Early-stage tech financings are still chugging along, it seems. On the heels of yesterday’s news of a $5.25 million financing of Seattle stealth startup Doxo, I checked in with Keith McCall of Bellevue, WA-based Enroute Systems, a maker of parcel-shipping management software, to hear the latest on his company’s recent financing.

McCall, the company’s founder and CEO, says Enroute has closed an oversubscribed Series A round worth a total of $810,000. That includes more than $500,000 from Keiretsu Forum Northwest earlier this year, and a new investment (as of October) from W.R. “Ford” Smith, the founder of PetSmart. Other investors include Zino Society and Puget Sound Venture Club. (The Series A round also includes $60,000 that Enroute won in Zino Society’s investment forum this fall.)

Enroute makes a Web-based software platform that helps businesses choose the cheapest and fastest delivery service—international, national, or regional carriers—to ship their packages. McCall says the software reduces companies’ shipping costs by about 30 percent.

The startup has moved into new 4,500-square-foot digs in Bellevue—near the Burgermaster and Microsoft’s original offices—as of the start of November. It is now up to a dozen employees and has signed more than 50 business customers, including Zumiez, Natural Partners, Renton Western Wear, Theo Chocolate, BikeWagon.com, and Lumber Liquidators.

McCall, who previously founded Seattle-based e-mail and communications management firm Azaleos, says he expects Enroute to be profitable in the first half of next year, and is now focused on expanding its customer base.

With that in mind, he is already getting ready to raise more money. “For those investors who would like to join our existing angel investors today, we are immediately opening a $500K convertible note, which we anticipate converting to a Series B offering in 2010,” McCall says. He adds that the next formal capital raise “is targeted as a $3 million Series B.”

McCall says that next financing round will be focused on expanding the company’s shipping-management services to Asia and Europe. “We’re interested in continuing our momentum,” he says. “There’s huge opportunity for us to significantly reduce cost for businesses of all sizes.”

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For Mik Kersten, it all started when he saw Maria Klawe speak at the University of British Columbia. It was the mid-1990s, and Klawe, a distinguished mathematician and computer scientist—now the president of Harvey Mudd College and recently appointed to Microsoft’s board of directors—was giving a lecture to students and faculty. “She talked about her hippie days traveling in India, and it convinced me to switch to computer science,” Kersten says.

Kersten was an undergrad at UBC studying anthropology. Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of Tasktop Technologies, a Vancouver, BC-based startup that is working to reinvent user interfaces for software developers and other knowledge workers so they can be much more productive. It is one of those quiet Northwest success stories you probably haven’t heard much about yet, but you will—Tasktop is profitable, and has recently signed a number of important deals with the likes of IBM and Microsoft.

The company’s basic idea is to organize work around tasks, instead of files, folders, or Web pages. Kersten’s “task-focused interface” builds tools and information around the specific task you are trying to accomplish—writing code to import digital media into a library, say, or analyzing trends in a database. Tasktop’s software automatically gathers screenshots, notes, e-mails, and other information related to the task at hand and puts it on your desktop in a single handy spot for reference. If you come back to the task an hour later, or a week later, your desktop is returned to where you left off.

It’s a far cry from the way most people work on tasks today, using tools that are glorified Windows Explorer or Mac Finder applications, or Outlook or Google search tools that make you scroll through tons of results, Kersten says. As a software engineer himself, he had felt quite a bit of personal pain. “I was getting bad RSI [repetitive strain injury] in my forearms,” he says. “I was spending more time looking for the information I needed to write code than actual coding.”

Kersten’s early career path took him to Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) in Silicon Valley, where he worked on user interfaces until 2003. There, he was exposed to a technology called “degree of interest trees.” This is a type of interface that lets you navigate large, branching structures of information. The amount of detail displayed is based on your level of interest in each item, so you don’t get swamped with lots of information about low-priority matters. As Kersten explains, this “makes it easier for programmers to work with very complex systems”—like having to refer to millions of lines of code, or search through 100,000 files. “Programmers get completely overloaded with information,” he says. “It’s extremely difficult to find what they’re looking for.”

After a six-month stint at Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software (billionaire Charles Simonyi’s company), Kersten decided to quit industry to do fundamental research on how to improve …Next Page »

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[Updated 12:25pm, 10/20/09. See correction below] Seattle-based Azaleos is announcing today it is releasing new software and services to help companies manage Microsoft Office Communications Server, which is a software platform for instant messaging, Internet telephony, and video conferencing over the Web. It’s a strong move for Azaleos that expands its product line beyond management services for e-mail and collaborative software, and into managing “unified communications”—all forms of company communication run by a single system.

Azaleos is best known for the services it provides to help companies manage their Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers and Microsoft SharePoint collaborative networks.

