After previewing its expansion plans last summer, San Diego’s EvoNexus, the free startup incubator established by the non-profit technology group CommNexus, has opened a newly renovated downtown office space. A dozen early stage companies began moving into the incubator Monday.

CommNexus founded EvoNexus in 2009, when San Diego’s innovation economy was reeling from the Great Recession. The incubator has taken in 14 companies so far, including six that have moved out of the EvoNexus incubator in University City. Office space, utilities, and other services are provided to startups free of charge, and companies leave with no obligations to EvoNexus or CommNexus.

“As far as we know, we’re the only pro bono incubator in the country,” EvoNexus chairman Kevin Hell says in a statement issued late yesterday. “The goal is to grow sustainable tech companies and expand the industry here in San Diego.”

When the EvoNexus incubator first opened in Sorrento Valley, organizers said they wanted to host startups developing advanced communications technologies, including wireless life sciences and smart grid networking.

Since then, CommNexus moved EvoNexus to University City and broadened its criteria. The industry group established the new downtown EvoNexus to host startups that are focused primarily on developing Internet software, Web services, gaming, social networking, and cloud computing technologies. The privately held Irvine Co. made the 15,000-square foot space available to EvoNexus at no cost. The incubator takes up an entire floor of the building at 101 W. Broadway, known locally as the AT&T building.

Hell says he sees parallels in the downtown San Diego locale with San Francisco’s SoMa, the downtown neighborhood South of Market Street that has become a magnet for social media startups and mobile app developers. The nightlife, housing, and amenities available in San Diego’s city center should appeal to young entrepreneurs, Hell says.

CommNexus plans to continue to operate its incubator in University City. The 12 companies in the new downtown space are:

Antengo: Real-time mobile classifieds.

BigSho: Social webcam game show.

Chatmeter: Online reputation management.

Fashioning Change: Shopping experience for eco-friendly apparel.

Saambaa: Social media app for finding things to do.

SwoopThat: Online textbook shopping by course.

TapChow: Cloud-based restaurant experience manger.

Taphunter: Mobile app for locating places that serve craft beer.

UgliApps: Mobile apps focused on food.

Voluware: Saas healthcare information software.

Xpenser: Web-based tracking of business expenses, time, and mileage.

Zambig: Web-based service that provides online outlet for radio ads.

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Heading into the holiday weekend, I thought I’d pull out a few highlights from recent discussions I’ve had with some Boston-area tech companies that are generating buzz. None of them will be taking the holiday off, I’m guessing.

So here’s a snapshot of five companies in different fields, and at different stages (with some common themes of communication, security, and location tech):

ByteLight
This is a new Cambridge, MA-based startup that’s heading to New York this weekend for the big annual National Retail Federation expo. ByteLight, led by founders Aaron Ganick and Dan Ryan (both Boston University grads), is developing technology for indoor positioning based on the circuitry in LED bulbs, together with smartphone cameras, for applications in sales automation, targeted deals, museum tours, and so on. “We view this as the next frontier in location based services,” Ryan says.

HeyWire
This Cambridge-based mobile startup makes an app for free texting and social messaging. But HeyWire has much bigger ambitions around creating a unified platform for social communications. Don’t want to give too much away here, but as engineering and marketing VPs Bill Gianoukos and Glenn Kiladis told me recently, an upcoming release from the company was inspired by the question, “How do we get Bieber to text us?”

Rapid7
This security assessment software company, based in Boston, recently raised a big $50 million venture round and is growing fast—and looking to make acquisitions. Rapid7 has well over 200 employees, and CEO Mike Tuchen says he is looking to add 100 more this year. One security tidbit he passed along: Many companies’ video conferences are surprisingly easy to hack into, because they put them directly on the Internet without security.

The Tap Lab
This Cambridge-based mobile gaming startup is working on its much-anticipated next release, which is still under wraps (but looks like it’s trying to reinvent the concept of location-based gaming—no pressure). In the meantime, CEO Dave Bisceglia is also working on a project to “increase the frequency and quality of hackathons” in Boston, he says. Stay tuned for more on this.

