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

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

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

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

Werner Vogels

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

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

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

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

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

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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A dark day in Boston is a little darker now. Jerome Rubin, the publishing executive and inventor who co-founded the display company E Ink and helped commercialize the online database that became LexisNexis, died from a stroke on Monday in New York City, according to a report by the Associated Press. He was 86.

Rubin worked at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s, where he helped spin out Massachusetts-based E Ink, the electronic-paper company that makes the display in the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Before that, Rubin, a Harvard University alum trained in physics and law, helped launch an Ohio-based research database for lawyers in 1973. The database search and retrieval system eventually became LexisNexis, specializing in news, legal, and public records information. Harvard Magazine wrote about some of Rubin’s achievements back in 2000.

Rubin lived in Manhattan and is survived by his children, Richard Rubin and Alicia Yamin, according to the AP report.

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

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

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

Frank Artale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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I didn’t know the full extent to which the Boston area has a thriving data and analytics startup scene.

I had always associated the city primarily with biotech innovation. My company, Chart.io, provides hosted business dashboards to help companies visualize their database data. We’re based out in San Francisco (we were part of the 2010 Y Combinator class), but our investors, Avalon Ventures, call Boston home. When my friends at Avalon-backed Kinvey (mobile backends as a service) and Boston-based SessionM (a platform to spark deeper consumer engagement with mobile content and ads) and I decided to co-host a data visualization and analytics meetup for the local community, we expected to get 20-30 RSVPs at most. Instead, we broke 100 in a flash and saw a steady torrent of emails from data enthusiasts pleading for admission.

In fact, a deeper look into the Boston tech scene reveals quite a rich history of data and analytics companies, including Netezza, Endeca, ITA, EMC, and other giants. And it turns out, the startup scene is equally rich, with companies innovating around NoSQL, data storage, search, healthcare, and a variety of cloud computing ventures. Here’s a quick tour of the Boston- data landscape. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

As data volumes have exploded in the past decade, so have the number of companies building tools to store, retrieve, analyze, and generally manage the deluge of data.

Two Boston-area companies, Cloudant and Basho, are tackling the big data problem through non-relational databases (NoSQL), designed to handle hundreds of gigabytes and even terabytes of data and enable applications to elastically scale out to meet the demands of millions (or hundreds of millions) of concurrent users. In this vein, Cloudant offers tools to help companies use Apache CouchDB, while Basho developed its own data store called Riak.

Meanwhile, other local firms are focusing on the next generation … Next Page »

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[Updated 12:20pm. See below] A buzz-worthy New England tech startup is relocating from Connecticut to the Boston area after raising a sizable venture capital round, Xconomy has learned.

New Haven, CT-based Hadapt has closed a Series A financing round, according to two sources with knowledge of the company. One source puts the round at $8 million. The other source says that, as part of the deal, the company will move to the Boston area (probably Cambridge)—which it may have wanted to do anyway. I don’t know who the investors are yet, but I’m betting at least one Boston venture firm is involved (and I have my guesses). Hadapt is planning to release the information soon, but declined to speak with Xconomy about any details yet.

[Updated] A new report in GigaOm says the round is $9.5 million—but that might include earlier seed money (see below). The lead investors are Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, according to the report.

Hadapt (pronounced “huh-DAPT”) spun out of Yale University in 2010. It specializes in combining advanced databases with an open source data-analysis platform called Hadoop. The goal is to allow business customers to analyze huge amounts of data, both structured (like spreadsheets) and unstructured (like free text), in a very fast and efficient way. (Hadapt’s name is a play on Hadoop and the startup’s “adaptive analytical platform.”)

The company is led by CEO and co-founder Justin Borgman, a Yale MBA who did his undergraduate work at UMass Amherst and started his career in the Boston area as a software developer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Raytheon. Borgman told me back in March that Hadapt had raised an initial funding round, mostly from angel investors. The company had seven full-time employees back in the spring, but that is bound to increase significantly now.

