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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.”

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Now that it’s got a very Apple-like system in place—tablet computer paired with digital media—Amazon.com appears to be cranking up the volume on its online music service as well.

The San Francisco office of Amazon’s a2z research and development subsidiary is chock full of job ads for people to work on the Amazon MP3 store and Cloud Player, the e-commerce giant’s challenger to Apple’s long-dominant iTunes music platform. The company says it’s looking to “rapidly grow this team,” and the 21 job ads listed paint a picture of that growth.

Amazon’s looking for a lot of different skills. The company’s got ads for developers and engineers to tackle both the front-end software and mid-level networking systems. It wants designers to help polish the user interface, engineers to specifically take on overseas products, and program managers to oversee things. And, of course, mobile developers with experience in both Android and Apple’s iOS—a system that doesn’t currently have a native Amazon music player application.

Amazon’s MP3 store has been lurking around for several years, but has really picked up steam with the broad adoption of Android-based smartphones, which often have the Amazon store pre-installed. Its Cloud Player, which debuted last year, is bundled with the Amazon MP3 service.

(Trying to become a default music player for Android is another clever way that Amazon is yanking parts of that mobile operating system away from its sugar daddies at Google, which was late to the game with a serious digital music competitor last year. The more prominent example of Amazon’s bigfooting is now the Kindle Fire itself, which runs on an extremely customized version of Android.)

I’m not sure how much people will use the new Kindle Fire to listen to music, but that would fit into CEO Jeff Bezos’ concept of the Fire as “a fully integrated media service.”

That’s a key distinction. While Apple got into the digital music business to drive sales of its hardware devices, Amazon is plainly coming at the tablet and mobile-app markets as ways to just sell more stuff, whether that’s music or e-books or streaming movies or groceries (still in Seattle only!) or tube socks, for that matter. The longer you stay in Amazon’s digital storefront, the more they know about you, and the likelier it is that you’ll buy something from them next time.

iTunes could certainly stand to face a strong competitor here—from a user’s perspective, the software can be very difficult to navigate and sometimes feels like it’s barely been updated in years (just ask one of the whiners on this “I Hate iTunes” Facebook page.) But even with an integrated MP3 store and attached Cloud Player that makes listening easier, Amazon still has a ton of work to do if it hopes to make a dent in Apple’s huge music-selling lead—especially now that Google also is also on the case.

At the moment, Amazon and other runners-up in digital music are still fighting over scraps. Market research firm NPD Group has estimated that Amazon accounts for about 14 percent of the digital song download market, with Apple claiming about 70 percent. From the look of these hiring plans, Amazon is hoping to get serious about changing that balance.

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Amazon.com’s cloud-computing services already power some of the biggest names in online gaming. Its new Kindle Fire tablet and app store are giving game publishers a critical new sales channel. And now, the e-commerce pioneer appears to be getting more serious about publishing its own games.

Over the last few months, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has ramped up job postings for game developers, artists, designers, and producers at both an Orange County research and development office and, for jobs focusing on social games, at its Seattle headquarters. Several notable names from the gaming industry have also joined the company recently, with a range of experience that spans many different gaming genres.

Some game publishers—who count Amazon as a key partner—have now concluded that it could become a competitor as well. Not much is known about what the secretive company is working on, and no sources who suspect Amazon is planning a bigger push into game publishing would comment on the record for this story. Amazon itself did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment.

But, as is often the case, you can tell what the company is planning by what it’s telling prospective job applicants.

In ads for developer, engineer, and producer jobs, Amazon describes its game development studio as a place to “imagine and develop games that will shape the future of interactive media,” with “an agile team made up of the brightest engineers, artists, producers and designers in the industry.”

The scope of what the company says it plans to build is pretty wide, pointing toward the all-platforms gaming experience expected to soon be standard in the industry: “We conceptualize, build and distribute the most exciting and addicting games on Android, iPhone/iPad, Kindle, HTML5 and other next generation operating systems!” The studio is based in an Orange County, CA, office of the company’s a2z research and development subsidiary.

Digital game publishing isn’t completely new territory for Amazon, but it’s been relatively quiet so far. The company purchased small game studio Reflexive Entertainment in 2008, and that unit has continued to publish some casual titles and e-book games for the Kindle digital reader—examples include cheery casual game Airport Mania 2 and interactive e-book Dusk World.

But now that Amazon has introduced its new full-color, touchscreen Kindle Fire tablet, it’s got a much stronger hand in selling digital games—and a much bigger reason to explore creating its own titles. Tellingly, the company’s job board lists six new game studio positions since the public introduction of the Kindle Fire, including three that were just posted yesterday.

Meanwhile, up at its Seattle headquarters, Amazon is building up a group that focuses on “social games innovation.” The company’s job board lists a dozen open positions mentioning that team, most of them posted in the past three months. Some of the jobs being advertised could be suited to a platform project, rather than game production. But job descriptions for designers and artists are pretty specific about the kind of work needed to produce a title. The artist, for example, is expected to “set the artistic direction [of] a new social game.”

