What’s in a tech startup name? More specifically, is there a correlation between the type of name a company has and its success?

That’s a question every startup founder and investor should be interested in. Because if there is a correlation, then using a name-based strategy for picking winners would be, well, about as good as any other strategy. And much faster.

Consider the following companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. And more recently, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga. Or how about these biggies: Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm. These are all top companies, no doubt about it.

Notice anything about their names? None of them has a capital letter in the middle of its name—sometimes referred to as “camel case,” because an upper-case letter in the middle of a word looks like a hump. (Of course, there’s also plenty of startup name-ology around whether to use real words, made-up words, misspelled words, acronyms, and so forth, but we don’t have all day.)

Maybe I’m getting punchy as the holidays loom, but as an end-of-year exercise, I thought we’d play the name game and see where it leads. So let’s drill down into some specifics. What I’m really talking about are company names that are two words mashed into one, where each word or part could stand on its own. Because there are so damn many of them these days. Not just Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Rackspace, mind you, but also Admeld, Airbnb, Dropbox, Foursquare, Zipcar, Wayfair, Redfin, Evernote, Flipboard, Shopkick…and the list goes on.

Note that the above companies—all of whom are doing reasonably well, I think—spell their names without the camel case. It’s Facebook, not FaceBook. Salesforce, not SalesForce. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Historically, camel-case companies have had their share of difficulties. Consider the plight of AltaVista, the early search engine that lost out to Google. Or of struggling MySpace, which seems to have actually changed its moniker to Myspace—exactly my point, of course. More recently, GlassHouse, the cloud computing and virtualization company, withdrew its plans for an IPO earlier this month (for the second time). BlackBerry hasn’t done much to … Next Page »

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All this talk about quarterly earnings and venture stats reminded me: I never posted my favorite stories from Xconomy Boston’s third quarter.

Yes, I know it’s almost the end of October, and the third quarter ended a month ago. I must have been traumatized by the collapse of the Red Sox or something (is baseball still going on?). Go ahead, run me out of town like Theo and Tito.

This time, I’m not consulting with my colleagues. I’m a rebel, a maverick. I work alone. Without further ado, here are my favorite stories from July through September:

Top 10 Tech Stories:

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The latest venture capital stats for the first quarter of 2011 are a mixed bag. Maybe it’ll take a little longer for the Boston area to witness what a lot of people are calling the new tech bubble.

Venture firms poured $639 million into 90 New England companies in the first three months of this year. That’s down 19 percent from the $790 million that was invested (in 102 deals) in the same period a year ago. But it’s a 13 percent increase over the $566 million (in 93 deals) in the fourth quarter of 2010.

That’s all according to the MoneyTree Report, prepared by the National Venture Capital Association, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Thomson Reuters. (The trend is in rough agreement with the Massachusetts numbers from CB Insights, which my colleague Bruce summarized yesterday.)

Looking at the 10 biggest New England investments from the quarter (see below), about half of them were biotech-related, but the top deal went to Harvest Power, a waste-to-energy startup. And tech/software companies accounted for three deals.

Here’s the top 10 VC deals list for the first quarter, according to MoneyTree, with links to our coverage:

1. Harvest Power, Waltham, MA, $51.7 million

2. RainDance Technologies, Lexington, MA, $37.5 million

3. Genocea Biosciences, Cambridge, MA, $35.1 million

4. HubSpot, Cambridge, MA, $32 million

5. CardioFocus, Marlborough, MA, $30.6 million

6. Movik Networks, Littleton, MA, $25 million

7. Constitution Medical Investors, Boston, MA, $20 million (a little bit about this investment firm here)

8. Euthymics Bioscience, Cambridge, MA, $17.2 million

9. Living Proof, Cambridge, MA, $16 million

10. Gemvara, Lexington, MA, $15 million

And here are some other notable financings we’ve seen in the past three months that didn’t make MoneyTree’s top 10 list from Q1:

