It wasn’t so much the predictions as the discussion that was most interesting at last night’s annual predictions dinner, organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association. Will Twitter be acquired in 2010, and why? Who will have the dominant cloud computing platform in the next couple of years? What kind of startup are you looking to build or finance, and which areas are you staying away from?

A panel of Seattle-area tech entrepreneurs and investors gamely took the bait and had some lively exchanges over the course of an hour. OK, these guys all know each other, and we’ll take what they say with a grain of salt since it’s a public forum—but here were some of the most interesting points they made. (You can read more comprehensive recaps of the panel on Brier Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times, and soon on TechFlash by moderator John Cook.)

The panel was split 3 to 2, with the narrow majority guessing Twitter will get bought next year. Andy Sack of seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op predicted Twitter will make more money than Facebook in 2010 (surprising, given the current disparity in the other direction). Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate firm, said Twitter should charge for search (as it has begun to do in partnerships with Google and Bing). Kelly Smith from Curious Office and the startup Pressplane argued that Twitter could be “absorbed by a big company,” but “it’s going to go nowhere.” By the end of the evening, Sack was predicting that Microsoft would buy Twitter next year.

There was a consensus that 2010 could be a big year for acquisitions. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson boldly predicted that Amazon will buy Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu, while opening brick and mortar “Amazon media stores.” Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group said Cisco might buy EMC (for VMware) and Seattle-based F5 Networks, while Microsoft might buy Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. Sack predicted Adobe would pick up Seattle photo-editing startup Picnik. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) would buy Seattle’s Cheezburger Network, and someone would buy Redfin.

Looking back on 2009 for a minute, the big deals that were questioned by the panel included Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture (Gottesman said it just didn’t make sense strategically) and …Next Page »

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Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace. Those companies’ products spread over the Internet like a virus. But why hasn’t there been a runaway hit like those in the mobile software world? Why does it take so much longer to build value, and a strong customer base, in mobile companies than in certain Internet startups?

Dan Shapiro had some entertaining thoughts on this yesterday, as he spoke to the Mobile Northwest 2009 crowd in Seattle. Shapiro is the co-founder and CEO of Ontela, a Seattle-based mobile imaging startup, and he’s a veteran of RealNetworks and Microsoft. I won’t do justice to his presentation, but here’s the gist.

Hotmail was one of the first examples of viral marketing. By appending the message, “Get your free e-mail at hotmail.com” (or some such) to the bottom of each e-mail, Hotmail helped pioneer a new method of promotion that was “basically free, highly measurable, and ridiculously effective,” Shapiro said. Its number of new subscribers jumped from hundreds to tens of thousands per day.

Maybe there’s something about the viral distribution model that doesn’t fly in the mobile world, Shapiro thought. In epidemiology, he pointed out, researchers use a parameter called the basic reproduction number to gauge whether a viral outbreak will spread or die out. The corresponding number in the Internet world tells you how many people a given user will “infect,” on average: Shapiro gave some estimates for Facebook (6), Gmail (5), MySpace (4), and Twitter (1.5). He argued that Twitter hasn’t been spreading virally; it has used more conventional marketing through word of mouth and the press.

“Heterogeneity in the target population is the best protection to keep you from being infected by viruses,” he said. That means some people have different levels of resistance, different behaviors, different types of contacts, and so forth, so not everyone will get infected by, say, the latest flu bug.

And that same kind of variety that makes individuals different is exactly why mobile isn’t viral, he argued. He cited some survey stats to explain how fragmented this market really is: There are roughly 500 different types of handsets, about 30 per carrier; about two-thirds of people (65 percent) don’t have a data plan; three out of four people (75 percent) are on a different carrier from you; almost that many (70 percent) don’t have a smartphone. And despite all the attention it gets, 98 percent of mobile users don’t have an iPhone. (iPhone apps are definitely not spreading virally, Shapiro said. He also argued that Tegic’s T9 predictive texting did not spread virally; it was pushed out by carriers and handset manufacturers in a dedicated partnership.)

“We will not see the Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo of mobile until this changes,” Shapiro said. He added that he’s not advocating one standard mobile platform; he’s just saying how it is right now.

So his advice for mobile entrepreneurs and investors was:

—Be skeptical of anyone peddling viral marketing in mobile.

—Build a business model that doesn’t require big adoption.

—Pick a market segment that’s homogeneous. (Examples: BlackBerry corporate users, Silicon Valley techies.)

—Use ubiquitous technologies like WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and SMS texting.

—Wait… (”Things are getting better,” he said.)

Afterward, Shapiro said he thinks “Europe holds the future of the U.S.” Over there, wireless carriers have influence, but only about half of consumers get their services directly from carriers, versus about 90 percent in the U.S. “I think you’ll see the carrier role diminish,” he said, when it comes to mobile software.

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Here at Xconomy we may not be on the absolute bleeding edge of media technology—usually we’re too busy writing about the latest stuff to adopt it right away ourselves—but when there’s a cool new way to get our content out, we try to take advantage of it as soon as we can. In that spirit, we wanted to call your attention to a few of the features we’ve introduced lately to make Xconomy easier to use.

