One Seattle-area company is more than a little happy about Amazon Web Services opening a new South American computing region: Livemocha, an online language-learning service that counts about a quarter of its more than 11 million members in Brazil alone.

Livemocha runs its Web-based software on AWS, but previously, the closest region for South American markets was still in the U.S. And that meant a distinct difference in quality. The more static elements of the site, like logos and other images, were hosted locally. But the main Web experience—the core of Livemocha’s product—had to make too many hops to get to the end user.

“When I’m in Brazil and I’m using Livemocha, it’s kind of painful in comparison to what it’s like in the U.S.,” CEO Michael Schutzler says. “It’s not terrible, but … it’s like the difference between 1999 and 2011.”

So when the AWS Sao Paulo region started coming to fruition, ”We were like, ‘Yes! Hallelujah,’” Schutzler says. “Because if we’re doing really well in Brazil now—serving from, you know, Dallas—it’s just going to be awesome for Brazilians using Livemocha.”

Livemocha added a Brazilian investor earlier this year, and is looking to the fast-growing country as a possible template for how to expand into other foreign territories in the future. That comes as the company has significantly grown its user base by branching out from consumers and into professional markets, including corporate users, and people in the public-sector sector who are seeking language lessons.

“There are a lot of companies that are starting to get serious about Brazil now, and kind of waking up to the fact that there are 200 million people there,” Schutlzer says. “And, hey, they have a middle class with disposable income. Maybe we should pay attention to that.”

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Today Natick, MA-based Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) announced second-quarter sales of $1.975 billion and earnings excluding special items of $0.17 a share, which beat analyst expectations by nearly a dime. Sales of its neuromodulation devices were up 16 percent, and the company reported sales increases in many of its product lines. It also said the recent introduction of its new drug-eluting stent, Ion, has gone well. To cap it all off, Boston Scientific announced its intention to repurchase $1 billion of its common shares—a classic sign of optimism, and a common tactic companies use to boost their stock price.

But much of the focus on the earnings call with analysts was on news the company announced yesterday: It’s greatly expanding its presence in China. Boston Scientific said it would invest $150 million in China over the next five years, and it expects to expand its employee base there from 200 to 1,200 as it builds out a fully staffed manufacturing presence. The company also intends to invest in R&D, with the goal of developing innovative devices designed for the China healthcare system.

Boston Scientific’s outgoing CEO Ray Elliott said during the call that the China expansion would help bring the company’s products into a market that’s still largely untapped when it comes to less-invasive cardiac devices such as stents. What’s more, Elliott said, “Longer term, the products we develop in China may ultimately reach other markets.”

During the question-and-answer session with analysts, Morgan Stanley analyst David Lewis asked what the return on investment might be with the China program, and how the initiative differed from previous emerging-market strategies the company had initiated. “It’s additive,” responded Boston Scientific chief financial officer Jeffrey Capello. “We enjoy over 20 percent growth in India and China, and we see it as a situation in which we’re just getting started.” He noted that the buildout would take four to five years, but that investors could start seeing an upside from the initiative as early as next year.

In the shorter term, Boston Scientific expects to capitalize on a surprise announcement from stent rival Johnson & Johnson. On June 16, J&J (NYSE: JNJ) announced it would exit the stent business that it’s credited for creating, and it will stop marketing its flagship drug-coated Cypher stent by the end of the year in the face of declining sales. “It’s a rare opportunity, and frankly a rare gift,” Elliott said during today’s analyst call. Some analysts predict Boston Scientific will grab … Next Page »

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Online business expense-management company Concur has been on a dealmaking tear this year, and isn’t slowing down just yet. Today, the Redmond, WA-based company (NASDAQ: CNQR) announced it would purchase London’s GlobalExpense for about $19.7 million. Performance incentives could add another $3.3 million to the price.

From Concur’s description, GlobalExpense sounds like a pretty similar company. Concur said the pickup boosts the size of its European operations by a third, although it wasn’t clear from the company’s release whether that meant customers, revenues, employees, or something else. Concur did say that it expects the GlobalExpense acquisition to increase revenues by about $5 million for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2012.

