There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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[Editor’s note: As a New Year's exercise, we asked a select group of Xconomists to answer this question: “What’s the craziest idea out there that just might succeed?” ]

After nearly twenty years of failed attempts, I’m still a believer in the potential transformative power of the “crazy idea” of alternative Internet payment systems, particularly micropayment engines and alternate currencies.

Payment systems are simply mechanisms to streamline and calibrate the exchange of value. It’s easier to assess the relative worth of cloth from India and tobacco from America if you can translate both into standardized European coinage. Modern payment systems also provide simplicity and security through the use of trusted third-party settlement agents such as banks and credit card associations. But none of these mechanisms are built into our DNA, and there’s no reason to think that today’s systems are the final word.

In fact, the Internet brings with it the potential for so many innovative payment mechanisms as to threaten chaos. This chaotic prospect, combined with the inherent conservatism of payment system users and the understandable desire of payment providers to protect their turf, has so far doomed nearly every new payment system enabled by the Internet. The few exceptions—most notably PayPal—have survived in large part through a strong alliance with the existing players in credit cards and banking. PayPal is (like First Virtual before it) largely a security-conscious overlay on the existing credit card and banking systems.

That kind of limited innovation is more than enough for the powers that be—the large financial players who are more interested in maintaining their near-monopolies than in enabling new kinds of economic activity. Not surprisingly, however, the interests of the banks and card associations are not necessarily in sync with those of the rest of us.

From Digicash to Cybercash to BitCoin, there have been plenty of demonstrations of the technical feasability of alternative Internet payment mechanisms. And in the physical world, alternative currencies such as Ithaca Hours have hinted at the potential for a community to revitalize itself by taking control of its own money supply. In times of economic hardship like today, the poor and unemployed have traditionally reverted to barter to exchange goods in the absence of currency, but those transactions have been limited by geography and personal circles of trust. With Internet-based alternative currencies, however, … Next Page »

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Stephen Wolfram is not one to be summed up in a few pithy quotes. Well, too bad.

Here is his life in a nutshell:

“I grew up in England and went to all sorts of good schools that I thought were completely irrelevant.”

“By the time I was 20 years old, I was a physics faculty member at Caltech, and I was building a big software system that was a forerunner of Mathematica.”

“Along the way, I learned a lot about what not to do in starting a company.”

“For about a decade I was almost a complete recluse, running the company from a distance, and spending every night working on basic science.”

“I don’t really have a boss. I just do what I want to do. The trick is not to have a private company that gets too weird and too pathological.”

That was a sampling of what the distinguished and controversial Wolfram had to say at our Xconomy Forum in Boston last week, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas.” For those who don’t know, he is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. He is also a recently minted Xconomist.

Wolfram, 52, set the table for the theme of our event, which involved some of the biggest ideas in technology and business from entrepreneurs and executives around the country. As only he could, the physics and software guru reflected on his 30 years in the tech industry and his contrarian approach to running big projects and building companies.

A few things really stood out to me in his talk. One was the importance of making mistakes early in his career. While at Caltech in the early ‘80s, Wolfram got into a “grisly early-IP-meets-university” battle over his software tools, he said.

“I ended up deciding I had to start a company around the software system I’d built, and of course I was just a physics kid. I didn’t know anything about starting companies,” he said. “I made lots of mistakes, like not running the company myself, hiring a CEO who was twice my age, and so on. The company quickly started doing things that I thought were silly and boring. In the end, after many trials and tribulations, it did in fact survive and finally went public and was gobbled up by bigger fishes.” (You can read more about his first startup, Computer Mathematics, which was venture-backed and later merged with Inference, here.)

Another thing Wolfram figured out early on was that university work was not for him. After spending time at Caltech and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, he started a research center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study complex systems and complexity theory. “My plan A was to get lots of other people to help work” on the implications and applications of his findings, he said. “It was OK, but it was really slow. I got kind of frustrated and needed a plan B,” he said. “My plan B was to build … Next Page »

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This is life’s big question: what should you spend your time on?

If you’re starting a company, you probably want to do something fun that lets you be your own boss and maybe, just maybe, gives you a good shot to strike it rich. If you’re an investor, you want to make money and be part of something that could be really big. But what about building something that will change the world? How do you decide what the right idea is—and then how do you make it work as a business?

Here at Xconomy we’re gearing up for a special forum in Boston on Thursday, Dec. 1, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas.” This is a chance to interact with some of the most sensational and ambitious tech companies in our national network—and to see how they are trying to change the world. We’ve just posted the agenda for the day here, and you can check out the registration details here.

Stephen Wolfram, the software entrepreneur and big-science mind-bender, will set the table with a keynote on what constitutes a breakthrough idea, and how to execute on the business side of things. Wolfram has plenty of world-changing experience as the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. And if he shares with us the few lines of code that underlie the workings of the known universe, I will consider that a bonus.

Then we’ll have featured presentations on specific ideas, businesses, and challenges from six companies across our network: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (representing New York); Nathaniel Borenstein from Mimecast (Detroit); Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston); Adam Goldstein of Hipmunk (San Francisco); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); and Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego).

