All the cool kids were doing it, so we just couldn’t resist. We’ve created an Xconomy page on Google+, where we’ll share several of our most interesting stories every day. We’ve also added Google+ sharing buttons to all of our stories here on the site—you’ll find them in the sharing box at right, and at the bottom of each story column.

We’re excited to have another great outlet for our content and a new way to engage with our readers online. We’re looking forward to some lively discussions and debates (and hopefully a few +1′s, too!). So please add us to your circles. Who knows, maybe you’ll even let us crash a hangout or two.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

When Doug Orr first moved up to Google’s Seattle office in mid-2010, he found a lot to like. The infrastructure expert isn’t a California guy—he came to Google by way of Ann Arbor, MI—and found Seattle’s culture, and even its climate, a little more familiar than Silicon Valley’s. “People are pretty laid back here, and there’s a lot of interest in beautiful green things,” Orr says.

One thing that was missing, however, was a large contingent of Googlers working on the networking side of the business. “I spent six months doing video conferences in a very small room, eight hours a day,” he says with a smile. “That was not a pinnacle fulfillment experience. But it worked OK.”

Things have picked up since then. As we first reported last month, Orr is the new Seattle site director for Google, giving him a senior management role with the Mountain View, CA-based web advertising and search titan. He replaces former director Brian Bershad, who is now on a new assignment in Russia for Google. Orr works closely with Scott Silver, a manager in Google’s advertising unit who has been director of Google’s Kirkland office since mid-2009.

Google Seattle

The pair oversees more than 1,000 employees for the growing office, which is expanding further on its Fremont neighborhood campus in Seattle as it takes over space previously occupied by Getty Images. Googlers in the Seattle-Kirkland offices work on a large swath of high-priority projects, including the network user connections within Google Plus, the company’s new social service, and Hangouts, the video-conferencing service that’s also part of Google Plus.

Orr retains major responsibilities in Google’s infrastructure unit, where he’s in charge of the systems that manage, monitor, and plan capacity for the traffic that flows through Google’s vast network. In addition, Orr is closely involved with Google’s moves into the retail cloud-computing market—a market that crosstown tech giant Amazon.com has revolutionized with its Amazon Web Services division. Google’s offerings include a cloud storage service, a relational database service, and Google BigQuery, which lets developers analyze huge sets of data.

“The infrastructure team is definitely growing here. It’s incredibly important to me, and the projects are actually completely awesome. I’m very excited about what we’re doing here,” Orr says. “Between the networking and other infrastructure stuff I do, I have connections with all the major offices, and it’s a great source of interesting diversity.”

While Orr downplays his appointment as a pretty simple case of filling a need, Google Kirkland site director Scott Silver—who’s been in his job since mid-2009—says Orr’s ability to tackle big projects is well known.

“The process by which Doug became the site director here wasn’t just like he raised his hand and there was no one else raising their hand, or something like that,” Silver says. “Doug actually has an excellent track record at Google about building consensus among disparate interests, someone who can build a community out of a bunch of parts that don’t all look the same at the beginning.”

Site directors serve as the semi-public faces of Google’s Seattle-area operations. That means they play key roles in finding possible acquisitions, building connections with the University of Washington’s computer science department, and recruiting new Googlers to the team.

“The majority of our time is spent working in the areas in which we make software. But at the end of the day, the site needs an identity based on the projects it works on,” Silver says. “It’s really important, in concert with the recruiting team, to have people who are passionate about building stuff to attract people to work on their teams.”

The past few years have seen a flood of Silicon Valley tech companies, big and small alike, heading to the Seattle area to fill their rosters with talented people from Microsoft, Amazon, the University of Washington, and the startup scene. The grizzled veteran of that pack would have to be Google, which first established an engineering office in the region in 2004.

Even though recruiting in the area is a lot more competitive now, Google is still growing quickly. Along with the expanded Seattle offices, there’s a new facility up in the Bothell area, which GeekWire found could hold more than 800 workers. To visitors, the company is eager to show off its bright, colorful offices with all the tech-company bells and whistles you’d expect: Game rooms, massage therapists, full cafeterias, snacks everywhere, and even rentable kayaks hanging on a wall.

“We’re out there aggressively growing. You wouldn’t hear about space coming online if we didn’t want people to work in that space,” Silver says.

For his part, Orr says the range of skills on display in the Seattle area has been a pleasant surprise, with smart people running the gamut of experience from gaming and interactive media to hard-core infrastructure and systems backgrounds.

“There’s really kind of a shocking diversity,” Orr says. “And there are a lot of people that have overlap with the kinds of problems that we do. So we’ve had a lot of good luck in terms of getting very high-quality talent.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

This is a story about what goes on under the hood of your smartphone or tablet device. It’s also about Yahoo, the troubled Santa Clara-CA based advertising and information giant. But Yahoo doesn’t make a single mobile gadget of its own. So what’s the connection?

