bancroft Group, the event filled up the conference center at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, just a stone’s throw from Xconomy’s new San Francisco headquarters in the Potrero Hill/Dogpatch neighborhood (+37.757 degrees latitude,-122.394 degrees longitude, for anyone who cares). As Xconomy’s former infotech reporter in Boston, I was pleased to see such a strong group of familiar faces from the New England tech scene, including David Chang from Where, Laura Fitton from Oneforty, Jason Jacobs from FitnessKeeper, Ted Morgan from Skyhook Wireless, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR.

I won’t try to capture the whole sense of the meeting, but I thought I’d summarize a few of the themes that stood out to me.

It’s not about finding yourself on a digital map; it’s about the intelligence you’re providing to marketers in the process. In a keynote talk, Fred Wilson of New York’s Union Square Ventures said that the location-related companies that interest him most as investment targets are those whose applications involve the generating and sharing of data among millions of people. Citing Comscore statistics, he said 14 percent of all mobile users, or about 80 million people worldwide, access maps on their mobile devices regularly. On one recent day, July 3, over a million people checked in on Foursquare—roughly 5 check-ins per active user (the company has 2.1 million registered users but only 200,000 are active on any given day).

All those searches and check-ins generate massive amounts of data. And this data can be used to tell map providers and other parties not only where people are, but what they’re doing (e.g. visiting Starbucks) and what they’re searching for. “Knowing where someone is in real time—particularly if you have some context around that—is an incredibly valuable marketing opportunity,” Wilson argued. So much so that he’s more interested in whether a location-based-services company has millions of users than whether it has a demonstrable revenue stream.

To gain users for your location-based service, give them rewards, make it fun, appeal to their narcissism–and be nice to journalists. A panel led by Stewart Alsop of venture firm Alsop Louie Partners asked how Foursquare piled up so many users—far more than competitor Gowalla (in which Alsop Louie is an investor). Blair Swedeen, of 1020′s Placecast targeted advertising service, said it was the game mechanics, which offer points, badges, and mayorships to people who check in on Foursquare repeatedly. Perry Evans, the founder of MapQuest and more recently of Denver-based Close.ly, which helps businesses market to their Facebook and Twitter followers, said the process of checking in and letting all your friends know where you are is “appealing to the ego…It’s like tweeting, people love recognition.” And all of the panelists agreed that Foursquare and its charismatic CEO, Dennis Crowley, had somehow captured the imaginations of journalists. “Their press exceeded what they were doing for a long time,” said Kent Lindstrom from PlacePop, a San Francisco startup that offers virtual loyalty cards for local businesses.

Check-ins themselves are becoming passe, so location-based networking companies have to provide value in other ways. Though pioneered by Foursquare and Gowalla, the location-based check-in is now basically a commodity feature, offered by many other services such as … Next Page »

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As mobile healthcare entrepreneurs, technologists, and investors gather in San Diego next week for a three-day conference on wireless health, a report assessing the state of the industry concludes that “mHealth” is still emerging, and not yet ready for mainstream adoption.

A survey of mobile health companies found that 94 percent of the wireless health companies that responded to the query are private—and two-thirds generate less than $1 million in annual revenue. Nevertheless, the study issued eight months ago by Edina, MN-based TripleTree, a boutique investment bank and research firm, predicts that the progress that mHealth has made over the past four years will be eclipsed by coming advancements over the next 18 months.

The survey, which is part of TripleTree’s report on Wireless and Mobile Health, found more than 250 wireless health companies in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Nearly all of those (90 percent) are based in the U.S.; about 41 are developing wireless technologies for new clinical applications, 37 percent are consumer-focused, with the idea of producing more successful patient outcomes, and 22 percent intend to improve operational effectiveness in healthcare services. Much of TripleTree’s results are based on information from 32 companies that responded to the survey.

One indication that the industry is on the threshold of a new era is that the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance, the San Diego nonprofit group organizing the 5th Annual WLSA Convergence Summit, became a full-time, member-supported industry group in January. In previous years, the WLSA was an all-volunteer effort that came together in May to host the conference, which will be held at the Estancia Hotel & Spa for three days, beginning Tuesday.