In between these talks, and a networking break, we’ll have three-minute “burst” presentations from some of the most exciting startups in the Boston area: Nathan Eagle of Jana, Gina Ashe from Krush, Jeff Seibert from Crashlytics, and Karl Wirth from Apptegic.

We’ll also have a special demo from Rosalind Picard of the MIT Media Lab, who will show you technology from her startup, Affectiva, that will be sure to get your attention. The big vision for Affectiva, and Professor Picard’s research, is to develop computers that can recognize and interpret human emotions from cues like facial expressions, blood flow, and other biometrics.

We’re looking forward to an amazing afternoon of big ideas, companies, and personalities. There are still a few tickets left, but they won’t last for long. Hope to see you at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology on Dec. 1.

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When last we checked in with Gordon Jones, it was six months ago and he had just been appointed the inaugural director of the Harvard Innovation Lab. It was May, the birds were singing, the Red Sox had pulled out of their season-starting slump, and anything seemed possible.

Now the cold, dark days are upon us, and we need a place to rejuvenate our spirits as we gear up for the holiday season. Students and young entrepreneurs especially need such a place. The Harvard i-lab, as it is called, might be that place—a $20 million center whose mission is to support all Harvard students interested in entrepreneurship. And it is officially open for business as of today, complete with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, school administrators, and politicians.

The important news is that the i-lab is real, and it marks a serious and ambitious effort to foster entrepreneurship on a grand scale. The unstated goal is to keep the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg from leaving town (and Harvard) and building a multibillion-dollar company somewhere else. Will it work? Who knows, but you have to start somewhere.

Back in May, Jones talked with me about just trying to get his baby to first grade—the idea being, walk before you run. He has been heads-down since then, but I recently caught up with him about the i-lab’s opening, and the progress and challenges to date. (And yes, he hosted Zuckerberg’s recent visit to the lab.)

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far,” Jones says. “It’s genuine, the interest here, and the level of engagement across the Harvard schools is strong.” He says that the overall support from the university and the enthusiasm from the academic and business communities “exceeds what I expected.”

Jones adds, “When we first talked six months ago, there was this question of, ‘Is Harvard late to the game?’ I think this is a great time to be doing what Harvard is doing.” And that is, in his words, “trying to bring the best of Harvard’s knowledge and network and make it available to students. And being part of the Boston innovation community.”

Here are my takeaways going into the first day of school at the i-lab:

1. Jones isn’t going anywhere. Yes, he has an extremely challenging job. (You try being accountable to seven different deans across Harvard, for starters.) The fact that he’s still alive and kicking—not to mention attending lots of entrepreneurship events and getting to know students and the local business community at every turn—bodes well for the lab’s future. “You’ve got to pick your battles,” he says.

2. The lab is already active. It officially opens today, but stuff has been happening there for months already: a “startup weekend scramble,” guest speakers (the series includes Eric Ries, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Taylor), Harvard courses on entrepreneurship and global innovation, special panels, startup workshops (Alex Taussig led one about mistakes entrepreneurs make; Eric Paley did one on career choices), and one-on-one consultations with “experts in residence” and “innovation partners” … Next Page »

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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Daily deals and flash sales, please step off. Social-local-mobile recommendations, go fly a kite. Photo-sharing sites, go take a long walk off a short pier (and send me a picture).

We don’t need more companies like those. Here’s what we need. Stretchy, bendy wearable computers. New tablet publishing models. High-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The next generation of cloud-based communication tools. A computer that can read your emotions from your facial expressions.

And did I mention, the workings of the entire known universe might boil down to a few lines of code? We’ll have to ask Stephen Wolfram for an update on that (see below).

These and other potentially world-changing ideas will be on display Dec. 1, when we all get together for Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston. This is the second year we’ve run this event, where we invite top speakers from each of Xconomy’s cities to talk about their big idea and how they’ve built a real business around it. The sessions will be interactive, and there will be plenty of networking time for Boston-area innovators to chat with our speakers and guests.

This year our featured talks are by Jason Baptiste from New York-based OnSwipe (tablet publishing); Adam Goldstein from San Francisco’s Hipmunk (travel search); Michigan’s Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (communication in the cloud); Kabir Shahani from Seattle-based Appature (relationship marketing); San Diego’s Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (advanced UAVs); and Dave Icke from Boston’s own MC10 (flexible electronics and sensors).

We’ll have some amazing speakers giving bonus talks as well:

—Nathan Eagle from Jana (global mobile marketing and compensation)

—Gina Ashe from Krush (social commerce and brand marketing)

—Hardi Meybaum from GrabCAD (social product development/manufacturing)

—Rosalind Picard from the MIT Media Lab and Affectiva (computers that recognize emotions)

Plus a keynote from the aforementioned and venerable Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and author of A New Kind of Science (which, thanks to Steve Jobs, has no quotes on its back cover).

We’ll be announcing the full agenda soon. In the meantime, you can get your tickets here; they’re going fast. See you on Dec. 1.

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Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Ahem.

[A giant “6x6” fills the screen.]

Macho narrator voice:
Star Wars had The Empire Strikes Back (Vader: “I am your father”)
The Godfather had The Godfather Part II (Pacino: “You broke my heart”)
Mad Max had The Road Warrior…well, you get the idea.