—Blueprint Medicines, Cambridge, MA, $40 million (might count for Q2 2011)

—Qteros, Marlborough, MA, $22 million (might be from Q4 2010)

—Jumptap, Cambridge, MA, $20 million (company hasn’t confirmed any details)

—iWalk, Cambridge, MA, $15 million (might be from Q4 2010)

—SCVNGR, Cambridge, MA, $15 million (might be from Q4 2010)

—SustainX, West Lebanon, NH, $14.4 million

—ExaGrid Systems, Westborough, MA, $10.6 million (the only Boston-area firm in the Wall Street Journal’s recent list of top 50 venture-backed companies)

—DataXu, Boston, MA, $10 million (from the MoneyTree list, but not reported in the media)

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Everyone loves a Top 50 list. Everyone except me.

Wall Street Journal, you can take your “Top 50 venture backed companies” list, published today, and…well, just take it. Not just because it counts a grand total of one—ONE—Boston-area company among its luminaries (Westborough, MA-based ExaGrid, at #42). Not just because the criteria for the list are pretty arbitrary (it’s determined by a formula that includes VC track record, amount of capital raised, and Dow Jones VentureWire editors’ picks). And not just because 35 of the 50 companies are based in California (mostly Silicon Valley). But because the companies you have picked to be “the next big thing” in terms of “technological breakthroughs” look to be just plain boring.

OK, I’m probably overreacting. The list is good if you think enterprise health benefits, enterprise Wi-Fi, sales compensation management, and wireless infrastructure are really exciting, and could become the Facebooks, Twitters, and Groupons of tomorrow (all of which I would have panned a few years ago, too, truth be told). To WSJ’s credit, the list also includes companies in slightly more popular fields like data management, multimedia over broadband, and mobile device analytics—though these are not exactly rocking my world either.

In any case, the lone Boston-area representative is no stranger to us. My colleague Wade profiled ExaGrid, the Massachusetts disk-based storage company, back in 2007. Meanwhile, notable East Coast companies that fell off the WSJ list between last year and this year include Boston-Power and Gilt Groupe. (Incidentally, only one Seattle-area company made the list too—EndoGastric Solutions, a surgical tech company that has raised a ton of money and isn’t really based in Seattle anymore; it moved headquarters to Silicon Valley.)

It’s notable that four New York companies made this year’s list: Recycle Rewards (municipal recycling), Etsy (marketplace for handmade goods), Everyday Health (online health publisher, looks like a future AOL acquisition), and TxVia (e-payments).

OK, thanks for letting me vent. Now let’s get back to work.

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The first three months of 2010 are in the books. The dreaded tax day has passed. Time to look back at the top 10 venture capital deals in Washington state so far this year, and see what the trends are. What kinds of companies are getting cash? Who’s unable to attract the loot, and why? (For more context, you can also read my colleague Bruce’s latest rundown of the national VC numbers here.)

First, here’s the list of the top local deals, compiled from the Xconomy Seattle archives, with an assist from the MoneyTree Report (PricewaterhouseCoopers, National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters), Dow Jones VentureSource, and CB Insights. I’ve included the stage of each deal if it was disclosed, as well as links to our prior stories about the companies:

1. Visible Technologies (Bellevue, WA), $22 million, Series C (story).

2. BlueKai (Bellevue, WA), $21.4 million, Series C (story).

3. Calistoga Pharmaceuticals (Seattle), $15.2 million, second tranche of Series B (story).

4. NanoString Technologies (Seattle), $15 million, second tranche of Series C (story).

5. Infinia (Kennewick, WA), $11.5 million (story).

6. Halosource (Bothell, WA), $10 million, Series D (story).

7. Avvo (Seattle), $10 million, Series C (story).

8. New Travelco (Seattle), $9.8 million, Series A (story).

9. Zumobi (Seattle), $7 million (this news comes from the MoneyTree Report; the company tells me this is its third round of funding; see related story here).

