In his 2006 run for the Massachusetts governor’s office, Deval Patrick campaigned on the need to make the most of the state’s “creative economy,” meaning industries such as advertising, architecture, design, digital media, film, gaming, marketing, music, publishing, tourism, and the arts. It’s a sector that employs at least 100,000 people in the state, and that has long been one of the Boston area’s strengths. But Patrick’s point was that putting even more emphasis on these industries, through public and private investment, could help to counteract declines in other fields such as manufacturing, bring in more high-paying jobs, and maybe even make life more interesting.

Well, the recession that set in shortly after Patrick took office and the state government’s resulting financial woes have pretty much ruled out significant new public spending on creative-economy programs. There’s even a movement to roll back the state’s one major economic initiative in the arts, the costly film tax credit enacted under Governor Mitt Romney in 2005 and expanded under Patrick in 2007. But Patrick has made good on his campaign promise in other ways, notably by launching a new Creative Economy Council to identify the biggest needs in the creative sectors and appointing a full-time “creative economy industry director” within the Massachusetts Office of Business Development to work directly with companies in these sectors.

The man who fills those shoes—and, so far as Xconomy can tell, the only person in any U.S. state agency explicitly tasked with helping local creative industries—is 33-year-old Jason Schupbach. While peers at the MOBD cover areas such as life sciences and defense, Schupbach’s primary job is to help for-profit businesses in the creative sector find the resources they need to grow in the state. (The MOBD is part of the Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development; last month we published an extensive two-part interview with Greg Bialecki, who heads that office.) Schupbach is also pinch-hitting right now as acting technology industry director while that title’s usual holder, Tito Jackson, is on leave to run for an at-large seat on the Boston City Council.

Schupbach seems omnipresent in the entrepreneurship community lately. If you’ve been to recent events such as the TechStars Investor Evening on September 11, the Tech Tuesday game-industry meetup on September 15, or the MassTLC gaming panel at the UK Consulate on September 24, you’ve probably run into him or seen him speak. His oft-repeated refrain at these events is that the Patrick Administration cares about the state’s innovators, and is ready to promote their work in any way it can. One recent mark of that recognition was Patrick’s proclamation of September 9, 2009 (the day Harmonix Music released Beatles: Rock Band) as “Video Game Innovation Day”; Schupbach showed off the signed, leather-bound proclamation at several local meetups.

A 2003 graduate of MIT’s Master in City Planning program, Schupbach studied under the late J. Mark Schuster, a well-known proponent for cultural policies in urban planning. “I was really interested in how the arts and culture and creative fields fit into the design of a city,” Schupbach told me in an interview late last month. “I wanted to be a city designer, but I wasn’t very good at the design part, so I ended up writing my thesis about the trend of cities trying to bring artists into their downtowns.” He won the best thesis award—and went on to do exactly what he had written about, working for New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and then for the Ford Foundation’s Artist Link project, which promotes affordable urban housing for artists.

In our interview, snippets of which are highlighted below, I asked Schupbach to describe his more recent role at MOBD and to talk about the office’s biggest creative-economy initiatives. While the state’s revenue crunch means that his job is largely about directing businesses to existing resources, along with a good measure of cheerleading, Schupbach says a recession is actually a good time to think and plan (that’s one of the roles of the Creative Economy Council, which he coordinates). “The state budget will come back. Things are cyclical,” Schupbach says. “This is the time to plan and write law for when there is money around.”

On the state’s new focus on retaining local innovators:

We are never going to be the state that pays a zillion dollars to move Boeing here. We don’t have oil money like Louisiana. What we have is an enormous amount of talent that’s here already, and we have to figure out the best way to get them to stay here so that we’ll have the next billion-dollar company here. That’s why you see us trying to …Next Page »

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When I set out to write “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” two weeks ago, I really meant to put all seven projects into one column. But I’m famous around Xconomy for my inability to say anything briefly. If 800 words are good, then 1,600 words are even better—that’s my motto.

The point being that I only got through three projects in that first column—on art, writing, and photography—before I ran out of time and space. Last week, I finished two more, on audio self-publishing and computer animation. In today’s third and last installment, I want to suggest two final projects that will give you a chance to express yourself in digital media that may be a little less familiar: maps and 3-D virtual worlds.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial

Mapmaking hasn’t traditionally been seen as a craft open to amateurs, or even one where self-expression is encouraged. A map, after all, is a public resource, and is supposed to be objective and accurate, right? Well, maybe in theory. In practice, the digital revolution is transforming the meaning of maps just as drastically as it’s changing the way we think about music and news and other forms of communication.

