This is a tale of two CEOs whose reputations precede them. It is a short tale.

The news today is that Cambridge, MA-based Kinvey and Portland, OR-based Urban Airship have formed a technology partnership involving mobile applications. Basically, Kinvey will handle the data back-end for mobile app developers whose apps reach end users through “push notifications” powered by Urban Airship; push notifications are typically marketing or news messages sent by publishers over a data network. Financial terms of the partnership weren’t given.

But this story isn’t really about financials. These are two startups, separated by 3,000 miles, and each has a personal flair. Last year, Urban Airship CEO and co-founder Scott Kveton told me about how his company first got off the ground. It was June 2009, Urban Airship had barely started, and Kveton and his team couldn’t afford to attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Instead, they bought $1,500 worth of donuts and camped outside the Moscone Center, chatting up (and feeding) hundreds of developers waiting in line about their mobile messaging needs.

Fast forward, and today Urban Airship’s thousands of customers include ESPN, Fox, LivingSocial, Warner Bros., and the White House. The company has raised more than $20 million, and its investors include Foundry Group, True Ventures, Founder’s Co-op, Intel Capital, Salesforce.com, and Verizon.

Kinvey’s back-story is no less dramatic. The founding team moved to Boston from Austin, TX, and graduated with the most recent class of TechStars Boston. Last July, when founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar and chief technology officer Morgan Bickle were stuck underground for two hours on the Red Line subway, they spent their time chatting up commuters about their mobile-app needs.

Sridhar’s startup has since raised a $2 million seed round from Atlas Venture, Avalon Ventures, and numerous angel investors. Kinvey is building its business around providing cloud-based back-end services like storing and managing app data, handling security and analytics, and enabling purchases. We’ll be watching to see how much its partnerships, like the one with Urban Airship, help boost its profile among developers and publishers.

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Big video games studios are a bit old school, with everything from game design, production, execution, and financing done in house, says Boaz Sender, a JavaScript programmer at the Boston-based Web consulting firm Bocoup. But they’re about to go the way that the old Hollywood movie studios did, he says, by outsourcing many of the operations they once tightly controlled.

Sender says that’s all going to happen as a result of traditional video games moving to the open Web, which is a set of standardized, royalty free, HTTP- and HTML-based technologies for building network software. The software design principles and content policies behind it focus on consumer empowerment and third-party integration, he says.

“When you move to the Web, one thing that becomes a lot cheaper is distribution,” says Sender. This enables younger, scrappier startups to get involved in building games, and encourages other startups to sprout up that are developing related games software, for functions like game authoring, payment, advertising, and managing player identities.

Bocoup is looking to seed this trend via Game Lab, a small games incubator it’s running with Cambridge-based Atlas Venture with the “goal of funding companies that help the games industry move to the open Web.” It’s particularly focused on HTML5, the emerging new standard for programming Web pages and services.

Bocoup’s 15-person team has spent two years helping companies develop and adopt open Web technologies, through events, evangelism, and consulting for customers like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Sender founded the firm, which consists of a group of (“especially elite,” according to Atlas) JavaScript programmers. They work closely with other Web design-focused consultancies.

Game Lab’s funding model varies from startup to startup, but it could potentially invest in seed rounds for existing companies, help new companies form and seed those, and participate in Series A rounds, says Sender. Atlas is supplying the capital and Bocoup is bringing its expertise in open Web technology to the teams. Entrepreneurs in the Game Lab also get close mentoring from Atlas, and the option of working out of Bocoup’s open source hacker space.

“It’s about how we’re going to fund the building blocks of the open Web games industry,” says Sender. Bocoup is also working with its … Next Page »

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When it decided to attack the smartphone market with a new version of its mobile operating system, Microsoft did something that might sound a bit counterintuitive: Starting in last place, it dug the hole a little deeper.

By tossing out the old version of Windows Mobile and starting anew, the company knew it would piss off developers who had been working with the previous versions. Which would make the job of growing a strong developer ecosystem—a live-or-die proposition for mobile platforms—an even bigger task.

But today, Windows Phone 7 is showing signs of progress, reflected in this fresh report showing Microsoft’s platform surpassing BlackBerry for the number three spot in developer interest. There’s still a huge gulf to bridge before Microsoft can truly challenge Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in the smartphone market—a role that, as my colleague Wade Roush has argued, will be a critical for the health of the entire sector.

