My pat answer is mathematics (the universal language), biology (in order to master non-linear, dynamic thinking especially related to complex systems and ecosystemic issues) and Chinese (since in 10 years Chinese will be even more important than it is today in both the commercial and scientific domains).

But let’s peek around the corner. Both design and the arts are going to become increasingly important. Why? First we must crack the problems of our lives being flooded by junk. We need to better understand the design ethos of ‘elegant minimalism’ and then we need to master the art of the sketch where hand and mind merge to expand our imagination. Imagination will soon count more than creativity, if it doesn’t already, because there is no deep reason to be creative if we can’t first imagine new worlds to create or enact.

But in addition, as complexity increases, our ability to communicate the complex in simple, authentic terms will become increasingly important in order to mobilize collective action. The ability to create sketches or other forms of visualization that evoke understanding and help coordinate action will be priceless.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Regular visitors to Xconomy.com may have noticed that we did some redecorating over the weekend. Our new look and feel, courtesy of the crazy talented Rob Hunter of True Italic in New York, is the first in a series of changes we’ll be making over the next few months—all aimed at making it easier and more enjoyable for you to read our stories, learn about our events, and soak up the wisdom of the Xconomists.

I know it’s de rigueur for these sorts of posts to step you through each change we’ve made and the rationale behind it, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned about our readers in four and a half years, it’s that you guys are exceptionally savvy consumers of online media. Given that, we’d love to get your reactions to the new design—and your suggestions for the next round of changes—unbiased by our own opinions. (Not that you couldn’t guess that we think it’s awfully purdy.) So please send us any comments or questions at editors@xconomy.com.

We look forward to hearing from you. In the meantime, let me give a big thanks to Rob, and to our CTO Emeritus Andrew Koyfman, who as per usual convinced WordPress to do things it really didn’t want to do. And stay tuned, because there’s more to come…

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

If you had to boil down Autodesk‘s business to a few simple words, it might be “helping people create new realities”—whether that means constructing new objects or structures first envisioned on the company’s computer-aided design (CAD) programs or generating new Avatar-like movie worlds using its modeling and animation software. But increasingly, the first step in the process of modeling a new product or environment is capturing an existing reality, then building on it. And a new cloud service hatched by Autodesk Labs, the company’s San Rafael, CA-based experimental design group, helps professionals and amateurs alike do exactly that, by synthesizing eerily accurate 3D computer models of almost any object or space from a few dozen conventional photographs.

Released in early November as an official Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK) beta product, the service is called 123D Catch, reflecting its place in a growing family of amateur-accessible design tools under the 123D brand. It uses a technique called photogrammetry to identify common features in a series of photos snapped from multiple angles. From those reference points, Autodesk’s servers can recreate the scene as a 3D mesh, like the model of my head shown below. The 3D models can then be modified using simple CAD programs like 123D, or even printed out and reassembled as real world sculptures using yet another Autodesk program, 123D Make.

It’s pretty amazing stuff for anyone who has a bit of maker in them. Until recently, building detailed photogrammetric models of everyday objects wasn’t possible without a battery of expensive laser scanners. But 123D Catch is just part of Autodesk’s larger plan to reach beyond its traditional audience of professional architects and designers with tools that can help advanced amateurs create, explore, and build their own 3D objects. And it’s a first step toward a future world where small-scale custom design and manufacturing may be widespread—and where Autodesk hopes to stake a big claim.

The “things industry” is gradually going the way of Netflix, argues Autodesk Labs vice president Brian Mathews. “We used to use money to buy things—shoes, glasses—but now we will effectively buy ideas,” Mathews says. “That is our prediction.”

And since the ideas will be digital, it will be easy to tweak them to our own tastes before they’re brought to life. Autodesk describes this as the “scan/modify/print” worldview. “In the music industry, people rip songs and deejays put them together in new ways,” Mathews observes. “That is also going to happen with the things industry. We’ve got the ability to modify things with 123D and do 3D printing with 123D Make. But what we haven’t shown is the scan part, and that’s what [123D Catch] is one aspect of—bringing laser scanning down to the consumer level.”

Autodesk first shared a preview version of 123D Catch under the code name Photofly in early 2010. I visited Mathews at Autodesk’s San Francisco offices this fall to learn more about Autodesk Labs, and we ended up focusing on Photofly as a soup-to-nuts illustration of the group’s mission and working pattern. “Everyone [at Autodesk] is inventing and improving, but an invention is not an innovation,” Mathews says. “An innovation has to be more in the practical realm; it has to work. We make real-world prototypes instead of research stuff, and our key differentiating feature is that we involve our customers. When we have something really new like Photofly, we are involving the customers in the R&D process from the beginning.”

Indeed, makers using early versions of Photofly have come up with some pretty stunning creations. One of the most impressive is this music video from the Brisbane, Australia-based electronic-pop band Hunz; it’s populated by haunting Photofly models of lead singer-composer-programmer Hans Van Vliet. But users have also employed Photofly to model more mundane scenes, from archaeological digs to ratty jogging shoes.

Photogrammetry—the process of measuring objects from their images—is a science that dates back nearly to the invention of photography in the mid-1800s. But it’s gotten a huge boost in the last decade from the introduction of digital photography and … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Ann Arbor, MI-based startup Mobiata is growing, both in size and location. The Expedia-owned company, which develops mobile apps designed to make travel go more smoothly, just opened offices in San Francisco and the Minneapolis-St. Paul area—which is where the company started out in 2008 before relocating to Ann Arbor. Founder and General Manager Ben Kazez says Mobiata is now looking to add 20 employees for open positions at all three locations.

Speaking of new hires, Mobiata just named Reed Martin as its director of design. Martin, who spent five years working at Apple, is someone Kazez hopes will in turn hire “all of his designer pals.”

“This is huge, huge news for us,” Kazez says, emphasizing that design is a company priority. “We’re in the process of this expansion to work on apps and emerging platforms for Expedia,” Kazez says.