1. Social Media Sharing—including Twitter and Facebook

If you’re reading this story on our website and you glance at the upper right corner of the story area, just above the “Related Posts” section, you’ll see a new collection of widgets from ShareThis that make it easy to share Xconomy stories with your Twitter followers, your Facebook friends, and users of many other social bookmarking and sharing services. It’s also a snap to e-mail stories to your friends (or yourself). Just mouse over one of the widget icons and the ShareThis window will pop up.

We’re especially excited about the new Twitter button, which makes it really simple to tweet any story you like and was one of the most-requested features from our readers. Speaking of Twitter, you can sign up to follow us there at twitter.com/xconomy, twitter.com/bbuderi, twitter.com/ldtimmerman, twitter.com/ryan_mcbride, and twitter.com/wroush.

2. Single-Page View

Many Web users feel overwhelmed by long rivers of text, so we insert page breaks into our stories every 500 words or so. But we also realize that other readers dislike having to click the “next” link several times to get through our longer stories. So we’ve added a “Single Page View” option. You’ll find it at the bottom of each page of multi-page stories, near the “Page” link and the little orange arrow. Click on that link once, and you’ll be able to view even our longest columns and interviews with no further hassle. This is also a useful feature if you want to print out our longer stories.

3. Xconomy Kindle Edition

These days, there are as many ways to read digital content as there are digital devices. For readers who’ve joined the e-book revolution, we now offer a Kindle Edition of Xconomy, available through Amazon’s Kindle Store. To sign up, go to the Xconomy page on Amazon and click on the Subscribe Now button. Or, on your Kindle, click Menu > Shop Kindle Store > Blogs, then type in Xconomy and click Search Store. The Kindle version includes the full text of all Xconomy stories delivered to your device wirelessly and automatically, every weekday.

4. Xconomy Mobile

This one isn’t quite as new—we actually launched it back in August—but we thought we’d remind you about it. If you open a browser on your mobile phone and go to www.xconomy.com, you’ll automatically be redirected to the mobile version of our site, which is optimized by Mofuse for viewing on a small screen. (You can also get to the mobile site directly at m.xconomy.com.) If you click on the “All Stories” link on the main page of the mobile site, you can then click through to full-text versions of all of our stories (just like you’d get on the Kindle). You can also browse by city and topic.

5. E-mail and RSS

These really aren’t new—we’ve offered them since we launched Xconomy in 2007. But while our e-mail newsletters and RSS feeds are extremely popular (we reach at least as many people through these mechanisms as we do through the website), we still talk to many readers who aren’t aware of them. To sign up for daily e-mails with Xconomy headlines and stories, or to add Xconomy to your RSS readers such as Netvibes or Google Reader, just go to our Email – RSS page. You can choose newsletters and RSS feeds specific to our cities (Boston, San Diego, or Seattle) or key topics (life sciences, information technology, nanotechnology, energy, people, venture capital, and my World Wide Wade column) that most interest you. Or you can just sign up to get all of our stories. (That’s our favorite option!)

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Say you’d like to look up an old friend from high school. You have no idea what happened to him after college, and you can’t find him on Facebook. But you do remember the address of his house down the street from your childhood home. What if there was a Web-based map where you could log on, locate your friend’s old house, and leave a virtual note for him to find?

That’s the scenario that Mark Sherman hopes millions of people will explore at ZoomAtlas, a new social mapping service going public today at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York. Using the site’s tools, you can publicly annotate any location that has some personal meaning to you. That might mean leaving a note for someone, or it might mean reminiscing about the house where you grew up, or a school you attended, or even a restaurant where you had a good meal.

But Sherman, the president, CEO, and main funder of the Cambridge, MA-based startup, thinks finding long-lost acquaintances will be the most compelling use for the site. “There’s nothing on Facebook I’ve seen that allows you to reconnect on the micro level,” he says. “The closest thing you have is groups for school alumni—but that’s not the only place that people want to reconnect from.”

You can think of ZoomAtlas as a cross between Google Maps, Facebook, and Wikipedia, with user-generated missives and memories as the key ingredients that—in theory, at least—will make it more than just another mapping site.

Speaking of Wikipedia, Sherman says Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the first wiki, is a close friend and an advisor to the company. In a short essay posted on the site, Cunningham says ZoomAtlas is “a perfect example” of the collaborative philosophy behind wikis. “We can make an atlas of our world that shows what we know and love, not just what a satellite can see,” Cunningham writes. “We can weave our memories and impressions together using the computer’s ever improving graphics to make a collaborative picture from our eyes and minds and hearts in equal proportion.”

The first thing to try when you visit ZoomAtlas is typing in a specific street address—say, the house where you grew up. You’ll see a satellite image of the neighborhood, with small icons representing the location of each house. Each house icon can be edited in a number of ways: you can move it in case it’s not in the right location on the property, you can give it a different look to correspond to your memory of the place, you can write an article about that address (this is the most Wikipedia-like part), and you can attach short notes for others to find. Right now the maps are 2-D, but in the future, according to Sherman, you’ll be able to go inside houses and annotate individual rooms. “Users are empowered to help detail to the map to the point that every location on Earth, no matter how small, can be defined and have attributes assigned to it,” says Sherman.