Word of a social gaming project started leaking out last summer when the website IndustryGamers reported that Amazon had hired longtime role-playing-game designer Jonathan Tweet to work on a social game, following his stint working on Facebook games at GameHouse, a division of Seattle-based RealNetworks.

Since then, Amazon has accumulated more experienced game-industry talent. They include Nik Davidson, a veteran of massively multiplayer online games; Paul Furio, who has experience in social and casual games, as well as interactive fiction; and Russ Glaser, a user experience designer who worked on several high-profile projects for Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, including Xbox Live Mobile and the integration of Facebook.

Some don’t think that Amazon is too serious about becoming a major game publisher. GameHouse president Matt Hulett says Amazon will probably use its industry talent to strengthen its distribution platform, possibly developing demonstration titles to show off the strength of its platform.

“Remember ‘Minesweeper’ on Microsoft Windows? Sometimes you need a couple of reference apps that are bundled in so that people know what to do,” Hulett says. “I just seriously doubt that Amazon would try to build its own hit games.”

But there are precedents for just such a strategy. For one thing, it’s quite common for big video game distribution platforms to produce their own titles—Microsoft, Valve, and BigFish Games are three prominent examples just in the Seattle area.

Amazon also has shown an interest in producing other kinds of content that it sells. After years of disrupting the business of selling books, Amazon is now directly taking on the publishing houses by signing up its own authors. And it’s also exploring new ways of getting movies made with its Amazon Studios project, a complement to a new video-streaming business.

That’s before we even discuss the plain dollars-and-cents reasons. Video gaming has been a relatively strong area of the overall media industry in the past decade, pulling in an estimated $16.5 billion last year. The console game sector may have suffered, but social and casual games continue to be hot, despite Facebook game-leader Zynga’s sometimes disappointing IPO—in Seattle alone, we saw PopCap Games acquired for up to $1.3 billion and Double Down Interactive sold for up to $500 million. And games continue to be the most popular smartphone apps, according to tracking by the research firm Nielsen.

Finally, don’t forget that Amazon started life as a seller of media—namely books—and views its new Kindle Fire in that vein, with CEO Jeff Bezos recently telling Wired that the device is “a fully integrated media service.”

If integration’s your thing, it’s pretty hard to beat this recipe: Owning the game itself, the app store that delivers it, the computing power that makes it tick, and the device that it lands on.

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

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

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

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

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

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Tableau Software, the Seattle-based data visualization company that started as a Stanford University spinoff, says it plans to hire some 300 employees this year after ending 2011 with nearly double revenue growth.

The company, which views itself as “a future IPO prospect,” says its hiring plans include an expansion of its San Francisco Bay Area office to a location in Menlo Park, CA that can house 60 employees. Tableau also has offices in Kirkland, WA and London.

Tableau’s software helps businesses analyze data in charts, graphics, and other visual displays. It also has a free version of the software that is available to the public, which has been used by news organizations in big demographics projects.

Tableau had big staff growth in 2011, adding more than 160 workers to bring its total to about 350. It also recently reported 2011 revenue growth of 94 percent, which would give it yearly sales of about $66 million, based on the 2010 revenue figure cited in the Inc. 5000 entry about the company.

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Hey Seattle, are you feeling above average?

You should, at least in the paycheck department, according to the latest report tracking American wages from Seattle-based PayScale.

The greater Seattle area came in as the fifth-best city for wage growth in 2011, one notch ahead of the San Francisco area. Yep, that’s right—we beat the Valley at something.

Specifically, Seattle’s rating in the PayScale Index for the fourth quarter was 1.6 percent higher than a year earlier, slightly better than San Francisco’s 1.4 percent. Nationally, PayScale pegged wage growth at 1 percent.

Unsurprisingly, the jobs that led the way for wage growth nationally were generally highly skilled professions in the energy or technology sectors.

“Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. are major tech hubs and saw good wage growth over the last year,” PayScale noted on its blog (D.C. was fourth nationally).

PayScale doesn’t rely on the usual government agency data for its analysis, but instead gathers its information via submissions from some 30 million people in full-time, private-sector work. More than 300,000 profiles are analyzed each quarter to determine the index, which is given for different industries, locations, and so on. Much more on the methodology here.

For a comparison, the federal government’s separate measure of private-sector wage growth showed similarly modest growth in the last comparable quarter.

With the frenzied hiring competition for people with software and other digital skills, it’s no surprise that tech jobs continue to pay well—and that the Seattle area does well nationally.

But why would the Emerald City’s index slightly outperform the San Francisco area’s? It’s partly because of economic diversification, with a potent manufacturing sector tied to Boeing—still the largest private employer in Washington state by far—and “a less-damaged construction industry than is typical nationally,” PayScale said.

The national summary for 2011 shows some optimism for the economy at large—another sign, perhaps, that we’re continuing to slowly shake of the malaise from the near-fatal economic collapse that sparked the Great Recession.

Labor economists had some good news last month when the unemployment rate fell to 8.5 percent-the lowest since February 2009—but the overall joblessness rate is still high by historic standards

“For the first time since 2008, wage increases are being seen across the board and not just for workers in high-tech and energy industries. Granted, these increases are small compared to those seen pre-2008, but they are a sign that the economy is on the right track,” PayScale analytics director Katie Bardaro said.

