Storage giant EMC (NYSC: EMC) of Hopkinton, MA, said today that veteran software executive Harel Kodesh has been appointed president of the company’s Cloud Infrastructure division and CEO of Decho, a new subsidiary formed in November from the combination of EMC’s Mozy and Pi divisions. Kodesh is the former chief products officer at Missouri-based telecommunications billing provider Amdocs, and helped to create the Windows CE embedded operating system for Microsoft as vice president of its Information Appliances Division. As Greg reported in November, Decho will focus on cloud-computing-based approaches to managing individuals’ digital information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Boston’s Spring Partners, a venture-backed Web software startup founded by five former executives from mobile marketing firm Third Screen Media, announced today that it’s opening beta testing of its first product, Springpad, to the general public. Springpad is a Web-based personal information management system that helps users create annotated lists or “notebooks” around dozens of themes such as pet care, prescriptions, holiday gift planning, receipts, and recipes.

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You get home from a big business trip to San Francisco, you’re talking with a friend from out of town, and you find out that he was just there too. If you’d known, you could have met up! It’s a common scenario—and it shouldn’t happen as often anymore.

After all, you probably keep an electronic calendar that includes details about your upcoming trips. And most calendars these days allow you to share your appointment data with other people’s calendars, over the Web or corporate networks. There ought to be a central exchange where your calendar program can go to find out whether any of your friends (or colleagues, or potential clients or customers) are going to be in the same area as you at the same time.

Well, now there is. It’s called LuckyCal, and it’s being built by a Lexington, MA-based startup that’s one of the first 10 companies to receive a grant from Facebook’ $10 million “fbFund.” Announced last year, the fbFund is run by Facebook with money from Accel Partners and The Founders Fund, and is designed to support independent developers working on applications for the Facebook Platform (the subject of my interview last week with Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin). LuckyCal got the largest possible grant from the fbFund: $250,000, to be doled out in installments as the startup meets usership milestones.

But, while LuckyCal’s Facebook application is an important part of its offerings, you can use the service even if you don’t have a Facebook account, by giving it access to your desktop- or Web-based calendars and address books and inviting friends to share their own data. LuckyCal’s matching algorithms suck in all this information, along with public event listings from sources such as Ticketmaster, and spit out what the company calls “lucky” events: confluences that you can then decide whether to act upon. Say you’re going to Minneapolis-St. Paul next weekend. LuckyCal might see from your address book that you have a cousin there, and suggest that you give her a call; and it might know from the interests you’ve listed on your LuckyCal profile that you love public radio, and send you a link to purchase tickets to a live broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion.”

When I first heard about LuckyCal’s service, it reminded me of 1990s-era predictions about “intelligent agents” that would scour the Internet, making your travel arrangements, negotiating appointments, doing your holiday shopping, and the like. A full-blown agent would require a level of artificial intelligence that’s still way beyond what computer science can accomplish. But LuckyCal does something very similar, just by crunching together the standard data that can be extracted today from productivity applications like Outlook and iCal and Web platforms like Facebook and Gmail.

It’s a no-brainer, in a way. But nobody had done it. “Calendars have been around for a very long time,” observes LuckyCal’s 37-year-old CEO and co-founder Sanjay Vakil, a Canadian-born entrepreneur and software architect who’s a veteran of local startups like Ambient Devices and PatientKeeper. “Electronic calendars have been around for a reasonably long time. And online calendars have been around for 8 to 10 years now. Yet nobody has tried to do this—to solve the simple problem of ‘Here’s where I’m going, show me what’s available while I’m there.”

Facebook, where members are already eager to make connections, is an obvious place to try out the model—and so far, a couple hundred Facebook users have signed up for LuckyCal. But ultimately, Vakil sees the software as something that could go beyond the social-networking crowd to become a money-saving tool for big organizations whose employees travel regularly. The fbFund grant comes at a key moment, helping the startup get its idea working first in a friendly environment (and perhaps helping it to earn a bit of money on Ticketmaster commissions along the way). But long-term, Vakil says, the business model is more about licensing LuckyCal’s services to big corporate customers.

Vakil says he’s been thinking about better ways to interact with event information for several years—ever since he worked at Ambient, a Cambridge, MA, startup that sells wireless information displays such as the Ambient Orb, which glows red or green according to the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Ambient Scorecast, which shows the progress of baseball games, hit by hit. (Vakil wrote the code for the latter device.)

“LuckyCal came out of a meeting with David Rose,” Ambient’s director and chair, Vakil says. “We had this idea for the Ambient Clock—a device that would take calendar information and show it on an analog wall clock. If you had an appointment between 2:00 and 3:00 it would fill in that pie piece. But we looked at the data real people put into their calendars, and on average it’s only about one event per day. What do you do with the rest of the clock? Why not try to … Next Page »

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