But ZoomAtlas is more than just a map-based bulletin board where people can leave notes for long-lost friends, Sherman says. He hopes it will evolve into the locus for any online conversation linked to a place. “It’s a framework on which to allow discussion of locations, whether big or small,” he says. “If there were another Fort Hood incident, God forbid, you could …Next Page »

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Online search and information discovery are being transformed before our eyes. It’s no longer just Google, or Google and Bing, or even Google, Bing, and Twitter—there are big problems in technology and business to solve across all areas of social media search, real-time news and information, mobile search, user interfaces, search marketing, vertical search (travel, products, people, video, you name it), and other related topics. Just imagine what the landscape might look like in another 10 years.

A lot of the action is happening around Seattle. If you want to hear what the big companies are doing to stay ahead of the curve, and where startups and venture capitalists have some real opportunities, you’ll want to join us for the Xconomy Forum on “The Future of Search and Information Discovery” on November 30 at the University of Washington. (Registration info is here—the early bird rate ends tomorrow, and tickets are going fast.)

Search touches almost every aspect of business today. So get your tough questions ready for our panel, which will feature Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast (acquired by Microsoft last year). Ed Lazowska will moderate the discussion, and I’ll be there to help stir up the crowd and make sure your questions are heard.

We’ll also have a series of startup “bursts”—short presentations from some of the most exciting young companies in the field. They include Evri, which is creating a smart index of the Web to help you browse for information more effectively; Gist, which sits at the intersection of e-mail, social media, and search, feeding you updates about your contacts; Sage Bionetworks, an effort to do for biology what open source did for software and Twitter and Facebook did for social networks; SEOmoz, which helps businesses do search engine optimization and online marketing; and Topsy, which is developing a new search engine for social media (starting with Twitter).

I can’t think of a better way to kick off the holiday season than to spend a couple hours being inspired and challenged by these guys. And, of course, some of the best stuff isn’t even in the program, it’s in the networking—besides our stellar panelists and speakers, you’ll be mingling with a first-rate crowd of entrepreneurs, investors, VCs, executives, researchers, technologists, and students.

Come to think of it, let’s get the discussion rolling right now. What do you really want to hear about at the event? What are your most compelling questions about search, information discovery, and online marketing? Leave a comment below, and we’ll address it.

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Want to know what the real opportunities are for startup companies and investors in the field of Web search and information discovery? Or what happens when you put Google and Bing in the same room? You’ve come to the right place.

We’re putting the finishing touches on the program for our next Xconomy Forum, on the future of search and information discovery. It’s all happening on the evening of November 30 in Seattle, at the University of Washington (Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room). You can see the writeup and program here.

In addition to our panel—which includes Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from the UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast—we’ll have a series of “bursts” from some of the most exciting startups working in information discovery today.

We have confirmed short presentations from four startups:

—Evri, led by CEO Will Hunsinger. This Seattle company is trying to reinvent Web browsing by understanding the content of Web pages and the connections between entities on the Web, using semantic algorithms.

—SEOmoz, led by CEO Rand Fishkin. This Seattle-based firm focuses on search engine optimization and Internet marketing, helping companies around the world boost their Web traffic and expand their business.

—Topsy, led by CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. This San Francisco startup is working on a novel search engine for social media, starting with Twitter. It’s what people call “real-time search,” and it’s based on Internet conversations, not documents.

—Sage Bionetworks, led by CEO Stephen Friend. This Seattle-based nonprofit is trying to do for biology what Twitter and Facebook did for social networking, and what Linux did for open-source software. It’s a tall order, but search technology is key to allowing biologists to find and share results in a common global database.

We’re really looking forward to the discussions on Nov. 30, and hope to see you there (registration info here).

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Greylock Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm formerly based in the Boston area, announced today it has hired Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, as a partner. Hoffman, who has also been an angel investor, will focus on early-stage consumer Internet and software investments, as well as advise entrepreneurs from Greylock’s portfolio companies. Greylock also announced it has closed a new $575 million venture fund. The VC firm has previously backed companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Data Domain, Farecast, and ZipCar.

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RunMyErrand, the Boston-based online clearinghouse where busy people can recruit temporary helpers to complete tasks around town, doesn’t have a branch in the San Francisco Bay Area (yet). But if it did, founder and CEO Leah Busque might be using it to pick up checks from Baseline Ventures and Maples Investments this week.

Baseline, in San Francisco, and Maples, in Menlo Park, CA, are the two investors in RunMyErrand’s $1 million Series A round, announced today. Both firms focus on seed-stage investments, and both have prominent Web 2.0 and social networking startups such as Twitter and Digg in their portfolios. “We’re really excited to be working with them, just because of their experience in the business and the resources they bring,” Busque tells Xconomy.

The new funds will help RunMyErrand build its staff—up to now, Busque herself has been the only full-time employee—and expand operations to San Francisco. Busque says the company’s model has proved itself well enough in Boston, where many new users sign up and post and run errands every day, that it’s time to scale it up and try it in a second city.

