Seattle photo-sharing startup PhotoRocket, stocked with veterans of high-profile companies like Amazon, Microsoft, aQuantive and Qpass, has cut its staff and changed CEOs as it tries to build up the product, including adding new features to make PhotoRocket stand out in a forest of mobile photo apps and services.

In an e-mail to Xconomy, founder Scott Lipsky said the PhotoRocket cuts are “less than 40 percent” of the staff, which had been above 20. That includes CEO Anna Collins, the former Microsoft advertising general manager who joined the startup in April. Lipsky writes that Collins “chose to cut herself,” and that PhotoRocket co-founder Michael Cockrill will now serve as CEO, while Collins remains an adviser. The changes were first reported by John Cook over at GeekWire.

Lipsky was pretty frank about the reason behind the changes. The company’s market, for online and mobile photo sharing, become much more competitive lately.

“For over a decade, there were only the ‘Web 1.0′ photo sharing sites. Then, over the past 12 months, there has been a huge flurry of new activity and development in the photo, mobile, social, and local spaces, which leads to consumer confusion and overload,” Lipsky said in his e-mail.

That clogged market made it really difficult to raise money, he said, leading to the need for PhotoRocket to cut its spending and re-focus on its technology and product. The lighter staff is heavier on engineering and development people, for instance.

“What we are doing now is focusing on evolving our core differentiating features, and focusing on product development—rather than on spending our dollars on marketing and buying users,” Lipsky wrote. “Anyone who downloads and uses PhotoRocket gets hooked and never needs to use email again to share photos—so we know we’re definitely onto something big.”

I had some skepticism going in as a test-user when I wrote about PhotoRocket earlier this year—how could another photo-sharing service be needed? I will say that, once I got down into the details, I could see the convenience of the application’s ability to send stuff quickly across lots of platforms and store it online.

A real marquee strength of PhotoRocket has always been the pedigree of its top people. Lipsky was a very early employee at Amazon and also co-founded aQuantive, the advertising company purchased by Microsoft for $6.6 billion. Collins also worked at aQuantive. Cockrill is a member of the “Qpass Mafia” of well-connected Seattle entrepreneurs, and was previously a managing partner at Atlas Accelerator. Another co-founder, Gary Roshak, was a vice president in mobile advertising for Yahoo.

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Continuing its strategy to cut costs, Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) today said that about 700 customer service workers in Las Vegas and Milton, FL, will now be employed by TeleTech, which already had been performing some work for Clearwire. Some 180 workers in both cities will remain on the Clearwire payroll.
The Pensacola News Journal reports that about 370 of Clearwire’s roughly 500 workers in the Florida office will now work for TeleTech, with the balance remaining Clearwire employees. That also means the company is repaying some $2 million in incentive payments from the governor’s office, which the News Journal says Clearwire “received in anticipation of an expansion that will not happen.”
This follows the Kirkland, WA-based wireless network operator’s recent announcement that it would hand over day-to-day network operations to Ericsson, which performs the same function for majority shareholder Sprint (NASDAQ: S). (h/t Geekwire.)

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The one thing Mok Oh was afraid of getting last month was an offer he couldn’t refuse. As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened.

Oh, the founder and former chief technology officer of Newton, MA-based EveryScape, had just left the company and was looking at his options for what to do next. He wanted to start another company. He had a 10-page slide deck ready for prospective team members. He was talking to angel investors. Then Walt Doyle stepped in and put an end to that. At least for now.

Doyle, the CEO of Where, a Boston-based mobile software firm, played the godfather role and hired Oh as chief innovation officer, starting this week. The two have known each other since around 2005, as they were both broadly involved in the field of local search. “Where makes sense in many different ways,” Oh says. “The company is growing, and the marketplace is changing.”

In the past year, Where has grown from 30 to 85 employees, most of whom work on the development side. The company says it has been profitable for the past six quarters. Its mobile application for consumers has about 4 million users and counting, and its location-based advertising network includes 250 publishers and reaches 50 million people in North America, Where says. Its third business unit is still emerging: merchant services and group-buying deals. The company acquired deals site LocalGinger last fall. And in December, Where said it had been granted a key patent covering a swath of location-based services related to delivering certain kinds of advertising, alerts, and coupons to mobile devices.