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First things first: Yes, Facebook engineering director Jay Parikh has some thoughts about Google’s move to boost Google Plus above other social sources in its search stream. And no, he can’t say anything about it.

Twitter has been out front in criticizing Google’s newest social-signals revamp—named Search Plus Your World—and Facebook Seattle adviser Hadi Partovi said on his personal Twitter feed that he “used to love new @google search improvements with joy and even a bit of awe. This new social-results rollout is the opposite.”

But Facebook itself, which has a separate search arrangement with investor Microsoft’s Bing search engine, hasn’t made any sort of public pronouncement about the Google changes. When politely reminded about that by a public relations guy, I prodded Parikh a bit: Surely you must have some thoughts about it?

Jay Parikh

“Possibly,” he said, with a bit of a smile. “He wiped my brain. I know nothing.”

That particular brain-wipe would probably be a big job. Parikh, who joined Facebook in 2009 from Ning, heads up the social network’s infrastructure team, which spans everything from software that keeps more than 800 million users tied together to the nuts-and-bolts datacenter designs of the Open Compute Project.

Parkih was visiting Facebook’s Seattle engineering office to give a technical talk on the company’s projects—the kind of appearance that serves as a recruiting tool for engineers that Facebook might want to woo away from Microsoft, Amazon, or Google’s own sizable Seattle-area offices.

We’ve previously heard about some of the more user-facing projects that Seattle engineers have worked on, including messenger features, the iPad app, and the integration of Skype. But Parikh notes that there’s a good contingent of infrastructure engineers in Seattle too.

“We do have a growing presence up here for our infrastructure engineering team,” with about four groups who have a presence in Seattle of “a couple to a lot of engineers.”

That continued growth is the driver behind the Facebook office’s impending move to new, more spacious Seattle digs—double the size of the office near Pike Place Market, which held about 60 last time we heard. “We’ve been aggressively trying to build the set of projects and thus the set of engineers up here working on those projects,” Parikh says.

And perhaps counter to the Silicon Valley cliché of twentysomethings working all hours and passing out at their desks, Facebook is looking for a range of experience in its hires, Parikh says. That’s partly a necessity, since there aren’t enough new computer science graduates to fill all the technical jobs available, and an enormous number of digital startups are … Next Page »

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Since when is naming your startup and posting a job ad news? When your name is Ray Ozzie, that’s when.

The former Microsoft chief software architect and Lotus veteran has surfaced after a year of working behind the scenes. Ozzie reached out to the Boston Globe‘s Scott Kirsner with a teaser about his new project: a startup called Cocomo that he has co-founded in Boston and Seattle. The company is developing communications software and tools for social interaction, and it is recruiting engineers—in particular, a lead user interface/experience designer with mobile chops. That’s about it for specifics so far, though Kirsner reports that the company doesn’t yet have office space, and that ex-Microsofties Matt Pope and Ransom Richardson are part of the team.

Ozzie left Microsoft at the end of 2010 after four years on the job (a move that I foreshadowed a year earlier). He had joined Microsoft with its acquisition of his collaboration software firm Groove Networks. Ozzie was Bill Gates’s handpicked successor as software architect, and he led Windows Azure among other projects, but ultimately Microsoft wasn’t a great fit for his talents. We’ll be watching closely to see what he builds at Cocomo.

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Google’s new site director in Seattle is Doug Orr, a senior engineer at the tech giant who was working most recently on cloud computing projects, two sources tell Xconomy.

Orr takes over for Brian Bershad, a former University of Washington professor who is now working for Google in Russia, one of our sources confirms. Word of Bershad’s new job was first reported in October by John Cook at GeekWire. Our source reports that Bershad’s job will be focused on determining Google’s strategy for gaining market share in Russia, one of the globe’s critical emerging economies.

Scott Silver remains the director at the company’s Kirkland, WA office, one of our sources says. Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity for this story.

Google’s presence in the Seattle area dates to 2004. More recently, it has seen other Silicon Valley companies come to the Puget Sound region in search of prime engineering talent, from the University of Washington and companies like Microsoft and Amazon. The trend has accelerated this year, with well-financed startups joining the parade as the Bay Area talent crunch gets worse.

Orr has been at Google for about five years, according to his LinkedIn page. Before joining Google he worked at Arbor Networks, a network security company. In a recent presentation at the University of Michigan—his alma mater—Orr described his work at Google this way:

“I’ve got two jobs. I’m actually in charge of the systems software for our network infrastructure, which means the load distribution and the management and monitoring of our production network. And I’m responsible for what we’re calling the cloud platform, which is the thing that we’re doing, sort of incrementally, to allow people to use our infrastructure for their cloud computing.”

As of this summer, Google said it had about 850 people between its Seattle and Kirkland offices, including engineers and product managers along with some sales staff. As GeekWire also first reported, Google recently staked out a new office in Bothell that could have enough room to nearly double that headcount.

At the beginning of this year, Google said 2011 would be the biggest hiring year in its history, surpassing the roughly 6,000 people hired in 2007. At a meeting of computer science educators this summer, Bershad put Google’s hunger for top-drawer talent this way: “We are not limited in the number of positions that we have. We are limited in the number of people we can find who are very good.”

