Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … Next Page »

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When you run a startup that focuses on mapping the floor plans of retail stores, there’s this inevitable question: What happens when Google, the company that has already mapped the entire world, decides to do the same thing as you? Josh Marti, the CEO of Seattle-based Point Inside, has heard it plenty of times.

“And our answer was always, yeah absolutely—whether they use our maps or their own maps, they’re going to see the value that indoor maps bring,” Marti says. His job as an entrepreneur is to make sure Point Inside is offering something more valuable.

That particular part of the job got even more important last week, when Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced that it was indeed bringing indoor layouts to the latest version of its maps application for Android.

As we’ve reported before, Point Inside thinks partnering with big players in location services can be good for its business, so I wondered whether Google’s new offering included the Seattle startup’s maps. Turns out, that’s not the case—Google appears to be partnering with retailers on its own, and also appealing to retailers to submit floorplans themselves.

Marti took this challenge head-on earlier this week during his demo of Point Inside at Xconomy’s Mobile Madness Northwest, a packed half-day forum on innovation in mobile computing. As Point Inside also detailed on its blog, the question isn’t necessarily whether Google can successfully map indoor spaces, he says—it’s whether Google’s business model of selling ads within those stores will be appealing to retailers.

To illustrate the point, Marti pulled up Google’s app and navigated over to a Home Depot store. Once there, he searched for “paint,” and was promptly redirected to a Lowe’s down the street.

That got some pretty hearty laughs from the crowd. But it’s serious stuff, both for retailers and smaller companies like Point Inside, which has some 1,300 locations using its indoor mapping service.

Marti puts it this way: Google’s overarching business model has been to index large amounts of information, attract eyeballs, and sell advertising. For a retailer, that could be a scary proposition: If Google makes the map, who owns the advertising inside your own store?

“Right now, the way it’s deployed today, it’s certainly a scenario where if you invite them in, you’d better be prepared to pay them to keep the competition out,” Marti says. “Assuming that the business model for websites is the same business model for physical locations, you’ll see that competitors are going to start buying ad words against each other and ad locations against each other.”

To be fair, that sounds like some pretty classic fear, uncertainty, and doubt from a competitor. And Marti is quick to acknowledge that this is still the very early public version of Google’s indoor mapping product—there’s no definite way of knowing how it will shake out.

But in any case, Marti says Point Inside is confident that retailers will want to retain more control over their shoppers’ trips through the aisles. That’s what the Seattle startup, which presently has about 30 employees and is seeing growing revenue, offers through a white-label service for indoor navigation apps.

“They have a real opportunity to control their brand experience as well as maintain the relationship with their customers,” Marti says. “And that’s an important, lifelong theme for the retailers—they hate to be disintermediated by anybody.”

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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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Those guys in Portland are pretty busy these days. Urban Airship, the Oregon-based supplier of push notifications and other services for mobile app developers, is being named today as one of the first two investments from a new $100 million mobile application-focused investment fund from the venture arm of tech giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC).

The amount of Intel Capital’s investment wasn’t disclosed, but the money is part of Urban Airship’s $15.1 million Series C round announced last week, which also included Salesforce.com and Verizon as investors.

In addition, Urban Airship and Intel are partnering to make the startup’s notification, payment, subscription, and location services available for developers working on apps for Intel’s own PC app store, called Intel AppUp, which focuses on portable devices like ultrabooks and netbooks powered by Intel’s Atom processor.

That could be a significant step for Urban Airship. The startup, which had previously been focusing solely on smartphone app developers, already has about 20,000 customers and says its revenue has grown “exponentially year over year.” But adding the Intel collaboration raises the possibility of expanding into millions of devices that run the Atom processor, which could pose a fresh challenge to San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and its Snapdragon wireless “system on a chip” technology.

“Our mission is to shape mobile experiences that are constantly getting smarter, more fun and more useful,” Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton said in a release today. Intel made the announcement at its Intel Capital Global Summit in Huntington Beach, CA. The other company named as an initial investment for the new AppUp Fund is German developer 4tiitoo.