“We assessed the situation and realized this market was on the verge of really booming,” says Rob McCray, a former TripleTree partner and now a senior advisor. “I think we’re finally at the point where we were in 1994 with Internet commerce and where we were in 2001 with wireless data.” He explains that a number of e-commerce startups were founded in 1994 (Amazon was started in 1994, eBay and craigslist followed in 1995)—and by 1999, McCray says, “we had some successful companies.” In the same vein, McCray traces the transformation of wireless data to 2001, as e-mail and the BlackBerry smartphone (introduced in 2002) triggered a wave of new users and applications.

In making San Diego’s WLSA a full-time trade group, McCray says he’s stepped in as CEO. He has also recruited healthcare marketing executive Ashok Kaul as WLSA vice president of healthcare convergence and former Qualcomm marketing … Next Page »

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The Internet is dying, and visitors are lost among its crumbling ruins. Sounds like hyperbole, but we are all trapped by an obsolete ideology binding most sites and keeping the Web from being all it could be.

We go to the Internet seeking entertainment, information, communication, commerce, and comfort. We find ourselves lost in a bewildering sea of boring, undifferentiated, incomplete offerings, smothered by advertising. The innovative community of Web creators who could actually meet our needs don’t know where we are or how to find us, largely because the locations where we could connect are bound by a rigid, failed ideology of search engine optimization, location-generated content, and traffic-based currency.

This is how I look at the Web and how I set up my presentation—all six minutes of it—at the semi-annual DEMO conference in Palm Desert, CA, a couple of weeks ago. It is also why I started my newest venture, DigitalScirocco, an auction-based marketplace bringing fresh and relevant content and services to Web-based properties.

The DEMO experience was amazing. We are angel-financed and only eight months old, with an initial focus on getting our product to market using a “Rolodex” direct sales model, and so we hadn’t even begun to think about marketing/PR, messaging, or even solid demos. Worse, as a market we planned to bootstrap by seeding with quality sellers, a process we had barely begun. But the opportunity was too good to pass up, so the already crazy pace of a startup went into hyper-drive for a few weeks.

Upon arrival at DEMO in Palm Desert, my immediate attention was caught by pink flamingos. My first thought was, “Tacky!” Then realized they are real, and my reaction changed to “neat!” Shortly after, I realized I hadn’t ordered a monitor for our Pavilion Station (booth) at DEMO. Our team raced to Best Buy and figured it out.

After taking care of the monitor drama, Sunday night offered a chance to rehearse on the main stage and attend a CEO dinner—both which were scheduled at basically the same time—I did both and made the most of the festivities.

I presented just after 11 a.m. on Monday. I was calm and thought of a couple things. The first: no matter how bad it might be, that it was unlikely to be as bad a performance as … Next Page »

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Massachusetts is going to be the focus of the health IT universe late next month — if it isn’t already. Governor Deval Patrick and his staff have invited power players in both the healthcare and technology fields to Boston in April for a conference that is expected to highlight the state’s fast-growing health IT sector.

The conclave comes as state organizations in Massachusetts and other parts of the U.S. begin spending more than $1 billon awarded to them by the federal government since February for regional and statewide systems for sharing electronic health records. To headline the conference, the governor has attracted at least two of the top federal officials involved in national health IT initiatives: Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health information technology. The conference is slated for April 29-30 at the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel in South Boston.

Several factors are playing into Patrick’s strategy for bringing these and other heavy hitters to the state, according to people involved with the conference. Massachusetts has a huge stake in President Obama’s plan to invest $19.5 billion from the federal economic stimulus passed last year to drive adoption of health information technology over the next several years; a bright spot in the mostly stormy economy in recent years has been the growth of tech companies such as Athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, and Meditech that provide software and services to hospitals and other healthcare organizations. These Bay State firms are competing with companies around the world for their share of the billions of dollars in new business that will be generated by Obama’s health IT initiative, which is expected to create jobs while reducing healthcare costs and improving patient care.

Bay State officials have invited state health IT and Medicaid leaders from around the country, as well as healthcare software firms from Massachusetts, to the conference. To help ensure their participation at the conference, the plan is to pay for the travel expenses of … Next Page »

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In the past, Microsoft has had a reputation for being slow moving in the areas of green technology and energy-saving innovation. However, in the last two years, the corporation seems to have turned the tide, stepping up to the sustainability plate and implementing a number of company-wide green initiatives.