The move to Boston makes a lot of sense, as Hadapt wants to position itself as a business-intelligence and analytics company among some big players in “big data” and data warehousing like Netezza/IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Vertica/HP, all of which have roots or significant operations in Massachusetts. In the short term, there is plenty of talent and customers to be found here that will help Hadapt build what could be a very solid business.

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Big news out of Boston and the Bay Area today. Oracle, the Silicon Valley database and business software giant, said it has agreed to acquire Endeca Technologies, the Cambridge, MA-based enterprise search and e-commerce tech company. Terms have not been announced, but the deal is expected to close before the end of the year.

Endeca started in 1999, led by Steve Papa and Peter Bell, and has been an icon of the Boston-area tech scene for the past decade. Its investors have included Bessemer Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, Ampersand Ventures, Intel Capital, DN Capital, and SAP Ventures. As of early last year, the company had raised about $75 million in venture capital. No word yet on any restructuring or employee moves.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Endeca would get scooped up by a West Coast giant, given that many Silicon Valley firms have been interested in the company for years. But it’s yet another Boston-built tech company that’s giving up local control (see ATG, Novell, ITA, Quattro, Where, Vertica…), if not heading West outright.

Redwood Shores, CA-based Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), for its part, says that together with Endeca it plans to “create a comprehensive technology platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together enabling businesses to make stronger and more profitable decisions.” The press release singles out Endeca’s InFront Web commerce and Latitude software products as being especially important to integrate with Oracle’s existing packages.

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Database designers are the secret wizards of the Web revolution, and they’ve been busy writing new spells. Deep inside the castle at each of today’s leading Web companies there’s at least one custom “NoSQL” database keeping things running: Google has Big Table, Amazon has Dynamo, Facebook built Cassandra, and LinkedIn has Project Voldemort. Seriously.

In fact, the Harry Potter allusion is apropos: just as Harry’s wizarding world was riven by conflict, there’s a revolution underway in database architecture. For decades, the relational database systems developed by stalwarts like IBM served as the foundation of business computing, but today they’re being displaced by non-relational databases, like Big Table and Dynamo, which are better suited for large-scale computations of the sort that big consumer-facing Web services carry out all day.

We’ve seen a movie like this before. In the 1990s and early 2000s Linux hackers created an operating system to rival Windows and other established players, eventually claiming enough of the corporate computing market to turn Linux support startup Red Hat into a juggernaut with $1 billion in annual revenues. Today several of the companies building NoSQL databases—including New York- and Redwood Shores, CA-based 10gen, Mountain View, CA-based Couchbase, Burlingame, CA-based DataStax, and Menlo Park, CA-based Neo Technology—see the chance to steal some of the $20 billion corporate database market away from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

Meanwhile, venture backers are jumping into the sector with gusto. Couchbase raised $14 million in August, and this month Data Stax and Neo received $11 million apiece. On September 12, 10gen, which had previously raised about $11 million from Flybridge Capital and Union Square Ventures, announced that it had obtained $20 million more in a round led by Sequoia Capital.

Dwight Merriman

This is clearly a company to watch—so I was pleased to host Dwight Merriman, 10gen’s co-founder and CEO, and Erik Frieberg, its new vice president of marketing and alliances, here at Xconomy San Francisco when they were in town a few weeks ago.

At the moment, the NoSQL market is still small—fewer than 1,000 companies subscribe to support and monitoring services for MongoDB, the free, open-source database that 10gen created and shepherds. But MongoDB itself is downloaded 100,000 times a month, and it’s already used inside Craigslist, Disney, Foursquare, IGN, Intuit, MTV, Shutterfly, and thousands of smaller organizations. (Merriman says 10gen doesn’t have an exact count of MongoDB users, since they don’t have to give their names to download the software: “We only know a fraction of them, which is normal in open source.”)

“There is an opportunity for somebody to create the Red Hat of databases in this space,” Merriman says. The NoSQL market, he says, “will be 100 times bigger than it is today.”