Now Xconomy presents 6×6, the long-awaited sequel to its riveting, change-the-world program from last December, 5×5. (It was “5×5” because we weren’t in New York City yet. Now we are.)

Yes, for the second straight year, Xconomy has canvassed its national network to find the most original, sensational, and transformative tech ideas out there—across software, hardware, digital media, social technologies, robotics, and more. We are inviting a select few speakers to Boston for an afternoon of mind-bending presentations and business networking.

It’s all taking place on the afternoon of Thursday, December 1, from 1:30-5:30 pm, at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston. One featured speaker will be on hand from each of our six cities: Boston, New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego. We hope “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” will be a rallying point for the Boston tech community to get together and discuss the future of their fields with our out-of-town guests.

The concept is to highlight some of the BIGGEST tech ideas out there—as well as the nuts and bolts of how founders are building successful businesses around these ideas. This event is about truly changing the world, so we’ve asked everyone to please check their daily deals, social network plug-ins, and run-of-the-mill mobile apps at the door.

Who better to set the table than Stephen Wolfram? We’ve invited the renowned scientist, inventor, and business leader to give the opening keynote. Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. So he knows a little bit about changing the world from a software, computing, and business perspective. Oh, and he also spent 10-plus years working to reinvent the entire landscape of modern scientific thought with his book project, A New Kind of Science. I’ll stop there, but you can read an interview I did with Wolfram around the beginning of last year. (As for what he’ll talk about on Dec. 1, it’s safe to say I have no freaking idea—but I’ll keep you posted.)

Here’s a quick rundown on who’s representing our six cities at 6×6:

—From the hometown of Boston, we have Dave Icke, the CEO of Cambridge-based MC10, a pioneer in developing flexible electronics and sensors for consumer, healthcare, and energy markets.

—New York City is sending Jason Baptiste, the CEO of OnSwipe, a scrappy young startup that is trying to invent the future of media through a new tablet publishing platform.

—Representing Detroit is Nathaniel Borenstein, the Chief Scientist of Mimecast, an e-mail management company headquartered in the U.K. Borenstein, who’s based in Michigan, is one of the fathers of modern e-mail systems, and will talk about the future of communication in the cloud.

—From San Francisco comes Adam Goldstein, the CEO of Hipmunk, an online travel search company that’s been making waves with its novel visual interface for finding flights and hotels.

—Seattle will be repped by Kabir Shahani, the CEO of Appature, a fast-growing startup specializing in social and relationship marketing technologies for the healthcare industry.

—And from the sunny climes of San Diego comes Bill Walker, Chief of Global Hawk Business Development at Northrop Grumman, the aerospace and defense tech giant. Walker will talk about high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

We also have a few intriguing “burst” bonus talks to highlight, from some of the most exciting startups around Boston. They will include Affectiva (CEO Dave Berman), an MIT Media Lab spinout that’s commercializing software to make your computer or smartphone understand your emotional state (talk about a big idea); Krush (CEO Gina Ashe), an ambitious startup focused on social commerce and marketing for apparel and lifestyle brands; and GrabCAD (CEO Hardi Meybaum), a company that’s connecting engineers with people who need stuff built, via an online community and marketplace.

We are really looking forward to 6×6, and we hope to see you there on Dec. 1. You can register at the special super saver rate here.

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The future for most of us is a totally uncharted territory. The noble art of divining doesn’t seem to have made much progress since the days of the Delphic oracle more than 2,000 years ago.

But Recorded Future, an American-Scandinavian startup founded by Swedish entrepreneur Christopher Ahlberg and headquartered in the Boston area, claims to be able to make fairly good predictions on what will happen, by organizing and analyzing information collected from the Internet and presenting the results in useful ways. To quote the company’s own description:

“Recorded Future offers robust tools for temporal and predictive analysis including advanced visualizations, data for predictive modeling, and fine-grain Future oriented alerts.”

The oracle of Delphi was known to be secretive, and Recorded Future has to a large extent embraced the same policy. If you look at its website under the heading “Press” you’ll find the statement: “We don’t grant interviews and we don’t issue press releases.”

There have, however, been some exceptions to the rule. In March, the company’s CTO, Staffan Truvé, gave a presentation of Recorded Future’s technology at a conference organized by students at Linköping University in Sweden.

And Christopher Ahlberg recently granted my colleage Mats Lewan at the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik an interview.

Dr. Ahlberg told Mats that he thinks that today’s search engines have shortcomings when it comes to temporal information: “Google doesn’t understand time. And there are very few systems that understand time. It’s tricky. Internet tends to organize in terms of publication date.”

“It is really not easy to be able to extract temporal information from human texts, especially when it is by journalists who like to write in a colorful way,” says Dr. Ahlberg.
To be able to do that, the software must make sense of vague terms like “early next week,” “on Thursday,” “soon,” “later,” and “towards the end of the year.” According to Dr. Ahlberg, Recorded Future has analyzed thousands of English temporal expressions and is now doing the same for other languages.

For a user, the analysis could result in knowing when a competitor’s new product will hit the market; or help one spot plans for mergers and acquisitions that will influence the stock market. Or maybe just knowing when the market thinks something will happen, and being able to track the rumors in advance, might be good enough for anyone trading in stocks.