The news also comes on the heels of Urban Airship acquiring San Francisco’s SimpleGeo, a mobile location-services startup. Not bad for a team that first started wooing developers by bringing donuts to people waiting in line for an Apple conference in San Francisco.

Intel has a large semiconductor research and manufacturing office in Hillsboro, OR, which is about a half-hour outside of Portland. The company is one of Oregon’s largest private employers, according to the Intel website.

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A Boston-area security tech company and the University of Michigan are involved in one of the most ambitious—and potentially controversial—transportation projects of our time. It could have major impact on federal legislation, and almost everyone you know.

Picture this: You’re driving in your car, approaching an intersection. Maybe you’re speeding a little, going 40 mph in a 35 zone, say. Unbeknownst to you, another driver is racing down the cross street and is about to run a red light (probably texting or something). This could spell disaster. But instead, your car picks up a wireless signal from the other vehicle. A beeping sound or flashing light on your dashboard alerts you to slow down, so you hit the brakes. Disaster averted.

Now let’s take it a step further. Maybe the alert is hooked into your car’s control system, so if you don’t put on the brakes, your car does it automatically. And maybe that’s fine with you. But you might be a little worried about giving up that kind of control in life-and-death situations. After all, computers get hacked and software crashes. Not to mention, you might not want your car broadcasting its speed and location out there for all to see (especially not the cops, since you were speeding).

This scenario isn’t the future. It’s happening already—at least the driver-alert part. In six cities around the U.S., trials of about 100 drivers each are underway to see how people react to in-car alerts (such as collision warnings, do not pass, and vehicle stopped ahead). But the next step is bigger. In Ann Arbor, MI, some 3,000 cars will be equipped with onboard wireless devices for communicating with each other and signaling to drivers when there’s an imminent hazard. This 12-month pilot study, which was announced recently and starts next August, is being led by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) through a $14.9 million contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The state of Michigan has been heavily involved as well.

The goal of the federal initiative is, ultimately, to save lives. In the U.S., auto accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34; more than 30,000 people are killed on the nation’s roadways each year. The hope is that with new early-warning systems in place, a sizable fraction of would-be victims could be saved—some say 80 percent of non-alcohol-related cases—especially when high speed is involved.

The idea of wirelessly connected cars isn’t new, of course. The field of vehicle telematics has been around for years, with applications in fleet management, tracking, and safety. But advances in GPS location technologies, wireless communications, sensors, hardware, and algorithms are enabling smarter, better-connected vehicles to be tested on a bigger scale. And recent breakthroughs such as autonomous road-racing vehicles and Google’s self-driving car are starting to propel the technology into the mainstream.

Nevertheless, the Michigan study raises some serious real-world concerns. “This is a massive system with tremendous security and privacy implications,” says Ed Adams, the chief executive of Security Innovation in Wilmington, MA. And that’s exactly where his software security firm comes in.

Security Innovation developed the mobile software being used in the U-M study to … Next Page »

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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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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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Social GPS startup Glympse has raised $7.5 million in a Series B round led by Menlo Ventures and Ignition Partners. The Redmond, WA-based company’s application allows users to show other people where they are in real time, showing up as an icon tracing its path around city streets, for instance. Glympse says it’s useful for things like alerting colleagues where you are if you’re late to a meeting, or finding friends for social meetups. Pravin Vazirani from Menlo Ventures and Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners are joining the startup’s board as part of the financing deal announced Wednesday. Existing board members include Seattle’s Tom Huseby, of SeaPoint Ventures, and Greg Tarr of the Bay Area’s Rogers Ventures. The company’s co-founders are former Microsofties: CEO Bryan Trussel and Chief Architect Steve Miller.

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San Francisco-based JiWire, which operates an online advertising network targeting public Wi-Fi networks in places such as airports, said today that it has raised $20 million in new funding. New investor Trident Capital led the Series C round, which was joined by existing investors Comcast Interactive Capital, DFJ Frontier, Norwest Venture Partners, and Panorama Capital. The company has raised $45 million all told. The company said the money would be used to “aggressively extend JiWire’s leadership position in location-based advertising.”