First, it hired Rob Bernard as chief environmental strategist, a position created specifically for him. It began integrating power management capabilities into its products—the latest release of Windows 7 and Microsoft Hohm include new energy tracking and management features. Partnerships were formed with the Clinton Foundation, the Carbon Disclosure Project, and the European Environmental Agency. And, most recently, Microsoft sent a 12-person delegation, led by Bernard, to the COP15 Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

Microsoft’s director of environmental sustainability, Francois Ajenstat, has been with the company for nine years, working in various groups including Office and SQL Server. He moved to sustainability, a personal passion of his, 18 months ago. His job includes everything from working with product teams to reduce the harmful environmental impact of their customers to talking with governments and NGOs around the world about climate change, and working on Microsoft’s own commitment to going green.

On the last day of the conference, Friday, I spoke with Ajenstat about how the company was received in Copenhagen and what its current environmental strategy entails.

“A lot of people join Microsoft to change the world,” he said. “This is clearly an opportunity where I could go in and have a significant impact on the world by also helping change the company.”

Here are a few edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: Microsoft has recently put much more emphasis on sustainable technology. Why now?

Francois Ajenstat: The way that I describe how things were originally is we had a lot of what I call “well intentioned chaos”—a lot different people within the company doing great work, but not necessarily a line to a broader vision or broader strategy. Sustainability has moved to the forefront of everybody’s minds, both in terms of our customers asking Microsoft how we can help, government talking to Microsoft, our employees looking for what the company was doing, shareholders. It was almost more of a whole mountain of requests coming from all directions. What we wanted to do was have a thoughtful approach that made sense based on what society needs and also based on the real capabilities that Microsoft can bring to the table.

X: What are the key components of Microsoft’s environmental strategy?

FA: There are really three parts to the strategy. The first one is to use IT to improve energy efficiency. The second is to accelerate research breakthroughs. And the third is about responsible environmental leadership. A number of different studies have shown that the IT industry represents about 2 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted. And you might say that 2 percent is … Next Page »

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I sat in on a good venture capital panel yesterday at Mobile Northwest 2009 in Seattle. No huge arguments or chair throwing to speak of (we’ll see what we can stir up at the next few Xconomy Forums). But some solid and useful observations from Geoff Entress of Voyager Capital, and also a prominent Seattle-based angel investor; Adrian Smith of Ignition Partners in Bellevue, WA, an expert in telecom and wireless; and Puneet Tandon of Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA, who is looking to sign partnerships with top entrepreneurs in digital media and social networking. (You can also see some comments from mobile VC Tom Huseby’s keynote here.)

The panel was moderated by Tricia Duryee, the Seattle-based correspondent for mocoNews, a website that covers wireless telecommunications. Here are my quick “top three” takeaways from the discussion of the local mobile industry:

1. The panic may be over, but caution rules. Entress says he’s added nine companies to his portfolio this year, out of a total of 32 he’s involved in (and six mobile firms, including TravellingWave, Swype, Dashwire, and Treemo). “We’re definitely not out of the woods yet,” he said. “But 2010 might be a good year for selling companies.”

2. It’s not all about the iPhone. Entress and Smith pointed out that Apple has only 17 percent of the smartphone market, so there’s plenty of opportunity on other platforms, like the BlackBerry and devices that use Windows Mobile. “Apple has a huge amount of mindshare,” Smith said, “but the critical thing is the development environment around [mobile applications].” Tandon agreed, saying, “Barriers to doing business with us [carriers] perhaps have been lowered.” Entress stressed the importance, especially for startups, of trying to avoid “getting locked into any one carrier, handset, or operating system.”

3. Watch advertising, input technologies, and connected devices. Tandon pointed out that by sometime next year, there are projected to be 3.3 billion Web-connected devices, and 70 percent of them will be connected via wireless operators. That means carriers will be willing to pay to know “who are the social influencers in your subscriber base,” he said. Smith and Entress said Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob signifies that mobile advertising is here to stay—but that the deal was the “first one out” (like YouTube for video), so don’t look for anything near that sort of valuation again. Entress added that he’s working with a number of startups selling new ways of inputting text on mobile devices (using speech recognition, touch-screen methods, and so forth). For all our fancy gadgets, it seems we still struggle to communicate.

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Tom Huseby says he’s finally able to go home and not worry about seeing his family’s savings stuffed under his mattress. “The panic is over,” he says. “All of a sudden, things are getting a lot better. It doesn’t feel much better now, but it is.”