Vivox
This voice and communication software firm, based in Natick, MA, has been making strides through partnerships with T-Mobile and Facebook. Vivox, best known for its voice chat software that lets gamers and virtual world inhabitants talk to each other, is now applying its technology to the broader markets of social networking and messaging (see T-Mobile’s recent Bobsled voice chat app). CEO Rob Seaver told me that his company’s platform is “very scalable and stable for large-scale social interactions.” What’s more, he says, the fields of gaming and communication are “not that separate.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Anti-theft technology for mobile devices just got smarter. Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced today that its location-finding software has been deployed by Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) in its new Norton Anti-Theft Web service. Financial details weren’t given, but the arrangement will put Skyhook’s software on more devices over a broader range of applications—namely, security.

The anti-theft Web service enables people to lock, locate, and, if all goes well, recover a lost or stolen laptop (Windows-based), smartphone (Android), or tablet (Android)—all from afar. Skyhook’s technology, which uses Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS signals to locate a given device, is already used by tens of millions of devices and applications, the company says.

Skyhook has been embroiled in two lawsuits against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) since last year. The suits allege that the search giant infringed on four of Skyhook’s patents and interfered with deals that Skyhook made with Motorola and Samsung. Those deals involved putting Skyhook’s location-finding software on Android devices.

Symantec’s deployment of Skyhook’s software is the latest example of how Skyhook has managed to maneuver its technology onto Android devices despite its feud with Google, which, like Apple, wants to own location technology for its devices itself.

Back in May, Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan talked about his company’s technology being deployed by MapQuest, Citysearch, Priceline, and other Web applications on Android (and other) devices. “We’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers,” he said.

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Funny, I thought there were already enough startup events around the Bay Area to keep any investor or tech journalist busy eight days a week. But now there’s one more—it’s called Pitch, and it’s the result of “the challenges many startups have in getting new users, media, attention, and investors,” writes Duane Nason of Launchabl.es, the event’s organizer. “Many demo events are either too pricey, or they allow only a handful of startups to participate.”

Way more than a handful of companies—I counted about 90—were on hand at yesterday’s debut Pitch event, which took place on the club level at AT&T Park, home of the world-champion (and now sagging) San Francisco Giants. Many of the startups were speaking in public for the first time about their technologies and services. Reflecting the current obsessions in the world of consumer technology, the event was heavy on startups offering mobile, social, or location-based apps and services (sometimes all three at once).

I attended with iPad in hand to capture a few of the startups on video. Below you’ll see elevator pitches from the following seven companies:

CheckInOn.me—A mobile, personal safety system that automatically checks in on members via text message. Debbie Levitt, Co-Founder.

Shwinkers—A social network for barhoppers. Patrick Clifton, Co-Founder and President.

SourceN Ventures—A startup incubator launched by San Jose design agency SourceN. Ajay Ramachandran, Managing Partner.

Wobblesoft—Maker of a Herd!, a mobile app that lets users assemble instant, temporary social networks. Marcus Colombano, Chief Marketing Officer. (Full disclosure: Colombano was a colleague of mine at e-book device maker NuvoMedia from 1999 to 2001.)

Doot—A location-based mobile app that lets users leave messages that other users can discover when they visit the same places. F.S. Narooddin, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer. [Update 9/10/11: Attendees voted via text message for their favorite startups at Pitch, and it turns out that Doot won the People's Choice MVP Award.]

LawPivot—A Google Ventures-backed startup offering crowdsourced legal advice for startups and other businesses. Benton Wong, Business Development Manager. (More Xconomy coverage here.)

LocalMind—A location-based question and answer service that lets users pose questions to people who have checked in at specific locations via Foursquare or Facebook Places. Beau Haugh, Co-Founder.

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Another Boston-area software startup has been snapped up by a West Coast power. Sunnyvale, CA-based TeleNav (NASDAQ: TNAV), a location-based services firm, said today it has completed an acquisition of Boston-based Goby, a local and travel search startup that has recently focused on mobile apps. Terms of the deal weren’t given. (The news was buried on the Friday before Labor Day, which makes people wonder how good an outcome it is.)