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San Francisco-based MapQuest, the mapping division of AOL (NYSE: AOL), will use hybrid GPS/Wi-Fi location-finding technology from Boston’s Skyhook Wireless in a forthcoming turn-by-turn navigation app for Android phones, according to an announcement today. The partnership helps to bolster Skyhook’s longstanding assertion that its location finding system is more accurate and reliable than the system Google builds into Android phones. “Skyhook is the leader in location positioning, and MapQuest’s partnership with them will provide better experiences and greater reliability to our Android customers,” said Christian Dwyer, MapQuest’s general manager and senior vice president, in a statement.

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Contrary to popular belief, the world is not a more dangerous place for kids today than it was in the mid-20th century. Rates of violent crime and kidnapping involving children are no higher today than they were in the 1960s, and physical and sexual abuse against children have declined dramatically since 1990.

For some reason, though, none of that seems to matter to the new breed of helicopter parents: every Amber Alert or missing-child frenzy on CNN raises their blood pressure.

All of which puts Chris Hulls in an awkward position. The 2006 graduate of UC Berkeley did not have a sheltered childhood—in fact his parents let him travel to Kenya alone when he was 12 years old. He says he’s skeptical of the helicopter-parenting phenomenon and troubled about the ethics of sex-offender registry laws as a way to protect children against perceived threats.

But the San Francisco startup Hulls launched in 2009, Life360, is building its business around parents’ craving for safety and security. Parents use the company’s GPS-powered smartphone software to keep closer tabs on their children and to see if sex offenders live in their neighborhoods. And they’re downloading the Life360 iPhone and Android apps in droves: the company announced earlier this month that it had passed the 2-million-family mark, and that it’s gaining more than 100,000 users each week.

How does Hulls reconcile the tensions? It’s been an interesting journey for the startup. While Life360 certainly works hard to be near the top of the search rankings when parents type in keyword clusters like “family GPS tracking,” its message isn’t all about keeping kids on an electronic leash, Hulls says. In fact, the design and branding of the Life360 app has been evolving over time to downplay the sense of omnipresent danger, and instead foster a more general sense of family safety and peace of mind. Exhibit A: the old “panic” button feature of Life360′s mobile app has been relabeled as the “check-in” button, to encourage kids to spontaneously alert their parents about their whereabouts.

“Moms have always had their kids call on Friday night to make sure they’re okay,” says Hulls. “We are doing that in a way that actually encourages freedom and tries to avoid politics. Helicopter parenting is real, and nothing we do is going to change that. But hopefully we are channeling that into something that is a little more liberating.”

With the disappearance of competitors such as Whereoscope (a Y Combinator-backed company I profiled last year, whose founders have since joined social game maker Zynga), Life360 is emerging as one of the leaders in the mobile family safety market. It’s been widely covered, not just in the tech and business press but on network TV and dozens of “mommy blogs,” and it’s adding users so fast that it could prove to be one of 2011′s breakout Bay Area startups.

Which would be welcome news for the startup’s investors, who include Founders Fund, LaunchCapital, Seraph Group, Kapor Capital, Venture 51, Band of Angels, and individual investors such as 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Intuit’s Mark Goines. They’d probably also like to see the startup devise a business model—right now the app is free and “the focus is not on monetization,” says Hulls. But the startup figures that if it can position itself as the leading smartphone app for family security, there will be ways to capitalize on its millions-strong base of users and the trust they place in the company (more on that below).

When Life360 was founded in 2008, the focus was only partly on mobile apps. Hulls says the initial idea for a better safety application had hit him a few years before, after … Next Page »

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There’s been a bit of discussion lately about whether “the check-in” is dead. Chicago-based daily deals behemoth Groupon apparently doesn’t think so: It’s acquiring Seattle’s Pelago, makers of the Whrrl social check-in service. Terms weren’t disclosed.

In a blog post, Groupon Chief Executive Andrew Mason said he was a fan of Whrrl’s technology and people, specifically Pelago CEO Jeff Holden, who will oversee Groupon product development. Mason also said there would be “many Pelago people taking integral roles” at Groupon.

