Companies building cloud-based services got lots of attention last week, as did those building social applications. And companies building cloud-based social applications? Watch out!

—Evernote, the Mountain View, CA-based online notekeeping service with nearly 5 million users, collected another $20 million in venture backing in a Series C round led by new investor Sequoia Capital. I interviewed CEO Phil Libin about the investment.

—I took a close look at Zoho, the Pleasanton, CA-based company offering small and medium-sized businesses free and low-cost alternatives to desktop productivity software such as Microsoft Office and even newer cloud-based services like Salesforce.com.

—While the Apple iPad may lack a camera, there’s no shortage of cool photo apps for the device, and I reviewed 10 of them in my regular Friday column.

—Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers announced the formation of the sFund, a $250 million fund that will be used to invest in startups building social Web applications. Facebook, Amazon, and Zynga each put some money into the kitty.

—I profiled AudioPress, a San Francisco startup that recently launched a versatile audio management app for the iPhone. The app lets users organize podcasts, streaming radio, and spoken-word articles into personalized playlists.

—San Francisco-based Siluria Technologies, which is developing a way to make natural gas into ethylene as a precursor for many types of plastics, raised $13.3 million in a Series A venture round, as Luke reported. Alloy Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Altitude Life Sciences Ventures, Lux Capital, and Presidio Ventures participated.

—I Went to Startup School, and All I Got Was This Lousy Video. Just kidding—I had a great time attending Y Combinator’s Startup School event at Stanford on October 16, and as a bonus I was able to make of video recording of a 30-minute interview between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Y Combinator partner Jessica Livingston. Zuckerberg talked about what the makers of The Social Network got right, and what they weren’t so careful about.

—As a follow-up to my column two weeks ago comparing two leading run-tracking apps, Abvio’s Runmeter and FitnessKeeper’s RunKeeper, I staged a virtual “smackdown” between Abvio co-founder Steve Kusmer and FitnessKeeper founder Jason Jacobs.

—San Francisco’s Crosslink Capital participated in a $12.5 million Series B financing round for SiOnyx, a Beverly, MA-based company working on a method for making “black silicon,” a highly photosensitive form of silicon that could eventually be used in image sensors for camera phones, as Greg reported.

—In other tech deals news, Sharethrough raised $5 million, Causes raised $9 million, Revolution Analytics raised $8.6 million, and Kontiki raised $10.7 million.

—In Xconomy news, we announced our first-ever San Francisco event: a public forum with Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital. Moritz is widely respected as one of the leading venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and I’ll be interviewing him on stage at San Francisco’s Kicklabs on Tuesday November 30. You can register for the event now.

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Something like 50 million Americans spend at least an hour a day commuting to work, which is a lot of people and a lot of time. For entrepreneurs who aspire to deliver audio content over the wireless Web, this is turning into a huge market of potential consumers up for grabs.

More and more of these commuters carry smartphones with wireless data plans, and there’s an abundance of content that can, in principle, be sent on-demand to those devices, from NPR podcasts to CNN news videos to streaming radio stations. The problem is that it takes some work to locate all that content and get it onto your device—which is where audio-aggregator services like Stitcher, MediaFly, and Aha Mobile come in. Then there’s the issue of making the technology so simple that it doesn’t make drivers distracted. When audio equipment maker Harman bought Palo Alto, CA-based Aha last month, Harman CEO Dinesh Paliwal called safe in-vehicle Internet access “one of the biggest challenges facing the infotainment industry” and portrayed it as a major growth area for the company.

Such a big market is unlikely to have one dominant player, and this month a new one jumped into the mix: San Francisco-based startup AudioPress. The company’s free iPhone app was released on Columbus Day, and has already climbed to the No. 4 spot in the iTunes App Store’s list of the most popular free news apps; it also won a coveted spot in the “New and Noteworthy” section of the iTunes App Store’s front page. Judging from user reviews, the app is hitting a sweet spot: it lets people subscribe to podcasts and hear the latest episodes on demand without having to sync with iTunes or figure out what they’ve already listened to. “This could become my one-stop, go-to streaming app,” gushes one reviewer.

I met recently with Taylor Bollman, the CEO and founder of AudioPress, who says the idea behind the advertising-supported app is to let commuters create their own lineups of audio programming from the app’s catalog of podcasts, radio stations, and other content. By stringing audio selections together into custom playlists, users can ensure they won’t run out of fresh content while they’re supposed to be concentrating on driving. “The problem we’re addressing here is the person who gets in the car and wants to switch between podcasts and audiobooks and updates on local traffic, then tune into the radio to hear weather, then check for stocks or sports scores, all while they’re driving to and form work,” Bollman says.

