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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It was a little over a year ago that Xconomy broke the news that a movement was underway to bring an Entrepreneur Walk of Fame to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, modeled after its Hollywood namesake.

The idea makes a lot of sense: If we celebrate movie stars and athletes, why not the top innovators and business leaders of all time? The goal is to inspire young people to make a big impact on the world. As for a location for the Walk of Fame, why not historic Kendall Square, which arguably sits in the densest cluster of technology and life sciences organizations and companies in the world?

Lo and behold, it’s really happening. Today the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame will be unveiled at a 1 pm ceremony in the newly paved plaza in front of the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square. To get to this point took the collaborative efforts of a lot of people from MIT, the City of Cambridge, the Kauffman Foundation, and several community and private organizations.

Here is the inaugural class of seven inductees (and who will present the awards at the ceremony, which is almost as interesting):

—Thomas Edison (1847-1931), founder of General Electric. Probably America’s most famous inventor, he is credited with pioneering the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the commercial light bulb. But it’s his contributions to industry that got him in here. (Presented by David Edison Sloane, Edison’s great-grandson.)

—Bill Hewlett (1913-2001), co-founder and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. He was a Stanford and MIT grad. (Presented by Howard Anderson of MIT Sloan School of Management, formerly of Yankee Group and Battery Ventures, and an Xconomist.)

—David Packard (1912-1996), co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Hewlett-Packard. A Stanford grad and General Electric veteran who supplied the garage that housed the early HP. Rumor has it they called it “HP,” rather than “PH,” based on a coin flip. (Also presented by Howard Anderson.)

—Bob Swanson (1947-1999), co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Genentech. He was an MIT undergrad and MIT Sloan grad, as well as a founding board member of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. (Presented by Tyler Jacks of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.)

—Bill Gates (1955- ), co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of Microsoft; co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is probably Harvard’s most famous dropout, and one of the world’s richest men. (Presented by Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, the PC spreadsheet.)

—Steve Jobs (1955- ), co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of Apple. On his resume: the Apple II, Mac, Pixar, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad…need we say more? (Presented by Dan Lyons, better known as Fake Steve Jobs.)

—Mitch Kapor (1950- ), founder of Lotus Development, creator of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kapor is the one inductee who will be present at today’s ceremony and will speak for himself. Rumor has it there will also be lots of ex-Lotus employees on hand wearing vintage Lotus 1-2-3 shirts.

“This is a hall of fame” for entrepreneurs, says Bill Aulet of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, who spearheaded the overall effort. “The event itself is kind of like The Breakfast Club. These people are coming together who fought at different times.” (He was talking about Gates, Jobs, and Kapor in particular.)

Each inductee gets a granite star on a 4-foot by 1.5-foot tile that has the entrepreneur’s name, title, and one of his inspirational quotes inscribed. (See photo, left, of the Steve Jobs tile, next to an MIT beaver mascot.) The tiles sit in the plaza next to the Kendall T stop, close to the sidewalk, on either side of the new grassy knoll. As of yesterday morning, about a dozen workmen were sweating to put the finishing touches on the construction in the plaza.

Of course, with any list like this, it’s easy to nitpick or ask why someone is or isn’t on the list. The whole selection process was probably subject to all the usual politics that plague any … Next Page »

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[Editor's Note: This post was co-authored with Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital]

1. The Rise of Celebrity Science

Nations, cultures, economies all get what they celebrate. Celebrate celebrities and we’ll have another generation of over-consumptive, over-indebted, overweight, underemployed citizenry. But celebrate scientists: thinkers, doers, achievers, explorers, inventors, creators and we stand a shot at restoring the very human capital that led to the rise of what made our nation great. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. So I founded the largest-ever celebration of science, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, to inspire and galvanize a force of young scientists keen to invent, explore, discover and create. 1 million participants is a good start, just 299 million to go.

2. The Rise of the IPO

Nearly a decade has passed without a blockbuster set of IPOs. Hints abound that the resurgence of an IPO market is upon us. The rise of secondary markets swapping shares of Facebook and other social-networking darlings prove there is pent-up demand and that capital is ready, willing, and able to once again fund high-flying companies that didn’t exist a few years ago and are the essential companies of tomorrow. Groupon, despite having 500 competitors and being founded only two years ago may be the fastest company in history to get to a billion dollars in revenue.

3. The Rise of the Tablet

The iPad was just the start. Samsung’s Galaxy and a slate of other touch tablets will continue seizing netbook and laptop share. When we get over the buzzword and just start calling the “cloud” the “Internet” again, people will also see that the prophecies of George Gilder and Sun’s Scott McNeely—that the network is the computer—were correct all along.