Mobiata was acquired by Internet travel empire Expedia.com in November 2010, in a deal that was referred to as Expedia’s “most significant investment to date in addressing the mobile travel market.” In April, Mobiata launched the Expedia Hotels app, which Kazez says allows users to book a hotel room on the fly “in four taps” and covers 130,000 hotels in 20,000 cities.

“It’s kind of changed the way I travel,” Kazez says. “I used to book hotel rooms in advance.”

In addition to the Expedia hotels and Mobiata apps teams, the company has added an Expedia flights team and an incubation team. The incubation team is charged with creating a new app every two months.

“There’s no product roadmap” for the incubation team, Kazez says. “The goal is to let the team pivot as often as possible. Users love when we frequently update our apps—they feel well taken care of. If we’re launching new versions, it maintains the connection and keeps things exciting.”

Kazez adds that, despite the expansions, the Ann Arbor office remains a critical part of the operation. In fact, Mobiata recently hired a University of Michigan architecture professor to spruce up the Nickels Arcade location. Included in the renovations were the transformation of most of the walls into giant dry-erase boards so employees can brainstorm an idea anywhere they happen to be standing.

“We don’t want people to get bored working on one app for too long,” Kazez says.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Why did Color, the $41 million startup that was launched with such force in March, slam instantly and with equal force into a wall of user dissatisfaction? The folks at Zurb have some thoughts about that.

Color’s iPhone app is designed to let users share photos with other people using the app in the same vicinity. The company describes it as “a fun way to create a public photo album with your friends.” But in an April blog post, Zurb marketing lead Dmitry Dragilev pointed out “the app only works if there are already a few users nearby.” People felt “confused and lost” because the app didn’t explain this subtlety, and didn’t give them a way to search for other people using Color.

In short, Color violated one of the fundamental principles Zurb tries to teach its clients: “It’s the click that matters most.” The firm formulated this maxim for the Web, but it applies equally well to mobile apps and other software. As Zurb founder Bryan Zmijewski explains, “Your online brand thrives and dies in the void that is created between clicks”—meaning the brief time between a user’s arrival at your site via an incoming link and his departure via an outgoing one. Unless your site (or app) lives up to the expectation created by the first click and delivers on the promise made by the second, nobody will care about it.

As you may be gathering already, Zurb is an unusual sort of design firm. It has a judgmental streak. And it’s not afraid to lecture clients about good and bad design, the dangers of complexity, and the need to think through a business strategy before sitting down to design anything.

Zurb "Chief Instigator" Bryan Zmijewski

Having been around for 13 years—which is roughly forever in Internet time—Campbell, CA-based Zurb has probably earned the right to have an attitude. If you got all your news from mainstream publications like Wired or Fast Company, you might think that the only design firm of note in Silicon Valley is Palo Alto-born Ideo, which employs more than 500 designers around the world. But boutique firm Zurb, with a team of just 14, has designed marketing sites, Web applications, and mobile apps for more than 150 companies, including a large group of what Zmijewski calls “grownup startups,” such as eBay, Facebook, McAfee, Netflix, Salesforce, Yahoo, and Zazzle. It claims to have generated over a billion dollars in market capitalization for its clients.

The Web is a far more automated and standardized place than it was in the 1990s, but Zmijewski (it’s pronounced shmi-yes-key) argues that companies actually need more help than ever understanding how to use their websites or mobile apps to hook customers. That’s because today’s sites and apps must often function as both the pitch and the product. “Ten years ago, there used to be a marketing site, and an application, and the story between the two could be completely different,” he says. “Now there is a marriage of the two and a kind of blending together. The marketing is a component of everything you click on. Understanding the words that are going to encourage a user to click in the right place or what are the places for the most profitable clicks; understanding how to drive people through a flow and get them to convert is all incredibly valuable, especially if your primary revenue stream is the Web.”

Zmijewski says Zurb designers think of themselves as “bottom-up strategists” who spend as much time helping clients conceive a product or service and how it might translate into revenue as they do thinking about its look and feel. “With an entrepreneur, I often say ‘Don’t worry about the marketing aspects of visual design right away. Start thinking about the mental model of the user that you’re trying to serve.’ If you have enough skills and you can collect enough information, maybe you don’t need help—or maybe you want a team to validate the idea and get it to market faster.”

Zmijewski’s first job out of Stanford, where he earned an undergraduate degree in product design in 1997, was at Skyline, a toy development company founded by Brendan Boyle. After Ideo acquired Skyline, Zmijewski spent some time soaking up the Ideo way of thinking and … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Continuing its strategy of rolling up niche publishing sites into a vertical media network, San Francisco-based Say Media said today that it has acquired Remodelista, a group blog and “sourcebook” on interior design and remodeling. “Remodelista has done an incredible job aligning its brand with clean, timeless and sophisticated style,” Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez said in a statement. “Their editors have established strong relationships with their readers and often use their own homes as laboratories for ideas and inspiration. In short, Remodelista is the epitome of what we look for when we acquire or partner with a new media property: passionate editors with a strong point of view and a vibrant community.” Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

San Rafael, CA-based Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), whose 3D design, graphics, and engineering software is used by more than 10 million design professionals around the world, has just made a small but interesting purchase. It has acquired Instructables, a San Francisco-based community site for DIY enthusiasts started almost six years ago by Squid Labs co-founder Eric Wilhelm.

Just last week, I published a long profile of Instructables, which is home to more than 55,000 how-to articles contributed by more than 20,000 volunteer authors, on everything from electric cars to cookie recipes. So I jumped on the phone with Wilhelm early this morning to find out more.

Turns out Autodesk plans to build up the profile of its consumer group, and they’ve been looking for a company that knows how to create online communities to jumpstart the outreach effort. “They want to build tools and services for creative folks as well as design professionals,” Wilhelm says. “They are realizing the power of really engaged communities around services and products, and we are going to help them build those communities.”