Merriman has an illustrious history as a serial tech entrepreneur. He’s best known as co-founder and chief technology officer at DoubleClick, the New York-based Web banner advertising company acquired by Google in 2007 for $3.1 billion. With business partner Kevin Ryan, who was CEO at DoubleClick, Merriman started AlleyCorp, a network of Silicon Alley companies that … Next Page »

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In Baltimore, a “hopper” is a young, street-level drug dealer (as devotees of The Wire can tell you). In Montreal, Hopper is a young travel search company. In Boston, well, we’ll see what happens in Boston.

Hopper is announcing today an $8 million financing round led by Atlas Venture, with previous investor Brightspark Ventures also participating. The company started in Montreal in 2007 but says it is moving its headquarters to Cambridge, MA, soon. The reason?

“We’re making a big bet on the talent pool,” says co-founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde. The company is currently scouting office spaces around Kendall Square and Central Square, and is looking to hire about 15 people, mostly engineers, he says. With a local ecosystem that includes online travel companies such as Kayak, TripAdvisor, Goby, and Google/ITA Software, and “big data” firms like IBM/Netezza, HP/Vertica, and EMC, (my examples, not his), Lalonde hopes to find a “particular kind of programming geek” well-suited for Hopper’s technology challenges.

The idea behind Hopper is to take natural language travel-search queries—things like “best beaches in Spain” or “scuba diving in the Caribbean”—and return a list of places, as well as flight and hotel options for each place, ranked according to measures of quality, convenience, and cost. It’s a more open-ended, “discovery” type of search than what has become standard on itinerary comparison sites like Kayak, Bing Travel, Orbitz, and newer sites like Hipmunk, InsideTrip, WaySavvy, and Yapta.

In other words, if you’re looking for a flight from A to B (and a hotel to stay in), there are plenty of other sites to help you do that. “Travel is a complex discovery process,” says Lalonde. “We’re working on the depth, quality, and intelligence of the search.”

He certainly knows the sector. Lalonde and co-founder Joost Ouwerkerk came from travel firm Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), which bought Lalonde’s previous company, Newtrade Technologies, in 2002. Together with co-founder Sebastien Rainville, the Hopper team plans to move to Boston, but they aren’t saying exactly when yet. They will also keep some operations in Montreal—notably the technical infrastructure and servers that crunch the firm’s travel data—because it’s much cheaper to do it there, Lalonde says.

Here’s a little more about how Hopper works. Say you type in “scuba diving Caribbean.” The site will access a “giant statistical grid of user information” that takes into account all mentions of relevant scuba spots—from articles, blogs, forums, reviews, social media, and so forth—and returns a list that’s ranked according to those mentions, but also things like distance, flight costs, and time of year, Lalonde says. The goal is to do all of that in less than a second, he says.

The whole approach requires some serious computing power. Hopper’s database includes … Next Page »

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Campbell, CA-based ParAccel said today that it has raised an undisclosed amount of new financing from Amazon and existing investors Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bay Partners, Walden International, Tao Venture Capital Partners, and Silicon Valley Bank. While ParAccel has shifted its headquarters to the Bay Area, the company still operates in San Diego, making a high-performance database system used by financial and government customers. It has raised $73 million all told, according to a report today in Dow Jones VentureWire.

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Slackers hate it. Go-getters love it. And store owners and managers? Well, so far they seem to be buying it. I’m talking about Objective Logistics, a New Bedford, MA-based software startup that’s looking to transform work environments, starting with restaurants and retail stores.

“It’s polarizing as hell,” says CEO and co-founder Phil Beauregard.

If you believe controversial companies are good, you’ve come to the right place. Objective Logistics has created a Facebook-like interface that accesses the point-of-sale database of a given store, ranks the performance of waiters and salespeople compared to their peers, and rewards high achievers with perks like getting to choose their own work schedules. In certain establishments, that can mean an extra $1,000 in tips for working a busy Saturday instead of a slow weekday, for instance.

“We’re kind of ‘gamifying’ the labor market,” Beauregard says. “The real vision is, if I can rank productivity through technology, I can reward you and compel you to perform better.” He adds that his company is about “objective transparency through technology.”

