“You will have meltdowns on a regular basis. You will have those moments. Make sure you have people you can talk to when you have those moments.”

That was Brad Feld, the tech entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, on Friday afternoon, speaking to a room of Boston and New York entrepreneurs and angel investors, at an event organized by Silicon Valley Bank. The setting was the Microsoft NERD center in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. Feld was talking about the experiences that all founders (especially CEOs) go through with their companies.

Feld is the co-founder of Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group and TechStars, the seed-stage startup accelerator with programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York. He relates very well to early-stage tech entrepreneurs, because he’s been there and done that himself. In his typical style, Feld spoke casually (and candidly) about the challenges of building a company. None of it was particularly earth-shattering, but it’s interesting to revisit these sorts of tips every once in a while, because different things jump out at you at different times.

Feld’s advice boiled down to two things: products and people.

1. “Be obsessed about your product.”

“The most important thing to focus on, early in the life of your company, is your product. In year two, it’s your product. In year 20, it’s your product,” he said. “If you focus on your product, most of your other problems will go away.”

But he has a broader definition of product—it’s not just the software you release, or your technology, or even your interface with customers. “The whole of the company becomes the product,” he said. “The whole lifecycle of what you do.”

That means entrepreneurs should be totally passionate about what they are building—not just starting a company to be their own boss, say—and they should be true to themselves. Feld admitted that with his first company, he got bored after four years. “I didn’t love the thing I was doing,” he said. (He sold it after seven years.)

2. “You cannot motivate someone.”

“The idea that a CEO can motivate people is a fallacy. All you can do is create an environment where people are motivated or not,” he said. Companies will make bad hires—talented people who aren’t a good cultural fit with the rest of the team—and they should get rid of those employees quickly, according to Feld. “You can’t change them,” he said, and you can’t “try to motivate people to work harder” through things like performance reviews. That simply doesn’t work, at least not for small startups.

Instead, founders need to continually make sure they are bringing on the right people for their team, communicating openly, “building the language of the company,” and tying that formative context and culture very closely to their product, he said. This will mean very different things for different companies, and it’s certainly not an exact science.

Feld said he sees a common mistake in young startups. “The CEO ends up doing a lot of the work,” he said, and “the non-CEOs don’t do the right work.” The CEO’s chief responsibility, over time, is to make sure “everyone is doing the right thing.”

Oh, and one more responsibility: “Don’t run out of money,” he said.

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I’m so sad this evening—as millions are—to hear of Steve Jobs’s death. Scattered over the last quarter century, I learned much from Steve Jobs, and was proud to consider him a friend. And indeed, he contributed in various ways to all three of my major life projects so far: Mathematica, A New Kind of Science and Wolfram|Alpha.

I first met Steve Jobs in 1987, when he was quietly building his first NeXT computer, and I was quietly building the first version of Mathematica. A mutual friend had made the introduction, and Steve Jobs wasted no time in saying that he was planning to make the definitive computer for higher education, and he wanted Mathematica to be part of it. I don’t now remember the details of our first meeting, but at the end of it, Steve gave me his business card, which tonight I found duly still sitting in my files:

…

Over the months after our first meeting, I had all sorts of interactions with Steve about Mathematica. Actually, it wasn’t yet called Mathematica then, and one of the big topics of discussion was what it should be called. At first it had been Omega (yes, like Alpha) and later PolyMath. Steve thought those were lousy names. I gave him lists of names I’d considered, and pressed him for his suggestions. For a while he wouldn’t suggest anything. But then one day he said to me: “you should call it Mathematica“.

I’d actually considered that name, but rejected it. I asked Steve why he thought it was good, and he told me his theory for a name was to start from the generic term for something, then romanticize it. His favorite example at the time was Sony’s Trinitron. Well, it went back and forth for a while. But in the end I agreed that, yes, Mathematica was a good name. And so it has been now for nearly 24 years.