Huseby, a noted Seattle-based venture capitalist with SeaPoint Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Voyager Capital (and the Godfather of what we’ve been calling the “Qpass mafia”), was giving his 30,000-foot view of the economic landscape and VC market at today’s Mobile Northwest 2009 conference in Seattle. He also drilled down into some of the most pressing challenges in the mobile space, as well as what the startup opportunities are. Just a few highlights here:

“Unemployment is going to slow growth across any consumer business. If you’re in mobile, I hate to tell you, but you’re in the consumer business. I do think there will be liquidity in mobile startups,” Huseby says. “Most startups are going to have to earn it the old-fashioned way, they’ll have to grow over a long time. You’re going to have to survive during a roller coaster ride. Every single company will have to go rushing to the bottom, and then do the slow, clanking ride to the top.”

In terms of startup opportunities, it helps to think in terms of what wireless carriers need. Huseby calls himself “fairly carrier-centric.” As he puts it, they are big customers that are predictable (once you understand them) and they generate huge amounts of cash. He laid out the top three challenges for carriers today—absolutely critical to understand if you’re an entrepreneur trying to get their attention with a new product.

—Bandwidth. There’s “tremendous pressure on carriers” to provide more bandwidth to support people’s exploding need for data connectivity wherever they go, Huseby says.

—Costs of bandwidth. “Oh my God, how are you going to pay for it?” he asks. With such a competitive market, Huseby thinks costs for consumers will actually go down. “I think they’re not going to get the money from us, they’re going to have to get it from advertising. Advertising revenue will absolutely help pay for the bandwidth.” (The problem is that mobile advertising revenue is still relatively small and doesn’t usually go to carriers.)

—Holding onto consumers. “If they’re going to pay for it with advertising, they need to get a much firmer grip on their customers,” Huseby says. He sees this as a crucial issue for the coming decade. “The next viral social network has to work hard to make [ad revenues] accrue to them. Carriers have to be very conscious of the demographics of their customers. They have to get their customers anchored in.”

After his talk, I had a chance to ask Huseby about some other areas of interest, like mobile search. He says he’s generally staying out of that space, but is looking at location-based services from the perspective of retail stores and local advertising.

We’ll have more from the conference soon, so watch this space.

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The DEMOfall 09 conference, billed as “the launchpad for emerging technology,” kicks off today in San Diego, with company presentations and new product launches officially starting tomorrow morning. The Seattle and Portland, OR, metro areas are well-represented in the mix, with three Seattle-area startups and one Portland company scheduled to present their stuff. That’s all according to VentureBeat, which co-produces the conference.

It’s a big deal in the tech industry, and a great opportunity for a select group of startups. Here’s a little bit about each Northwest company that will take the stage:

—Intelius, based in Bellevue, WA, provides background checks and identity theft protection for consumers and businesses. Back in May, we reported that the company acquired Spock, the Silicon Valley-based people search engine, for an undisclosed amount. Intelius was founded in 2003 and is led by CEO Naveen Jain, the founder of InfoSpace.

—Point of Wealth Systems, based in Portland, OR, has developed a method that allows employees who make their money in cash and tips (waitstaff at restaurants, for example) to deposit their earnings into a secure register for savings, retirement, or investment purposes. Point of Wealth was formed in March 2008 to bring financial services to this new market.

—Symform, based in Seattle, has been honing its cloud data-storage product in beta trials (and a pre-launch version) since the spring. We first profiled the company back in February, and in April, Symform announced it had raised a $1.5 million Series A round from OVP Venture Partners. Its basic idea is to offer cheap, efficient, and secure data storage and backup services to small and medium-sized businesses.

—Enroute, based in Bellevue, WA, is giving a sneak preview of its product—a unified system to help businesses find the most efficient way of shipping packages from A to B. Enroute is one of the finalists from the Zino Society investment forum, which took place last Thursday in Seattle. It is in the running for a $50,000 Zino investment prize, to be announced within the next few weeks.

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Casual games are a serious business.

Seattle-based PopCap Games’ Bejeweled and Big Fish Games’ Mystery Case Files were cheap to develop compared to most modern computer and console games, and the cost to buy them is similarly low, but games like these are played by millions of people around the world. Between the recession and the ever-rising development costs for new games, the so-called “casual” video game seems ripe for an extension of its already massive success. For developers, entrepreneurs, business strategists, and others, the place to network, show off products, and learn new techniques is in Seattle this week.