And despite its clunky name, Objective Logistics has been attracting lots of buzz among venture capitalists—and customers—this year. The five-person company’s software was first deployed last month at Not Your Average Joe’s (it’s slated to go live in 15 of those restaurants), with several other local stores and major chains also at various stages of adoption. Objective Logistics has raised $750,000 in seed-stage funding from angel investors including Richard Darer, Greg Pesik, Serguei Netessine, Nigel Machin, and other Boston-area investors. The company might look to close a VC round in the next few months, Beauregard says.

Beauregard, who turns 30 next week, is a former investment banker who started Objective Logistics in early 2009. His partners in crime include co-founder Matt Grace, who was reputed to be the youngest product management director in Oracle’s history, and engineering vice president Dan Velcea, a 3Com and Credit Suisse veteran and a Romanian native who, in 1986, dropped his army-duty AK-47 … Next Page »

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San Francisco-based MongoLab, a spinoff of ObjectLabs, has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group, according to an announcement yesterday from Foundry. MongoLab offers hosting and support for companies using the MongoDB database system developed by New York- and Redwood Shores, CA-based 10gen. Baseline Ventures, GRP Partners, Freestyle Capital, and Bullet Time Ventures also participated in the round.

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All my peers in tech seem to be talking about wireless these days. So this past Friday, I stepped outside my world of the data biz to attend the MassTLC tech event on “The Global Impact of Mobility” at the Kendall Square Marriott next to MIT. The event included panelists from industry (Groupon, BT, Cisco, Thomson Reuters, Akamai, Jumptap, Where, and others), venture capital (Highland Capital, Castile Ventures), and academia (MIT, Fletcher School at Tufts University).

The news was good for Boston—we’ve got 400 companies and 30,000 jobs in the wireless sector, the vast majority of which is local. Once we were done with the self-congratulatory navel gazing, we got down to business to review the mobile landscape. My top three takeaways were surprising.


1. Wireless Safari



Despite all the great work on mobile done in the U.S. and in Europe, the adoption of new wireless technology in emerging markets can be the most rapid. Nicholas Sullivan of the Tufts Fletcher School noted that 70 percent of adults in Kenya use a mobile payments solution such as M-PESA and stated that 20 percent of the country’s GDP is moved by mobile daily. This technology has proved to be a vastly more efficient, reliable, and safe way to pay for services and do banking in a country that only has 1,500 ATMs total. To me, this is reminiscent of emerging markets skipping landlines and going straight to wireless—it’s a lot cheaper and more efficient than building a traditional infrastructure.


2. Ma Bell, Ma Bank



As a corollary to the above on new technology adoption, the leading providers of these services are not who you think. It’s not Bank of America or Deutsche Bank rolling out mobile payments—it’s Vodaphone, one of Europe’s largest telephone providers. Maybe there is hope yet for Verizon and AT&T, who missed the boat on Skype to Microsoft. In fact, I can just see the advertisements now in the US—why sign up for a triple play bundle (voice, data, TV) with your telco provider when you can have a “quadruple play” and do your banking too.



3. SoMoLo



SoMoLo is the latest buzzword—social, mobile, and local. It’s the new trifecta. “Hyperlocal, hypertargeted ads are a key to monetizing mobile experience,” noted Tom Erskine, a director of the communications and media industry at Pegasystems and a panelist on Media Convergence. It’s why Michael Shim, the VP of global partnerships at Groupon, who was on the panel on Making Money in Mobile, is rolling out Groupon Now!. Steve Whittaker of BT noted that with all this data, there is now a compelling use for the cloud for wireless. This would include collecting info in a city and then using the cloud to process info at an aggregate level of activities and trends. (Hmmmm…the cloud and lots of data. Now I can justify this expense report back at my database company!)

