Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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The blow from getting a higher-than-expected bill from someone like your lawyer could be softened it if came attached to a 60-second video message explaining the special things he or she actually did in detail.

At least, that’s what Dave McLaughlin thinks—and he’s building his new startup Vsnap around the idea.

McLaughlin has been around the block before as an entrepreneur. He co-founded the mobile payments startup Fig Card, which was acquired by eBay last spring. Coincidentally, the 2011 application deadline for MassChallenge fell on the day that acquisition closed, so McLaughlin hurriedly finished the paperwork for the startup accelerator—and nabbed a spot. He’s also joined at Vsnap by chief technical officer Claudia Santoro, former vice president of engineering for the restaurant-focused software startup Exit41.

Vsnap didn’t take home one of the MassChallenge checks in October, but it’s now pulling in early customers—like Suffolk University and Schering Plough’s alumni association—to test out its alpha product and is readying itself to introduce its beta product sometime in February.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Users log into the Vsnap interface, record a 60-second video using their phone or computer camera, add descriptions, and can add attachments such as PDF files or Web URLs. Vsnap sends the package out through e-mail. Users can also record a video “signature” about themselves that will accompany all the messages they send. Currently the technology can be accessed via a Web browser, but Vsnap is developing iPhone and Android apps as part of the beta release.

The customer target for Vsnap is “any industry that has a low conversion rate but a higher price point,” says Joe Nigro, business development manager at the startup. That’s because lower priced products and services typically e-mail and communicate thousands of customers at once, and video messaging that many recipients could land you in a spam folder pretty quickly.

Vsnap was first thought up to fulfill a personal need, says McLaughlin. His cousin, Jim Joyce, lives in Ireland and is from the U.S., while his wife’s family lives in Italy. He started shooting video snapshots of his kids to send to his family in different time zones. When Fig Card sold, McLaughlin decided to join his cousin on this new idea rather than move on to PayPal, he says. Vsnap still offers a free consumer service, but business messaging has become its focus.

Vsnap is currently developing its pricing model, which will vary depending on the number of Vsnaps a user sends and their access to Vsnap analytics. The analytics can measure things like if and when the recipients viewed the video and how they interacted with the attachments. Currently, recipients of the video message have to view the video message in a separate link, but Vsnap is working with PowerInbox, another local startup, to build out the capabilities for video viewing right in the e-mail inbox.

Vsnap recently nabbed a $40,000 investment from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. MTDC had previously said it … Next Page »

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New York’s Producteev released on Tuesday the first Windows desktop version of its task management software in an effort to become more ubiquitous than its rivals. Producteev’s software lets users who work collaboratively organize, update, and see who is responsible for getting specific jobs done. The platform can be accessed via mobile apps, the Web, a native Mac desktop app, and now Windows. Producteev has raised close to $2 million since its founding in 2008 from investors that include angels and Palm Ventures.

Comparable to project collaboration software Basecamp, Producteev lets users communicate with each other about their shared tasks. The software gathers updates on tasks from e-mails, instant messages, and shared calendars. However, CEO and co-founder Ilan Abehassera says Producteev aims to be more streamlined than Basecamp by focusing on specific tasks rather than managing overall projects.

The Producteev platform is free for up to two people to use per organization. Producteev charges licensing fees for larger groups to use its software, which also connects with services such as Google Calendar, Google Apps, and Google Tasks. “We’re trying to consumerize productivity apps,” Abehassera says.

With the new Windows desktop app, he says, Producteev hopes to greatly increase adoption of its software. “Very few competitors have developed something for the Windows platform,” Abehassera says, “which is way bigger than the Mac platform.” He points to file hosting services Evernote and Dropbox as models he tries to emulate. “We’re trying to build the same kind of platform for tasks,” he says.

Also on Tuesday, Producteev introduced an Android version of its app. An iPhone app, which was already available, was updated as well. And a new feature is available across the various versions of Producteev: integration with San Francisco-based TaskRabbit, which hosts a marketplace for users to find people to complete … Next Page »

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The vast majority of mobile applications in the marketplace aren’t coming from well-established businesses, but experimental developers. The apps can even accrue a good user following, but those developers don’t exactly have the skills or desire to build a business around their creations.

“It’s laughable how many times I’ve heard, ‘I didn’t get into this to answer support requests,’” says entrepreneur Jonathan Kay.

Kay is the chief operating officer and co-founder of Apptopia, a Cambridge, MA-based startup developing a marketplace that condenses the droves of similar, one-off app projects and puts them in the hands of people looking to turn them into real moneymakers. It looks like the lovechild of eBay and a Web domain brokerage, with hints of a mobile strategy consultancy.

As you can imagine, buying and selling source code for mobile applications is just a bit more complex than auctioning off your used electronics. “I’m spending more time than I’ve ever wanted to with lawyers,” says Kay, who I caught up with this week.

