How are companies spying on each other these days? One of the surprising ways I’ve heard about recently is through the webcam in boardrooms.

That’s right, apparently it’s easy to hack into some companies’ video conference systems, because they lie outside typical security measures. Companies sometimes set up video conferences so they can be accessed directly on the Internet—leaving the door open for eavesdroppers to listen in on meetings, or even remotely monitor a conference room via the camera.

One local software company is helping organizations guard against this threat—and many others. Boston-based Rapid7 is one of the leaders in the growing cluster of IT security companies around town. Rapid7’s approach is complementary to firms like NitroSecurity (recently acquired by Intel/McAfee) and Q1 Labs (bought by IBM), which help organizations guard against security threats in their computer networks and systems.

What Rapid7 does is help organizations find security flaws throughout their IT infrastructure, and then test whether they’ve been corrected. To fuel its growth, the company raised a $50 million Series C round from Technology Crossover Ventures in November—one of the largest tech venture rounds in the Boston area lately. (Rapid7 has raised $59 million to date.)

“There’s a lot of cyber-espionage going on in business,” says Mike Tuchen, Rapid7’s CEO (see photo, left). The activity ranges from stealing sales plans, financial information, and intellectual property, to the aforementioned boardroom eavesdropping, he says. And, of course, it’s not just companies spying on each other; it’s governments and nation states as well, all trying to get their hands on everything from Citibank credit card numbers to the special sauce in Apple’s iPad design.

What’s a CEO to do? If you’re Mike Tuchen, you take a promising company and try to make it better. Tuchen joined Rapid7 as chief executive in 2008. (The company has been around since 2000.) Previously he worked at Microsoft as a group program manager and general manager of SQL server marketing. An engineer by training, he also worked at Sun Microsystems and co-founded Paramark, a dot-com-era online advertising startup.

When he arrived at Rapid7, brought in by Bain Capital Ventures (the firm’s original VC investor), Tuchen saw a company that had “a great engineering and sales team” but not much else. He says he didn’t have to tear up the company, just bring in some key additions: marketing, channel partners, new processes, and a broader product roadmap, including a more international market focus.

So far the effort seems to be paying off. The company has grown to about 240 employees (about half in Boston), and Tuchen says revenues … Next Page »

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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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

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

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

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

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

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[Updated 12:20 pm] Here are a couple of notable Boston-area deals in digital advertising and marketing, each with a certain je-ne-sais-quoi European flair. Plus one more local company worth watching…

—Neolane, a social marketing tech company based in Paris with North American headquarters in Newton, MA, has closed a $27 million financing round led by Battery Ventures. The company’s previous investors also participated in the round. Neolane, which has 240 employees globally—just under 50 in New England—says it will use the money to expand its operations, particularly in North America. Neolane says it competes with IBM/Unica, Aprimo, and SAS.

—DataXu, the Boston-based digital advertising and marketing startup, has acquired U.K.- and Germany-based Mexad, a top European “demand-side platform” provider (meaning it gives advertisers tools to optimize when and where they place ads). Terms of the deal weren’t given. DataXu makes a software platform for advertisers who want real-time information and insights on consumer behavior across Web, mobile, and video channels. I spoke with CEO Mike Baker last year about DataXu’s recent growth and strategy in the ad-tech sector.

—ClickSquared, a Boston marketing software startup, has closed $9 million in equity financing led by Staley Capital, with existing investors also participating. The company, which started in 1999, does e-mail marketing and delivery, customer analytics, and campaign management, among other things. [This deal was added to the roundup after the first two were published---Eds.]

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I guess Werner Vogels changed his mind. Amazon.com’s chief technology officer told me a couple years ago that his company had no intention of opening a Boston office. MIT engineers, he said, had no problem moving out west to Seattle to join the e-retail technology giant. I thought that was kind of strange, but Amazon has always done things its own way.