Last spring, Azaleos established itself in the realm of SharePoint server management. The company also merged with North Carolina-based M3 Technology Group, doubling its size and solidifying its position in e-mail and other communications management. Azaleos now has about 125 employees, and is backed by Ignition Partners, Frontier Capital, and Second Avenue Partners.

“Anybody who follows the IT industry sees the promise of the concept of unified communications, integrating real-time and non real-time,” says Scott Gode, vice president of product management and marketing for Azaleos. “It’s important for Azaleos to get in early.”

These days, companies typically implement instant messaging first, Gode says, and then follow up with conferencing and Internet telephony for their employees. [An earlier version of this article mixed up the order of these services. We regret the error---Eds.] Azaleos provides extensive consulting to help companies deal with the complexities of running and monitoring these features using Microsoft’s Office Communications Server. (Microsoft is a leader in the space, though it competes with Cisco and others.) Azaleos breaks even on its consulting service and looks to make its profits on the management service, Gode says. This is different from big companies like Accenture or IBM, which tend to make more on consulting fees.

So who’s the target customer for Azaleos? “The sweet spot in general for our business is a 500 to 5,000-seat company,” Gode says. “They’ll assume a little more risk [in moving from telephony to IP telephony].” He adds that companies typically can save 30 to 50 percent of the cost of running communication systems by using Azaleos.

Gode says the company has also been “pushing aggressively into Europe.” In late August, Azaleos opened a new office in London that employs five people. He says the company is now selling to more companies based in Europe, such as Mediq, a Dutch pharmaceutical firm.

Lastly, I asked Gode where Azaleos is in terms of its cash flow. From his response, it sounds like the company is still in a growth and expansion mode, rather than hunkering down and getting profitable. “We’re flirting with profitability, and I mean that in a good way,” he says. “Business is good.”

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Call it the iPhone “2G.” Two Seattle-area startups that start with the letter “G” are rolling out new iPhone apps today. OK, this would not normally make significant news for us, because new apps appear on a daily basis, but each of these cases provides an interesting update to the company’s mobile strategy, so here we go:

—Glympse has been on a tear since May, when co-founder and CEO Bryan Trussel said the Seattle-area company first started offering its location-sharing service on mobile phones. The idea of the software is that your friends and business contacts can get an immediate “glympse” of where you are on a map, automatically, for a certain amount of time that you set. Today’s announcement that Glympse is available as a free download on the iPhone is no surprise. Last week, the startup’s service was named a showcase application in Windows Marketplace for Mobile, and the company has been working on its iPhone app for some time. It’s all part of Glympse’s strategy to build a mass-consumer audience based on a free service, before working up to paid models and location-based ads.

—Gist has also been picking up steam, in a very different market. The Seattle-based company, led by founder and CEO T.A. McCann, focuses on giving consumers and business customers information about their e-mail and social-network contacts in a quick and easy way. The goal is to help people manage their relationships more efficiently, for example, by feeding them updates from all over the Web about their contacts. Gist opened up to the public last month, and McCann told me then that the company had done some optimization for the iPhone and was more broadly improving its mobile version. The new iPhone app, which is free, makes sense for busy professionals who want to scan the latest info on whoever they’re meeting next, from blogs, articles, and social media, right before their appointment. It also fits into Gist’s strategy for bridging e-mail, search, and social media in order to help people manage all that information.

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Every time I look at Gist, it’s a little different. Given it’s a scrappy startup trying to navigate the worlds of e-mail, social networking, business software, and Web search—each a huge market opportunity, each hugely competitive—this is probably a good thing.

The Seattle company, backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Colorado-based Foundry Group, is announcing today that its software, which has been in private beta trials for the past year, is now available to the general public. Gist bills itself as an online service that helps people manage their personal and professional relationships more efficiently.

The basic idea is to provide a Web dashboard that finds your contacts from your e-mail inbox and social networks (Outlook, Gmail, Twitter, Salesforce.com), and keeps you up to date about these contacts—even ranking their importance—through online information from blogs, articles, tweets, and updates on Facebook and LinkedIn. So, before your next business meeting, instead of having to Google around or search on Twitter to get up to speed on notable developments, Gist will surface any recent activity involving your contact, says Gist founder and CEO T.A. McCann.

It’s an ambitious product. Since the company’s $6.75 million Series A funding round from Vulcan and Foundry Group was announced in May, Gist has buckled down and focused on listening to customers (about 10,000 and counting) and improving its software and interface. It also moved into new office space near Qwest Field.

Among the new wrinkles in the software: Gist can filter information based on which people you’re meeting with this week, or which people you’ve exchanged new e-mail with; the software can also hook into customer relationship management through your Salesforce.com contacts; you can invite other people to try Gist, so there’s a viral component to the product distribution.