The company has funding from Google Ventures and also from another party with a long history of gathering and analyzing information—the Central Intelligence Agency, via its venture capital company In-Q-Tel.

Christopher Ahlberg started out as a researcher in data visualization technologies. In the mid-1990s he started Spotfire, a company focused on analyzing and visualizing business-critical information from large databases. Spotfire had its head office in Cambridge, MA, with several customers in the New England biotech and pharma industry. Tibco, based in Palo Alto, CA, acquired the company in 2007 for about $195 million. Just like Spotfire, Recorded Future has part of its workforce in Sweden, as well as in other parts of the world, like Washington DC.

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Whether you’re part of the Boston-Cambridge technology community, or just an interested observer, you’ve probably been to the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (known affectionately as NERD) at least a few times in the past year. But do you know what Microsoft is actually working on there? I didn’t.

Until last week, that is, when I visited Microsoft Research New England, one of the main groups at NERD, housed near Kendall Square. The tower at One Memorial Drive rises majestically from the banks of the Charles River, but it guards its secrets closely. Jennifer Chayes, the managing director of Microsoft Research New England, which occupies the 12th floor, reveals the projects her group is working on slowly. But she does reveal them.

OK, it’s an open research lab with hundreds of visitors and collaborators from academia and industry, so secrecy isn’t the culture here—at least, not amongst the research community. But from the lab’s opening in 2008 until now, Chayes, an expert in discrete mathematics, networks, and game theory, has said very little to the technology and business media about what her teams have been working on—and what it all has to do with Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) business. And that’s just fine, because I’m about to tell you.

Microsoft Research New England is three years old this month. Although the full-time research staff has doubled in size since inception, it’s still a fairly small operation—12 staff researchers (including deputy managing director Christian Borgs), another dozen postdocs, a half-dozen software development engineers and support staff, and any number of students and interns. Their research breaks down into six main areas—computer science (including algorithms, cryptography, machine learning and vision, and security), computational biology, economics, mathematics, networks, and social media. (Microsoft declined to say how much it has invested in the lab so far.)

It’s not a typical lineup for a Microsoft research lab, of which there are six worldwide, including the mother lab in Redmond, WA. “Our lab has gone into certain areas that haven’t been nearly as emphasized by the other [Microsoft Research labs]. Most of them are fantastically strong in mainstream computer science disciplines,” Chayes says. “One of the reasons for opening the lab here was because we wanted to help advance the state of the art at the boundaries between computer science and other fields. And Cambridge is a place—of course it’s very strong in computer science—that’s phenomenally strong in other fields.”

Take empirical economics. Susan Athey, the renowned Harvard economist (and Microsoft consultant), heads up a year-old group in the lab that’s focused on analyzing huge datasets that Microsoft has access to—things like online advertising trends and performance, search-engine user behaviors, Xbox Live networks, e-mail and instant-messaging patterns, healthcare trends, and so on. Chayes pitched the idea for the economics group to CEO Steve Ballmer in December 2009, and he said to go for it.

The group’s goal is to find patterns in databases that could make various systems more efficient. Little did they know this would lead to the lab’s first technology to become a Microsoft product. … Next Page »

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Ladies and gentlemen, after last week I hereby declare the end of high season for tech events in Boston. We’ve had our celebrations, drunk our grain, and talked our heads off. Now, before we start getting some things done around here, let’s reflect just a little more.

The following took place during a 24-hour period last week:

—Coolio performed at the DartBoston/TechStars Demo Day party.

—The Boston Bruins beat the favored Vancouver Canucks in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals for their first title since 1972.

—Fashion guru Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt Groupe, shared the stage with me at our XSITE 2011 conference at Babson College (photo gallery here).

I’m not sure which of these pairings was least likely—fashion and I have rarely shared the same sentence—but the fact that all three happened in the span of a day suggests Armageddon is upon us. And, given the collective lack of sleep in this region (or at least this office) during that time, I will refer to it as Hell Week—after the Navy SEAL training where candidates are pushed to their limit, sleep less than four hours over 5.5 days, and emerge on the other side stronger than they thought they could be. I mean it in a good way, really.

All of this calls for a retrospective of highlights I’m able to remember through the haze of last week. Let’s get right to it:

1. I remember TechStars Demo Day kicking off with “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys blasting from the speakers of the Royale nightclub—and all the startup teams joining managing director Katie Rae on stage, clapping, wearing a mix of company T-shirts, camouflage tuxedo suits, and other hipster items.

2. I remember a lot of raucous whooping and cheering for the startups (before, after, and sometimes during their pitches), and intro music for each speaker. A bit over the top, but I understand the need to build excitement. One investor called the format distracting, but he was in the minority.

3. I remember a mix of presentation styles, which was nice—from “here’s my life story” to “let’s get right to the business,” from laid-back to in-your-face. Also I remember Walt Doyle from Where (now PayPal) looking like a veteran stand-up comic as he introduced the first TechStars startup, EverTrue.

4. I remember angel investor Bill Warner introducing Ginger.io’s Anmol Madan by saying he was “fearless.” Case in point: some of Madan’s research work at the MIT Media Lab was on “trying to understand women with a computer.”