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It’s not just the Silicon Valley giants of technology who are moving into the Seattle area to raid technical talent from Microsoft, Amazon, and others. These days, you’re just as likely to see some well-financed startups wooing the big-company guys with promises of changing the world.

A prime example is Nebula, a cloud computing startup that has about half of its roughly 30-person staff in Seattle. As Xconomy’s Wade Roush wrote in this detailed profile of the company, Nebula is selling a smarter version of a networking switch, one that is integrated with the open-source cloud computing platform OpenStack. Specifically, the Nebula device contains a 10 gigabit Ethernet switch along with access to the OpenStack software platform—a combination the company is calling a “cloud controller.”

Nebula’s device, which is just now being tested by potential customers, will allow companies to cheaply build private cloud computing systems. Nebula’s device uses customized OpenStack software and works with inexpensive, commodity servers, including hardware from the Facebook-sponsored Open Compute Project.

Chris Kemp, Nebula CEO

It’s worth mentioning that Nebula’s CEO, Chris Kemp, is one of the co-founders of OpenStack. He helped get the project off the ground when he was the chief technology officer for IT at NASA, working out of its Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

Kemp’s also no stranger to Seattle. He was a key employee at Classmates.com, and co-founded the vacation rental management startup Escapia before heading to NASA. Another veteran of Escapia and NASA, Devin Carlen, is a Nebula co-founder and its engineering vice president, based in the Seattle area.

When I visited Nebula’s temporary digs recently, Carlen and Kemp were in that tired-but-excited phase of developing a new company and getting the first versions of their product out to testing. Their conference room was peppered with notes and diagrams, piles of hardware, and the occasional wine bottle, as engineers worked intently in an office down the hall. The company’s current hiring plans will put it at about 50 people in the next six months or so, and a bit more than half of the team will probably be based in Palo Alto, CA. But “all the cool kids are in Seattle, of course,” Carlen says with a smile.

“Seattle’s actually been our secret weapon,” Kemp says. “We found it very difficult to bring folks on in the Bay Area. And, as it turns out, Amazon’s a great place to recruit from. Microsoft’s a great place to recruit from.”

Those hires include a pair that Nebula boasted about in a recent press release: principal engineer Tres Henry, a former lead in developing the Amazon Web Services Management Console; and Matt Gambardella, who … Next Page »

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How annoying is the Web? I’m not talking about the nonstop distractions, the social-media window into human stupidity, or even the endless pop-up ads that block your view of the screen. I’m talking about the utter loss of privacy that most consumers have suffered online, yet rarely think about.

Sure, the Web is a net positive (we hope), but there are costs. When you visit any website, you leave a record of who you are, where you are, and what you looked at. That by itself might not be traceable to your specific identity, but over time, sites can track you via social media, share buttons (Facebook “likes,” even if you don’t click them or log in), check-ins, and other online activities. Companies can then show you personalized ads based on your product preferences, zip code, and history of Google searches. Worse, they can create a profile of your activities, often combined with data from public records, and sell it to other companies to do whatever they want with it.

Trying to combat all of this is a small Boston tech startup called Abine (pronounced “uh-BEAN”). Its name stands for “A Bit Is Not Enough.” The company is working to give consumers more control over their personal information on the Web. I’ve heard a fair amount about this startup over the past year, but I recently had a chance to meet co-founder Andrew Sudbury and CEO Bill Kerrigan over a beer.

The timing seems good for Abine, what with the massive flak Facebook has been taking over user privacy lately. As Sudbury points out (along with others), Facebook treats its users not as customers, but as products. Meaning that each social network member’s profile, with its likes, recommendations, and social connections, can be thought of as just part of a $100 billion machine for marketers.

“We don’t want our users to be our product,” Sudbury says. Instead, he says, consumers pay Abine to help shield them from Web tracking and other misuses of their personal information. “We want to sell privacy services,” he says. “We want to be at the point of contact between the user and the net. We want them to use the Web without worrying that all their data is flying out the door.” For example, “users think they’re going to Boston.com, but they’re really going to 10 other websites,” Sudbury says. (That’s because their browser fetches different pieces of the website from other sites—things like ads and snippets of code that let advertisers know a little bit about who each visitor is.)

So what does Abine do about it? The company makes add-ons for browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome; at the moment, different pieces of its software work for different browsers. The software, called Do Not Track Plus, blocks unwanted tracking by detecting all tracking requests … Next Page »

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“You will have meltdowns on a regular basis. You will have those moments. Make sure you have people you can talk to when you have those moments.”

That was Brad Feld, the tech entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, on Friday afternoon, speaking to a room of Boston and New York entrepreneurs and angel investors, at an event organized by Silicon Valley Bank. The setting was the Microsoft NERD center in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. Feld was talking about the experiences that all founders (especially CEOs) go through with their companies.