“Their obsession with real-world serendipitous discovery, or “Anti-Search,” is core to Groupon’s mission. It’s about discovering what you didn’t know you didn’t know, right in your own backyard,” Mason wrote.

Whrrl, like FourSquare and other location-based apps, allows users to check in at various places they visit and share pictures, comments, and other information with friends and the wider world. Users can accumulate points and join “societies” of like-minded people, and unlock rewards from other companies.

Whrrl will shut down at the end of April, with its technology being sucked inside the Groupon brand. On his company blog, Holden wrote that Whrrl’s last big engineering task was to create a way for Whrrl users to get back all the data that they’ve been holding in the cloud through Whrrl.

“You will be able to continue using Whrrl normally through April 30,” Holden wrote. “Starting today, however, you’ll find on the website that you now have an option to retrieve your data—pretty much everything you ever put into Whrrl.”

Holden said he hoped people would be able to use it in the future, although neither company said anything about migrating a Whrrl profile over to Groupon. I guess that things like photos might be nice to get back, if someone hadn’t kept them elsewhere. But what in the heck would you do with downloaded check-in data from a defunct service anyway?

Pelago has been around since 2006, led by veterans of Amazon.com, RealNetworks, and Yahoo. Investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bezos Expeditions, T-Mobile investment branch T-Venture, Trilogy Equity Partners, and Reliance Technology Ventures.

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A really interesting variety of startups made their initial pitches to the broader investing crowd yesterday at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum. The 12 presenters represented a wide array of sectors, from food to retail to software services and—seriously—nuclear fusion power. “I don’t think we could have imagined a more diverse slate, in every sense of the word, than what we have today,” NWEN executive director Rebecca Lovell said.

The event itself was the culmination of a long coaching process that readies a select group of companies and entrepreneurs for their turn in front of the investor audience. And there’s a real emphasis on showcasing many different kinds of businesses—which is notable in an investing scene (and media landscape) that can seem dominated by techies.

Each of the 12 companies on display had five minutes to give a pitch (with slides), and then five finalists were grilled by a panel of venture capitalist judges: Mark Ashida from OVP Venture Partners, Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners, and Bill McAleer from Voyager Capital.

The winner was Guide Analytics, a mobile-connected bracelet and monitoring system that keeps track of edema, a swelling that can lead to hospitalizations, particularly in heart patients. Chief executive Deborah Kessler’s previous work includes time at Rosetta Informatics and NASA—”My advisers tell me I’m supposed to say, ‘I am a rocket scientist,’” she quipped. The device itself boasts low manufacturing costs, even though it has a battery, transmitters, and sensors. Investors did question whether relying on elderly heart patients to have a new smartphone for transmitting critical medical data was asking too much. Kessler said it was possible, however, to work with patients who have a lower-end cell phone. The company won a year of free office space from Martin Selig Real Estate.

I put together these snapshots from the four other finalists, and you can check out the longer list of participants over at NWEN.

—Snuggle Cloud is a private, one-on-one social network for couples—especially those in long-distance relationships. Co-founders Emily Marshall and Kiran Gollu were actually in separate long-distance relationships themselves. Their idea is that, although Facebook is hugely popular, people are not going to post a bunch of lovey-dovey stuff in the wild where anyone else can read it. Snuggle Cloud is … Next Page »

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If you’re a software engineer turned product manager who’s overseen the seventh-most-visited website in the world—Google’s Blogger platform—what do you do for an encore? You move to New York to work for a little startup trying to change the world through mobile check-ins, of course.

Siobhan Quinn got her BS in computer science at the University of Washington in 2003 and spent the next seven years at Google. Last summer she became Foursquare‘s first product manager, overseeing new feature development for the startup’s mobile apps. Those apps—in case you’ve been living on a desert island for the last two years—allow users to earn virtual badges, and often discounts and other rewards, by checking in at locations like coffee shops or restaurants.