So, what does a 3-D imaging guy like Oh bring to a mobile startup like Where? A lot of what it needs, apparently. EveryScape is about providing immersive photos and virtual tours for restaurants and stores in local search results. Where is about helping consumers find places they want to go and connecting them with local businesses that want to find those customers. As Oh says, it’s all about “connecting with merchants in the mobile, local, and social space.”

Whether you call it local search or small-business brand marketing, all the big players—Google, Bing, AOL, Groupon, Amazon—want to own the sector. Which makes the field pretty interesting (and dangerous) for startups. One question is what expertise in this sector Oh will specifically bring to his new company.

For now, it sounds like his “innovation” role at Where is fairly loosely defined. Oh says he’ll “be involved in all aspects of the company, from the business side of things to the technical and product side of things as well.” He adds, “When we think ‘innovation,’ it’s not just creating something new, it’s also a supporting role in supplementing existing products and technologies and business strategies as well.”

Talking more broadly about his new job, Oh says, “It’s the intersection of the place graph and the social graph. The vision of Where is using mobility and location to accelerate [different] types of markets. Innovation happens when it’s not something out of the blue. It’s combining multiple ideas and being able to work with a team.” (On a related note, David Beisel of NextView Ventures has penned a series of blog posts about “how to find the perfect startup job” as an employee rather than a founder; many of the issues would seem to be relevant to Oh and others who are joining startups.)

It will be interesting to see how Where ultimately fares in the ultra-competitive field of location-based ads, recommendations, and deals. And we’ll be watching to see what a veteran startup founder (and deep thinker) like Oh will bring to this fast-moving and ubiquitous field.

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It’s usually noteworthy when a founder leaves a startup. I heard this week that Brian Balfour, the founder of Cambridge, MA-based Viximo, has stepped back from his full-time role at the virtual-goods technology company where he served as vice president of product marketing.

Balfour has been a fixture in the Boston-area tech startup scene for the past few years. Before Viximo, he worked at ZoomInfo and was an instigator of local events and resources for techies, including PopSignal and the Boston incarnations of Tech Cocktail. He was also a founding member of Betahouse, the co-working space for tech entrepreneurs in Cambridge.

Reached by e-mail today, Balfour says, “I’m still involved with Viximo on an almost daily basis. The company is doing extremely well which has allowed me to shift my role so that I can take some time to recharge. I’m not working on any other companies right now.”

Last August, Balfour spoke with me about the future of casual and social-network games—and about the possibility of consolidation in parts of the sector. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for Balfour, a self-professed serial entrepreneur who’s “addicted to technology, startups, entrepreneurship, product management, and marketing,” according to his website.

In a January 19 post for VentureFizz, in which he detailed Viximo’s beginnings (“in an inebriated conversation while standing over a keg of beer”), Balfour said he’s working on a side project called reCatalyze, which is “still in the experimentation phase, but details will be released soon.” On his own blog, Balfour says reCatalyze was co-founded by himself and Ariel Diaz, the founder of SavvyTextbooks.

Balfour said in an e-mail that reCatalyze is a project “around helping entrepreneurs connect in helpful and meaningful ways,” similar to PopSignal, and that it “might not come together until Fall.”

Of course, it’s also interesting to watch where Viximo goes from here. The company started in 2007 and is now led by CEO Dale Strang, the former president and co-founder of the online ad network 5to1.com. About a year ago, my colleague Wade wrote about Strang’s perspective on expanding the business around virtual goods. Last fall, Viximo announced it was opening a San Francisco office and bringing on new management talent. And last month, the company said it had signed on three more Facebook games with a total of nearly 11 million monthly users.

It’s still early, but the success of companies like Zynga, Playdom, and PlayFish suggests that virtual goods sold in social games could become a large, sustainable industry—which would bode well for Viximo, which makes software to help Web publishers, social networks, and game developers make money from virtual goods and currencies.

Viximo most recently raised a $5 million financing round in 2009 led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Ed Anderson and Bob Davoli serve on Viximo’s board.

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BuyWithMe, an online group-buying startup founded in Boston and based in New York, said today it has named Jim Crowley its new chief executive. Crowley, the former CEO of Turbine and chief operating officer of m-Qube, succeeds Cheryl Rosner, who stepped down in December. It’s a key hire for BuyWithMe as the company ramps up its efforts to compete in an exploding sector that includes Groupon, LivingSocial, Tippr, and dozens of other growing startups. BuyWithMe started in 2009 and raised a $16 million Series B venture round last July.

