It’s been a busy week around here for the big tech companies. At Xconomy, we don’t usually report on things like product releases from Microsoft or sales figures from Amazon—our main focus is on new ideas, models, and companies—but readers need to understand where the big players are heading so they can see the gaps and opportunities for new businesses. So, for each of these pieces of mainstream tech news, I’ll tell you why savvy innovators and business leaders should care.

—Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) demonstrated its Web-based Chrome operating system for the first time in public yesterday. It won’t be available for another year, but the tech community is scrambling to understand all the implications. (Google’s Seattle engineers have contributed technology to the Chrome Web browser, helping to boost security—one potential advantage of a cloud-based operating system).

Sure, a fully cloud-based OS is a direct threat to Microsoft’s business model and the ecosystem of companies that support Windows. But more than that, it could reshape the landscape of online advertising by providing a new platform for launching ads on mobile devices, video channels (YouTube), and Internet TV. Perhaps the only thing that can slow down Google’s dominance on the Web is the federal government. In other words, this could get ugly.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide info about your business contacts within Outlook e-mail. It’s all part of Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector, an add-in that feeds you data from your social networks. Integrating e-mail with social networks and search is a fast-growing area, with startups like Gist in Seattle (backed by Paul Allen and Foundry Group) helping lead the way. Gist’s CEO T.A. McCann told TechFlash that he’s known about Microsoft’s effort for a while and doesn’t see it as a direct challenge. Gist’s offering is more advanced, he said, and it includes features like integrating with Salesforce.com and the iPhone. But startups and investors beware: if you’re in this crowded space, you better have a product that cuts through the noise and has a way to attract customers fast.

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) is in discussions with Viacom’s MTV Networks to sell off at least some of its stake in the Rhapsody music service, as first reported by PaidContent. In a regulatory filing, prompted by a tender offer to issue new stock, Real said it is in talks to reorganize the management structure and/or corporate governance of the division, which might mean giving up its majority ownership stake (51 percent) in Rhapsody. Back in September, digital-media guru Bill Baxter (now at Seattle-based Cozi) wrote in Xconomy about Rhapsody’s fierce competition with Pandora, iTunes, and piracy. Message to startups: the world of digital music services is probably not where you want to be.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been busy ramping up operations ahead of the holiday shopping season. Its billion-dollar acquisition of Zappos is helping it expand into shoes and apparel, and its Kindle sales look poised to take off, especially now that Barnes & Noble’s competing e-book reader, the Nook, has sold out until January. Amazon has really become the business and technology model to follow in online retail and product search. While there is still room for e-commerce startups to compete in various niches, they would be wise to study how Amazon built its brand and customer relationships before branching out to the wider world of retail.

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When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that …Next Page »

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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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Aptera, the sleek carmaker backed by Google and Idealabs, didn’t respond to my inquiry earlier this week about reports of an internal split in which founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony had left the company. But in an online report published today by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Aptera officials rejected accounts that Fambro and Anthony were ousted in a boardroom showdown.

The company’s status is a keen issue to some 4,000 people, including celebrities Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Shaquille O’Neal, who have put down $500 deposits to be the first to buy one of the three-wheel, two-seater vehicles. The Aptera 2e, the company’s first production vehicle, resembles a wingless plane and is expected to cost between $25,000 and $40,000. Aptera is based in Vista, CA, about 30 miles north of San Diego.

Citing a statement issued by Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur, the Union-Tribune says the carmaker had to adjust its production schedule “to align with financing realities.” Instead of producing its first fuel-efficient model in the fall of 2009, as Aptera announced at the beginning of this year, Wilbur says the company will complete its first vehicles in 2010. About 10 of Aptera’s 40 employees have been laid off.

The company, which has raised at least $27.5 million from Google, Idealabs, and other venture investors, is seeking additional funding, according to Popular Mechanics. Aptera says it also intends to resubmit its application for a $75 million loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentives Program.