Casual Connect Seattle, a three-day conference combining seminar, lectures, and networking opportunities started today, filling Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle with a strange mixture of video game exhibitions and business meetings. While men in suits discussed adjusting costs to hang onto consumers, a woman dressed like a medieval princess took pictures with men wearing a crown to promote King.com, a games website. “This is a really important conference for your industry,” Washington Technology Industry Association president Ken Myer told a crowded auditorium this morning in his welcoming remarks. More than 2,000 people are expected to attend the event from companies all over the world.

Casual Connect occurs three times a year—in Seattle, in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a rotating European location (this year Hamburg, Germany). Seattle is home to a large cluster of video game developers of all stripes, including divisions at Microsoft and RealGames devoted to casual games. “We’re very proud of our gaming industry here in Washington,” Myer said.

Xconomy wrote about the recognition of casual games as increasing sources of revenue at last year’s conference, and the surprising resilience of casual game profit margins despite the recession. Understanding that, the keynote talk given today by Big Fish Games president and CEO Jeremy Lewis focused on what he called “building value”—growing a casual game company into the best shape possible. Lewis talked about his own personal journey to his current position, using various artistic pictures as analogous illustrations. It’s easier said than done to grow value, he admitted, but he offered some lessons he had learned such as putting aside ego, making culture a priority, and looking for ways to expand the audience. For Big Fish, the audience “is what we call the chief household officer,” Lewis said.

What really drew the attention of the crowd, though, were the announcements Lewis made for the first time. He showed a brief preview of a new game called “Drawn: the Painted Tower,” and said it is the first “cinematic game”—a more graphically intensive story-based kind of game that Big Fish will be focusing on more. He also announced an exclusive deal with People.com to put games on their site, which, with 32.6 million unique visitors a month, should build value for Big Fish quite well. And 88 percent of those visitors are female. “That’s a lot of chief household officers,” Lewis remarked.

Tom Prata, senior director of project development at Redmond, WA-based Nintendo of America was the other main speaker this morning. He expanded somewhat on what Lewis said, focusing on what exactly creates avid gamers and retains them. The main area of development has expanded beyond just the linear improvement of graphics because of a combination of cost and complexity, he said. Ten years ago, “the cost of developing titles was increasing at an alarming rate,” Prata said, and games were becoming so complicated that many potential customers were dissuaded from buying them. Today, however, with the rise of casual games, the video game market has expanded enormously, with around 30 million new players in the last two and a half years. “There have never been more opportunities for game developers than right now,” Prata said.

Judging from the eager energy and purpose-filled stride of people in Benaroya, Prata is not alone in his belief. Dozens of companies have booths to talk about their latest products, and there are certain to be a number of deals between different companies and organizations in the works before the end of Thursday. And office workers everywhere can look forward to a new crop of games to absorb them. “Everyone enjoys video games,” Prata said.

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I met Simon Thompson at the center of the GIS world, which was set at least for several days this week at 32.7090 degrees North, 117.1644 degrees West. Those are the coordinates for the main exhibit hall of the San Diego Convention Center, where more than 12,000 people interested in GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, gathered to attend the 2009 ESRI International User Conference. The annual convention organized by ESRI, the Redlands, CA-based leader in GIS systems is the largest of its kind.

As I reported a few weeks ago, GIS modeling and mapping software is becoming an increasingly hot segment of the IT industry—and Thompson is doing everything he can to push adoption as ESRI’s director of commercial marketing. Thompson tells me that he was living in Sydney, Australia, when ESRI president Jack Dangermond began recruiting him in 2006. “I actually used ESRI tools to evaluate the move,” he said.

Comparing ESRI’s GIS databases for Sydney with Redlands, CA, a city of more than 64,000 in San Bernardino County, Thompson says he could see that he would be trading Sydney’s cosmopolitan city life, theaters, and soccer, rugby, and cricket matches for easy access to Southern California’s mountains and U.S. National Parks. When I mentioned that San Bernardino also is the unhappy recepient of air pollution blown inland from Los Angeles, Thompson says, “That’s why I chose to live in Yucaipa, which is at an elevation of 3,000 feet above sea level. I get to look down on the bad air.”

Thompson says big corporate retailers such as Walgreens, Petco, Starbucks, and Target use GIS technology to make similar assessments every time they consider locating another store. “One of the reasons I came to ESRI was that I’d seen ESRI tools and technologies mature to the point of reaching the enterprise,” Thompson says. (He worked for an unnamed competitor in Europe and Australia before joining ESRI) What it comes down to, he adds, is taking “geographic thinking and applying it to the business needs that different people have.”