5. I remember lots more financing being announced by lots more companies than usual over the past couple of years (see this updated list of TechStars Boston financings for the current class). Perhaps Y Combinator’s $150K guaranteed investment for graduates of the program is not so big an advantage anymore.

6. I remember Hardi Meybaum of GrabCAD saying he likes Boston because … Next Page »

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Smarterer, a Boston-based tech startup, is generating some buzz this week, having demoed its product at the WebInno meeting last night.

The company started in the fall of 2010, founded by Dave Balter, Jennifer Fremont-Smith, and Michael Kowalchik. It provides crowdsourced skills tests on digital, social, and other techie tools—think Twitter, Ruby, Matlab, Photoshop. Job seekers and other curious folks can sign up, take multiple-choice tests in under 60 seconds, and get a score that they can promote on their resume (or bury with shame, for us dumb and dumberer folks).

Although some media outlets are reporting it like it’s news this week, Smarterer raised a $1.25 million seed round, led by True Ventures and Google Ventures (and a bunch of angels), before April.

In honor of the company’s 10-question test format, here’s Smarterer in 10 points:

1. The problem: “There’s no smart way for professionals to validate that they have [certain technical] skills and articulate it to the world,” says Fremont-Smith, the company’s CEO.

2. Goal: “To completely reinvent the skills section of the resume of the world,” she says. “Our mission in life is to take that skills section—which is completely wasted, it’s like a joke—and give it meaning.”

3. Context: “The tools people are using today did not exist a few years ago, and there will be a bunch more new ones tomorrow. The pace of change is actually accelerating. So we use the collective intelligence and experience of the crowd.”

4. How it works: Any user can go in and create a test about any topic. (But to get in, you have to be invited by another user.) Then others add to the test questions. When people take the test, Smarterer’s software figures out which questions are harder or more relevant than others, and the tests get “smarter” over time.

5. Approach: “This will be a very powerful tool for employers…but I’ve got the whole team focused on building for consumers.” (Eventually the trend-spotting of which skill sets are becoming important could be valuable too.)

6. Business strategy: “Not chasing revenue right now, we’ve got a lean team. We’ve got some time to get it right for the consumer.”

7. Biggest challenge: “Getting engineering talent. It’s definitely an arms race.”

8. Impact: “We’re building it for professionals to show the world what they know—what they know, instead of who they know. Think about all those people who have a lot to offer, but they’re not natural self-promoters.”

9. Deeper idea: There’s a “core craving” to show people “this is what I know, this is why I’m important.” “That’s for everybody,” she says.

10. Why Google Ventures: “It makes perfect sense for us to be partnered with Google Ventures because these guys [Google] make all the tools. And Google hires the top 1 percent. Our system is designed to identify the top 1 percent.”

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We know you’re out there.

You have gripes about the way innovation is done, in Boston or beyond—or ideas for how to make entrepreneurship and innovation even better.

Maybe one of those pet peeves is that Silicon Valley is poaching all the hot young tech talent from the East Coast. We get it. We’ve all heard about it, read about it, talked about it, written about it. But that gripe probably won’t get you on stage at XSITE (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship), which will take place on June 16, at Babson College.

You heard me. We’re offering you a public platform to sound off your discontent with, or your best idea for, entrepreneurship: whether it’s surrounding funding, tech talent, government support, R&D, academia, or office space. You tell us.

We want some of the snarkiest, most passionate people we can find—with real, legitimate concerns and ideas—who can stir up the pot before we all break for lunch next Thursday. We will choose a few people—two or three, say—with the most original and interesting rants or recommendations to share their views with the XSITE audience and gain even more fame by being written up in Xconomy. If you haven’t already registered and we choose you, you ‘ll get a free ticket to the event. If you have already registered, we’ll let you bring a guest. And either way, you’ll also get a $25 coupon for use on Gilt, the high-end fashion site co-founded by one of the XSITE speakers.

So email us (ekutz@xconomy.com, or editors@xconomy.com). Tell us what you’d like to sound off about and why. This soapbox portion of this day is supposed to be electric, so don’t hold back.

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When I met last month with James Fowler, the UC San Diego expert on social networks, one of several topics we discussed was the role that Twitter played—or might have played—in the recent political revolutions that overturned governments in Egypt and Tunisia.

A lot of research will be coming out on the topic, Fowler said, but the UCSD professor was doubtful that someone in Tunisia or Egypt exerted much interpersonal influence through Twitter’s online network. Rather, he described Twitter as a broadcast medium that provided information in a way that enabled protesters to see when their probability of success had shifted. “So everybody changes all at once—just through information, not through persuasion—their calculus of whether or not they should participate in the protest,” Fowler said.

As it turns out, the purported effects of social networking in what some have dubbed “the Facebook Revolutions” have come under pointed criticism from none other than Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker staff writer and author of “The Tipping Point” and other books. In an interview with CNN last week, Gladwell says he’s skeptical of some of the more grandiose claims on behalf of social media. Like Fowler, he says the role of social media in staging revolution hasn’t really been assessed yet, and a lot of research is on the way. But if history is any guide, Gladwell says it’s unlikely that Twitter or Facebook were the key ingredient because past social revolutions occurred without communication tools. For example, he says the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 when only 13 percent of the people in East Berlin had a telephone.