Concur has been expanding its footprint in recent months, particularly overseas. In January, the company acquired San Francisco-based TripIt, a consumer and business online travel-planning service, and announced a joint venture with SunBridge Corporation to establish Concur Japan. In mid-April, Concur said it was investing $40 million in a minority stake in Cleartrip, a privately held online travel-booking service in India, and said it would open an office in that country.

In a note today on the GlobalExpense acquisition, D.A. Davidson analysts John Kraft and Douglas Greiner said more deals could follow for Concur, noting the company reported nearly $570 million in cash in its last quarterly report. “This acquisition is not surprising; it clearly makes strategic sense and we expect more like it,” Kraft and Greiner wrote.

The recent spate of acquisitions and investments are longer-term plays that won’t drive immediate revenue or profits, the analysts wrote. They also noted that international operations account for more than 10 percent of Concur’s revenues. Concur expects the deal to close in its fourth quarter.

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Concur, which helps businesses manage travel and expense accounts, is making a couple of big moves to broaden its international reach today. The company said it has invested $40 million to obtain a minority stake in Cleartrip, a privately held online travel-booking service in India. Redmond, WA-based Concur said it’s forming a marketing partnership with Cleartrip, and opening a Concur office in India.

If the Cleartrip news sounds a little familiar, it should: Concur (NASDAQ: CNQR) started the year off by acquiring TripIt, a San Francisco-based online travel itinerary manager, for as much as $120 million. Concur subsequently made TripIt into its front door for mobile travel booking.

Concur already has offices around the globe, including Hong Kong, Sweden, France, England, Germany, and the Czech Republic. In a statement, CEO Steve Singh said the Indian expansion and Cleartrip partnership will help Concur reach “a travel sector that is expected to grow to over $20 billion by 2012.” Concur had previously worked with businesses in India, but clearly saw more room to grow.

The Cleartrip partnership sounds like it will function much how TripIt is set up for Concur in the U.S.—funneling travel booking for business customers through that interface, and tying it into the Concur tracking system on the back end. It’ll be really interesting to see how far Concur takes this expansion of using consumer-friendly tools to manage business travel— two key moves in two quarters obviously amounts to a big bet on that side of the business.

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Consider these five trends, and then ask yourself what kind of Internet business you would create to exploit them.

1. Persistent economic uncertainty, leaving employers unwilling to hire lots of new permanent employees—but needing to get work done nonetheless.

2. The emergence of outsourcing as a mainstream, accepted, even expected corporate practice.

3. A growing number of people with home broadband connections for doing computer-mediated work and easy access to remote collaboration tools like Skype, Box.net, Basecamp, and Github.

4. More workers choosing (not necessarily being forced) to work from home as career contractors.

5. The interconnection of banking and financial systems around the world, making it more practical to transfer payments internationally.

Well, obviously, if you were thinking like an Internet entrepreneur, you’d want to go out create some kind of online service that helps businesses find, manage, and pay remote contractors, whether domestic or foreign, and then take a cut of the action.

But as it turns out, you’d quite possibly be too late: a company called oDesk created just such a service in 2005, and it’s now built up such an impressive lead over rivals such as Guru and Elance that it may be unstoppable. The six-year-old Redwood City, CA, startup has been growing its business at 100 percent per year for the last three years, and is now the world’s largest online employment platform, with more than 1 million contractors and employers signed up in more than 150 countries.

ODesk’s services, which include a hiring marketplace, tools for monitoring contractors’ hourly work, and a backend for handling payments across national borders, have been “a hit from the beginning,” says Gary Swart, the company’s CEO. But the venture-funded startup has also been the beneficiary of some huge and unexpected shifts, especially the global economic meltdown of 2008-2009. “The winds got stronger, fueled by the economy, the Internet, and globalization,” Swart says.