Now it appears the company (NASDAQ: AMZN) is about to establish a beachhead in Cambridge, MA. According to a report by Scott Kirsner in Boston.com, Amazon is in the process of hiring engineering and research talent and is looking for about 40,000 square feet of office space in the Kendall Square area, slated to open in February. The company has not confirmed any of this publicly, and will probably try to keep it quiet as long as it can. Kirsner speculates that the timing might have to do with changes in sales tax laws.

We’ll have more on this developing story as details surface. If the report is accurate, the impact on the Boston area, and Kendall Square in particular, could be really significant.

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If you’re a cyber security company, get your funding while it’s hot. On the same day security software firm CounterTack (fka NeuralIQ) said it is moving from DC to the Boston area and taking a venture round, Boston-based Rapid7, a security assessment software company, says it has raised a $50 million Series C round from new investor Technology Crossover Ventures, based in Silicon Valley.

Rapid7 says the new money will be used to hire talent, accelerate product innovation, expand internationally, and make strategic acquisitions (let’s keep an eye on this—clearly a plan to go big). The company previously raised $7 million from Bain Capital Ventures in 2008, as well as a $2 million follow-on round last year.

The idea behind Rapid7′s software is to scan an organization’s entire IT infrastructure—including routers, hubs, networks, operating systems, databases, and Web applications—to find security holes and patch them. It also checks whether a company’s systems are in compliance with accounting and privacy regulations.

Rapid7 started in 2000 and is led by CEO Mike Tuchen. The firm has raised $59 million to date and says it has more than 200 employees.

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In advance of his appearance at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference on Dec. 1 in Boston, I did a live tweet chat with Kabir Shahani, the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Appature, yesterday. Thanks to all who tuned in and sent us their thoughts; we had a great audience.

Appature is a four-year-old startup that makes Web software tools to help healthcare, pharma, and medical device companies reach hospitals and doctors and build important relationships with them. The big idea, as I see it, is to allow brands to drill down into a huge customer relationship database and quickly target the right people to sell to—and for the right reasons, namely, patient health. Yes, it’s big data, analytics, cloud, marketing, and healthcare, all wrapped up in one.

Which is why I think Boston-area tech companies like HubSpot, Buzzient, Constant Contact, SocMetrics, Kyruus, Ginger.io, Athenahealth, and others should be interested. And young entrepreneurs, who can really relate to Shahani. Plus I hear there are a few pharma and medical device companies (and hospitals) around town…

While some things don’t necessarily come across in tweets (like Shahani’s youthful charisma and CEO hair), other things do. Here are my top takeaways from the chat:

1. Appature knows more about Boston than Boston knows about Appature. “There are some incredible companies in Boston,” Shahani tweeted. “We have customers there and I absolutely love being out there to spend time with them.” Sure, Appature has customers and partners around town (and soon, employees—see below), but the general Boston tech and health-IT community doesn’t talk about this company very much. I’m telling you to pay attention, because Shahani and his crew are potentially on to something big. Whether they’ll execute and take full advantage, we’ll see.

2. The cutting edge of marketing tech for niches like healthcare is moving fast. “The dynamic has changed dramatically in the past 12-18 months,” Shahani wrote. He was talking about pharma companies trying new ways to reach and target customers, rather than just pursuing traditional approaches with their sales reps. It’s no surprise that cloud-based analytics and social technologies are transforming the way most industries work.

3. Growth is challenging for any startup, especially one based on relationships. Shahani, who bootstrapped Appature to profitability before taking a venture round, tweeted that his biggest mistake was “not getting an [East] coast office sooner.” (The company has employees around the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border, presumably to work with lots of pharma customers. It also has people in San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago.) And here’s a news flash on its expansion: “Stay tuned on news about a Boston team in [January],” he wrote.

For the record, here’s the full live chat stream, via Storify (thanks to my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty for this).

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Twitter has already sucked away 20 percent of your life. What’s another 30 minutes?

If you don’t know Kabir Shahani or his startup, Appature, here is your chance. I will be hosting a live Twitter chat with him tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 3). This open chat will start at 2 pm Eastern / 11 am Pacific Time, and you can ask him whatever you want for 30 minutes.