“It goes beyond errands,” Busque says. “It’s about building a community of people willing to help each other out.” One recent posting, for example, came from a woman who was stuck attending a wedding in Providence when her elderly mother’s Beacon Hill home was burgled. “Some jewelry was stolen and she need to file a police report,” Busque says. “So this woman went online from Providence and posted that she needed a runner to go over to help her mother, and they got the report filled out that night.”

So how did a one-employee startup working out of office space donated by Cambridge, MA-based Zipcar get connected with two West Coast micro-investors? Busque says it was a byproduct of her time in Palo Alto last summer, participating in Facebook’s “fbFund” incubator program.

RunMyErrand was one of 25 companies chosen for the exlcusive program (Busque wrote about some of her fbFund experiences for Xconomy back in July.) While she was in the Bay Area, Busque says, she approached entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, of Four Hour Work Week fame, about being an advisor to her startup. Ferriss not only liked RunMyErrand and agreed to advise Busque, but connected her with Maples managing partner Mike Maples and Baseline founder Steve Anderson.

A million-dollar Series A round isn’t huge in the tech financing world, but Busque thinks it will be enough to show that the company can gain a critical mass of users in Boston and San Francisco before it raises more money and expands to more cities. “We are a service networking company, and with those types of companies you can really go lean and agile and take it pretty far,” she says. “A year ago I was working out of my house. I plan to remain in that very bootstrapped, agile mode.”

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It was a big week for big companies. Amazon’s stock soared, and the e-commerce giant made a deal with Microsoft that should make Kindle e-books even more popular. There was also interesting deals news from Bing and a few Northwest venture firms and startups.

—Kennewick, WA-based Infinia has raised $3.25 million in debt and options out of a total financing round worth as much as $10.5 million, as Luke reported. The investors were not disclosed. Infinia, which (before this latest round) has raised $84 million from a syndicate that includes Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital and Vinod Khosla, is developing novel solar power systems.

—Seattle-based Bezos Expeditions, the venture firm run by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, re-upped with an investment in Aviary, a design software startup based in Long Island, NY. The $7 million Series B round was led by Boston-based Spark Capital. Aviary makes cloud-based software for graphic design, audio editing, and other creative digital services.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is teaming up with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to release Kindle for PC, a software application that will let people read Kindle electronic books on Windows personal computers. No financial terms were announced. The free application will be released next month.

—Revolution Computing, which has offices in Seattle and New Haven, CT, raised $9 million from North Bridge Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, and Intel Capital, based in Santa Clara, CA, as Wade reported. The startup, which provides software and support for the statistical programming language known as “R,” also announced that Norman Nie, a veteran of the data mining software firm SPSS, is its new CEO.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $12 million investment in RedSeal Systems, a security software firm in San Mateo, CA. Existing investors Venrock Associates, Jafco Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Leapfrog Ventures also participated in the deal, which brings RedSeal’s total funding to more than $43 million. OVP managing director Mark Ashida has joined the company’s board.

—Bellevue, WA-based AudienceScience confirmed it has raised $20 million from Silicon Valley investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Meritech Capital Partners, and Integral Capital Partners. The online advertising firm said it will use the funding to hire new staff, do R&D in targeted advertising, and expand internationally. Luke previously reported that AudienceScience (formerly called Revenue Science) had closed a $15.1 million funding round involving equity, debt, and preferred stock, which had the potential to go up to $20 million, based on an SEC filing.

—Microsoft is integrating real-time status updates from Twitter and Facebook into its Bing search engine, as Thea Chard reported in her first freelance story for Xconomy. The Redmond, WA, software company has formed non-exclusive partnerships with the two social media networks, as part of Microsoft’s plan to fuse the “real-time Web” with its search engine to create a new kind of social-media focused reader. Bing’s access to tweets is now in beta form, while the Facebook deal, which will grant the search engine access to all publicly shared information from the social network’s users, will be effective at a later date, according to Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi.

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Some tech companies seem to be at their best when things are at their worst. Those are the ones you really need to keep an eye on, especially in a recession. Isilon Systems is one of those companies.

The Seattle-based data storage firm (NASDAQ: ISLN) is announcing its third-quarter earnings this afternoon, and it will be interesting to see how well its products are selling across a wide range of industries—everything from movie studios and media companies to financial institutions and biomedical research organizations. I recently sat down with Isilon’s founder and CEO, Sujal Patel, for a wide-ranging interview about the nine-year-old company’s technology and business strategy. It makes for a pretty compelling case study of a tech startup’s growing pains, and how it has bounced back from adversity to become a leading player in a crowded and competitive field.

In case you don’t know all the twists and turns in Isilon’s history, here’s a quick recap. Patel, a former engineer at Seattle-based RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), co-founded Isilon in January 2001. The basic idea was to provide cheaper and more efficient data storage for companies needing to host or deliver video, music, and other multimedia content that requires a lot of storage space. In his previous role as chief architect of RealNetworks’ media delivery software, Patel had seen many customers struggle to upgrade their storage capabilities. So there was a real problem to solve. But the tech bubble had collapsed, so customers weren’t necessarily in the mood to buy. Patel says he “pretty much timed the worst spot of the decade to start a company.”