4. The Rise of Nuclear & EVs

My partners at Lux Capital always tell entrepreneurs to shave with Occam’s Razor: find the simplest solution. In energy it’s nuclear power, and the electrification of everything, including cars. Watch for just-out-of-stealth startups like Kurion that are solving … Next Page »

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Three months ago General Electric (NYSE: GE) announced a $200 million open innovation competition, with the goal of finding and financing breakthrough ideas that will help create a smarter, cleaner, more efficient, and more economically viable grid, and help accelerate the adoption of smart grid technologies. Since the “GE Ecomagination Challenge” was introduced on July 13, businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and students from around the world have submitted 3,809 ideas in three categories—eco homes/buildings, grid efficiency, and renewables.

GE has already dished out its first award in the competition, $50,000 to the idea that won the most user-generated votes—the Idaho-based Solar Roadways project. Next month the judging panel—which includes GE energy services digital energy vice president Bob Gilligan, senior vice president and director of GE global research Mark Little, and Wired Magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson—will select six more winners. Five will receive $100,000 awards, and one will be given the GE Scientific Merit Award, an opportunity to work with the company’s Global Research Center.

All candidates will be considered for potential future commercial relationships with GE, including equity investments and cooperative agreements beyond the competition itself—part of GE and its partners’ capital pledge to invest $200 million into promising smart grid ideas and startups around the world.

Though the competition is truly a global one, a large number of participants hale from the Pacific Northwest. In fact, Washington state comes in No. 11 in the list of states and provinces with the most entrants. Given that there’s so much innovation coming out of the region, especially in cleantech, we thought it might be fun to give you a sneak peak at the 31 NW ideas competing in the GE ecomagination Challenge. Take a look:

Eco Houses/Buildings

—Box Playhouse Telepresence—The Future of Meetings and Entertainment, Tim Lyons, Portland, OR

—Don’t forget the farmers, Nathan Hastings, Bend, OR

—The Green Microgym, Adam Boesel, Portland, OR

—Intelligent Adaptive Traffic Light, Glenn Godden, Lynnwood, WA

—Knowledge of Power, Alexandre Cross, Bellingham, WA

—Micro Fleets for Mega Cities, Melissa Brandao, Medford, OR

—Public Watch: Powering Down Government, Mike Green, Eugene, OR

—Selfocus Solar BBQ, Ab Mobasher, Portland, OR

—Two Birds with One Stone, Caleb Tallent, Tacoma, WA

Grid Efficiency

—E-C Swap, Steven Reynolds, Portland, OR

—Grid Scale Storage—Flow Battery, Craig Wilkins, Walla Walla, WA … Next Page »

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Calling all basketball players and fans… Want to hang out and shoot some hoops on a summer afternoon?

We at Xconomy—OK, at least Bob and I—are excited to invite our readers and members of the startup and innovation community to an informal H-O-R-S-E tourney tomorrow. Come one, come all. It will take place from 1:00-2:30 pm this Friday, August 6, at the Anthony Costa Playground, which is on Charles Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets, near Kendall Square and the Cambridge Galleria Mall.

We’ll probably set up a bracket of two-person teams. Again this is a non-contact, shoot-around competition for fun—and it’s for any and all comers, not just gym rats. Plus, anyone who can beat Bob and me might get, um, special mention in Xconomy. Not that we’re competitive or anything.

I will say that Bob played basketball for his college team (sometime last century), and once hit a 35-footer over a tree to beat me on the very court we will be at tomorrow. As for me, well, I’ve fouled a lot of people in my pickup days, as my Seattle colleague Luke can attest. No fouls tomorrow, though.

Everyone is welcome to meet us for lunch in the park beforehand, and to warm up those creaky jump shots, starting around 12:30. (Shaq, you might need a little extra time so get there early.)

If you’re interested, please leave a comment below, or e-mail us at editors@xconomy.com, so we know how much ice cream to bring. See you there.

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This week, the Seattle area has lived up to its reputation as home to the future of technology, with three local (or formerly local) innovators making the national media rounds in Technology Review, the New York Times, and Time Magazine. And not in just one field or sector either—the three span academia (smart sensors), a major online video company, and a pervasive viral humor blog startup.

—Jason Kilar, CEO of online video website Hulu and a former Amazon executive, wrote a personal essay for the New York Times about his journey into the world of Internet startups, including his first meeting with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, back when Bezos could be much more casual in presentation than he could probably get away with now. Kilar left Amazon in 2006 after becoming senior vice president of worldwide application software, to work for Hulu.