“There are probably a whole bunch of users who can get a lot out of Gist,” McCann says. “We think Gist is something people will want to talk about and share with other professionals.”

For now, the software is free, and will remain so for the rest of the year. But come early next …Next Page »

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I spent nine years working for a Customer Relationship Management software provider called Onyx Software. Our CRM systems were (at the time) largely implemented and run on-site at our customers’ locations. I ran the Professional Services team for the Americas—we were responsible for aligning business strategy with our software implementations, conducting business modeling, installing and customizing our software, performing training, and supporting our product.

Today I run Deneki Outdoors, a company that owns and operates fly fishing lodges in Alaska, British Columbia, the Bahamas, and Chile. We’ve got six year-round employees spread across those locations, and 40 folks who work for us seasonally.

What in the world could you learn at an enterprise software company that also applies to a fly fishing lodge business? Here are three big lessons.

—As a small business in 2009, you probably don’t need to own a single server.

Just a few years ago, running sophisticated business systems like CRM, financials, document management, and heck, even e-mail and calendaring, meant buying enterprise software packages, installing them on servers that you own and maintain, and paying a person or a team of people to keep things running smoothly. In 2009, the vast majority of small business functions can be supported by hosted applications that are simple, cheap, and close to zero maintenance.

Our business runs on Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and hosted Quickbooks. Other modern productivity tools like Skype help too, but our ability to run our core business functions on hosted platforms leads to a huge savings for us in terms of time and money. We don’t own a single server. We’ve never had to perform an upgrade. Customization is a piece of cake. Our “core systems” have been down for all of about three hours in the past five years combined.

If you run a small business, let the SaaS [software as a service] folks do the dirty work …Next Page »

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My favorite limerick of all time came printed on the bottom of a coffee cup:

All hail the goddess Caffeina!
She hangs out by the coffee machina.
We’re all on the run
But we get more work done
Since coffee came onto the scena!

Yes, this anonymous ditty breaks the rules of limericks, principally by mangling the meter and using made-up words like “machina” and “scena.” But it’s the sentiment that appeals to me. I do get more work done because of coffee. If the sprightly elixir was good for Voltaire, who is said to have consumed 50 cups a day, I figure it must be good for me.

I also get more work done because of e-mail. And because of the Web, and RSS feeds, and Google, and Twitter, and my iPhone and my MacBook and my Kindle—all of the tools, in short, that are melting our brains and impoverishing our communications, according to a circle of naysayers who have been very busy lately publishing books and articles with titles like Digital Barbarism and The Cult of the Amateur and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Technology criticism is an invaluable strain in our culture that stretches back to such brilliant writers as Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, Marshall McLuhan, and Jane Jacobs. But to tell the truth, I don’t give much more credence to the recent anti-digital jeremiads than I do to the periodic warnings—always swiftly overturned by medical authorities—that caffeine is bad for your health.

The latest addition to the curmudgeon’s club is John Freeman, the acting editor of the UK-based literary quarterly Granta, who published a so-called “manifesto for slow communication” in the August 21 Wall Street Journal. The essay, which was adapted from Freeman’s forthcoming book The Tyrrany of E-Mail, argues that living in such close and constant proximity to our e-mail inboxes stresses us out, cuts us off from the physical world, and undermines our communication skills. Freeman thinks that spending all day writing and answering e-mail amounts to “simulated busyness” rather than genuine productivity. And he believes that the only way to restore sanity is to “step off this hurtling machine,” jabber less, and think more. “We need to learn to use [e-mail] far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives,” Freeman writes.

There are certainly days when I’d love to ignore my e-mail. Thursdays, for example, when I’m supposed to be writing this column. As Freeman rightly notes, “We need time to shape and design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean,” and it would be wonderful, on those days, to have a few uninterrupted hours to take his advice. But I know that closing the e-mail tab in my browser would be as unwise as …Next Page »

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On Friday, I wrote about the corporate culture of six Northwest tech startups, boiled down to one word each. From “paranoid” to “easy,” from “humble” to “obsessed,” these companies—which spanned business software, mobile, gaming, and other areas—clearly follow the lead of their CEOs and founders.

Here are three more, from the tech worlds of Internet, healthcare-IT, and e-mail and information discovery. Keep ‘em coming.

Gist (Seattle)
CEO: T.A. McCann
Culture: “Focused”
Comments: With $6.75 million in new funding last spring and an aggressive new set of beta releases, Gist is helping more and more customers manage their e-mail and information flow. (We had to disqualify McCann’s other word choice, “metrics-driven.” No hyphens!)