As Mathematica was being developed, we showed it to Steve Jobs quite often. He always claimed he didn’t understand the math of it (though I later learned from a good friend of mine who had known Steve in high school that Steve had definitely taken at least one calculus course). But he made all sorts of “make it simpler” suggestions about the interface and the documentation. With one slight exception, perhaps of at least curiosity interest to Mathematica aficionados: he suggested that cells in Mathematica notebook documents (now CDFs) should be indicated not by simple vertical lines—but instead by brackets with little serifs at their ends. And as it happens, that idea opened the way to thinking of hierarchies of cells, and ultimately to many features of symbolic documents.

In June 1988 we were ready to release Mathematica. But NeXT had not yet released its computer, Steve Jobs was rarely seen in public, and speculation about what NeXT was up to had become quite intense. So when Steve Jobs agreed that he would appear at our product announcement, it was a huge thing for us.

He gave a lovely talk, discussing how he expected more and more fields to become … Next Page »

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With all the hoopla around social media and other newfangled marketing tools, people sometimes forget that Google is a $30 billion business—thanks mostly to paid search advertising.

Not Larry Kim. His startup, Boston-based WordStream, specializes in search engine marketing software. That means helping businesses make their paid text ads appear high up on the page, next to the most relevant search results—say, for instance, when people search on Google for car insurance. The approach sounds almost quaint, but the idea is what Kim calls “automated expertise”—basically, providing software as a service to help businesses navigate Google’s AdWords platform, as opposed to a consultant who charges $1,000 or more per job (and then goes away).

The company is releasing a free tool today, called AdWords Performance Grader, and it’s geared toward small- and medium-sized businesses. As Kim explains, the software analyzes their AdWords account, shows them where they’re doing well and not so well, scores them compared to other advertisers spending a similar amount, and suggests ways to do better, such as adding certain keywords, excluding others, and adjusting the text in their ads.

It’s part of a big push by WordStream to add thousands of more users this year. The company has been growing fast, bringing in record revenues in each of the last four months, says Kim, the founder and chief technology officer. The startup currently has hundreds of customers, he says.

WordStream started in 2007 and has raised $10 million in venture funding from Sigma Partners and Egan-Managed Capital. The company went through a restructuring in the past year, which included bringing on new CEO Ralph Folz, who previously co-founded digital marketing firm Molecular (bought by Isobar in 2005). WordStream currently has 35 employees.

Kim originally came to Boston in 2000 and worked as a software engineer and then a search marketer and consultant for six years. He started developing the core technology behind WordStream to make his consulting work more productive. In the past decade, he has lived the classic consultant-to-startup life, including early days of working out of a Panera Bread café (free Wi-Fi) and the trials and tribulations of hiring a team and putting a product out there.

Paid search seems pretty complementary to what some bigger marketing-tech companies around Boston, like HubSpot and Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), are doing. Those firms provide a mix of social media marketing, e-mail marketing, customer relationship management, and search engine optimization. But WordStream is here to remind us that good old-fashioned search marketing is alive and well, in the form of automated software.

“We think it’s a billion-dollar market opportunity,” Kim says.

True, but who wouldn’t? The challenge for WordStream lies in continuing to develop a product that resonates with core users, and getting the word out more broadly about its offerings. We’ll be watching to see if today’s release helps the startup reach the masses.

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If there is anything constant about Constant Contact, it is change. The online marketing company (NASDAQ: CTCT), based in the Boston area, is announcing today it has opened a new office in New York City. That by itself isn’t big news, but it’s part of a larger strategic shift in the firm’s technology approach—what is being called the biggest evolution in its 13-year history.

Constant Contact’s New York office, a 2,850-square-foot space in Tribeca, is expected to house more than 10 employees within the next year. For now there is a small team of five, brought over in the firm’s $15 million acquisition of Bantam Live, announced in February. Bantam focused on “social CRM”—social media technologies for helping businesses do things like add new customers, retain them, and better understand what they want, especially in online communities. The New York office, which is currently hiring engineers, apparently will be the hub for integrating social CRM into all of Constant Contact’s marketing tools and services. (The company, with more than 800 employees, also has offices in California, Colorado, and Florida.)

Indeed, the firm’s newest space is symbolic of bigger changes happening under the covers. It’s all part of the broad innovation strategy that CEO Gail Goodman laid out for me last month, as Constant Contact transitions from being known mostly as an e-mail marketing company to being known as a more diversified software-as-a-service firm.