Brandon Watson

So what’s the recipe for closing that gap? In a pretty revealing blog post, Windows Phone developer lead Brandon Watson lays out the roadmap his team has followed in the year or so since the software hit the market. The short version: keep it simple, be friendly, be generous, and the goodwill will be repaid—even if you’re from the Borg.

“Invest in the community. It’s very easy for someone to hate a company, but very hard to hate a person,” Watson writes.

That’s taken several forms, Watson writes, including a drive to shine the spotlight on developers.

“We don’t need any more web traffic. Any chance we can take to redirect web traffic to a partner/developer is one we should take. Same thing for speaking opportunities, inclusion in press, conferences, etc. People know who we are. They don’t know who the developers are. Investing in them early pays off huge dividends later,” he writes.

Ditching any bureaucratic “not my department” tendencies is also a huge key—one of several lessons Watson attributes to former boss Charlie Kindel.

“Yes I run the developer experience team for Windows Phone, but really, I work on Windows Phone, and that’s all customers care about. They don’t care about my title, or my org,” Watson writes. “They care about the problem they have in front of them, and not much else.”

And perhaps above all, being available and interested in the community. Watson has handed out his e-mail and phone number pretty freely, and says he spends lots of time answering mentions on Twitter. But it’s also extremely important to be available in real life—Watson points to an anecdote of some feedback he gave an Android developer, dropping any resistance to helping out a competitor.

“If I could help make him successful on Android, my hope is that when he considers his next platform, he puts Windows Phone first because one of us stopped to help him out,” Watson writes. “Trying to convince him he made a bad choice with Android can only end in tears, and he may walk away thinking that we are jerks.”

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Professional athletes marketing their mugs in endorsements is nothing new. But the explosion of digital goods and micro-entrepreneurs has opened up a ton of new ways for sports stars to make their mark, such as the mobile apps and games from the likes of Chad Ochocinco and Mike Tyson.

Seattle startup Playmark is hoping to be a broker for even more innovation in the sector by setting up an easy-to-use online marketplace for licensing rights. The startup’s first major licensing partner is a big one: the NFL Players Association, which is also a strategic investor in the company.

“We think it’s a really tough thing to crack, and we feel we have arrived maybe at a way to crack the code by partnering with the Players Association,” says Playmark co-founder and CEO George Aposporos, a former early VP of business development at Amazon.com.

What makes the sports-licensing game so tough, Aposporos explains, are all the overlapping rights held by different entities over different parts of the overall sports experience. Playmark’s deal with the players’ union, for example, allows it to license the name, number, likeness, and autograph of some 2,000 NFL players. The rights to the games themselves are held by the league, and the individual owners control all the assets associated with their teams.

Playmark says it can help make navigating that thicket seamless for entrepreneurs who want to make sports-related products. The company wants to add leagues, teams, and other sports as time goes on—and its technology can sort out all of the various rights-holders on the back end, figuring out each rights-holder’s share of any given collection of material.

The players’ union also continues to have the final say on uses of its member’s likenesses. Playmark’s guidelines lay out some of the cases that are unlikely to be approved, such as “demeaning portrayal of athletes,” “distasteful humor and language,” or “adult content and illegal gambling.” Interestingly, the union also apparently only wants games that pit a user against one athlete, not multiple players at once.

“Maybe it’s my Amazon days, but one of my favorite quotations is ‘Making something easy is hard,’” Aposporos says. “You have to democratize access across different kinds of situations and essentially unify a lot of fragmentation.”

One early example of a licensing customer is ESPN’s Sports Bar Facebook game. That game already had some licensing rights, Aposporos says, but Playmark’s broader access to the players allowed ESPN’s game to offer even more digital goods. “Now, they’re adding autograph graphics from our system to build customizable social jerseys within the game,” he says.

Another interesting case involves Electronic Arts games, which owns the Madden NFL video game franchise. Part of making that game inclues digital 3D head scans of all the players—but that asset was locked up for use in the game until now. With Playmark brokering the rights, those head scans could be used in any number of applications, including physical goods like bobblehead dolls, for instance.

The market for licensed sports merchandise is huge—Aposporos says some estimates show it at around $18 billion worldwide. At those levels, “even a high single-digit share would be not insignificant,” he says.