Stitcher and Aha Radio are similarly configurable, but AudioPress has an added ingredient that could set it apart from the competition. It’s called AudioArticles: long-form pieces, based on newspaper, magazine, or wire service content, that are read aloud by human voiceover artists (not synthesized voices). Think of it as Audible.com for news. The first AudioPress AudioArticles are all based on Associated Press content, with 20 to 40 new articles available every day. But Bollman says the company is working to bring in articles from other sources such as The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and Technology Review. “That enables access to a huge universe of quality content that people often don’t get to read, but may have extra time to listen to during their commute,” Bollman says.

Bollman is a New England expatriate who formerly analyzed the mobile technology sector as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He says the AudioArticles concept was the seed idea that the rest of the AudioPress business grew around. While walking to … Next Page »

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Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates visited MIT today as part of his College Tour, a three-day trip to universities across the United States. In his talk, Gates emphasized the importance of getting more bright young people to innovate in critical areas such as global health, education, and energy—all areas where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is already investing or considering investing.

My full writeup of the talk is below, but first here’s a podcast recording of Gates’s talk, for anyone who wasn’t able to get to MIT (or squeeze into Kresge Auditorium) for the event.

Please try to ignore the typing sounds in the recording—that’s me taking notes.

Gates opened by joking that he’d promised his dad after dropping out of Harvard that he’d go back to college, and that he was now doing it, one day at a time. But he quickly segued into the serious subject of his talk, which was his conviction that schools like MIT are not turning out enough students who want to solve the kinds of big global problems that that Gates Foundation concentrates on. “Mostly I’ll talk about a question that fascinates, me, and that is, are the brightest minds focusing on the hardest problems?” Gates said. “To the degree that they’re not, how can we increase that?”

Gates argued that that are “five or six things that we haven’t put enough attention toward that would make a huge difference.” Among those, in his mind, are education, agriculture, nutrition, child health, reproductive health, and low-carbon energy sources. Gates said, only half jokingly, that his dream is to reach a day when high-IQ people spend their weekends arguing about the new teaching methods with the best outcomes, rather than which way the stock market is heading or who’s going to advance in the NCAA basketball tournament.

“We have lots of talent that could be shifted, at least to some degree, from sports, entertainment, and investing,” Gates said. “Even in the areas of innovation and science a lot of that focuses on the needs of the rich. There is a great deal of work on baldness cures….and while I know some people who would be easier to look at if they used a baldness drug, how can we have a shift?” Most of the key work on malaria, a disease that kills a million people every year, is done by just 100 scientists around the world, Gates pointed out.

Gates admitted in his talk that he himself didn’t choose a career “based on some list of great problems.” He said he “fell into what I ended up doing when I was 13 and … Next Page »

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The Fifth Conference on Clean Energy, one of the biggest events of the year for New England energy and cleantech entrepreneurs, is coming up November 12 and 13 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. For the second year in a row, I worked with the organizers of the conference—the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center and the Massachusetts Hydrogen Coalition—to produce a podcast previewing some of the themes that will be featured prominently at the event, ranging from the state of energy investing to the role of stimulus funding for energy startups, the Obama Administration’s performance so far on energy policy, and the significance of A123Systems’ recent IPO for other energy startups hoping to go public.

My guests for the podcast were Jon Karlen, a general partner at venture firm Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston, and Russ Landon, a managing director in the Boston office of Canaccord Adams, a research and investing firm.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the play button on the widget below, or you can download it and listen to it on your computer or mobile player.

I’d like to thank Jon and Russ for taking the time to speak with me, as well as the conference organizers for inviting me to host the podcast once again. Thanks also to Suzanne Moran and her crew at Lois Paul & Partners for setting up the recording session and producing and hosting the podcast. You can see Lois Paul’s blog post about the podcast here.

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If you’re under 25 or so, you probably don’t need much training on how to share digital photos, make a digital sketch, create an animated cartoon, make a personalized online map, or the like. I wrote the last three installments of my World Wide Wade column for everyone else: The majority of everyday computer users who are vaguely aware of all the amazing tools popping up in the digital media world, and who might even enjoy putting some of them to creative use, but who could use a few handy pointers.

But my “Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings” series appeared in three episodes over the course of two weeks, which isn’t too handy. So I thought it might be useful to list all seven projects in one place. Here we go:

1. Make a Digital Painting with Brushes. Relive your finger-painting days using the same iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to create the June 1 cover of The New Yorker.