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For years, Carbonite has been one of the compelling stories of the Boston-area tech scene. That story is about to get more compelling in 2011.

The online data-backup company, which launched its consumer service in 2006, has talked openly about its plans to file for an initial public offering later this year. In an in-depth profile last January, my colleague Wade wrote about Carbonite’s approach and history, as well as its broader business and marketing strategy and competition with Mozy (part of Hopkinton, MA-based storage giant EMC).

A year later, it seemed like a good time to check in with Carbonite to see how things are progressing—particularly in regard to the company’s proposed IPO, and its relatively recent move to focus on small businesses as well as consumers. The firm is led by serial entrepreneur and CEO David Friend, who co-founded five previous tech companies: ARP Instruments, Computer Pictures Corporation, Pilot Software, FaxNet, and Sonexis.

“We’re in the final stages of banker selection,” Friend told me a few weeks ago about Carbonite’s IPO progress. “We’re just marching ahead. We’re in no huge rush; we have quite a bit of money. We want to have top name bankers. We just have to continue to execute, continue to bring out new products, and expand internationally.” The prospective IPO, he says, depends mostly on Carbonite’s “ability to show we can do more of what we’re doing.”

Indeed, cash is not an issue for the company, which most recently closed a $20 million Series D venture round about a year ago, and has raised more than $67 million to date. More importantly, Carbonite has been doubling its revenue every year since 2006. The firm has about 160 employees in Boston, plus around 200 other full-time equivalents, Friend says.

Yesterday the company announced a series of promotions and hires to go along with a reorganization around its two main kinds of customers. Swami Kumaresan, formerly vice president of marketing, is now general manager of Carbonite’s consumer group, while Peter Lamson, formerly senior vice president at NameMedia, has joined Carbonite as general manager of its new small business group. And, rounding out the personnel moves, Bill Phelan from Intuit and Richard Surace from PlumChoice have joined Carbonite as vice presidents of product and services, respectively.

Carbonite’s focus on providing online backup for businesses (in addition to consumers) has grown over the past year or so. The significance of yesterday’s news is that the company’s business … Next Page »

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Seattle-based AppStoreHQ, a mobile software startup, said today it has named Scott Blanksteen the company’s new CEO. Blanksteen, a wireless tech executive who was previously with IceBreaker (and is a member of the Qpass mafia), succeeds co-founder Chris DeVore from Founder’s Co-op in the chief executive role. AppStoreHQ helps consumers discover mobile apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices; it also provides services for developers and publishers.

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There’s some interesting personnel news today in the world of mobile software apps for companies. Boston-based Apperian, a mobile development and platform startup, says it has appointed a new CEO as of last week. He is David Patrick, a veteran of Lotus, Sun, Novell, and a number of cutting-edge tech startups on both coasts. He succeeds founder Chuck Goldman, a former Apple executive who is staying on as chief strategy officer and will continue to run the company’s services, sales, and business development.

I took the opportunity to get to know Patrick a bit, and to get an update on Apperian’s business. The company has about 20 full-time employees plus a number of consultants; there were three new hires last week, and more will come soon. Patrick says the firm’s revenue “has grown very dramatically” and could be on pace to increase by 300 percent this year over last year. Nevertheless, one of his first objectives as CEO is to raise a Series A financing round. To date, Apperian has been supported by $1.5 million in seed money from CommonAngels, plus services revenue from its mobile-app development work.

“I’ve looked at a lot of startups, and this is the first one I’ve seen as healthy as it is after 18 months,” Patrick says.

Founded in January 2009, Apperian has developed consumer iPhone apps for companies like American Greetings (electronic cards), Intuit (tax forms), and Timberland (retail marketing). It also counts Estee Lauder, Rue La La, Progressive Insurance, and Warner Bros. among its customers, for whom it has developed 55 apps so far. But an even bigger opportunity may lie in creating a platform for companies to develop their own internal mobile apps—what would amount to an “enterprise app store” for iPhones, iPads, and Google Android-based devices.

That’s what Apperian announced it was working on this spring, as my colleague Wade detailed in an interview with Goldman. The software platform is still in beta mode, Patrick says, and he has been studying it for the past couple of months (before officially starting with the company), thinking about issues such as how to ensure the security of confidential data and users’ identities on mobile devices. In the meantime, the company seems to be gaining traction, particularly around the iPhone and iPad.