That sounds kind of abstract, but here’s one concrete aspect. Bantam Live uses Ruby on Rails, a popular Web programming framework, for its software development. Constant Contact uses mostly Java, which is older and more established (especially for large-scale backend stuff), for its software and database systems. It’s a challenge—albeit not a unique one—to integrate the two. The goal is to make it so that Bantam’s social software for managing sales contacts, for instance, can talk to Constant Contact’s account management, security, and e-mail and social media marketing systems. As newer social features permeate older technology stacks, this issue is bound to become more widespread.

For Constant Contact, the integration (and a lot more) falls under the domain of Stefan Piesche, the firm’s chief technology officer. Piesche, who joined the company two years ago from Cobalt, oversees an engineering team of about 150, roughly half of them software engineers. “The company is changing its tune vertically and horizontally,” he says. “This requires a different approach on the technology side. But we’re not rewriting everything.”

Rather, newer pieces of code written in Ruby are being embedded, rather cleverly, into existing Java applications so as to maintain a “very cohesive user experience” where “customers don’t see the difference,” he says. The end result: the user sees one unified product, even though it’s made up of multiple sets of products and new features.

Imagine performing this integration on the scale of 450,000 business customers and 8,000 partners (including hundreds in the New York area), and you start to get a feel for the … Next Page »

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Does the world really need another seed-stage technology investment fund? Maybe not—but Boston entrepreneurs can use all the expertise they can get.

That’s where Project 11 Ventures comes into play. In the increasingly crowded field of early-stage tech investing, Project 11, which is co-led by Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae, is taking a very hands-on approach to mentoring startups. That means helping founders (especially first-timers) refine their product, test it, think through business models, recruit talent, and work together effectively, among other things. Project 11 has announced a couple of investments already, in Boston-area startups Locately, which provides location-based information for advertisers, and peerTransfer, which focuses on international money transfers and payments.

I recently sat down with Sturtevant and Rae to talk about their investment themes and philosophy—and what really distinguishes them from other seed-stage tech investors in town. They couldn’t talk about any progress in raising their fund yet (rumored to be in the $5 million range), but they did shed some light on their unique background and their approach to working with entrepreneurs.

Sturtevant and Rae have been fixtures of the local startup scene for years. They previously worked together at Eons and Microsoft Startup Labs—in each case incubating startup ideas and testing numerous Internet businesses in parallel, rather than being more traditional “serial” entrepreneurs. Sturtevant is the tech guy, while Rae’s expertise is products and customers. Project 11 is their first fund together. (Rae was also recently tapped to be the new head of TechStars Boston.)

Becoming successful investors is a long road, of course, and lots of people will try and fail to make money as angel investors, “super angels,” or “micro-VCs.” It will take years to establish a track record of successes, and Rae and Sturtevant face a steep learning curve. Nevertheless, they are confident as they dive into the investing fray.

Here are a few nuggets from our chat:

—On their personal motivation for Project 11:

After leaving Microsoft last year, the two decided they liked working together, so they explored different startup and investment ideas. “I love making things real,” Sturtevant says. “If I step over to be an investor and coach, can I have more impact on more companies and more products than what … Next Page »

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Today is a pretty important day for Jeff Janer and his startup. Charlestown, MA-based Spring Partners is releasing a new version of Springpad, its online notebook service for organizing all the information in your life. (And who doesn’t need that?) What’s more, it could be the make-or-break moment for the startup as it strives to differentiate itself from other consumer-focused digital filing systems on the Web—and get a lot more people using it.

“This is a very significant launch for us,” says Janer, Spring Partners’ co-founder and CEO. “We rebuilt our whole Web app.” And the company is looking to get much wider distribution through mobile app stores via Apple (iPad and iPhone), Google Android, and eventually Microsoft (Windows Phone 7).

My colleague Wade has reported extensively on Springpad, including this head-to-head comparison of Springpad vs. Evernote for online note-keeping, earlier this year. The basic idea behind the company is to help consumers store and organize all the interesting info they come across in daily life—whether it’s a bottle of wine at a restaurant, a movie or book worth checking out, or a hotel or attraction relevant to a future trip. Just save it with Springpad (which is free for consumers), and it’s there for you to come back to later.