The ability to apply GIS technologies to business problems has improved steadily over the past decade, Thompson says. In early 2000, ESRI launched an online product intended to help business users do market analytics and … Next Page »

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At the Nantucket Conference, an invitation-only gathering of New England-area CEOs, entrepreneurs, venture partners, and select others, first-time attendees get a single blue dot on their nametags. Alumni get another dot for every year they’ve attended, and veterans of five or more conferences get a gold starfish pin.

About a third of the participants at the tenth annual conference, held April 30 to May 2 on Nantucket Island, MA, had one blue dot, including myself (I was one of a handful of journalists invited by the conference organizer, Shayne Gilbert of Future Forward Events). But strikingly—despite the obsession among attendees with the economy’s drastic downturn and its effects on entrepreneurship—several of the starfish people said afterward that it was the best, most energetic edition of the conference they’d been to. It seems that the crisis has inflamed the classic innovator’s itch to get on with business—and to invent new ones.

In past years, the proceedings of the Nantucket Conference were off the record to journalists unless a source explicitly agreed to be quoted. This year, the organizers reversed the policy, so everything was on the record, unless a speaker indicated otherwise—which only happened once the entire weekend, to my knowledge. That meant attendees were free to indulge their social media passions, blogging and tweeting freely (you can see the whole conference Twitter stream here).

It also means I’m able to bring you a few of the main themes from the conference. Though the program included panels on topics as diverse as getting venture funding, robotics, gaming, energy, and the roots of the economic crisis, a few ideas seemed to frame the mood of the conference (and perhaps of the entrepreneurial set in general these days), a mindset I’d call pragmatic optimism. Some of the main elements:

Fundraising is getting harder—especially for new companies, but even for established ones. Michael Greeley, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, pointed to estimates that only 600 new startups will win venture funding nationwide this year, down from 1,171 in 2008. VC firms have become exceedingly cautious, keeping $5 in reserve for every $1 they invest, rather than the more traditional 2-to-1 ratio, Greeley said. Jana Eggers, CEO of Leipzig, Germany-based Spreadshirt, a T-shirt customization company whose North American headquarters are in Boston, said that even though her company is cash-flow-positive, it had a very difficult time raising its most recent round of growth capital. The terms offered by potential funders were “shocking” and were “clearly based on the economy, not on our fundamentals,” Eggers said.

In areas such as robotics where New England has clear strengths, venture capital is largely absent, pointed out MIT roboticist Rod Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot who now leads stealth-mode startup Heartland Robotics. In the energy and cleantech space, according to General Catalyst‘s Hemant Tenaja, money from hedge funds and strategic investors has largely dried up, and the spigots will stay off until Congress and the Obama Administration work out energy and climate bills. And heaven help the startups that need cash quick: Each of Boston-Power‘s three funding rounds took a year to negotiate, according to CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud. “The best time to raise capital is when you don’t need it,” said Andy Palmer, co-founder of Vertica Systems, former CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a veteran of Bowstreet (acquired by IBM).

On the other hand, companies need less money—and should probably be lowering their sights anyway. John Landry, a software industry veteran who is managing director at Wayland, MA-based Lead Dog Ventures, used his pulpit as moderator of a panel on “Getting and Staying Funded” to argue that infotech startups “don’t really need a lot of money” these days thanks to technologies like … Next Page »

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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Late last fall, after discussion with some board members, I decided to apply to show some new features from Evri at DEMO 09, which we were about to start active development on. We got accepted, so now we really did have to get the stuff ready to ship. In fact, one of the great reasons to do something like appearing at DEMO is the motivation it provides to get more done, in less time, than you think you can. Well, we got our new Collections feature done, and a Firefox and IE toolbar to boot, so that part worked out! Here’s how our experience went on the ground at DEMO.

Day 1

I flew down to Palm Desert, CA, early Sunday morning to get to a mandatory noon presenters meeting. This was a good intro—the DEMO team was all there, including outgoing chief Chris Shipley, and incoming one Matt Marshall. They really did a good job making everyone feel that they would do whatever it takes to make this successful for the presenters. After that we (me, our CTO Deep Dhillon, and product manager Keith Williams) tried to do our equipment check and rehearsal. Now, understand that we hadn’t actually pushed our new code to production yet—I was waiting until closer to Monday morning, when the show opened, to deploy. We fought with our VPN and the DEMO network for a long time to try and do our walkthrough with our behind-the-firewall version. After a grueling hour-and-a-half, we finally just launched the stuff live—about 6 hours early—and had a good run-through. This is when it was particularly nice to have a kick-ass team covering us back in Seattle. (Thanks Mark, Ryan, and the rest!)