“The team here will continue, and we will be adding more people,” says Mark Watkins, Goby’s co-founder and CEO. Ten employees of Goby are joining TeleNav and staying in Boston, he says. Watkins, a veteran of Parametric Technology and Endeca, will have a new title at TeleNav: general manager of entertainment content.

Watkins didn’t comment on how good a deal it is for Goby and its investors. (The company raised $7.5 million from investors including Kepha Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners.) He stressed that the acquisition is “a good fit” and that the two companies have “complementary applications and audiences.” He also said his team will continue to support the Goby apps (for iPhone and Android devices), which help consumers discover events and activities near them.

Meanwhile, TeleNav is known for its GPS-based navigation applications that compete with Garmin and TomTom; the firm’s mobile apps have about 24 million subscribers. Watkins’s team will be working on new projects for TeleNav, but the companies aren’t saying much about that yet. We can surmise that it will be about generating and organizing location-based content on mobile devices, though.

Goby started in 2008 as an activity search engine with “deep Web” technology. Watkins told me back in May that the startup was pursuing a couple of revenue models based on advertising, and was looking to raise more money later this year. Whatever the terms of the TeleNav acquisition, they must have outweighed the prospect of raising more venture money to acquire more customers.

“The biggest challenge for us has always been, how do we get to scale? We’re coming up on a million downloads, but the mission is how to get to tens of millions,” Watkins says. “It’s a real challenge to reach a massive scale of audience, to build any type of consumer business.”

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Josh Marti’s wife is one organized lady. When she sends him a text message with the night’s grocery shopping, it’s arranged like a roadmap to the whole store, with items listed in the order they’re found in the aisles for maximum turn-by-turn efficiency.

With four daughters at home, that list is one heck of a ruthless time-saver. But really, should she have to do that, with the location-aware minicomputers everyone carries around in their pockets these days?

Marti thinks it should be easier—and he’s working on a solution at Point Inside, the Seattle startup he co-founded with longtime collaborator Jon Croy. The company, founded in early 2009, is developing an indoor version of GPS by building interactive maps of shopping malls, big-box retailers, and airports.

Merchants and advertisers appear to be pretty hungry to develop the platform. Marti wouldn’t reveal actual sales figures, but says the startup’s revenue for 2010 came in double its goals. “And 2011 has already seen an increase on top of that, to the point where we’ve raised our estimates,” Marti says.

Clients include Continental and United Airlines, Clear Channel’s airport advertising branch, mall owner General Growth Properties, and Meijer, a regional retailer that operates big combination grocery-and-merchandise stores.

Big players are also looking at the indoor navigation sector, including Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which unveiled its own mobile mall maps just earlier this month. Marti says Bing’s move into mobile mall mapping is nowhere near an existential threat to his startup—instead, Point Inside sees the big guys getting involved as good partnership opportunities.

“I can confirm that we have formal relationships with large mapping players, whether they’re content providers or mapping companies,” Marti says. “We just don’t name who they are.”

In fact, he says, Point Inside has made a lot of its own mapping data available to companies like Google and Apple in an attempt to broaden adoption of interior location maps.

Point Inside had to expend lots of effort to get its mapping procedures down—projects that once took four months can now be banged out in four days. But getting big players … Next Page »

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New York’s evolving startup community offers a bevy of forums for fledgling companies to pitch their ideas to potential investors and collaborators. Duy Huynh, CEO and co-founder of startup Taap.it, has been to a menagerie of such events this summer, including the New York Venture Summit, NY Tech Meetup, and the NY Entrepreneurs Business Network. Huynh says he seeks these gatherings not only to get the word out about his company but to hear feedback on his plans. “One of the priorities for us over the past two months is we try to be at as many events as possible,” he says.

Five-month-old Taap.it lets users post classified ads for products they want to sell locally. The app is available on Android devices and the iPhone, and the listings are on the Web, as well.. Users can take photos with smartphones of the products and upload them to the ads. Listings for apartments and jobs can also be posted. Rivals such as Milo.com in San Jose, CA provide similar services.