What’s the occasion? Well, Shahani will be one of our featured speakers at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference in Boston on Dec. 1, and I want to give him a hearty welcome.

I got to know Shahani and Seattle-based Appature while I was living in the Northwest a couple years ago. The company has a remarkable story. It started in 2007 and bootstrapped itself to profitability before taking a VC round in late 2009. Appature is also interesting because it is complementary to many companies in Boston’s marketing tech cluster, like HubSpot, Constant Contact, BzzAgent (Tesco), and Buzzient. It works with a lot of healthcare companies and institutions around Boston and the East Coast. And, of course, it is going through many of the same growing pains that young companies around Boston (and elsewhere) talk about, as it expands its customer base across the country.

Appature’s founders are hardcore techies with a social networking background, but they chose to go after the healthcare market—making new kinds of software tools for medical device and pharma companies to build relationships with their customers (mostly hospitals and doctors), all in a fundamentally different way from traditional marketing.

So, in our live chat, I’m interested to hear what the big idea is all about at Appature and why it chose its particular niche. Other areas up for discussion include social marketing trends in healthcare and other industries; startup/VC lessons and tech advice; and maybe a little Boston vs. Seattle talk (in terms of innovation ecosystems, talent, and coffee). I’ll bet the tech and healthcare communities will have some good questions for Appature, too—so please get them ready.

Here’s how it will work on Thursday. I’ll send off a few questions to Shahani from @Xconomy, and then we’ll open it up to everyone’s questions. Shahani will be responding from his personal account, @Kabir, with an assist from his team @Appature. And we will all keep track of the running dialogue using the hashtag #XCappature. That’s the key for you to follow the conversation on Twitter. (You can use TweetChat or another app to focus on the half-hour discussion, or for however long you want to tune in.)

See you online at 2pm ET / 11am PT on Thursday…

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It’s official: Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners is announcing a couple of moves related to its network of Dogpatch Labs startup incubators. One bit of news involves the fate of the original Dogpatch in San Francisco. The other piece is about a brand new (and long-awaited) international site that is opening today. (Dogpatch Labs already exists in San Francisco, Cambridge, MA, and New York City.)

First, the Bay Area news. As my colleague Wade reported earlier this month, Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco has been looking for new office space as it is being forced to move from its current location at embattled Pier 38. The new space, it turns out, will be in Palo Alto, adjacent to the new Polaris Ventures office, which is one block off of University Avenue, says Dave Barrett, a general partner at the firm. The Polaris office has Brian Chee and Ryan Spoon based there, and several other partners who spend a fair bit of time there. (Chee moved to the Bay Area when Polaris closed its old office in Seattle recently.)

The Dogpatch facility in Palo Alto will be open for business in early November, Barrett says. Interestingly, while some VCs are talking about startup ecosystems becoming more concentrated in urban centers (and that fits with some Boston-area venture firms opening offices in Kendall Square), Barrett sees Palo Alto as “the center of gravity” and “a pretty interesting base for life sciences” in the Bay Area.

And now for the international news. As my colleague Erin reported last December, Polaris has been working on a new Dogpatch Labs site in Dublin, Ireland. Today it is being unveiled in a ceremony attended by the Irish prime minister and other dignitaries. Dogpatch Labs Europe, as it is being called, will start with about 35 entrepreneurs, some from Ireland and some from elsewhere in Europe and Africa, Barrett says.

“We think it can be an interesting center of heat for entrepreneurs, for Ireland and for Europe,” says Barrett. He calls Dublin a “breeding ground” for ideas and startups. “It’s got a vibe to it,” he says.

Heading up Dogpatch Labs Europe will be Noel Ruane, a tech veteran who previously led LaunchPad, a Dublin-based startup accelerator program. He’s also the former CEO of Brandmail Solutions and spent a few years in Silicon Valley with IDA Ireland, where he played a role in attracting Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal to set up offices in Ireland. And in fact, the new Dogpatch building is located in the Grand Canal area of Dublin (see photo above), right across from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft’s offices, Barrett says.