2. Start Lifestreaming with Friendfeed or Posterous. Set up a “lifestream”—2009′s replacement for the old-fashioned blog—as a locus for all your social media activities.

3. Document a Space with Photosynth. Use Microsoft’s amazing experimental software for collating hundreds of digital pictures of a single space or object into an immersive, three-dimensional environment.

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo. Learn how to use this UK-born iPhone app to make mini-podcasts that all your friends can listen to.

5. Create a Short Animated Film with Xtranormal. Be the first on your block to script your own computer-animated short feature, using a nifty new “text-to-movie” technology.

6. Put Yourself on the Map with Platial. Learn the basics of photo-enhanced storytelling using digital maps.

7. Become a Virtual Architect in Second Life. Try your hand at building 3-D virtual objects inside the world’s most flexible and welcoming social virtual world.

Have fun and let us know what you created!

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Whether the fall is back-to-school season for you or not, there’s always more to learn. In last week’s column I outlined three fun weekend projects involving new technologies for digital self-expression. My suggestions covered art (digital “finger painting” with an iPhone app called Brushes), writing (“lifestreaming” with Posterous and Friendfeed), and photography (building three-dimensional photographic spaces with Photosynth). This week I’ve got two more digital projects in mind for you, this time in the areas of podcasting and computer animation. Next week, I’ll finish up with maps and virtual worlds.

I’m writing this three-part column because I think it’s an exciting time for anyone who’s interested in consumer-level digital media tools. Not only are we seeing a profusion of inexpensive new gadgets for capturing media—witness Apple’s announcement Wednesday that the new iPod Nano will have a built-in digital video camera—but there are also many new Web-based services where creators can edit, enhance, share, and promote their media creations. The only way to keep up with all these new technologies is just to jump in and try them. So let’s get back to it:

4. Become an Amateur Podcaster with AudioBoo

When podcasting first took off four or five years ago, most podcasters tried to emulate radio hosts, kitting out their podcasts with fancy musical intros and outros and other audio goodies. Just to experiment with podcasting, you needed a pricey microphone and recording rig, audio editing software, and a working knowledge of RSS, iTunes, and other distribution methods. But thanks to a bit of good old technological progress, the barriers are now much lower. In fact, producing a podcast these days can be just about as easy as making a phone call. Which means that dictating a few off-the-cuff thoughts on your mobile device and uploading them to the Web is becoming a realistic alternative to blogging and other more familar forms of Web-based communication.

This is precisely the point of AudioBoo, a UK-based service that I profiled in July. If you live in the UK (or if you’re willing to splurge on an international phone call), you can call AudioBoo from any phone and record some thoughts, then publish the the recording straight to AudioBoo.fm, which is basically a giant community audio blog featuring recordings or “boos” from all AudioBoo users.

But if you have an iPhone, you can use the nifty AudioBoo app to do the same thing, without the phone calls or the attendant charges. The app has a voice recording function that lets you talk for up to five minutes. It then uses your wireless data connection to upload the finished boo to the AudioBoo.fm, along with a photograph and a map of your location, if you wish. Fans can listen to your boos at the site, or they can subscribe and get new boos delivered via RSS or iTunes. The AudioBoo site also provides some handy code that you can use to embed your boos in your blog.

In fact, by doing a bit of social media marketing to promote your boos, you could turn AudioBoo into your own personal audio publishing empire. Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t … Next Page »

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Last week the organizers of the Fourth Conference on Clean Energy, coming up November 18 and 19 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, asked me to host a panel discussion on the funding climate for new clean-energy ventures. In a teleconference recorded October 28, I asked four leaders from the local venture capital and public-financing communities—all members of the conference’s investor advisory board—to talk about the challenges facing energy entrepreneurs in today’s unsettled economic climate, and about how the funding picture for alternative-energy ventures might change under an Obama or a McCain administration. Now we’re publishing the recording as a podcast (about 28 minutes long), which you can listen to using the orange player below.

The guests whose voices you’ll hear include:

• Jerry Bird, vice president, Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, Boston.
• Dennis Costello, managing director, Braemar Energy Ventures, Boston.
• Sissi Liu, industry investment and development manager, Renewable Energy Trust (part of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative), Westborough, MA.
• Jim Matheson, general partner, Flagship Ventures, Cambridge, MA.

You can also download an MP3 of the podcast and listen to it on your iPod or any other mobile media player.

Clean Energy Investing Podcast Download

Instructions: Right-click (control-click on a Mac) on the link above. Select “Save link as” to save the file to your hard drive. To listen to the podcast on your iPod or iPhone, open iTunes, click on File > Add to Library, find the saved MP3 file, add it to your iTunes library, and then sync your device.