Taap.it has attracted businesses users that list their wares and services, including real estate brokerages Bond New York and Exit Kingdom Reality, retailer Harlem’s Heaven Hat Boutique, and restaurants such as T.S. Ma and Mellie’s Seafood Restaurant. But like so many others in the New York tech community, Taap.it needs to raise money, hence Huynh’s tour of the tech-events landscape. His experience has given the entrepreneur some perspective on what works and what doesn’t.

Huynh, a native of Vietnam, says the local ecosystem continues to offer new opportunities for young companies such … Next Page »

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Conferences and other business events offer the chance to make new professional contacts, but wading through the masses of attendees can be a nightmare. Marching around with a guest list does not make it much easier. Enter seven-month-old Qrious, a New York startup working on an app that lets smartphones sift through contacts people make in-person.

“Our goal is to help business people meet more of the folks they want to connect with,” says Qrious co-founder John Federico. The app is still in beta but has already been put to work at events hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum, Pace University, BarCamp NYC, and the Chicago Clean Energy Alliance.

The Qrious app is still in its embryonic stage of development, but here’s how it’s basically supposed to work. Users of Qrious create profiles activated through their LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter accounts that let them share contact information with other event attendees. Qrious users can search profiles at the events based on industry, area of expertise, or other criteria. Event planners can also print name badges, through Qrious, with quick response (QR) barcodes that provide contact details for the respective attendees. Qrious users can scan the barcodes with their smartphones to swap information, Federico says. Exhibitors at events can also use the Qrious codes at their booths for attendees to check-in to receive incentives.

Qrious is developing a feature to notify users when anyone with a profile that matches their search criteria enters the room they are in, Federico says. Future uses of the feature include breaking the ice between … Next Page »

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Offering what it says is a different spin on location-based services, four-year-old New York startup Hotlist is pursuing more funding and plans to expand its staff to fill its new offices. Billed as a social discovery engine, Hotlist lets users see where their friends and acquaintances plan to be, rather than where they have already checked in.

“When you think about Foursquare, it’s more about declaring where you are for the sake of an incentive to get a deal,” Hotlist CEO and co-founder Chris Mirabile says. “There is no emphasis on the social aspect.”

Coordinating plans for a night out even among close-knit friends, Mirabile says, can be tedious. Text messages and photos from the venue are often shared too late for their fellow revelers to join in the fun. “The problem was being able to stay in touch with everybody and figure out what they were doing without having to text, call, or e-mail everybody every day,” he says.

From that personal frustration emerged Hotlist, which aggregates information from Facebook users who RSVP to public events. Mirabile says Hotlist collects that public information from more than 110 million people’s social plans. Hotlist only shows first names and profile photos of the expected attendees. While users of Hotlist must sign up through their Facebook accounts, information is gathered from all Facebook users who make their plans public even if … Next Page »

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Like mechanics building different cars around the same powertrain, makers of many location-based apps work with the platform provided by New York’s Foursquare. Some developers have meshed the check-in system with social connections, while others help movie fans discover the locations where their favorite scenes were shot, among other applications.

In spite of its innovations, however, the buzz surrounding two-year-old Foursquare may have died down somewhat. Other types of technology debuting on the scene such as the social network Google+ and music sharing platform Spotify may be attracting media attention for the moment. But Foursquare seems entrenched enough to control its own future which continues to unfold in the location-based services domain.

Foursquare, which had some 10 million users as of last month, still faces competition from larger players. For example, Facebook Places and mobile app Google Latitude also let users share their locations with others in their networks. Such rival offerings have not dissuaded investor support for Foursquare, however.

In June the company landed $50 million in new funding to help it expand its ranks. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and also included investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Spark Capital. Foursquare says some of the funds will … Next Page »

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This month’s NY Tech Meetup, held on July 5, brought more than 750 spectators to the NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts eager to see some of the latest ideas from local startups, including one group that came out of stealth that same day.