That doesn’t mean the existing Instructables site is going away—far from it. “We’ll now have the resources to make some improvements to the site I know our authors and community will love,” Wilhelm said in a blog post announcing the acquisition this morning. All 24 employees of Instructables are joining Autodesk, and the company will remain in its 2nd Street digs in SoMa (only blocks from Autodesk’s San Francisco location).

The companies aren’t sharing the financial details of the acquisition, but Wilhelm says that “everybody is very happy” with the terms. Instructables had raised almost $2 million in venture financing from San Francisco-based O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, the investment fund started by O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, and Baseline Ventures, an early stage investing firm founded by former Kleiner Perkins partner and Microsoft exec Steve Anderson.

Wilhelm says that when he spoke with me for my original profile on July 15, he wasn’t able to share the fact that an acquisition was in the works. But I could tell that the question was on his mind—and in particular, that he’d been thinking about what would make Instructables an attractive purchase. “At the size we’re at, the actual revenue and earnings are not really that interesting to people who might buy us,” he said then. “The most interesting thing is … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Blade Kotelly thinks that any Radio Shack salesman and Steve Jobs are telling the same exact story. Jobs is just better it at. That would be: “Here’s the problem, here’s the product, here’s the call to action,” he says.

It all plays into Kotelly’s theory that there are the same few story lines recycled throughout the world, and that some people just convey them more successfully than others.

The idea is the driving force behind his startup, 1Minute40Seconds, which is developing story templates for businesses and marketers to plug images and words into. It then pops out quick, compelling videos that it hopes will engage viewers better than existing ads or text. “If we can codify those stories in a way that allows you to tell it better, you can capture [your audience] emotionally and intellectually,” he says

Kotelly, who teaches engineering innovation and design at MIT and has previously taught design at Tufts University, said the idea for the company came to him late last year. His company formed this spring and has been developing its Web-based software technology throughout the summer, with the help of three current Tufts students and a couple of recent graduates working part-time. Kotelly has staffed the startup with a 2:1 ratio of designers to coders.

“It’s a platform that very flexibly allows you to integrate your words, your pictures, your video, your sound, in a template,” Kotelly says of his technology. “You drop it in and it assembles it for you.”

The platform also allows users to pull existing content from the Web, like YouTube videos, and uses third-party technology to translate written words to voice recordings throughout the video. That’s a field Kotelly is familiar with—he spent much of his career in design and marketing at SpeechWorks, which was eventually acquired by Burlington, MA-based speech software developer Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) (called Scansoft at the time).

1Minute40Seconds isn’t the first startup to recognize that plenty of businesses don’t have the budget to hire professional video production teams for marketing content and the like. Cambridge, MA-based Pixability provides customers with Flip video cameras to take their own footage, and hires video editors to produce marketing videos from that content.

But Kotelly says his is the first company to center that process entirely on technology and turn out a finished product in minutes. “This is at the core of what makes this technology different—we can do it very, very, very fast,” he says.

The speed of the process extends 1Minute40Seconds’ reach to beyond … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Less is more. Obvious marketing messages fall flat. Users are more sophisticated than you think.

Those were some of the big lessons that Seattle mobile design shop pinch/zoom took away from its latest big project: designing the new iPad video player application for the BBC, the international TV powerhouse.

The new app, called iPlayer Global, is available for users in Western Europe—the U.S. will come later—but American users played a big part in pinch/zoom’s test phase as it was calibrating the product. And that testing delivered some interesting results that say a lot about how consumers are rapidly adapting to their new devices, says Brian Fling, pinch/zoom’s CEO

Here’s a run-through of four big things Fling says he took from the usability studies:

Keep It Simple
The design pros at pinch/zoom wanted to push the envelope with a marquee client like the BBC, and add as many bells and whistles as they could muster on the iPad screen. They promptly turned off the users in their study, sending the team back to a more streamlined design.

“We created some pretty crazy proof-of-concepts,” Fling says, with content zooming around in all kinds of directions. It was beautiful, but way too complicated. “Users always picked the simple version, which ended up being the final version.” Fling says that’s the major “Steve Jobs-ism” he gleaned from the project.

High Expectations
The “Apple aesthetic” is built in for users, even if they’re not what you would consider technically sophisticated. On the iPad, people want things to work simply, efficiently, and intuitively—and they’re hungry to experiment.

“We would put something in front of them and say ‘Don’t touch it, it’s just a picture.’ And 15 seconds later, they’re swiping it. You couldn’t have them not swipe it,” Fling says. That’s a big change in design studies. “On the Web, people deliberate and really consider the choices before they actually click on something. Whereas on an iPad, with Apple aesthetics, people will just touch things to see what happens. They’ll rotate the device to see if it moves.”

Swipe, Not Scroll
The device itself is still relatively new for the mainstream, but users—who ranged from longtime owners to iPad newbies—knew what to expect from a touchscreen, and didn’t want old-school Web-based controls getting in the way.

Testing their app design against video-on-demand leaders Netflix and Hulu showed that users found a Web-type of scrolling navigation to be cheap or low-quality, Fling says. “They wanted it to be different than the Web. That was really interesting to us. We didn’t think they cared.”

Keep It Real
Reaffirming some foundational mobile design guidelines, Fling says users were able to quickly sniff out obvious marketing messages in the content and quickly rejected them. Mobile devices are an intimate experience, and people just want things to work—not get served up with tons of advertising.

This isn’t the first big media name that pinch/zoom has worked with—the company also did mobile design for The New York Times. But the BBC actually has been the most open about allowing the agency to share the insights it garnered from the process, Fling says, which makes a difference because of the new things he felt the agency learned about tablet users.

“Even to a 10-year veteran of the space, there’s many times when I feel like it’s the first day of school,” Fling says.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

If you’re a follower of this column, you know that I write a lot about apps for the iPhone and iPad. It’s not just because I’m an Apple fan. It’s also because these revolutionary touchscreen-based devices are attracting some of today’s most creative developers, who are writing software unlike anything we’ve ever seen on other platforms.