Aptera says co-founders Fambro and Anthony were not asked to leave. Fambro remains on the board, but has taken a leave of absence from the company until next year. Anthony is now the CEO of Flux Power, a startup in the San Diego area that is developing battery-management systems. In another online account published by Popular Mechanics magazine, Fambro also voiced his continuing support for CEO Wilbur.

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Wade Roush wrote:

One of the great things about doing your computing in the cloud is that you don’t have to worry about which machines your jobs are running on, or whether they have the right software on them, or even what city they’re in. Indeed, that’s the whole point. But one of the less ideal things about doing your computing in the cloud is that the network everyone uses to reach various public clouds—the Internet itself—is so unpredictable.

Cloud providers—who essentially rent out processing and storage resources so that companies can outsource IT infrastructure—can guarantee a certain level of service within their clouds. But there’s almost nothing they can do about traffic delays on the Internet, a problem that falls right back into the laps of users who were trying to increase efficiency in the first place.

Now, companies that rely on big cloud providers like Google, Amazon Web Services, or GoGrid will have a better way to see how the network connections linking them to each provider’s data centers are performing—and make judgments over time about which clouds are easiest to reach. That’s thanks to Apparent Networks, a Wellesley Hills, MA-based network performance software startup that’s introducing a service today called the Cloud Performance Center. It’s a free online tool that visually quantifies network performance for up to five “paths” between a user’s location and any specified cloud provider. (After the first five paths, Apparent charges $5 per path per month for the information.)

Information about network performance is useful because large delays or “latency” can disrupt business and weaken the argument for outsourcing computing jobs to off-premises resources. “Providers like Amazon or Google are building these beautiful data centers with top-notch people that have got these great services that are highly available, and that’s all good, but when I have to connect, I have to do it over the same old Internet,” says Jim Melvin, Apparent Networks’ president and chief marketing officer. “What we’ve done is provision the Internet, in North America to start with, with performance monitors in about a dozen key points like Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Detroit. Our service will allow customers to see the performance for any of the top-tier cloud providers in those locations, trending back in time.”

So if you have an office in Boston, you can use the Cloud Performance Center to see which cloud provider has a history of the fastest network connections to the Hub. Melvin emphasizes that Apparent is “not trying to poke anyone in the eye” over the latency issue, but rather to raise awareness. Network connection slowdowns are most often a result of logjams within the network itself, he says.

“The vision and the ideal of cloud computing is that you don’t have to worry about where the compute cycles are being generated, but we’ve seen countless times that the reality of the Internet today is that you cannot count on connectivity,” he says. “You do need to care what level of performance you’re getting across the Internet.”

The fact that cloud computing providers can’t or won’t take responsibility for network performance issues once information leaves the data center “is one of the big stumbling blocks for the growth of cloud computing in general,” Melvin says. His company’s so-called “path-based” performance monitoring is one way businesses can get around that problem, he argues—indeed, he says some Apparent clients are already using the service to monitors tens of thousands of paths.

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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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I sat in on a good venture capital panel yesterday at Mobile Northwest 2009 in Seattle. No huge arguments or chair throwing to speak of (we’ll see what we can stir up at the next few Xconomy Forums). But some solid and useful observations from Geoff Entress of Voyager Capital, and also a prominent Seattle-based angel investor; Adrian Smith of Ignition Partners in Bellevue, WA, an expert in telecom and wireless; and Puneet Tandon of Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA, who is looking to sign partnerships with top entrepreneurs in digital media and social networking. (You can also see some comments from mobile VC Tom Huseby’s keynote here.)

The panel was moderated by Tricia Duryee, the Seattle-based correspondent for mocoNews, a website that covers wireless telecommunications. Here are my quick “top three” takeaways from the discussion of the local mobile industry:

1. The panic may be over, but caution rules. Entress says he’s added nine companies to his portfolio this year, out of a total of 32 he’s involved in (and six mobile firms, including TravellingWave, Swype, Dashwire, and Treemo). “We’re definitely not out of the woods yet,” he said. “But 2010 might be a good year for selling companies.”