Barring the collapse of the Internet, a drastic drop in unemployment, or a sudden end to globalization, oDesk seems positioned to keep growing for years to come—and perhaps to eventually earn a nice return for investors Sigma Partners, Globespan Capital Partners, Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures, who have put $29 million into the company. With 38 full time employees of its own, the startup may or may not be breaking even yet, but … Next Page »

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Today, much manufacturing has gone to China, many services are going to India, and agriculture is threatening to go to South America. What will the U.S. excel in? Innovation is the frequent response. Indeed, President Obama has issued a clarion call to the nation: “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” But what does “out-innovate” the rest of the world really mean today?

Our recent research suggests that China and India have grown to lead all countries in privately funded new R&D investments, jobs created, and new projects. Moreover, both nations are steadily moving from imitator nations to those with radical innovations of their own. Indian firms have brought out some amazing innovations in the small car, mobile phone service, cataract surgery, and prosthetics areas, to name a few. China has impressed the world with advances in electric car batteries, low cost solar energy panels, bullet trains, stealth aircraft, and space technology, as examples. The decade and century ahead will see even greater innovations from these and other emerging economies. These markets are blessed with huge, growing, restless, and increasingly wealthy populations. Such populations create demand, nurture their own innovators, and stimulate local innovations. Indeed these economies have millions of entrepreneurs. Innovation is no longer the prerogative of developed economies.

In this context, to “out-innovate” the world is urgent but complex. The flight of R&D to emerging markets is driven by low costs, abundant talent, and growing markets. Failure to locate R&D in emerging markets risks the loss of an innovative edge to competitors. On the other hand, location in foreign countries risks leakage of talent, implicit knowledge, and explicit know-how to foreign entrepreneurs. Some countries, such as China, make transfer of know-how a pre-condition for trade and manufacturing.

What can U.S. firms do to best innovate in this changing environment? First, firms should abandon the mantra to locate R&D close to headquarters. Instead, they should locate their R&D in research clusters the world over, where talent and demand are abundant and the environment is conducive. Second, firms should exploit the innovative potential of entrepreneurs in home and foreign nations. Third, firms should build a culture of relentless innovation. Our research indicates that key traits that firms should try to inculcate in their organizations are encouraging innovations to cannibalize current products, embracing risk, and focusing on the future. These traits in turn can be institutionalized by empowering innovators, fostering internal competition, and … Next Page »

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Index Ventures, a European life sciences and technology venture investing firm with offices in Geneva, London, and Jersey, plans to open a Bay Area office, according to a blog post today by London-based partner Mike Volpi, who will head the new outpost together with partner Danny Rimer. About a third of Index Venture’s 173 portfolio companies are in the United States. “We feel we can do a better job of supporting the entrepreneurs we work with both in Europe and the US by having a permanent presence in the Bay Area,” Volpi writes, adding that he and Rimer will be “quite happy to reduce the quantity of 11pm phone calls to California from London.” There’s no word yet on exactly where the firm’s Silicon Valley office will be located, or when it will open.

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I spent two weeks of December in Chile as a guest of Professor Cristóbal García, Director of EmprendeUC at the Catholic University of Chile, which just signed up a 3-year collaboration partnership with Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. I did a keynote on innovation hubs at the newly created DoFuture program, spoke at Santiago’s Startup Weekend on Customer and Agile Development, and at a Conference in Patagonia supported by the Ministry of Economy’s Innovation Division.

I got smarter about the world outside of Silicon Valley, met some wonderful people who made me feel part of their family and shared some thoughts about entrepreneurship.

This post is a personal view of what I saw in what I call “Chilecon Valley” — in no way does it represent the views of the fine institutions I teach at. Read this with all the usual caveats: visiting a place for a few weeks doesn’t make you an expert (heck I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for over 30 years and I’m still surprised), I’m not an economist, and the odds are I misunderstood or misinterpreted what I saw or just didn’t see enough.

Creating the Next Silicon Valley – The Chilean Experiment

Chile has decided that it wants to be an innovation hub in South America.