The check-in concept didn’t exist five years ago, but it has spread at lightning speed thanks to Foursquare and competitors like Brightkite, Gowalla, SCVNGR, and Facebook. But now that the novelty of earning a Bender badge (for going drinking four nights in a row) or a Jobs badge (for checking in at three Apple stores) is starting to wear off, Quinn’s job is to make sure that people keep using Foursquare. And that means making th app truly useful—for example, by giving merchants new ways to reward loyal customers who check in at their stores, or helping third-party developers invent totally new uses for the platform. (There’s one that your dog would really like—read on for that.)

In a conversation last week, Quinn told us that she loves working in New York, in part because “technology is the underdog” here and has to compete for attention alongside finance, fashion, the arts, and all of New Yorkers’ other obsessions. Ultimately, being just one element in the city’s diversity—rather than the dominant force, as in Silicon Valley—may help tech companies develop more balanced products, says Quinn, who is an Xconomist (a member of our board of informal editorial advisors). Quinn says Foursquare resembles Google—where co-founder Dennis Crowley also worked after it acquired his previous location-based-services startup, Dodgeball—in the sense that it’s full of whip-smart engineers and business folks. But she says Foursquare has the advantage of being much smaller and nimbler—and, of course, of being in New York. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: First question. What does a product manager do at a company like Foursquare, where there’s only one product?

Siobhan Quinn: It’s funny, the term product manager is so ill-defined. I guess the product manager plays an essential role in the entire development of a product, from the idea stage to actually getting it out the door. That means defining the functions of our application, prioritizing features, performing market research, gathering requirements, and taking the vision and turning it into a plan that designers and engineers can execute, and finally getting it into the hands of customers.

Until recently, I was the only product manager at Foursquare, so I kind of focused on everything. But now I can be focused on something I’m more excited about, which is how to encourage users to use Foursquare. That is one of our big problems—making it easier to check in and maintaining the feedback loop with users when they interact. For example, sending people an alert to say ‘Hey, you haven’t checked in six months,” or creating rewards and incentives to get people engaged.

It’s true that we only have one product, but there are large features that span across the whole product, and sometimes totally new features. For example, we recently launched … Next Page »

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This is the fourth in a series of profiles of Y Combinator Winter 2011 (YC W11) startups.

Gift cards, also known as stored-value cards, may be one of the most popular types of gifts—Americans spend at least $80 billion on them every year. But let’s face it, the little plastic rectangles are so 1994. They’re impersonal, and you can only use one at the store that issued it. That inconvenience means that much of the value stored on the cards—an estimated 10 percent—never gets redeemed (to the obvious delight of retailers, who get to pocket billions of dollars in so-called “breakage” every year).

If a Mountain View, CA, startup called GiftRocket gets its way, the stored-value card will soon have a place in the trash heap, alongside the old paper gift certificate. The Y Combinator-backed startup, which introduced its service two weeks ago, has an alternative that relies on smartphones with mobile Web access to help people deliver cash gifts to friends or family based on their location. GiftRocket uses PayPal to deliver the actual money, and it works for any business location with a customer review on Yelp (which is a lot of locations, though Yelp doesn’t reveal hard numbers).

GiftRocket’s founders argue that their system has at least two big advantages over gift cards: It’s a friendly, low-friction way to encourage someone to check out a restaurant, retailer, or other location you think they’d like. Also, recipients get the whole cash amount when they check in at the suggested location, so none of the value disappears as breakage, as with gift cards.

And merchants get a bonus too: the gifts bring people into their locations, where they often “upspend” or shell out even more than the value of their gift. And by encouraging their own customers to use GiftRocket, businesses too small to issue their own gift cards can, in effect, set up an instant, no-hassle gift certificate program.

“We tried to replicate what people do with gift cards as closely as we could, and then make it frictionless,” says Kapil Kale, who co-founded GiftRocket with his Dartmouth College classmate Nick Baum and their Stanford University friend Jonathan Pines. “Our central belief is that a gift card is for a person, and the money should be going to the person, not directly to a retailer.”