2. It’s not all about the iPhone. Entress and Smith pointed out that Apple has only 17 percent of the smartphone market, so there’s plenty of opportunity on other platforms, like the BlackBerry and devices that use Windows Mobile. “Apple has a huge amount of mindshare,” Smith said, “but the critical thing is the development environment around [mobile applications].” Tandon agreed, saying, “Barriers to doing business with us [carriers] perhaps have been lowered.” Entress stressed the importance, especially for startups, of trying to avoid “getting locked into any one carrier, handset, or operating system.”

3. Watch advertising, input technologies, and connected devices. Tandon pointed out that by sometime next year, there are projected to be 3.3 billion Web-connected devices, and 70 percent of them will be connected via wireless operators. That means carriers will be willing to pay to know “who are the social influencers in your subscriber base,” he said. Smith and Entress said Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob signifies that mobile advertising is here to stay—but that the deal was the “first one out” (like YouTube for video), so don’t look for anything near that sort of valuation again. Entress added that he’s working with a number of startups selling new ways of inputting text on mobile devices (using speech recognition, touch-screen methods, and so forth). For all our fancy gadgets, it seems we still struggle to communicate.

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It turns out that Don Dodge—famous among entrepreneurs for putting a personal face on Microsoft’s operations in New England, until his unceremonious termination earlier this month—was only in job limbo for about about an hour and a half. Dodge sends Xconomy word this morning that he has been hired by Microsoft archrival Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, was the first person to contact him with a job offer, “90 minutes after the news of the layoff hit” on November 4, Dodge says in a blog post about his move.

At Microsoft, Dodge was director of business development for the Emerging Business Team. In an e-mail, Dodge says he’ll have a similar role at Google: “My main job will be working with developers helping them build apps on Google technologies and platforms. Startups will always be my first love, so I will spend as much time as possible with developers at startups.”

Dodge says he will spend his “20 percent time”—the one day per week that Google employees are encouraged to spend on personal projects—working with Google Ventures, the venture funding wing led by Rich Miner from Google’s Cambridge office and Bill Maris from the company’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters. “There are some obvious synergies there,” Dodge writes.

Dodge’s job shift will ultimately take him away from Massachusetts. But he says he’ll be working from Google’s Cambridge office through the holidays, and that he will be “back in Boston so often people will think I still live here. It was the same after I left Silicon Valley…they think I still live there.”

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch broke the story about Dodge’s new job last night, and Dodge himself shared more details about it this morning.

In previous public statements about his departure from Microsoft, Dodge has been diplomatic to the point of saintliness. But in today’s post he takes the gloves partway off, writing that “laying off 5,000 people when you have $37B in cash and huge profits is not cool.”

He also takes a few jabs at Microsoft products—calling Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail management program “tired,” saying that his Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone “didn’t measure up,” and commenting that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser is too slow. At Google, naturally enough, Dodge will be using Gmail to manage his e-mail, getting an Android-powered mobile phone, and using the Google Chrome browser. And it’s probably safe to assume he won’t be doing many searches on Bing.

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San Diego serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is going to have to find something else to do now that Gizmo5, the VoIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) company he founded in 2003, has become part of a certain search giant to the north. We have that news and more.

—Google confirmed that it’s buying San Diego-based Gizmo5, a six-year-old company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. The service will become part of the Google Voice number-unification service. Google did not disclose the purchase price, which media reports put at about $30 million. Gizmo5’s 6 million users will still be able to use the service, according to a statement. But Google is suspending new Gizmo5 signups, and existing users can no longer sign up for a call-in number.

—Platformic, a Web-based startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites, said it is adding social media capabilities. The two-year-old San Diego-based company, which has targeted broadcast companies, says its expanded software-as-a-service product will help a broadcaster’s audience share photos, create their own user profiles, and create personal blogs on the broadcaster’s Platformic-powered website.