That night was a CEO dinner, with a panel discussion on public technology policy. I missed most of the discussion, but had a good conversation with James Joaquin, from Xmarks, Raman Khanna, a VC from Onset, and Michael Wheatley from Ensembli. Not yet having looked closely at the DEMO schedule, I didn’t quite realize that James, Michael, and I were presenting in the same “Smarter Internet” group on Tuesday morning, but figured that out soon enough. After more wine than food, I went back to my room to catch up on work, and make sure everything was working in preparation for our first full day at the “booth.”

Day 2

Monday was mostly spent on one thing: talking about the product, over and over. Either we were at the booth giving demos, or I was talking to press, or I was rehearsing my two minutes of our six-minute presentation scheduled for Tuesday morning. But the day went well. Deep was off pitching to a potential partner, so Keith and I handled the booth, with ace PR guy Lane Buschel helping out. Some of the first DEMO stories came out later that day. The first I saw pitted Evri vs Ensembli as competitors. I don’t see it that way, but all press is good, right?

Some good companies that day. I really want to get my hands on a Touchbook when it comes out, and Skout is funny, if nothing else. Fellow Northwest startup Ontier, from Portland, also showed well with Pixetell. The panel that ended the day—with VCs ranging from angel Eric Tilenius to First Round’s Christine Herron to August’s David Hornik—was a bit grim, but interesting. … 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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Last night’s 20th meeting of the Web Innovators Group at Cambridge’s Royal Sonesta Hotel was possibly the largest ever, spilling from the usual ballroom into the adjacent conference rooms and attracting a crowd so thick that it was difficult to see the demo tables. Perhaps the high attendance was to be expected, given the layoffs rolling through the local tech community and the fact that more entrepreneurs and software developers these days are looking for their next gigs. But what was unexpected was the spotlight role assumed by Local Motors, a Wareham, MA-based startup with dangerously disruptive ideas about automobile manufacturing.

John “Jay” Rogers—a Harvard MBA and former Marine who is the president, CEO, and co-founder of Local Motors—explained during one of the meeting’s three “main dish” presentations that the company intends to drastically reduce the time and expense that goes into developing new car models, by building a nationwide network of “micro-factories” where car buyers themselves would be involved in the design and construction of their vehicles. The Web will play a key role in the process, as the company hosts online competitions where amateur car designers from around the world can submit concept sketches and other community members can vote on their favorite designs. The company plans to purchase the licensing rights to the winning designs and make them into working prototype cars, Rogers said.

One car that won a contest on the site, the Rally Fighter, will become Local Motors’ first production vehicle; the company recently brought the car’s designer, Sangho Kim, to its Wareham facility for a week of full-immersion development work. “Where GM would spent $100 million to get this far, we’ve spent $10,000 on a website, a prize, and a plane ticket,” Rogers said.

The company, which beat out its two competitors in the traditional audience-favorite text message voting at the Web Inno meeting, says it plans to build its cars around a standard chassis and sell them for about $50,000—not exactly an affordable price, but one that may attract a certain class of buyers who want to see their car being built. Don’t ask me right now how Local Motors plans to build low-production-quantity cars efficiently, certify their safety, or provide for serviceability—but I’ll get to the bottom of it in a future story.

The other two main-dish presenters were Cambridge, MA-based Web analytics startup Crimson Hexagon (which I profiled last month and therefore won’t describe here), and Stratham, NH-based Skyward Innovations, which rolled out a free travel assistance service earlier this year called TripChill. Built to work with mobile phones, the beta-stage service is designed to supply business travelers with the real-time information they need to manage their trips while they’re en route.

The way Alex Shore, Skyward’s co-founder and CEO, explained it during an entertaining on-stage sketch, the TripChill system is at its best when travelers are coping with unexpected changes, such as a flight cancellation that leaves them stranded overnight in an unfamiliar airport. Once users have submitted their flight itineraries and hotel reservations to TripChill, the system can monitor online sources for schedule changes and send text-message updates. Say a traveler gets stuck overnight at Chicago’s O’Hare International: TripChill reasons that the user probably needs a hotel room for the night, and automatically sends … Next Page »

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