It’s certainly a forward-looking deal for the players’ union to cut. But they surely understand better than anyone how short-lived a pro career can be, no matter how big those paychecks look at the time. “Our players can’t wait to see what today’s creative designers and developers can dream up,” said Keith Gordon, president of the union’s for-profit licensing arm.

Playmark currently has nine people on its team and is backed by angels from the Seattle area and beyond, along with the NFL players’ union investment, Aposporos says.

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Back in August I wrote about Flite, a San Francisco startup that transformed itself from a developer of Web widgets into a cloud-based platform for rich-media, interactive ads. Today the company is taking another step, introducing a marketplace for ad components or mini-apps where advertisers will be able to pick and choose which apps to drop into their ads.

The online ad business is moving toward interactive ads because—in theory, at least—they’re more engaging and have higher click-through and conversion rates than static ads. A theater chain, for example, could choose a movie showtimes app that lets consumers buy tickets directly through Fandango, then share their moviegoing plans via Twitter or Facebook.

Each app in Flite’s new “Flite Hub” will add a certain amount to the CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, of the ads that advertisers buy. Flite will split the revenue with the apps’ developers, according to CEO Will Price.

“The goal of it is really to create an economy around components, defined as Web services,” Price says. “We’re inviting developers to come into Flite and create components that can be consumed via APIs [application programming interfaces], and we’re allowing brands to come in and pick the Web services that map to their goals and very easily drop them into an ad unit.”

At launch, Flite Hub includes apps from six Flite partners: Aditive, ChatID, ePrize, Mashery, Mass Relevance, and Movie Connect. Dave Bailey, CEO of Aura Group, the interactive agency that developed Movie Connect, says Flite’s platform will make it much easier for advertisers to integrate the app into their display ads. “We typically saw a two week turnaround time to integrate MovieConnect into ads,” Bailey said in a statement today. “Now, Flite users can now drop MovieConnect into an ad and configure it in minutes.”

Price says that Flite expects to have 20 to 30 partners listing apps in Flite Hub by the end of the year. What’s new about the service isn’t the ability for Flite customers to build interactive ads—Flite itself has been offering its own rich-media elements since its 2009 pivot. “What is really different is that we have taken this vision, of ‘componentizing’ the back end of online advertising, and made it available to non-Flite developers,” says Price. “Many of those companies have no access to the market for display-ad dollars, and now they do.”

All of which brings Flite full circle, in a way. In its previous incarnation, as Widgetbox, the company had attempted to build a marketplace for widgets—small software components backed by Web services (e.g., an allergy meter that can find today’s local pollen count based on your zip code). “The reason we never got there was that we never had a compelling value proposition for the developers,” says Price. “At that point, Facebook and Apple came along and trumped us, giving app developers a much better platform. But there is an economy now, and that economy is display advertising. So, we had to wander in the woods for a while to get there, but we have been able to resurrect that vision.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A local tech startup that has been toiling away for four years saw its first partnership with a big company come to fruition last week—and it could be a sign of bigger things to come.

Back in February, Cambridge, MA-based OfficeDrop, a digital filing software company, inked a deal with Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the speech and imaging tech firm in Burlington, MA. OfficeDrop provided the software and expertise for Nuance’s new cloud-based scanning and document-managing service, called PaperPort Anywhere, which rolled out last week.

It’s a big deal for OfficeDrop, which stands to get about $1 million in revenue from Nuance in the first year of the partnership, says Prasad Thammineni, the co-founder and CEO of OfficeDrop. Nuance’s scale could help the startup reach millions of new users—so it’s a distribution model that Thammineni is looking to replicate with other big companies in the next year or so.

OfficeDrop lets people (primarily in small businesses) organize, index, and share their digital data, and look at their documents instead of a list of files, for example. “We take visual elements of paper and replicate it,” Thammineni says. “And we bring search to the table.”

The startup sits somewhere in the middle of a swirling ecosystem of companies, many with Boston roots, offering cloud-based services like data storage (EMC), online backup (Carbonite, Backupify), paper digitizing and document management (Iron Mountain), personal file management and search (Evernote), and file hosting and sharing (Microsoft SharePoint, Box.net, and Dropbox, the astronomically-valued startup du jour).

OfficeDrop (formerly called Pixily) started in 2007 as a service to help people scan in and digitally organize their paper documents. It has evolved to include collaborative features and mobile apps, so people can scan documents and access their files from their iPhone, iPad, or Android device. The company has 20 employees, split about equally between the Boston area and Brazil, where most of its software developers are.