10. HemaQuest Pharmaceuticals (Seattle), $6 million (story).

Looking over the companies, they come from a wide variety of disciplines. Five companies are from the software sector (Internet and mobile), three deals went to biotechs (although two were second tranches from rounds announced last year), and two cleantech companies raised cash. But seven of the top 10 were mid-to-late-stage deals, Series C or later, while only one was a first-round funding (New Travelco, the stealthy online travel startup from ex-Expedia execs). The relative dearth of funding for young companies around Seattle remains a concern I hear often, and entrepreneurs are increasingly turning to angel investors or bootstrapping as viable alternatives to raising venture capital.

Meanwhile, Seattle-area investors see the overall funding results from the first quarter as encouraging, but they’re being cautious (and realistic) about the long-term prospects of the sector. “The investment level wasn’t solely dependent on the one big deal, which sometimes happens. A number of companies in the Northwest are getting larger financings completed, and angel and entrepreneurial activity in the marketplace is strong,” said Andy Dale, managing director of Seattle-based Montlake Capital (formerly Buerk Dale Victor), in a statement. “We still need high-quality, successful M&A and some local IPOs to demonstrate that the asset class can make money for long-term investors.”

Chad Waite, managing director of Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, added in a statement, “We are encouraged by these numbers and are staying focused on building great companies within IT, biotech and cleantech with a concentration in the Pacific Northwest.”

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At the pace of today’s news, it can be hard to maintain perspective on what all the important stories are. Sure, the iPad is dominating headlines today, but remember when Google bought Picnik just a month ago? That deal is still resonating in the startup community. What’s more, headlines fly off the page so fast that not everyone can catch them the first time. Luke and I wanted to find a way to help readers discover more of the stuff we’ve been busily producing for the past few months.

The first quarter of 2010 is in the books. So we thought it would be fun and useful to recap our favorite stories of the year so far—everything from Alder to Z2Live, with Amazon, Apple, Cell Therapeutics, Dendreon, and Microsoft in between. These were sometimes our most popular pieces, but not always. In every case, they highlight the kind of in-depth analysis and exclusive reporting that we are bringing to bear on the Seattle-area innovation community. Enjoy.

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Greg’s Top 10 technology stories:

Cowboys Like Us: Investor Nick Hanauer on How to Think About Breakthroughs in Business and Society (Part 1)

Nick Hanauer, a “High-Functioning Contrarian,” on How to Think About Breakthroughs in Business and Society (Part 2)

Bill Gates’s Nuclear Miracle? John Gilleland Says TerraPower Needs Discipline, Not Divine Intervention

Picnik CEO on Getting Bought by Google, and How It Affects Startups and Consumers

How Amazon Innovates: Lessons in Strategy for Microsoft and Others

How to Win the Future of Social Mobile Gaming: The Z2Live Story

The Apple iPad’s Impact on Mobile, Gaming, and E-Books: Local Techies and Startups React

Friend or Foe: How Apple Is Forcing Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and AT&T to Raise Their Game

MIT MBA Students: Amazon, Google, and T-Mobile Are Hiring, Expedia Isn’t; Microsoft “Super Interesting,” Apple Is “Sterile”

Stephen Wolfram Talks Bing Partnership, Software Strategy, and the Future of Knowledge Computing

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Luke’s Top 10 biotech and life sciences stories:

The Dendreon Alumni: Where Are They Now?