In my short time in Chile, I spent time meeting with:

• Chilean entrepreneurs; as part of Santiago’s Startup Weekend as well as EmprendeUC-DUOC New Ventures Contest Awards ceremony.
• The government; the Innovation Division of the Ministry of Economy, the Chilean Economic Development Agency, (CORFO) which sponsored Start-Up Chile and Do Future in Patagonia as well as Fundacion Chile, the main R&D agency and the National Innovation Council.
• Universities; including the business, design and engineering schools in the Catholic University of Chile who are hard at work teaching and encouraging their students to think big and to start companies.
• Independent non profits such as the Innovation Forum, encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation in education.

The good news:

Entrepreneurship and innovation is being talked about continually in Chile. This isn’t some small-time effort. The country is dead serious in all levels of government and universities about making this happen. They’ve been thinking hard and smart about the lessons to be learned not only from Silicon Valley, but with only 16 million people, they are also looking for lessons from other small innovation clusters such as Israel, Singapore and Finland. These countries are great models of countries too small to sustain startups of scale on just domestic consumption yet have managed to create innovation with a global reach.

What needs work:

As an outsider I was incredibly impressed with how far Chile has progressed in making the country an innovation hub. However I had questions about the challenges that still needed to be addressed.

Venture Capital

Perhaps it was just who I was meeting, but for a country so focused on innovation and startups the lack of venture capitalists was noticeable. Given the interesting things going on in the engineering labs I visited and the startups I met, one would have thought the place would have been crawling with VC’s fighting over deals. Instead it felt like the government – through CORFO – was doing most of the risk capital investing. Given that great VC’s are much, much more than just a bag of money, this means that startups lack experienced board members with practical experience. There seemed to be very few who knew how to … Next Page »

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How do men and women small business owners approach innovation differently? That’s one of the questions the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is seeking to answer through a six-country study that’s going on as we speak—as one of the organizers of the study, I’m looking for entrepreneurs in the U.S., both male and female, who can take a few minutes to participate in an online survey.

Business creation has long been known as a driver of economic growth, and new firm formation is often seen as an indicator of a healthy and growing economy. New firms challenge the status quo with new ideas or innovative approaches to existing market needs, forcing incumbent firms to either improve their products and processes or be overtaken in the marketplace. In this process of economic natural selection, only the fittest firms remain, and economic growth is stimulated.

Yet, it is increasingly recognized that one size does not fit all in terms of economic policy and enterprise support: targeted and proactive policy and programmatic support is needed to foster small firm formation and innovation in particular. There is also a growing recognition that fostering small firm formation in general does not ensure economic self-determination and opportunity for all. Women and other socially excluded groups are often left behind if an “open for all” approach is taken in business development.

At this crossroads of increasing interest in improving business-enabling environments, fostering entrepreneurship, and ensuring the economic empowerment of women comes a growing focus on fostering economic growth through innovation. We are seeking to better understand the process of innovation from a gender perspective in order to examine what impediments to innovation there may be from a structural or societal perspective—and how these impediments may vary by gender—as well as to craft recommendations for policy and practice in the area of fostering a greater level of innovation by firms, both male- and female-owned.

I’m hoping that as a reader of Xconomy you will be willing to participate in this survey. I’m especially in need of male business owners, but am looking for both men and women business owners to participate. The survey includes 46 questions, and they’re all quite thought-provoking—so by participating, entrepreneurs are doing themselves, as well as UNCTAD, a real service.

I will write a follow-up post here with aggregate results from the survey. All responses are anonymous. Participate here—and please do it soon, as the study is quickly drawing to a close: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/unitedstatessurvey.

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Fighting illiteracy in Indian villages; facilitating local health reporting in Mexico; creating a mobile logistics app for truck drivers in Colombia. These may sound like projects run by a big non-governmental organization like the United Nations Development Program, but in fact they are three examples of MIT NextLab projects run mainly by MIT students and local organizations in the respective countries.

