“There’s sort of an infinite number of good ways to start a company,” says Xconomist Joe Chung. “One of the fundamental rules in startups is that there really aren’t any rules.”

But the serial entrepreneur has some pretty specific plans for how his new creation will pop out startups. That would be Cambridge, MA-based Redstar Ventures, which has been described by its other co-founder, Jeet Singh, as a “company that builds companies.” The pair would know a bit about putting together companies. Both were co-founders of the Cambridge, MA-based e-commerce software company Art Technology Group, which went public in 1999 and sold to Oracle last year for $1 billion. Chung went on to to start another shopping tech startup, Allurent, which didn’t see the success that ATG did, while Singh worked on his rock music career.

But back to Redstar, which was founded last year. There’s no shortage of entities that are specifically in the business of supporting other tech startups (read here for my colleague Wade’s thoughts about the incubator bubble), but Redstar doesn’t align itself with the heavily consumer Web-focused, three-month-long accelerator programs such as Y Combinator and TechStars, and their mentorship models. Instead, it’s using its team to research market opportunities for new companies, and then match them with the right entrepreneurs, using all its own internal funding.

Read below for some takeaways from my conversation with Chung on how they’re going about things at Redstar. (And check out Chung’s Xconomist posts on how to and how not to start companies.)

—Chung and his team take pride in their “maturity.”

“One good thing to do when you start any kind of venture is to start things that are biased in your favor, that play to your strengths,” Chung says. “Because we’re old, we’ve built a really strong network. Hopefully we’ll bring commercial relationships and partnerships to the table right from the beginning, and revenue and customers from the initial business proposition. We’re looking for companies in spaces where we already know or identify consumer needs or business needs.”

—We won’t be seeing any “solomo” companies being created at Redstar. No, that’s not a typo, but techie jargon for companies working in the social, local, and mobile sector, Chung says.

“We’re doing stuff that is targeted at the TechCrunch crowd’s mothers,” he says. “They have all the money and are deeply underserved by the Internet.”

Considering this and the Redstar team’s past experience, it might not come as a surprise that the first company it has put together is focusing on … Next Page »

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PopCap Games is an undeniable Seattle success story. The company, started by three twenty-somethings in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, has evolved from a freemium version of “Bejeweled” into an international, multi-platform publisher with $100 million in revenue and 400 employees.

This year, with the casual games industry reaching mass-market investment potential, PopCap announced that it was aiming for an initial public offering to move to the next big phase in its history. Of course, IPO plans can mean a company is interested in being acquired, and the rumor that PopCap was in the middle of a $1 billion buyout from Electronic Arts dominated the region’s headlines this past week.

To follow up, I talked with a couple of industry analysts to help chew over the logic of an acquisition vs. going public. Personally, I’m still not sure which course would make the most sense for PopCap, if you take at face value the company’s statements about wanting to continue its course for years to come. The whole thing still hasn’t been confirmed, denied, or proven out with real-world results as of this writing.

Also making news around town:

—We rounded up the roughly $70 million in equity financing deals for Washington state companies in May, with three entrants getting $10 million or more: IT management company ExtraHop Networks, blood-stopping drug-maker Profibrix, and tax software startup Avalara.

—Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow parsed the data from a new international survey of venture capitalists, which had some interesting predictions. By two-to-one margins, the roughly 165 U.S. venture capitalists surveyed said they expect investments in cloud computing and new media or social networks to increase over the next five years. Among the sectors expected to stay level or decline were biopharma, semiconductors, and telecoms.

—Speaking of cloud computing investments, we saw a handful of deals announced involving Bellevue, WA’s Ignition Partners. Two of them—deals with ScaleXtreme and Bromium—specifically included new Ignition managing director Frank Artale, a former Microsoftie who has returned to the Northwest after stints with Citrix Systems, Accel Partners, and others. The third Ignition cloud deal was with StorSimple.

—Anybody sick of daily deals yet? Yes? Not e-commerce king Amazon.com, which rolled out new markets for its house-brand online discounts service, expanding to its hometown of Seattle (and environs) from the original testbed of Boise, ID. Amazon’s offering, called AmazonLocal, is powered by LivingSocial, the No. 2 national deals site, which counts Amazon as an investor. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) says it’ll supply its own deals eventually, but it’s unclear when that’ll happen.

—And finally, social gaming startup Giant Thinkwell announced a $600,000 seed investment and rolled out its first official celebrity game, Mix-N-Match with Sir Mix-A-Lot; audio snippet sharing site Hark showed off a redesign for its premium multimedia collections; and social GPS startup Glympse raised $7.5 million led by Menlo Ventures and Ignition Partners.