—Qualcomm’s No. 2 executive opened a regional mobile technology conference in San Diego by providing an overview of steps the chipmaking giant is taking to help ease the pressure on wireless network bottlenecks as mobile data traffic soars. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer told the 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference that in the year 2014, worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

—Technology innovations that help companies optimize their profitability will likely lead to the next wave of analytics-based software startups, according to Stephen Coggeshall of San Diego-based ID Analytics. Another hot area will be analytics that can help forecast consumer behavior, said Coggeshall, who was participating in a discussion about new opportunities in analytics during the San Diego Software Industry Council’s annual forum on analytics.

—Israel’s Panoramic Power won $250,000 and became the first winner of the top QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power is developing energy-monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy so-called “smart grid” technologies within their existing facilities.

—The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group said is getting $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a giant wind farm in eastern Washington state, about 110 miles east of Portland, OR. The $1 billion Windy Point/Windy Flats project is expected to generate enough electricity for 250,000 homes.

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When Tom Clancy introduced a panel discussion yesterday at a forum on analytics software, the founder of San Diego’s Tao Venture Partners said the forum was “founded four years ago by people who had an interest in seeing San Diego get established as a leading cluster in the analytics space.”

The forum, which is sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council, offers an annual snapshot of local developments in a booming industry that has become crucial to business intelligence, data storage and management, and complex decision-making.

Since Robert Hecht-Nielsen founded HNC Software here in 1986, the number of companies that focus on analytics software in San Diego has mushroomed, with more than 100 companies specializing in neural networking, data mining, pattern recognition, and related algorithms and technologies for analyzing data. Yet Clancy and local experts who discussed “opportunities in analytics” lamented that San Diego’s standing as the birthplace of some key companies and technologies has gone largely unrecognized. Among the examples cited:

— HNC, which specialized in technology to analyze credit card transactions, was acquired for $810 million in 2002 by Fair Isaac and Co. and integrated with the Minneapolis, MN-company’s credit-scoring business.

—Urchin Software, a suburban San Diego Web analytics company that developed an assortment of tools for measuring website usage, page views, and other statistics, was acquired by Google in 2005 for an estimated $30 million. Seven months later, Google renamed its Urchin business Google Analytics, and made analytics tools available to Web users for free.

—WebSideStory, a San Diego company that developed website traffic analysis tools, rebranded itself as Visual Sciences in 2007 and was acquired later that same year for $394 million by Utah-based Omniture. (Last month, Omniture was itself acquired by San Jose, CA-based Adobe Systems in a $1.8 billion deal.)

—Carlsbad, CA-based analytics software developer Keylime Software was acquired for $9.5 million in 2003 by Pasadena, CA-based Overture, an advertising distribution network that was later acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion.

Such deals reflect a surging awareness of the value of data, says Stephen Coggeshall, a co-founder and chief technology officer for San Diego-based ID Analytics, which uses advanced analytics to search credit databases for telltale signs of identity theft. In terms of technology innovations that will likely lead to forming new companies, Coggeshall says …Next Page »

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Dossia is nearly three years from launching to provide electronic personal health records for major U.S. employers. And though the vision to provide employees of self-insured companies with a secure and portable electronic record of their health information is still alive, so far one company is offering the records to its workers.

The Cambridge, MA-based organization, which operates as a nonprofit, had a well-publicized launch in December 2006 and the support of founding members Applied Materials, BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes, and Wal-Mart. The hope was, and still is, that the personal electronic records would lower healthcare costs and improve health of users. But only one of the 10 major U.S. employers that have pledged to support the development of Dossia’s health records system, Wal-Mart, has actually adopted the technology for its workers and their dependents.

Dossia has recently solidified its leadership team recently as it takes steps to drive further adoption of the personal health record system, which is based on the Indivo personal health platform (PHP) developed at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Colin Evans, Dossia’s president and CEO, was put on the payroll last month, having previously served the nonprofit outfit while technically an employee of the digital health group of computer chip giant Intel. Evans’ former Intel colleague, Steve Munini, the chief operating officer of Dossia, has also transitioned from Intel’s to Dossia’s payroll.