Springpad emerged as a beta version in 2008, focused on a few niche areas like cooking and parenting. Back then, Janer called the service an “anti-Facebook: a place to focus not on your social network but on yourself and all the tasks and information you have to manage.” Subsequent releases made the process of saving lifestyle information to the Web interface simpler and more convenient. In the past few months, the company has added alert features that tell you when the price of something you want to buy drops, say, or a movie you’re interested in seeing comes out on DVD.

“It started out as a digital filing cabinet, and now it’s a personal assistant,” Janer says. Now it’s about “what if I want to work with my stuff and organize it,” he adds.

The key to Springpad is that it detects the kinds of information you save and structures them in a smart way, Janer says. That allows the software to pull in other relevant links and services from around the Web. It’s also the key to making money, through contextual advertising and affiliate marketing. In other words, while using Springpad you can book a restaurant reservation through OpenTable or buy movie tickets through Fandango, and Springpad gets a cut of the proceeds.

The Web application being released today (and built using HTML5) has some new organizational features too. There’s a new homepage for each user, which is customizable and can be … Next Page »

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“Why not have a high-tech company in Michigan?”

This is the question Bill Hamilton asks of those incredulous of the possibilities of success of a software company based in Okemos, MI. Hamilton, an Ann Arbor native, started TechSmith in 1988, and the company, best known for its screen-capture software, has weathered the challenges of a startup from the rust belt state.

“We see a lot of positives being here in Michigan,” Hamilton said in an interview last week. “The one problem we have is more of a psychological problem than a real one. And that is when we go to recruit people from outside of Michigan, the press is so bad on Michigan right now, so we get people who have a lot of pause.”

Working in a state known more for blight than innovation hasn’t seemed to hold TechSmith back. Hamilton expects the company will end the year with about $41 million in sales.

TechSmith first introduced its flagship product, Snagit, in 1991. And since then, the technology—which allows users to take a shot of their PC screen, save the snapshot, manipulate it, and share it with others—has taken off. But it hasn’t always been steady success for Hamilton and the company. TechSmith has faced challenges common to many startups. The company developed a variety of products, some commercially successful, some not, before finding a viable business model.

Hamilton and a business partner co-founded TechSmith in February 1988, knowing they wanted to develop and sell software products, but they had to start by focusing most of their time on consulting, instead of developing software. “Mostly what we did was help people get PCs to talk to many computers and mainframes,” he said. “We did that for some time. It was partly to put food on the table, but it was also partly to understand what people were looking for.”

After the founders consulted for a few years on the side, they were able to develop their first product—a gateway for local area networks to connect to databases—and were selling it with some success. But an unfortunate partnership stalled the company’s trajectory, at least temporarily. “I made a bad business decision and got into a business relationship with a company that turned out we didn’t have a level of compatibility that we thought,” Hamilton said.

As part of the “divorce,” as Hamilton calls it, TechSmith gave the other company the technology for local network interfaces and was forced to start from scratch, about seven years after the … Next Page »

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Parametric Technology Corporation, better known as PTC (NASDAQ: PMTC), is one of the leading companies in Boston’s “3D design cluster”—the group of companies focusing on computer-aided design (CAD) software for the construction, engineering, architecture, and manufacturing sectors. Back in May, Needham, MA-based PTC announced that its current president and CEO, Dick Harrison, will become the company’s executive chairman, and will be replaced by the company’s current chief operating officer, Jim Heppelmann. The transition goes into effect on October 1.

The 45-year-old Heppelmann (see photo above) was the founder of Windchill, a pioneer in the area of product lifecycle management—that’s the science of keeping CAD data consistent and updated throughout a product’s design and lifecycle. PTC acquired Windchill in 1998 and made the startup’s product lifecycle management software into its biggest product, with five times as many users today as PTC’s CAD products, Pro Engineer and CoCreate. Heppelmann has been with the company ever since.

I met with him in late May, shortly after the announcement that he would take the CEO reins from Harrison. What follows is an edited transcript of our interview.

Xconomy: Does the change of CEO mean any change in direction for PTC?

Jim Heppelmann: No, I do not see any big changes. We will continue to optimize around Windchill.