“Traditional aid does little for the very poor,” says Jhonatan Rotberg, founder and director of the NextLab program. “Only a fraction of the donated money trickles down to those who need it most. But with a mobile phone, poor people can get ahead. For countries in the Third World, a smart phone is the perfect tool for creating local progress in a society.”

Rotberg’s vision is that one day we could all have an open-source smart phone, running an operating system such as Google’s Android that can easily be adapted to the need of different user groups. These phones will be able to do basically anything a computer can do today, but anytime, anywhere, and much more cheaply. They will bring content, applications and services to the people of the developing world, reducing friction in economic transactions and helping people to be more effective in their everyday lives.

Already, over 4 billion mobile phones are in use in the world today. Markets in the Western world are near saturation. The next billion new users, Rotberg says, will be spread out in the developing countries, mainly in Africa and Asia. Many of them are poorly educated and live in rural areas. That means builders of mobile devices and mobile applications need to bring a different mindset to their work, he says.

“The big challenge is not technical, it is about usability,” Rotberg says. “Getting people to use and understand the applications is a daunting task.”

Rotberg, who gave the opening address at Xconomy’s recent Mobile Madness forum, is a lecturer in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division. Before coming to MIT four years ago, he spent years developing new business models for Telmex, the largest Latin American telecom company. At MIT, he has studied how technology, especially mobile communications, can be used to enhance quality of life in the developing world, and has worked with students and local partners to create joint MIT-industry programs that spin off promising mobile technologies for use in developing countries.

“The idea was to get access to MIT’s large intellectual capital and use it for the benefit of emerging markets,” explains Rotberg. “Together with MIT Media Lab, we worked out the concept for the MIT Next Billion network”.

After that project was completed in 2009, Rotberg says, he felt no wish to go back to his old job. On the contrary, he wanted to … Next Page »

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As Don Corleone said in The Godfather, “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” If that’s true, then a Seattle company called Cozi should help quite a few people become real men.

Cozi is a tech startup focused on family-related software for the home. That includes things like online calendars, shopping lists, to-do lists, message boards, and family journals for sharing family memories and photos. These are the kinds of things, the company reasons, that busy families want to have to keep the trains running on time, and which most still do with paper and pen, or a physical bulletin board. Cozi puts it all online.

But there’s something deeper here. Cozi’s mission statement is to help family members improve their relationships with each other, through its software. I’m paraphrasing, but this is essentially the company’s 10-year “audacious goal.” It’s posted on the wall of Cozi’s meeting room at its headquarters in the Smith Tower near Pioneer Square. The place feels like a comfortable living room, as CEO and co-founder Robbie Cape pointed out when he showed me around. I came away with a strong sense that Cozi is a family, not just a company. And that if Cape were in a Godfather movie, you’d call him Don Cozi. (I’m kind of hoping that sticks.)

In any case, a sweeping mission to help families is all good—and atypical of tech startups, where 80-hour weeks and product focus are the norm. But it’s one thing to have a noble mission, and another to deliver on it. That’s why Cozi is interesting right now: for the first time, it can see a viable path to achieving its mission. “We are only now starting to see signs that the vision we had when we started the company can become a reality,” Cape says.

Cozi seems to have surged ahead of most startups in family organization software, including Fircle, Famundo, and Nesting.com. Seattle-based Trumba started as an online calendar service for families, but has switched to focusing on businesses and other organizations. Meanwhile, most big companies like Microsoft and Google don’t focus on family software because to them, the market is too small.

Being privately held, Cozi doesn’t disclose its financial performance and growth rates. But here are some hints of success. Cozi’s software now comes pre-loaded on all Dell machines. It has … Next Page »

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As cross-pacific partnerships multiply among life science companies in California and Asia, San Diego biotech companies are increasingly interested in learning how to do business in China, India, and other countries. At least 250 representatives of the international life science community are expected to gather for CalAsia, a two-day conference that begins today at the downtown San Diego Marriott Hotel & Marina.