One of the most stunning examples to date is a program called LetterMPress.

Released last week by Champaign, IL-based Bonadies Creative, LetterMPress is a $5.99 graphics app for the iPad that lets you create digital posters and cards that look as if they were made using wood type on an old-fashioned letterpress printing machine. But while that’s an accurate description of the app’s output, it’s a woefully insufficient summary. After all, if you just want to make graphics that have an antique look, there are dozens of desktop and tablet apps to choose from. What makes LetterMPress unusual is that it’s also a wonderfully faithful re-creation of an actual letterpress—a 1964 Vandercook SP-15 cylinder proofing press, to be exact.

To make a finished print with LetterMPress, you have to go through all the same steps a journeyman printer would: arranging type on the press bed, locking it in place, choosing ink and paper, cranking the carriage handle to roll the impression cylinder across the press. The app even has sound effects. Only in the final step, when you share your finished graphic, do you depart from the traditional letterpress process—at least, I’m pretty sure Gutenberg didn’t post his prints to Facebook.

Why go to all this trouble when you could just use a graphics program like Photoshop? Haven’t Adobe, Apple, and other companies spent the last two decades perfecting graphics software specifically to free us from all the old constraints of analog printing technology? Those are legitimate questions—and they go to the heart of what makes LetterMPress so interesting. If you ask me why this app isn’t just for typography geeks, but in fact represents a major milestone in mobile app design, I’ll give you three reasons.

1) LetterMPress’s graphical effects are rooted in the physical world of type, ink, and paper, which means you can make genuinely unique art with it—stuff that isn’t possible in other graphics programs.

The type used to create the World Wide Wade logo above.

To create the app, graphic designer John Bonadies started by collecting old wood-block type and art in a variety of fonts. (Donations collected through the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform helped that process along. Full disclosure: I pledged $10 to the Kickstarter campaign back in March, and received a free download of the finished app as a thank-you gift.) Bonadies and his collaborator on the project, Jeff Adams, scanned the type to create digital images. Creating a layout in the app involves dragging these images onto the press bed, then arranging or resizing them as you see fit. It’s all illustrated in the video on page 2.

Bonadies also made real impressions using the type, under varying degrees of pressure. Scans of those impressions serve as the patterns for the finished prints you make in the app. You can also choose from 21 different varieties of paper, all scanned from real sheets to ensure a realistic texture. The end result: prints produced using LetterMPress bear all the idiosyncrasies of the physical type and paper that Bonadies used, pockmarks and all.

Thanks in part to the vintage, handcrafted feel of letterpress prints, there’s a mini-Renaissance underway in real letterpress design. “Call it a reaction to the ‘perfect’ look of laser printing,” Bonadies wrote at the LetterMPress Kickstarter page. Thanks to the app, you don’t have to own a letterpress to match this look yourself.

2) The app powerfully highlights the strengths of the touchscreen interface.

It’s hard to imagine another scenario where direct manipulation of digital objects, without a mouse or cursor in the way, would be more natural and useful. In LetterMPress you move type and furniture—the spacers, locks, and magnets that hold type in place—by dragging with your fingers. If you want to make a particular letter smaller or bigger, you simply … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

“I am not convinced that I would put my child in an incubator that is made of car parts.”

That’s Krista Donaldson speaking. She’s the CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based D-Rev, and the quote says a lot about the non-profit organization and its philosophy on designing healthcare equipment for the developing world.

You may have read about the incubator in question—it’s called NeoNurture, and is the creation of Cambridge, MA-based design studio Design That Matters. The device made a media splash and won design awards last year for its unique solution to the parts shortages that often render medical equipment inoperable in rural hospitals in developing countries. NeoNurture uses car headlights to keep neonatal infants warm, a dashboard fan for air circulation, and a motorcycle battery for backup power. The machine’s designers reasoned that since car parts and car-repair experts can be found almost anywhere, NeoNurture ought to be easier to maintain than a more specialized unit.

But to Donaldson’s way of thinking, the folks at Design that Matters forgot to ask a key question about their device: Could they imagine selling it to a U.S. hospital? “It’s a great example of a product that resonates with the techie community because it very cleverly solves a real need,” says Donaldson. At D-Rev, by contrast, “Our approach is that we are developing world-class products that meet quality standards here, but are designed to meet the needs of the environment there. With every project, we ask, ‘Is this something that could be used at Stanford Hospital? Is this something I would put my children in?’”

D-Rev isn’t building an infant incubator, but it is building a phototherapy device for treating severe jaundice, a condition that afflicts about an eighth of all newborns. And if there’s a simple premise behind that project and the others underway at the four-year-old organization, it’s that patients and healthcare providers in the developing world deserve access to the same high-quality technology available here—and that sometimes all it takes to make such technology affordable is a little Silicon Valley-style design and engineering thinking, matched with on-the-ground market know-how.

Indeed, if you visit D-Rev’s Emerson Street headquarters, just a couple of blocks away from world-famous design consultancy IDEO (where Donaldson once interned), it feels much like any other Palo Alto startup, with the requisite Macs, iPad, and overhead projector. The only sign that D-Rev is developing physical stuff, rather than software, is in the laboratory, where prototypes litter the floor and there’s a workbench complete with circuit boards and soldering irons. And the only sign that D-Rev is a non-profit is…well, there aren’t any.

D-Rev CEO Krista Donaldson shows a prototype for the Brilliance phototherapy device to doctors in India.

“One of the things that makes us a little out of the ordinary, and one of the things that makes us really successful, is that our methods are 95 percent business methods,” says John Dawson, chairman of the board at D-Rev (the name stands for Design Revolution). “It’s not like we are taking just a little bit of Silicon Valley and shoving it into a non-profit. Most of this organization operates like a startup.”

The main difference, Dawson told me when I visited him and Donaldson in Palo Alto in late April, is that D-Rev is aiming for social benefit, not big profits.