Evans said last week that he expects Intel, where the idea for Dossia originated, to open the personal health record system to its employees in early 2010. A total of four other founding employers will be ready to deploy the system within the next three months, he says. “My major goal is to get everybody from the founder group to get implemented,” Evans said. There are now only tens of thousands of users of the Dossia record system today, most of them employees of Wal-Mart, which deployed the system for its workers in fall 2008, he said.

Why haven’t the other corporate members adopted the technology? “They really want to see Wal-Mart …Next Page »

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Being journalists, we here at Xconomy try to refrain from bald political statements or endorsements. We’d never ask you to “vote early and often” for any candidate for office. But this week we can cheerfully recommend that you subvert the democratic process by going to www.google.com/trike and voting as many times as you can for Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace as the next U.S. pedestrian mall to be photographed by Google’s tricycle-borne Street View crew.

Street View, as most Google users know, is the Google Maps feature that gives you a panoramic visual preview of places you may plan to visit in person. Using a fleet of camera-equipped cars, Google has collected 360-degree, street-level views for hundreds of cities in all 50 U.S. states and quite a few countries around the world. But until recently, those views haven’t extended into pedestrian malls, parks, hiking trails, and other areas where cars are off limits.

That’s changing thanks to the Street View Trike, a contraption dreamed up a couple of years ago by Google senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner. The trikes are essentially pedicabs that Google has converted to carry the standard Street View camera and computer equipment. Ratner and his crew have already used the trikes to create Street View images of places like California’s Legoland (just north of San Diego), and in an October post on the official Google blog, Ratner invited users to say where they’d like to see the trikes go next.

The company got 25,000 nominations, and on Monday it announced that it had picked 24 finalists in five categories. Faneuil Hall is a finalist in the pedestrian malls category. It’s pitted against Chicago’s Navy Pier and San Francisco’s Pier 39.

Now, without insulting our friends in the Windy City and the Golden Gate, I think it’s fair to say that Faneuil Hall is the only historically significant place on that list. Pier 39 is a mall-on-stilts built in the 1970s that owes most of its fame to the sea lions who have adopted it as their home, and Navy Pier was basically an abandoned eyesore until its redevelopment in the 1990s. So Boston’s historic “cradle of liberty”—the site of fiery oratory by the fathers of the revolution—should clearly be the first of these locations to get the Google Trike treatment.

Google users get to vote for the winners in each category. According to the company, you can vote as many times as you like—but you’ve only got until midnight on Monday, November 30. So stop reading this now and go vote!

To get the whole scoop on the Google Trike and how it’s changing the face of Google Street View, I talked with Dan Ratner himself on Tuesday.

Xconomy: Do you think the Google Trike helps to put a human face on Street View, which has sometimes run into public skepticism and misunderstandings?

Dan Ratner: Let me put it this way. Every time I’ve been out there on the bike—which is quite a number of times now—there’s been a lot of excitement. People are like, “Wow, this is Google Street View? I’ve seen that, but I didn’t know how you get the data!” Seeing a bicycle does seem to put a human face on it, literally, because …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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San Diego’s Gizmo5, which was rumored to be a Skype acquisition target for $50 million about three weeks ago, is now reported to have been sold—except the buyer is identified as Google, and the price is put at $30 million.

Both the Skype and Google reports were exclusives from TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who initially explained that Skype’s acquisition of Gizmo5 was the perfect backup plan in case Skype lost control of certain patents to its core technology that were the subject of lawsuits filed by Skype’s prospective buyers. Now Skype doesn’t really need Gizmo5, since eBay reached a comprehensive settlement with Skype’s founders last week. TechCrunch now says, citing “multiple sources with knowledge of the deal,” that Google has therefore stepped in to acquire Gizmo5.

Gizmo5, which was founded by Michael Robertson of MP3.com fame, provides free VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) software and related technology for making Internet-based phone calls. After seeing the TechCrunch account earlier today, I sent an e-mail to Robertson asking, “Can you confirm? Can you discuss?”