I’d like to thank the conference organizers, including the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center and the Massachusetts Hydrogen Coalition, for inviting me to host the podcast. Lois Paul & Partners, which is handling public relations for the Conference on Clean Energy, took care of the podcast logistics, recording, and editing.

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I drove from Boston to northern Michigan last weekend to hang out with my parents over the 4th of July. It’s a 15-hour trek—plus another two or three hours if you forget your passport and you have to go south around Lake Erie instead of straight through Canada. But I didn’t mind the drive, because I had an iPod full of Radio Lab podcasts to catch up on.

Radio Lab, a production of New York’s flagship NPR station, WNYC, isn’t just the best science and technology show on public radio. I think it’s a contender for the best contemporary radio show, period. I discovered it in 2006, when it was already in its second season. But thankfully, MP3s are available at iTunes and at the show’s website, and because there are only five new episodes per year, I had plenty time in the car to get through the show’s entire third and fourth seasons.

If you asked me to say what Radio Lab is about in one word, I would say “perception.” Jad Abumrad, the show’s lively host and producer, is the son of an endocrine surgeon and a research biologist, a graduate of the music and creative writing programs at Oberlin College, and a longtime radio journalist. Clearly, the only fate open to a person with a background this eclectic is to invent new interviewing, storytelling, and sound-editing techniques to explore big questions at the boundary of neuroscience, evolution, and philosophy—questions like, Where’s the part of my brain that’s me? Why do some songs get stuck in my head? Where does guilt come from? What makes placebos work so well? Can we erase memories? Why do we find zoos so fascinating? Why are people who deceive themselves more successful than those who don’t? Why do we sleep/dream/laugh/lie/age/die?

In the end, all of these questions are about how we see the world. And it doesn’t take a PhD to ask them—just a notebook or a microphone. Abumrad has said in interviews that he only became interested in science a few years ago, and that he often embarks on making an episode with only a “Time magazine-level” understanding of his subject matter. I think that’s actually one of the show’s main strengths. If you’ve studied science too long, or spent too much time around scientists, you lose the ability—or maybe just the courage—to ask big, silly, impertinent questions.

Part of the trademark Radio Lab approach developed by Abumrad and his jovial and mischievous co-host, ABC science correspondent (and fellow Oberlin alum) Robert Krulwich, is to stumble around behind a scientist in his or her lab, posing questions a third-grader might ask, professing astonishment and disbelief at the answers, and nagging for clarifications and simplifying analogies. Of course, it’s all an act—Abumrad and Krulwich know exactly what they’re doing as they maneuver scientists into dropping their professional reserve and showing their unedited, human passion for their subjects.

One of those passionate researchers is Diana Deutsch, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the psychology of music. Deutsch, whose lilting Oxford-accented voice is somehow both playful and extremely serious, has uncovered some very strange things about the sounds of language by studying looped recordings of human speech. It turns out that certain phrases, if you listen to them over and over, start to sound like music, complete with rhythm and melody—which raises some big questions about what music really is, in neurological and cultural-linguistic terms.

Is it possible, for example, that children who grow up speaking tone-based languages like Mandarin are better equipped to become great musicians (thus accounting for the frequency of Chinese violin prodigies)? While investigating such ideas, Abumrad and his colleagues deftly use digital sound editing, actual music, and even, from time to time, hired singers and actors to raise material like Deutsch’s tape loops to the level of performance art. If you just listen to the first few minutes of the Season 2 episode “Musical Language,” you’ll understand what the heck I’m talking about.

Two more of the show’s unofficial scientists-in-residence are neurologist Oliver Sacks, surely one of the three or four best physicians writing in English today (along with Sherwin Nuland, Atul Gawande, and Abraham Verghese), and theoretical physicist Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe and surely the world’s most understandable string theorist. These folks pop in every so often to share earth-shattering yet deadpan observations—like this one from Greene, in a Season 1 episode called “Beyond Time“: “In quantum theory, some have suggested the so-called ‘many worlds’ interpretation—that the universe is not a single entity, that there are many universes and each of the choices you make is borne out in one of these copies…The fellas that believe this say, ‘I chose vanilla [ice cream] in this world but there’s another version of me that’s now eating chocolate.’”

As you listen to the show over time, you start to feel toward these guests as you might toward that wonderful, itinerant aunt or uncle who’s always stopping by between their European lecture tour and their Australian scuba safari, just long enough to take you to the planetarium and drop off their latest manuscript on neurotransmitters and quantum teleportation at the publisher’s office. The genius of Radio Lab is that Abumrad and Krulwich play the role of the wide-eyed nephew/niece so convincingly while—behind the curtain—they’re also operating the whole glorious Wurlitzer.