What’s more, there were already about 250 venture-funded storage companies out there, Patel says, and about 50 of them sounded just like Isilon. Patel says he built his business plan around solving the specific problem Real’s customers had, and “how that problem would be pervasive across all mid-range to large enterprises over the next decade.” To start with, he set an incredibly narrow customer focus on photo-sharing and streaming media websites, and media companies.

Isilon’s technology approach was to cluster together a large number of storage “bricks”—each one includes disks, memory, processing, and networking—into a single storage unit. It was a novel approach in the field of network-attached storage, which today is a $4 billion industry with big players like NetApp, EMC, and Hewlett-Packard. Isilon’s technology requires solving some very tough software problems, but the payoff is better storage performance that is also cheaper and easier to manage, for companies dealing with huge amounts of unstructured data. “We can build one gigantic network drive, and we can scale it as the customer’s needs change over time,” Patel says.

Venture capitalists were sold. In August 2001, Isilon closed an $8.4 million funding round …Next Page »

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Microsoft announced the integration of real-time status updates from Twitter and Facebook into its Bing search engine this morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi and Online Services Group president Qi Lu confirmed the company’s non-exclusive partnerships with the two social media networks on stage, followed by a short demo, discussion, and audience Q&A.

According to Mehdi and Lu, the new deals are part of Bing’s ongoing plan to join “the emerging hot area of real-time information” with search engine technology to create a new kind of socially focused reader.

“We think about search holistically,” Lu said. “It’s about user intent…You are trying to build a mind-reader.”

During his speech, Mehdi demoed Bing.com/twitter, which went live in beta form only minutes after the announcement. “We are going to get access to all the Twitter information in real time,” he said, while organizing the tweet index by quality, relevance, and social significance to make searching easier and more efficient.

“We look at the people who are tweeting and we assign a social relevance score,” Mehdi said. The tweets are ranked by relevance, range, popularity, and interest, with stronger emphasis on tweets that are considered to be the most trustworthy and prolific. “If a particular tweet is being re-tweeted several times, you know it’s hot,” he said.

The new Twitter integration also includes a spam filter to improve searchability in the Twitter stream, a “tag cloud” of hottest Twitter topics, tweet ranking abilities, and top tweeted links. Bing will also automatically expand shortened URLs, like bit.ly and tinyurl, so that searchers will be able to see where the links will take them before clicking.

Meanwhile, the Facebook deal will allow Bing access to all publicly shared information from the social network’s users. According to Mehdi, this will launch “at a later date.”

The deals, described by Mehdi as “strategic partnerships,” come at the height of the “real-time search” competition between Microsoft and Google—efforts to help consumers get up-to-the-minute information about the world around them. In the last several months, Bing also has been on a partnership blitz, making a deal with PayScale to edge into the job search market, and signing a 10-year, $150 million agreement with Yahoo that gives Microsoft control of both companies’ search engine technologies.

And this is not Bing’s first attempt at going social, either. With Google now infiltrating what was Microsoft’s core client base—corporations—and dominating personal Web browsing and e-mail, Bing has been running a campaign to outpace the search giant in other areas. Both companies have been actively developing social media capabilities—Google using iGoogle to integrate content sharing, games, and communication tools into its users’ individualized homepages, and Bing utilizing already established social media. Facebook now employs Bing for the site’s search feature, and back in July, Bing began including popular Twitter feeds—like those of Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest—into its search results, in an attempt to get a leg up on the competition.

Google is said to be in similar partnership talks with both Twitter and Facebook. And although Microsoft’s deals are non-exclusive and do not preclude any future deals between the two social media groups and Google, it was clearly a sprint on the part of Microsoft to get in first in the social media race.

Passing over financial and operational details, Lu made it clear that this was not the last we’d hear of Microsoft’s forward-thinking, social media push. “A real-time corpus like Twitter…is still evolving and emerging,” Lu said. “This is just the beginning.”

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Brendan Boyd, a San Diego Internet entrepreneur, gave me an update today on the venture we discussed last April, when Boyd and his partners were developing ideas for a website that enables users to sell merchandise through multiple online venders.

The website that Boyd had created with partners Jan Anton and Eric Jacobson was in beta development at the time, and they also had decided to rename the business. They had started the business as iSelfStore.com, which only reflected half of their business model—an online hub that helps users to keep an inventory of their belongings.

So they changed the name of their San Diego-based startup to Onemarketplace, which better reflects the higher-value part of their online business, which enables users to put their items up for sale on multiple e-commerce sites at the same time. Their Web-based application enables someone to fill out a single form at Onemarketplace.com, and sell items simultaneously on eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Oodle, OLX, and Vast. Users also can sell merchandise through online classifieds at AOL, Facebook, and MySpace, and promote their listings on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Boyd says they launched Onemarketplace.com on Sept. 14, and Web traffic has been rising steadily since then. “We re-branded the business and re-did the whole look and feel of the website,” Boyd says.

The partners have continued to put their own money into the venture, Boyd says. While he told me in April that they were seeking between $250,000 and $500,000 in angel funding, Boyd now says they have stopped actively seeking investors.