This is the first year the event has been hosted by Biocom, San Diego’s life sciences industry association. Those attending include established pharmaceutical companies, startups, investors, and researchers, as well as individuals and delegations from China, Singapore, Korea, Australia, India, and other countries in the Asian Pacific region. Workshops and plenary sessions include an overview of opportunities and challenges for the biopharmaceutical industry in key markets, licensing deals with Asian partners, raising money in Asia, and evolving intellectual property rights in China and India,

In a preview of the event, I asked Dr. Hui Cai to answer some questions about doing business in Asia. She is president and CEO of Inflexion BioPartners, which provides international management and consulting services in the life sciences, and she has been involved in international sourcing of drug candidates, cross-Pacific operations, strategic planning, and strategic partnerships. She also serves as chairwoman of the board at the Sino-American Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Professionals Association, although she notes these are her personal comments.

Xconomy: What does it mean that the FDA has opened an office in China?

Hui Cai: Setting offices in China reflects the shift in the FDA’s prevention-focused approach to ensure quality at the point of manufacture and that U.S.-bound goods are safe before they are exported. It also plays a positive role in facilitating better communications, and in sharing information and best practices with Chinese regulatory authorities and manufacturers. In reality, good cooperation is key to maintaining a mutually beneficial practice, and it’s important to ensure intentions remain true to sharing best practices, rather than imposing standards unilaterally.

X: What are the chief concerns today for U.S. biotechs that want to form partnerships in Asia, and especially China?

HC: Many U.S. biotechs are reaping … Next Page »

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Declaring that “quality journalism in America is threatened more profoundly today than at any time in our history” by the accelerating death throes of the traditional newspaper and TV news businesses, two veteran Boston-area journalists yesterday launched GlobalPost, an online-only source for on-the-ground international news of the sort that’s increasingly scarce in the mainstream media.

Philip Balboni, the founder and longtime president of New England Cable News, and Charles Sennott, a staff writer and former foreign correspondent at the Boston Globe, say in the site’s mission statement that they want to “redefine international news for the digital age.” They’ll do that by hiring top correspondents who live in the countries they’re covering to write with “a decidedly American voice” about complex international issues—without all the expensive encumbrances of the traditional media, such as printing presses and satellite TV equipment.

“American television networks today largely cover the ‘hotspots’ of international news, and even then, not comprehensively,” the founders write in a statement about GlobalPost’s business model. “U.S. newspapers have significantly cut back their foreign bureaus. Ironically, this comes at a moment in history when globalization is sweeping across all continents.”

Balboni and Sennott hope to counter that trend by providing a daily mix of text articles, photos, videos, podcasts, and blog posts that both delve into the details of conditions in countries where correspondents are located and highlight cross-cutting regional or global issues. The operation, which is a kind of professional, for-profit echo of the Global Voices project launched in 2005 by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, already has 65 correspondents in locations as varied as Pakistan, Senegal, Bolivia, and Zimbabwe. Many are freelancers or correspondents for other publications; for example, Jane Arraf, GlobalPost’s at-large Middle East correspondent, is the Iraq correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.

For financial support, GlobalPost is counting on a combination of online advertising revenue, syndication deals with online and newspaper partners, and a soon-to-be-introduced membership system called Passport. Individual Passport memberships will cost $199 per year and will provide access to “exclusive content on key economic and political events”—including monthly newsletters, short text alerts on breaking news, and live conference calls with correspondents—that won’t be available to readers of the free site.

Sennott, who is the site’s executive editor, said in an interview yesterday with WBUR’s mid-day local news program “Here and Now” that GlobalPost hopes to restore something of the Edward R. Murrow tradition of passionate, engaging international coverage tailored for American news consumers.

“We’re looking for people who have a passion for a country, a language facility in that country, who want to be there based as writers or videographers or radio reporters and who are great at telling stories,” Sennott said. “We almost don’t care what medium you want to tell it in. We just want to know that you know how to tell a story that’s grounded in fact, that’s well reported, that has a sense of the American ear for a narrative, and that really understands and is unabashedly in an American voice—not in any way nationalist or jingoist, definitely not, but understanding that you’re writing to or doing a video for an American audience that needs to understand the world.”