He replied by e-mail, saying, “No and no. Can’t comment on any rumors. Sorry.”

The deal could make sense. While Google Talk is among Google’s many free offerings, the on-line chatting service is not set up to call specific phone numbers, and both parties in a call must have the Google Talk client running for it to work. TechCrunch says, anyway, that the Gizmo5 acquisition would enable Google to combine Google Talk with Google Voice, the application it has been testing that allows users to have a single phone number that connects to a variety of features, including conference calls, phone call recording, and text messaging.

While Google was mum on the Gizmo5 report at the time of this writing, it did confirm one acquisition today, saying that it has agreed to pay $750 million to acquire AdMob, a mobile display ad technology provider based in San Mateo, CA. Wade offers his perspective and some reaction among Boston’s mobile ad startups to the deal here.

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I was at the offices of uLocate, a Boston startup with a suite of location-aware information services for mobile phones, when I heard today’s news about Google’s $750 million acquisition of San Mateo, CA-based AdMob, which runs one of the largest mobile advertising networks. “It’s a very good thing,” commented Walt Doyle, uLocate’s CEO, who was clearly impressed by the figures involved. “It’s a very good thing that Google, or any company, is willing to pay close to a billion dollars for a company involved in mobile.”

And that’s the dominant message today from the mobile companies around Boston that I’ve reached about the AdMob deal. No one’s fretting (publicly, anyway) that a Google-AdMob combination will overrun the still-fragile market for mobile advertising, or that there’s one less exit path for other startups, now that Google has already bought itself a mobile ad network. Instead, the consensus in the company’s public statements is that Google’s move offers an important boost for the whole mobile media industry.

“We actually think it’s great for the industry, because it really shows the importance of the mobile advertising market, and how important it is for advertisers and publishers to have access to mobile specialists who know how to make the most of that medium,” says Lynn Tornabene, chief marketing officer at Waltham, MA-based Quattro Wireless. Quattra presents itself, of course, as one of these specialists—it works with major brands such as Ford, Netflix, Procter & Gamble, and Visa to get their ads into the most advantageous mobile venues.

“Google is a sophisticated company with deep resources, and yet they really saw the need to acquire a specialist to gain traction in the space,” Tornabene says. “So that really validates the business model of all the mobile ad networks.” (By the way, when it comes to Google, Tornabene knows what she’s talking about—she used to be head of communications for Google’s DoubleClick division.)

That word “validates” came up a lot today. “The announcement is causing tremendous excitement as it validates the enormous potential of mobile advertising,” says Paran Johar, chief marketing officer at Jumptap, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of targeted mobile ads. “We predicted consolidation in the industry and Admob’s broad high volume business model is highly synergistic for Google.”

The $750 million price tag—making Admob Google’s third largest purchase ever, after the $3.1 billion deal to buy DoubleClick and the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube—surprised some observers today, including me. (AdMob had raised some $46 million in financing since its founding in 2006 from Silicon Valley venture firms Accel, DFJ Growth Fund, Northgate, and Sequoia Capital, which makes the Google acquisition an extremely lucrative exit by current venture standards.) The odd thing, to me, was that …Next Page »

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Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) is about to receive an investment of at least $1.5 billion led by Sprint Nextel, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sprint will invest $1 billion, and its partners, including Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks, will chip in an additional $500 million, for continuing support of Clearwire’s WiMax broadband network. Google, which has invested previously in Clearwire, is not participating in the current financing round. The official announcement could come as early as this week, the WSJ reports.

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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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There must be some new force pulling West Coast tech CEOs to visit Boston. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in town; yesterday it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

To mark the unusual occasion, Google invited a raft of journalists to its offices in Cambridge for an open, on-the-record roundtable discussion with Schmidt. Google’s Cambridge site director Steve Vinter served as moderator. Many of the questions tossed Schmidt’s way focused on specific Google projects such as Chrome, Wave, and Android 2.0, and when they’ll evolve into major consumer-facing offerings. While some of that was interesting, I thought Schmidt’s comments on a few of the bigger strategy and policy questions revealed more about the company’s outlook on the world.