—Ben Huh, the Seattle-based owner of wildly successful humor websites like Lolcats (I Can Has Cheezburger) and FAIL Blog, was profiled in a Time Magazine story about his company Pet Holdings’ success with user-generated content. Starting with angel investor money in 2007, Huh bought the original Lolcats website and has since expanded to more than 20 viral humor blogs.

—Shwetak Patel, assistant professor in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science and engineering at the University of Washington made Technology Review’s list of top young innovators for developing a way to tell how people are moving around a house based on how they use electricity, gas, and water. Patel started with simple devices to monitor house utility use, but has since developed devices for sensing when people enter or leave a room based on air pressure. Monitoring resource usage could ideally lead to conservation of those resources, and help with keeping watch on elderly people who live alone. Patel recently co-founded a startup company in Seattle to generate appliance-itemized utility bills for consumers.

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Map and list updated Dec. 19: Want to know where your favorite VC gets his or her morning latte? How about where tech and life sciences entrepreneurs gather to network and discuss ideas? If you’re looking to rub shoulders with the technological elite—or if you’re just looking for a quiet cafe to have a meeting or get some work done—you’ve come to the right place.

Here at Xconomy Seattle, we’ve been keeping track of the coffee hotspots around town favored by the tech-business leaders we talk to and write about every day. We thought it would be fun to share what we’ve found, both as a list and as an interactive map you can click around on (see below). In many cases, we’ve met the innovators or investors in their favorite haunts and sampled the local beverages. In other cases, we’ve gone by what they told us. But this is in no way a comprehensive list. We’d love to hear from you about where you like to go, where plans get hatched, and where tomorrow’s deals are being discussed. We’ll update the list as we go.

It may be cliché to say the Seattle innovation scene runs on coffee, but it seems to be true. One of the amazing things about the region is the sheer number of great cafes and places to gather, talk, refuel, and recharge. There’s something for everyone, from the quiet elegance of Caffe Fiore on Queen Anne Hill to the casual charm of Louisa’s on Eastlake to the hustle and bustle of Espresso Vivace near downtown. Not to mention the old reliables, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Tully’s (especially on the Eastside—what’s with the dearth of independent cafes over there?).

View Larger Map

And behind every great cafe is a great story. Take Trabant Coffee & Chai, known for its strong espresso, tasty drip coffee, and spicy teas. The Pioneer Square branch is a personal favorite of Dan Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of Ontela—and there’s an interesting reason why. In early 2006, Shapiro says, he was one of several entrepreneurs pitching their companies at a Keiretsu Forum angel investor meeting downtown. “We were singing for our supper,” he says. The guy in front of him was pitching a $12,000 drip-coffee maker, and he had coffee samples for everyone (Shapiro was too wired to try any). The panel asked the coffee guy questions like, Aren’t you just going to compete with Starbucks? Why wouldn’t Starbucks just do this? He replied that Starbucks’ leaders were too set in their ways, and the only way they’d do it is if they saw it in action.

The guy was Zander Nosler of the Ballard-based Coffee Equipment Company. His machine was called the Clover, and sure enough, he was right. His 11-person startup was bought last March by Starbucks, which now has Clover machines in several-dozen stores in the Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Boston metro areas. So what does this have to do with Trabant? The local coffee shop was a key early customer of the Clover, buying the machine in the spring of 2007. “Every time I go there, I feel like I’m supporting the local startup scene,” says Shapiro.

There are many more stories, but we won’t get to them today. Instead, we present our first pass of the Greater Seattle Coffee Cluster: an alphabetical list of cafes (50 and counting), and some of the notable people you might run into there. If you’ve got a favorite spot, or a story to pass along, please do comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com. Then again, you might want to keep your local treasures to yourself…

Belle Epicurean
1206 4th Ave, Seattle, WA
Recommended by Megan Muir of DLA Piper for its pastries, good coffee, and confidentiality.

Caffe Fiore
224 W. Galer St, Seattle, WA
Martin Tobias of Kashless is known to arrive for meetings here on his Segway. Also the favorite of Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games and Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Caffe Ladro
600 Queen Anne Ave North, Seattle, WA
Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games also lists this institution as one of his likes. … Next Page »

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Back in the summertime, we did a short piece about Wetpaint, the Seattle-based Web startup that had just surpassed its 1-millionth-consumer-wiki milestone. Wetpaint is one of the more heralded tech startups in the Northwest, backed to the tune of $40 million in venture capital—including, most recently, a $25 million round led by DAG Ventures in May. Investors (and others) are intrigued by its vision of “social publishing,” which many think will be the next evolution in social networks.

The basic premise is, now that social networks exist online, what are people going to do with them? Wetpaint thinks they’re going to generate new kinds of content, and that this user-generated content is the key to the future of many Web businesses. The company pitch is that with Wetpaint’s software, any site can become social—users can post comments, photos, and other content while connecting with a community around any topic—and that this social dimension will drive up traffic. But I wanted to know more about this strategy: where it came from, why the startup’s founders think it will work, and what they’ve done to overcome various challenges to this point.