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I can’t do justice to a comprehensive review of yesterday’s FiReGlobal (West Coast) conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. Instead, I’ll just give a few of my key takeaways. The all-day event, organized by Strategic News Service, focused on how to solve some of the most pressing problems in technology, business, and society—in areas as diverse as broadband access, entrepreneurship, education, sustainability and the environment, political discourse, human health, and mobile devices.

The sweeping conference had the tagline, “Global technology driving local solutions.” Interesting, as that’s sort of the reverse of Xconomy’s mantra, which is reporting about local stories with global impact. But I think they’re two sides of the same innovation coin.

So, in “ESPN plays of the day” style, here’s my top 10 list from the conference (if only I had the video to go with it):

10. Setting up entrepreneurial zones. A panel led by Ty Carlson of Microsoft proposed denoting special “R&D zones” from Oregon to British Columbia geared toward supporting startups in fields like renewable energy, sustainable farming, and biotech. The idea would be to offer tax credits and other incentives to create a more entrepreneurial culture in the Northwest, especially in rural areas.

9. What government should and shouldn’t do. Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias of Seattle-based Kashless said, “Startups and investors can’t make a 10-year bet when you have a two-year tax credit.” Those conditions freeze out small companies, especially in costly ventures like energy. So government should create open markets and set minimum market sizes for new technologies, Tobias said. But it shouldn’t pick the technology winners themselves.

8. Northwest tech startups do the Olympics. Tom Guthrie, CEO of Seattle-based Twisted Pair Solutions, said his company has helped numerous agencies on the Olympic Peninsula inter-operate their radios—a key problem in disaster response and other scenarios. Twisted Pair, which is backed by Ignition Partners and other investors, is also working on a laser system to deliver broadband signals. Meanwhile, Paul Manson, CEO of Vancouver, BC-based Sea Breeze, talked about his company’s project to build a high-voltage, direct-current undersea cable between Victoria, BC, and Port Angeles, WA. This would be a fast, controllable power transmission component of a smart grid; it should be under construction by mid-2010, he said.

7. The world according to Dell. In a chat with Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service, Michael Dell said he is excited about China and the rest of Asia as fast-growing economies. He anticipates a U.S. recovery from the recession, but says, “I don’t think you’ll see an immediate snap-back.” And he likes South America as an emerging market (Dell does sales of more than $1 billion in Brazil alone). But Europe, not so much—he sees a lot of uncertainty in the workforce there.

6. Get ready for Dell smartphones. “Mobility is absolutely the theme,” Dell said. He was talking about the relative importance of desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices to …Next Page »

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Microsoft’s latest reorganization, which involves labs in both the Seattle and Boston areas, has a new face. It’s Lili Cheng, a 14-year Microsoftie with experience in both research (social computing) and products (Windows Vista user experience). Cheng now officially leads three separate groups that are being rolled into one: her Creative Systems Group within Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA; Rich Media Lab led by Kostas Mallios, also in Redmond; and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA, led by Reed Sturtevant.

Yesterday, chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced the creation of the new entity, called FUSE (Future Social Experience) Labs, which will focus on social computing as applied to Microsoft products in entertainment and business. Sturtevant, the founding managing director of Startup Labs, is leaving the company, while Mallios will continue to report to Ozzie and is taking on business development duties involved with technology incubation.

But back to the lab’s new head, who spoke with me from Cambridge yesterday. Cheng, after inheriting about 70 staff members from Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab, now manages about 80 people in FUSE Labs, and says she will be splitting her time between the Seattle and Boston areas. She said the employees of Startup Labs (there are 30-some staff members) will be staying in Cambridge.

As Cheng explains, the goal of FUSE Labs is to “bridge the gap” between research and products—an oft-heard refrain at Microsoft (and most big companies)—by working on projects that are two to five years away from commercialization, and interacting closely with product teams.

The specific focus of the lab is social computing—applying social media (things like Twitter, Facebook, and other social-network technologies) to problems in business collaboration and entertainment. The high-level strategy here is to “embed social activity into business scenarios” for Microsoft, Cheng says. She didn’t say anything more specific about Microsoft’s plans for social media, or about how the employees in Startup Labs and Rich Media Lab will be integrated into the social theme. But she adds, “Interacting with other people is so personal and emotional to every single person out there. It’s important for every company out there.”

Cheng’s team has previously built applications like Kodu, which lets kids create games and stories using an Xbox controller and share them on a community games channel; and Salsa, a prototype that connects your e-mail inbox with social networks. (The latter sounds a lot like what the Seattle startup Gist, led by ex-Microsoftie T.A. McCann, has built and is actively testing.)

Asked what her greatest challenge is in the new job, Cheng said it’s addressing how to “take best advantage of this amazing opportunity.” Having been in the social computing space for many years, she says, now it’s time to “just go for it.”

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My friend Brad King, a journalism professor at Ball State University, makes fun of me for being such a Web and gadget geek while at the same time shunning social networking tools like Facebook. He’s got a point. I’ve written a lot about Facebook, MySpace, and their predecessors, but I’ve never wholeheartedly joined in, the way I have with most of the other digital media technologies that are the loose theme of this column. I guess I never quite saw the point. Also, though it’s probably a sign that I’m growing prematurely crotchety, I keep telling myself that that social networking is a fad, like some fashionable night club that will empty out as soon as something new opens up down the street.