Using GiftRocket is pretty simple for both the giver and the recipient, as Kale demonstrates in the video below. To use a personal example: I wanted to thank some friends in Medford, MA, for letting me sleep on their couch a few weeks ago while I was in Boston for an Xconomy conference. I went to GiftRocket.com and searched for Lyndell’s, an amazing 124-year-old bakery just down the street from my friends’ house. After finding it in Yelp’s listings, I entered the e-mail address for one of my friends, chose the gift amount ($25–enough for about 10 scrumptious Half Moons), wrote a personal message, and entered my credit-card info. That was it.

My friends will get an e-mail with my message and a link leading to a personalized, mobile-friendly GiftRocket Web page. The page is actually a sophisticated little mini-app that interacts with a smartphone’s GPS chip. When my friends click on the big red “Redeem” button on their iPhone, GiftRocket will check their latitude and longitude against Yelp’s location database to make sure they’re at Lyndell’s, and then it will release the $25 to the PayPal account associated with the e-mail address I used. (If a recipient doesn’t have a PayPal account under that address, or doesn’t have an account at all, that’s okay—PayPal has a way to get money to anyone with an e-mail address.)

It’s up to my friends whether they want to spend the whole $25 at Lyndell’s. If they wanted to spend $2.50 on doughnuts and use the rest to go to the movies, I’d be none the wiser (and I wouldn’t really object). Either way, says Kale, “You get back the full value of the gift into your PayPal account—which is the only way we could be merchant-free and have it work all over the place.”

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So far, people are sending GiftRocket gifts for “lots of different types of things—there hasn’t been one key use case,” Kale says. The most common scenario, he says, is someone sending cash for a birthday dinner at a nice restaurant—from a pub in a small town in Minnesota to the famous … Next Page »

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Skyhook Wireless may have won the audience favorite vote during the “location smackdown” at Xconomy’s Mobile Madness conference last week, but people in the tech-business community are still wondering: what’s next for the firm?

Boston-based Skyhook, founded in 2003, is a pioneer in location-positioning technology for mobile devices. The company’s software determines the precise location of a device based on data from Wi-Fi networks, cellular towers, and GPS satellites. The technology is deployed in thousands of mobile apps and tens of millions of devices worldwide, made by the likes of Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Dell, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Sony.

But the company hit a rough patch last year. In July, Skyhook confirmed that Apple dropped its location-finding software from the latest iPhone (and the iPad) in favor of Apple’s own technology. And in September, Skyhook filed a pair of lawsuits against Google, alleging that the search and advertising giant infringed on Skyhook’s patents with its in-house location system, and also interfered with contracts Skyhook had with Motorola and Samsung last spring (to put Skyhook’s software on the manufacturers’ Android phones).

Many observers have interpreted those competitive interactions as a serious threat to Skyhook’s business. The question I’ve been hearing on the street from tech entrepreneurs is, does Skyhook need to reinvent itself, or “pivot” in a big way?

Not so much, says Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s founder and CEO. The company’s current growth plans are “less a pivot” than a question of “how do we do more?” he says. In an interview last week, Morgan laid out his firm’s plans to compete on different types of devices and in a wider range of mobile applications. He also had more to say about the situation with Apple and Google, and its broader significance to startups and the mobile industry.

Reading between the lines, my take is that the company is adjusting its strategy because of these tech giants—it really has to—but it’s not a drastic change. (Then again, if Skyhook were planning to make a big strategic shift, it wouldn’t want Google and Apple to know about it.)

Morgan began by giving a high-level pshaw to naysayers who think Skyhook’s core business is petering out. “The strategy is more sound than ever,” he says. “Google is the only competitor. We own all the intellectual property around it. While the Google [litigation] is a headache, you couldn’t ask for a better market to be in.”

What’s more, he touts Skyhook’s ability to “get around Google” by working … Next Page »

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Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced this week that its location-finding technology will be embedded in Sony Computer Entertainment’s forthcoming “NGP” handheld gaming system, which will roll out in late 2011. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but the news comes on the heels of some other recent customer wins for Skyhook, including Intel and Citysearch. Skyhook’s software blends Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS data to provide a fast location reading for mobile devices.