“Our currency is impact,” says Donaldson. “We collect minimal royalties on our products, we have licensing deals, but our measure is how successfully we treat children who wouldn’t otherwise receive treatment, and mobilize people who wouldn’t otherwise walk.” (That’s a reference to the JaipurKnee, D-Rev’s multi-axis prosthetic knee joint for amputees.) D-Rev depends on philanthropic grants to fund early product R&D that the market can’t support—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is its largest supporter. But its product development methods are straight out of the for-profit world. And it doesn’t waste time on products that don’t have a market measuring in the millions of people, or for which it can’t find eager manufacturing and marketing partners.

Donaldson is a mechanical engineer who joined D-Rev in 2009 after working as a product designer with KickStart International (then ApproTec) in Kenya, a reconstruction advisor for the … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

In this era of Kindles and iPads and cloud-based data storage, the idea of an Internet startup that’s actually focused on paper is more than an anachronism—it’s almost a contradiction in terms. But that’s Chirply, a Y Combinator-backed company in San Francisco that sells high-end greeting cards—and soon notebooks and wrapping paper—printed with designs from independent artists. The six-employee startup runs a website where artists submit designs and random fans and customers vote for their favorites (that’s the Internet part). And the designs themselves are fun, hip, and edgy. But in most other ways, Chirply would be as at home in Peoria in 1935 as it is in San Francisco in 2011.

To find out more about the startup, and what inspired a pair of brothers with background in cloud, security, database, mobile, and video technology to launch something so retro, I biked into SoMa in April to visit Chirply’s office at 153 Townsend. (They’ve since moved.) The building contains a warren of rental offices occupied by early-stage Web startups, including other Y Combinator alumni like Convore and Rapportive. So it’s probably safe to say that Chirply was the only company in the building whose office was stacked high with boxes full of actual stock—greeting cards, on the day I visited.

“My brother and I both come from artistic backgrounds,” Gagan Palrecha explains. “I ran a record label for 10 years. My brother [Neel Palrecha] was a professional musician in a touring band. We both grew up screen-printing T-shirts and concert posters in our parents’ basement. So we’ve been in that world, and a big part of what we set out to accomplish was to work closely with designers and give them a serious outlet for their art.”

Laudable enough—and as for why the Palrecha brothers chose greeting cards and wrapping paper as the medium for their mission, I’ll get to that in a minute. But it’s an interesting fact that Chirply didn’t start out as a crowdsourced paper goods company. “Pivots” aren’t unusual for young startups, but Chirply’s, which came just a month before Y Combinator’s summer 2010 demo day, was more dramatic than most. The original idea for the company was all about the Internet, befitting Gagan’s background at early cloud services company Loudcloud, security startup Vantu, and Oracle, and Neel’s history at mobile video companies MobiTV and Quickplay. The Palrechas wanted to turn Twitter into a platform for e-commerce by writing software that would translate a retweet into a purchase. “Let’s say you were Capital Records selling a new Coldplay album,” says Gagan. “You could put out a message saying ‘retweet this message and get the new Coldplay record for $5.99′ and then all of your followers, to get that price, would click the retweet button.”

Gagan Palrecha (left) and Neel Palrecha

A neat idea—and “we still have the code,” Gagan says. But the brothers realized that profit margins on such an operation might be small, and that mitigating fraud would be costly. “We made a decision that this wasn’t going to be big as big as we wanted.” But they already had a domain name that was “cute, short, memorable, happy, and cheerful,” in Gagan’s words. So for their second act, the brothers picked something closer to their artistic passions.

Gagan says he and Neel are both big fans of Etsy, the online marketplace for small independent craftspeople, and Threadless, which sells T-shirts with crowd-sourced designs. They’re also the kind of people who will gladly spend $20 on a leatherbound Moleskine journal when a $2 spiral notebook would do. “The reason we use really nice notebooks in the office and at home is because we just feel more productive and more driven and happier when we’re using stuff that we have an emotional connection to,” Gagan says. “That is what we want to do, help people create meaningful artistic connections with the things they use every day.”

But Threadless already had a corner on artsy clothing, as Etsy did on jewelry and other crafts. The Palrechas wanted to find a market where they could spotlight cool independent designers, but in a way that that would guarantee recurring revenues. “The question was, … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Waltham, MA-based Bluespec, a maker of software for designing electronics components, has raised $1 million in an equity offering, an SEC filing revealed. The company was founded in 2003 and had previously raised a total of $17.25 million, from investors Atlas Venture and North Bridge Venture Partners, according to its website. The filing for the newest funding notes that the money comes from four investors.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The Boston-area technology scene is known for several mini-clusters: companies in mobile software, music software, robotics, online video, data storage, e-commerce, and Internet marketing, to name a few. But “mass customization” might be the most broadly interesting sector in town. The term refers to online companies that offer consumers personalized, custom-made goods—everything from clothing and jewelry to art and books—at relatively low prices.

The trend toward mass customization isn’t new—you can read about related startups here and here—but a critical, um, mass of local companies has formed that should make things fun to watch for years to come. They include Blank Label (shirts), FashionPlaytes (girls’ clothing), Gemvara (jewelry), Tikatok (children’s books, acquired by Barnes & Noble), F. Rock (bags), Artaic (mosaics), CustomMade (artwork and furniture), Loom Decor (home decorating), Vistaprint (printed goods, U.S. headquarters in Boston area), and Zyrra (bras).

I happened to be talking about this cluster with micro-VC David Beisel from NextViewVentures this week. Beisel also organizes the quarterly Web Innovators Group, and was previously with Venrock (he still serves on the board of BlogHer) and Masthead Venture Partners. In a previous life, he co-founded Sombasa Media, an e-mail marketing startup that was acquired by About.com for $35 million in 2000.