“So, I mean, in cases where there are no tools of communication, people still get together,” Gladwell told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “In looking at history, I don’t see the absence of efficient tools of communication as being a limiting factor.”

To Gladwell, the more important question than how political organizers used Twitter and Facebook is whether years of unemployment, poverty, and oppression created a pervasive political mindset—and a catalyzing demand for change—among the masses.

I asked Fowler this week for his take on the debate. He declined, but he pointed me to a commentary that he wrote with “Connected” co-author Nicholas Christakis for CNN in November—before the Mideast revolutions were in full bloom. It turns out this debate over online social media was underway long before the revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt. In their article, the Connected co-authors responded to an article about social media that Gladwell had written last summer:

“Malcolm Gladwell, author and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, recently argued there was no hope that online social networks could be used for large-scale change. The reason is that the connections between people online are usually weak ties, not strong ties such as those to our family, next-door neighbors and real friends.

“But this perspective overlooks something important. People do not just have countless weak ties online. Buried among all those weak ties are some strong ties. And they can make all the difference.”

Fowler has focused much of his research on the strong ties of social networks because those are the bonds that help people to quit smoking or lose weight—and they extend beyond our closest friends and relatives—to their networks of friends and relatives. He is scheduled to explain how that works in a talk in San Diego next week that is focused on using social networks to detect epidemics. You can find more information about that presentation here.

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[Updated and corrected. 02/08/11 at 12 pm ET] Stern lectures about taking your heart pill as prescribed, eating right, or exercising regularly—or else—can be a real turnoff. Some people simply tune out, perhaps while eating fried chicken sandwiches with extra pickles. But might there be a way to seduce people with medical advice, tailoring the message about how they can be healthier by appealing to their dreams or desires rather than their nightmares?

To get leaders in healthcare to start talking and thinking about ways to spice up communications to patients, Google chief health strategist Roni Zeiger and Alexandra Drane, founder and president of Beverly, MA, medical message service Eliza have started a website called Seduce Health. While this is a nascent effort now, Drane says that she hopes to use it to influence leaders in healthcare to be open to new approaches to talking with patients and perhaps get those people to commit to using such approaches at their organizations to get patient to adopt healthier behaviors. [Drane is founder and president of Eliza, not the firm's CEO, as she was previously described in this article. We regret the error.]

Healthcare can be a conservative field, in which new ideas and technologies can be slowly adopted, so it’ll be interesting to see whom else Drane and Zeiger can recruit to their new cause.

Seduce Health’s website, which went online in October, has been tackling some hot health topics like how to get people to stop smoking, calling for making quitting just as cool or seductive as starting. And the group has got some playful YouTube clips of high-profile people in healthcare—such as HHS chief technology officer Todd Park and Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of Cambridge, MA-based PatientsLikeMe—delivering what’s evidently the group’s slogan, “Talk health to me, Baby.”

“In my experience as a patient and practicing physician, we tend to talk about health as set of chores and choices framed to avoid poor health, to avoid regret,” Zeiger says in an e-mail. “On the other hand, market forces have helped us evolve sexy and sophisticated messages for everything from socks to scooters. What about immunizations? I think we can make these conversations more fun and more relevant.”

While there have been serious discussions and studies on ways to change patients’ unhealthy behaviors with better communication for years, there’s evidence that the healthcare system has failed miserably at getting through to people. For instance, Americans costs the system about $290 billion per year by not taking their medicines as prescribed, and sometimes landing themselves in the hospital as a result.

Is Seduce Health capable of putting a dent in these costs by advocating for healthcare communications that strike inspirational—or even sexy—chords?

“In the healthcare space, there have certainly historically been some examples of a lack of information, but for the most part it’s been a lack of inspiration,” says Seduce Health co-founder … Next Page »

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As Erin Kutz wrote about a few weeks ago, my fellow ATG co-founder Jeet Singh and I have recently launched Redstar, a “company that builds other companies.” Unlike most incubators and angel funds, which invest in companies that are already formed or at least well along in the process, Redstar’s goal is to create a stream of valuable startups completely from scratch. If you liken Redstar to a factory (for whatever reason, the startup business is rife with metaphor, so I will beg your forbearance for dragging in a few more by the scruff), then the inputs to our assembly line are essentially three things: ideas, people, and money. In contrast to the archetypal startup story, which invariably features a bolt of Eureka from the blue, we believe that it’s possible and even desirable to create startups more methodically, recruiting talented entrepreneurs and matching them to the ideas, fellow founders, and seed capital necessary to launch.

So the whole Redstar factory metaphor begs a very concrete question: How do you hire an entrepreneur? Aren’t entrepreneurs, by definition, people who have no inclination whatsoever to be hired, and anyways, aren’t all the good ones running stark and raving down the street? In fact, I think the best entrepreneurs know who they are from very early in their careers and are drawn, often defying all logic and reason, to the startup world to carve their own distinct paths by building and running their own operations. They’re just not assembly line sorts of people.