Polaris isn’t talking about how much it plans to invest in the Dublin facility, or the number of companies it will house (or finance)—though the first group of eight startups is being announced today. “The mission is to try to build a community and build relationships with folks, some of which we’ll invest in and some we won’t,” Barrett says. He adds that the main challenge, as in other places like New York, is that “it’ll take time to lead a rebirth.” (He also says Dublin’s Dogpatch might be most similar to Kendall Square in its breadth of sectors—not just consumer-focused Internet, but also software as a service, infrastructure, and life sciences.)

In any case, Dogpatch Labs Europe will add to this running total of stats for Dogpatch in the U.S.: more than 500 residents from 300 companies; 100 companies have received outside funding totaling more than $140 million; 13 companies have been acquired; and Polaris has provided funding for 13 of the startups.

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BuyWithMe, the New York- and Boston-based local deals startup, said today it has acquired TownHog, a San Francisco-based daily deals site owned by Dotblu. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

This is the sixth acquisition of the year for BuyWithMe, continuing a trend of consolidation in the local deals sector. Last month, CEO Jim Crowley (formerly of Turbine) spoke with me about BuyWithMe’s growth strategy in mobile, payments, and merchant-focused loyalty programs. The firm is pushing 200 employees and shows no signs of slowing down.

“The velocity of business across my various companies, each year it goes faster,” Crowley said last month. “Your need to move quickly seems to be at a heightened premium.”

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Boston-based Rue La La, the private sale and shopping site, said today it has opened a local deals site in San Francisco called Rue San Francisco. It’s part of a broader effort, called Rue Local, that has rolled out local deals sites for Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, and (earlier this summer) Washington DC, Los Angeles, and New York City; Miami and Chicago sites are slated to follow later this month. Rue La La started in 2008 as part of Retail Convergence, led by CEO Ben Fischman. In late 2009, Retail Convergence was acquired by GSI Commerce. Then in March 2011, eBay agreed to buy GSI Commerce and spin out Rue La La (and another GSI division) as a separate company, with eBay retaining a 30 percent stake in the company.

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Standing out in New York can be a challenge for a young company—especially one serving the singles scene. The “been there, done that” attitude is difficult to overcome in Manhattan when pushing a dating website, given the plethora of paid and free services available such as Match.com, eHarmony, OkCupid, and PlentyofFish. While many dating services draw generic masses of users, OneStop Singles offers its clients à la carte–style options based on their deal breakers when it comes to romance.

OneStop is the parent company of OnSpeedDating.com and SingleAndTheCity.com, which organize themed speed dating events and singles parties in the New York City area, respectively (two to five events per week in total). OnSpeed and SingleAndTheCity are ad-based websites with paid events. OneStop also operates the free online dating site Kissburg.com, which is not anchored to the New York market. Members of OnSpeed and SingleAndTheCity are automatically enrolled in Kissburg.com.

Co-founders Amber Soletti and Carmine Di Re created OneStop Singles in 2008 out of dissatisfaction with existing dating websites and the speed dating options in Manhattan. Soletti and Di Re make up the company’s staff, though they also collaborate with event promoters and hosts throughout New York City.

OneStop Singles is self-funded and profitable, according to Soletti, thanks in part to its low overhead. The company is growing at a time when dating sites are seeking ways to generate revenue even as the public can connect through free social networking portals such as Meetup and Facebook. There has been some consolidation too. In February, subscription-based Match.com paid $50 million in cash to acquire New York City’s OkCupid, an advertising-driven website that is primarily free to use but includes some paid services.

While its technology is no moon-landing breakthrough, OneStop Singles structured its services to appeal to daters’ preferences based on interests, background, and physical attributes. Soletti said the idea is to give singles the chance to target the niche groups they are attracted to, such as firefighters, blondes, Ivy Leaguers, and even men with accents. “If you’re a busy New Yorker who doesn’t have a lot of time, you can come out and you’ll have some kind of starting point that you are into,” she said.