Beisel had an interesting take as to why the Boston area seems to be putting the “Mass.” in mass customization. He views the sector as “another upspring of the e-commerce mini-cluster. We [in Boston] are good at assembling—taking raw components and building blocks, and then fashioning them into something whole greater than its parts,” he said. “Mass customization is a natural extension of our strength because it’s assembling something new and doing it both systematically and repeatedly.”

I took this to mean also that mass customization startups are a natural outcrop built on top of more traditional New England tech strengths—things like building physical products and developing e-commerce businesses (e.g., CSN Stores, Shoebuy, Next Jump).

You can learn more about this burgeoning group of startups next week. The MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge (Beisel is on the board) has organized a panel discussion and networking hour around the mass customization cluster on Feb. 16 (rescheduled after the snowstorm). Katie Rae from Project 11 and TechStars Boston will moderate a panel of startup founders including Ted Acworth, Sharon Kan, Matt Lauzon, Sarah McIlroy, Sung Park, and Michael Salguero.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

These days, the simple act of going to the grocery store is a fraught and anxious affair. Americans are being told that what they choose to eat isn’t just a personal decision, but has major economic, political, and moral implications. For one thing, there’s the spiraling cost to society of food-related health conditions, from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and hypertension. Then there are books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eating Animals and movies like Supersize Me, Food Inc, and Our Daily Bread, which expose the unsavory sides of a food economy dominated by supermarkets and fast-food joints and the factory farming system that’s grown up to serve them. And, of course, there are the burgeoning organic and local food movements, which argue that foods produced locally and without the use of pesticides or antibiotics are healthier and more sustainable—even if they’re beyond many consumers’ price range.

Into the middle of all this steps ShopWell, a Silicon Valley Web and mobile startup spun off last year by the design consultancy Ideo. The company’s proposition to consumers is simple: tell us a little about you, and we’ll tell you which products on the supermarket shelves best fit your nutritional needs.

It sounds great, given the difficulties ordinary mortals face with the very first step of responsible shopping and eating: trying to figure out how ingredient lists and nutrition labels relate to their own lives. But the company’s plan for making money is a bit more complex. It wants to be an advisor and information broker to food producers, who supposedly lack good data about how consumers make buying decisions in the grocery store and therefore have a terrible record when it comes to launching new products. To collect useful intelligence for its food-industry clients, ShopWell will need lots of users. And to sign up lots of users, it will have to provide non-obvious product recommendations in a usable format.

But frankly, it’s not there yet—which isn’t surprising, given that the company launched its beta site in September and its iPhone app even more recently. So in this third and final installment in our ShopWell case study, we’ll look at the product development challenges the company has ahead of it, and the business-model hypotheses it has yet to test.

[Editor's Note: This is the third article in a three-part series on ShopWell. Part 1 appeared Monday, November 1 and Part 2 appeared on Tuesday, November 2.]

What makes ShopWell worth following, and sets it apart from the scores of Silicon Valley startups launched every month, is not just that it’s trying to validate two premises at once (i.e., that consumers want an easier way to identify healthy food, and that food producers will pay for fine-grained data about consumer preferences). It’s also that the startup’ fate will reflect on Ideo’s ability to launch successful companies. Is the consultancy’s fabled user-centered design philosophy an effective tool in the real rough-and-tumble of startup life? Do good designers also make good entrepreneurs? Such questions may not be answered until ShopWell itself exits the startup market and its venture cashiers ring up the totals.

The Google of Food?

Whatever else it may mean, the “user-centered design” philosophy espoused at Ideo and many other creative hotbeds is about listening to people and creating things they’ll want, rather than force-feeding them products that don’t fit with their existing behaviors. But one of the interesting things about food and wellness, according to ShopWell CEO Jasmine Kim, is that many people only start thinking about the subject once they’re forced to give up their old behaviors. “A big insight from user-centered design”—that is, from the stories people have told Ideo and ShopWell—”is that when you are starting a transition, that is when you need nutrition advice,” Kim says. “You could be told by your doctor, ‘You have type 2 diabetes, eat less sugar,’ but people are left to their own devices to go figure out what they could eat.”

That’s why ShopWell has put a lot of energy into allowing users to filter its database of foods based on health needs—there are simple “preselects” on each users’ account page that will … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

With the ShopWell concept for helping consumers make more sense of the nutrition labels on food, Ideo thought it had a winner. But while the design consultancy has many of the attributes of a startup incubator—a large flock of creative thinkers and a commitment to testing new ideas, to name just a couple—it’s not equipped to fund and staff new companies on its own.

As soon as Ideo senior designer Michelle Lee and entrepreneur-in-residence Brian Witlin had formalized their pitch on ShopWell in mid-2009, Ideo partner Brendan Boyle put out the word that the team was looking for venture support—preferably from a firm that understood how to manage the spinout process.

“Within one or two hops, somebody told Brian, ‘You should talk to these guys at New Venture Partners,’ and that is how they found us,” says Robert Rosenberg. “It was actually a cold-call e-mail that came in via LinkedIn.” (Score another one for PayPal alum Reid Hoffman’s professional networking service.) [Correction, 11/2/10: Rosenberg sent Xconomy this revision: "The thread that actually brought Ideo to New Venture Partners wasn't LinkedIn.  It was somewhat high tech (someone at IDEO posted the question "does anyone know anything about spinouts?" on a Stanford GSB listserve), but it was also a little old fashioned in that a person who saw the post forwarded it to Frank (Rimalovski, a partner at the firm)."]

[Editor's Note: This is the second article in a three-part series on ShopWell, a Palo Alto, CA, Web startup that rates food products based on shoppers' personal health goals. Part 1 appeared Monday, November 1.]

Rosenberg is a longtime partner at New Venture Partners, which has offices in San Mateo, CA, and Murray Hill, NJ, as well as the UK and the Netherlands, and purports to be the world’s only venture firm specializing in corporate spinouts. (In a two-part conversation in September with another partner at New Ventures Partners, David Tennenhouse, I learned exactly how that process has worked in cases such as Freescale’s spinoff of magnetic memory startup Everspin.)