Platial is a website where average users can try a new form of storytelling that combines maps, photos, and writing. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can create your own themed maps for other Platial visitors to browse. Each map consists of a set of locations that you designate on an underlying Google map; for each location, you can add a title, a written description, photos, and Web links.

One way to use Platial would be as a kind of personal photo-travelogue, uploading pictures from your trips across the country or around the world. But a lot of people seem to employ Platial to document personal interests or obsessions. For example, a user named “Barnaclebarnes” has created a map of famous film locations, like the house in suburban Tujunga, CA, where Steven Spielberg filmed E.T. And I’m working on my own Platial map showing locations around San Francisco used in one specific film, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

You can designate a map on Platial as closed—meaning it’s for your own personal doodling—or open, meaning anyone can contribute to it. One cool open map is “Where I Was When I Heard Obama Won,” where you can join the more than 15,000 people who have marked the spots where they learned of President Obama’s historic election. For people on the go, the folks at Platial have also built an iPhone app called Nearby that figures out where you are and shows you nearby Platial locations created by other users. The app also lets you create and document new locations directly from your phone.

To me, the intriguing thing about Platial is the way it melds the personal and the public—allowing users to anchor their inner visions and insights by attaching them to maps representing our shared landscape. And Platial is just one example of a worldwide explosion of Web-mediated geographical expression and exploration. The phenomenon goes by fancy names like “neogeography” and “locative media,” but it boils down to …Next Page »

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From architecture to kids’ videos to online animated ads, Ksenia Oustiougova’s path to founder of Seattle online ad company Lilipip has been unusual. To start, the company was funded not by investors, but on credit cards. The good news: after shutting down the kids’ video version of Lilipip and retooling to its current incarnation, Oustiougova is now paying down the debt.

Oustiougova said Lilipip’s change of focus in the summer of 2008—from children’s videos to online marketing ads—had a straightforward motivation. “We ran out of money. It was as simple as that,” she said. “Either reinvent or close down. And I’m not a quitter by nature.”

Now, together with more than 150 independent creative contractors around the world and a director of business development, Oustiougova makes one-minute animated videos for small businesses. Her team currently works on about four projects at once, she said, but they hope to get up to their capacity of 20 at a time eventually. Oustiougova and the director of business development are not yet salaried, taking a cut of the proceeds from each project, but Lilipip is bringing on four project managers as Lilipip’s first employees in the next six to 12 months. Now starting to pay off her credit card debt, Oustiougova has no plans to look for outside investment.

Asked why fundraising isn’t part of the plan, Oustiougova gave several reasons, among them: “The entire process takes months, and it takes away focus from sales; second, suddenly you have someone looking over your shoulder telling you what to do—we are breaking a lot of conventional rules, and I want to build a company where people don’t feel like they work, but feel like they play.” She added, “I am not interested in growing huge. I want to build an excellent business, and we won’t be necessarily big. But investors want a certain return at a certain time that might force us to do things faster…Some things just take time to get very good, like good wine—you can’t speed it up.”

Lilipip’s animations are mostly used online, Oustiougova said, on businesses’ websites, Facebook, YouTube, or other social marketing sites. She has also seen them played on TVs at trade shows, or used in presentations to clients or shareholders. Lilipip will encode the videos into any format its clients need for free. Many small businesses like having their ads available on their cell phones to share on the go, she said.

“This is really a tool to tell their story in a uniform way through all the new social media channels,” Oustiougova said.

Oustiougova’s first entrepreneurial steps came when, after leaving a career as an architect, she began making PowerPoint presentations for her son to teach him to read in English and Russian (her native language). Her friends soon started requesting custom videos for their kids, and …Next Page »

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Today Bedford, MA-based Zink unveiled the winning designs in a $25,000 contest called “Zero Boundaries,” launched to elicit creative ideas about how Zink’s inkless printing technology might be built into devices that young people and future mobile consumers could use to capture, modify, and share digital photos.

We’ve told you the story of Zink, the Bedford, MA, startup whose pocket-sized printers can make instant, 3-by-4-inch prints from any digital image without using ink. In essence, the company reimagined a thermal printing technique that was invented but never commercialized at Polaroid. In a contest announcement earlier this year, Zink (whose name stands for “Zero Ink”) asked designers and design students around the world to reimagine Zink’s own products.