Though the event was themed as the “Now Neighborhood,” the nine startups offered a mix of ideas that included a different way for retailers to offer loyalty-based discounts and a three-dimensional model of the human body that … Next Page »

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Consumers who gobble up smartphones and tablets are getting revolutionary tools for work and play. An ever-growing forest of app developers is targeting the devices as a juicy new business platform. But for mobile carriers and marketing pros, it’s all about the data—who’s consuming the bandwidth, what they’re doing online, and what else they might buy while they’re there.

As of today, there’s a new company aiming to own that business. Seattle’s Ground Truth and Boston-based Umber Systems are merging to form Mobile Intelligence Solutions. The combined operation will be headquartered in New York, with branch offices in Boston, Seattle, and India.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the company said it has raised $8 million as part of the merger from each startup’s previous investors: North Bridge Venture Partners on the Umber side, and Steamboat Ventures, Voyager Capital, Emergence Capital, and Openair Equity Partners from the Ground Truth camp. Ground Truth had previously raised close to $10 million in equity financing. I couldn’t find a reference to the size of Umber’s previous fundraising, but North Bridge was the only investor listed on its site.

There’s clearly a ton of opportunity in mobile data, with growing numbers of consumers adopting smartphones and tablet computers. Big companies and startups alike are attacking the problem of how to make money out of all that information that’s flowing through those devices.

Ground Truth marketing VP Evan Neufeld says leaders in traditional Web data analysis—names like comScore, Omniture, and Google—have stepped up their game in the mobile arena. But Mobile Intelligence Solutions thinks it has a nice head start on those larger companies.

“One, mobile’s our only business. If comScore doesn’t sell a dime of mobile business, I don’t think it affects their stock price,” says Neufeld (formerly of comScore Mobile). “The other thing is that market research is really a garbage-in, garbage-out business … and we’ve got the biggest, most accurate data source in the U.S.”

Mobile Intelligence Solutions gets data from partnerships with other companies, particularly the network carriers. They’re the gatekeepers and owners of tons of information about mobile consumer … Next Page »

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With big bets by the titans of technology and consumer finance, 2011 is becoming the year that American business got serious about jumpstarting the “Internet of things“—a broad web of digitally enhanced locations that consumers can navigate the same way they now use smartcards to pay their bus fare or open security doors at work.

For Seattle startup Iota, that transformation isn’t happening fast enough. This team of former T-Mobile employees is aiming its considerable experience in the mobile sector at a new type of device that it says is ready to go right now. They believe it can be made cheaper, easier, and more open than expensive new radio frequency ID-enabled smartphones controlled by the big market players. Their mission is to put the futuristic promise of what’s called “near-field communications,” or NFC, into the hands of anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone, or wants to spend less time digging around in a field of apps. The company, based in Seattle’s hip Capitol Hill neighborhood, has raised $1.4 million so far and is currently about $600,000 of the way through a $1 million convertible-note round, founder and CEO Russ Stromberg says.

Iota’s first device is called the Tapp. With physical design from partners here in Seattle, the Tapp looks and feels a bit like a thicker Zippo lighter, with a slit in the middle that kind of reminded me of a futuristic moneyclip. Inside are an RFID reader, a cellular radio, and a Bluetooth radio.

The initial idea behind the Tapp is making it easy and entertaining for people who don’t have cell phones to check in to places via social networks and collect consumer discounts by physically activating an RFID tag, rather than digging around in a smartphone app and hitting a touchscreen button. With cheap, reprogrammable RFID tags embedded in logos or advertising collateral on a retailer’s countertop, for instance, a consumer can wave their Tapp device nearby and collect rewards, while also spreading the word to friends about where they are.

Sounds fairly cool—but another device? Isn’t the market racing toward two powerful chunks of computing hardware at maximum? Iota gets this question a lot. The answer rests on two major points.

First, while smartphone use is on a rapid ascent, there’s still a big chunk of people in the U.S. who haven’t chucked their old-style mobile phones. The latest estimate from research firm Nielsen says that 38 percent of mobile users are using an iPhone, Android, or some other smartphone device—a considerable leftover of people with older-style feature phones.