Feld is the co-founder of Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group and TechStars, the seed-stage startup accelerator with programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York. He relates very well to early-stage tech entrepreneurs, because he’s been there and done that himself. In his typical style, Feld spoke casually (and candidly) about the challenges of building a company. None of it was particularly earth-shattering, but it’s interesting to revisit these sorts of tips every once in a while, because different things jump out at you at different times.

Feld’s advice boiled down to two things: products and people.

1. “Be obsessed about your product.”

“The most important thing to focus on, early in the life of your company, is your product. In year two, it’s your product. In year 20, it’s your product,” he said. “If you focus on your product, most of your other problems will go away.”

But he has a broader definition of product—it’s not just the software you release, or your technology, or even your interface with customers. “The whole of the company becomes the product,” he said. “The whole lifecycle of what you do.”

That means entrepreneurs should be totally passionate about what they are building—not just starting a company to be their own boss, say—and they should be true to themselves. Feld admitted that with his first company, he got bored after four years. “I didn’t love the thing I was doing,” he said. (He sold it after seven years.)

2. “You cannot motivate someone.”

“The idea that a CEO can motivate people is a fallacy. All you can do is create an environment where people are motivated or not,” he said. Companies will make bad hires—talented people who aren’t a good cultural fit with the rest of the team—and they should get rid of those employees quickly, according to Feld. “You can’t change them,” he said, and you can’t “try to motivate people to work harder” through things like performance reviews. That simply doesn’t work, at least not for small startups.

Instead, founders need to continually make sure they are bringing on the right people for their team, communicating openly, “building the language of the company,” and tying that formative context and culture very closely to their product, he said. This will mean very different things for different companies, and it’s certainly not an exact science.

Feld said he sees a common mistake in young startups. “The CEO ends up doing a lot of the work,” he said, and “the non-CEOs don’t do the right work.” The CEO’s chief responsibility, over time, is to make sure “everyone is doing the right thing.”

Oh, and one more responsibility: “Don’t run out of money,” he said.

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Facebook’s Seattle office, the social networking giant’s biggest engineering presence outside its Palo Alto, CA headquarters, is doubling its footprint to make room for more engineers. Facebook Seattle opened in August 2010 with three employees, and has grown to about 60 people in the year-plus since then, the company says.

Some key early projects that Seattle engineers have tackled include a revamped chat feature and the integrated Skype video calling service rolled out this summer, which was led by Facebook Seattle’s Philip Su, a former Microsoftie. Facebook says Seattle engineers also work on the iPad and other iOS functions, along with general site stability and reliability.

Leon Dubinsky, a Facebook Seattle engineer who worked on the long-awaited iPad app, described working in the remote office in this recent post recounting the project.

After starting during his “bootcamp” orientation in Palo Alto, Dubinsky wrote that he took his chunk of the app project home to Seattle, “and a few of my Seattle teammates joined me to help continue improving the product. It now feels a little more like the typical structure of Facebook Seattle—three or four people working up here, and three or four of your teammates down in Palo Alto.”

Facebook Seattle is led by Ari Steinberg, an engineer who was a fairly early Facebook employee. The company also counts on advisers like Hadi Partovi, formerly of iLike (and MySpace), and Peter Wilson, formerly of Google (and Microsoft).

The new 27,000-square-foot office will be at 1730 Minor Avenue. The original space is down by Pike Place Market, at 101 Stewart Street, and was clearly getting to capacity the last time I dropped by in June. The move is expected early next year.

The office has held pretty regular “tech talks,” which service as outreach and recruiting events. The biggest one of those came in late June, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg (and engineering head Mike Schroepfer), held an an invitation-only Q&A with developers, just before the Skype video calling announcement.

At that time, Zuckerberg praised the quality of talent in Seattle: “I just think there’s so many good engineers up here, largely from Microsoft and Amazon traditionally, and Google a bit more recently, and there’s a really good startup scene up here.”

Facebook Seattle posted this enticing photo of the view from its new digs, which has the city looking its non-drizzly best—only partly cloudy, Space Needle on display, and some sparkling water in the distance. (This is the Seattle I was dreaming of yesterday evening, when I got soaked waiting for the bus).

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Get a bunch of prominent Boston-area founders and CEOs in a room together, and ask them provocative questions. It’s a tried and true recipe for a good discussion, and that’s exactly what we got at the end of the day on Friday at MassTLC’s 2011 unConference at Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The topic was “the secrets of scaling,” and it was a fitting end to a fun and productive day.

This was the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s fourth annual innovation conference, and the event has really solidified in its “unconference” format, in which hundreds of tech entrepreneurs, investors, execs, and other business leaders meet and create organic sessions to discuss whatever is on people’s minds. Most people are there for the networking and private meetings, but that didn’t stop a few lively sessions from breaking out.

The secrets of scaling session—focused on how startups get big—was organized by journalist Scott Kirsner and was more conference-y than unconference-y, as it was planned ahead of time and had the feel of a big panel. Here are some takeaways from that (before I get to some broader highlights later).

Each of the companies on the panel could be considered a Boston success story: Constant Contact, Gemvara, iRobot, Kayak, LogMeIn, Wayfair (fka CSN Stores), Zipcar. (See photo above by Jeff Bussgang, who noted that you can distinguish the pre-IPO companies from the public companies by who’s wearing jeans.) The idea was to tap into this collective braintrust and draw out some key lessons.