The winning ideas hail from designers in the U.S., China, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Romania. They vary from an iPhone accessory to a little robot that crawls around on a giant piece of Zink paper, printing as it goes. The company has published slide shows and descriptions of the winning entries on its contest website.

Zink’s basic technology involves a thermal print head that applies precise pulses of heat to special paper impregnated with crystals that turn various colors when they melt. Contest entrants had to build their designs—whether physical models or 3-D CAD renderings—around the basic mechanical and electronic elements of the Zink printer.

“The designs were incredibly well thought-through and truly showcase the breadth and disruptive nature of the future of printing that only Zink can enable,” said CEO Wendy Caswell in today’s announcement.

In the “Youth” category, the company’s challenge to designers was to “make today’s youth crave Zink products in the context of their digital and mobile world.” The winner, Zink Mix, consists of an iPhone application that searches a user’s photo albums and social networks for pictures they might want to print, along with a fancy iPhone docking station with numerous sliders and dials for photo editing that give it the appearance of an audio mixer. Patrick Schuur, of design firm Maketropolis in the Netherlands, won a $10,000 cash prize for the design.

In the “Future” category, Zink wanted designers to reimagine printing altogether. The winning design certainly does that: called the Mini Giant, it’s a self-propelled, large-format poster printer that rolls across a piece of Zink paper the way a farm combine traverses a wheat field. A thermal head on the Mini Giant’s undercarriage exposes paper as it goes. The design came from Paula Adina Sumalan, a recently graduated design student from Romania, who also won $10,000.

The company also handed out $1,000 second prizes in each category and $500 third prizes, along with a $500 “People’s Choice” award, with the winner determined by voting at the contest website. Brazilian Arthur Ditlef’s design for a portable business card printer, called the SmartBC, won the popular vote.

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Seattle-based Rogue Sheep, a software development and consulting firm, has won an Apple Design Award for its iPhone App, Postage. The news was announced this week at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, and reported by the Seattle Times. Postage lets you create customized electronic postcards.

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Design isn’t just about deciding which shade of taupe to paint City Hall or whether to make a water bottle square or round. It can mean the difference between comprehension (think iPhone) and confusion (think butterfly ballot). A new multidisciplinary organization launched yesterday is out to promote the importance of the Bay State’s design industries, and to serve as a resource for the more than 44,500 people in Massachusetts who work in graphic design, industrial design, landscape architecture, and interior design, among other fields.

Called the Design Industry Group of Massachusetts, or DIGMA, the organization had its coming-out party at the West Newton design firm Continuum, birthplace of the Swiffer mop. Housing and Economic Development Secretary Gregory Bialecki announced at the event that DIGMA would receive a $150,000 grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s John Adams Innovation Institute. Additional funds for the group came from Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Boston Foundation, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

DIGMA’s leadership comprises CEOs, professors, and leaders of universities, including Kay Sloan, the president of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, which is a large sponsor of the organization.

“MassArt has invested in DIGMA in order to ensure the Commonwealth’s competitive advantage in the design industry is maximized to its full potential,” she said in a press release.

As one of its first initiatives, DIGMA will organize the first annual Massachusetts Design Festival—to be held from September 24 through October 24, 2009—in order to publicize examples of design around the state. The Festival encompasses several other design-related events: Boston Design Center’s Design Boston 2009, Boston Fashion Week, and National Design Week.

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Seattle entrepreneur Kelly Smith and his team at Pressplane have announced the launch of their new site, Inkd. Billed as the world’s first market for original print design, Inkd takes the basics of a user-generated community and applies it to the business print marketplace, connecting business owners with print designers. The startup raised $1.7 million in angel funding last September.

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Have you ever talked to someone who really knows technology, and really knows how to sell it? It’s a potent combination. I got that feeling from Luis Salazar, the chief marketing officer of Bellevue, WA-based GMI, an international market research firm. Salazar moonlights as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) at Voyager Capital in Seattle, where he advises Voyager’s portfolio companies and helps evaluate new investments in terms of their go-to-market and monetization strategies. (He’s Voyager’s sole EIR.)