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To me, one thing seems pretty clear: the changes wrought over the coming 10 years by mobile devices are going to be even more far-reaching than those we’ve seen over the past 20 years from desktop and laptop PCs. The shifts in the ways we communicate, learn, shop, travel, and do business might not be as starkly noticeable as the last time around, since the Internet, which was insignificant before the PC era, is now an important constant tying together PCs and mobile devices. Even so, we’re talking about order-of-magnitude increases in the number of people affected, the new capabilities afforded, and the amount of money to be made.

To grapple with those changes and their implications, Xconomy pauses every spring for a half-day conference on mobile technology. The third edition, Mobile Madness 2011, is coming up on March 9. I’ll be emceeing much of the program, and as part of my prep work I started a two-part column last week on seven of the key unanswered questions about where the changes will be most dramatic and about the kinds of opportunities that are being created for mobile innovators and entrepreneurs. Today it’s time for Part 2.

The industry leaders speaking at Mobile Madness obviously know a lot more than I do about these subjects; my hope is just to provide some starting points for conversation. In Part 1 I asked who the new mobile “gatekeepers” will be, in an era when the wireless operators no longer have so much control over the software running on the phones they sell; whether makers of mobile apps will adopt Web-style principles of openness and sharing; and whether wireless operators will be able to provide basic infrastructure like faster, 4G broadband at a price low enough to encourage ongoing innovation. Today I’ll cover four more topics, including mobile commerce, enterprise adoption of mobile, geolocation, and what a “post-mobile” world might look like. If you’re in Boston on March 9, I hope you’ll join us for the afternoon at Microsoft’s NERD Center and help keep the conversation going.

(Why seven questions rather than six, or ten, or 50? I admit it’s a bit of a gimmick. Last week’s World Wide Wade column was the 128th in the series, and 128, for you non-math-geeks, is 2 to the 7th power.)

4. How will physical, bricks-and-mortar commerce evolve in response to mobile technology?

It almost goes without saying that the rise of the desktop Internet shifted the information balance in favor of consumers and citizens. All sorts of data that used to be difficult or impossible to find—from airline schedules to the weather in Antarctica to the locations of toxic waste sites—became easily accessible online. Unfortunately, as soon you left your computer and went out into the real world, the balance shifted back again. Only the airline could tell you how long you’d be stuck in the terminal; only the Best Buy clerk could tell you how much a Samsung TV should cost, or why it was better than the Sony model.

Internet-connected mobile devices are now extending consumers’ information advantage into every setting, including stores. The dumb retailers will perceive that as a threat, seeing only how easy it is for a customer to walk into a store, scan the barcode on an item with their iPhone or Android phone, use an app like SearchReviews to find dozen product reviews written by other consumers, and then order the item for 30 percent less from Amazon. The smart retailers will see mobile as an opportunity, figuring out ways to reach consumers on their devices with relevant and timely information, offers, and services.

One of the most interesting testbeds for a lot of new mobile services is your neighborhood grocery store. Last fall I wrote about a Bay Area startup called ShopWell whose free iPhone app lets you scan food packages, then call up personalized nutrition labels highlighting the ingredients that might be unhealthy for you, depending on your profile. You might think that would upset food producers—but in fact the company says food companies will pay for ShopWell’s data about what users are scanning and buying; it could turn out to be a far more accurate form of market research than traditional focus groups. ShopWell also plans to offer stores and food brands marketing services such as personalized coupon distribution. They call it a win-win.

Quite a few other companies, such as Cellfire, Modiv Media, and SavingStar, are also entering the mobile coupon business, with the goal of … Next Page »

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Mobile is becoming redundant: in technology, everything is mobile. It’s not just location-based services, or devices, or advertising—it’s networks, consumer Web apps, business software, social commerce, human-computer interfaces, you name it.

Every company and every tech entrepreneur is touched by this revolution. That’s part of why the future of mobile is so exciting—and so very hard to predict. And that’s why we’re going to have a blast on March 9.