Lee, Witlin, and Boyle presented their plan to Rosenberg and his former colleague Frank Rimalovski, who has since left New Venture Partners to head up NYU’s Innovation Venture Fund. “One of the first things we saw was how fully thought-through the whole concept was,” Rosenberg recounts. “The prototypical entrepreneur has a hammer and everything looks like a nail; they think they can take over the world with their hammer. What Brendan, Brian, and Michelle had was a much more realistic and frankly more nuanced vision. I think part of the reason is that at Ideo, where they come from, they have the discipline to think that way. But it also reflects the fact that ShopWell itself is not a point solution. There are lots of innovations that brilliantly spot a problem and pair that with a brilliantly conceived solution, but with ShopWell, it’s that times two.”

On the consumer side, Lee and Witlin had come up with a plan for offering personalized food ratings reflecting consumers’ specific circumstances—not just their age, gender, height, and weight, but their health conditions and fitness goals. “This stuff is not just for health nuts,” says Rosenberg. “There is a real desire to understand the health impact [of different foods]. It’s just really hard to get at that on a personal basis. The tools that are out there are the quintessential one-size-fits-all tools—the USDA Food Pyramid says, ‘Eat this, not that.’ Well, what’s good for me could kill my mother.”

And on the producer side, ShopWell was offering a solution to food manufacturers’ age-old problem predicting what new products consumers will buy. “These are some of the world’s largest companies, and they are swimming in data from supermarket scanners and from generations of focus groups sitting behind one-way mirrors,” says Rosenberg. “But it turns out that … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control shocked the nation two weeks ago with a study projecting that by the year 2050, as many as one fifth to one third of U.S. adults could have diabetes, up from just 10 percent today. Part of this increase is inevitable—a side effect of the swelling population of people at high risk for the disease, such as the elderly and Hispanics. It’s also a result of the fact that diabetics are living longer thanks to better treatments. But the CDC researchers also offered evidence that key “preventive interventions” could considerably reduce the future prevalance of diabetes and the resulting burden on the healthcare system.

It’s no mystery what those interventions might be, and they aren’t expensive or high-tech. The most effective way to prevent adult-onset diabetes, by far, is weight control through exercise and healthy eating. And diabetics aren’t the only ones who could benefit from a better diet: 34 percent of U.S. adults are obese, according to the CDC.

Unfortunately, choosing healthier foods is easier said than done. The huge stakes involved in those choices—and the opportunity to help simplify them—are among the reasons why team members at ShopWell, a recent spinoff of Palo Alto, CA-based design consultancy Ideo, are so passionate about their business: a Web-based service that helps consumers make smarter grocery buying decisions. As its name implies, ShopWell shows consumers which products on supermarket shelves mesh best with their health goals, and which are non-starters.

“Before I came on board here, I asked, ‘Is this just a Palo Alto problem that you’re trying to solve at Ideo?,’ because I really want to solve a big problem,” says Jasmine Kim, who joined the startup as CEO in September. “Well, when one in three children under 17 are overweight; when Americans don’t even recognize what overweight is now, because it’s the new normal; when you have Michelle Obama tackling childhood obesity on a national level; when Jamie Oliver is trying to get schools to go from chocolate milk to regular milk—that all tells you that this is a big problem, and that’s the kind of problem we want to solve.”

The first challenge ShopWell is biting off: the sorry state of nutrition labeling on food packaging. It’s been more than 70 years since Congress mandated that food makers list ingredients on their labels, and 20 years since the advent of the familiar “Nutrition Facts” chart. But while these labels are packed with information, it’s largely a contextless, one-size-fits-all deal—the percent daily values, for example, are based on a 2,000-calorie diet, which may be more or less than you really need, depending on your age, weight, gender, and activity levels.

Using ShopWell is like getting a Nutrition Facts label made just for you. At the ShopWell website, you start by entering personal details like age and gender, along with information about your health goals and conditions—whether you have high blood pressure or diabetes, for example. That allows ShopWell’s behind-the-scenes algorithms to spit out personalized ratings for thousands of common products. If you’re trying to lose weight, foods with lots of added sugar will obviously score low (bye-bye, Betty Crocker Cookie Mix). But on a subtler level, ShopWell will also bump up the scores of high-calcium foods for people with osteoporosis, or those with high levels of fiber and potassium and low levels of fat and cholesterol for people with heart disease. Armed with this data, you can build a shopping list that speeds your trip through the nutrition minefield that is the typical supermarket.

ShopWell’s executives and investors see the service as the missing link between nutrition labeling and personal health. “There is a groundswell of interest in the connection between food and wellness,” says Robert Rosenberg, a partner at New Venture Partners, the San Mateo, CA-based venture firm that backed ShopWell’s launch. “But if you look at where the rubber meets the road, in the supermarket, day after day you are going to see a consumer holding a box of this in their right hand and a box of that in their left hand, trying to figure out, ‘What does this mean for me?’ The world needs a personalized food rating engine that can connect this impenetrable mound of scientific data about nutrition and ingredients with my personal preferences or medical needs as a consumer.”

Of course, Silicon Valley is humming these days with Web startups and apps promising to help consumers with one challenge or another, from monitoring their finances to keeping track of their kids to buying a car. What makes a food website with only a dozen employees so interesting? Quite a few things, actually.

One is the undeniable scale and importance of the problem: some 100 million Americans have food-related health problems, from annoyances like lactose intolerance to life-threatening conditions like … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

In the movie 21, three MIT students who know their math go to Las Vegas and play blackjack. Eventually they get thrown out, after nearly breaking the bank at the casinos’ card tables.

Well, as we’ve reported before, it’s a true story. And one of the three MIT geniuses was Jon Hirschtick, who invested his winnings from the adventure wisely, founding Concord, MA-based SolidWorks and developing the first 3D computer-aided design (CAD) software that ran on an ordinary PC.