Joe Eichinger, Top Medical Device Entrepreneur and UW Volunteer, Dies From Cancer

Cell Therapeutics Offers Bigger Cash Bonuses for 2009 While Stock Languishes

Ekos, Swedish Aim to Shake Up Stroke Treatment with Ultrasound Brain Clot Buster

Geospiza Runs in the Black as Scientists Turn to Software to Help Crunch Genomes

Microsoft Fleshes Out Health-IT Portfolio, Waits (and Waits) for Market to Materialize

Medical Device Entrepreneurs Converge on Wings, a New Angel Investing Network

Dendreon’s New Operations Man, Hans Bishop, Aims to Keep Provenge Trains Running on Time

Halosource Nails Down $10M for Global Expansion of Water Purifying Technology

Alder Rises from Ashes of Layoffs, Overcomes Skeptics to Become Seattle Biotech Force

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Seattle-based Cozi announced today it has formed a strategic partnership with MeadWestvaco (NYSE: MWV), a Sidney, NY-based maker of school and office supplies and planning tools. Financial terms of the deal weren’t announced, but the partnership will give MWV consumers access to Cozi’s Web-based software for helping families manage their busy schedules. The tools include a family calendar, customized to-do lists, and messaging systems. This is the third partnership Cozi will announce with a Fortune 500 company this year, including a previous deal with Dell to pre-load certain home computers with Cozi’s software.

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Seattle-based Pet Holdings, owners of I Can Has Cheezburger and other humor sites, has taken over the top spot from Zillow in Seattle 2.0′s startup index for August, a ranking of website traffic estimates. The rest of the top five are BuddyTV, Picnik, and CarDomain. Big gains were made in the top 100 by EVO Media Group, Raveable, and nPost. Others Online and iLike were taken off the list after their recent acquisitions by the Rubicon Project and MySpace, respectively.

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Four companies from Washington state have been selected to a list of the world’s 100 most promising private cleantech firms. That’s according to a report released yesterday, in a joint effort by The Guardian (the UK-based newspaper) and the Cleantech Group, a global company that provides research, data, and advisory services for the clean technology industry.

The Washington results are not too shabby—especially for a state that has been perceived as trailing other parts of the country in terms of cleantech venture investment, alternative energy policy, and expertise. We’ve been hearing a lot about those issues from experts like Jesse Berst of Redmond, WA-based Global Smart Energy and Michael Butler of Seattle’s Cascadia Capital. While the latest news won’t do much to stem any criticism (nor should it necessarily), it does provide some recognition for the local cleantech scene.

The Global Cleantech 100 list “recognizes companies at the forefront of cleantech innovation offering solutions to some of the planet’s most pressing environmental challenges,” according to the Cleantech Group’s website. The companies were selected by a process involving hundreds of international experts on cleantech innovation, venture capital, and entrepreneurship (check out the methodology here). Cleantech, by their broad definition, spans the fields of energy generation, storage, infrastructure, and efficiency, as well as transportation, water and wastewater, air and environment, materials, manufacturing, agriculture, and recycling and waste.

The four Washington companies span energy generation (solar and geothermal), energy efficiency, and software. We’ve covered all of these companies this year at Xconomy, and here’s a bit about each one:

—AltaRock Energy, based in Sausalito, CA, and Seattle. This geothermal company was founded in Seattle in 2007, and plans to artificially engineer reservoirs of hot water deep underground and extract steam energy as it rises to the surface, as we reported last summer. AltaRock hit a snag in recent weeks when it had to suspend drilling of a well in Northern California due to geological problems, but says it is continuing to develop its technology and look for alternate drilling sites. The company is backed by Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Google.org, and others.

—Infinia, based in Kennewick, WA. This solar power company makes devices that capture and focus sunlight, and then harness the concentrated heat (using a Stirling engine) to generate electricity, as Luke reported in a recent company profile. The strategy is complementary to traditional solar cells and photovoltaics. Infinia has been around since the 1960s, but has focused on solar since 2005. It is backed by Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, Idealab, and other prominent investors.

—Powerit Solutions, based in Seattle. This energy-efficiency company, originally from Sweden, has been in Seattle since 2002. It makes hardware and software to reduce energy consumption and costs in industrial facilities like steel mills and manufacturing plants, as Rachel reported this summer. In May, Powerit raised $6 million led by Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal’s Clean Technology Fund, with @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners also participating. Some of its customers include Ikea, Benton Foundry, Stockholm Airport, and the San Jose Mercury News.