Interestingly, although the three founders are Indian, OfficeDrop has no employees in India. Thammineni says that’s because most software developers in India have a big-company mentality that doesn’t mesh well with a startup. Brazil, on the other hand, has a lot of “out of the box” talent that fits with the OfficeDrop culture. “They challenge you at every turn,” he says.

Thammineni’s company, his fifth so far, was self-funded in its early days. It raised a small financing round in 2009, followed by a $1 million angel round this spring—and it will be looking to raise more money this fall, he says. But for now, OfficeDrop’s main focus is on “making the product better and better,” Thammineni says. And on squaring away its next big-company deal.

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Kinvey, a mobile software startup (originally from Texas) that recently graduated from the TechStars Boston accelerator program, said today it has completed a $2 million seed financing round that was led by Atlas Venture. Avalon Ventures also participated in the round, along with Boston-area angel investors including Chris Lynch, Mike Baker, Jennifer Lum, Ty Danco, and Joe Caruso, according to BostInnovation. The idea behind Kinvey is to provide an easy cloud-based backend for mobile app developers. At TechStars’ demo day in June, Kinvey founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar joked that he was putting the “BaaS” (backend as a service) in “Badass.” Sridhar has a flair for the dramatic: last month he and chief technology officer Morgan Bickle were among the unfortunate Boston subway riders stuck underground for two hours during a morning commute. (Welcome to Boston, gentlemen.)

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The gaming industry’s ears recently perked up with news that Bungie, the studio behind the hit Xbox franchise Halo, wanted to give mobile game developers more thrust behind their products with its new Bungie Aerospace platform. It turns out that one Seattle startup was a little more interested than most.

Zipline Games, based in South Lake Union’s Founder’s Co-op offices, says today that its Moai mobile-game platform is being used to build the first offering through Bungie Aerospace. That game, called “Crimson,” is being developed by Harebrained Schemes, the imprint run by industry veteran Jordan Weisman, who once served as creative director for Microsoft Games.

As I wrote back in April, Moai attempts to take some friction out of building mobile games—an area that’s already progressing pretty fast. Moai is built around Lua, a common programming language for games, and offers a single open-source platform for both the front-end elements seen by consumers and the back-end infrastructure. Moai has been available in private beta testing for a few months, but today it’s being opened up to the wider world for a public beta.

Weisman, an adviser to Zipline, said in a news release that “the Moai platform has helped us build a great game faster than we could have otherwise. It allows us to get our ideas on to multiple hardware platforms very quickly so we can play test them on the actual devices.”

“It’s really helped take it from an alpha to a really strong beta,” Zipline CEO Todd Hooper said. “We think when people see the game, they’re going to be pretty impressed.”

Zipline also notes that Moai’s being used to deliver downloadable updates for the game Bubble Ball, an overnight success story that has garnered more than million downloads earlier this year for its teenage developer, Robert Nay. Zipline is continuing to work on its own game, Chronosaur, along with its development of Moai. In addition to Founder’s Co-op, Zipline is financed by Benaroya Capital and Groundspeak.

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Black Duck Software CEO Tim Yeaton says his Waltham, MA-based company is fulfilling a mission that it set out on when he started two and a half years ago.

“We enable organizations that are building software products and applications to use open source components successfully in their development,” Yeaton says.

Black Duck was initially known for its technology that helped software developers comply with the licenses for different open source software components they used. Yeaton says the company’s product can also help others build software with open source elements from the ground up, rather than just policing themselves.

“When used early on in the development process as part of a suite of tools, it enables organizations to accelerate software development and reduce costs,” he says.

Black Duck says it already had the” world’s definitive database of open source projects and information” from its original business, and decided to focus on creating a community for individual open source software developers. Black Duck helped accelerate that with its acquisition of Ohloh.net last year from Geeknet (NASDAQ: GKNT). Ohloh offered a free public directory of open source software and a Web community of developers working with those components. Black Duck is working on integrating Ohloh with its own code search site, Koders.com, to create “a single integrated destination for developers, a wide-angle lens into the open source ecosystem,” Yeaton says.

The company still makes money from selling its technology to enterprise software makers using open source components but connecting with developers and building up that community on its free site supports the business, Yeaton says. “We think that actually better enables the entire software industry to more effectively use open source,” Yeaton says.