Soletti, 35, a transplant from Austin, TX, serves as vice president of marketing for OneStop Singles (see left). Her role can include beating the bushes for daters to populate themed events. “If it’s my ‘Gentleman Prefer Blondes’ night and I’m short blondes, you better believe I am hitting every hair salon in New York,” Soletti said. Prior to launching OneStop, Soletti worked as global marketing director of hair care with Avon and in a similar role with Aveda. Some 18 months ago, she committed herself full-time to OneStop. Di Re, 36, a native of Brooklyn, handles Web design and technical aspects as vice president of development; he retains his job as a senior developer for a New York City media firm.

Other singles sites can inundate members with unwanted contacts, Soletti said, and traditional speed dating events tend to be grouped simply by the ages of the participants. Soletti said she wanted a better option for herself and others after enduring some of her own … Next Page »

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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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French software firm EntropySoft, which has U.S. headquarters in Cambridge, MA, said yesterday it has closed $3.5 million in new financing led by Alven Capital. EntropySoft, which makes business software for managing data and documents between different content management systems, said it will use the money to boost its technology, expand its sales team, and increase its U.S. presence. Many of its customers are in the U.S., including EMC, Endeca, and Symantec. The company was founded in 2005 and is led by CEO Nicolas Maquaire.

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Jim Crowley wants to have it both ways. The new CEO of BuyWithMe, the online deals site, insists the company is based in both Boston and New York. (Yes, well, this is a sensitive topic to me this week.)

“The company exists in two spots,” Crowley says. It has about 100 employees total—roughly two-thirds of them in New York, and one-third in Boston.

BuyWithMe was founded in the Boston area in 2009 and moved its headquarters to New York last year. The company, which provides local deals for consumers in a dozen markets around the U.S., has been ramping up its efforts to compete with other group-buying sites like Groupon, LivingSocial, and Tippr. (Other Boston-area social commerce sites include Eversave, LocalGinger–which was acquired by Where—and Daily Grommet.)

Crowley, a Boston guy himself, is the former CEO of Turbine, the Westwood, MA-based online gaming company that was bought by Warner Bros. for a reported $160 million last April. Before that, he was chief operating officer at Watertown, MA-based m-Qube, the mobile software firm acquired by Verisign for $250 million in 2006. He succeeds Cheryl Rosner, who left BuyWithMe late last year.

I wondered how Crowley’s deep experience with mobile and gaming companies might translate to the ultra-competitive sector of group-buying and local marketing. “The common thread is extraordinarily rapid growth,” he says. “I have been involved in several companies that have had to grow very quickly.”

Specifically, he oversaw Turbine’s transition from a subscription-based business to a free-to-play, virtual goods model that “went to millions and millions of customers,” he says. And m-Qube was “one of the fastest growing technology companies in New England before we sold it,” he says. What’s more, it sounds like mobile devices are key to BuyWithMe’s expansion strategy. Crowley declined to give many details, but he said that for both local merchants trying to attract new customers, and consumers discovering and sharing places with friends, “there will be a move towards mobile engagement” that will “bring the group dynamic and social dynamic into play.”

And he gave a little more context: “The data is overwhelming that by 2013, mobile devices will be the primary access point for the Internet in North America. Perhaps sooner. It’s offering tremendous ways to become hyperlocal, to better personalize, and to bring experiences to their pocket. It is incumbent on BuyWithMe to understand that technology shift and take advantage,” he says.

None of this is very surprising, of course, especially given Crowley’s expertise in mobile. But I also asked for his broader perspective on group buying, given that he is a relative newcomer … Next Page »

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Seth Priebatsch strikes again. The wunderkind CEO’s location-based gaming startup, SCVNGR, announced today it has raised $15 million in a new venture financing round led by London-based Balderton Capital. SCVNGR’s existing investors, Google Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, also participated in the round, which was raised at a valuation of just over $100 million, according to TechCrunch.

Cambridge, MA-based SCVNGR, which started in 2008, has been on a tear in the past few months, integrating with Facebook Places, announcing rewards partnerships with big brands like AT&T and Zipcar, and becoming well-known for its game mechanics and “challenges” that it says help businesses build customer loyalty and engagement. SCVNGR has raised nearly $20 million to date.