The other part of Iota’s answer points to successes from companies like Nike, which has seeded its Nike Plus fitness monitoring technology into watches and other small devices, and Amazon.com, which upended the book industry again with the Kindle e-reader.

“Users will migrate towards the simple. I can download the Kindle app on my iPhone, but I still want the Kindle because it’s portable and it’s much better for reading books,” Stromberg says. “The mobile consumer space is ginormous. It’s interesting—when you talk about the number of startups that are … Next Page »

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Standing out in New York can be a challenge for a young company—especially one serving the singles scene. The “been there, done that” attitude is difficult to overcome in Manhattan when pushing a dating website, given the plethora of paid and free services available such as Match.com, eHarmony, OkCupid, and PlentyofFish. While many dating services draw generic masses of users, OneStop Singles offers its clients à la carte–style options based on their deal breakers when it comes to romance.

OneStop is the parent company of OnSpeedDating.com and SingleAndTheCity.com, which organize themed speed dating events and singles parties in the New York City area, respectively (two to five events per week in total). OnSpeed and SingleAndTheCity are ad-based websites with paid events. OneStop also operates the free online dating site Kissburg.com, which is not anchored to the New York market. Members of OnSpeed and SingleAndTheCity are automatically enrolled in Kissburg.com.

Co-founders Amber Soletti and Carmine Di Re created OneStop Singles in 2008 out of dissatisfaction with existing dating websites and the speed dating options in Manhattan. Soletti and Di Re make up the company’s staff, though they also collaborate with event promoters and hosts throughout New York City.

OneStop Singles is self-funded and profitable, according to Soletti, thanks in part to its low overhead. The company is growing at a time when dating sites are seeking ways to generate revenue even as the public can connect through free social networking portals such as Meetup and Facebook. There has been some consolidation too. In February, subscription-based Match.com paid $50 million in cash to acquire New York City’s OkCupid, an advertising-driven website that is primarily free to use but includes some paid services.

While its technology is no moon-landing breakthrough, OneStop Singles structured its services to appeal to daters’ preferences based on interests, background, and physical attributes. Soletti said the idea is to give singles the chance to target the niche groups they are attracted to, such as firefighters, blondes, Ivy Leaguers, and even men with accents. “If you’re a busy New Yorker who doesn’t have a lot of time, you can come out and you’ll have some kind of starting point that you are into,” she said.

Soletti, 35, a transplant from Austin, TX, serves as vice president of marketing for OneStop Singles (see left). Her role can include beating the bushes for daters to populate themed events. “If it’s my ‘Gentleman Prefer Blondes’ night and I’m short blondes, you better believe I am hitting every hair salon in New York,” Soletti said. Prior to launching OneStop, Soletti worked as global marketing director of hair care with Avon and in a similar role with Aveda. Some 18 months ago, she committed herself full-time to OneStop. Di Re, 36, a native of Brooklyn, handles Web design and technical aspects as vice president of development; he retains his job as a senior developer for a New York City media firm.

Other singles sites can inundate members with unwanted contacts, Soletti said, and traditional speed dating events tend to be grouped simply by the ages of the participants. Soletti said she wanted a better option for herself and others after enduring some of her own … Next Page »

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After maturing into a steady software company with a mammoth organizational chart, Microsoft is the source of plenty of eye-rolling in the world of tech upstarts—hometown fans included. But every so often, you see a glimpse of what the Redmond, WA-based tech titan could do if its energy was directed just right.

We’ve certainly seen that kind of promise with Microsoft’s big acquisition of Skype, and at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge, MA, folks were treated to a fascinating look at the future from Qi Lu, the company’s head of online services. As Xconomy’s Greg Huang details in this report, Lu’s talk touched on several areas—deals, social, mobile—where Microsoft wants to dominate. Also check out the transcript of our exclusive interview with Lu.