Below are some of the high points from the discussion—including Schmidt’s thoughts on strategies for economic recovery, why people fear Google, and what role the company may play in the survival of journalism.

Google is growing fast in Cambridge.

Vinter said Google’s Cambridge office, which handles a variety of projects from Google Friend Connect to Google Book Search, has passed the 200-employee mark and will be “hiring very aggressively” in the coming months. (That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft, which reduced its headcount yesterday by some 800 people, including some here in Cambridge.) “Virtually every project we have is scaling up,” Vinter said. Schmidt (who attended both Princeton and Berkeley) said Google was attracted to Cambridge in the first place because it “likes cities with extremely good technical universities.”

Many more people will be getting a look at Google Wave in the near future.

Up to now, Google has been carefully parsing out invitations to Google Wave, its experimental real-time e-mail/chat/collaboration/document sharing platform. Schmidt said the company is “getting ready for a broader distribution very soon—weeks, not months.” He said feedback on the software from early users has been positive, but the company has been slow to invite in more users for fear of outages. “So far the experiment has yielded a very innovative model and a lot of buzz, and now we want to see if it can scale,” he said.

Google has very big plans for the Chrome browser and its bigger cousin, Chrome OS.

Adoption of Google’s Chrome Web browser is progressing “very well,” Schmidt said. But for Google, Chrome is “more than a browser,” he said. “It’s a platform for powerful Web-based apps that you can’t really deliver in cloud computing without having a browser that can support cloud apps.” Making Chrome work fast, maintaining a clean separation between applications running in different tabs or windows, and supporting the new HTML 5 standard “are central to making the apps model work,” Schmidt said. “And Chrome’s success is a necessary precondition to the success of Chrome OS,” he said, since the one is derived from the other. “We have a lot riding on Chrome.”

The first public version of Chrome OS will be coming out by the end of 2009, Schmidt said. But the operating system won’t be a serious competitor for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or other operating systems until …Next Page »

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[Updated and corrected, see below---Also see end of story for news of Google announcement of Nov. 4] In May 2008, Google moved into colorful (hey, it’s Google) new offices in the heart of Kendall Square. Governor Deval Patrick played ping-pong at the grand opening with Google site director Steve Vinter. And since then, Google Cambridge has grown to some 200 people spread over four floors, and about evenly split between sales and engineering.

But while engineers at the local Googleplex are working on key infrastructure components such as BigTable and MapReduce and consumer-facing offerings like Google Books and Google Images, only one effort to date has been conceived, developed, and released entirely from here in Cambridge, MA: Google Friend Connect.

GFC is a social media tool that makes it extremely easy for website owners to add social features to their sites—without the need to learn programming. These features include gadgets or plug-ins that allow visitors to automatically import their personal profiles from Google, Yahoo, and other places without having to do it manually for each new site they want to join, as well as widgets for letting users rate and review things. Website owners simply select the features they want, fill out an extremely short (three-item) form, and the code is generated for them to cut and paste into their site. The idea is that such as easy tool will make sites more interactive and interesting, thereby helping site owners attract and retain their users. (We’ll get to Google’s motives later on).

[Editor's note: the second sentence of this paragraph was amended to reflect the correct number of monthly GFC websites and users.] And it seems to be working. Since the public beta launch last December, Google Friend Connect has grown to some 8 million websites a month spread across what are estimated to be hundreds of millions of users. Google isn’t exactly sure how big GFC has gotten. “It’s big,” though, is how tech lead manager Sami Shalabi sums things up. And there is apparently more news coming. Google says it is planning a big announcement in the near future about GFC.

Besides being the only Google product entirely born, bred, and weaned here in Cambridge, I found the GFC story interesting because it illustrates how entrepreneurship can flourish inside a big company (yes, Google is officially a big company). A small team was allowed to run with a product idea, much like a boot-strapped startup might do—but when the project showed promise, the corporation stepped in with marketing clout virtually impossible to match in the startup world. If done right, that kind of one-two (startup-giant) punch can make up for the overall bureaucratic sluggishness that often permeates big companies (and yes, Google has been known to exhibit some big company bureaucratic traits).