It turns out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has ambitious plans to help publishers get more efficient about how they push content out to mobile devices. Specifically, Yahoo wants to become the new middleman of the mobile publishing world, giving media companies software that they could use to reach users of iPhones, Android devices, Windows phones, and other gadgets without having to bow to the programming approaches favored by their powerful makers—namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

To show how the system might work, Yahoo launched a fancy personalized news app back in November called Livestand. The app lets you select feeds from Yahoo partners like Forbes and ABC News and browse their stories on customized, magazine-like pages. It’s full of nifty user-interface elements like a 3D sideways-scrolling publication gallery. So far Livestand only runs on the Apple iPad, and at first glance it’s pretty similar to Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, and a number of other social news reader apps. But Livestand’s true importance is as a demonstration of what’s coming. The unique and potentially revolutionary thing about the app is its software design: it may look and act like a native iOS app, but it’s mostly written in Javascript and HTML5, the languages of the Web.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

How Yahoo pulled this off, and what it could mean for content owners who don’t want to put all their eggs in Apple’s basket—or Google’s, or Microsoft’s—was the focus of a long Xconomy interview last week with Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect for Yahoo’s platform technology group in Sunnyvale, CA. I’d heard Fernandez-Ruiz speak before about how Yahoo is betting on HTML5—the next-generation version of the markup language underlying all Web pages—as an antidote to overreliance on proprietary operating systems like Apple’s iOS. “If you only work in iOS you are bound to the rules of iTunes,” he said at a December talk in San Francisco. “Publishers want pixel-precise, ‘Cupertino-like’ experiences—and we can do that, but also make layouts fluid,” he said.

I wanted to know more about exactly how Yahoo can do this, so I invited Fernandez-Ruiz to my office and quizzed him about the state of mobile software architecture, the role of the Platform Technology Group inside Yahoo, and the true significance of Livestand. The story he told will be eye-opening for anyone who was under the impression that the future of mobile apps is in Apple and Google’s hands alone. Those two companies may control the lion’s share of the smartphone market at the moment, but if Yahoo goes through with plans to share the tools behind Livestand with outside developers, it could help push the siloed mobile-app world back in the direction of the open Web, where no single company is able to dictate how online software and services should work.

The first thing you need to understand about Yahoo’s publishing vision is that it’s coming from the Platform Technology Group. This is the same part of the company that created and then open-sourced key technologies that are now part of the Web’s infrastructure, such as Hadoop, which allows companies to run big, distributed software systems, and YUI, a library of JavaScript tools for building rich Internet applications. Yahoo built many of these tools as part of an effort that began more than half a decade ago to reduce what Fernandez-Ruiz calls a “technical debt.” The company was weighed down by all of the separate technologies its engineers had built to support services like Yahoo Music and Yahoo Movies, and it needed a central platform. “There was a realization around that time that we had to switch the company from being vertical to being horizontal, and start creating reusable technology that we could deploy across the whole place,” he says. “That is how Hadoop got started, for example.”

Technologies created by the Platform Technology Group, such as Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), also help the company and its partners tailor content to appeal to specific users based on their demographics. Fernandez-Ruiz says click-throughs increased 300 percent after Yahoo applied C.O.R.E. to … Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

I’ve been taking in Google’s recent release of “Search, plus your world” (or SPYW as the cool kids say) over the last several days, reflecting on what it means for Wetpaint and other media companies; but perhaps even more importantly, deeply understanding what it indicates about Facebook and Google themselves. As we all know by now, these most recent changes are meant to make its search more personal by up-weighting social activity in its algorithm, and using each person’s own position within their circles to determine relevance.

You might think that I would be one of the first to jump in the game with Google. After all, my company Wetpaint has been making a massive investment in distributing our content via other social channels, particularly Facebook. We’ve been seeing massive returns. And, I’ve even gone on a limb to predict that Facebook should be implementing its own Web-wide search this year.

Still, when it comes to playing Google’s social games, so far I’ve advocated staying on the sidelines of all their social venues—even their recent business pages. That’s been because even though the stadium lights are on, no one is on the field. More specifically, even though Google has 90 million registered users of the service, we see very little activity of significance among our target audience. But with its new SPYW changes, the question is: Has Google indeed forced companies’ hands?

Unfortunately, they have. And, in doing so, it marks a milestone in the changing mentality of Google. The search company’s great innovation—using the signals of the Web to best determine what the audience really wanted—has now been subverted. The company’s originally unshakable-seeming ethos of mechanistic neutrality has slowly, slowly, slowly, and now all of a sudden given way, and the new precedent is to favor its own business interests over those of the audience.

The result, like it or not, is that companies that rely on search for traffic must hear and obey loud and clear Google’s message that Google will favor those that favor it. It’s a dirty truth, and one far more chilling than the other more technical biases of its algorithm before.

Google has already started infusing search with the content that’s been blessed via Google+. Do a search for “New York Times” and you’ll probably find the New York Times plus.google.com page as the second search result. Search for “Mark Zuc” and you’ll likely see Zuckerberg’s Google+ page (despite the irony) populate as an option in the Google Instant choices.

I haven’t seen this bleed over to news stories yet, but I believe that it’s coming. Soon you’ll do a search for the latest headlines and your search results will be chock full with musings from your friends and non-friends inside Google+.

Google+ may not take off as a real social network, but Google has indicated that it’s throwing its full weight behind it anyway to make the best of what it’s got. Even if consumers don’t adopt it en masse, whatever activity is present will pepper the famous algorithm’s search results.