Paul English of travel site Kayak said he routinely asks people, who’s the smartest person you ever met? And then he goes out and tries to hire them. He relayed the story of recruiting Giorgos Zacharia, Kayak’s chief scientist, a process that took several years but was well worth it. “It was transformational,” English said. He also talked about Kayak’s expensive acquisition of rival SideStep back in 2007. Kayak fired all of SideStep’s engineers and created a duplicate version of its site. Lesson: hire and fire ruthlessly.

Niraj Shah from Wayfair talked about his e-retail company’s bootstrapped growth, starting in 2002. Once his team figured out how to make money from niche online stores, it faced lots of competitors and had to decide whether to raise money or stay the course. It chose the latter (until this year, when it did raise a big round). “We just launched new categories as fast as we could, built out selection in each category as fast as we could,” Shah said. “We let the growth compound on itself.” The key was “not letting early successes keep us from letting that compound,” he says. Lesson: stick to your knitting.

Michael Simon from LogMeIn, the remote access and IT management firm, started with the idea of being a lifestyle business, not a public company (it now has 450 employees, about 200 in Massachusetts). The key moment in LogMeIn’s growth was when it “started giving away stuff,” he said. This was before “freemium” was a popular model. The company’s revenues started very small but grew exponentially. “If you have an exponential growth curve, the absolute number doesn’t matter,” Simon says. “You’ll get there.” Lesson: start small and get traction.

Matt Lauzon from Gemvara, the online custom jeweler, represented the younger generation of entrepreneurs on the panel. Although it’s still fairly early for Gemvara (which started as Paragon Lake in 2006), the company seems to be on an impressive growth trajectory. “We didn’t want to … Next Page »

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Here in Boston, September 1st brings about quite a bit of change: students migrating back into town, moving trucks and furniture in the streets, and street cleaners around my office (all cutting down on parking options, sorry to say).

We’ve weathered Tropical Storm Irene and a roller-coaster stock market, felt the mild rumblings of an East Coast earthquake (OK, most of us here didn’t), and are waiting to see how the Red Sox-Yankees series plays out tonight. And football season. Did I mention football season?

It’s also a time of change and opportunity in the tech-business community, as we look forward to a high season of events and news. Here are some quick hits:

—Joi Ito has officially started as the new director of the MIT Media Lab (he succeeds Frank Moss). In a blog post, Ito writes, “The awesome space that the Lab lives in, and the somewhat tricky issues around IP and confidentiality, have kept a lot of the great things going on at the Lab out of the public view. I’d really like to have the Media Lab be more involved in the conversation that is the global Internet, and to invite everyone to participate in what we do.”

—CSN Stores is now officially Wayfair.com. No surprise there, as the Boston e-retailer (think Amazon for the home) has rebranded its 200-plus sites under a unified name. Wayfair, which has long been profitable, recently raised its first round of outside funding, and it was a doozy: $165 million from Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capital. It sounds like a lot of the money will go towards marketing and building the new brand.

—A number of Boston-area companies are hiring up a storm in a seriously competitive job market. HubSpot is among the usual suspects, coming off its recent acquisitions of Performable and Oneforty. The company is 285 employees going on 2,085. (We’ll be keeping an eye on how it manages its growth and integrations.) Other firms looking to hire include Gemvara, PeerTransfer, and a bunch of TechStars Boston companies—plus giants like Verizon and Pfizer (both are setting up R&D beachheads in the Boston area). I’m guessing Google and ITA Software aren’t exactly sitting still in Kendall Square either.

—While on the topic of Kendall Square tech icons, I should mention that Akamai has formed a partnership with fellow Cambridge startup Happy Cloud to speed up software downloads via Akamai’s content delivery network—in particular, downloads of high-quality PC games. Happy Cloud came out of beta with its on-demand game store in July.

—In the “dead” category, consider U.S. solar panel startups. This week’s news about Solyndra, the Fremont, CA-based company that said it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, is another nail in the coffin. Solyndra raised nearly $1 billion in private equity financing (and borrowed $500 million-plus from the U.S. Department of Energy), making it one of the largest failures in venture capital history. Solyndra was backed in part by Boston and Silicon Valley-based RockPort Capital and a number of other firms, including Madrone Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.

The news comes on the heels of Evergreen Solar’s bankruptcy—which Black Coral Capital’s Rob Day says isn’t the end of the story for the Marlboro, MA-based firm. And last week’s bankruptcy filing by Intel-backed SpectraWatt, in upstate New York. The broader consensus seems to be that U.S. solar investors didn’t look out far enough on the cost curve and didn’t have deep enough pockets to keep supporting companies trying to compete with cheaper solar overseas. There are still big opportunities to innovate in solar, of course, but the investor climate is looking pretty dour.

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Lean startup, schmean startup. There’s more than one way to build a Web company.

Just ask Coach Wei, the founder and CEO of Yottaa, a two-year-old tech startup in Cambridge, MA. Yottaa (pronounced sort of like the green Jedi master) makes software tools to help business websites run faster, monitor their performance, and generate sales more efficiently—a field known as Web performance optimization. In a previous life, Wei worked at data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) and founded business software firm Nexaweb Technologies. He is a graduate of MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, which foreshadows the approach he is taking with his current startup.