Challenges aside, it’s clear that being an early player in the emerging mobile business … Next Page »

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Microsoft Research announced today that Peter Lee has been named the managing director of Microsoft Research Redmond, effective this fall. Lee was previously director of the Transformational Convergence Technology Office at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Before that, he was head of Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department and had served as the university’s vice provost for research. His technical expertise includes software security and reliability. Lee will succeed Rico Malvar, the current head of Microsoft Research Redmond, who will stay on as chief scientist of Microsoft Research.

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Bellevue, WA-based Livemocha, the online language learning startup, said today it has appointed Michael Schutzler as its new CEO. Schutzler was previously the CEO of Classmates.com, a senior vice president at RealNetworks and Monster.com, and the founder of CEOSherpa, a business coaching firm. He succeeds Livemocha co-founder and former CEO Shirish Nadkarni, who will serve as chairman and chief strategy officer. Livemocha launched in 2007 as a global website and online community for language learning. The company has raised $14 million in venture funding from Maveron and August Capital since 2008.

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One of Microsoft’s most respected executives announced today he is leaving the company. Alex Gounares, who was previously vice president of advertising research and development, has been hired as the chief technology officer of New York-based AOL and will be moving to the East Coast to take the job. The announcement was made internally at Microsoft, and was first reported by All Things Digital.

I’ve confirmed the news with an ex-Microsoft source close to Gounares, who says Microsoft is losing its “best technical mind” and a “great professional” who “works behind the scenes, like any good architect.” He’s also an avid sailor who seems to have strong relationships throughout the company.

Gounares is perhaps best known for being Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’s top technology assistant for three years during the 2000s. One of his many duties was to handpick papers for Gates’s famed “Think Week,” a biannual tradition dating back to the 1980s in which Gates would sequester himself for seven days to recharge, read papers and books, and brainstorm ideas.

Gounares, known to many as “AlexGo,” joined Microsoft in 1993 as a software developer, after having worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and several small companies, according to his bio on Microsoft’s website. He rose through the ranks in Redmond, working on major products such as Microsoft Office and the Tablet PC operating system (including digital pen and ink technologies). He moved on from his role as technology assistant to Gates, becoming vice president for corporate strategy before taking on his most recent role of vice president of advertising research and development, and then chief technology officer of Microsoft’s online services division.

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By now, you may have heard that Susan Sigl has been named as the successor to Ken Myer as head of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). This is one of the largest trade associations in the U.S., representing 1,000 members and some 125,000 employees in the technology sector.

This morning, I had a chat with Sigl, who officially starts her new job as WTIA’s chief executive on April 5. I wanted to hear about how her venture capital experience, among other points of interest in her diverse background, affects her goals and her mission with WTIA—and what she sees as the organization’s biggest challenge in the near-term.

First, a little more background: Sigl is the co-founder of Seattle-based SeaPoint Ventures (together with VC Tom Huseby), and she has supported early-stage companies such as SnapIn Software, Zumobi, and most recently, Ground Truth, in the mobile and wireless sector. She started her career at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Houston, TX, and worked for 18 years at private companies in the oil and gas and real estate industries in Houston and Seattle, before helping start SeaPoint in 1997. She is a University of Washington alum and is active with various business and entrepreneurship groups around town.

Sigl says she was approached about the job by a WTIA board member in January. She hadn’t been involved with the organization in the past three or four years, but was curious and became more and more intrigued as she thought about it. “What really grabbed me was the mission,” she says. That means helping technology companies in Washington state, providing advocacy, and addressing broader issues like public education. “It’s the perfect intersection of where I am in my career and my personal passions,” Sigl says.

SeaPoint Ventures is in the process of winding down its funds, she says. Its first fund will finish at the end of this year, and its second fund will come to an end in 2011. Sigl will remain an advisor to the venture firm, but she says WTIA will be her “full focus.”

So how does her VC experience translate to WTIA? Sigl was quick to point out that the organization will not be shifting its focus to early-stage companies and entrepreneurs at the expense of more established companies. “Just having this innate experience and understanding of how challenging it is to form, grow, and sustain a company is part of what I’ll bring to the table,” she says. She adds that her fundraising experience as a VC will help too. “I’m hoping those skills transfer to broadening our sponsorships and our membership,” she says.