Talyst (Bellevue, WA)
CEO: Carla Corkern
Culture: “Safety”
Comments: Talyst helps pharmacies manage medications safely, efficiently, and reliably. Corkern says her staff is focused “on doing whatever we can to help our customers increase patient safety. This permeates our culture to test exhaustively, share problems early and broadly, and to work tirelessly when we identify a potential problem.”

TeachStreet (Seattle)
CEO: Dave Schappell
Culture: “Growth”
Comments: Having recently raised $1.2 million in new funding and expanded to seven metro areas around the U.S., TeachStreet is looking to gain some serious traction in the student-teacher networking space.

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Sometimes we’re so busy doing new stuff here at Xconomy that we don’t have time to actually let you know about it. So here’s a handy list of things that have been happening at the company this summer that you might have missed.

—We published our first premium product, Startup School: The Xconomy Guide to Venture Incubators. Here on the site, there’s a free list of the 19 programs we canvassed where early-stage startups can obtain mentoring and seed funding. For $45 (going up to $60 on September 1), you can buy the full report, which contains details about the programs’ application deadlines and procedures, stipend and equity policies, notable graduates, and more.

—With help from Providence, RI-based Mofuse, we launched a mobile version of Xconomy at http://m.xconomy.com. It contains all the same great content as the full Xconomy site, but in a format that’s quick to load and easy to read on mobile devices.

—The first Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepeneurship drew a standing-room-only crowd on June 24. Ryan wrote a nice summary and Bob gave props to everyone who helped.

—We moved our Cambridge headquarters from a funky but tiny former dentist’s office at 10 Rogers Street to a funky and gigantic space in the venerable Foundry Works building at 101 Rogers Street.

—Our first Seattle Battle of the Tech Bands, co-hosted with the Washington Technology Industry Association, was a huge smash on July 30, garnering great reviews from The Seattle Times, TechFlash, and nPost. The winning bands: Indigo Soul (Audience Favorite) and Lions Ambition (Most Innovative).

—As always, we offer many ways to access Xconomy. You can sign up for e-mail newsletters, including newsletters pertaining specifically to subject areas like information technology or life sciences, or to news from Xconomy’s home cities of Boston, San Diego, and Seattle. Ditto for our RSS feeds.

—We’re very active on Twitter. Staffers tweet about a variety of Xconomy stories at @Xconomy. And several of us tweet regularly from our personal accounts: You can follow Bob at @bbuderi, Luke at @ldtimmerman, Ryan at @Ryan_McBride, and me at @wroush.

—If you want to distribute the full text of an Xconomy article to clients, customers, or colleagues, it’s easier than ever to buy a reprint.

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As a device for managing your e-mail, the Apple iPhone isn’t bad, but it does have a few quirks and limitations. This week, I want to write about two brand-new applications that work around those failings, making the iPhone into a far more powerful tool for staying connected.

The first app grabbed my attention because of my recent brush with almost-literal highway robbery. My drive to Michigan last week to visit my parents took me through southern Ontario. Soon after I crossed over Buffalo’s Peace Bridge into Fort Erie, this astonishing little SMS message popped up on my iPhone: “AT&T Free Message: International data rate of $15.00/MB applies. Unlimited domestic data rate plan does NOT apply outside the U.S.”

I immediately put my phone into airplane mode, fearful of receiving any more SMS messages or e-mails, which, at $15 per megabyte, would have cost me more than the gas I was burning. That meant I was effectively off the grid during the four hours it took to cross this little corner of Canada. I survived the hardship—but the experience did highlight the problem that outrageous roaming charges can pose for travelers who use mobile e-mail a lot.

As it happens, a new app called reMail can take some of the sting out of this dilemma. It went live in the iTunes App Store yesterday, and I learned about it from Jessica Livingston at Y Combinator, the California venture incubator where reMail got its start. ReMail stores your entire e-mail archive on your iPhone, which means you can read your messages without ever having to go online. You can’t do that with the iPhone’s built-in mail application, which only keeps the last 50 messages. ReMail also lets you search the full text of all your messages—which, again, the built-in mail app can’t do. (In a recent update, Apple added a search function to the mail app that can scan older messages stored in the cloud, but it’s limited to the subject line and the sender and recipient addresses.)

“I live in e-mail while I’m traveling—all my meetings are scheduled via e-mail,” says Gabore Cselle, the founder of San Francisco-based NextMail, the one-man startup behind reMail. “So I need access to my e-mails, all the time. Building an app which would let me take all my e-mail with me seemed like a good idea. And it’s saving me money.”

I’ve been testing reMail, and so far it’s working exactly as advertised. The app connects to your Web-based e-mail account—it works with Gmail and any IMAP-enabled e-mail service—and sucks down your entire e-mail archive. That process can take a while (reMail spent about eight hours downloading the 78,000 messages in my Gmail archive) but the upside is that you only have to do it once. After that, each time you start the app, it just grabs your most recent messages.