A few months ago, Jesse Thorn, the host of another very good public radio show called The Sound of Young America (which happens to share Radio Lab‘s time slot on WNYC), interviewed Abumrad and Krulwich about their work. Abumrad said part of the show’s goal is to liberate science from the textbooks and the gray newspaper columns. “Scientists are often talked about as people who know stuff—as, like, esteemed elders who have some knowledge to bestow upon us unwashed masses,” Abumrad said. “When really they are just people who are passionate about what they do. And they stay up really late doing these experiments, 99 percent of which don’t work, and they are as crazy driven as the rest of us are. It’s about putting your finger on the person, the humanity.”

That’s a great thing for public radio to do—and I can’t wait to hear how Radio Lab keeps doing it.

You can subscribe to World Wide Wade via RSS or e-mail.

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The Kraft Group in Foxborough, MA—which not only owns the New England Patriots but invests heavily in technology ventures such as the Matchmine recommendation engine and the Patriots’ own media-rich website—is the lead investor in a $4.6 million Series A funding round announced yesterday for New York-based social media site BlogTalkRadio.

BlogTalkRadio’s Web-based software allows users to conduct their own free, live, call-in talk shows. The shows are also automatically archived and published as podcasts. The company says that 3.2 million people listened to its shows in May, and that users launch 400 new shows every day.

“This round of financing further validates BlogTalkRadio as a powerful, new platform,” Alan Levy, CEO and co-founder of BlogTalkRadio, said in a statement. “Given the broad number of opportunities our platform presents to marketers and advertisers, and those who are already using BlogTalkRadio, such as Sun Microsystems, Hachette Book Group, J. Wiley and Sons, Intel and the Department of Defense, we believe this is the right time to strengthen our capital base.”

Former hedge fund manager Scott Sipprelle and other private investor joined the financing round, which the company says it will use to hire sales and marketing staff, strengthen brand awareness, and develop new content.

In a post yesterday, New York Times blogger Brad Stone used BlogTalkRadio’s own platform to interview Levy. “What blogs have done to newspapers and magazines, I think companies like BlogTalkRadio can do to talk radio,” Levy told Stone.

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It’s a big week for Boston-area mobile software companies looking to leverage the reach of national telecommunications firms. Yesterday Waltham, MA-based Quattro Wireless announced that Cox Newspapers has hired it to produce mobile-friendly versions of the websites for 19 Cox newspapers. Today, AT&T announced that its wireless subscribers can access a library of video, audio, and live radio content provided by Bedford, MA-based Buzzwire.

When we last checked in with Buzzwire in July 2007, the company had just begun a beta trial giving free Web-based mobile access to a variety of streaming content, from news podcasts to videogame trailers, at m.buzzwire.com. The company said then that it expected to ink deals with national cellular carriers to offer subscription-based access to streaming media directly from an application on the home screens of subscribers’ phones, without having to go to a website. Its deal with AT&T is the first such agreement.

The Buzzwire mobile media application, which can be downloaded from the AT&T Media Mall, requires a $4.99-per-month subscription and works on most 3G handsets available to AT&T subscribers (but not the Apple iPhone). The application gives users access to “Today’s Buzz,” a list of the most popular video clips from the Web, and also lets them create personal media channels mixing their favorite video, audio, and live-radio content, all streamed over AT&T’s data networks.

Buzzwire users who signed up during the beta trial will continue to have free access to the Web-based content. But starting today, new visitors to m.buzzwire.com will be limited to a two-week free trial, according to Buzzwire. At the end of the trial, they’ll have the option to continue the service through AT&T at $4.99 per month. All of Buzzwire’s content will still be available free to Web surfers using laptop or desktop computers at app.buzzwire.com.

“Buzzwire is all about giving people snippets of time in their busy schedules to stay on top of the latest videos, find the information they need, steal a moment to connect with a friend over a shared interest or simply tune out the world and enjoy,” Buzzwire CEO Andrew MacFarlane said in a statement about the AT&T deal. “We’re excited to work with AT&T to deliver a compelling and relevant mobile application that allows its customers to stay connected to the people and things that matter most.”

Mark Collins, vice president of consumer data products for AT&T’s wireless unit, said in the statement that Buzzwire is “a nice complement to our extensive suite of social-networking and video applications.” Alongside the Buzzwire announcement, AT&T also said today that it’s working with Los Angeles mobile startup Juice Wireless to offer cellular subscribers access to a video- and photo-sharing system called Juicecaster.

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