Well, Facebook may still be a fad, but with 300 million users and growing, it’s a remarkably enduring one. It’s probably time for me to get used to it. On top of that, I’ve had some experiences over the last couple of weeks that have started to change my attitude about the site.

It started with my iPhone. Two weeks ago, as you might remember, I wrote a column about “The Best Camera.” It’s an iPhone app created by Seattle photographer Chase Jarvis as part of a cross-media campaign promoting his message that “the best camera is the one that’s with you.” The app lets you apply some intriguing digital effects to the photos you snap with the iPhone’s built-in camera. It also lets you upload your processed images directly to Facebook, where every new shot will show up on your Wall and in your friends’ news feeds.

I’ve sent a few of my Best Camera shots to my Facebook photo albums, and a truly surprising thing has happened. People have been commenting on the photos. Not a huge crowd of people, but enough to make me realize that there are Facebook users who actually pay attention to the new stuff they see every day, and that some of them care enough to leave feedback.

I don’t mean to sound naive—I know that posting and reading updates and commenting on other people’s updates are the main order of business at Facebook. The wake-up call for me was the realization that Facebook has now become what Flickr was originally supposed to be.

I’ve been a Flickr user since ancient times—back before it was part of Yahoo, when it was a funky little startup based in Vancouver and was mainly a place where people could comment on each other’s photos by decorating them with little thought-balloon captions. I’ve got thousands of photos there, and it’s going to remain my default online photo storage location. But nobody ever comments on my photos at Flickr anymore. At Facebook, by contrast, I can upload a camera-phone shot and get five comments within an hour.

What’s up with that? I thought at first that the sheer volume of photos at Flickr might be one explanation. There are so many new ones every day that my shots might just be getting lost in the crowd. But from what I’ve read, the world’s largest photo-sharing site these days is …Next Page »

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Natick, MA-based Vivox said today that it’s opening its new “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” service to all Facebook members. The application—which allows Facebook users to set up free voice chat rooms and invite their friends to participate from within Facebook—is one of the first creations of Vivox Labs, a new R&D arm of the company, and had been in closed beta testing for the last few months. Vivox, which we profiled last month, is known mainly as a provider of voice communication services for massive virtual worlds and game worlds such as Second Life and Eve Online.

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While making small talk on my last trip to the dentist, I mentioned that as a biotech journalist, I sometimes interview entrepreneurs who create new dental products, like the Sonicare toothbrush. The dentist, maybe to test if I knew what I was talking about, asked me what cool ideas I’ve seen lately. I stammered a little before mentioning the San Diego company with a drug that makes anesthesia wear off faster so dental patients can get back to work.

My dentist hadn’t heard of it. And, I’m sure Novalar CEO Donna Janson will be chagrined to learn, I couldn’t remember the product’s name off the top of my head, either. But it reminded me that it had been a few months since I first wrote about this first-of-a-kind drug, phentolamine mesylate (Oraverse). So it was time for a follow-up with Janson to see how the initial marketing campaign is going.

It’s been more than six months since San Diego-based Novalar kicked off its marketing campaign at a dental meeting in Chicago in late February and early March. Some 30,000 people attended that meeting, including some leading dental researchers, and Novalar spent a few marketing bucks by holding a reception at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The initial buzz from the meeting translated into about 2,000 customers after about six months, although not all have re-ordered the product, Janson says. The Novalar drug has been introduced in six major regions around the country that are serving as test markets.

The original plan was to hit the test markets for six to eight months, staff up from 55 people to 100 with a national sales force, and go after the whole country with gusto. Novalar has decided to hold off on that more ambitious plan for at least a few more months, seeking to learn more from its experience in the test markets before it goes after the bigger territory.

“We’re pushing out to 2010 our national launch to learn a few more things,” Janson says.

Just to remind those who missed the initial story on Novalar last November, here’s the basic business idea. Something like 275 million cartridges of local anesthetic are used in U.S. dental offices …Next Page »

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Personnel moves usually make for boring news, but sometimes they carry deeper meaning. I couldn’t help but wonder about the deeper meaning when Cambridge, MA-based Ironwood Pharmaceuticals said last month it had recruited David Ebersman, the former chief financial officer of Genentech, to join its board.

Ebersman, a boyish-looking guy just 39, took the chief financial officer job earlier this year at Facebook, joining its more famously boyish CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. But Ebersman is well-known as well for his remarkable 15-year career climbing the ladder to become CFO at Genentech until the company was acquired by Switzerland-based Roche last spring. Ebersman was one of the reasons Genentech had the most respected biotech management team on Wall Street for years. His appointment to Ironwood’s board made me wonder if the privately held enterprise wants a little more help opening some doors with deep-pocketed biotech investors who can take the company to a new level, and maybe even help it go public.

Why say that? I’ve interviewed Ebersman several times and know he has exceptional command of facts and how they fit into company strategy, but even more than that, I remember seeing Ebersman in action at a Genentech analyst day at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York two years ago. In front of at least 500 fairly stressed analysts and fund managers watching every word for market-moving news, he stepped up to the microphone after some heavy scientific presentations and broke the tension. Ebersman said he couldn’t really start into his presentation without first admitting how awed and intimidated he was that day to bump into one of his boyhood heroes in the elevator—former New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing.