What’s amazing about reMail is that it uses a relatively small amount of your iPhone’s memory. My 78,000 Gmail messages are taking up about 4.3 gigabytes of space on Google’s servers. But the reMail database on my iPhone is about one-tenth that size: 432 megabytes. “Compressing your e-mails down to a size that people would find acceptable” was one of the three biggest technical hurdles to making reMail work, Cselle says. Exactly how he pulled that off is “a state secret,” he jokes, but part of the solution was to grab just the text of each message, not attachments, which take up about 70 percent of the storage space at Gmail, according to Cselle.

“We ‘lazy load’ attachments,” he says, adding, “We download them to your iPhone when you first click on them, and then keep it there permanently. Once open, you can be confident that you’ll have that PDF or JPG with you wherever you go.” Of course, the more attachments you download, the more space reMail will take up on your phone.

The only problem I’ve experienced with reMail is that it sometimes fails to connect with Gmail, but I suspect the problem is on Google’s side—lately I’ve been seeing all sorts of server errors and delays with Gmail on the Web, too. (What’s up with that, Google?)

Cselle says he got the idea for reMail because his parents live in Switzerland, and every time he visits them, he gets the same AT&T text message about …Next Page »

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The big news of the week was Microsoft’s sale of Razorfish to Publicis (see directly below), but there were a few other important deals in software, biotech, and energy.

—Microsoft’s online advertising subsidiary, Seattle-based Razorfish, was bought by French marketing firm Publicis for approximately $530 million, as Bob reported. The payment is expected to include cash and Publicis Groupe treasury shares. In addition, Microsoft and Publicis have entered into a five-year strategic alliance whereby Publicis clients can purchase display and search advertising from Microsoft on favorable terms. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) originally acquired Razorfish in its 2007 purchase of aQuantive.

—Bellevue, WA-based Confirma, a medical imaging software firm, has been acquired by Merge Healthcare, a Milwaukee, WI-based health IT provider, for about $22 million, as Eric reported. Merge will incorporate Confirma’s MRI software into its IT offerings for doctors.

—Vancouver, BC-based Tekmira (TSX: TKM) formed a two-year partnership with Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals to develop new particles to deliver RNA-interference drugs to diseased cells deep in the body, as Ryan reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t given. Alnylam is funding the research effort and has exclusive rights to new discoveries, while Tekmira can use the discoveries for some of its own RNAi treatment programs.

—Seattle-based EnerG2 won $21.3 million in federal stimulus funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a new manufacturing plant in Albany, OR. The University of Washington energy-storage spinout is developing nano-scale materials to make better ultracapacitors for electric and hybrid vehicles and other applications.

—A few more terms of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, in which Yahoo will use Bing as its search engine and will control ad sales for five years, were spelled out in a filing with the SEC. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will pay Yahoo $50 million a year for three years to cover transition and implementation costs. It will also hire 400 Yahoo employees, plus another 150 to assist with the transition. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) can opt out of the deal if it isn’t approved within a year, or if Microsoft and Yahoo’s combined share of the search market dips below an undisclosed percentage.

—Seattle-based Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY), a developer of cancer drugs, raised $15 million by securing commitments from investors to buy new shares and warrants, as Luke reported. Last week, the company said a small group of lung cancer patients showed long-lasting responses after taking Stimuvax, the immune-boosting vaccine therapy Oncothyreon is co-developing with Germany-based Merck KGaA.

—Seattle-based WatchGuard Technologies, a network security company, acquired Toronto-based BorderWare Technologies, an e-mail and Web security firm, as Eric reported. Financial terms were not given. WatchGuard plans to use BorderWare’s technology to make its security software more comprehensive and competitive.

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Colin Wong called me from Malaysia last night. His startup, Bellevue, WA-based Sharein (formerly ZoeCity), has rolled out an interesting new product and website today—a bookmark tool for sharing links with friends, family, and customers to Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail, all from your Web browser.

It’s not earth-shattering technology, but it’s part of a new generation of browser-based social media tools that are changing how people browse and share information online. Wong’s startup seems to have a lot in common with other sharing sites like Cambridge, MA-based Shareaholic, and Mountain View, CA-based ShareThis. “The goal is convenience, to make it easy for the user,” Wong says. “It’s not a power tool, but for the average user who wants to share.”

What differentiates Sharein from the competition, Wong says, is the ability to combine sharing to social media sites with all forms of e-mail, as well as providing analytics on things like how many people have re-shared a given link and its overall reach. “Once we get more traction, we’ll expand on the consumer side,” Wong says. He adds that once his team has more data on how people are using the tool, Sharein can add recommended links and other features that will be more attractive to advertisers.