X: PTC is a public company. How did the market react to your announcement?

JH: I think the investors all know me. The announcement couldn’t be of any surprise for those familiar with PTC.

X: What makes PTC’s tools uniquely valuable? What can engineers or product designers do with your tools that they can’t do with software from your competitors?

JH: Our products allow for globally optimized product development processes. We have a better architecture, a broader footprint of capabilities, and our products simply work … Next Page »

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With more companies putting more of their data and services in the Internet cloud, someone has to help them manage all those bits in an efficient and controllable way. Now a Waltham, MA, startup called Aprigo is trying to position itself as the leader when it comes to important challenges in data security and storage.

The main problem Aprigo is solving has to do with keeping track of who has access to which shared documents, and for how long. That might sound simple, but when companies change partners or end contracts with vendors, IT managers can end up pulling their hair out trying to keep track of file permissions in the cloud. The point is to keep sensitive things like source code, customer data, financial records, and trade secrets out of the wrong hands.

Aprigo is announcing today that its “Ninja” software for managing Google Docs is widely available in the Google Apps Marketplace. The software is targeted at businesses, and it’s all part of the company’s broader efforts to make data storage and management more secure and cost-efficient, for both on-site and online applications (Google Docs would be the latter). The technology includes a data visualization interface, whereby an IT administrator can see graphically which data is exposed to whom, how important the information is, how old it is, and so forth.

Did I mention the online data management sector has been heating up? Just yesterday, we reported on Cambridge, MA-based Backupify and its recent efforts to help companies back up and manage their Google Apps data. It’s clear Google is putting an emphasis on building up its business-software ecosystem, and startups are more than happy to compete for a piece of the action.

Aprigo started in 2008 as an incubation project out of Cedar Fund, a venture capital firm that has offices in Israel and Waltham, MA. Gil Zimmermann, the co-founder and CEO of Aprigo, says he and his two co-founders got “pre-seed” money from Cedar Fund to investigate a bunch of … Next Page »

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Dave McClure is a dynamic guy. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak to a small audience of tech startup founders in Seattle earlier this week. His impassioned message to entrepreneurs was, first of all, to take risks and be ambitious, and second, to build something that people really, really care about.

That sounds obvious, but when you’re a developer slaving over a piece of code, or a designer tinkering with a new look for a website, or a CEO trying to make money to pay your employees, it can be easy to forget that most people visiting your site (or otherwise perusing your services) won’t care about whatever new feature you’re working on.

Of course, every tech company from Amazon to Apple says it focuses heavily on its customers—and always has. But what McClure is talking about is something deeper, something primal.

McClure, a self-professed Silicon Valley geek, angel investor, fund manager, and startup advisor, has amassed a large following among techies and entrepreneurs. He has advised or invested in more than 60 companies in the past six years, including Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), KissMetrics, TeachStreet, Twilio, and WePay (which my colleague Wade just wrote about yesterday). Back in 2001-2004, McClure was director of marketing for PayPal. He has expertise in microfinance, social networks, consumer Internet strategies, and other areas.

There was some overlap in his Seattle talk with what he has said elsewhere—including at Dogpatch Labs in the Boston area in March—about the kinds of metrics that Web startups should pay attention to. But I pulled out a few more nuggets that I think all business leaders interested in innovation on the Web should listen to, even if they might disagree. (These are just my takeaways, they’re not representative of McClure’s whole talk or philosophy.)

First, McClure stressed the importance of building something meaningful, and getting the big picture right. There’s no sense in iterating small things about a product and testing different versions with consumers if you’re not in the right ballpark to start with. And that’s something that can be tested out by gauging just a few people’s reactions to your idea. If no one seems interested, look for a different concept.

Once you’re on what he calls a “meaningful hill,” you can start testing out different looks and features with a small number of consumers (say, 10-20 to start), to gauge whether what you’re doing really matters to them. Ideally, he says, you should talk to potential customers before you even start coding. This is related to “driving usage before trying to acquire users,” he says—a crucial distinction that means, basically, make your product matter before you try to sell it too hard.