Salazar spent 11 years at Microsoft, starting in Venezuela in 1997 and progressing to become general manager for marketing in Redmond, WA, and co-founder of Microsoft Office Live. He left in October, and has been working with Voyager since last spring. As an advisor, he specializes in the consumer side of Internet companies, and one of his guiding themes is that online market research and online advertising are one and the same. For example, as an avid photographer, Salazar says companies like Canon need to put ads in front of him—but they also need to know his product preferences so they can develop a better camera. Marketing and advertising should help each other.

But the problem is how to get the right survey to the right sample of people. That’s where technology comes into play, and that’s where Salazar thinks Web 2.0 software—everything from user-generated content to targeted ads—will have its greatest impact. In particular, he sees Web 2.0 starting to reinvent health care, online market research, and energy management.

We didn’t get into all those details yet, but I asked Salazar to pull out his top lessons in marketing and product strategy from his career. He responded with three:

1. “The product is the go-to-market.” It sounds obvious, but companies often forget the most important thing is make a good product and retain customers. A big part of that is “getting marketing more involved in product engineering,” Salazar says. “Marketing and engineering are so entwined…You need to code in such a way as to engage ad networks.” As opposed to the common view (especially among engineers) that marketing is just promotion.

2. “Design does not equal user experience.” Don’t forget that the user experience is very subjective, he says. “It’s not how it looks, it’s how it works.” Sometimes just the wording of a phrase in the click-to-buy box, or the color, or where you put something on the page, can have a big effect on sales. The key is to find out what that effect is, and build it into the design.

3. But perhaps the best advice Salazar had is what he told his 11-year-old son, whom he helped start a bookmarks business to pay for a Nintendo Wii. (His son has already learned the ropes of Google ads, print ads, radio promotion, and price points, and now donates his proceeds to United Way.) “It doesn’t matter what you do in life as long as you do what you love. The money will come.”

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Local Motors, a Wareham, MA, startup that has incorporated Web-based community collaboration into its unconventional new process for designing consumer automobiles, today announced the winner of its latest online auto design competition, which challenged community members to come up with a design fit for Boston’s narrow streets and urban lifestyles. Mihai Panaitescu, a Romanian who attends Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Turin, Italy, won Local Motors’ $2,000 first prize for the “Boston Bullet,” a three-passenger electric-powered sports car with a transparent roof.

It’s the seventh time Local Motors has run an online competition since launching its online design studio in March, and the fifth time it’s used a geographic theme (previous challenges imposed engineering requirements specific to Miami, Southern California, Hawaii, and Manhattan). Members of the Local Motors Web community chose Panaitescu’s design from more than 50 submissions through an online vote.

The competitions are the company’s way of generating designs for its nascent car manufacturing effort, which I’ve described at length in a separate post. If the company decides to build a production car based on Panaitescu’s design, he will earn an additional $10,000.

Panaitescu describes the Boston Bullet as “a vehicle for narrow city streets and quick nature escapes.” The second-place winner in Local Motors’ Boston competition was Vietnamese designer Huyng Ngoc Lan, who proposes building a 2-seat diesel called the “Combatant Concept” (shown at left). Grégory Rossi of France took third place for the P-s4h, a compact with extra cargo space.

Jay Rogers, Local Motors’ co-founder and CEO, says the company’s online design competitions—which are partly modeled on the design challenges sponsored by Threadless, a trendy Web-based T-shirt maker—have already attracted more than 1,600 participants who have submitted over 20,000 designs. “They come because there is a chance that their car will actually be made,” Rogers says. “The design studios in Detroit are blocked off from most people—you have to take a job there and then spent ten years as an apprentice just to get the chance to be the lead designer on a car.”

Local Motors has chosen one of the car designs submitted by a community member, Sangho Kim’s Rally Fighter, as the basis for its first production vehicle. The company hopes to deliver the first finished car next November.

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While capitalist systems are, in theory, open to any entrepreneur with an idea for a better mousetrap, most investors are pragmatists. They aren’t likely to pony up for a garage tinkerer with a way to build passenger jets better than Boeing’s or supercomputers better than Cray’s. The reality, in other words, is that certain high-tech industries are essentially closed to small businesses—and that includes the American automobile industry, as the litany of failed rebel carmakers, from Tucker to Delorean, attests.

So how were Jay Rogers and his nine employees at Local Motors, a tiny startup in Wareham, MA, able to raise $4 million to test the idea that car design can be crowdsourced to Web-based communities and that consumers will want $50,000 “mass-customized” vehicles built in small batches at a network of micro-factories?