—Verdiem, based in Seattle. This cleantech software firm, founded in 2001 and backed by Kleiner Perkins and other investors, focuses on energy efficiency and management in the corporate IT world. Its personal computer power-management software has been installed on more than one million desktops, and its customer base has doubled in the past year to include more than 300 corporations, government agencies, and universities. We’ve reported on Verdiem’s progress in demonstrating energy and cost savings to companies, as well as its broader strategy in cleantech-meets-IT from CEO Jeremy Jaech.

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The Seattle area is known for its technology giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, and RealNetworks. It’s also known for its popular tech startups like Zillow, Wetpaint, Pet Holdings (I Can Has Cheezburger), iLike, and Big Fish Games. But there are dozens of other sizable tech companies operating behind the scenes, quietly executing on their vision to change the world. You don’t see these companies mentioned in the media very much. They generally aren’t built on large venture funding rounds, and they tend to be not very flashy. That’s why I call them unsung heroes.

I’m going to point out five of them here. This is not a “Top 5″ list, and it’s not the end of the story—it’s just the beginning. Here are my (admittedly arbitrary) criteria. I looked for privately held companies with tremendous engineering talent and a strong influence on their particular market—proportional to their size and the amount of attention they get. I looked across different tech sectors like Internet, business software, consulting services, gaming, and entertainment. I also looked for companies that have weathered the recession to this point and have kept charging forward. Lastly, I wanted companies that mainstream readers may not have heard about lately.

The problem with a list like this, of course, is that it’s subjective. There are plenty of other companies around town that could be on the list—and I want to hear about those too. But for now, here’s a snapshot of five Seattle-area companies that are quietly delivering the goods:

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Jetstream Software (Kirkland, WA)
Mike Moskowitz, CEO

This 15-year old applications development firm makes software products for big companies and startups alike. Its list of customers includes Microsoft, Intel, IBM, F5 Networks, Captaris, SnapIn Software, HouseValues, and the University of Washington. In fact, if you pick any prominent organization around town, there’s a good chance Jetstream has done work for them. The company has developed tools for Microsoft that shipped with Office and Windows Media Center, for example. And the firm often serves as the entire development team for Web startups, say, that want to create a user interface or product. The 25-person company, largely made up of senior engineers, works on projects across software publishing, … Next Page »

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Inc. magazine has released its annual list of the top 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. A dozen Washington state consulting or technology-related companies made the list, with the highest-ranked firm, Kirkland-based Revel Consulting, at number 34. The others are: Xtreme Consulting Group, Clarisonic, Sirsai, C&I Engineering, Remote Medical International, Visible Technologies, Audigy Group, Big Fish Games, Winshuttle, Tableau Software, and Adaquest. The companies were chosen based on their percentage increase in revenue from 2005 to 2008.

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BusinessWeek’s list of Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009, announced today, includes Seattle-area startup whiz kids Rand Fishkin, 29, of SEOmoz and Kabir Shahani, 26, of Appature. SEOmoz, a search engine optimization startup, is backed by Ignition Partners and Curious Office Partners, while Appature, a health-care marketing firm, is self-funded.

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Marcelo Calbucci’s Seattle 2.0 index of local startups’ websites is out for February, and shows little movement at the top. Zillow, Pet Holdings, iLike, BuddyTV, and Robot Co-op have the top five sites, based on traffic estimates. Calbucci points out a few sites in the top 20 that were not there a year ago: BigOven, UrbanSpoon, Menuism, Avvo, Feedjit, and nuTsie (Melodeo).

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Portland, OR-based Jive Software announced it has been named to KMWorld’s 2009 list of “100 companies that matter in knowledge management.” Jive makes social business and collaboration software.