The irony here is that Google’s pivot toward a social search belies how important that social data is. The company is putting its lock on search at risk to gain a chance at a foothold on social. But what really comes through to me is that a great social search can be a winning product—if it’s populated with the right social data. So far, Google’s is not.

The question is—if that’s what I’m after—won’t I still just go to Facebook, where all my friends actually are (and which Google has adamantly cut out of SPYW)?

While SPYW does force publishers to support Google’s social network, fortunately it will be a temporary sacrifice from publishers during this period of transition from these days of search to a socially wired world. And that forthcoming world looks increasingly like it will be wired not by Google, but by its arch-enemy Facebook. Indeed, by corrupting the quality of their search product, Google may have just opened up a clear product entry into search for their rival as well.

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

With a kind of candor that speaks of the motivation in the startup and investment communities, angel investor Jerry Neumann talked bluntly Tuesday evening about the companies he backs. “All of my entrepreneurs are irritating,” he said jokingly during a panel discussion at the Digital Media Center event held at Times Square in New York. “They need to be smarter than me, they need to be more driven than me, they need to be people who can go the distance,” he said.

Neumann took the stage with Benjamin Wolin, CEO and co-founder of Everyday Health in New York, and moderator Dennis Kneale, senior media and technology correspondent for FOX Business Network. Wolin and Neumann spoke about the startup and investment scene during the third and final panel of Tuesday’s event, hosted at the Nasdaq Marketsite by Digital Media Center, a New York group formed in late 2011 that brings together investors, digital media startups, and other industry players.

Digital Media Center was formed by Cooley, CTPartners, Deloitte, Nasdaq, and Silicon Valley Bank.

The night kicked off with representatives from Facebook, Samsung, and EMC’s data storage division Isilon Systems discussing trends in social, local, and mobile technology—then continued with a look at the future of digital content through the eyes of Verizon and Heart Television. Wolin and Neumann later engaged in a lively conversation about funding and building up startups in the current clime.

“It’s a lot easier to raise small amounts of capital,” Wolin said, “certainly to get started it’s a lot easier than it was ten years ago.” Everyday Health operates websites for brands such as South Beach Diet.

“It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur,” said Neumann. He has been investing in … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

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 »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s not just Wikipedia that’s throwing its weight today behind the movement to stop the controversial anti-piracy bills moving through the U.S. Congress.

While the English version of the world’s most-visited encyclopedia site has gone dark for the day to call attention to the perceived dangers of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, a number of other organizations are stepping into the spotlight, making their case that the laws—which, in their original form, would have given federal prosecutors and courts the power to block access to Internet domains deemed to be supporting “infringing” activities—would deter free speech and undermine the Internet’s technical infrastructure.

Given indications that markup of the bill is being delayed, as well as the Obama Administration’s recently declared opposition to SOPA (the House version of the bill) and PIPA (the Senate version), it’s doubtful that the anti-piracy bills will make it into law this year. But protesters and Internet entrepreneurs are saying today’s actions are necessary to forestall future Congressional action and call attention to the extent of popular opposition to the bills.

Here’s a quick survey of protest actions going on today around the San Francisco Bay Area and Xconomy’s other home cities.

—Hackers & Founders plans a live protest against PIPA and SOPA at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza at noon Pacific Time today. The group of programmer-entrepreneurs says it’s joining forces with other groups such as 106 Miles, SV NewTech, SF NewTech, Designers and Geeks, Hacks & Hackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, and TechNet to stage similar events in New York, Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C. Speakers expected at today’s protest in San Francisco include angel investor Ron Conway, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, TechNet vice president Gideon Lett, and Hackers & Founders founder Jonathan Nelson.

—The Occupy Oakland website used by coordinators of grassroots protests in the East Bay has gone dark for the day—but features a nifty mouse-tracking spotlight that allows you to read a statement explaining the action.

—The 20,000-member New York Tech Meetup group has blacked out its site and is organizing an “Emergency NY Tech Meetup” today at 12:30 Eastern time at 780 Third Avenue in Manhattan, outside the offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Speakers will include Meetup.com CEO and NY Tech Meetup founder Scott Heiferman, NYU media studies scholar Clay Shirky, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and Tumblr vice president Andrew McLaughlin. New York Tech Meetup chairman Andrew Rasiej said in a statement that the tech community in New York is “appalled” by Schumer and Gillibrand’s support for PIPA.

–A Seattle Against SOPA rally originally planned for 11:30 a.m. Pacific time today has been postponed due to the city’s poor weather, but organizers say they will reschedule the event.

—Google is censoring itself by placing a symbolic black square over its logo. The search and advertising giant has also posted a petition urging members of Congress to vote against PIPA and SOPA.

—Craigslist has interposed a black landing page protesting SOPA and PIPA before users can reach its online listings (which are still accessible).

—Flickr, the photo sharing site owned by Yahoo, offered users the ability to black out up to 10 photos each as a symbolic way to”deprive the web of the rich content that makes it thrive.”

… Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

From cloudy Seattle to the vast suburbs of Silicon Valley, we covered a lot of ground on MIT Sloan’s recent technology trek, which concluded with a leg in Boston.

The first stop was Seattle where it was predictably raining. Visiting Amazon, Microsoft, and Adobe, we came away with an appreciation for how much tech activity is actually going on in that city.