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Amazon.com’s attempt to cash in on the online-coupon craze, AmazonLocal, is spreading to a bigger market: The online retailer’s hometown of Seattle. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) kicked off its deals offering earlier this month, starting out in Boise, ID. Today, Amazon is announcing its first discounts in the Seattle area, including a half-off coupon for food and drinks at the Garage, a fancy-pants bowling and pool joint just down the block from Xconomy’s First Hill office.

It’s not just confined to Seattle proper—I coincidentally got another offer for a spa discount in the Tacoma area in my personal email this morning, and I found a restaurant coupon for the Bellevue area too. The AmazonLocal Seattle Twitter feed identifies a fourth offer up in Snohomish County.

The offers are being provided by No. 2 daily deals service LivingSocial, but Amazon says it’ll eventually start plugging its own discounts into the service. This market obviously makes sense for Amazon’s bedrock shopping brand, but as a feature it hardly stands apart from the herd of online discount-mongers chasing Groupon’s wild ride (well, not the relentless criticism part).

I wonder how long it’ll take to see whether Amazon has decided to apply its retail expertise and massive data-crunching power to this market, or if this just fades away as a me-too campaign of the moment. I also wonder whether AmazonLocal will have any interplay with Seattle’s Tippr, which recently gobbled up crosstown discount service DealPop from WhitePages. Tippr’s Martin Tobias has likened the startup’s patent portfolio to “pocket aces” in the deals market.

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In William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer, the hero Case lives in a near-future place called BAMA—the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, aka the Sprawl, a giant city that has spread Coruscant-like across the whole eastern seaboard. (If it had extended to Orlando, maybe Gibson could have called it OBAMA.) But while this part of Gibson’s sci-fi dystopia may have seemed plausible in the 1980s, it’s a little less so today. Yes, cities are still dealing with the consequences of the mid-20th-century’s automobile-driven sprawl—but if anything, the big metropolitan regions in the U.S. today are contracting around the edges, not blurring into one another.

And once the cheap oil runs out, analysts like James Howard Kunstler argue, cities will have to get smaller yet. The future “will be much more about staying where you are than about being mobile,” Kunstler predicts. Unless there’s a miraculous advance in solar-electric vehicle technology, or the government suddenly decides to invest a couple trillion dollars to build a serious passenger rail network, it’s hard to see how he might be wrong.

But that’s just one side of the picture—the physical reality of freeways and suburbs and Wal-Marts. There’s another trend at work that’s erasing what I would call the mental boundaries between cities. That trend, obviously, is digital networking.

It’s a tired cliché to say that telecommunications technology is breaking down the meaning of geographical distance. People have been pointing this out since the advent of telegraphy in the 1840s. What I’m saying is a little more radical. Given today’s work styles and networking tools, information workers can be anywhere. It makes very little difference whether your software engineers or QA testers or telesales representatives are in Boston or Burlingame or Bangalore. In fact, it’s easier to send an e-mail or an instant message to a colleague 3,000 miles away than it is to get up and walk a hundred feet across your office.

Which means distributed teams can get the same amount of work done as concentrated ones—probably more, thanks to the planet’s rotation and the single most important invention of 1883-84, the division of the globe into 24 standard time zones based on Greenwich Mean Time. In effect, the world’s information workers all live in one giant city—a mental space where Gmail and Twitter are more important than parking garages and subway tunnels.

Which makes one particular strain of inter-city bickering all the more inane. Over the last few years, I’ve listened to endless arguments about whether New York or Silicon Valley or Boston or insert-your-favorite-city- here is the best place to be an innovator, find investors, hire engineers and salespeople, and grow a technology company. In Boston, people still wring their hands over why Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook to Palo Alto. In Silicon Valley, meanwhile, people glance nervously over their shoulders at New York. Recently, in fact, there’s been an extended and entertaining kerfuffle over New York’s merits as a startup hub, involving, at various points, SpeakerText CEO Matt Mireles, Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham (see 2:30 in this video), and AdGrok co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez. Dixon, Fake, and Graham think New York’s tech scene is exploding with cool startups and “ambitious ass-kickers,” and that it’s becoming an easier place to find angel or venture financing and engineering talent. Mireles and Garcia-Martinez, on the other hand, think that New York is expensive and elitist, that the angels and tech-focused venture firms are still few and far between, that Wall Street sucks up all the talent, that the city lacks decent engineering schools, and that New Yorkers are generally hustlers rather than builders.

It’s all beside the point. Regions have their distinct flavors, of course, but in the end, none of this affects the global pace of innovation, which depends on people and their ideas much more than their locations. Does anyone seriously want to argue that Google would not exist if … Next Page »

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AOL, the New York-based Internet portal company soon to be spun off by Time Warner, said today that it has acquired Going, a Boston startup that publishes an online guide to nightlife, music, and cultural events in Boston and 29 other U.S. cities.