The new money will be used to fuel the company’s international growth (presumably Europe first, though perhaps not exclusively), and to do more research on implementing game mechanics in the physical world. In a blog post today, SCVNGR urges its community to “get excited, because we’re going to be bringing some more awesome your way.”

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After hiring a new CEO in May and securing an additional $2.5 million in financing in September, San Diego’s VMIX appears to be taking the first steps in a new strategy. VMIX, which provides Web-based software used by customers to manage their online video clips, said it’s opening VMIX offices in London and Glasgow, Scotland. In a statement from the company, VMIX CEO Pat Burns said the launch of VMIX UK is the first stage in a plan to establish itself as a global provider, and to extend the reach of its online video technology. “Establishing a presence in the UK allows us to build personal relationships with our European-based clients and partners, and provides critical insight into the growing online-video integration market there,” Burns said.

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Quick, name a semiconductor company in the Boston area that’s been getting lots of venture financing lately. OK, well, you already read the headline, so that one doesn’t count. My point is, there haven’t been too many of those—until today.

SiOnyx is the Beverly, MA-based semiconductor materials company that is working on commercializing so-called “black silicon.” This is essentially silicon that is much more efficient at absorbing light at certain wavelengths (and producing electricity) because it has been treated by just the right combination of laser pulses and chemicals. That means black silicon could potentially be used to make ultra-sensitive image sensors for digital cameras, night-vision goggles, and medical imaging equipment, as well as much more efficient solar cells. As my colleague Wade reported almost exactly two years ago, SiOnyx thinks it can revolutionize these fields, in part because its advanced technology can piggy-back on conventional silicon-based manufacturing processes.

Today the company is announcing a $12.5 million Series B financing round that includes new investors Crosslink Capital in San Francisco and Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm. Strategic partner Coherent, a laser company in Santa Clara, CA, also has signed on as a new investor in SiOnyx, and existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and Harris & Harris also participated in the round. The $12.5 million represents the completion (and sum total) of the financing round that Xconomy first wrote about in June.

“When we last talked about the company, we were vague about the application areas,” says SiOnyx CEO Stephen Saylor. “It’s a platform technology, and you want to evolve it and see where the value is.” (More on this in a minute.)

The SiOnyx technology is based on research from physicist Eric Mazur’s group at Harvard University. In the late 1990s, Mazur’s team first developed (and coined the term) black silicon in a series of experiments that used sulfur gases and femtosecond lasers—which emit sharp pulses of light that last only a millionth of a billionth of a second—to roughen up the surface of silicon wafers (see photo below). After discovering how well the resulting material absorbed photons, and delving deep into its atomic properties, the team decided to start a company.

SiOnyx was incorporated in 2005, and the following year, it gained an exclusive license from Harvard to commercialize its process. In 2007, the startup raised $11 million in venture capital from Harris & Harris, Polaris, and RedShift Ventures. It also has raised an undisclosed amount of non-dilutive financing from government sources and partners, Saylor says, which brings the company’s total funding to more than $35 million.

So where is the first big commercial market? Try camera phones taking pictures in low lighting—at night or in a dark bar or restaurant. And other applications like night-vision cameras, next-generation automotive sensors for detecting driving hazards, security and surveillance, and medical imaging devices. The basic idea, as Saylor explains, is that black silicon gives you performance in the dark comparable to what a conventional image sensor can do in daylight. That’s partly because the material is much better at absorbing photons in the near-infrared part of the spectrum than conventional silicon detectors.

“We’re going where [others] are blind, and we enable you to see,” Saylor says. “There is no other way to deliver this kind of performance.”

The question, then, is whether SiOnyx can scale up its capabilities fast enough to … Next Page »

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As a reporter, you can tell when the innovation economy tide is turning, when a particular sector is rebounding, or when certain companies have turned the corner. How? Because all of a sudden CEOs want to talk on the record, PR people are your best friends, and marketing and real estate guys chat you up about the field at random events.