Last year, Black Duck also acquired SpikeSource, a maker of software and services for identifying application components and assessing compliance. Yeaton says that deal was entirely a technology acquisition, but that it will build those capabilities into its for-fee enterprise products, as well as its free website for developers. To round it all out, Black Duck also acquired the consultancy Olliance Group, which helps companies define and drive their open source strategies, this past January. “Our products work best when they’re automating a series of well defined policies and strategies,” Yeaton says.

Black Duck has added 24 jobs this year, largely in development and services roles. The company now has about 150 employees, and has had 40 percent year-over-year sales growth for the last three years, Yeaton says. It hasn’t raised outside venture funding since 2009, and has been able to finance its own recent acquisitions.

The firm has better branded itself as the open source enablement company in the past few years, Yeaton says, and it’s going to keep going on that mission. It’s all about “enabling other organizations to drive their own innovation,” Yeaton says.

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[Updated 2:10 pm with more details throughout] It’s not just for bootleggers anymore. Today, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is making good on its promises to officially open up the Xbox 360′s Kinect motion sensor, offering a software development kit download for non-commercial uses. That means it’s aimed at “enthusiasts and academics,” some of whom the company said it invited over to its Redmond, WA campus for an all-day hackathon yesterday to start road-testing the kit.

While today’s beta version of the kit for Windows 7 isn’t aimed at commercial developers, Microsoft has already said it’s heading that way eventually, with Microsoft Research distinguished scientist Anoop Gupta telling CNet earlier this year that he thinks it could be “a meaningful business” in both software and hardware.

One of the chief areas that seems primed for Kinect’s technology is a combination with Microsoft’s recent $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, the online video-conferencing service. Gupta told me in a follow-up interview today that video-conferencing—something Microsoft calls “telepresence”—is one of the big areas he personally sees as a holding rich potential for Kinect development.

For non-gamers who may have missed all the hubbub, Kinect is a bar-shaped sensor that uses cameras, microphones, and sophisticated software to detect live movements by people playing Xbox games. It is sensitive and sharp enough to distinguish depth, sense separate people standing in the same area, notice faces and pick up on hand movements.

Interest in the device quickly spread beyond video games, inspiring all kinds of futuristic-semming motion-controlled hacks right after it hit the market in late 2010—one of the most noted early adaptations was the effort by some University of Washington engineering students to use the Kinect for research into how surgeons can better control robots to perform delicate surgeries.

Microsoft was caught off-guard by the immediate enthusiasm for Kinect hacks, at first poormouthing the phenomenon and then clarifying that it intended to open up the technology all along. I guess this week’s hackathon leaves little doubt about the company’s seriousness for developing an ecosystem around the product, but it remains to be seen how soon Microsoft will go after the commercial side.

Gupta declined to give a timeline for a commercial release, saying in Microsoft’s in-house video conference that “Although our intent is to release a commercial SDK, we’re not making any announcements about it now.”

There’s not really anything stopping someone from doing some homework ahead of time, of course, and those academics have been known to turn their research into businesses from time to time. But Gupta also reminded business-minded hackers that the programming interface could change when CNet caught up with him in April.

“For a while, it was [that] you were waiting for the SDK,” Gupta said to developers in Microsoft’s announcement. “Now, it is I am waiting to see what are the exciting things the community is … Next Page »

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Interesting news in the mobile scene today. Session M, a new Boston-area startup, announced it has raised $6.5 million in Series A financing from Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (iFund), and mobile industry leaders. Bob Davis from Highland and Matt Murphy from KPCB serve on the company’s board.

As is often the case with a new project like this, what’s interesting is all the people involved. Session M is led by co-founder and CEO Lars Albright, who was most recently with Apple, and before that, co-founded mobile-ad firm Quattro Wireless (bought by Apple early last year) and was vice president of business development at m-Qube.

Albright’s fellow co-founders at Session M are Mark Herrmann and Scott Weller, veterans of Gamesville, Lycos, GameLogic, and most recently, Meblur. So the new company is an intriguing blend of gaming and mobile advertising expertise.

Session M is solving a problem having to do with helping mobile developers find “new ways to achieve higher rates of engagement, and deliver even more rewarding experiences to their users,” according to its website. The company is clearly riding the fast growth of the mobile-app ecosystem and the evolving means by which consumers are interacting with digital content.

Presumably it will focus on Apple’s iPhone and iPad platforms, at least initially. Session M says it is looking to hire developers and technical talent “that want to get in on the ground floor of something big.”