At Microsoft, we got to talk to alumni about what it’s like to work there. Yes, it’s a large company and therefore bureaucratic, they confessed. But, the huge plus is that they have the resources to work on some very innovative projects. Amazon also was big, but the theme there was its quirkiness. In addition to all of the desks being made out of doors, they also have whiteboards everywhere, even in the elevators. I made sure to leave an “MIT Sloan was here” tag in one of the elevators!

Adobe seemed like a more typical office where they provide a pleasant work environment with lots of exposed brick and wood. Overall, I could really see myself enjoying working in Seattle.

Moving on to Silicon Valley, it was noticeably sunnier and warmer. It was also a lot bigger. In Seattle, you could probably get by with just a bike and public transit, but good luck to anyone who tries that in Silicon Valley. Here, you definitely need a car. Being settled with a family might help too, as the area is comprised of endless suburbs punctuated by large office parks where the tech companies are located.

If you want to live where the action is, you’d need to get a job in San Francisco or do the 40-minute commute each way and hope for no traffic. I guess I should point out that Palo Alto does have a downtown, but it’s just two or three streets and most people would still have to drive there.

As for the tech companies, most of the ones we visited were in Silicon Valley and all offered quite a lot of amenities compared to what we saw in Seattle. Free food, gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and acupuncture were just some of the perks you get at most of these companies. I guess they need these things to entice people not only to live away from the city, but also to work some pretty long hours.

For example, the employees at Facebook—who all seemed to be in their 20s—joked that working at some firms in the Valley is like working in a sweatshop. Employees are expected to work extremely hard, but they also provide an endless amount of food that includes a rotating candy of the week. Facebook keeps its employees well fed, caffeinated, and hydrated with the largest cafeteria of all the tech companies we visited.

Google had a similar environment with lots of … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Microsoft’s “Android isn’t free” campaign continues to roll along, with the Redmond software behemoth today announcing a patent licensing deal with handset maker LG to cover Google’s mobile operating systems.

With this deal, Microsoft says it’s got licenses covering more than 70 percent of all U.S.-sold smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. The LG deal also covers the Chrome operating system, a web-based system for laptops.

Prices were not disclosed, as usual, but Wall Street analysts have pegged previous licensing deals at $5 per handset or perhaps more—which means that with Android’s massive market share, Microsoft is making more on Google’s mobile phones than its own, which have a sliver of the market.

It’s the 11th licensing deal covering Google OS products—previous licensees who have paid up to Microsoft include major manufacturers HTC, Samsung, and Acer. “We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS,” Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez says in a statement.

As has become typical with these deals, Microsoft executives are on Twitter boasting about the deal. VP and general counsel Brad Smith announced the deal this morning on his feed, and quickly followed up with this gem, somewhat bizarrely inspired by the Occupy protests against concentration of wealth:

Microsoft claiming it’s the 99 percent by getting a patent licensing fee? Somewhere, a protester’s head just exploded.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

At his curtain call—for the moment anyway—at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hyped his company’s efforts to innovate and compete across multiple platforms. Microsoft announced previously that after 2012 it will no longer give the keynote at CES. As they waited for seats Monday evening, some members of the press corps voiced doubts about the weight of Ballmer’s anticipated final keynote. But the Microsoft boss still drew a throng that came to see if the company had any new tricks up its sleeve.

CES, hosted by the Consumer Electronics Association, is an annual conference held in Las Vegas where device makers, software developers, and others in the consumer technology world present their newest offerings and give a glimpse of what is in the works. Though many hopes are raised at each CES, not every gadget or promised innovation arrives on schedule or meets expectations.

For the past 14 years, Microsoft has delivered the keynote address that gets the week-long conference under way. But even though Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro said that Microsoft would “take a break” from the keynote stage, he added that the association would continue its relationship with the company. “I would be shocked if a Microsoft leader does not return to the stage in the next few years,” Shapiro said.

Ballmer, with some help from “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest, chatted about the development of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system and ways Microsoft wants to compete across phones, televisions, PCs, and other devices. “Nothing better than good competition,” Ballmer said.

Perhaps in an effort to shake up the stodgy feel and look of the Windows desktop, Microsoft is taking a new approach in its next version of the platform. “The Windows PC has constantly changed and reinvented and spurred other technology innovations,” Ballmer said. While he talked up the ubiquity of Windows among computers, he noted that users want new features and options. “With Windows 8, we’ve reimagined Windows from the chipset to the user experience,” he said.

Much of that change is being borrowed from the mobile world. It is called the Metro … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Google is changing its mind about what’s relevant.

In a sweeping technical overhaul that will start to go into effect today, the search giant is altering the way it ranks search results to highlight content that users have shared, or that has been shared with them. If you’re logged into Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), links to this personal and social content—such as photos you’ve uploaded to Google+ and posts shared by the people in your Google+ circles—will now appear at or near the top of search result pages for the appropriate keywords.

For example, if you’ve ever shared photos of your cat Mittens on Google+ and you type “Mittens” into the Google search box, those images are likely to be among the top results, alongside links to Web pages about winter wear.

The personalized results won’t include information users have shared outside of Google’s ecosystem—say, status updates on Facebook or photos on Flickr (or, notably, tweets on Twitter). And users will have the option to turn off the new personalized results if they find that the information is getting in the way of their routine Web searches. But with the changes, Google is betting that most people who use its flagship search engine will prefer to see information they or their friends have created or shared over pages published by faraway people they’ve never met.