The purchase is part of a strategy at AOL to invest in more sources of local news and information. In the same announcement, AOL said it has acquired Patch Media Corporation, a network of news sites covering six towns in northern New Jersey.

“Going forward, local will be a core area of focus and investment for AOL,” chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong said in a statement. “The acquisitions of Patch and Going will help us build out our local network further with excellent local services that enable people to stay better informed about what’s going on in their neighborhood.”

AOL claims to be the “largest online local network.” But in the comScore Media Metrix reports on which this claim is based, the “local network” category was custom-designed by AOL itself.

Three-year-old Going is aimed mainly at barhopping and concert-going 20-somethings. It’s advertising-supported; Bacardi is a major sponsor. In addition to event listings, the site supplies local venues and event organizers with a self-service, Web-based ticket sales and RSVP system.

“Going allows young people in leading cities to discover upcoming events, parties and new hot spots—and most importantly connect with others who share a similar lifestyle,” Going CEO Evan Schumacher said in AOL’s release. “By joining with AOL, we have the opportunity to greatly expand the reach of our platform to more cities both in the U.S. and around the world.”

In addition to its Boston site, Going has major sites covering Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and less complete information for about 20 other cities.

Going isn’t the first New England company to be scooped up by AOL—the former juggernaut of Internet access acquired Boston-based mobile advertising company Third Screen Media in 2007.

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The number-one customer complaint coming into Waltham, MA-based EveryScape, says CEO Jim Schoonmaker, is “Give us more.”

So far, EveryScape’s Web-based collection of pannable street-level photographs is limited to Boston and environs, New York, Miami, Laguna Beach, and four Colorado ski resorts—Aspen, Breckenridge, Snowmass Village, and Steamboat Springs. (Oh, there’s also Beijing, China—which is a strange and beautiful city, but not a place where many U.S. Web users are likely to need navigational advice.) For a company whose tagline is “The Real World, Online,” that’s what you call a start.

Schoonmaker acknowledges that EveryScape is “probably six months behind Google in the acquisition of content”— referring to the images behind the Street View feature of Google Maps, which covers 29 U.S. cities and counting.

Which is why the $7 million Series B financing round EveryScape announced today will come in very handy. “We need to get more content, put in more cities, and do it all faster,” says Schoonmaker. That will mean, among other things, making EveryScape’s server infrastructure easier to scale up, finding better ways to recruit and reward “Scape Artists” (outsiders who agree to contribute images and links), getting faster at creating the company’s distinctive interior tours of private properties, and generally bringing down the cost of content acquisition.

“If your ambition is to build the world, you can’t have even one expensive component,” says Schoonmaker. “Everything has to be scalable. That’s why we’ve had to think hard about how to shoot the public content, how to enable the private content to be shot and sold, how it’s all hosted on the portal, and how we can maintain it and make changes and update it over time. I think over time we’ve probably made as many mistakes as anyone else—but hopefully that just makes us a lot smarter.”

As we’ve noted in our previous pieces on EveryScape, the company’s patented “HyperMedia” technology weaves together photographs of contiguous locations using 3D graphic technology that makes browsing is database a far more immersive experience than what you’ll encounter with Google’s Street View service. But Google provides much wider coverage and, arguably, a friendlier interface.

Schoonmaker says improving EveryScape’s interface will be a major priority this year. The company has already bounced back from one misstep: its initial choice of Adobe’s Shockwave as its interactive-animation platform. “It was wonderful but no one would download it,” Schoonmaker says—so the company switched to the much more commonly installed Adobe Flash format. Now it needs to work on making its resources more discoverable and usable, says Schoonmaker. “For the vast majority of people out there, the idea of panning a picture is still not intuitive,” he says. “Pictures don’t move; movies do. So you’ve got to find a way for people to come to your site and understand immediately how to use it.”

Taking the lead in EveryScape’s financing round was Dace Ventures, a new Waltham, MA-based firm led by former CMGI president Dave Andonian that mainly invests in digital media, consumer marketing, and mobile services startups. (The firm’s portfolio also includes auctionPAL, CityVoter, LocaModa, Panraven, and Vitrue.) Also participating were existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic and LaunchPad Venture Group.

“Dace is consistently looking for the next wave of innovation in the Web 2.0 space coupled with passionate entrepreneurs that can bring cutting-edge technology to market,” Andonian said in EverySpace’s official announcement of the financing round. He said the company “has the potential to fundamentally change the way we explore cities, towns and businesses online by truly replicating the real world experience.”

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