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Seattle 2.0′s monthly ranking of local-area startup websites is out for January. Based on traffic stats compiled by Marcelo Calbucci, Zillow and Pet Holdings remained #1 and #2, with iLike, Picnik, BuddyTV, Robot Co-op, and PayScale making gains in the top 10. Notable gains in the top 100 were made by SEOmoz, Mixpo, TeachStreet, GotVoice, Zooppa, Visible Technologies, and Twilio. Calbucci notes that 25-odd sites were removed because they had shut down, and only four new sites were added to the list.

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[Updated Jan. 28, with information on Intellectual Ventures' patents (see below)]
If its volume of new patents is any indication, Microsoft is going to be just fine. The Redmond, WA, software firm blew away the rest of Washington state in terms of the number of patents it was granted last year. That’s according to IFI Patent Intelligence, based in Wilmington, DE, which recently released a national survey of patent grants for 2008. Xconomy obtained the figures for Washington state, as well as Massachusetts and California. (See the list of Washington’s top 25 patent winners below.)

Patent awards are, of course, just one measure of an organization’s competitiveness and inventiveness. It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions about a company’s ability to innovate based on its number of patents, say—imagine trying to compare a biotech company with an electronics firm, or a young software startup with an established powerhouse. But it’s still a key measure of an organization’s investment in its intellectual property.

Microsoft’s tally (2,030) is greater than the rest of Washington’s top 25 combined. It was good enough for fourth place nationally, behind IBM (4,186), Samsung (3,515), and Canon (2,114), and ahead of Intel (1,776). In Washington state, Sharp Laboratories and the University of Washington were a distant second and third, respectively.

A few other notables. Boeing is fairly low on the list (16th), in part because the figures only count patents awarded to each organization’s operations in Washington; patents awarded to offices or operations outside the state are not included in this list. Amazon ranks pretty low as well (12th), and Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures, the invention company, is in 8th place, listed as “Searete.” Lastly, there was a seemingly random tie for 5th place between forestry firm Weyerhaeuser (which just closed two of its Washington mills this week) and biotech company ZymoGenetics (which just bought back the rights to its lead cancer drug candidate today).

Without further ado, here’s Washington state’s top 25 patent winners in 2008:

1. Microsoft — 2,030
2. Sharp Laboratories of America — 144
3. University of Washington — 47
4. Battelle Memorial Institute — 33
5. (tie)
Weyerhaeuser — 28
ZymoGenetics — 28 … Next Page »

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A Seattle startup is playing an important role in helping President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team get organized. As of yesterday, the Obama-Biden Transition Project has been using technology from Blist (pronounced as one syllable, and spelled with a lowercase “b” by its employees) to power its Change.gov website. The company’s software lets people create, manage, and publish large, interactive lists and databases—similar to working with a simple spreadsheet, but shareable across the Web.

It’s all part of Obama’s pledge to run an open and transparent White House transition, in part by releasing the names of all its donors on a monthly basis. In his company blog, Blist’s founder and CEO Kevin Merritt says he is “really excited” about the exposure and about what his software can do for Obama’s team. “They are using blist in a simple but useful way,” he says.

Go to the Change.gov site, and you’ll see a Blist widget replacing the plain HTML table of the past two months. The widget lets you sort the donor table by column, such as by city or amount. It also lets you search for things like names and employers. (Out of 53,853 donors, I counted 43 from Microsoft versus two from Amazon, for instance.)

This afternoon, I heard from Jon Byrum, Blist’s senior product manager, about how the collaboration with Obama’s team originally came about, and what it means to Blist. “Last Wednesday—on New Year’s Eve—a member from the Change.gov New Media team contacted us about using a blist Widget to post the Obama campaign donor list,” said Byrum in an e-mail. “He let us know that he was planning to post a press release and web page on January 5th, and wanted to ensure that our servers would be able to handle the load. When we asked how he got started with blist, he said the Change.gov team found us through Google … Next Page »

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Seattle and Boston, two of Xconomy’s network cities, have something extra to be proud of today—at least when it comes to Internet startups. Each city contributed two companies to a popular list of the year’s best Web applications for improving customers’ real lives.