That’s when Xconomy is convening our next forum, Mobile Madness 2011, at Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge, MA. You can see the full agenda here and registration details here (saver rate ends today).

Just a sampling of what’s on offer: We’ll put Qualcomm, Clearwire, and Ruckus Wireless together to hash out the future of 4G. We’ll have Google Ventures, Swype, and Vlingo talk about how your phone is making you smarter. We’ll have interactive panels on the maturation of mobile payments and enterprise apps.

Add two mystery startups that will emerge from stealth at the event…Throw in a “location smackdown” in which SCVNGR, Skyhook Wireless, Where, Locately, and others will debate the future of location-based software and how to actually build a sustainable business there…

And just to make things really interesting, we’ll ask Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, A New Kind of Science and Wolfram Alpha, to give his perspective on where mobile is really headed—and how it touches software companies like his (Wolfram Research).

My colleague Wade, who will be in town from San Francisco to emcee the event, has been previewing some of the key themes in the mobile industry. He has compiled a list of seven questions that will decide the future of mobile.

One that caught my eye in particular: who will be the new mobile gatekeepers? Look for Part Two of his column tomorrow, where he’ll tackle questions about the future of physical commerce, business IT, whether context and location-based services are a legitimate business (or just a feature)—and the ultimate question, what comes after mobile? (OK, before we get to that, I also want to know what’s going to happen with Microsoft and Nokia.)

We look forward to seeing you on March 9 to help us get to the bottom of these questions.

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I generally hate cocktail parties, but the one at Cambridge, MA-based Performable on Tuesday night was pretty good (you can see some photos here). Not that many VCs were there, which was just as well, because I got to meet tons of entrepreneurs from Boston and beyond, all working on interesting startups.

Plus, who knew that Performable had hired Andrew Bialecki, the son of Greg Bialecki, Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, as a developer? (I met them both at the party and I’d say it’s a smart move, Performable.)

At such gatherings, and elsewhere, I’ve been hearing about lots of interesting Boston-area tech startups—some still in stealth, others not. Let’s call these “quiet startups.” In any case, they’re early-stage but won’t stay quiet for long. Some of them might not want the attention yet, but hey, that’s my job: Dig up the news and write about it here.

So here are five startups I’ve been hearing about:

—Take the Interview, led by founder and CEO Danielle Weinblatt, a former private equity associate and investment banking analyst (and current MBA student at Harvard Business School). This company has scored angel financing and is already gaining some traction. The idea is a Web-based video interviewing system for employers and job seekers—basically trying to make the recruiting process more efficient by screening more candidates before doing in-person interviews. My colleague Wade wrote about a similar-sounding Y Combinator startup last summer called HireHive; that company is now defunct, though I’m not quite sure what happened.

—Open Mile, led by Evan Schumacher, the former CEO of Going.com (and a few other tech startups). This company got money about a year ago from Charles River Ventures, and is using Web and mobile technologies to help shipping companies like UPS and FedEx match up supply and demand in an effective and economical way.

— Loom Décor (co-led by Jessa McIntosh) and CustomMade (led by Mike Salguero). These two are in honor of the recent activity around town in “mass customization,” which may start to redefine some segments of e-commerce. Loom Décor hasn’t quite launched yet, but it seems to focus on fabrics and home furnishings. More importantly, it is a Boston company masquerading as a New York company, but we know better (the founders come from BU and MIT Sloan). Meanwhile, CustomMade is based in Kendall Square, has quietly grown to 27 employees, and focuses on selling a wide variety of furniture, displays, jewelry, and other items.

—Locately, led by Thaddeus Fulford-Jones, Eric Weiss, and Drew Volpe. This location-based mobile tech startup is roughly following Compete.com’s business model—sell competitive insights to businesses through subscriptions. I recently spoke with Volpe, who said, “We think location analytics will become like Web analytics. We think there’s a huge company here. Our goal is to get there first, build really great technology, and build a great company.” (Volpe will be speaking in the “location smackdown” portion of Xconomy’s Mobile Madness event on March 9.)

Locately’s goal applies to all of the above startups, I suppose. We’ll be watching closely to see what happens.

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