“Relevance is what we do,” says Sagar Kamdar, group product manager for search at Google’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters. “It’s our bread and butter. We are blending this content to optimize what we see as relevance.”

A mock preview of personalized search shows results both for chikoo, a fruit that grows in India and Pakistan, and Chikoo, a dog belonging to Google Fellow Amit Singhal.

Which is to say that if Google’s new algorithms have some reason to think you’re actually looking for mittens rather than Mittens, your kitty might get demoted. “If you have a personal result that is not as good as the Web result, the personal result will be visible in the appropriate place on the search result page,” Kamdar explains.

Alongside the personalization features, Google is making it easier to find information about people you know, in part by changing Google Instant to show links to the profiles of people in your Google+ circles. Google Instant is the technology rolled out in 2010 that predicts the search keywords you want as you type a query. With today’s changes, entering the first few letters of the name of someone in your Google+ circles will be sufficient to surface their Google+ profile in the autocomplete list.

In addition, Google will do more to direct users to content from people they may not know personally, but might like to follow via social media. The names of prominent Google+ users will be included in the Google Instant autocomplete predictions—type “Trey R,” for example, and you’ll see a link to the Google+ profile for Trey Ratcliff, a professional photographer who has made extensive use of Google+ photo albums. And in the right column of Google search result pages—the area normally reserved for keyword-based advertisements—the company will begin promoting the profiles of prominent Google+ users associated with certain search queries.

In the example Google Fellow Amit Singhal shared in a blog post announcing the changes today, a search for “music” summons Google+ pages for Britney Spears, Alicia Keys, and … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

What is the future of electronic books and digital publishing in Boston? We might be getting a glimpse of it today.

The news is that Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, is acquiring Threepress, a Boston-area software and consulting shop specializing in tools for digital publishing. Terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but it’s probably fairly modest in size.

What makes it interesting is that it’s a story of homegrown, bootstrapped talent in a burgeoning field—e-book reading and publishing—that has finally come of age.

Safari (not to be confused with the Apple browser) provides an on-demand digital library of thousands of books and videos on software, IT, professional development, and other techie and business topics. The 10-year-old company, which has just under 100 employees, is headquartered in Sebastopol, CA. But it started in Boston, and some of its leadership team, including CEO Andrew Savikas, is based here.

As part of the Threepress acquisition, Safari is planning to move into a new office space in Boston that will have about 10 employees. “We are looking at space with room to grow,” says Savikas, an O’Reilly Media veteran. “I expect we’ll be hiring in Boston, especially on the technology side.”

Threepress is a profitable, four-person tech shop founded by Web developer Liza Daly in 2008. Daly previously worked at Digitas and iFactory, and she originally started Threepress to do consulting and build tools for academic publishers and websites. As is often the case for startups, she found an unexpected niche. [Disclosure: Daly is married to Dan Schmidt, my longtime Honest Bob bandmate.]

Daly entered the e-book world by writing Bookworm, an open-source, browser-based reading system for e-books using the EPUB format. At first, she saw books as just part of the content of academic websites. But her work got the attention of Savikas at O’Reilly Media, which decided to host Bookworm on its site in 2009. That year Savikas also recruited Daly to speak at a big … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

DailyWorth.com in New York, an online community and daily e-mail which offers women personal finance and career information, raised $2 million, according to a press release.

Joanne Wilson and Howard Lindzon, the co-founder of StockTwits, led the round. Thus far DailyWorth has raised more than $3 million, which includes backing from angel investor group Robin Hood Ventures; Dave McClure, founding partner of 500 Startups; David Cohen, founder and CEO of TechStars; and Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt through his TomorrowVentures investment firm.

Amanda Steinberg founded DailyWorth in 2009. Early this year the company plans to introduce MoreWorth, targeting affluent women, and CreateWorth, aimed at female entrepreneurs.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

A little more than 4 million children are born in the U.S. every year, and quite a few of those prospective parents are curious about potential genetic defects in their offspring. And so a group of investors are betting $20 million today that Redwood City, CA-based Gene Security Network is going to make some serious money from a variety of prenatal genetic tests for those curious parents.

Gene Security Network, which is being renamed Natera, is announcing today it has raised $20 million in a Series D financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Claremont Creek Ventures and Sequoia Capital. The company, founded in 2004, has now raised a combined $42 million of venture capital in its four publicly announced financing rounds. Founders Fund, the West Coast’s largest in vitro fertilization center (Huntington Reproductive Center), and Google vice president Marissa Mayer have all participated in prior investment rounds in the company.

The company currently sells a test that examines the genetic profile of embryos that are candidates for implantation in a woman’s uterus through in vitro fertilization. The new investment will help Natera commercialize a noninvasive test that looks for Down Syndrome, as well as other genetic conditions. Several companies, including San Diego-based Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) have been working for years on a test to detect chromosomal abnormalities like Down by looking at a drop of maternal blood, rather than using accurate but more invasive techniques like amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling (CVS). Natera said today it is preparing to introduce the new commercial test in 2012.