So last week, I sat down with Kevin Flaherty, Wetpaint’s co-founder and vice president of marketing. Things looked to be running smoothly at the company, especially given that its staff of just under 50 had just moved into new digs on Second Avenue three days earlier. Wetpaint used to be upstairs from Armandino’s Salumi—Flaherty says that, regrettably, they never got the “Salumi cam” up and running to monitor the line outside the popular eatery (though he ate there only once himself).

Like most seemingly overnight successes, Wetpaint’s story goes back many years. In 2002, Flaherty, an ex-Amazon employee, was working in the Seattle area at Precor, a fitness equipment company. One day, he was interviewing a young guy named Ben Elowitz, who had been a co-founder of Blue Nile, an online jewelry retailer, and had worked at Fatbrain.com. “I thought, ‘What are you doing here?’” says Flaherty. It turns out Elowitz was a fitness fanatic (and still is). He got the job, and a friendship was born.

In late 2004, Elowitz started getting the itch to do something new, and Flaherty went along. They were watching the growth of Wikipedia and saw an opportunity. Their “aha!” moment happened, … Next Page »

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In studying why Boston has been a center of innovation for nearly four centuries, the Boston History & Innovation Collaborative has identified a set of drivers which came up in all eras, in all types of innovation (technical, medical, and social). Deep historical research on more than 60 cases, conducted with funding from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, pinpointed five drivers that re-appeared over and over in the stories behind each of these particular innovations—why they happened in Boston, and why they happened at the time they did. These are Boston’s “secret sauce,” explaining why we have an innovation tradition.

We call these five ingredients or drivers the “High Five.” They are:

1) A driving entrepreneur or a team of leaders.

2) A local network of people and businesses/organizations sharing information, working across silos.

3) Local funders.

4) Local demand which the entrepreneur can use to refine and perfect the new idea or product.

5) National or global demand for the innovation.

An example of entrepreneurship truly driving a particular innovation in Boston’s past is the Boston Associates, a group of entrepreneurs including Lowell, Appleton, and others, who set up the first factories in Waltham and later Lowell, taking the wealth from shipping and transferring it into a new industry, textile manufacturing. More usually innovation is driven by a single entrepreneur like Cambridge’s Elias Howe and his sewing machine or An Wang and office word processing in the 1970s.

An example of the second driver, local networks and clusters, can be found in the fierce debate in Boston between black abolitionist David Walker and white abolitionist/journalist William Lloyd Garrison, which helped to spur the abolitionist movement—a social innovation.

The third driver, local funding, or capital and financing from Bostonians and local institutions, was central to King Gillette’s development of the safety razor, funded by John Joyce; the birth of state-chartered banking in 1784; and Georges Doriot’s invention of the venture capital model in the 1940s.

Local demand, the fourth driver, helped to get Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, off the ground. Bricklin was able to sell his first units in 1979 because there was a local market exemplified by the Boston Computer Society, a user group founded in 1977. Other cities didn’t have such a ready market.

Finally, the development of the lucrative salt cod trade in the 17th century was a response to national and global demand. Bostonians have been particularly good at gauging and meeting this demand, whether with salt cod in the 17th century, mass-manufactured textiles in the 19th, or Ned Johnson inventing check-writing off mutual funds in 1976.

Four of the High Five drivers are local in nature. Taken together, these factors led us to identify the phenomenon of the “bump and connect.” Proximity brings about crucial encounters among entrepreneurs, funders, and researchers, collaboration within industries and clusters, and professional and social networking. Even in today’s digital world, business leaders like Novartis’ Bernard Aebischer report that networking opportunities are important—and were in fact a determining factor in the decision to locate Novartis’s research headquarters in Cambridge’s Central Square, in close proximity to Cambridge’s “Genetown,” MIT, MGH, and Harvard’s Longwood campus.

Also central to our research findings is that innovation in Boston has had a broader racial, ethnic, and gender base over the past few centuries than many think. Our innovation tradition is not only white and male. African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics have made an important difference in technical, social, and medical innovations. Immigrants have played a leading role in introducing new ideas and social movements. And the role of women has been critical, from the first years of Massachusett’s settlement all the way through to the present.

Our History & Innovation Collaborative works to ensure that the “bump and connect” is recognized and continually woven into our fabric—whether in new real estate developments, or the Boston Museum coming soon to the Greenway, or our 2008 History & Innovation Awards. Helping to generate new waves of innovation is all about fostering the bump and connect.

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