The rest of the past week’s tech news:

—Back out west, Microsoft scored a little coup right in Google’s back yard by landing a multimillion-dollar contract to handle cloud e-mail services for San Francisco’s city and county government. It’s not a big moneymaker for someone the size of Microsoft, but getting the city hall crowd in America’s tech capital to pick your service over the hometown offering is a big PR win.

—Google came north to do a little shopping, acquiring consumer electronics shopping startup Sparkbuy for undisclosed terms. Sparkbuy had barely taken the covers off its service, which used online travel-inspired customization tools to help shoppers find laptops and TVs—making this look pretty clearly like a talent acquisition. The Sparkbuy team will be joining Google’s Kirkland, WA office.

—Speaking of talent, we had two more entrants in what might be this year’s overarching story in tech: The lack of qualified hires to fuel growth. I’ve covered this story a few times already with reports on the overall job climate and individual California companies making aggressive hiring moves, but there’s more ground to cover. In this week’s roundup, we have a sharp analysis from guest columnist Ed Lazowska and a study from job-search site Dice, which took a national look at which states have big shortages of tech talent.

—Xconomy had another great event here in Seattle, bringing together leaders in the cleantech sector to talk about the future of alternative fuels in the U.S. The speakers on our main panel all have deep experience in the science and business of trying to disrupt oil’s dominance as the world’s primary fuel, and sparked some really interesting conversations. Also—a photo gallery!

—Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) took another step away from its original business plan, handing over management of its 4G wireless network to Ericsson—the company that also manages the network of Sprint (NASDAQ:S), Clearwire’s majority shareholder. There’s been an enormous amount of change at the Kirkland, WA-based company in just the past six months or so. It’ll be really interesting to see what interim CEO John Stanton and crew have in store for the rest of 2011.

—Zaarly is technically based in San Francisco, but has strong Seattle connections: co-founder Eric Koester is based here. So naturally, Zaarly picked Seattle as one of the original cities for the crowd-buying service’s kickoff.

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After several weeks of hype-building, name-your-price crowd-commerce startup Zaarly began publicly operating today. The company came together when co-founders Bo Fishback, Eric Koester and Ian Hunter won a Startup Weekend competition in Los Angeles. Here’s how it works: A consumer posts an offer to Zaarly, either through its website or a mobile app, naming a price for something they want. So, for instance, you could say you’d pay $5 for a Top Pot doughnut—and see if someone else monitoring the site will fulfill the request. According to this YouTube video, that deal apparently actually went down today in Seattle. Zaarly has financing from investors including actor Ashton Kutcher, Felicis Ventures, and Lightbank.

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Streetline Networks, a San Francisco startup profiled by Xconomy in December, said today that it has expanded Parker, its mobile parking spot finder for the Apple iPhone, beyond Hollywood to parts of the Marina District in San Francisco. The app can now guide drivers to blocks with open parking spots in Studio City, CA, as well. In addition, the company said it has released an Android version of Parker, and added features such as live garage data, parking location tracking, and a parking timer.

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A chat with the nation’s first chief technology officer was one of the highlights of the past week in tech news. Aneesh Chopra, President Barack Obama’s CTO, is in town this week for a panel discussion at the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology luncheon. He had lunch with local corporate execs yesterday, and we published this interview that touched on just a couple of the administration’s main topics: Why innovation is primed to take off in healthcare, and how the new Startup America Partnership can help the private sector develop strong infrastructure for new companies.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech news from the past week or so:

—I profiled startup Pinpoint Pickup, a towncar-booking app that has bootstrapped its way to services in seven cities. This all comes as competitors like San Francisco-based Uber get tons of press and millions in investment, all without anything near the scope of expansion that Pinpoint has achieved.

—Xconomy’s Greg Huang checked in with Charles River Ventures about the firm’s stake in Intellectual Ventures, the intellectual property machine founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Charles River Ventures has put a whopping $300 million into Intellectual Ventures. Partner Izhar Armony says more investors would get into the developing market if they weren’t convinced that IP is “a dirty world controlled by lawyers.”