One of my mentors memorably advised me to invest in jockeys, not horses (those damn metaphors again). In this light, I think not so much of hiring entrepreneurs in the conventional sense, i.e. with a salary, bonus, and vacation packages, but rather in betting on a rider and then helping them choose or even breed a steed. In my experience, startups tend to end up doing something pretty far afield from the original idea (ATG’s original business plan, for example, was to build computer music systems for live rock shows—that’s why we called it “Art Technology Group”). In other words, the initial concept really functions more as a point of departure. So what we are really trying to do is invest the earliest tranche of seed funding in a super-talented person who can grow and evolve an idea with the help of some folks who have been around the track a few times before.

As for the entrepreneurs themselves who, if they are any good, are asking what’s in it for them, we’re offering a way to break out of the chicken-and-egg cycle of experience versus funding. It’s extremely hard to attract backers without a strong track record and just as hard to build a track record without ever having been backed. By investing in jockeys for several months before the race, everyone has a chance to learn a lot before the starting gun. And if it turns out the first horse just won’t run, there are plenty more in the stable to develop.

As my kids are fond of asking me, “How’s that working out for you so far?” I’ve just started a series of meetings with our first batch of potential entrepreneurs for hire, so I’ll continue to blog about what I see, hear, and learn…

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Thanks again to all who helped make Xconomy’s “5×5: Five Cities, Five Big Tech Ideas” forum a smash hit this week. I wrote up a quick recap with a few takeaways from the event here. Now it’s time for the pictures.

We heard keynote talks from Boston-area innovation stalwarts Bill Warner and Bob Metcalfe (the latter gave a “terminal keynote” and closing observations). We took deeper dives into five of the potentially most transformative companies in our network of cities, from Joaquin Silva of On-Ramp Wireless, Mick Mountz of Kiva Systems, Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks, Roger Reynolds of TerraPower, and Tommy McClung of CarWoo.

We also got to hear “burst” presentations from Sarah McIlroy of FashionPlaytes, Dug Song of Duo Security, Bettina Hein of Pixability, Iker Marcaide of peerTransfer, and Joe Viola of Prysm.

And we got to ask questions, schmooze, drink beer and wine, and enjoy some cool demos from Avaya, Turnstone, Prysm, Duo Security, and peerTransfer. Thanks again to the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology for supplying such a great space.

Special thanks to Keith Spiro from Kendall Press for snapping some great photos, which I’ve stitched together below.

You can click on the thumbnails to see larger versions of Keith’s shots:

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We had such a great time at our “5×5” Xconomy Forum yesterday, I just wanted to share a few thoughts from the talks and discussions. I think it was very useful and entertaining stuff, especially for entrepreneurs and investors.

First, a note of thanks to all our participants, several of whom flew into frigid Boston from warmer climes. And a very special thank you to our host and sponsors, who made this event possible. Our host, the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, was wonderful in every respect—it was a fantastic event space, and the supportive staff helped us with logistics and a lot more. Our event sponsors—Avaya, Comerica Bank, Duane Morris, and Turnstone—provided much-needed support and some really cool demos that added depth to the program and reception. We also got support from our design sponsor, Upstatement; our event partner, Mass Technology Leadership Council; and our media partner, Greentech Media. Thanks again to all of you.

Now here are my top five takeaways from a rousing set of speakers:

1. Bill Warner turned our thinking around. The entrepreneur evangelist and renowned angel investor spoke from the back of the room and made us all turn our chairs around, to emphasize his unconventional approach to startups. “I intend to help people follow their heart,” he said. “I believe people are pushed to follow their head.” Essentially, a startup’s philosophy boils down to what he calls the “negotiated invention” model—what most entrepreneurs follow by leading with their idea or technology and making compromises based on the market and egos—versus his “from the heart” approach, which involves sticking to your true beliefs and intentions and building a loyal following (and taxing them as little as possible—see Google, Facebook, Twitter).

2. CarWoo gave us tips on how to become the next Groupon. Founder and CEO Tommy McClung, from the Bay Area, talked about targeting established business models in big markets, which are “usually ripe for disruption”; riding the emerging trend of “online to offline” (like Groupon, getting merchants up and running online while also getting customers into physical stores); and balancing incentives for your customers (in CarWoo’s case, letting car dealers in for free while charging consumers a service fee).

3. Kiva Systems is profitable. The Woburn, MA-based robotics, er, warehouse automation startup, is cash-flow positive and now gets business from 10 of the top 100 retailers, including Amazon (Zappos, Diapers.com), Staples, and Gilt Groupe. CEO and founder Mick Mountz showed some nifty action videos and talked about lessons learned from dot-com disaster Webvan, All in all, not bad for a robotics company (sorry Mick, but retailers have to get with the robot revolution) that’s been quietly building its business since 2003.

4. Whether it’s the energy grid or the Web, we need situational awareness. That was the message from two of our out-of-town speakers, Joaquin Silva of On-Ramp Wireless (San Diego) and Craig Labovitz from Arbor Networks (Detroit). Silva discussed new ways to harness super-sensitive wireless sensor networks to monitor global electricity and water systems for safety and efficiency. Labovitz talked about the vulnerabilities in today’s Web and mobile systems (hint: firewalls are not secure), and how to fight back in the escalating battle between hackers and security experts. (He also stuck up for Ann Arbor as a key contributor to the modern Internet.)