Over lunch recently, Wei talked in depth about what he’s doing with Yottaa. You might call it the “anti-lean startup” (my description, not his). In some ways, it is the opposite of the lean startup model, coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries, which involves having a small team, creating software prototypes quickly, and using customer feedback to rapidly iterate code. The process is much faster than traditional software engineering and uses methods such as “agile” software development and “customer development.”

As Wei explains, that approach works well for some social media and Web startups, but not all. In particular, he says, if you’re trying to build a company that will be able to grow from, say, $1-5 million in revenue to $50 million, you could run into difficulties with the lean startup model. If you start small and local, ramping up to hire a team of 100 people in Boston or San Francisco will be almost impossible because of the current talent crunch and skyrocketing cost of good developers. “There’s a huge scalability gap,” Wei says.

So he’s trying something different at Yottaa—and he’d probably be the first to acknowledge that it might not necessarily work. The idea, he says, is to be “global from day one and have scalability built in.”

Translation: hire most of the team in Beijing and the rest in the Boston area, from the start. “We try to integrate the best of here, and the best of China, to build a company,” he says.

This is different from offshoring, he says, because it’s not about cost, and the Beijing employees are not seen as second-class citizens. “You don’t do it for the sake of cost saving,” Wei says. “You have to think of building a scalable growth engine into your company. You have to build it into your DNA.” More specifically, he says, it’s about “how to leverage the global workforce.”

Here’s how I see it. Plenty of U.S. tech startups—and big companies—make use of developer talent in other parts of the world like Brazil, China, and Eastern Europe. But few are building their … Next Page »

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Y Combinator unleashed its latest class of startups on the world yesterday at its summer Demo Day in Mountain View. The famed venture incubator, which provides mentorship, networking, investor access, and a modest cash stipend in return for an equity stake in each company, admitted a record 63 startups this time around. That’s up from 43 in the winter 2011 batch, and 34 in summer 2010.

To accommodate all those entrepreneurs, Y Combinator has had to expand, literally. For the second time, the organization has moved the signature orange wall in its common room about 30 feet to the west, roughly doubling the amount of space for work tables—and for Demo Day seating for investors and journalists, which is always at a premium.

Summaries of the YC startups’ pitches start below, one paragraph each. But fear not—you won’t have to wade through 63 paragraphs. That’s because a record proportion of this year’s startups, 33 out of the 63, asked to stay off the record, meaning they haven’t launched their services or they’re not ready to have it known that they took part in Y Combinator. Also, I just couldn’t get through all 30 summaries last night, so I’m dividing up this debrief into two parts. Today it’s A through Mo; tomorrow, Mu through Z.

I’m trying something new this time around. As in the past, each listing contains a link to the company’s website, the names of its co-founders, the tag line provided by each company (when there is one), and my summary. What’s new is the final line—my quick personal take on each startup. The presentations were admittedly brief (about three minutes each), so I’m not ready to form final judgments about any of these companies. But as they say, first impressions matter.

Aisle50

Chris Steiner, Riley Scott, George Korsnick

“Groupon for groceries.”

The founders of Aisle50 argue that newspaper circulars are losing their effectiveness and that large food manufacturers are looking for new ways to promote their products, including e-mail and the Web. Whereas the incumbent digital coupon provider, Coupons.com, simply reduces an entire circular to a few Web pages, Aisle50 crafts a single, custom page for each promoted product and features one discount per grocery chain at a time. When a member buys the currently featured product via credit card at the Aisle50 website, a matching credit is applied to his or her store loyalty card. The startup is currently working only with the Lowes Food chain in North Carolina, but will soon add hypermarket chain Meijer. A “giant pot of money” is waiting to migrate from paper coupons to digital platforms, the startups says, and it wants to become “the premier way for food manufacturers to market their product.”

My take: Reminiscent of YC S10 startup Anyleaf, which is also out to kill the supermarket circular, but Aisle50 has the Groupon twist. Y Combinator seems to return to certain themes again and again, as if searching for the right solution.

Bushido

Sean Grove, Kevin Zettler

“An app store for the cloud.”

To get their Web or mobile apps distributed, developers have to worry about lots of things outside their areas of specialty, such as hosting, authentication, and billing. Bushido says it can take an app written using the Rails programming framework and “wrap” it in a software package that takes care all of that, liberating developers to focus on their software. Over time, the startup says it will accumulate “all the apps, all the users, and all the data,” giving it an understanding of a “data graph” that will be as powerful as Facebook’s social graph.

My take: Probably the brashest and most cryptic pitch of the day. The company clearly hopes to bask in the glow of Heroku, the Ruby on Rails hosting service that was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2008 term.