So lots of disruption and lots of good opportunities abound. What are the possible pitfalls? Several folks pointed to concerns about privacy—not surprising given the recent headlines about location data and smartphones. Also, with all this power and thousands upon thousands of apps, getting to what you need has to be more efficient with more intelligence built into your phone. Just imagine if your phone had the right apps on your screen ready to launch depending on where you were or what you were doing. This should be feasible. According to Professor Iqbal Quadir of MIT, the typical smartphone these days has more processing power than the Apollo computers that got us to the moon. Personally, I just hope my smartphone doesn’t get too smart, especially if I ever need to run the “open pod bay door” app I was thinking of installing.

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Marketfish, a Seattle startup that provides email marketing services for businesses, has raised another $4.5 million in venture capital from Javelin Ventures and Rustic Canyon, according to GeekWire. Marketfish’s product gives marketing clients the ability to dial up specific criteria for the people on its email blasts—targeting by profession, size of family, income, and location, for example. The company says there are “200 million records in the Marketfish platform database, and 250 different ways to filter them.” Marketfish is led by founder and CEO Dave Scott, who has worked in marketing for Intermec, PeopleSoft, and others.

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Citrusleaf, a Mountain View, CA, company offering “NoSQL” database software intended for high-performance, data-intensive Web and mobile applications, came out of stealth mode today and said that it has collected $2 million in Series A venture funding from Alsop Louie Partners, Kalpathi Investments and Draper Associates. The money will be used “to enhance products, expand the team, and support growing vertical market customers in the advertising, financial, government and healthcare sectors,” the company said in a statement. The company’s founders are Brian Bulkowski, a veteran of Aggregate Knowledge, Liberate, and Novell, and Srini Srinivasan, formerly of Verdisoft, Yahoo, and Liberate. The company says its Citrusleaf 2.0 software “elegantly solves a problem that challenges today’s most data intensive, mission-critical businesses: how to optimally store and access schema free data with absolute accuracy, linear scalability, high throughput, and extreme reliability.”

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San Francisco-based Clever Machine, the developer of a production management tool for film and video producers called Scenechronize, has raised $3.25 million in a round of equity-based financing that could eventually total as much as $6 million, according to a regulatory filing. The company is led by former Switchhouse chief technology officer Hunter Hancock and veteran software product manager Darren Ehlers. According to the company’s website, Scenechronize is the first application built on Clever Machine’s “post-relational database information management platform.” Investors in the round have not been identified, but Climan Sanford, the managing director of Los Angeles-based Entertainment Media Ventures, is listed as a director.

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Big data, schmig data. I know, you’re sick of it. Too bad.

Let’s get right to the trash talk, shall we? A few weeks ago, Netezza CEO Jim Baum (who’s now part of IBM) was telling me about the competitive landscape in “big data” analytics—the software and machinery that businesses are using these days to analyze increasingly huge amounts of data on customers, sales, logistics, and so forth.

While touting Netezza’s products, Baum dished on the shortcomings of other players in the sector like EMC/Greenplum, Oracle, and especially Hewlett-Packard, which acquired Billerica, MA-based Vertica in the data analytics arena last month. Baum pointed out some of HP’s recent struggles in data warehousing and business intelligence. He said the company has suffered “a tremendous brain drain” and that its “talent pool is gone.” He concluded that “HP has completely missed the boat” on big data analytics.

Vertica, whose acquisition by Palo Alto, CA-based HP (NYSE: HPQ) officially closed last week, would beg to differ. Chris Lynch, Vertica’s chief executive, started out by giving me a quip of his own about Netezza. “Their tag line is ‘The power to question everything,’” Lynch says. “So the first question is: why do they need proprietary hardware? The second question is: why are they using a database engine that’s based on technology from 1982?”

Netezza would probably dispute those assertions, but let’s hear Lynch out. In comparison to Vertica’s software-only “next generation architecture,” Lynch says, Netezza’s technology is “like taking an AMC Pacer and putting a turbocharger in it.” He also says Netezza faces “challenges architecturally” and, in its integration with IBM, will have to navigate the “politics of five competing databases” at Big Blue.