It wasn’t because of Detroit’s recent travails—Local Motors collected its two investment rounds well before the Big Three started passing the hat in Washington. More likely, it was because of Rogers’ impressive resume—Princeton undergrad, investment analyst, startup entrepreneur in China, Marine company commander in Iraq, Harvard MBA—and his passionate intensity when it comes to talking about cars. And not just about car design (though he loves his classic 1971 Mercedes 280SL) but about the auto industry’s carbon footprint, and what you might call its geopolitical footprint.

“Being on the ground in Iraq showed me that the war is really about our reliance on Middle East oil,” Rogers told me after a whirlwind tour of the startup’s headquarters yesterday. (I had scheduled the visit immediately after learning about Local Motors from the company’s unusual presentation at the December 9 Web Innovators Group meeting.) “The problem of oil end-use is absolutely being missed here,” he says. “We were helping the Iraqis to rebuild their oil ministry, but thinking deeper, thinking to myself as a businessman and an entrepreneur, I would have liked to just shut this whole apparatus down. Friends of mine had been killed. Global warming was weighing heavily on my mind. I really had a moment of ‘What should I be doing with the rest of my life? What can I do to make a difference?’”

His musings took him back to his love of cars—which could well be genetic, considering that he’s the grandson of Ralph Rogers, who helped develop the United States’ first diesel passenger car and took over the famous Indian Motorycle Manufacturing Company in Springfield, MA, in 1945. (The elder Rogers went on to chair PBS and co-found the Children’s Television Workshop.) After the Marines, Jay Rogers, who’s now 35, briefly considered starting a company to build cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. “But making a bet on the science was not going to be a sure-fire way to change things,” he says. He wanted to make cars that people could actually buy, and soon.

“I looked at the supply chain and I saw that there are people who make great engines, great batteries, great lightweight materials—but the people who make cars can’t use them, because they’ve gotten stuck in their enormous apparatus.” For Ford, Chrysler, and GM (and, to be fair, for Toyota, Honda, and BMW too), bringing out a new car model is a five-to-seven-year process that can cost a billion dollars or more. Which means as much as the Big Three might want to respond to consumers’ changing tastes—their newfound disdain for trucks and SUVs, for example—they simply can’t, in any reasonable amount of time. It also means that bailout or no, any serious contribution Detroit can make to scaling back the nation’s petroleum consumption is likely half a decade away.

“I want to change how the system itself works,” Rogers says. “So I thought, maybe we’ll just make a system.”

The system Rogers and his colleagues have built so far is 50 percent Web 2.0 social community and 50 percent rapid-prototyping workshop. The first half of Rogers’ big idea is to …Next Page »

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Sometimes you just have to write the story even when you don’t know all the details yet. This is one of those times. This is the story of H-Farm, an Italian design and investment firm, coming to America.

But it’s only Part One of the story—a preview, really. That’s because it won’t be until next month that I sit down with Riccardo Donadon, the founder of H-Farm, when he visits Seattle. In the meantime, my Italian isn’t what it used to be, so I can’t just call up the company and start asking questions (OK, I never could). So in case I missed something, please do comment or let me know.

The story begins in 2005, when Donadon founded H-Farm as the first private Italian incubator of startups. Before that, he was an Internet entrepreneur, having created the online shopping site Mall Italy Lab (sold to Infostrada in 1999) and E-Tree (sold to Etnoteam Group in 2001). He started H-Farm in the scenic countryside of Cà Tron, near Venice and his hometown of Treviso. The company’s second principal, Maurizio Rossi, joined as an investor. Rossi came from the fashion and design industry, having worked for LVMH and sports-brand marketing firm Vista Point.

It’s an intriguing combination of design and technology expertise—and it shows in the eight or so companies that have been incubated by H-Farm so far. The group includes H-art, an interactive media company that does design for high-end brands like Gucci and Armani, and Zooppa, a user-generated advertising firm. H-Farm’s portfolio also has startups in mobile, graphics, consumer Internet, and retail—including social-shopping site Wishpot, based in Seattle and profiled here last week.

Which brings us to an even bigger Seattle connection. It turns out H-Farm isn’t just an incubator. “Using design thinking,” the company’s website says, “H-Farm is going to develop a worldwide interconnected network of innovative technology and new media start-ups.” In other words, besides spinning off companies, H-Farm seems to want to help its U.S. startups gain a foothold in the European market, while also introducing its broader portfolio to U.S. customers—and that requires setting up an office here.