—Like just about everybody in the local startup scene, I swung by the Seattle 2.0 Awards. It was an interesting mix of celebration and navel-gazing (the good kind), punctuated by an energetic keynote speech from California VC Mark Suster—lots of F-bombs, a Public Enemy reference, and even a bit of aggressive crowd control. Also featured: Rampaging mascots.

—There were a couple of acquisitions to report, both on the same day. BuzzLabs, a member of Seattle’s burgeoning social media cluster, was snapped up by CityGrid Media, a unit of Barry Diller-headed IAC. BuzzLabs works on social media monitoring, helping other companies sort through the tons of things people are saying about them online. The other deal involved Seattle’s Smashing Ideas, a 15-year-old digital media and marketing company. It was acquired by Random House, the publishing unit of Bertlesmann AG. Terms were not disclosed for either deal.

—Finally, two bits of Xconomy news. We have a recharged Facebook page, to which we’re adding photos, stories, and all the other goodies you’d expect—with more to come. And it comes with a promise: No spam. We’re selecting three of our best stories throughout the day to push through Facebook, so we won’t clog up your feed with every last tidbit. We’ve also added more horsepower to our upcoming event, “Separating Hype from Reality in Alternative Fuels.” Kelly Ogilvie from Blue Marble Energy joins folks from Harvest Power, General Biodiesel and more as we sort through the opportunities for this industry in the years ahead.

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Boston-based SCVNGR started out in 2008 doing exactly what its name suggests—organizing mobile-based scavenger hunts. Since then, the startup has been downright Protean, morphing into a Foursquare-like system of location-based checkins and rewards and then introducing a Groupon-like spinoff called LevelUp. But while it still isn’t clear whether 22-year-old CEO Seth Priebatsch wants to be the next Dennis Crowley or the next Andrew Mason (or both), his company has at least unveiled some details of how LevelUp will work.

At a press event at Google’s San Francisco offices yesterday, Priebatsch announced a partnership with American Express and Levi’s stores that will demonstrate, in a preliminary way, how consumers can buy into LevelUp’s discount programs, which the startup is portraying as a more addictive alternative to daily deal programs like Groupon’s.

It works like this: If you have an American Express card and you live in Boston, San Francisco, or Philadelphia, you can go to the LevelUp website and use the card to buy a coupon that entitles you to $20 worth of jeans and accessories for just $10. The deal can be redeemed at one of three Levi’s retail locations—on Newbury Street in Boston, on Post Street in San Francisco, and at the King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia. When you go to the store, you just present your card to get the discount. And once that purchase is complete, LevelUp unlocks a second, steeper discount—$10 for $30 worth of Levi’s stuff. That’s followed by an even better offer, $10 for $50 worth of merchandise.

Priebatsch argues that this escalating reward, or “level up,” adds a game-like element to the standard Groupon-style deal and will therefore bring customers back to retailers more often. “Anyone with an e-mail list can get customers in the door,” the company said in its press materials today. “We can get them to come back.”

The company calls the AmEx-Levi’s program “the first true alternative” to the traditional daily deal. That may be stretching it a bit—the LevelUp program takes advantage of the same American Express “Smart Offers API” that Foursquare used at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX, in March to demonstrate its own couponless discount system. But that pilot program did not include a system of escalating rewards like LevelUp’s.

Oddly, given SCVNGR’s heritage in mobile and location-based technology, there isn’t much that’s actually mobile about LevelUp’s discount system. You sign up for LevelUp’s discount offers via the Web. The company does offer iPhone and Android apps that let users browse its offers, and when a coupon is redeemed, a push notification is sent to the user’s phone, but that’s about it. The company acknowledged in its press materials today that redeeming a coupon is only “loosely location-based” and that its system incorporates “just a twist” of location-based, mobile, social, and gaming technologies.

Meanwhile, there are signs in today’s announcement that the new LevelUp brand may be pushing aside the old SCVNGR brand. “With 20MM in funding from Google Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Balderton Capital, LevelUp is based in Boston, with satellite offices in each of the communities they serve,” the company said in a statement. “LevelUp is founded by the same folks who brought you SCVNGR.”

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