Natera’s claim is that its test is less invasive than the other techniques, can be performed in the first trimester of fetal development, and approaches the accuracy of amniocentesis, as the company described in a story last month by Bloomberg News. The company generated $4 million in revenue in 2010, tripled that in 2011, and expects to triple that again to about $36 million in 2012, according to the Bloomberg report.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

A lot has happened in the technology world in the past year. So let’s take a minute to reflect on the defining moments of 2011 and where we stand now, as a local tech community with increasingly global impact.

This is by no means comprehensive, or even a summary of the most important stories of the year. It’s just a select few of the biggest highlights and lowlights, organized in spaghetti western fashion (cliché alert).

The Good: Oracle Buys Endeca

Some might argue this wasn’t necessarily “good” for the local tech scene, but Oracle’s $1B+ purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Endeca, the enterprise search and business intelligence firm, was one of the biggest deals of the year, and was kept under wraps pretty well. It will be interesting to watch whether Endeca’s technology and talent give Oracle a leg up in its competition with IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and Google. Endeca, which started in 1999, stands as a testament to the notion that billion-dollar tech companies can be built—and are being built—in Massachusetts. (See Acme Packet, Progress Software, Wayfair, and others on their way.)

Honorable mention: Carbonite, TripAdvisor, and Zipcar each went public with successful IPOs in 2011. That’s three more publicly traded tech companies in Boston that seem to be thriving in a tough market. Who will join them in 2012?

The Bad: RSA Gets Hacked

No one would argue this isn’t bad—and not just for local companies. In March, RSA Security reported a data breach involving its authentication products, which are widely used by big companies and government agencies. The Bedford, MA-based division of data storage giant EMC said it had … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Mobile industry leaders are looking for big moves in 2012 from the Seattle area’s two technology heavyweights, taking the lead from a surge by Google’s Android operating system, according to a new survey from Issaquah, WA-based Chetan Sharma Consulting.

Sharma’s 2012 Mobile Industry Predictions Survey, compiled from about 150 responses through the consulting firm’s global mailing list of industry insiders, also predicts that mobile payments and commerce will remain a big focus for businesses and consumers alike, further roiling the waters for retailers.

When asked what the biggest storyline of 2012 would be, survey respondents put Amazon’s entry into mobile in second place, with a Microsoft and Nokia “resurgence” close behind in third (the top story was the continued growth of mobile data usage worldwide).

The interest in Amazon certainly owes a lot to the newness of the e-commerce pioneer’s move into mobile computing, with the late 2011 debut of the Kindle Fire tablet. So there’s clearly a lot more room for Jeff Bezos and company to grow.

The company is also pretty well-regarded for its focus, and it has shown an ability to execute very well with Amazon Web Services, another business not directly tied to its Internet retailing niche.

Sharma says the extension into tablets, and perhaps a mobile phone in the near future, is just part of Amazon growing to become a “super-retailer for everything. They are already into groceries. Electronics is very heavy—they sell a lot of phones online.”

Amazon’s newly unveiled business model with tablets, which (at least currently) sells the device at a small loss and makes up the margin on content sales, is very hard for other companies to replicate, Sharma says. And the company’s retailing expertise means it knows shoppers’ tastes better than almost any other company.

“Amazon is very, very well placed, and they’re just starting to show their hand as to what their ambitions are,” Sharma says. “I think they’re sitting very pretty for many years to come.”

Microsoft’s role in the future of mobile has a lot to do with the success of Nokia, its main hardware partner for the refreshed Windows Phone operating system. The immediate stakes are higher for the Swedish phone-maker than they are for Microsoft, Sharma says, because cash-rich Microsoft can afford to play a bit longer game with the mobile market. But he notes that initial response for new Nokia phones has been “tepid” in Europe so far, and needs to show much better response when devices start hitting the U.S. market.

“If they don’t do that successfully by Q4, then definitely they’re in trouble—some of the same trouble that RIM is in,” Sharma says. Without success selling newer handsets, he adds, ”Nokia might not survive, or it might have to morph into something else.”

That possibility was surely on the minds of survey respondents who placed Microsoft No. 1 among the companies expected to make the biggest mobile acquisitions of 2012, with more than a quarter of the responses. Google and network operators broadly grouped together were in second and third place, with Amazon thought to be the fourth most likely to make a big M&A splash.

Sharma said one response that surprised him was the low rank given to Windows in the tablet sector. The latest version of Windows for tablets isn’t a reality for consumers yet, but Sharma asked respondents to look out two years—and they still saw Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform taking most of the market.

“People still didn’t think Windows would make a big dent. That was surprising,” he says. “I think they can have a decent impact on the marketplace, because in the enterprise especially, there you have to have create tablets versus consume tablets,” the difference between filing out a spreadsheet and watching a YouTube video, for instance.

“Mobile is starting to become very important for Microsoft longer-term,” Sharma says. “Even if they are not doing that well today, five years out they have to be doing really well.”

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Boston has a pretty well-known cluster of tech companies—young and old—that are focused on aspects of travel like booking flights and hotels. Kayak, TripAdvisor, and ITA Software (now part of Google), just to name a few, fit that mold. But there’s another area player that’s helping customers to experience a city once they get there, via an interesting marketing proposition.