That’s according to the tech-news blog ReadWriteWeb, which has published its list of the “top 10 real world Web apps of 2008.” These are Web services that help keep people’s offline lives more organized and efficient. The categories were finance, health, education, politics, nonprofits, and travel. Without further ado:

—In Seattle, the teacher/student community site TeachStreet won in the education category, while the airfare-tracking site Yapta won in travel. TeachStreet expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area last month, from Seattle and Portland. Yapta is in the process of closing a funding round of at least $2.7 million.

—In the Boston area, the social-networking sites PatientsLikeMe and Sermo, both based in Cambridge, MA, won in the health category. PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease, HIV, and Parkinson’s disease. Sermo is a site where 90,000 doctors exchange information about medical practice. Sermo recently signed a deal to open up access to this network to financial industry experts who subscribe to the Bloomberg Professional information service.

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If you’re like me, you go through life with the vague hope that someday, technology will help you become a more efficient person. How often I’ve driven to the grocery store or the library to pick up one thing, knowing full well that there’s some other item I needed, but that I’ll never be able to locate it beneath the dust bunnies of my memory.

New tools for tidying up one’s brain come along all the time, of course: the File-o-fax of the 1990s gave way to the Palm Pilot, which eventually gave way to online services like Jott, Evernote, Remember the Milk, and Ta-Da List, and to the hundreds of personal productivity applications available for platforms like the iPhone. There’s even a whole website, Lifehacker, devoted to tracking such technologies.

But I’m still waiting for the über-application, the one central online repository that will allow me to a) file away all of the noteworthy bits of information coming in every day via e-mail, snail mail, catalogs, the blogs and websites I read, the mass media, billboards and posters, and the like, b) curate that information—that is, organize, annotate, tag, rearrange, and share it, and c) retrieve it when and where I really need it, whether I’m using my computer or my cell phone. The tool that currently comes closest to doing all that, for me, is Evernote, created by the Sunnyvale, CA, startup of the same name (I wrote a column about Evernote back in July). But now there’s a promising New England candidate, though it’s still in its embryonic stages: Springpad, an online notebook service launched in beta form last week by Boston-based Spring Partners.

Springpad is a system for creating customizable, task-oriented Web pages called, logically enough, springpads. To each springpad, you can add blocks of data such as text notes, to-do lists, contacts, calendar events, maps, and digital documents such as photos. You can build as many springpads as you want for the various tasks in your life. The company provides useful starting springpads designed for dozens of activities, from planning a vacation to tracking your pet’s medical records. There’s a powerful personal database system under the hood that allows you to tag, search, and share individual blocks, and Spring Partners—a 10-person, venture-backed startup located in Boston’s quaint Charlestown neighborhood —is working on add-ons such as an iPhone app and a Web clipper that will allow you to send information you find on the go or on the Web directly into your springpads.

If you go to Springpad right now, you might get the impression that it’s all about holiday planning—the same way MyPunchbowl is all about party planning or Geezeo is all about financial management (both of those life-tool startups happen to be located in the Boston area too). But the Thanksgiving and Christmas motif at Springpad is a bit misleading—and actually represents a marketing gamble of sorts for the startup.

As co-founder and CEO Jeff Janer explained to me when I visited the company Wednesday, the team had to start somewhere. Spring Partners—which consists almost entirely of transplants from Boston-based mobile advertising company Third Screen Media, acquired by AOL in 2007—has extremely ambitious plans for Springpad. Janer sees it as the central place for consumers, starting with the Web-savvy 25- to 35-year-old demographic, to organize all their life activities—shopping, chores, hobbies, eating out, exercise, travel, research, you name it. He describes it as a kind of anti-Facebook: a place to focus not on your social network but on yourself and all the tasks and information you have to manage.