“It’s going to gain a lot of momentum,” he says. “You look at Twitter, there’s quite a lot of sharing. We’re finding the older generation is more comfortable with e-mail, but the new generation is basically doing link sharing through Twitter.”

Wong has been CEO of the company since 2007, when it was founded as ZoeCity, a social network for the Christian community, by entrepreneurs Rocky Tannehill and Jyde Ojo. Previously, Wong worked for Google on the AdSense product team from 2002 to 2006. Originally based in Silicon Valley, he moved to Seattle in early 2005 and worked out of Google’s Fremont office.

Sharein currently has 10 employees—four in Bellevue, and six developers in Malaysia. The company is backed by angel investors, and Wong says he will probably look for additional funding towards the end of this year.

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Seattle-based WhitePages, the Web and mobile online directory, announced today it has redesigned its website for $2.5 million. The site is meant to help customers across the U.S. connect with each other by phone, text, e-mail, or snail mail. It includes new privacy controls and a user interface intended to improve services for customers and advertisers. WhitePages was founded in 1997 and is led by CEO Alex Algard.

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San Diego’s TelCentris is announcing an upgrade to its VoxOx universal communicator service that includes a personal assistant feature, a virtual service that can answer your phone calls and route them according to your personal preferences. With the technology, you can direct phone calls from a family phone to reach you on your cell phone, office phone, or home phone—and you can send phone calls from that pesky sales rep to your voicemail.

The company says VoxOx is meant to solve your personal communications overload by unifying all the different methods that you use to communicate into a single user interface. While the startup faces a number of larger rivals—such as Google Voice—that offer unified communications service, TelCentris executives maintains that its service represents a different proposition than Google Voice or Skype. “There’s really no other product like it that’s out there,” says TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz.

TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz

Before today’s announcement, Hertz told me that while some rivals have combined communication services, most “unified communications” are usually done within the limits of an enterprise software application. Microsoft Exchange Server, for example, enables users to get audio voicemail messages, faxes, and e-mail delivered in their mailboxes, and lets them access their mailboxes from their cell phones or wireless devices.

In contrast, Hertz says VoxOx is “technology agnostic.” Unlike Google Voice, Hertz says VoxOx can be used to integrate a variety of communications services from a variety of third-party providers. So a VoxOx user can combine his or her existing phone number with their Gmail or Microsoft e-mail service and an outside instant messaging provider such as Yahoo, AIM, MSN, as well as social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. “We’re not necessarily here to replace them, but we are here to organize them,” Hertz says.

The new VoxOx service—which is free—also aggregates the user’s list of contacts from different sources into a universal address book that is part of an iPhone-like graphical user interface. “We go much deeper than any of these other tools do individually,” says Hertz.

For example, if you use the VoxOx desktop display to update …Next Page »

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The private e-mail addresses of several hundred customers of Waltham, MA-based Pixily were accidentally shared with other customers Saturday in the aftermath of an Internet routing snafu that left many users unable to reach the document-scanning service for several hours.

The breach, in which names intended for the “bcc” line of a customer service e-mail explaining the routing problem were put into the “cc” line instead, was the result of “human error,” according to Pixily co-founder and chief product officer Anand Rajaram.

The shared data included e-mail addresses only, and involved only a small fraction of Pixily’s customer list—not the entire list, as Fidelity Ventures’ Larry Cheng posted on Twitter today.

“We view customer security and privacy extremely seriously, and we have a level of trust with the people who use us,” Rajaram told Xconomy. “Our customers have been pretty supportive [about the problems] so far.”

In his own tweet this afternoon, Pixily CEO Prasad Thammineni said the e-mail system used to send out the customer service alerts was not the same one used to communicate with customers about their confidential scanned documents. “[The] entire management is in the office to address this issue and to make sure it does not happen again,” Thammineni wrote to Xconomy.

Update 10:45 pm 7/11/09: Pixily has posted an entry on its company blog (and a comment on this story, see below) apologizing for the e-mail error. The post says that the company will automate customer service communications in the future to eliminate the possibility of human error, and it is offering affected users one envelope’s worth of free document scanning.

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Dedham, MA-based Sonian, which provides cloud-based e-mail archiving services, has raised $4.1 million out of a planned $6.6 million private stock offering, according to regulatory documents filed yesterday. Prism Ventureworks partner William Kohler is named as a Sonian board member.

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Paul Allen has still got it. The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist announced today the launch of a new Seattle company, Xiant, and the public beta version of its software tools for organizing your e-mail inbox. Xiant (pronounced “Zi-ant,” which rhymes with “giant”) is being run in-house at Vulcan Technologies, the company that handles all of Allen’s tech work. Chris Purcell, the vice president of Vulcan Technologies, is in charge of the startup, which is apparently Allen’s first foray into consumer software since he left Microsoft back in 1983.