The story of Google Friend Connect begins, fittingly enough, with two friends. Shalabi and Mussie Shore met each other in 1998 at Iris Associates, an IBM subsidiary where they worked on a suite of Lotus products, most notably Lotus Quickplace and LotusNotes. I visited the pair on the sixth floor of Google Cambridge, where their 11-person team (counting them) occupies a funky, open workspace in a prime corner area. We then retreated to a “huddle room” (what non-Googlers call a conference room) named Magic Hat. It turns out that all the huddle rooms on the sixth floor are named after beers or breweries, which is cool with the GFC crew because three of the team are microbrewers. (Click on the team image to enlarge it and see a full caption.)

In 2006, Shalabi and Shore got the entrepreneurial bug and, together with Martin Fahey, co-founded Zingku, a social networking startup that made it easier to share things like photos, polls, and invitations via instant messages, e-mail, the Web, and (especially) cell phones. You know who purchased Zingku in fall 2007 (for an undisclosed sum). And it was just a few months after …Next Page »

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In a presentation at the Boston Book Festival last weekend, Jon Orwant, a Google engineer involved in the company’s Book Search project, made a memorable and, I thought, quite perceptive remark about the e-book business.

“Think about the books you have at home and how you organize them,” Orwant said. “Some of you may not organize them at all. Some of you may organize them based on the person who reads them—Mom’s books, Dad’s books, the kids’ books. Some may organize by subject or genre. I’ll tell you one way you don’t organize them: you don’t say, ‘Here are the books I bought from Barnes & Noble, here are the books I bought from Amazon, and here are the books that were given to me as gifts.’ We need to be very careful to make sure that we don’t create an environment in which digital books end up that way.”

What Orwant was talking about, of course, is the siloing going on in the nascent e-book industry—the fact that if you buy an e-book for your Amazon Kindle, you can’t read it on a competing e-book device such as Barnes & Noble’s new Nook, or vice-versa. That’s because book publishers, who are understandably spooked by the music industry’s implosion, are worried about losing revenue if people can copy, transfer, and share their digital content too easily. It’s also because many of the companies getting into the e-book market aren’t happy just selling you a gadget or a couple of megabytes of digital content—they want you to buy into a whole ecosystem (i.e., the Kindle family of devices and the 360,000 books formatted for them, or the Nook and its claimed one million titles).

And so far that plan is working, at least on early adopters like me. I bought a Kindle 2 in May, and since then I’ve purchased about $120 worth of books for the device, plus subscriptions to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and multiple Sunday editions of the New York Times. All of this content is protected by digital rights management (DRM) technology that would prevent me from opening it on, say, a Nook or a Sony Reader device—and that quite likely will prevent me from reading my books 10 or 20 years down the road, when my Kindle will be dead or obsolete and reading technologies and content formats will undoubtedly be completely different. But those restrictions haven’t kept me from scarfing up more e-books: since I became a Kindle user I’ve bought about 20 Kindle editions and exactly four physical books (two that weren’t available as Kindle editions, and two that were gifts for other people).

But while I’m not particularly concerned about the fact that my Amazon e-books are tied to my Amazon hardware (hey, I’ve also bought hundreds of songs and videos from Apple’s iTunes Store that only play on my Apple MacBook and my Apple iPhone), a lot of people are more skeptical toward the Amazon model. As e-books gradually catch up to and surpass physical books as the main way many people access book-length content—which they will, mark my words—continued reliance on proprietary formats and DRM could wind up fragmenting our common literary inheritance in exactly the way that Orwant warned about.

But I have a feeling the story isn’t over, and that market pressures may eventually push all of the big players in the still-young e-book business toward a more open future. The day before the Boston Book Festival, I had a long conversation with Steve Haber, president of the Digital Reading Division at Sony, and I got an earful about …Next Page »

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