The startup is being pretty stealthy for now, but we’ll have more details as they emerge.

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San Francisco-based StackMob, which provides programming tools, analytics, and other services to mobile developers, said today that it has raised $7.5 million in new funding. New investor Trinity Ventures led the round, which was joined by existing investors Harrison Metal and Baseline Ventures. Trinity general partner Dan Scholnick has joined StackMob’s board. The company says it plans to use the money to hire more staff and expand its product to support additional mobile platforms.

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Picking the right team can make all the difference when launching a new venture. Starting on May 21, a group of some 16 designers, engineers, and marketing professionals will gather to form teams aimed at creating startups. Founder Labs, a five week “pre-incubator” program targeting concepts for the mobile sector, is ready for its Manhattan debut.

Shaherose Charania, CEO of Founder Labs and Women 2.0, said her program was created to help teams come together and validate their ideas prior to formally launching startups. While accelerator programs such as TechStars offer existing startups seed funding and the opportunity to pitch to potential investors, Founder Labs brings together individuals who may not have completely formed their ideas yet but are eager to explore entrepreneurship.

Charania said she taps her connections with incubators, accelerators, and seed funds such as TechStars, 500 Startups, and i/o Ventures to refer in the teams from Founder Labs that show potential. The Founder Labs program, started last August in San Francisco, has run three times—twice in San Francisco and once in Menlo Park—helping would-be entrepreneurs find others with the skills and desire to bring new ideas to market.

For example, Spoondate, a company born from last October’s session of Founder Labs, is expected to launch this spring. Spoondate is a dating website for foodies with shared tastes. Charania said the company was accepted in February into the incubator program run by angel fund 500 Startups, which includes seed funding and access to investors.

Founder Labs NYC is the fourth iteration of Charania’s program and its first appearance outside of California. Charania said the 16 participants at Founder Labs NYC, chosen from more than 150 applicants, will meet in the evening Monday through Friday during the coming weeks and on some weekends. In addition to collaborating with each other, participants will present their ideas to investors and veterans of the startup community such as James Robinson, managing partner with RRE Ventures, and Winifred Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation.

San Francisco-based Founder Labs is an offshoot of Women 2.0, a venture that encourages women in the technology sector to start their own companies. Charania said Founder Labs picks a 50–50 split of men and women to participate.

Charania, an émigré from Canada, knows a little something about starting from scratch. After she earned her bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Western Ontario and spent one year abroad in Spain, she moved to the U.S. in 2005 with no money, no job, and no idea … Next Page »

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A really interesting variety of startups made their initial pitches to the broader investing crowd yesterday at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum. The 12 presenters represented a wide array of sectors, from food to retail to software services and—seriously—nuclear fusion power. “I don’t think we could have imagined a more diverse slate, in every sense of the word, than what we have today,” NWEN executive director Rebecca Lovell said.

The event itself was the culmination of a long coaching process that readies a select group of companies and entrepreneurs for their turn in front of the investor audience. And there’s a real emphasis on showcasing many different kinds of businesses—which is notable in an investing scene (and media landscape) that can seem dominated by techies.

Each of the 12 companies on display had five minutes to give a pitch (with slides), and then five finalists were grilled by a panel of venture capitalist judges: Mark Ashida from OVP Venture Partners, Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners, and Bill McAleer from Voyager Capital.

The winner was Guide Analytics, a mobile-connected bracelet and monitoring system that keeps track of edema, a swelling that can lead to hospitalizations, particularly in heart patients. Chief executive Deborah Kessler’s previous work includes time at Rosetta Informatics and NASA—”My advisers tell me I’m supposed to say, ‘I am a rocket scientist,’” she quipped. The device itself boasts low manufacturing costs, even though it has a battery, transmitters, and sensors. Investors did question whether relying on elderly heart patients to have a new smartphone for transmitting critical medical data was asking too much. Kessler said it was possible, however, to work with patients who have a lower-end cell phone. The company won a year of free office space from Martin Selig Real Estate.

I put together these snapshots from the four other finalists, and you can check out the longer list of participants over at NWEN.