That would be Boston-based Smart Destinations, which is looking to provide a Disney World-esque experience to hitting tourist and historical sites in 12 cities such as Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. It’s not a new idea, as you’ll see, but it has a modern twist.

For Boston, adult travelers can buy a three-day “Go Card” from Smart Destinations for $109, and gain admission to more than 70 attractions, like the New England Aquarium, Salem Witch Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and even Cape Cod activities like whale watching. That price can be adjusted in wintertime (when people don’t want to be out on a boat), and, naturally, a kids’ Go Card costs less. The card also enables users to skip lines at tourist attractions, says CEO and founder Kevin McLaughlin. That, and the one-stop-shopping aspect give it the amusement park pass feel.

“It makes it really easy for families to go to big cities,” he says.

McLaughlin recognizes that not every customer may be looking for a 72-hour-straight, nonstop tourist-attraction-hopping vacation, though. Smart Destinations also offers a Go Select pass, with which consumers can pick certain spots they’d like to see. For each attraction they add to the pass, the amount of the discount at each individual spot grows.

McLaughlin started the company with travel industry veteran Cecilia Dahl in 2003. The inspiration came from a Paris tourist service, which sells a card giving visitors access to all of the city’s museums. This is McLaughlin’s sixth tech startup. His past ventures include Delphi Internet (acquired by News Corporation), Netspoke (acquired by Premiere Conferencing), and exchange.com (acquired by Amazon). Smart Destinations is now up to around 32 employees, and has raised three rounds of funding from investors such as North Hill Ventures.

Smart Destinations is now making a bigger push into the mobile sphere, says McLaughlin.The company started by selling physical cards with a smart chip through its website. Consumers can get still get that card via snail mail or participating kiosks in their destination cities, or they can access it via their mobile phones. Starting first quarter of this year, consumers can also create, purchase, and customize the Go Select pass right from their phones, adding tourist destinations and racking up discounts as they make their way through a city. A small … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

The challenge of writing a year-end “top stories” post is that a list of headlines is too particular to illustrate what really happened over the last year. Sometimes the outlines of the big trends only become clear when you step back, look at the whole year’s output, and see what groupings naturally emerge.

That’s why I want to start off this list story by looking at five important clusters of technology stories we covered extensively this year. Each cluster includes five or six stories that examined the bigger trend from different angles.

That’s followed on page 2 by a list of the most significant Bay Area life sciences and energy stories of 2011, and then by a rundown of our top 10 traffic-getting stories.

THE BIG STORIES IN TECHNOLOGY

1. The Rise of Smartphones and Tablets

Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 1, New Frontiers of Speech Recognition (1/3/11)

Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 2: Changing the Equation in Machine Translation (1/5/11)

Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Humanity: Part 3: Computer Vision Puts a “Bird on Your Shoulder” (1/6/11)

The iPad Finally Has a Worthy Rival: Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 (5/13/11)

Dear Apple: Go Big with Siri and Nuance in iOS 5 (6/4/11)

Siri, Apple’s New Old Personal Assistant App, Points Toward A Voice-Activated Future (10/5/11)

2. Apple, iOS, and the Death of Steve Jobs

Here Are Six Features Apple Should Include in the iPad 2 (And They’re Not the Ones You Think) (1/7/11)

With iMovie on the iPad 2, Video Editing Is Fun Again (4/8/11)

Will Apple’s iCloud Finally Kill Off iTunes and End the Scourge of Sync? My Week in Apple Hell (7/8/11)

How Steve Jobs Rewired Our Lives—and Raised Our Expectations (10/6/11)

Saint Steve? Not Exactly. Apple and the Power of the Dark Side (10/7/11)

Steve Jobs’ Dying Realization about Biology and Technology (12/5/11)

3. The IT Transition in Healthcare

Epocrates Preps for IPO—And For Push Into Electronic Medical Records (1/25/11)

HealthTap Seeks to Arm Healthcare Consumers with Better Answers, and Better Questions, Before They Go to the Doctor (4/19/11)

Doximity: A Mobile Facebook for Doctors, but With Real Privacy Protections (6/21/11)

Practice Fusion Bids for Dominance in the Doctor’s Office with a Free, Ad-Supported Electronic Health Record System (11/10/11)

Why Mint.com for Health Is a Terrible Idea, and How Keas Pivoted to the Fun Stuff (11/18/11)

4. The Rise of the Cloud

Okta: Helping Companies Maintain Visibility Despite Cloud Cover (1/27/11)

Engine Yard—The Ruby on Rails Company Salesforce.com Didn’t Buy (1/31/11)

Adam Wiggins on Heroku’s Pivot, Building a “Washing Machine” for Web Developers, and Joining Salesforce.com (5/24/11)

Born from NASA, Nebula Aims to “Disrupt and Democratize” Cloud Computing (8/11/11)

Death of the Salesman? Marketo Is Automating Sales Relationships—And Growing Like Crazy (11/8/11)

5. The Incubator Explosion

White House Startup Investment Coincides with Sweeping Changes for TechStars, Y Combinator, Other Incubators: A Road to Recovery, or Another Bubble? (2/1/11)

Will the Internet Venture Incubator Model Work in Cleantech? Greenstart Is About to Find Out (6/14/11)

There Is an Incubator Bubble—And It Will Pop (8/12/11)

Rock Health, A New Incubator for Healthcare IT Startups, Names Its First Class (6/2/11)

Greenstart Hatches Four Startups, Proving Accelerators Work in the Energy Business (12/9/11)

Scientists Morph Into Entrepreneurs Through NSF I-Corps Program (12/19/11)

… Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

AT&T shook up a potentially drowsy holiday week with the news that it was abandoning its $39 billion bid for Bellevue, WA-based T-Mobile. Ma Bell and T-Mo’s parent, Deutsche Telekom, telegraphed the end of their deal a week earlier when they got a federal antitrust lawsuit suspended. It seemed for a while like maybe there was some hope of an alternate deal, but apparently the Obama administration wasn’t having it.