Lynch (see left) also defended his own house, pointing out (in response to Baum’s remark about HP’s talent) that Vertica hasn’t lost a single engineer during his year-long tenure or as a result of the acquisition. In that regard, he says, HP’s talent pool is quite strong, thank you very much. What’s more, Vertica is currently hiring top talent across sales, engineering, and product management, he says, and is looking to more than double the size of its Boston-area headquarters to more than 200 workers sometime later this year.

It also sounds like HP is letting Vertica run pretty autonomously, as its own … Next Page »

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There were a number of tech developments this week that I didn’t get a chance to digest yet. That’s in part because I couldn’t eat solid food for, like, two days. Let’s just move on.

—As one incubator class (Y Combinator) wrapped up its session on the West Coast, another one got started here on the East Coast. TechStars Boston announced its 12 teams (selected from 600+ applicants) that will work for the next three months on becoming real businesses with real investor interest. Their names and focus may change, but for now they are EverTrue, Ginger.io, GrabCAD, HelpScout, Kinvey, Memrise, Promoboxx, Senexx/SircleIt, Scout EP, Student Spill, The Tap Lab, and one undisclosed real-estate startup. (Scott Kirsner from the Boston Globe got the pre-briefing here.)

—It was a big week for “big data.” One database company I didn’t get a chance to report on is Tokutek, a Lexington, MA-based firm that announced version 5.0 of its software that makes databases faster and more efficient to query. Tokutek focuses on high-volume online applications in areas like click-stream analysis and advertising. (Travel meta-search firm Kayak is a customer.) Lawrence Schwartz, an MIT and E-Ink alum who works at Tokutek, wrote a blog post with some key observations from a big data event in New York this week.

—Continuing on the data-driven theme, Exoprise Systems of Waltham, MA, busted out its debut product with the dreaded “cloud” prefix (CloudReady). But seriously, Exoprise makes analytics software that helps businesses move applications like e-mail from local servers to the Internet cloud. The startup was founded in 2009 and has raised $1 million from Fairhaven Capital and angel investors.

—Jumptap, the Cambridge, MA-based mobile advertising company, announced partnerships with five “rich media” providers: Celtra, Phluant Mobile, PointRoll, Crisp Media, and Medialets. Financial terms weren’t given, but the moves should allow Jumptap to cash in on advertisers’ desire to reach consumers through more engaging video and interactive ads on mobile devices. Jumptap also said it has been granted its 13th U.S. patent (#7,912,458) in 22 months.

—Global law firm Latham & Watkins announced it has opened a new office in Boston (John Hancock Tower) and has added six new partners and one counsel locally. The new staff are John Chory, Peter Handrinos, Susan Mazur, Phil Rossetti, Hans Brigham, Alex Temel, and Julie Scallen. Besides providing a solid footprint in New England, the move appears to strengthen the firm’s overall expertise in advising emerging companies, strategic buyers, and financial institutions working in technology, cleantech, and life sciences.

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If you don’t know Hadoop from a hole in the wall, please meet Justin Borgman. He’ll break it all down for you.

Borgman is the co-founder and CEO of Hadapt, a New Haven, CT-based startup that is coming out of stealth today at GigaOm’s Structure Big Data conference in New York City. Hadapt calls its product “the adaptive analytical platform for big data,” but trust me, it isn’t that boring.

The company is trying to merge the best features of advanced databases with a software platform called Hadoop to enable business customers to analyze enormous amounts of data, both structured (e.g., spreadsheets) and unstructured (e.g., free text), in a super-fast and efficient way.

OK, first things first. Hadoop is an open-source version of a software platform originally built by Google to store and analyze data generated from search indexes. But Hadoop is primarily used for unstructured data, and mostly by technical geeks. So, what Hadapt is trying to do is broaden the market for Hadoop by opening it up to all types of data and queries, by linking it to what’s called a relational database (which handles structured data).

“We’ve built a true hybrid,” says Borgman, a Yale MBA with Boston-area engineering roots. “You can have both structured and unstructured data in one platform, and do analytics across both.”

If you’re wondering how it’s different from the dozens of other companies trying to harness Hadoop, or otherwise help companies crunch huge amounts of data faster, well, it gets a bit … Next Page »

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