5. TerraPower will change the world—if it works. Technology advisor Roger Reynolds talked about Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold’s nuclear reactor design and its many challenges. The 20-year goal: cheap, safe, and plentiful energy for everyone, and the eradication of poverty. Reynolds’s deadpan style worked well—with an idea this big, you don’t need bluster, you need expertise to make it work. (Or as Bob Metcalfe put it, “Why is this taking so long? It was very clearly explained. Just build it and ship it.”)

Speaking of whom, here’s a bonus takeaway:

Bob Metcalfe isn’t leaving, he’s expanding. The Internet tycoon’s move to Austin, TX, is part change of scenery (and weather), part new career (Professor of Innovation at UT), and part “strolling into Whole Foods and buying everything in there.” But there’s something more profound in this, too, and it’s really about the spread of ideas and influential technologists and business leaders to new clusters. “Is innovation a zero-sum game?” Metcalfe said. “I don’t think so. We want innovation to be everywhere.” To that end, Metcalfe proposed the idea of an Xconomy “6×6” conference next year—adding Austin (or perhaps another city) to our network. We shall see, Professor. We shall see.

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Activity in the Boston-area innovation community seems to be picking up steam as we head into the holiday season. We’re getting excited as we gear up for our next Xconomy Forum in Boston on Dec. 8, which is called “5×5: Five Cities, Five Big Tech Ideas.” This is a chance to see, up close and in person, how some of the most exciting companies in our national network of cities are plotting to change the world. We’ve just posted the detailed agenda here, together with registration info.

Bill Warner, the angel investor, entrepreneur, and startup evangelist, will set the table with a keynote about “how to build your startup from the heart.” I’m looking forward to some personal inspiration here, and I’m sure it’ll be delivered in Warner’s usual thoughtful and understated manner.

Then we’ll have detailed talks on specific ideas and companies from Joaquin Silva, CEO of On-Ramp Wireless (San Diego); Mick Mountz, CEO of Kiva Systems (Boston); Craig Labovitz, chief scientist of Arbor Networks (Detroit); John Gilleland, CEO of TerraPower (Seattle); and Tommy McClung, CEO of CarWoo (San Francisco).

Interspersed with these talks (and plenty of networking time), we’ll have three-minute startup “bursts” from some of the most promising tech startups in our networks—ones that haven’t gotten tons of exposure yet: Sarah McIlroy, CEO of FashionPlaytes; Dug Song, CEO of Scio Security; Bettina Hein, CEO of Pixability; Iker Marcaide, CEO of peerTransfer; and Amit Jain, CEO of Prysm. We’ll also have a demo area set up where you can check out some of the companies’ technologies and products up close.

It should be a really fun and inspiring afternoon—we hope to see you there, at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in Boston, on Dec. 8.

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If some is good, more is better. That’s certainly the case for “5×5: Five Cities, Five Big Tech Ideas,” the next Xconomy Forum taking place in Boston. It’s all happening on the afternoon of Dec. 8 at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology, near South Station.

We’ve got some big additions to the lineup. Bill Warner, the Boston-area startup evangelist and angel investor, has signed on to give a keynote. We’re hoping he’ll share some of his perspective on how to think about big ideas in technology—and how to build viable businesses around them. Warner knows a little something about that, having founded Avid Technology (NASDAQ: AVID), Wildfire Communications, Warner Research, and a number of other companies over the past 35 years.

Warner joins Bill Taylor, the co-founder of Fast Company and the author of Mavericks at Work and the forthcoming Practically Radical, as a keynote speaker. Together, the two Bills will help frame the day’s discussions about what it takes to turn a big idea into a promising company—and help inspire all of us to change the world.

Now here come the big ideas. In addition to the five featured presenters, who each represent one city in Xconomy’s network (see below), we will also hear shorter talks from five promising startups, each with a big idea of its own: FashionPlaytes (online customized clothing), peerTransfer (global financial transactions), Pixability (online videos for businesses), Prysm (next-generation laser-based displays), and Scio Security (mobile and Internet security). It’s an interesting mix of technologies, markets, and business strategies—and it’ll be really instructive to hear about the genesis and execution of each company’s plan.

The program is anchored by a select group of five other companies, who will each do a deeper dive into their technology and business strategy—and make their case for why their idea is transformative. The presenters will be Mick Mountz, CEO of Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics firm that could reshape retail, distribution, and manufacturing (Boston); Joaquin Silva, CEO of On-Ramp Wireless, a data tracking and wireless monitoring startup named a technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum (San Diego); John Gilleland, CEO of TerraPower, a nuclear power startup that could fundamentally change the energy landscape (Seattle); Craig Labovitz, chief scientist of Arbor Networks, an Internet security firm that is unifying Web and mobile (Detroit); and Tommy McClung, CEO of CarWoo, an online car-buying startup out of the Y Combinator incubator (San Francisco).

We will keep the sessions informal and interactive; we want to encourage audience participation, and lessons to be shared back and forth on things like honing company ideas, formulating market strategies, and building businesses. We are also planning a demo area, a first for Xconomy.

Last but not least, we are convening a top-notch audience as well as speakers, and we hope you’ll be part of this special event (early bird registration and details here, including special rates for students and employees of startups). Looking forward to seeing you on Dec. 8.

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