—Snuggle Cloud is a private, one-on-one social network for couples—especially those in long-distance relationships. Co-founders Emily Marshall and Kiran Gollu were actually in separate long-distance relationships themselves. Their idea is that, although Facebook is hugely popular, people are not going to post a bunch of lovey-dovey stuff in the wild where anyone else can read it. Snuggle Cloud is … Next Page »

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Chalk up another sign of the explosive growth in mobile and casual gaming—Seattle’s PopCap Games, makers of the hit games Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies, has set up an “experimental” second label for feeding their weirder side. Yes, even weirder than a Zombie bobsled team.

The new studio and label is called 4th & Battery, a tribute to PopCap’s headquarters address. The second label is intended to help feed the PopCap team’s creative juices by offering a sandbox for coming up with far-out games in a more fast-twitch manner, the company said in a statement. Ed Allard, PopCap’s executive vice president of studios, described the new shop as “a pressure valve,” recognizing that the normal development process can be long and intensive for creative types who like to have fun with their work.

“4th & Battery gives us a way to quickly try really strange or marginal ideas, and to give our designers a safe area to hone their chops,” Allard said. PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka added that 4th & Battery also won’t have “the typical concerns like schedules, profitability, or even target audience. It’s kind of the video game equivalent of B-sides or short films.”

It’s an interesting move for a maturing company like PopCap, which has been around since 2000. It certainly has the resources to let its developers run loose, now that it claims 56 games and more than 400 employees, and has been edging toward a possible public offering. On one hand, I could see something like 4th & Battery functioning just as advertised—a place to capitalize on PopCap employees’ creative side without restrictions or expectations. That’s probably a good way to keep talent—and their wild ideas—in the building at a time when many of them could be hearing siren songs from other talent-hungry companies.

But this indie-label approach also could function as a faster-moving development pipeline that adds new streams of revenue pretty quickly. One of the casual game industry’s major advantages over traditional console gaming is a quick development cycle. That’s led to some tension within the broader gaming world, but it’s also clear that technological improvements are going to make game development even quicker than it is today. On top of that, PopCap’s 4th & Broadway experiment is a potential play on a broader market, as PopCap says the games coming out of 4th & Battery will include titles aimed solidly at a “mature audience.” I read that to mean people—particularly guys—who love games but don’t want to download some of the cutesier titles out there.

The first game coming out of 4th & Battery definitely fits that mold. It’s Unpleasant Horse, which involves keeping a skull-bedecked black Pegasus flying through the air and sending nicer creatures into a field of meat grinders below. The demo video includes an awesome heavy-metal theme song that really makes me think we should resurrect our Battle of the Tech Bands.

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A downer in local tech-job news: Sony Online Entertainment is closing its game development office in Bellevue, WA, part of a broader downsizing that also includes the shutdown of offices in Denver, CO and Tucson, AZ. The company’s statement also says it is stopping work on the undelivered game “The Agency” to focus efforts on new massively multiplayer online games. A total of 205 jobs are being cut, the company said, although it didn’t say how many were from each location.

The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley notes that “Sony spent millions on the game and at one point employed more than 100 developers at the Bellevue studio,” including some lured over from Microsoft to start the office in the fall of 2004. Neither the Times nor GeekWire could get a definitive answer from Sony on how many jobs would be lost in the Seattle area.

Sony’s statement said the development work from the Denver and Tucson offices is being transferred to the San Diego, CA headquarters. The Sony Online Entertainment site still had a blurb about “The Agency” on its site as of Thursday evening, describing it as a chance to “live the life of an elite agent in a world of superspies and rugged mercenaries, who use both high technology and low tactics to accomplish their missions and goals.” The release date was listed as TBA.

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Another month gone by in Seattle, and another Silicon Valley company has moved in to establish a beachhead for recruiting tech workers. And they all seem to say the same thing: This area is rich with talent.

That’s certainly true—not to mention cheaper, compared to the Bay Area. But all of those companies often wind up chasing the same pool of experienced workers—a pool that Washington state isn’t adding to fast enough by cranking out computer science graduates of its own.

It’s a situation that can’t be sustained if the region is to maintain its prominence in the tech world. And if it isn’t fixed soon, some worry that the mega-companies currently feeding the pipeline—namely Microsoft and Amazon—could tire of poaching and immigration woes and cut off the supply, establishing more satellite offices where the workers already live rather than investing a lot to recruit them to the Northwest and then lose them.

“They have to spend a lot of money to recruit talent around the world to come here,” says Eric Schinfeld, who works on regional economic development for the Prosperity Partnership. “If I’m Microsoft, how long do I want to subsidize everybody else stealing my employees?”