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When I visited Nathan Myhrvold in the summertime, he lamented that he wasn’t able to attend the Olympics in Beijing (though he did provide some insight into the physics of ping-pong matches). But this week and next, Myhrvold is taking a grander tour of Asia, as his Bellevue, WA-based invention company, Intellectual Ventures, opens a series of new offices in the region. It is the firm’s first major foray into the global market, with the goal being to amplify its focus on investing in technological invention as a key commodity and driver of innovation.

To that end, Myhrvold (an Xconomist) and Edward Jung, the founders of Intellectual Ventures, are in the midst of hosting office launches and events this month in five Asian countries. The company’s new regional headquarters is in Singapore, with additional offices located in Tokyo, Japan; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; and Seoul, South Korea. Each office will be staffed by roughly seven to 10 people. “I am struck by the gap between Asia’s collective, innovative talent and the lack of resources for Asia’s greatest inventors. IV is working to fill this gap,” said Jung in a statement.

So what exactly will Intellectual Ventures be doing there? As Myhrvold told me previously, “Most inventing organizations like universities and nonprofits have a tech transfer office or a technology licensing office. Most institutions in Asia don’t.” Intellectual Ventures, he said, wants to “be an outsourced tech transfer agent for inventing institutions that don’t have one. We can provide the same functionality that you’d get from a technology licensing office. We evaluate ideas, we pay for them to be patented, we provide a little bit of funding for them, and then we license them. There’s no reason that smart people in Asia shouldn’t be able to get the same traction that Stanford provides.”

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The mobile search and advertising specialist JumpTap, based in Cambridge, MA, says it will open new offices in Madrid, Spain, and Stockholm, Sweden. The expansion is in response to the rapidly growing mobile market in the Nordic and Baltic regions and in Spain, says the company, which has partnership with several mobile operators, including the Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera and Telefónica Spain.

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A report from Dow Jones VentureSource shows that venture capital investment collected by entrepreneurs in India nearly tripled in 2007, totaling $928 million across 80 separate deals, as compared to just $349 million for 36 deals in 2006. It was “easily the highest total on record for the region,” according to the Dow Jones report,  which was released today. Some 48 percent of the funding went to information technology companies, and two IT-focused New England firms, Waltham, MA-based Matrix Partners and Westport, CT-based Canaan Partners, were among the top 10 venture firms sending money to India, closing five deals between them.

Within India’s IT sector, Web-based information services companies captured the biggest chunk of venture cash, accounting for 22 deals worth almost $141 million. ItzCash, the Mumbai-based company behind a new form of pre-paid cash card, is a prime example. With a $10 million investment from Matrix Partners and Intel Capital, ItzCash has created a system that allows Indian consumers to load their cards with 100 to 10,000 rupees (about $2.50 to $250) and use the cards to pay in person, online, or via text messages for things like Internet access, online shopping, utility bills, railway tickets, insurance, and even donations to Hindu temples.

“Service-oriented companies in India….continue to attract investment and this is likely due to their low capital requirements as well as to the rapidly emerging nature of the broader Indian economy,” Jessica Canning, Dow Jones VentureSource’s director of global research, said in the company’s release today. “It takes relatively little money and little time for these kinds of companies to begin generating revenues and, because of this, Web-related and consumer and business services companies accounted for more than half of all the venture capital deals done in India in 2007.”

While U.S.-based venture firms still lead the way when it comes to investing in Indian entrepreneurs, investors from other countries are gaining interest. U.S.-headquartered VC firms led 52.5 percent of the Indian venture deals in 2007, compared to 64 percent in 2006 and 60 percent in 2005, Dow Jones reported.

Here’s the list of the top 20 investors placing equity-based venture investments in Indian companies in 2007. (All data courtesy of Dow Jones Venture Source.)

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