The company is the brainchild of co-founder Eliran Sapir, who jumped on early iPhone trends to create the mobile app GPush, which created push notifications for Gmail on the iPhone. Despite the paid app’s popularity in the iTunes app store, Sapir couldn’t quite figure what business to sell it to for an exit, Kay says. But he kept thinking about the problem, and later toyed with the idea of creating a mobile app brokerage while entrepreneur in residence at Cambridge-based Greatpoint Ventures. Last fall, Sapir connected with the boisterous Kay—a former brand evangelist for local startup the Grasshopper Group—and left the venture firm to work on Apptopia full time.

Apptopia’s first step is to formulate a target price range for app developers to sell at, using market knowledge and algorithms. Developers then must give Apptopia access to their apps that enables the startup to gather accurate, objective data on performance, user base, and other information that will inform prospective buyers.

“Much like in eBay, we provide a professional middle ground where a buyer and a seller can actually negotiate,” Kay says.

Sellers can list their apps to be purchased for a fixed price within that suggested range or set up an auction with a minimum starting point.

Connecting buyer and seller is just part of the challenge, though, says Kay. Apptopia continues to oversee that payment and transition process, and has developed contracts with lawyers outlining the details of the agreement.

“If you put the app up, you legally are bound to send us the source code,” says Kay of the developer responsibilities. Sellers also have to agree not to … Next Page »

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Slice, the online purchase-tracking site backed by heavy hitters including Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Playdom founder Rick Thompson, started as a research project. While looking for a new business venture, company founders and Scott Brady, Harpinder Madan, and Eric Botto took a close look at the e-commerce industry and the massive amount of information that is sent back to consumers after they purchase goods online. In their research and in conversations with consumers, they found that there was a real need for a service that could organize information about purchases from many different companies in a smart, informative way.

“If you’re shopping and trying to remember, ‘What size did I buy my nephew last year?’ it’s just virtually impossible to find,” says Brady, the company’s CEO. “While e-mail is a great place to store and receive this info, it’s just not a good tool for accessing and actually acting on the data.”

The founders set out to build a tool that would organize the information, showing consumers not only where their packages are and when they’re expected to arrive, but also what’s in them, how much time they have to return the goods, and contact information for the retailer. The company partnered with Yahoo Mail to build a tool that Yahoo’s users could use to track the goods they bought online. “The goal was to bring together some of top semantic scientists and build series of algorithms that could extract information from e-mails and give it to users in a very useful format,” Brady says.

While it sounds like a simple service, building the algorithms that could pull important information from a confirmation e-mail from say, Amazon or the Gap, required some complicated engineering, and some time.

“We actually tapped into some of the latest the latest natural language processing and semantic algorithm technology to be able to do this,” Brady says. It took the company 12-13 months—and patient investors—”to create a scalable infrastructure that allowed us to do this in a scalable way.”

They also had to make sure they had “bank-level” security in place to ensure that consumers—and e-mail platforms—felt safe handing over personal data.

Initially, the founders funded Slice themselves, but in May, Slice completed a $9.4 million Series A funding round lead by Lightspeed Venture Partners and DCM.  Michael Birch, Rick Thompson, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and Floodgate Fund also invested.

The next month, Slice and Yahoo Mail started rolling out an app called All My Purchases to the e-mail provider’s 93 million U.S. users. In October, the company launched a standalone product, making Slice available to Gmail customers, and by November the company had already released an app for iPhone, with an Android app to follow shortly (it’s currently in testing).

So far, the free service has already tracked more than 10 million purchases from nearly 2,000 different merchants, and its users have been very vocal about feedback. The company has edited design elements and added features based on the desires of its consumers, including a notification when the price of a product drops after purchase, so users can potentially get a price adjustment. They also add new merchants to the service in response to user requests, and now also track receipts e-mailed from in store purchases.

As more and more retailers—including The Gap, Nordstrom and Anthropologie—begin to give customers the option of electronic receipts instead of handing over the paper version, Slice will be able to track a greater percentage of American commerce. “What’s fascinating to us is that when we first looked at this problem we were anticipating 8-10 billion e-mails sent annually, but if you extrapolate this out based on growth of in-store receipts we can expect to see tens of billions of these electronic receipts,” Brady says. Even grocery stores are getting in on the game, which adds the potential for … Next Page »

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Finland’s Playmysong said in a press release it raised a seed round, $350,000 according to a spokesman, led by startup accelerator Lifeline Ventures and opened a New York office this month. The company plans to also set up shop in San Francisco in February. Playmysong’s Apple iOS and Web app lets users request songs to play at participating bars, nightclubs, hotels, and cafés, and simultaneously checks in their locations via Facebook and Twitter. The venues let the app’s users connect over WiFi or 3G wireless with the in-house iTunes playlists to make their choices.

Playmysong charges venues for premium services, which include the option to send messages with discount deals to users of the app after they request songs. Playmysong says its New York office will handle business development and marketing in the region.

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A flotilla of fifteen startups from Atlanta presented their ideas in New York on Wednesday for a demo day at the offices of Union Square Ventures. Merrick Furst, director of the Flashpoint accelerator at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said the program helps entrepreneurs develop their concepts beyond their startup phase. “They are trying to figure out what the business opportunity is,” he said.

Flashpoint offers entrepreneurial education to startups, access to mentors, and opportunities for early-stage funding through the Flashpoint Investment Fund, angel investors, and other sources. Furst said the startups that presented at demo day are backed by the Flashpoint Investment Fund, which typically invests $15,000 to $25,000 at a time. The Atlanta startups presented ideas ranging from improving corporate data security in the cloud, to preventing phone scams that spoof caller ID systems, to a 3D scanning technology that runs on iPhones.

Furst said the Flashpoint startups visit cities to seek potential backers. Wednesday’s demo day was sponsored in conjunction with the Harvard Business School Angel Alumni Association and ff Venture Capital. Union Square Ventures provided space for the event. Flashpoint takes some of its inspiration from the Y Combinator accelerator program and plans to bring its startups to visit venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in Menlo Park, CA next.

Social Fortress, the first startup to present on Wednesday, offers technology to help companies in regulated industries such as financial services and health care use the cloud more securely. Adam Ghetti, co-founder of Social Fortress, said such companies view the cloud as a major security risk. “They have data that’s very important to them,” he said. “They have laws and regulations that say they can only do certain things with that data in certain places.”

Ghetti said Social Fortress’s technology abates some of that risk by encrypting data before it is shared on the cloud. Social Fortress’s technology can also track how data is used after it’s shared with a third party such as Salesforce.com. Ghetti says angel investors have committed about $1.5 million to back Social Fortress and the startup is talks to raise another $500,000.

Trimensional, another startup presenting at demo day, already has a bit of New York connection. Grant Schindler, founder of Trimensional, developed an iPhone app that captures objects and people in 3D. After his presentation, Schindler told Xconomy he connected with MakerBot, a Brooklyn-based maker of 3D printers, in January 2011 shortly after Trimensional’s app went live. “The day I released the app, Bre Pettis [CEO of MakerBot] emailed me,” Schindler says. The companies developed a way for users to export 3D images captured by Trimensional’s app for use with MakerBot 3D printers, which print objects layer-by-layer using thermoplastics.

Schindler says his technology gives consumers access to scanning technology that might otherwise require expensive equipment. It may not be on par with the gear and … Next Page »

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Everyone knows mobile is everywhere, and everything is mobile. Smartphones, tablets, and mobile software are transforming how we all shop, connect, get around, and lead our daily lives. In the five years since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, the mobile industry—and the tech world, more broadly—has changed radically. So what are the emerging opportunities, pitfalls, and strategies in this sector? And how will the next five years play out?

On March 14, Xconomy will hold its fourth annual half-day mobile conference to tackle these questions—and much more. Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility will take place at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, MA. We are convening some of the most prominent mobile technology and business leaders from the Boston area and beyond—and we are expecting a packed house.

We are still working on the agenda and full speaker list, but I can share a few highlights with you now. We will have a keynote panel consisting of Boston’s “mobile mafia”—founders, CEOs, and investors from some of the region’s biggest mobile successes, including m-Qube, Enpocket, Quattro Wireless, and Where. This distinguished panel—which will include Jeff Glass, Mike Baker, Lars Albright, and Ryan Moore—will discuss Boston’s mobile history and how the region can continue to lead the world in mobile innovation.

Other themes we’ll tackle include next-generation consumer and social apps; mobile retail and commerce; the convergence of mobile marketing and big data analytics; emerging business strategies around mobile apps, mobile websites, and hybrid models; and, more broadly, how mobility will continue to change the way we all interact with content, products, and each other.

To those ends, we will also hear from Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; and Michael Putnam, director of mobile products for TripAdvisor (only the biggest consumer Web company in New England). We’ll also hear from up-and-coming startups including ByteLight, HeyWire, Kinvey, and Crashlytics. Again, this is only a partial list of speakers—we’ll have more updates soon.

If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate. Looking forward to seeing you all at NERD on March 14.

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Cloud-based notekeeping service Evernote found its first 20 million users through sheer geek appeal. Hardcore users (full disclosure: that includes me) love the ability to upload Web clips, documents, images, audio files, and other materials to Evernote’s online notebooks, then search and retrieve them at will, from virtually any device. They also like features such as Evernote’s ability to recognize and search the text in photos and scanned documents.

But to grow to its first billion users—and CEO Phil Libin thinks that’s a realistic goal—the company may need to stop thinking about features and start thinking about experiences.

“The mainstream isn’t looking for fantastically powerful solutions. They are looking for real, elegant, magical solutions. And it turns out it’s much harder to build those,” Libin says.

But the Mountain View, CA-based startup has begun to move in a more magical direction. In the last couple of months, the company has rolled out three mobile apps and one Web app that tie into its central notekeeping service but are designed to offer dedicated, simple solutions to common problems, such as remembering the people you meet (Hello), keeping a record of your favorite meals (Food), learning new subjects (Peek), and clearing away distractions for a more streamlined reading experience on the Web (Clearly). And last summer, Evernote hired the Australian creators of a drawing app called Skitch and came out with a free tablet version of the image-annotation tool.

It might seem to outsiders as if Evernote has taken a left turn, forsaking its identity as an online personal archive in order to go after the sexy new thing, i.e., mobile apps. But in fact, it’s all part of a deliberate strategy to “add structure, intelligence, and context” to the information people are already storing in Evernote, Libin says. “If Evernote 1.0 was ‘Whatever you put in you can get out in the same format many years later,’ the next phase is ‘Whatever you get back is better’—it has been illuminated, so to speak.”

Libin says he means that in the medieval sense of an illuminated manuscript, such as a Bible decorated with initials, miniature illustrations, and other marginalia. “We really want your memories to be better—to have additional context and beauty in them,” he says. “One of the first steps is to start creating beautiful experiences for certain types of memories. They all live in the central Evernote location, but there are custom experiences for capturing and recalling particular things, like food, and people, and other stuff in the future.”

How Evernote designs these new custom experiences will be one of the themes of a public Xconomy event in Mountain View, CA, on February 7, where I’ll be interviewing Libin on stage, together with Evernote investors Gary Little, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, and Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital. The evening’s main point will be to dissect the idea of the “100 year company,” that is, Libin’s plan to keep Evernote independent and ensure its long-term survival through serial secondary fundraising rounds. But there’s so much to say about Evernote’s app strategy that this will be a big topic as well. (Register for the event before January 24 to get the saver rate.)

I didn’t want to wait until February 7 to learn more about the app strategy, so I connected with Libin (pictured above right) for a long conversation on Friday. I started off by asking whether Evernote ever expected to have 20 million users—a milestone it announced it had reached shortly after the new year. “Yes, in the sense that when we were raising money, our business plan has us getting to 20 million right about now, so it’s exactly what we told our investors,” Libin answered. “On the other hand, we never actually believed it, so getting there is quite shocking.”

But as mind-blowing as it can be to actually hit one’s business-plan projections, Libin says he keeps reminding himself that there are still 6.98 billion people on the planet who aren’t yet using Evernote. Even if you narrow that down to the people with some access to smartphones and the Internet, “that’s probably 2 billion people right now who are easily within reach, and in 10 years, more like 4 billion,” he says. “So having a couple of billion users is not … Next Page »

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For the first time ever, the International Consumer Electronics Show created a zone called Eureka Park specifically to showcase startups from across the country. Fledgling companies have come to CES before and can still be found elsewhere at the conference, but Eureka Park is a new way to highlight them at the 2012 show. At an event where companies such as LG and Samsung occupy huge territory, startups such as Kogeto in New York and Flingo in San Francisco have space at The Venetian to stand out, albeit away from the digital carnival at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Kogeto CEO and founder Jeff Glasse made his way to CES bringing his company’s panoramic camera lens attachment called Dot iCONIC. “Of all the events we’ve attended with technology companies, this is the first place where I’m not the only hardware guy in the room,” Glasse says. “That’s kind of nice.”

The Dot iCONIC attaches to smartphones’ camera lenses and lets users capture panoramic 360-degree video. The lenses went on sale last October for the Apple iPhone 4 and 4S. Glasse also brought to CES demo versions of lenses for Android phones, which he expects to release within the first half of this year.

Glasse says grouping startups together at CES is an interesting move by the conference hosts to keep the event relevant as the dynamics of innovation change. “I felt like, as a [CES] outsider, that place’s days are numbered,” he says. “I think they’re adapting to a world where there are things like TechCrunch Disrupt.”

Compared with the show floor at the convention center, Eureka Park looked a bit barebones with its small booths and tables, but Spartan aesthetics tend to go hand-in-hand with startups. Some startups at CES could still be found outside of Eureka Park. Shodogg from Valhalla, NY, for example, set up a more elaborate display in another part of The Venetian to debut its technology for sharing video across Web-connected devices. Shodogg has raised $1.7 million from angel investors, and its backers include actor Seth Green, known for such roles as Scott Evil in the Austin Powers movies and co-creator of the “Robot Chicken” television show on Cartoon Network (he’s the voice of Chris Griffin on “Family Guy” too). Green dropped by the company’s display to meet with Shodogg CEO Herb Mitschele (see photo above).

While some big electronics players such as Samsung have proprietary platforms to share video among their own devices, Shodogg is agnostic. Shodogg users can share content regardless of the brand of television, computer, or smartphone. “It’s a validation of our model,” says Rajiv Lulla, Shodogg’s chief innovation officer, regarding the moves by major electronics makers.

Back in Eureka Park, MIT spinout Lantos Technology, a startup in Cambridge, MA which raised $4.1 million last August, set up … Next Page »

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What is the future of electronic books and digital publishing in Boston? We might be getting a glimpse of it today.

The news is that Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, is acquiring Threepress, a Boston-area software and consulting shop specializing in tools for digital publishing. Terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but it’s probably fairly modest in size.

What makes it interesting is that it’s a story of homegrown, bootstrapped talent in a burgeoning field—e-book reading and publishing—that has finally come of age.

Safari (not to be confused with the Apple browser) provides an on-demand digital library of thousands of books and videos on software, IT, professional development, and other techie and business topics. The 10-year-old company, which has just under 100 employees, is headquartered in Sebastopol, CA. But it started in Boston, and some of its leadership team, including CEO Andrew Savikas, is based here.

As part of the Threepress acquisition, Safari is planning to move into a new office space in Boston that will have about 10 employees. “We are looking at space with room to grow,” says Savikas, an O’Reilly Media veteran. “I expect we’ll be hiring in Boston, especially on the technology side.”

Threepress is a profitable, four-person tech shop founded by Web developer Liza Daly in 2008. Daly previously worked at Digitas and iFactory, and she originally started Threepress to do consulting and build tools for academic publishers and websites. As is often the case for startups, she found an unexpected niche. [Disclosure: Daly is married to Dan Schmidt, my longtime Honest Bob bandmate.]

Daly entered the e-book world by writing Bookworm, an open-source, browser-based reading system for e-books using the EPUB format. At first, she saw books as just part of the content of academic websites. But her work got the attention of Savikas at O’Reilly Media, which decided to host Bookworm on its site in 2009. That year Savikas also recruited Daly to speak at a big … Next Page »

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How will the media habits of families, especially those with young kids, evolve in the era of the tablet computer?

I got an interesting perspective on that question over the holidays, which I spent with my brother and his family in Alaska. Jamie and his wife Jen Athey have two loveable children, aged four (Kieran) and 13 months (Lucy). My parents were also visiting, so the Athey-Roush house on Moose Mountain, 15 miles outside of Fairbanks, was temporarily home to five adults and two children, plus two dogs and two cats.

The weather was standard for central Alaska in December—a frigid -10F to -40F—so there wasn’t a lot of outdoor activity. There is a TV in the house, but given that it’s located in the room where the toddler sleeps, it’s almost never used. In any case, there is no cable TV service that far from town, so there’s not much to watch besides DVDs and Netflix. (Internet data gets beamed in wirelessly from a transmitter on nearby Ester Dome.)

What we did have at hand, however, were four tablets (three iPads and a Motorola Xoom) and three smartphones (one iPhone and two Motorola Atrix Android phones). So conditions were ideal for observing how a high-density group of family members uses their mobile devices for entertainment, reference, learning, communication, and just goofing off.

It goes without saying that Kieran and Lucy already know their way around touch-driven devices. Kieran can’t read fluently yet, but he knows exactly which icons open his favorite apps. He can flip virtual pages, start and stop videos, and tap on words in lists. To his generation, non-touch interfaces will feel antique. Indeed, when we took the kids into town to visit the public library, Kieran had no idea how to use the trackballs attached to the ancient Windows computers.

He did, however, leave the library with three actual books. His favorite: The Z Was Zapped, a book of abecedarian mayhem by illustrator Chris Van Allsburg.

There is an idea circulating on the net that tablets somehow spoil kids for other types of media. You may have seen the video that surfaced on YouTube last fall called “A Magazine Is an iPad that Does Not Work.” The video, which been viewed about 3.4 million times, shows a 1-year-old girl deftly navigating an iPad, then trying futilely to interact with the pages of a paper fashion magazine using pinch-and-spread gestures like those pioneered for the iPhone. To the Apple-fanboy dad who made the video, it showed how “magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives.”

But if I could offer one conclusion based on my visit, it would be this: the notion that tablets will kill off older, more static media is poppycock. Kieran’s bedroom has shelves full of books, from Dr. Seuss to Richard Scarry to Roald Dahl to Dorling Kindersley’s obsessively detailed nature and engineering books. His parents read to him at least twice a day, at naptime and bedtime. And that’s not counting all the time they spend reading with him and Lucy, usually curled up on the couch or the easy chair with a physical book. When reading with Kieran, the only problem is finding books around the house that he doesn’t already know by heart. Lucy, who isn’t old enough to comprehend what books are, nonetheless loves to flip through them.

At the same time, tablets offer beginning readers elements that books can’t. Jamie and Jen bought the Xoom so that Kieran could use a Flash-based early reading program from Seattle-based Headsprout. (Flash doesn’t work on the iPad.) Headsprout uses cartoon games to keep kids motivated while they learn to recognize and sound out words. In the lesson segment Kieran showed me, he advanced a monkey character through a jungle by … Next Page »

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Even for natives of busy cities, it is not always easy to know the fastest way to get around town on foot or by public transit. It would be nice to find out about planned changes to subway lines and bus routes, for example, before rushing to stops that might not be in service. That was the impetus for six-year-old HopStop, the New York-based company that offers its users door-to-door directions for biking, taking taxis, walking, and other forms of transit.

HopStop collects data from transit agencies and other verified sources to provide information on navigating the cities the company covers. The information and directions are tailored for pedestrians and transit riders, which sets HopStop apart from the many websites and apps that offer driving directions, such as Google and MapQuest. As his rivals race to catch up, HopStop CEO Joe Meyer says his company is developing new revenue streams by seeking business-to-business clients.

Users can access HopStop via the Web or mobile devices to plan their routes or look for new ways to reach their destinations. The company provides detailed, hyperlocal information that Meyer says rival services such as Google Transit have yet to match.

“We have a proprietary, patented routing engine that gets smarter over time,” says Meyer.

Though HopStop has raised $2.2 million in total funding since its founding, for the past three years the company has been growing on ad revenues, which Meyer says is in the $2 million-to-$5 million range annually. “People use us because we are helping them in their daily lives,” he says. “We don’t have to incentivize our users.”

HopStop was founded in 2005 by Chinedu Echeruo, who remains chairman of the company. Meyer says Echeruo got the idea for HopStop out of frustration with … Next Page »

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—Quest Software (NASDAQ: QSFT), the IT software provider on the border between San Diego and Orange Counties, said today it acquired BitKOO, a North Hollywood, CA-based specialist in identity and access management technology. Financial terms were not disclosed. Combined with the recent acquisitions of e-DMZ (privileged identity management), Völcker Informatik AG (provisioning), and Symlabs (virtual directories), Quest says the BitKOO deal extends the strength of its Quest One Identity Solutions business.

—San Jose, CA-based EnVerv, a chip design firm with a San Diego office, said it raised $12 million in a Series B round for its power line communications technologies, which enable electric utilities to use their own power lines to serve as a smart grid communications network. Benchmark Capital led the new round, which was joined by existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Walden International.

—UC San Diego computer security researcher (and San Diego Xconomist) Stefan Savage talked with me about recent research into spam networks and hacking the automotive software used to control cars. Savage said he takes a more holistic approach to protecting computers and networks against malicious intruders. While a great deal of money and effort are devoted to technically “hardening” computer systems against spam, for example, Savage said the payment systems by which advertised goods and services accept consumer credit cards “is a huge weak link that has no cheap substitute.”

—Ford’s Dan Kapp came to San Diego to plug the carmaker’s new plug-in, the 2012 Focus EV. The electric vehicle will go on sale at San Diego Ford dealers during the first quarter of 2012. Ford said … Next Page »

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High school and youth sports teams may lack the deep pockets of the pros, but they can still take advantage of technology for tracking game stats thanks to a New York startup. Angel investor-backed GameChanger Media offers coaches of young athletes a mobile platform that evolves record keeping from pen and paper to smartphones and tablets. “Coaches and scorekeepers of youth and high school teams have incredibly archaic tools for managing what is the most painful and time-consuming part of their job,” says GameChanger Media CEO Ted Sullivan.

His company offers youth teams a free app that lets them log game information, which they can then share in real-time with local news outlets and the public. Rather than jotting down notes on a clipboard, the teams punch in the numbers with their mobile devices. Initially designed for use by baseball and softball teams, the app is available for Android phones, iPhones and the iPad. Sullivan says another version of GameChanger Media’s platform is under development for basketball teams and is due out in beta by midyear 2012 with the full release expected by next winter.

Thanks in part to $1 million raised in November from angel investors, Sullivan says he expects to grow his staff of sixteen by 30 percent by the end of 2012. GameChanger Media has raised $3.5 million to date in total from private investors.

Founded in 2009, GameChanger Media released its app to the public in January 2010. Sullivan says in 2011, some 30,000 youth and high school teams across country and around the world adopted his company’s tools to record game stats. Amateur baseball governing body USA Baseball, youth sports program Little League International, and high school baseball team tournament host Perfect Game USA all use the platform, Sullivan says. The app is also catching on internationally, Sullivan says. “Our product is only in English, but we have teams from Korea to Germany using it,” he says.

While GameChanger Media’s platform is free for teams to use, the company also … Next Page »

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According to Bobby Ghoshal, the future of news consumption is in finding new ways for users to interact with content and influence other users’ reading habits, and the development of online “news personalities.” Ghoshal is the co-founder and CEO of Flud, a news aggregation app that unveiled its updated platform for the iPhone and iPad earlier this month. (The Android version is set to launch in January.)

With Flud, everyone has the potential to become a news source,” Ghoshal says. “It’s all about taking consumption and merging it with social networking.”

Flud’s new platform allows news enthusiasts to create their own news profiles, recommend content to their community, discover new information and sources from friends, and to build information networks around key interests. The San Diego-based startup recently received funding from Detroit Venture Partners and Detroit-based Ludlow Ventures.

What Flud aims to create is a sort of meta aggregator, where users are curating content to create individualized aggregation sites within the larger Flud ecosystem. If that sounds daunting to a novice, Flud has also created a “hit list” of content Ghoshal and other members of the Flud team consider especially worth reading. (For example, I discovered during my interview with Ghoshal that Xconomy is on that list.)

Flud thinks of its content as having three tiers. Tier 1 belongs to the publications that are ubiquitous at news stands: Time; Cosmo; Sports Illustrated. Tier 2 is the place for niche blogs that are widely read—think TechCrunch or Perez Hilton. Tier 3 is the home of blogs that may not be household names, but that have enough of a readership to stay relevant in the market.

Tier 3 is where Ghoshal sees a big opportunity with Flud users. The new platform includes a feature that allows users to see who else is reading an article at the same time they are. (Ghoshal calls it “serendipitous news discovery.”) Ghoshal is hoping that users will be pleasantly surprised to see 20 or 30 other people reading the same cult-favorite blog they are, and that will lead them to reach out for additional content recommendations.

Other new features in the updated platform include a Flud button, which allows users to endorse high-quality content; an activity feed to track what’s trending inside a user’s news circle; the ability to push content out to Tumblr and connect to Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Instapaper, and Read It Later accounts;  and synching across devices so that a user’s “news legacy” follows them from phone to tablet and vice versa.

It was the popularization of the tablet computer, Ghoshal says, that inspired he and Matthew Ausonio to found Flud in the first place. “The tablet was intriguing, and we guessed that using them to read news would be huge,” he says.

The initial app was launched in August 2010, but Ghoshal describes those … Next Page »

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San Diego-based VMIX has been revising its strategy, which was originally focused on providing a technology platform that enables TV stations and other media companies to stream online video. Earlier this year, VMIX began rolling out technology that allowed consumers to use the company’s video streaming technology on social media sites like Facebook.

Now the six-year-old startup is launching Givit, a new consumer-oriented business that makes it easy for users to share video privately. In contrast to posting a video on Facebook, where just about anyone can see it, Givit users can selectively send a private video link to designated friends and family.

After introducing a beta version of Givit last month, VMIX says today that users can download the Givit app for use on the iPhone and iPad. The technology was previously available as an app for Windows or Mac OS-based laptops and desktop PCs.

Basic Givit service is free; service that provides additional video storage capacity is available as a subscription. While there are plenty of competitors that already enable consumers to share videos online, VMIX says Givit is the only video-sharing service designed to restrict the people who can watch a video.

“One of our big value propositions is private video,” VMIX CEO Greg Kostello told me earlier this week. “There already are a number of ways to share video publicly through Facebook. But everyone who sees it is not necessarily a friend. They just friended me.”

In a statement from the company today, Kostello says, “Smartphones are now the camera of choice for recording everyday moments, but sharing mobile video is often a frustrating process. Givit makes it easy-and most importantly, by default we share securely and privately, rather than broadcasting your personal content across public social networks.”

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Time for our irregular, data-driven roundup of recent deals news from around San Francisco Bay. From biggest to smallest:

$50 million—The amount that Sunnyvale, CA-based Proofpoint hopes to raise in an upcoming initial public offering, according to S-1 registration papers filed with the SEC yesterday. The cloud security company’s leading venture investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures, Benchmark Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, DAG Ventures, and RRE Ventures.

$35 million—New funding from Swiss power giant ABB and Oak Investment Partners for GreenVolts, a Fremont, CA-based maker of concentrating photovoltaic systems. The company took the wraps off its technology yesterday, calling it “the industry’s first complete and fully integrated solar system, including modules, trackers, inverters, and energy management software.”

$30 million—A round of debt and option funding for Redwood City, CA-based Silver Spring Networks, a maker of advanced metering hardware and software for utilities. The lion’s share of the funding, $24 million, came from Hopkinton, MA-based EMC, which announced that Silver Spring’s system will tap EMC’s Greenplum analytics platform.

$17.8 million—New funding for TaskRabbit, the San Francisco-based service networking startup. Xconomy’s Greg Huang detailed the funding yesterday; participants included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, Floodgate Fund, Collaborative Fund, and Shasta Ventures.

$14 million—A Series B financing round for Prezi, the Budapest, Hungary- and San Francisco-based startup offering a cloud-based presentation tool. Accel Partners led the round, which was joined by existing investor Sunstone Capital.

$10 million—Series A funding from IDG-Accel for BlueSprig, a new San Francisco startup offering utility software for iOS and Android mobile devices. BlueSprig’s first app, AirCover, combines cloud backup, security, and family safety features.

$7 million—Total venture financing raised by Rypple, the cloud-based human resources management company to be acquired by Salesforce.com for an undisclosed amount. With offices in Toronto and San Francisco, Rypple was backed by Edgestone Capital Partners, Extreme Venture Partners, and Bridgescale Partners. In a seeming dig at Rypple competitor SuccessFactors, Salesforce.com said it would relaunch Rypple as part of a new human capital management division called “SuccessForce.”

$3.5 million—A Series A funding round announced December 13 for San Francisco-based Life360, which makes a popular family safety app for smartphone owners. The new backers included Fontinalis Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Venture51, Bullpen Capital, Social Leverage, and EchoVC Partners, as well as previous seed-round investors.

$1.725 million—The amount of a Federal Highway Administration grant for San Francisco- and San Diego-based peer-to-peer car sharing company Getaround. The startup says it will use the funds to expand service to Portland, OR, in the first quarter of 2012.

$1.5 million—A seed funding round for MixRank, a Y Combinator Summer 2011 startup offering a Web display ad intelligence platform that helps advertisers track how well their own ads and and competitors’ ads are performing. Contributors to the round include 500 Startups, Mark Cuban, Rich LeFurgy, Peter Bordes, Robert Afshar, Larry Braitman, David Beyer, Tom McInerney, Matt Ocko, and Zachary Bogue.

1 million—The number of iPhone and iPod touch owners who downloaded the new Flipboard iPhone app during the first week after its launch, according to an announcement yesterday from the Palo Alto company. We took a look at the new Flipboard app last week.

766,000—The number of unique visitors to tech news site ReadWriteWeb in November. San Francisco-based vertical advertising network Say Media said yesterday that it’s acquiring the site for an undisclosed sum. Xconomy examined Say Media’s niche-publishing strategy in a May 2011 profile.

100—G-Pad‘s ranking in the iTunes list of most popular free iPad apps as of last night, just 24 hours after its launch. The app, from the same San Francisco startup that makes the Facebook app MyPad, is designed to help people manage their Google+, Gmail, and Twitter accounts.

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Shoppers with iPhones will be able to discover Nike products in a virtual way at Finish Line stores today, thanks to technology from GoldRun in New York. GoldRun raised $1.2 million in a seed round in April with a plan to conquer an emerging field: augmented reality, which is technology that adds images, sounds, or contextual information to content viewed on mobile devices. The company’s idea is to help brands virtually insert their products into consumers’ lives.

GoldRun CEO and co-founder Vivian Rosenthal says her company’s technology put virtual Nike Air Max shoes inside Finish Line stores for the new promotional campaign that shoppers can only see by using the cameras on their mobile devices.

It’s an idea that’s quickly gaining traction in the advertising and media industries. GoldRun has already landed work with Ford, HBO’s True Blood series, and retailer H&M, among others. With the help of GoldRun’s technology, these brands are creating virtual experiences for their customers and fans.

For example, viewers of True Blood can download the free GoldRun app from Apple’s iTunes App Store and use it to insert the characters in the show into photos they take with the smartphone’s camera. “Fans can be watching the show and take a photo with one of the characters on their couch,” says Rosenthal.

Users can also search their own surroundings with their iPhone cameras for images placed virtually in designated geographic areas on behalf of GoldRun’s clients. That could include shoes, dresses, or other objects. The app also lets users superimpose a product they may want—such as a new car—in a photo taken of an empty driveway.

Rosenthal says augmented reality offers marketers a way to reach customers in the real world that goes beyond the check-in model made popular by Foursquare. “A check-in from a brand or advertising perspective doesn’t bring that much value because it’s not visually driven,” she says. The limitations of other technology, she adds, motivated her to create GoldRun. “I realized advertising agencies and brands needed a platform where they weren’t spending tons of money and time developing one-off apps,” she says.

With augmented reality, Rosenthal says, brands can connect the social experience with a visual experience. “It can be any kind of product, message, or content as a virtual layer on top of reality,” she says. GoldRun, she says, can also tie the images to rewards such as discounts or the option to buy products.

GoldRun charges each client by the number of “hot zones” it establishes. These are … Next Page »

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Gadget girl walks in carrying a red umbrella. It’s not just any red umbrella, though. This one is a “blunt” umbrella. It has round tips, instead of pointy ones, so you don’t poke people in the eye as you walk down a crowded street. It also has what looks like a special tensioning system along the underside of its edges, to withstand high winds and keep the thing from blowing inside-out.

Gadget girl also has touchscreen gloves with her. These are fashionable-looking items with special conductive fingertips—it’s all in the threading—so you can use your iPhone, iPad, or other capacitive touchscreen device in cold weather. (Plus, with the gloves, you can save on your home heating bill so you can afford more gadgets.)

Gadget girl is Fatma Yalcin, a recent MIT Sloan School grad and startup CEO. She found both of the above items on Curisma, the gadget-discovery site she started with Eugene Gorelik earlier this year.

The idea is to provide a social platform for finding and sharing new technologies and products. Users can sign in and post gadgets they like—everything from inkless pens to a “magic cube” that projects a keyboard onto any surface—and others can follow them, recommend products, see the most popular items, and sign up for a personalized feed. The site sends users to other retailers if they want to buy a gadget, but Curisma plans to make money by working with brands and eventually enabling people to make purchases through the site itself.

“It’s the power of community meets personalization, and it’s all determined by you,” Yalcin says. “Within a year, we’d like to reach half a million users.”

Curisma, which operates out of Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge, MA, has some features in common with personalized product sites like Pinterest, Daily Grommet, Krush, and Stylefeeder (acquired by Time), as well as private sales … Next Page »

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