The Xiant software being released today (Xiant Filer) is a Microsoft Office Outlook add-on designed to make e-mail systems more efficient by learning your filing preferences, making filing recommendations automatically, and filing long threads of related e-mails all at once. Other software tools are currently under development. The startup currently has no outside employees or additional funding.

The project began as a personal project for Allen, who grew tired of manually filing huge volumes of e-mails in his Outlook inbox. According to Vulcan Technologies, it worked so well for Allen that the whole organization started using it.

Xiant will sell the software online only (”no sales force or packaged product”), according to Vulcan spokesman David Postman, and version 1.0 should be on sale in about 60 days. In the meantime, you can download the beta version for free at http://www.xiant.com.

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Back in March, I wrote a column about Google Voice, the reincarnated version of a voicemail unification service that Google acquired from Grand Central back in 2007. The free service gives you a single phone number for life that isn’t tied to any particular land line or cellular device—instead, calls ring through to whichever phones you specify. Voicemails get stored online and (if you want) transcribed into text e-mails. In my column, I called Google Voice “the end of the phone as we know it,” since a Google Voice number resembles an e-mail address more than an old-fashioned phone line. It goes with you everywhere, can be managed entirely through the Web, and literally turns your voicemails into e-mails.

Google Voice was, and still is, in a private, invitation-only, beta testing phase. When I checked with Google early last week, employees were still saying the service will be available to the general public “soon”—which is the same thing they were saying back in March. But the big day may be approaching. While rumors circulating last week about the service’s impending launch turned out to be false, Google Voice product manager Craig Walker did state, via his public Twitter stream, that “We’re cranking 24/7 to get there.”

In conjunction with my March column, Google kindly provided 100 Google Voice beta invitations for Xconomy readers—and not surprisingly, all of the invitations were snapped up within an hour after we publicized the offer. So in anticipation of the public launch of Google Voice, I decided to ping the lucky 100 beta account winners last Friday to find out how the service has been working out for them, and whether they’d recommend it to others.

The readers who’ve written back so far have been lavish with their praise—at least, the ones who have actually been using their accounts. Several have admitted that they never signed up, or that they signed up but found that Google Voice wasn’t what they expected, or that, as one reader put it, “I would have liked to [use it] but then work (life?) got in the way.” More about the potentially high barriers to adoption below.

Readers who’ve used Google Voice seem to like the way it lets them give out a single phone number to everyone, rather than separate office, home, and cell numbers. Several readers said they like the (somewhat sneaky) feature that lets users listen to callers as they’re leaving a voicemail, and break in if they want to talk to that person directly. And if there’s one feature everyone loves, it’s the automatic transcription of voicemail messages into e-mails—a Google invention that wasn’t part of the original Grand Central service. While Google’s speech-to-text technology is far from perfect, readers say it’s good enough to get the gist of a message across, and that it saves them from the universally dreaded task of actually listening to all their voicemail. (You can browse readers’ detailed comments below.) Xconomy’s CEO and editor-in-chief, Bob Buderi, has been using Google Voice since March, and he also cites voicemail transcription as his favorite feature.

Readers report surprisingly few technical glitches or other difficulties using Google Voice. The problems they do cite tend to be ones that are baked into the service’s design. Most people said it’s too much trouble to make outgoing calls through Google Voice, since users must either call their own Google Voice number first, or go to the Google Voice website. Which leads to another frequent complaint—the caller ID problem. Unless you place all your outgoing calls through Google Voice, then the people you call will see the number of the device you’re calling from, rather than your Google Voice number. That means you have to train everyone not to store your device’s number in their contact list, but to call you back on your Google Voice number instead. That’s plain confusing for everyone.

Asked to say whether they’d recommend Google Voice to a friend or a family member, quite a few readers said “Yes, but…” The “but” was that they’d only recommend it to people who are technically adept—”power users,” in one reader’s phrase. As another reader put it: “The person who is going to use [it] needs to be a bit of a techie (not super technical, but my wife who is not technical would get lost in the concept)…[there are] lots of configuration options which I enjoyed learning and setting up.”

How much have Xconomy readers actually used their Google Voice accounts, in the end? That varies. Some say they’ve made their Google Voice number into their main phone number, and that they use the service extensively every day. Others say …Next Page »

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Over the last couple of years, we have been witnessing a resurgence of the “Internet as the new computing platform” idea. I say resurgence because that was the premise of the late 90’s “Internet Bubble.” Given that history, it would be a mistake to use the same term, of course. Instead, we’ve coined a new one— “cloud computing.” New term aside, the core premise of providing applications & services over the Internet remains at the heart of this resurgence. The Internet Bubble has taught our industry to be more circumspect. Furthermore, with 10+ years of multiple successful Internet services under its belt, the industry is that much more mature. Amazon, Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, and SalesForce.com are all great proof points of this maturity.