Can’tWait

Eric Florenzano, Eric Maguire

If the names Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire sound familiar, it’s because these are the same two Erics who worked with Leah Culver to launch Convore, a YC W11 company that specializes in IRC-style group chat. That probably makes them the first startup founders to participate in two consecutive terms at Y Combinator. This time around, they’re going after the movie business—specifically, trailers. The startup’s iPhone app (coming soon to Android) lets users browse and watch movie trailers, share their favorites with friends, and set reminders so they won’t miss out when the movies hit theaters. Florenzano calls it “the best marketing platform Hollywood could hope for” and predicts studios will pay the startup handsomely to feature their trailers. In the future, the company plans to take on video games, consumer electronics, and other product categories where pre-orders are prevalent.

My take: It will be interesting to see what company Florenzano and Maguire start for YC W12.

… Next Page »

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In Baltimore, a “hopper” is a young, street-level drug dealer (as devotees of The Wire can tell you). In Montreal, Hopper is a young travel search company. In Boston, well, we’ll see what happens in Boston.

Hopper is announcing today an $8 million financing round led by Atlas Venture, with previous investor Brightspark Ventures also participating. The company started in Montreal in 2007 but says it is moving its headquarters to Cambridge, MA, soon. The reason?

“We’re making a big bet on the talent pool,” says co-founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde. The company is currently scouting office spaces around Kendall Square and Central Square, and is looking to hire about 15 people, mostly engineers, he says. With a local ecosystem that includes online travel companies such as Kayak, TripAdvisor, Goby, and Google/ITA Software, and “big data” firms like IBM/Netezza, HP/Vertica, and EMC, (my examples, not his), Lalonde hopes to find a “particular kind of programming geek” well-suited for Hopper’s technology challenges.

The idea behind Hopper is to take natural language travel-search queries—things like “best beaches in Spain” or “scuba diving in the Caribbean”—and return a list of places, as well as flight and hotel options for each place, ranked according to measures of quality, convenience, and cost. It’s a more open-ended, “discovery” type of search than what has become standard on itinerary comparison sites like Kayak, Bing Travel, Orbitz, and newer sites like Hipmunk, InsideTrip, WaySavvy, and Yapta.

In other words, if you’re looking for a flight from A to B (and a hotel to stay in), there are plenty of other sites to help you do that. “Travel is a complex discovery process,” says Lalonde. “We’re working on the depth, quality, and intelligence of the search.”

He certainly knows the sector. Lalonde and co-founder Joost Ouwerkerk came from travel firm Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), which bought Lalonde’s previous company, Newtrade Technologies, in 2002. Together with co-founder Sebastien Rainville, the Hopper team plans to move to Boston, but they aren’t saying exactly when yet. They will also keep some operations in Montreal—notably the technical infrastructure and servers that crunch the firm’s travel data—because it’s much cheaper to do it there, Lalonde says.

Here’s a little more about how Hopper works. Say you type in “scuba diving Caribbean.” The site will access a “giant statistical grid of user information” that takes into account all mentions of relevant scuba spots—from articles, blogs, forums, reviews, social media, and so forth—and returns a list that’s ranked according to those mentions, but also things like distance, flight costs, and time of year, Lalonde says. The goal is to do all of that in less than a second, he says.

The whole approach requires some serious computing power. Hopper’s database includes … Next Page »

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Money goes out, people come in. That’s the plan for the latest out-of-town investment by Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners, which led a $10 million growth round for Clifton Park, NY-based cloud computing startup Apprenda.

I caught up with Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller after Tuesday’s announcement to get some more details on a nugget that wasn’t in the press release—Apprenda is expanding in the Seattle region as it looks to add more people. That tidbit actually came via this tweet from Ignition managing director and new Apprenda board member Frank Artale.

Schuller, who was in the Seattle area when we spoke Tuesday afternoon, confirms that Apprenda is looking at ramping up its presence in the region. The company already has a couple of employees here who telecommute, but the future plans foresee a standalone office to house business development and product development talent. The location makes a lot of sense because Apprenda’s product targets companies that use Microsoft’s .NET framework.

“The startup culture is here, the business culture is here. But we also found from a product development and business development point of view, that Microsoft DNA is just pervasive,” Schuller says. “And given that we’re a Microsoft-centric startup, I think it just fits the ingredient list perfectly.”

Apprenda sells a software platform that developers in big companies can use to significantly cut back on the amount of specialized coding needed to write applications for large data centers. Honeywell is probably the biggest-name customer, but small independent developers and startups also have used the free entry-level version, Schuller says.

Apprenda is also looking to hire sales and marketing people, but they’ll be focused in New York. “Sixty 60 percent of the IT budget almost worldwide is within 30 miles of Manhattan,” Schuller says. The company, founded in 2007, employs more than 20 people now.

The Northwest expansion is preliminary for now. Apprenda doesn’t have a site picked out, and doesn’t even have a number nailed down for how many people it wants to hire out here. Those decisions are coming in the next month or two, Schuller says.

I reminded Schuller that he’s not the only company in town looking to lure some Microsofties from their big corporate jobs in Redmond. He agreed, but notes that his type of engineers are probably a bit more focused on hard-core cloud infrastructure than those who might go to a consumer Web company, for instance. And besides, this is ground zero.

“You’re not going to find those people just anywhere in the country,” Schuller says. “They’re going to be here in the Redmond, Seattle area.”

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