Last month, H-Farm started renting office space near Seattle’s Pioneer Square—sharing it with Wishpot and another startup in stealth mode. It is H-Farm’s only office in the U.S., and the company plans to make it the major center of operations outside of Italy. H-Farm’s website says, “This operation will endow it with the possibility of significant growth on the other side of the Atlantic as well as the chance to increase its projects and activities.” Why Seattle? Max Ciccotosto, Wishpot’s co-founder, says, “They’d looked in the Bay Area, but they really got feedback that Seattle was the right market for them.”

To me, the West Coast makes sense for H-Farm’s expertise, and I suspect the choice of Seattle boiled down to personal and business relationships in the area. Ciccotosto, a native of Italy, says he originally met H-Farm last year through one of his investors, Rob Monster of Monster Venture Partners. “Rob said, ‘There’s a guy [from H-Farm] coming from Venice, can you meet him?’” It turned out Ciccotosto was going to a fashion-industry party hosted by Nordstrom’s that night, so he relayed the message to the H-Farm visitor, a senior employee named Marco Janeczek (who was born in Poland but raised in Italy). Evidently, the cocktails and fashion models were a hit—and pretty soon Ciccotosto was on his way to securing a Series A investment from H-Farm. The Italian firm has also gained several advisors around town, so it’s a well-connected operation.

I’ll be getting the scoop on H-Farm’s local strategy from Donadon soon. In the meantime, it doesn’t look like the firm is soliciting wide-ranging funding proposals from early-stage startups, à la incubators like Founder’s Co-op or Y Combinator, which we’ve been covering at Xconomy. So its role in the local innovation community is less clear at this point, but its outside perspective could be valuable. “These guys come with heavy global expertise,” says Ciccotosto.

H-Farm is accepting proposals through the end of September in a very specific area: new applications for the Apple iPhone. The company says it has received more than 100 proposals so far, and will invest $250,000 in the winner(s). It also says it will make a new call for proposals in October, in an area yet to be announced, so stay tuned.

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Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE), the Woburn, MA-based maker of electronic fonts and text imaging software that went public last summer, announced last night that it’s planning a secondary public offering of 5 million shares of its common stock at $12.00 per share. The 170-employee company, the creator of famous fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial, competes with San Jose, CA-based Adobe Systems and Cambridge, MA-based Bitstream in the market for digital typefaces and software for text rendering on computers.

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If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a box spring up a stairway or down a narrow hall into your bedroom, then you can imagine how comically awkward and expensive it would be to ship one via UPS or FedEx. Which explains why box springs (otherwise known as mattress foundations) aren’t exactly big sellers on e-commerce websites. But what if there were a way to make a box spring that collapsed to a manageable size for shipping, then unfolded to its full dimensions in the customer’s home? Then the lowly box spring might finally be able to join the Internet revolution.

That was the idea that struck engineers at Leggett & Platt a couple of years ago. While the Carthage, MO-based manufacturer isn’t a household name, almost every mattress sold contains some L&P components; indeed, co-founder J.P. Leggett invented the spiral steel coil bedspring in 1883. Despite the company’s history of bedding innovation, however, the L&P engineers weren’t quite sure how to squeeze a fully upholstered box spring into a box small enough to put on a UPS truck.

Fortunately, Leggett & Platt owned a piece of software called Goldfire Innovator, made by Boston-based Invention Machine. Imagine that you’re a product developer who likes to make notes and draw diagrams on a whiteboard— but that whiteboard is attached to software that understands the intention behind your drawings, labels, and notes; searches the Web and global patent databases for designs that employ similar concepts; automatically serves up references to related literature; and even makes suggestions about how to improve your sketches. That’s roughly what Goldfire Innovator does.

According to Vincent Lyons, vice president of engineering and technology at Leggett & Platt, the company’s mattress designers had Goldfire Innovator at their sides as they pored over the mechanical, ergonomic, and materials-science problems associated with building a collapsible box spring. Because the team could use the software to quickly search internal company databases and external patent literature for related ideas—including concepts already patented by other companies that the engineers would need to work around—”we were able to speed up the development of the product by at least a third,” as Lyons told one podcast interviewer. The result: the Leggett & Plat Semi-Fold Box Spring, a mechanical marvel that hit the market in 2007 and folds up into a rectangular shape with one-quarter the volume of a traditional mattress foundation.