We got some insights on what the future might hold for the fourth-place carrier from entrepreneur Giri Sreenivas, VC Tom Huseby, and state Rep. Reuven Carlyle. For now, it seems, T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom might take the significant spectrum it got from AT&T for the breakup and get back to work on the core business—while keeping an eye out for new suitors. I guess that makes this holiday season one of slightly less anxiety for T-Mobilers in the region.

Here’s the rest of this week’s tech headlines from Xconomy Seattle:

—I found out that Google had appointed senior cloud engineer Doug Orr as the new director of its Seattle offices, replacing Brian Bershad. Bershad is still with Google, but is focusing on a new job in Russia, where his broad task is finding ways to increase Google’s market share in that country’s burgeoning economy. Orr has been with Google for about five years, and was most recently working on internal and external cloud-computing software projects. Scott Silver remains director of Google’s nearby Kirkland offices.

—We saw reports that Amazon.com is hunting for an office in the Boston area, with at least four research scientist jobs posted on its internal board. The move isn’t a huge surprise, since tech companies of all kinds are racing to acquire talent wherever they can find it. One interesting angle is that the Amazon subsidiary apparently involved here, a software development shop called A2Z, is primarily based in California—where the market for engineering talent is the hottest around.

—Seattle’s Voyager Capital, a technology VC firm that also has offices in Portland, OR and Silicon Valley, filed paperwork with the SEC for a new fund that could be worth up to $125 million. Voyager wouldn’t comment on its new fund, which is the firm’s fourth, and its first new fund since 2007. It will be interesting to see what kind of appetite there is out there for new VC activity, since we’ve seen reports of a tougher market for high-risk investments in the current climate.

—On the smaller end of the investing spectrum, I also reported on a fledgling project to draft new angel investors in the region. The idea, called the Seattle Angel Conference, is being spearheaded by tech-business and economic development veteran John Sechrest. The idea is taken from a series of events in Oregon, which get angels to chip in a small amount of money for a prize pool, which goes to a startup that makes it through several weeks of due diligence.

—We stopped by the offices of Seattle’s Stratos Product Development, an engineering and design shop that other companies turn to when they need help turning out a novel new product. Stratos president Sean MacLeod and former WTIA president Ken Myer gave us a run-through of some of the common elements, and even more common mistakes, that you see when companies try to build an innovative culture.

—I’ve seen some pretty humble startup offices—mine included—but Redmond’s Digital Lifeboat may take the cake for locations at its spot “between the cemetery and the trailer park.” The company, founded by two veterans of iShip.com, is an online consumer PC backup service. But instead of owning lots of big iron, Digital Lifeboat relies on a distributed network that uses its customers as storage nodes. We’ve seen this before in town from Symform, a cloud startup that is taking a similar approach to IT customers.

—And finally, our friends in Boston reported on the formal split of TripAdvisor from Bellevue-based Expedia, which leaves TripAdvisor as its own public company. This spinoff was announced back in the spring. TripAdvisor has more than 1,000 employees and is on pace to top the $486 million in revenue it made in 2010.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Merry Christmas, Boston. You asked for it, and you got it. A big, publicly traded consumer tech company to put us on the map alongside the Silicon Valley bad boys and uppity New Yorkers. I present to you: TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP).

Sure, we already have Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB), iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), and privately held but well-established companies like Wayfair, Kayak, and Harmonix. But TripAdvisor is different. Although the online travel firm is not new—it’s been cranking here in Boston for more than a decade—it has become one of the biggest consumer-focused Internet companies on the East Coast, with more than 1,100 employees; 50 million-plus unique visitors a month checking out hotel, restaurant, and travel reviews; and, oh yeah, a market cap north of $3 billion. Yet it hasn’t received as much media coverage or tech-community-adulation as you might expect over the years. (An exception to the former would be this in-depth story by my colleague Wade Roush; the latter would be this commentary from investor Chris Dixon.)

I spoke with TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer on Wednesday, the day his company officially became independent from Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) and started trading on the Nasdaq under its own stock symbol. Here are my takeaways from our chat:

1. TripAdvisor wants the spotlight now. “We have generally been very, very surprised at how little attention the press have paid to TripAdvisor,” Kaufer said. He pointed to his company’s size, number of employees, traffic, revenues, and profits, calling it “the $3 billion company in our own backyard.” On the local training and ecosystem front, he says college interns are turning down offers from Facebook and Google and working at TripAdvisor instead.

2. TripAdvisor is global. Seventy-five percent of the traffic to the company’s branded websites comes from outside the U.S. Think about that for a minute. “We’re almost unchallenged in most countries in the … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: