As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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It’s a question as old as human nature. You’ve heard the stories, you know all the famous examples. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Eisner, the list goes on. All difficult characters with strong personalities—and hugely successful companies.

So, in today’s ultra-competitive tech and business world, does a CEO have to be an asshole to be successful?

First of all, let’s get our terminology straight. There’s no hard and fast definition of the term, but you know it when you see it. Bullying or backstabbing behavior towards subordinates or partners? Check. Public humiliation of employees? Sure thing. Tantrums, abrasive language, egomania, and other unprofessional displays? Yep. (See a related Xconomy story about bad bosses.) But more subtly, there’s stuff like not returning messages, passing people off to underlings, talking way too much, and saying different things to different people. And more generally, not caring what other people think. Which, of course, can also be a very good thing.

Some months ago, a group of prominent Boston-area tech CEOs discussed this question of “assholicism”—rhymes with Catholicism—at their regular meet-up. Some may have felt they should be tougher leaders or negotiators. Some wanted to pick up management tips and strategies. Others were reflective about their own styles that have served them well. So…is it necessary to be a jerk? Apparently the discussion took all day (and even came up in multiple meetings).

The upshot: Yes, a CEO has to be somewhat of a jerk to succeed. At least, it can be helpful—but there were plenty of caveats.

“It was concluded on some level that this was the case,” says Dave Balter, the CEO of BzzAgent (owned by Tesco’s Dunnhumby), who was part of the group. “But there was a huge amount of debate and not everyone agreed.”

One of those dissenters would be Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, the fast-growing marketing tech firm. Reached by e-mail, Halligan said that being a jerk “used to work” for leaders, but that “it is not acceptable today.”

His main reasons—neither of which I would call deeply fundamental to human psychology or the nature of leadership—are that “smart GenY-ers don’t put up with that stuff,” and that corporate information flow and reputations have become more transparent, so CEOs can’t get away with bad behavior anymore. It “used to be that information was centralized at the asshole,” he writes.

I also pinged Brad Feld, the tech entrepreneur-investor, while he was in town. He was unequivocal that good leaders don’t have to be jerks. “Some of the sweetest people in the world are super successful CEOs,” he says.

So perhaps there are deeper trends at work here. … Next Page »

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Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW), the New York parent company of Maynard, MA-based Monster.com, the jobs and recruiting site, said in a regulatory filing that it has laid off about 400 employees, or 7 percent of its worldwide staff of 5,700.

The layoffs include fewer than 100 job cuts in Massachusetts, according to the Boston Business Journal. No more specifics on that were available.

In the Form 8-K, Monster Worldwide says it is taking a “series of strategic restructuring actions” in 2012 to invest in marketing and sales and “improve its long-term growth prospects and profitability.” The company says it is consolidating some office facilities as part of the restructuring.

Monster reported fourth-quarter 2011 revenues of $250 million and a $13 million profit. The company made a $46 million profit for the year, compared to a loss of $9 million in 2010. Monster’s stock is down about 13 percent to $7.80 this morning.

Last spring, Monster.com spoke with me about its recent efforts in mobile apps and social media partnerships. The company has been investing heavily in R&D to keep up with a slew of newer, hip competitors.

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

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

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

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

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

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Hey Seattle, are you feeling above average?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From cloudy Seattle to the vast suburbs of Silicon Valley, we covered a lot of ground on MIT Sloan’s recent technology trek, which concluded with a leg in Boston.

The first stop was Seattle where it was predictably raining. Visiting Amazon, Microsoft, and Adobe, we came away with an appreciation for how much tech activity is actually going on in that city.

At Microsoft, we got to talk to alumni about what it’s like to work there. Yes, it’s a large company and therefore bureaucratic, they confessed. But, the huge plus is that they have the resources to work on some very innovative projects. Amazon also was big, but the theme there was its quirkiness. In addition to all of the desks being made out of doors, they also have whiteboards everywhere, even in the elevators. I made sure to leave an “MIT Sloan was here” tag in one of the elevators!

Adobe seemed like a more typical office where they provide a pleasant work environment with lots of exposed brick and wood. Overall, I could really see myself enjoying working in Seattle.

Moving on to Silicon Valley, it was noticeably sunnier and warmer. It was also a lot bigger. In Seattle, you could probably get by with just a bike and public transit, but good luck to anyone who tries that in Silicon Valley. Here, you definitely need a car. Being settled with a family might help too, as the area is comprised of endless suburbs punctuated by large office parks where the tech companies are located.

If you want to live where the action is, you’d need to get a job in San Francisco or do the 40-minute commute each way and hope for no traffic. I guess I should point out that Palo Alto does have a downtown, but it’s just two or three streets and most people would still have to drive there.

As for the tech companies, most of the ones we visited were in Silicon Valley and all offered quite a lot of amenities compared to what we saw in Seattle. Free food, gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and acupuncture were just some of the perks you get at most of these companies. I guess they need these things to entice people not only to live away from the city, but also to work some pretty long hours.

For example, the employees at Facebook—who all seemed to be in their 20s—joked that working at some firms in the Valley is like working in a sweatshop. Employees are expected to work extremely hard, but they also provide an endless amount of food that includes a rotating candy of the week. Facebook keeps its employees well fed, caffeinated, and hydrated with the largest cafeteria of all the tech companies we visited.

Google had a similar environment with lots of … Next Page »

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

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

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

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I guess Werner Vogels changed his mind. Amazon.com’s chief technology officer told me a couple years ago that his company had no intention of opening a Boston office. MIT engineers, he said, had no problem moving out west to Seattle to join the e-retail technology giant. I thought that was kind of strange, but Amazon has always done things its own way.

Now it appears the company (NASDAQ: AMZN) is about to establish a beachhead in Cambridge, MA. According to a report by Scott Kirsner in Boston.com, Amazon is in the process of hiring engineering and research talent and is looking for about 40,000 square feet of office space in the Kendall Square area, slated to open in February. The company has not confirmed any of this publicly, and will probably try to keep it quiet as long as it can. Kirsner speculates that the timing might have to do with changes in sales tax laws.

We’ll have more on this developing story as details surface. If the report is accurate, the impact on the Boston area, and Kendall Square in particular, could be really significant.

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Another day, another (wholly unscientific) survey from Men’s Health indicating Detroit is a crappy place to live. This time, they’ve named the Motor City the second saddest city in the United States; in August, the lad mag skewered residents of our fair city for not buying iPads fast enough.

This time around, they’ve created their list of top “frown towns” by culling suicide-rate data from the Centers for Disease Control and unemployment figures through June 2011 from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They also used SimplyMap to determine the percentage of households that use antidepressants, as well as the number of people who report feeling blue all or most of the time. So which cities, according to the Men’s Health methodology, were the happiest? Honolulu; Manchester, NH; and Fargo, ND.

Since this Detroiter, for one, doesn’t care to dwell in the negative, let’s take a look at some of the other headlines floating around lately:

• Last week, the Associated Press found that Michigan’s drop in unemployment during October 2011 was one of the highest in the nation.
• The Business Journals reported that Ann Arbor, MI is the smartest U.S. city with 100,000 or more residents. In Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, a whopping 72 percent of all adults age 25 or older hold a bachelor’s degree. (Incidentally, Ann Arbor beat out two other Xconomy towns—Cambridge, MA and Berkeley, CA—for brainiest city honors.)
• Forbes called Detroit the 40th best place in the nation to land a tech job. I know what you’re thinking. “40th? Big whoop!” Maybe, but the magazine also had this to say: “How about other potential up and comers for the coming decade? … The first: Detroit. Though the Motor City area lost 20 percent of its tech jobs in the past decade (ranking 40th on our list), it still boasts one of the nation’s largest concentrations of tech workers, nearly 50 percent above the national average. In the past two years, the region has experienced a solid 7.7 percent increase in technology jobs, the second highest rate of any metro area. The Motor City region seems to have some real high-tech mojo. According to the website Dice.com, Detroit has led the nation with the fastest growth in technology job offerings since February—at 101 percent. This can be traced to the rejuvenated auto industry, which is increasingly dependent on high-tech skills. Manufacturing is increasingly prodigious driver of tech jobs; games and dot-coms are not the only path to technical employment growth.”
• According to a recent U-M forecast, Michigan is on target to end 2011 with a net gain of jobs—something that hasn’t happened in more than a decade.

So forget you, Men’s Health. I was stuck in Fargo for a day in the 1990s during a road trip from Michigan to Montana. What I remember about Fargo is the dearth of open prarie, ghost town streets, and that the best meal I ate there came from Subway. I think I’ll stay in Detroit.

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In San Diego, Connect is the non-profit organization that reaches into most corners of the local innovation community. Connect likes to say that it has assisted in the formation of more than 3,000 technology and life sciences companies in the area, and more than 50 cities around the world have emulated its programs for mentoring entrepreneurs and supporting startups.

Under CEO (and San Diego Xconomist) Duane Roth, Connect began issuing a quarterly report in 2009 to provide a more comprehensive measure of the relative health and wealth of San Diego’s innovation economy. Connect also hired a full-time lobbyist early last year to represent the interests of San Diego’s innovation community before legislators in both Sacramento and Washington, D.C.

These two things have come together in the latest innovation report, under a section in the full report that outlines “Seven Innovation Policy Ideas to Spark an American Recovery.” Roth tells me they encompass recommendations that San Diego’s life sciences and high-tech leaders have pulled together over the past two months as legislative priorities to be pursued over the next year.

Yet as Jessie Womble, Connect’s associate director for public policy, puts it, “We can’t expect to get anything passed that’s just for San Diego, so this is part of a national agenda.” In other words, these ideas should also be good medicine for the health of other U.S. regions with innovation clusters.

I’ve distilled the seven ideas with some background information from Connect below:

—Increase the monetary cap on direct public offerings by small companies to allow new opportunities for emerging companies to raise capital.
The SEC adopted “Regulation A” to provide smaller companies a less burdensome process to raise capital through direct public offerings. The cost of compliance with regulatory burdens, however, makes the $5 million cap unworkable and little-used. Proposed legislation would increase the outdated cap under Regulation A from $5 million to $50 million, allowing emerging companies to raise new capital through “mini-offerings.”

—Create an incentive for U.S. corporations to “repatriate” their foreign earnings from overseas and direct the capital flow into emerging technology research and commercialization.
H.R. 1036—the Job Creation and Innovation Investment Act of 2011—accomplishes this by setting a zero percent tax rate for global companies that return their … Next Page »

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A comprehensive snapshot of San Diego’s innovation economy shows that 76 technology startups were formed during the three months that ended June 30, a nearly 20 percent increase over the 64 startups established during the same quarter last year.

Counting the 70 new tech companies formed during the first quarter, a total of 146 startups sprouted here during the first half of 2011, according to the latest Connect Innovation Report, which covers innovation activity in the San Diego area during the second quarter of 2011. The full report is available here.

Connect’s innovation report also highlights rising tech employment, a three-fold increase in the total value of M&A deals involving tech companies, and a historic high for patent applications. The report was prepared by Connect, the nonprofit group supporting San Diego innovation and entrepreneurship.

Taken as a whole, the indicators suggest that economic activity was improving for thousands of local life sciences, technology, and defense companies during the first half of 2011. For example, the 146 new companies founded during the first six months of 2011 marked a nearly 48 percent jump over the 99 new companies formed during the first half of 2010.

But the encouraging vital signs measured in the report were taken before this summer, when U.S. markets were unsettled by a variety of political and economic setbacks, both foreign and domestic.

Those broader economic concerns could have been a factor in a nationwide survey of CEO confidence conducted during the third quarter by Vistage International. The survey, which Connect included in its full report, found that small-business CEOs anticipate a slowdown in the pace of economic growth amid record-high economic uncertainty. Generally speaking, that means small companies are more cautious about making investments and slower to hire new workers. The September survey of 1,710 small business CEOs resulted in … Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Economists from the UCLA Anderson Forecast and University of San Diego will break out details of their 2012 economic outlook at a conference in downtown San Diego this morning. The study was released earlier today. We have highlights, along with a roundup of last week’s San Diego tech news.

—Job growth in the nation, state, and San Diego remains the biggest concern in the 2012 economic outlook being released today by the UCLA Anderson Forecast. The San Diego economy will “continue to grind along with slightly positive job growth… mirroring the softening forecasted for the nation and state,” according to University of San Diego economists Ryan Ratcliff and Alan Gin, who prepared the local economic outlook for the next three to four quarters. They say, “Unfortunately, this job growth will just barely keep up with the growth of the labor force.” They see unemployment holding steady at 10 percent in San Diego County. The California forecast sees virtually no growth in employment, with the jobless rate stuck at 12 percent. The forecast predicts very modest national economic growth of 2.5 percent to 3 percent, with nationwide unemployment at 8.6 percent.

—Japan’s Sony Corp. agreed to pay almost $1.5 billion to buy Ericsson’s share in Sony Ericsson, the joint venture the two global giants formed 10 years ago to make wireless handsets. The deal could pose ramifications for San Diego-based Sony Electronics, part of Sony’s U.S. operations. By buying out its Swedish partner, Sony is expected to integrate smartphones produced by its new handset business with Sony’s existing expertise in consumer electronics, as well as games, music, and movies.

—In a separate announcement, Sony said its U.S. subsidiary based in New York has acquired Redmond, WA-based Micronics, which is focused on developing “point of care” medical devices. Financial terms of the buyout were not disclosed. This deal also could involve Sony’s operations in San Diego, which has been emerging as a hub for both biomedical diagnostics and wireless healthcare. The Japanese giant said it bought Micronics to accelerate its own R&D in point-of-care diagnostics, and to accelerate the commercialization of Micronics’ other point-of-care devices.

—The Consumer Electronics Association showcased wireless health at its annual industry forum in San Diego last week. The CEA says a study on the role of technology in consumer health and wellness found that consumers are interested in communicating with their doctors via wireless devices. The study says 36 percent of those polled said they would be interested in sending health data to their doctor via a wireless device; 33 percent are interested in managing their health records online; and 32 percent would be willing to consult with their doctor via online video.

—U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra told a consumer electronics industry forum that government initiatives in technology innovation are leading to a host of success stories in communications, from helping to find lost children to fostering better collaborations among police, fire, and other emergency “first responders,” according to the Consumer Electronics Association. In a keynote speech during the CEA Industry Forum in San Diego, Chopra named Compete.org as a website where entrepreneurs can find information about incentive prize competitions and other challenges the government has established.

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[Updated 4:35 pm] Bedford, MA-based iRobot laid off about 55 people last week from its government and industrial robots division, Xconomy has learned. I heard from a source familiar with the company that some of the layoffs came to light because ex-employees posted on social media looking for new positions. An iRobot spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The staff cuts come as the pioneering robotics company (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced its third quarter financial results this afternoon. The press release mentions that the company “implemented a reduction in force” because of “expectations for a reduction in government-funded research in 2012.” There is an earnings conference call scheduled for 8:30 am Eastern Time tomorrow.

The last significant layoff at iRobot was back in 2008, but this one is bigger, according to my source. The latest staff reduction is also notable because it affects the biggest division in the company—the one that houses some of its most famous products, like the PackBot military robot.

I have heard that iRobot has roughly 550 employees, which would make the layoff about 10 percent of the firm’s total workforce. Those numbers are not confirmed, however.

In the past year, Xconomy has reported on iRobot’s progress and expansion in Michigan, among other things. It’s not yet clear in which cities the staff cuts have occurred.

[Updated with comments from iRobot] A company spokesperson just confirmed the layoffs, but with slightly different numbers: “We can confirm that iRobot Corporation has had a reduction in force. This difficult action was taken based on our current view of future defense spending and a shift in program structure. In 2012 we see a significant decrease in our externally funded research and development. This transition from development to production requires our Government and Industrial robot division to reduce the size of its workforce. The reduction accounted for approximately 8 percent of the total workforce.

“We will be addressing this on the call tomorrow.”

[Updated 5:40 pm] iRobot has confirmed that 55 full-time employees were let go from the company’s offices in Bedford, MA; Durham, NC; and San Luis Obispo, CA.

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Big-data company EMC plans to add 200 jobs at its Seattle-based Isilon branch through 2012, filling out spacious new offices in the city’s Pioneer Square neighborhood—and leading to another hunt for office space in the not-too-distant future.

Add those 200 new jobs to the 430 Isilon workers already in Seattle, and some additional people from other divisions of EMC (NYSE: EMC) in the area, and the new 140,000 square-foot offices just north of the Seahawks and Mariners stadiums will fill up fast, EMC Isilon president Sujal Patel said Wednesday.

“Certainly, more space is already on our mind,” Patel said. “Our intention is to build out this facility and our Pioneer Square presence. For us, this is an ideal hub for building great technology and there’s lots of innovative companies in this area. It’s a great place to be.”

The jobs announcement, which also featured comments from EMC CEO Joe Tucci and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn, also served as a bit of an update to Hopkinton, MA-based EMC’s blockbuster $2.25 billion acquision of Isilon, which was officially announced late last year.

Isilon would have reported about $200 million in revenue last year if it had remained a standalone company, Patel said, and recently doubled in size year-over-year as a unit of EMC.

When the acquisition closed, Patel said, Isilon had just over 500 employees, mostly based in Seattle. Now, Isilon has more than 850 people, with 430 in the Seattle office. And the 200 new jobs on the table for Seattle over the next 15 months “is really just a fraction of the jobs that in the Isilon division we’ll be adding worldwide,” Patel said.

Tucci said the ramp-up of EMC’s Seattle center fits with the company’s strategy of building large tech hubs around the country. It already has major centers in the Boston area, the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle will probably be the fastest-growing of those centers, he said.

“Our model is to take the great things that Isilon is doing and invest more cash,” Tucci said. “It’s a terrific city, and you can count on that we’ll continue our expansion here.”

McGinn said the Isilon expansion was emblematic of a makeover of the Pioneer Square area, and the city government’s drive to provide a strong base for high-quality, innovative companies to locate and expand in the city.

On that note, Isilon’s Pioneer Square offices are actually just one floor down from the Seattle headquarters of Nuance Communications, which just announced the acquisition of Seattle touchscreen-input startup Swype. (And Swype itself was also in the neighborhood).

“One of the things that Sujal told me … was he wasn’t the only person with the idea that having new ways to manage large amounts of data was going to be a growth industry. A couple hundred companies had that idea. Not many are left,” McGinn said. “So it’s a highly competitive environment out there.”

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Mobile technologies were the topic of the week as the wireless industry’s big enterprise & applications conference came to town. But we also had some interesting economic new, and our Xconomy week in review begins now.

—The number of wireless-connected devices around the world will double by 2010, from roughly 12 billion to about 24 billion, according to a study released by the London-based GSMA industry group on the first day of the CTIA Enterprise & Applications Conference in San Diego. About half of the 24 million devices are expected to be machine-to-machine connections, with personal mobile devices making up the other 12 billion.

—A TechCrunch report that Hewlett-Packard was laying off “around 500″ employees and rolling up its entire San Diego Software unit set off a scramble last week among local media, which knocked down much of the report. Mike Freeman of The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that HP is eliminating about 50 jobs at its suburban campus related to help desk and analytics products, which came from HP’s $425 million acquisition of Peregrine Systems in 2005.

—The Ford Motor Co. demonstrated a voice-activated system that could someday help motorists monitor their own health and chronic illnesses on the road. Ford’s prototype uses voice-recognition software to help diabetic motorists who use wireless glucose measurement technology to monitor their blood glucose while driving. K. Venkatesh Prasad, a senior technical leader at Ford Research & Innovation, told the Wireless Health 2011 technical conference that Ford’s in-car health and wellness technology is part of a broader effort to expand the capabilities of Ford’s SYNC in-car connectivity system.

—Local technology industries have had a disproportionate effect in boosting San Diego’s regional economy, according to a study from the National University System Institute for Policy Research. Counting direct, indirect, and induced employment, the study found that San Diego’s 363,000 technology-dependant jobs represent more than 29 percent of all jobs in … Next Page »

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San Diego’s high-tech sectors did not escape unscathed from the great recession of 2007-2009, but a new study says local technology industries have had a disproportionate effect in boosting the regional economy in recent years.

Using state employment data, the study released yesterday by the National University System Institute for Policy Research counted just over 6,000 high-tech employers in this region last year—or about 6 percent of all employers (with payrolls) in the San Diego region.

Yet these 6,000 companies directly employed 138,800 workers, or 11.2 percent of the total regional workforce in 2010. Using standard economic modeling, the institute estimated that San Diego’s technology industries indirectly created an additional 103,800 jobs last year, and induced another 120,400. The total—363,000 technology-dependant jobs—represents more than 29 percent, or close to a third of all jobs in the San Diego area.

Wages paid by technology companies have had an even-more disproportionate effect on the regional economy in recent years, according to the institute’s analysis. It shows the average annual wage of workers directly employed by technology companies in San Diego at $93,800 in 2010, more than double the $45,000 average annual wage paid by non-technology companies.

Accordingly, overall labor income generated directly by technology jobs reached $15.7 billion in 2010. The study found another $12.3 billion was generated by indirect and induced labor income, totaling $28 billion—or 45 percent of all labor income generated in the San Diego region last year.

San Diego’s technology sectors shed some jobs during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, contributing to a county unemployment rate that still stands at slightly more than 10 percent, according to August unemployment data. (The statewide unemployment rate in California was nearly 12 percent in August.) But technology employment held up much better than the overall  job market, according to the study. Employment in most tech sectors had returned to 2007 levels by 2010—except in computer and electronics manufacturing, which declined 8 percent, from 13,700 to 12,600 jobs throughout San Diego County.

In contrast to all other technology sectors, the number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical jobs actually increased by almost 21 percent in San Diego County during the recession—from 17,300 jobs in 2007 to 20,900 jobs in 2010.

The institute analyzed economic trends in nine high-tech sectors, based on a standard federal job classification system. The nine sectors are biomedical products, biotechnology and pharmaceutical, communications equipment, computer and electronics, defense and transportation, environmental technology, recreational goods, software, and technology consulting services.

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We’re quickly moving to a new world where the wealth gap is compounding and increasing. We’re moving to a world that is going to look a lot like Hollywood: a few people enjoying insane success … and everyone else spends their days waiting tables.

The delta between A-players and B-players in companies has always been high. A-players get promoted faster and they earn more. My guess is that an A-player earns about 30 percent more than a B-player in that same position for most professions. An A-player administrative assistant usually can earn about 30 percent more than a B-player in the same position. That’s a significant difference and even more when you compound that difference in savings and lifestyle over the course of one’s career.

In some professions like sales and entertainment, an A-player might earn 300 percent more than a B-player and essentially live an entirely different lifestyle. In the future, everyone’s jobs will look more like salespeople.

Let’s focus on the profession I am most familiar with: software engineers.

Today, an A-player software engineer has a lot more job prospects than a B-player. That seems obvious. But there are plenty of B-player and C-player engineers that work at great companies and get paid well. Their services are needed and important. And while they don’t make the contributions that an A-player makes, they still are very valuable to a company and have a lot of importance to the success of an organization.

But things are changing (queue in the Darth Vader music).

There are three forces that will drastically change work, compensation, and our value to each other forever:

1. A productivity boom will automate B- and C-player work.
2. Globalization will commoditize B- and C-player work.
3. A-players can have much more impact.

The productivity boom will automate your job.

Everyone is massively more productive today than they were just a few years ago. A salesperson can use tools like Salesforce.com to track customers, LinkedIn to find prospects, and they can easily call and send documents from the road with their iPhones (unless they are on AT&T). The Internet makes all of us extremely productive and automates parts of our jobs.

In the 1990s, I was a software developer and I remember writing a script to determine if a string was a valid e-mail address. It took about 12 hours for me to write. First, I had to research what could and could not be in an e-mail address (dashes are ok, commas are not, only one “@” symbol, etc.) and there were a bunch of corner cases that I had to guard against and test against. After coding into the night, I finally came up with something I was proud of.

Today those 12 hours of work would take about 1.2 seconds. There are hundreds of libraries that have been written by really smart people and tested by thousands of programs. All one has to do is … Next Page »

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Jobs are the single biggest political issue of the day in the U.S., and rightly so. As of August, the official unemployment rate in the United States stood at 9.1 percent. That was down one point from the October 2009 peak of 10.1 percent, but still higher than at any time since the 1930s, with the exception of the worst months of the 1982-83 recession. And today’s real unemployment rate, if you include discouraged workers who have stopped searching for jobs and people who have settled for part-time positions, is much higher, at around 16 percent. That translates into 25 million Americans who need work.

That’s a terrifying number, because no one knows how the country might create that many new jobs. Let’s say President Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill were enacted in its current form (an unlikely prospect, given the levels of partisan obstructionism in Congress). The most optimistic estimates from economists are that the new spending in the bill would add only 2 million jobs to the economy in 2012. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it’s a tenth of what’s really needed.

On top of that, technology-driven productivity gains are allowing American corporations to rack up big profits despite their trimmed-down workforces. So even if consumer demand were to magically return to pre-recession levels, companies probably wouldn’t hire back all the people they’ve laid off since 2008.

Could there a technological cure for unemployment? Ever since the 2005 introduction of Amazon Mechanical Turk, a Web service that pays users small amounts for completing tasks such as transcribing short audio recordings or recognizing an object in a picture, tech pundits have been talking about the benefits of digital crowdsourcing. It’s been portrayed both as a way for companies to get work done cheaply and as a source of supplemental income for casual Internet users with a little time to kill. But with the joblessness picture looking so dire, observers are now starting to ask if crowdsourcing technology could play a more central role in economic recovery. Could Internet-mediated “microwork,” as this kind of employment is being called, give millions of people a way to earn meaningful amounts of income?

Mechanical Turk, by itself, certainly isn’t a panacea. As a service, it’s not terribly inviting or easy to use, and Amazon itself has never expressed much ambition to improve or expand it. And by definition, Mechanical Turk workers need a computer to complete tasks, which leaves out a big slice of the unemployed population.

Here in San Francisco, though, there are at least four organizations taking Amazon’s idea and tweaking it to make microwork more feasible for broader populations. One is Samasource, a non-profit that distributes computer-based tasks such as data verification and audio and text transcription to workers in Haiti, India, Kenya, Pakistan, South Africa, and Uganda. Another is Servio, which creates crowdsourced editorial content for clients using a platform called CloudCrowd. Then there’s CrowdFlower, a kind of meta-platform that helps big, Fortune 500 companies with data management tasks by farming out the work to Mechanical Turk, Samasource, and other crowdsourcing engines. Finally, there’s a new player called MobileWorks; it’s a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers digital work to underemployed people in India and Pakistan, but with an emphasis on tasks that don’t require a computer and can be completed using only an Internet-connected mobile phone.

Yesterday I called up MobileWorks co-founder and CEO Anand Kulkarni to find out how people are using his platform, and whether the technology might offer hope for unemployed people here in the United States. As you might expect, he’s bullish on … Next Page »

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