Sigl sees her main challenge as “continuing the mission to be the larger voice for the technology sector and public advocacy.” That means helping to create and sustain a strong ecosystem for tech companies in the state, and helping Washington companies be more competitive with those in other states, as well as globally. Some of that will boil down to policy and how Washington state chooses to close its budget gap. “The real question,” she says, “is how does the technology industry influence that so that [Olympia] remains complementary to our business environment?” (See Ken Myer’s recent argument against a proposed new tax scheme.)

Whatever progress she makes on that front, Sigl’s chief focus will be serving the massive constituency of tech companies in the state. “Just the opportunity to work with the people in the technology sector on such a large scale is incredibly exciting,” she says.

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Seattle-based Northwest Energy Angels announced today it has hired Margo Shiroyama as its new executive director. Shiroyama is a veteran of the Washington Technology Industry Association, Northwest Entrepreneur Network, enterpriseSeattle, and the Washington Biomedical Device Innovation Zone. Martin Tobias and Jeff Morris founded Northwest Energy Angels in 2006. The angel group provides early-stage capital to cleantech entrepreneurs and helps connect investors with promising startups. Its members have invested a total of more than $2 million in 16 companies.

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Bellevue, WA-based Offbeat Creations, a developer and publisher of Facebook gaming apps, has been acquired by Playdom, the social gaming company based in Mountain View, CA. Financial terms of the deal weren’t released. Offbeat Creations is best known for its dice game, Super Farkle. Its founders, Chia Chin Lee, Robert Reichner, and Tom Fakes, are joining Playdom in leadership roles, and its 12 developers and designers will join Playdom’s existing 15-person Seattle studio.

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Seattle-based MOD Systems announced that former Microsoft vice president and social technologist Will Poole and former Coinstar and Naverus CEO Dan Gerrity have joined the company’s board of directors. Poole is co-chairman of Redwood City, CA-based NComputing, while Gerrity is vice president of business development at Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures. MOD board member Kyleen Cane has stepped down after 18 months. MOD Systems is a digital entertainment company that aims to bring movies, TV shows, music, and games to consumers through kiosks in retail stores.

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Bellevue, WA-based SinglePoint, a mobile software firm, announced it has sold its mobile aggregation business to Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) for an undisclosed price. The assets will give the Swedish giant connections to mobile operators that will bolster its text messaging reach in the U.S. SinglePoint is focused on mobile marketing and advertising; its messaging service enables publishers, brands, and ad agencies to connect with mobile subscribers. The company also announced that Gowri Shankar has been named CEO. Shankar succeeds Rich Begert, who has led SinglePoint, formerly called Wireless Services, since 2004.

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Redmond, WA-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said today that chief financial officer Chris Liddell is leaving the company at the end of this year to pursue other opportunities. He will be succeeded by Peter Klein, who is currently the CFO of Microsoft’s Business Division. Liddell joined Microsoft in 2005 and helped lead the company’s $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive in 2007, as well as its more recent cost-cutting measures.

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Greylock Partners, a Silicon Valley venture firm formerly based in the Boston area, announced today it has hired Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, as a partner. Hoffman, who has also been an angel investor, will focus on early-stage consumer Internet and software investments, as well as advise entrepreneurs from Greylock’s portfolio companies. Greylock also announced it has closed a new $575 million venture fund. The VC firm has previously backed companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Data Domain, Farecast, and ZipCar.

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Seattle-based Earth Class Mail, which helps companies access and manage their postal mail online, announced today it has promoted Sarah Carr to chief executive. Carr succeeds Ron Wiener, the company’s founding CEO who stepped down in June and is now chairman of the board. Carr joined Earth Class Mail in September 2008 as chief operating officer and was promoted to president in June. The company was founded in 2004 and has been backed by Ignition Partners, Keiretsu Forum, and Alliance of Angels.

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Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) announced today it has rolled out its WiMax wireless broadband service in 10 new cities, including Bellingham, WA, and Boise, ID. Also on the list are eight cities in Texas, including Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Waco. The new markets join Las Vegas, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Portland, OR as WiMax hubs. Yesterday, Clearwire also announced two new executives who are helping with the WiMax deployments: Erik Prusch, chief financial officer, and Teresa Elder, president of strategic partnerships and wholesale.

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