David Ebersman

Just the mental image of Ebersman, who’s about 5-foot-6, looking straight up in the elevator at a 7-foot former NBA basketball star like Ewing, had the room break out laughing. Genentech CEO Art Levinson, a science nerd to the core, added to the humor when he admitted he had never heard of Ewing and asked who he was, and why people seemed to think he was a big deal (which prompted some gentle ribbing from Ebersman).

So when I had a chance to talk by phone with Ironwood CEO Peter Hecht a couple weeks ago, I asked him whether he reached out to Ebersman to add his credibility and deep reservoir of good will on Wall Street. Might Ebersman be able to help Ironwood go public?

The short answer from Hecht was no. “We didn’t add David Ebersman to the board with any one transaction in mind. I’ve been working on him for three years to join our board,” Hecht says. But he didn’t disagree with how Ebersman’s affiliation can benefit Ironwood. “David has terrific credibility with investors,” Hecht says, adding that even before Ebersman joined the board, he introduced Hecht to a contact at Morgan Stanley, who led a $50 million financing for Ironwood a year ago.

Even if Hecht doesn’t have any direct comment about IPO possibilities, other people …Next Page »

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Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone (as the old saying goes). Or maybe not. Maybe no one weeps alone anymore, what with Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

This week’s release of a “sentiment analysis” product from Seattle-based Appature made me think about what’s really going on at the intersection of social media and semantic understanding of the Web. Appature is an up-and-coming, already profitable startup that has made its name in helping companies in the healthcare industry better understand their customers, so as to deliver more effective marketing campaigns. It has made inroads with big customers, like Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft Health Solutions Group.

Appature’s latest offering “allows marketers to close the loop between the pulse on the broad Web and their non-Web business in an immediately actionable way,” says Kabir Shahani, Appature’s co-founder and CEO. “It’s the linkage between the broader Web and the other information you already have about a customer or prospect, with immediate action built on top of this, that is the key here.” In other words, it’s not just about market awareness, it’s about directly driving revenues—by monitoring and understanding positive and negative feelings about brands, products, and other industry topics, gleaned from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, other social sites, and Web documents.

It’s a fast-moving trend, and there are now enough Seattle companies working on this kind of technology to put the Northwest squarely on the “Web sentiment” map. (I haven’t talked to companies in Portland, OR, yet, though Jive Software comes to mind.) Here’s how it all works, in a nutshell. If you’re a marketer, you can buy software to help monitor and summarize what customers are saying about your brand on the Web. If you’re a big company, or an individual with a reputation to protect, you can even do things like change the visibility of search results that pop up on your name. And if you’re a regular old consumer, you can keep track of things like what percentage of people (and who) are saying positive or negative things about the iPhone, Microsoft, or Kanye West.

That kind of software is exactly what Seattle-based Evri rolled out in August. Evri’s calling card is that it scours the Web every minute of every day, trying to understand the semantic meaning of sentences on Web pages and documents. What’s more, its software makes connections between all the entities (names, places, products) it encounters on the Web. The broader goal is to give people a better way to browse and discover information.

“One thing we do which is really different is we actually say who or what is expressing the positive or negative sentiment, as opposed to simply remaining ambiguous,” said Deep Dhillon, Evri’s chief technology officer. “One of the reasons we can offer these more involved capabilities is due to the depth of our technology stack—because we know, for every sentence, who the subject, verb, object, etc. are.”

Which raises the question of just how far along the semantic technology …Next Page »

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It’s always good to hear about another small Seattle startup that’s bootstrapped and already profitable. Yesterday it was Appature, today it’s AppBank. They may share the first three letters of their names (and bootstrapped profitability), but after that they’re about as different as two Internet software companies can be.

AppBank is a six-person company focused on developing software to help Facebook users create social entertainment applications—and get paid for them. The company is rolling out the public beta version of its site today. The world of Facebook apps is very crowded, of course, but what AppBank is trying to do is give average Facebook users easier ways to make simple apps like quizzes, surveys, and games in their spare time, and more effective ways to make money from them by providing targeted advertising. “It’s the first time a company has paired relevant ads with crowdsourced social entertainment,” says Fred Hsu, AppBank’s founder and CEO.

Hsu started the company in April of this year, together with chief operating officer Joyce Chang. Hsu is the co-founder of Oversee.net, a Los Angeles company that holds Internet domain names and does domain marketing for the search, display, and lead-generation industries. Oversee did $200 million in revenue last year, and Hsu sold a minority stake in the company to private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners for $150 million. Chang, for her part, came from Seattle-based Tracento, which implements Facebook applications like Friend Hugs, Kisses, and Send Flowers. Both UCLA computer science grads, Hsu and Chang are based in Seattle, and the rest of the company’s employees are in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.

What AppBank offers is a quick way to create a Facebook quiz, for example—”What type of underwear are you?” or “Are you left-brained or right-brained?” or some such—and then free tools to …Next Page »

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