I’m not the type to get excited about mattresses, but I was so curious to see how the Semi-Fold works that when I saw the Leggett & Platt box during a recent visit to Invention Machine’s 38th-floor offices at the Prudential Center I made the staff take the assembly out of the box and unfold it so I could take a couple of pictures. Seeing how elegantly the device opened up and snapped into its solid, unfolded shape made it easier to understand why Goldfire Innovator, after only three years on the market, has found its way into more than 500 of the Forbes Global 2000 manufacturing companies.

“We bring ideas to reality,” says Invention Machine CEO Mark Atkins. (If that sounds like an echo of General Electric’s old tag line, “We bring good things to life,” it might not be a total accident. GE was one of Invention Machine’s earliest customers, and the “o” in the company’s logo is shaped like a light bulb.) The company’s history stretches back to 1992, when it was founded by Valery Tsourikov, an engineer in Belarus. His own big idea was to embody in software the so-called “value analysis” principle at the core of Soviet scientist Genrich Altshuller’s Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (more commonly known by its Russian acronym, TRIZ). Roughly speaking, TRIZ advises engineers to assign a value or importance to each component of a problem, then prioritize their research according to those values. And Goldfire Innovator provides an easy format for doing so.

But Tsourikov also wanted to speed that research by giving engineers a way to search the Internet and other knowledge bases according to various types of physical or conceptual relationships, not just keywords. To a traditional search engine, there isn’t much difference between “a pump moving water” and “moving a water pump,” because, for the most part, they look at individual words or strings of words, with no attention to the concepts they embody. But obviously, the two phrases have completely different meanings—and Tsourikov’s inspiration was to …Next Page »

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Marlborough, MA-based Proficiency, which makes software that allows product designers to transfer product models between various types of computer-aided design programs, said today that it has raised $4.25 million in new venture funding. Catalyst Investments of Israel led the round, joined by Carmel Ventures and Pitango Venture Capital. Catalyst said its network of connections in the aerospace and automotive industries would help Proficiency expand its reach to new users.

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New England’s Web design and advertising community—a much larger and rowdier crowd than I had realized—piled into the grand ballroom at Boston’s Marriott Copley hotel last night for the MITX Awards, an annual ceremony recognizing the coolest examples of online design, marketing, and media.

The high-tech event, sponsored by the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, came complete with a comedian MC (Jeff Caldwell), giant multimedia screens, and even a rock band. As the winners were announced, the companies’ names showed up on the monitors in the form of tattoos on the arms and backs of videotaped actors, and, rounding out the rock-and-roll theme, the evening’s program was designed to look like Rolling Stone magazine. It was about the closest you can get to being at the Emmys or the Oscars without leaving Boston.

Nominated agencies and companies competed for awards in 28 categories, from biotechnology to real estate, healthcare, government, travel, and “best use of social media.” In this last category, the winner was OTOi, a part of One to One Interactive, a digital marketing agency in Charlestown. The company won for its project with Comcast to build Comcastic Island, a virtual amusement part inside Second Life featuring jet-ski and rocket-backpack races. The island is apparently part of Comcast’s effort to raise awareness of its home broadband cable Internet service.

OTOi also won in the biotechnology/pharmaceuticals category for its website Start the Talk, an informational “direct to consumer” site about genital herpes. The site is sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, which markets a genital herpes drug called Valtrex.

On the less serious side, another of the evening’s winners was Wenham, MA, advertising firm Mullen, for its amusing website on the Stanley Fubar, a truly nasty-looking demolition tool with enough claws, edges, and striker faces to be a prop in a Mad Max movie. At the website, visitors can direct a macho demolition crew to “Break Stuff” including a toilet, a sink, a piano, an armoire, and a bunny rabbit. (Actually, if you click on the bunny rabbit, the crew demurs and calls you a “sicko.”) The Fubar site (and yes, it stands for what you think it does) was also the evening’s winner in the category of Best User Experience. Go figure.

Canton, MA-based Reebok was also one of the evening’s big winners. At least five agencies were nominated in various categories for their contributions Reebok’s big “Run Easy” campaign, and Carat Interactive won in the Best Integrated Campaign category for creating the Reebok Custom website.

ADDENDUM 11/14/07: MITX has posted photos and videos of the award ceremony as well as a complete list of the winners, with links to the winning sites.

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