That’s the feeling I’m getting about radio frequency identification (RFID) these days—and I’m getting it from both coasts. The field of RFID comprises tags, readers, and software that, together, enable wireless communication via tiny embedded chips so people can gather information about everything from the location and status of product inventory on shelves to runners in a marathon. A couple of months ago, I profiled ThingMagic, a 10-year-old Boston-area RFID company founded by MIT Media Lab alums, whose time appears to have come, thanks to fortuitous changes in the market.

ThingMagic’s sister company in the Northwest is Impinj, a 10-year-old Seattle RFID tech firm founded by University of Washington professor Chris Diorio. Impinj is a bigger company than ThingMagic—and has raised much more venture capital—but both startups survived the RFID-for-retail-supply-chain-tracking hype around 2003-2004 (and the ensuing crash) and lived to tell the tale. The firms have worked together on RFID reader technologies, with Impinj selling its reader chips to ThingMagic. Now they and a few other survivors and competitors, including San Francisco Bay Area-based Alien Technology, are poised to make some bold moves.

I spoke with Impinj CEO Bill Colleran by phone last week to hear about the company’s progress, and some interesting new challenges ahead. One thing that grabbed me was how much the competitive landscape in RFID was decimated by the early hype and glacial adoption of the technology—plus the economic recession. That now leaves Impinj with relatively few competitors. “There’s been a shakeout along the way,” Colleran says. “We’re in a great position to grow as this industry takes off.”

And take off it apparently will, across sectors like consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, and apparel and other retail applications—finally. “RFID has experienced a resurgence in the last year or so,” says Colleran. “The common theme is the technology has continued to move along—performance is dramatically better, and cost has come down…It’s a maturing of the technology and ecosystem. We’re seeing wholesale adoption.”

That’s easy to say, of course, but here are some stats to back it up. Impinj says it will ship as many RFID tag chips in the second half of 2010 as it has in the previous five years … Next Page »

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Nathaniel Borenstein is a man you either love or hate. Or both. There’s nothing in between. If you have more than 24,000 unread e-mails in your inbox, like I do, you curse the day he was born, even if you enjoy being able to communicate with friends and business contacts in real-time, for free.

Borenstein is one of the fathers of modern e-mail systems. Currently based in remote northern Michigan, about a three-and-a-half hour drive from Detroit, he is an original designer of MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), the standard protocol for Internet e-mail that supports different kinds of character sets, non-text attachments, header information, and other crucial (if boring-sounding) features. As of three months ago, he is also chief scientist at Mimecast, a U.K.-based company that is making waves in the U.S.—and has been expanding its presence in the Boston area.

Mimecast makes e-mail management software, primarily for mid-market and medium-size corporations. The goal of the software is to make e-mail systems and archives easier to manage, more efficient, and more secure. It also lets you do things like track detailed information about e-mails across different networks and nodes, so customers have a clear record of when a given message was sent, and exactly where it was received.

The company was formed in 2003 by a pair of South Africans, Peter Bauer (the firm’s chief executive) and Neil Murray (chief technology officer). They first introduced their product in the U.K. in 2004 and set up headquarters in London. In 2008, Mimecast came to North America with a very small team that has grown to about 50 people, including a growing office in Waltham, MA. The firm has 220 employees worldwide.

Mimecast says it has some 3,500 corporate customers, amounting to 700,000 users and about 11 million mailboxes. “We’ve grown pretty substantially,” says Mary Kay Roberto, the company’s senior vice president and general manager in North America. “Last year we doubled the business, and we’ll probably grow by 70 to 80 percent this fiscal year.”

Borenstein, 53, is key to the company’s growth strategy. At Mimecast, his domain includes intellectual property management, e-mail standards work, and research and development. He was previously an IBM Distinguished Engineer, a faculty member at the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University, and a founder of First Virtual Holdings (an online payment system acquired by DoubleClick) and NetPOS (an Ann Arbor, MI-based e-commerce startup).

“It takes a lot of discipline for a company of this size to do anything but the short term,” Borenstein says. “I’m trying hard to put half the time into seeing where we can go. This is the right place to … Next Page »

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