But while that was a key moment in the evolution of CAD technology, it was the second or third chapter in the development of the New England region’s cluster of CAD software makers, which one of the world’s strongest. Companies here lead their industry in the development of 3D design and engineering software, which help engineers create visualizations and specifications for everything from cars to buildings to the consumer products on the shelves at Target and Wal-Mart. Indeed, CAD software is so central to the construction and manufacturing industries that without it, innovation and economic growth would be far slower.

That’s why Xconomy will be featuring leaders of the local CAD cluster during a breakout session at our June 17 XSITE event, the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship. Entitled “Designing the Next Economy,” the panel will include multimedia presentations by speakers from Autodesk, Newforma, Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), SolidWorks, SpaceClaim, and Z Corporation, followed by a discussion of the cluster’s key role in accelerating innovation.

Like most regional technology clusters, Boston’s CAD cluster started out small and, to some extent, accidentally. In 1985, Sam Geisberg, a Russian immigrant and math genius, left Bedford, MA- based Computervision, an early pioneer in CAD and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), to develop the first “parameter driven” CAD system, later named Pro Engineer. (In computer-aided design, parameter-driven systems are “associative,” so if you make one small change in a model the corresponding parts that need to be relocated will be updated automatically. This speeds up the design process considerably compared to earlier non-parametric systems.) Together with Mike Payne and others, Geisberg founded PTC in 1985. The company quickly lined up its first important customer, John Deere. PTC went public in 1989, and today its products have almost 800,000 users.

Another pioneer is Jim Heppelmann. In 1996 Heppelmann left Metaphase Technology to start his own business, named Windchill Technology. His goal was to develop a new Internet-capable system for “product life cycle management” (PLM), the art of keeping product data from CAD models and other sources consistent and updated through a product’s entire lifecycle. He succeeded well enough to attract the attention of PTC, which acquired Windchill in 1998.

Today companies like PTC, SolidWorks, SpaceClaim, and MathWorks all have their headquarters in the Boston area, as does the architecture, engineering, and construction devision of San Mateo, CA-based CAD giant Autodesk. (Our detailed list of these companies follows on page 3 of this story.) While most of the companies are branches of the same big family tree, they also form a competitive ecosystem, frequently hiring engineers and programmers away from one another and pushing the technology forward in a race to make their systems more useful, quick, and attractive.

But the CAD companies will need to become more innovative than ever if they hope to stay competitive. Twenty-five years ago, CAD programs were used only by … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

[Editor's Note: Lux Capital's Josh Wolfe and Shahin Farschi also contributed to this post.]

In terms of the difficulty of the turnaround needed, it’s telling that Detroit derives from the French word for strait—a narrow passageway—symbolic of the chances Detroit really has for re-invention. It will take radical action, hugely energetic leaders, and messianic spokespeople to bang the drum for renewal and galvanize a depressed populace to squeeze through against the pressures of obsolescence.

Our ideas for the Motor City:

—Use the excess auto manufacturing capacity to build batteries, electric motors, renewable power and wind power chassis systems, which of course has been a theme of Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s administration.

—Lure software engineers from Washington and California to build better mobile apps and services—the Ford-marketed SYNC is a start—but leaves much to be desired.

—Create a for-profit expert consulting hub modeled on the Gerson Lehrman Group that can be used to employ a core of displaced, highly skilled design, CAD, automation engineers to serve clients in other regions.

—Bulldoze Hamtramck, except for the big warehouses; turn them into “exploratoriums.“

—Make local government officials spend at least a year traveling around the world—so they don’t think the universe has been modeled after Michigan.

Editor’s note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we’ve queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Concord, MA-based SpaceClaim has raised an additional $5 million in Series D funding, bringing its total venture pot to just over $30 million, president and CEO Chris Randles told Xconomy yesterday. The four-year-old startup sells 3D modeling software for non-engineers, and has been enjoying explosive growth over the past year, according to Randles.

The funds came from SpaceClaim’s existing coterie of investors, with North Bridge Venture Partners and Kodiak Ventures in the lead and Borealis Ventures and Needham Capital Partners also on board. Randles says SpaceClaim, which experienced a 2.5-fold increase in sales in 2009 and even faster growth in the first quarter of 2010, has moved solidly beyond the R&D phase and needed the new funds to invest in sales and marketing support. “Our big investment is in customer-facing technical staff who can help existing and prospective customers solve problems, as well as sales staff,” says Randles.

SpaceClaim is part of a major cluster of engineering software companies with headquarters or major outposts in New England, from established giants such as Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes (which owns Concord-based SolidWorks), and PTC, better known as Parametric Technology Corporation. In fact, both Randles and SpaceClaim co-founder Daniel Dean spent time at PTC. “It’s an overlooked asset in this area,” says Randles.

PTC largely invented parametric modeling, the dominant paradigm in 3D mechanical design, in the mid-1980s. To hear Randles tell it, there hasn’t been any fundamental innovation in the computer-aided design (CAD) field since then, though he says SolidWorks and other companies have improved on the idea. SpaceClaim’s innovation, which the company calls “direct modeling,” is to give engineers simple tools that allow them to experiment with design concepts by moving, stretching, combining, and re-using shapes onscreen.

“People who use CAD tend to be people who are specialists in CAD—if you want a parallel, think of the database specialists before the days of Microsoft Access,” says Randles. “We are democratizing 3D by bringing powerful but very easy-to-use 3D modeling tools to engineers who have never really used CAD.”

Randles says SpaceClaim’s business is split roughly equally between the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Automotive manufacturers and suppliers were the biggest customers in 2009, followed by aerospace and defense, consumer goods, and medical device companies.

SpaceClaim’s software is in demand because it helps companies’ product designers experiment with new designs without having to involve CAD specialists at every step. “3D modeling technology is changing working practices and moving things to market quicker,” Randles says. “In an odd way the global recession has also helped us—it’s made companies come to terms with some of their inefficiencies. When things are good, you tend to put off radical rethinking or reengineering.”

Comments | Reprints | Share: