Urban Science, a Detroit-based company founded 34 years ago to help bridge science and marketing functions primarily for automotive clients, recently announced it has expanded to a larger and completely renovated 100,000-square-foot space. The new digs, at 400 Renaissance Center in Detroit, will accommodate Urban Science’s growing business and work force.

“People think of the Renaissance Center as GM’s headquarters, but we were there first,” says company founder and CEO Jim Anderson with a laugh.

The company got its first break in 1977, when Anderson was still a professor at Wayne State University. He got wind that Cadillac was in search of better technology to deal with the problem of mapping potential dealer locations. Anderson pioneered the concept of using a mainframe computer to generate dot mapping and the discipline of automotive network planning.

“It caught on like wild fire,” Anderson says. “Today, you can get a map for free on the Internet, so we’ve had to grow into other areas of our clients’ business. We bring sophisticated analytics to clients who are data-rich. Science plus marketing is better than marketing itself.”

Through the years, Anderson has taken Urban Science from a $50,000 company to a $125 million company with offices in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, Australia, China, Mexico, and Japan. Previously located in Tower 200 in Renaissance Center, Urban Science is now occupying four floors in Tower 400 with the option to add another floor next year. The move accommodates a 69 percent increase in staff over the last five years, which has brought the Detroit office workforce to more than 300. The company has more than 750 employees worldwide.

Anderson says the main goal with the expansion was to increase collaboration and connectivity with its other offices across the globe.

“The office is now almost littered with large screens that we use to connect with other offices,” Anderson says. “It used to require tens of thousands of dollars to get everyone in one place. Now it’s free thanks to the Internet and video conferencing.”

Urban Science also has the only office in the Renaissance Center with an interior staircase. In the middle of the four floors is a large, open area where employees can eat their lunches while gazing at the Detroit River. Anderson says that, too, is meant to be another opportunity for collaboration, though on a more informal level.

So now that Anderson has doubled down, so to speak, on Urban Science’s Detroit headquarters, how does he feel about Michigan’s prospects for the future?

“Urban Science has been through four recessions, three wars, and one oil embargo, and our revenue has increased every year,” Anderson says. “That’s because we offer to help our clients sell more stuff and save them money. But I wouldn’t have made the decision to expand here if I didn’t get the sense that things are turning around for Detroit and the state in general. We like doing business here. The quality of people we’re able to attract (as employees) is outstanding.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hey Big Apple: Ready for some Cheezburger? Seattle-based Cheezburger Network, the holding pen for online humor sites like I Can Has Cheezburger and Fail Blog, has acquired the Internet-culture trackback site Know Your Meme. It’s the first big acquisition move that we’ve seen Cheezburger make since securing $30 million round of venture financing early this year.

Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh notes that the Know Your Meme acquisition represents not just a good fit in terms of content, but an opportunity for his profitable humor-website factory to expand into the biggest media market of them all—New York. The Know Your Meme team is now the “Cheezburger East” office, and the company plans to add staff there, Huh says.

“It’s a great place for Internet culture,” Huh tells Xconomy. “It seems there are a lot of people who are interested in this there—even more so than Seattle, which is kind of odd.” Huh says he might have thought the quirky viral humor behind Cheezburger’s success was a little more West Coast in flavor. But for whatever reason, he says it seems to translate across any major regional differences.

Know Your Meme, which says it reaches about 2.5 million people a month, is based around the idea of treating online pop culture as the subject of a fast-moving anthropology exercise. The site tracks the origins and evolution of all the flotsam, mashups and mini-celebrities churned out by our “Check this out!” online impulses. The appeal of this site is pretty obvious to me. When I wanted to tell my wife about Internet sensation Antoine Dodson’s unlikely path to becoming wildly popular, I directed her to the Know Your Meme page on that topic.

Although the video presentations tracing the lifespan of particular items are pretty tongue-in-cheek—fun background music paired with ironic white lab coats—the documentation process is logical and straightforward, even bordering on serious.

Huh says the deal was effective last Monday. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Tubefilter, which appears to be the first to report the news, points out that Know Your Meme’s previous owner blogged that it was a “super seven figure deal,” whatever that means.

Know Your Meme was created by Rocketboom, which also feasts on Internet pop culture with TV news anchor-style video reports on a variety of topics. Meme, for those who don’t know, is a neologism that refers to the passed-around bits of content that underlie a lot of the mass-sourced time-waster entertainment online.

Cheezburger’s various sites basically operate as repositories of different types of memes—the prime example being bizarrely captioned cat photos that appear on the namesake site “I Can Has Cheezburger?”

Huh built his his online humor empire partly through shrewd acquisitions, and he says Know Your Meme is another good addition because it can pretty seamlessly provide context to the funny thing you’re looking at for the moment.

“You’ll see something and it has no context. It’s like, why’s this funny?” Huh says. “It’s an area that we’re missing, that can really benefit a lot of the users who want to know more about this stuff.” Huh adds that, in a weird way, this completes a circle. The humor culture of the Internet, he says, does a great job of taking things out of context and rearranging them into something new. Know Your Meme adds back some of the context behind that remixing exercise.

When Xconomy’s Luke Timmerman spoke to Huh in January after Cheezburger’s big Series A round, Huh said quite frankly that one pitfall of taking that much money could be getting “indigestion” from acquiring too many properties and losing focus. Huh says that’s still on his mind. “We don’t expect to do a lot of acquisitions. In fact, we’re not talking to anyone else right now,” he says. “This isn’t something like we have a war chest and we’re going to go spend it.”

Huh also says previously stated hiring plans for the Seattle office are progressing, even though he’s among those who say it’s becoming harder to find enough tech talent to fuel rapid growth. “We are actually hiring pretty actively,” he says. “We’re up to 58 people now.”

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Salesforce.com, the cloud-computing provider that has been in an extended battle with Microsoft for market share and talent, plans to hire as aggressively as possible to fill its new 11,000 square-foot space in South Lake Union.

And the pace apparently won’t be slowed by a recent court battle over Salesforce.com’s (NYSE: CRM) hiring of a manager from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

“We’re after the best talent in the industry, wherever we can find them—and not all of those people are at one company,” Salesforce.com’s Woodson Martin says. “The truth of the matter is, a lot of people want to work on the next generation of technology. They want to be out on the cutting edge and innovating, and not maintaining the status quo.”

Martin, a senior vice president for San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, spoke to reporters this morning while joining some colleagues at an event to celebrate the official opening of the company’s new Seattle office.

Salesforce.com’s Seattle team—which includes new and existing employees working on its major products—moved into the new office over the weekend and had a little shindig Monday night, Martin says.

It must not have been too crazy, because several people made the 9 a.m. call at Operation Sack Lunch, a local charity.

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn welcomed Salesforce.com’s larger presence here, part of … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Redfin, an online real estate brokerage, said today it has expanded into New York state (Suffolk County, partners in Westchester County, and search in other areas) and central California (El Dorado, Placer, and Sacramento Counties). The move is part of Redfin’s strategy to reach every major real-estate market in the United States.

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On a grey winter day, it might not seem like Seattle has much to contribute to the solar power industry. But cleantech and IT are converging in the Northwest these days. And what we lack in sunshine we make up for in software developers, according to Jeff Ressler, head of the software division of Clean Power Research, a small renewable-energy company that expanded to Kirkland in September.

The company, which consults and writes software for solar power and other clean energy industries, is a small group of 15. Their Kirkland office has a whopping total of two people so far. But they clearly have staying power. Founded 11 years ago in Napa, CA, the self-funded company is profitable and growing, and all that growth will be happening here in the Northwest, said Ressler, who heads the Kirkland office.

Clean Power Research plans to hire six more employees in Kirkland by this spring. “We’re really excited to be in Washington, just in terms of the job candidates we’re seeing,” said Ressler, a former Microsoftie. “There’s a kind of built-in awareness in many people up in the Northwest of environmental issues, and a real passion for that. That’s what we really want to tap.”

The company has five products on the market right now, all Web-based software applications that calculate energy output or cost of solar panels. The applications range from Clean Power Estimator, a general tool to estimate solar energy available in your area for individuals considering installing solar panels on their roofs, to SolarAnywhere, a database developed in collaboration with researchers at the State University of New York that uses U.S. government satellite photos to calculate the precise amounts of solar radiation across the country at any given time. The database can tell you hourly amounts of solar rays for every 25 to 35 square miles in the United States.

“If you wanted to know how much solar radiation hit downtown L.A. yesterday afternoon, we could tell you what those numbers were,” Ressler said.

While it might sound cool to know the exact amount (or lack) of sunlight shining on your … Next Page »

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Seattle-based venture firms Voyager Capital and Maveron have made some West Coast additions. Voyager announced it has opened an office in Portland, OR, staffed by new venture partner Diane Fraiman, formerly of Sanctum and Informix Software. Maveron has recruited Amy Errett, formerly of Olivia and Trinity Ventures, as a partner in its San Francisco office.

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