Here are the big numbers: In the second quarter of this year, state labor economists expect about 88,400 people in King County will be employed in computer science-related jobs. That figure is projected to rise to almost 95,000 by 2013, and climb to about 105,000 by 2018. Between 2013 and 2018, labor economists expect the number of job openings to average nearly 3,700 per year.

Washington’s colleges aren’t churning out enough grads to get those precious jobs. According to U.S. Department of Education statistics, fewer than 1,000 computer science degrees were granted to master’s and bachelor’s students in the 2008-09 school year across all colleges in the state—a positively middling performance. Washington schools ranked 23rd among states in producing computer science bachelor’s degrees, with 736, and 24th in master’s degrees, with 213. The state is getting beaten in those rankings not just by the usual suspects—California and Massachusetts—but also by states like Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri.

Meanwhile, the slow economic recovery is crimping our sales-tax dependent state budget, which means Washington’s almost entirely public university system is not likely to see large, sustainable additions in enrollment anytime soon. It’s ironic: The tech sector is robust, expanding, and pays well. But that economic performance doesn’t show up very well in the flow of money feeding educational growth, because Washington doesn’t have an income tax. So in some ways, the slower parts of the economy wind up holding back the pipeline of talent for the parts that are charging ahead.

Ed Lazowska, the the University of Washington’s Bill & Melinda Gates chairman in computer science, says the last sustainable increase in state spending for higher education enrollments was … Next Page »

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Skyhook Wireless may have won the audience favorite vote during the “location smackdown” at Xconomy’s Mobile Madness conference last week, but people in the tech-business community are still wondering: what’s next for the firm?

Boston-based Skyhook, founded in 2003, is a pioneer in location-positioning technology for mobile devices. The company’s software determines the precise location of a device based on data from Wi-Fi networks, cellular towers, and GPS satellites. The technology is deployed in thousands of mobile apps and tens of millions of devices worldwide, made by the likes of Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Dell, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Sony.

But the company hit a rough patch last year. In July, Skyhook confirmed that Apple dropped its location-finding software from the latest iPhone (and the iPad) in favor of Apple’s own technology. And in September, Skyhook filed a pair of lawsuits against Google, alleging that the search and advertising giant infringed on Skyhook’s patents with its in-house location system, and also interfered with contracts Skyhook had with Motorola and Samsung last spring (to put Skyhook’s software on the manufacturers’ Android phones).

Many observers have interpreted those competitive interactions as a serious threat to Skyhook’s business. The question I’ve been hearing on the street from tech entrepreneurs is, does Skyhook need to reinvent itself, or “pivot” in a big way?

Not so much, says Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s founder and CEO. The company’s current growth plans are “less a pivot” than a question of “how do we do more?” he says. In an interview last week, Morgan laid out his firm’s plans to compete on different types of devices and in a wider range of mobile applications. He also had more to say about the situation with Apple and Google, and its broader significance to startups and the mobile industry.

Reading between the lines, my take is that the company is adjusting its strategy because of these tech giants—it really has to—but it’s not a drastic change. (Then again, if Skyhook were planning to make a big strategic shift, it wouldn’t want Google and Apple to know about it.)

Morgan began by giving a high-level pshaw to naysayers who think Skyhook’s core business is petering out. “The strategy is more sound than ever,” he says. “Google is the only competitor. We own all the intellectual property around it. While the Google [litigation] is a headache, you couldn’t ask for a better market to be in.”

What’s more, he touts Skyhook’s ability to “get around Google” by working … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Harmonix, the music-gaming company behind Rock Band and Dance Central, said today it has been sold by Viacom (NYSE: VIA) to Columbus Nova, a private equity firm based in New York. Financial terms were not disclosed in the press release, and Harmonix was not immediately available for comment.

“We’re excited to be returning to our roots as an independent and privately owned studio,” said Harmonix representative John Drake in a blog post.

Viacom announced its plans to sell off Harmonix last month. Speculation had swirled around whether Electronic Arts or another big publisher would snap up the studio, which was founded in 1995 and bought by Viacom/MTV Networks for $175 million in 2006. Now it looks like Harmonix will be free to form partnerships with the big game distributors while maintaining its independence.

[Disclosure: I'm in a band with one current employee and one former employee of Harmonix. The band, Honest Bob & the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, has songs in Harmonix games.]

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