But that’s a lot to explain to prospective users—and historically, quite a few super-duper personal information management tools have fallen victim to what Janer calls “blank slate syndrome,” the problem of having a great tool in front of you, but not knowing what to put into it.

So that’s why Springpad’s front pages are currently full of the kind of tips and advice you might find on the cover of the December issue of Better Homes & Gardens or Real Simple: an “8-week Holiday Preparation List,” a “Christmas Card Log,” a “Holiday Meal Planner.” The tips are linked to pre-built templates that guide users through the traditional tasks related to Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, and New Year’s celebrations. “The idea was to show people, in a focused way, how to survive the holidays,” says Janer. “Yes, there are all these other templates and features and functionalities available, but … Next Page »

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Max Ciccotosto has entrepreneurship in his blood. A native of Italy, his parents ran a business in the old country. While in college at the University of Bologna, Ciccotosto ran a “junior enterprise” company (the system no longer exists in Italy) that handled networking and IT for small companies. He came to Seattle in 1999 to do his master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Microsoft offered him a job the day after he graduated, to work in the Microsoft Exchange Server division, which develops messaging and collaborative software products.

After six and a half years at Microsoft, the last three in mobile technologies, Ciccotosto decided to go back to his entrepreneurial roots. His eureka moment happened at a Barnes & Noble. He was browsing a book and thought, “This looks good, but can I get it cheaper? And is it the right book [on the topic]?” He realized this sort of thing happens frequently—he calls it “transient wishes,” when you see or hear about something interesting but don’t close the deal then and there, and end up forgetting about it. (I won’t let that happen with Ciccotosto’s recommendation for best Italian food in town, Pian Pianino.) He thought, why not set up a service that keeps track of things you like and might want to buy, and make it social, so your friends and family can be part of it and see what’s on other people’s wish lists?

That’s the idea behind Wishpot, a Seattle-based startup founded by Ciccotosto and fellow Microsoftie Alexis Campailla. Their social-shopping service is coming out of beta in the next few weeks, and is currently available as a browser plug-in and a Facebook application. They already have many thousands of users, says Ciccotosto. Yesterday, I stopped by the new Wishpot digs near Pioneer Square (they moved this summer from Lower Queen Anne) to get more of the company’s story from him.

In terms of getting off the ground, Ciccotosto recalls a pivotal lunch meeting with Seattle-based Alliance of Angels in 2006. Although Wishpot didn’t get capital then, he says, they got “fundamentally solid feedback” and after that their pitch was “20 times better.” “We were two guys from Microsoft, nobody knew us, so they weren’t going to throw money at us,” says Ciccotosto. By early 2007, the startup had a prototype, and in March 2007, they were able to secure seed money from angels. They followed that up earlier this year with a $1 million round led by Monster Venture Partners, with Curious Office Partners and the Italian “startup designer” H-Farm also participating (more on the latter soon).

Ciccotosto showed me a demo of the latest Wishpot features and how it works. The service helps you “discover, save, and share the stuff you want” in an easier way, he says. Going to Nordstrom’s website and browsing some fashionable suits, a Wishpot window pops up, stores a particular suit in his wish list, and allows him to set up an alert when the price drops by a certain amount, or when another store has it for cheaper. But the most popular applications so far, he says, are baby and wedding-gift registries. The business model is based on transactions—Wishpot has relationships with vendors (like Nordstrom) so that when users buy items, Wishpot gets paid.

Wishpot competes with Amazon’s product wish lists—which Ciccotosto points out are not social or interactive—and a slew of startups (mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area) like Kaboodle, StyleHive, and ThisNext. Time will tell which comes out on top, but Wishpot is now up to seven employees and is gearing up for marketing promotions, a full product launch, and international expansion. “With the holiday season coming, we want to make sure we have the right content and the right product in place,” says Ciccotosto.

“I love working on products, that’s my thing,” he says. “Once you’re an engineer, it’s hard not to go back and build things.”

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