Yet, as I observe this resurgence, I see the hype is rebuilding and we might be getting carried away again. History is a great place to look for patterns to help predict patterns in the future. Here are some I see.

Fallacy of paradigm shifts

Mainframes to PCs, and now PCs to the Cloud. I’ve noticed that when there is a paradigm shift, a set of people take on the task of re-implementing existing applications in the new paradigm. Somehow, a mindset develops that “paradigm shift” means it is an opportunity to replace the incumbent solutions by re-implementing them in the new paradigm and suddenly the world will move over. I believe that it is a waste of time & energy to re-implement applications that work well in the existing paradigm. ROI for making the shift rarely exists for the majority of the market. It is important to internalize that computing is a tool for most organizations and individuals, not a way of life (like it is for some of us) so they won’t make the change unless there is a very good reason to do so.

Historically, when computing shifted from mainframes to PCs, some believed that mainframes would go away and even tried to rewrite key mainframe applications on PCs. Mainframes remain and continue to be a very healthy business. Most batch/transaction processing applications that worked extremely well on these systems continue to do so. What popularized the PCs was killer applications such as spreadsheets, word processing, etc. that made computing tools much more accessible to businesses and individuals at large, and significantly increased efficiency and productivity compared to using paper and typewriters.

The same is going to be true as we make the shift from PCs to the cloud. PCs aren’t going away—in fact, they are at the heart of popularizing the Internet and fueling the adoption of this new computing paradigm. So PC applications such as Microsoft Office and Adobe PhotoShop that harness the power of local computing capacity, storage, and huge existing user bases aren’t going to be easily replaced, if at all. In fact, I believe that such efforts will see very limited success. I encourage entrepreneurs and innovators …Next Page »

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The economy is forcing companies of all sizes to do more with less. The big winners are increasingly the small businesses and specialized sole proprietors. On one hand, they provide the “just in time” component services no longer staffed at the downsized firms, and on the other, they are adept at operating with lean resources and contracting for component services themselves.

This atomization of business is more than a reaction to the current economy. It’s a function of the nature of work today, and of the growing availability of technologies that will soon transform this approach to business-as-usual.

In the U.S. we are increasingly a knowledge worker economy, which lends itself perfectly to digitized deliverables. The ability to provide results electronically (vs. manual labor on the factory floor) greatly benefits small businesses and individual contractors, as geographical location and infrastructure are no longer barriers. More and more opportunities will be available to productive workers to serve countless niches.

The supply side is coming via the fracturing of integrated companies into specialty service firms and contractors. With the pay-for-performance contract, results become the job cost of the contractor. Companies can now hire highly specialized experts, spec out the results they want and pay only when the contractor achieves those results.

As an example, our small company Smartsheet outsources Graphics Production, Press Calendar Monitoring, Case Studies, Website Development, Website QA , Accounting, Video Production, Copy Review, and some Product Testing to different people who work an average of 1 – 4 days per month for our company. In addition, we use crowdsourcing (high volume on-demand outsourced data gathering) for prospect profile information, e-mail addresses, list building, and website keyword surveys, to name a few.

The main barrier to this volume of atomization has traditionally been the “productivity tax” on the coordinator who manages all the players working outside the company. The information overload becomes intense with too many e-mails, spreadsheets, and overhead material with so many separate contributors. The logistics and technological challenges often outweighed the gains. But new online tools are changing all that.

New technologies are making it very easy for delivered work to be traded online. These tools are also departing from the forced project management structure and process that has been the impediment to successful work management technology adoption for the past 20 years. They have been the equivalent of being required to understand how stock and bond trading worked in order to use eTrade.

Collaborative work management tools will be tightly integrated with online work marketplaces (LivePerson, eLance, RentaCoder) as well as crowdsourcing technologies (Amazon Mechanical Turk, Smartsourcing). Think of these solutions as part of a global switchboard that connects real and virtual teams on an as-needed basis in order to accomplish specific work. They will be as universally accessible as Gmail, and available to all. And the important components—the tasks, milestones and deadlines, as well as the team members who own specific responsibilities—will always be clearly visible to whoever owns the end results.

As the overhead costs of internal employees continue to rise from regulated increases in health care, payroll, and other taxes, looking outside the company walls will become more and more appealing. Integrated work collaboration tools enable every business to be a services provider and every business to be a services requestor.

My advice to everyone is to be very good at what you enjoy doing, and be prepared to shop it to the highest bidders around the world. Businesses will pay 3 – 4 times the rate of an internal employee for the same work delivered in a quarter the time with higher quality and less management. In fact, it will become table stakes to stay competitive.

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