And to make a product really matter, McClure says, entrepreneurs need to “tap into the reptilian psyche” of consumers. Make your service—and the visual elements on your website, if it’s Web-based—appeal directly to people’s primal need for things like sex, power, money, fight-or-flight response, protecting loved ones, and so forth. Simplify the interface and focus on one or two aspects, making use of people’s natural visual affinity for things like faces, buttons, and edges. (McClure didn’t give the following as examples, but I think of the “gamification” trend of services like Foursquare as appealing to power; companies like PayPal, Mint.com, and WePay as appealing to money; and some news media sites and porn sites, obviously, as appealing to sex.)

Lastly, as a developer or founder, when do you know you’re done with a given product cycle? It’s when you have a meaningful offering that’s “easy to find and better than the alternatives,” McClure says. “You’re done, market it!…Stop building [stuff]!”

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Can this device take on the iPad? Last night, Seattle-based Amazon.com announced its new version of the Kindle DX (its larger e-reader device), which it touts as having “50 percent better contrast for the clearest text and sharpest images,” as well as a slew of other features including long battery life, 3G wireless connectivity, and a reduced price of $379. Its new screen comes courtesy of E Ink, the longtime Boston-area company now based in Taiwan, which today is officially announcing the availability of its “Pearl” display technology.

E Ink is all about making electronic displays that look like ink on paper. The company was founded back in 1997 by MIT Media Lab researchers, and it has endured a long road to widespread adoption in millions of devices worldwide—not just the Kindle, but most of the top e-readers including those from Sony and Barnes & Noble.

The new Pearl display uses E Ink’s core technology of microcapsules filled with white and black particles that respond to electrode charges. The key advance now is chemical engineering that has made the whites whiter and the darks darker. The company says this means the contrast between the words and the background has gone from the look of a typical newspaper to that of a paperback book. And, unlike the backlit LCD screens of laptops and tablet computers, the E Ink display is readable outdoors in direct sunlight (something we haven’t had to worry about in Seattle yet this year).

It sounds simple, but it’s the kind of incremental advance that takes years of reformulating the “overall chemical stack,” and developing and testing new pigment systems that are robust and reliable, says Lawrence Schwartz, the product director at E Ink responsible for its e-reader business. A key part of the development is making sure the new systems work with large-scale manufacturing processes, and integrating correctly with device partners like Amazon’s Kindle.

OK, so everyone is wondering how the new DX stacks up against Apple’s iPad. (The DX is the Kindle with the larger screen, 9.7 inches diagonally—the same size as the iPad.) Well, the DX is now $120 cheaper than the iPad, and it certainly works well for reading books, newspapers, and magazines. But it doesn’t play video or render full-color pictures, for example. They’re very different devices with different use cases.

What about future versions of e-reader displays? Back in February, Amazon acquired Touchco, a touchscreen technology startup in New York. This raised questions about whether future Kindle devices might offer a touchscreen, full-color display, or some sort of hybrid of a touchscreen and an E Ink display.

E Ink certainly has been working on ways to integrate its technology with different kinds of resistive, capacitive, and inductive touchscreen displays. Schwartz couldn’t go into detail about any particular partners, though. “We’re trying to support all the options out there,” he says.

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Mercer Island, WA-based Napera Networks said today it has released its software for network management and security on the Google Apps Marketplace. It is the first systems and network management application sold in the Google marketplace, says Napera’s CEO and co-founder Todd Hooper. Napera joins Concur Technologies, Skytap, Smartsheet, and Gist in the growing list of Seattle-area software companies selling their wares in Google’s business app store.

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Seattle-based Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) said today it has been awarded a multi-year, $47 million contract from the U.S. Department of Energy to provide supercomputing products and support services to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The machines will be used for advanced climate modeling and research. Under the terms of the contract, Cray will first deliver an XT6 machine, which will go into production later this year, followed by a next-generation supercomputer codenamed “Baker” (plus upgrades to the XT6) in 2011.

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Microsoft said today it will pay VirnetX Holding Corp. $200 million to settle patent infringement cases brought by VirnetX against the Redmond, WA-based software company. VirnetX (NYSE AMEX: VHC), an Internet security firm based in Scotts Valley, CA, filed a lawsuit in 2007 alleging that Microsoft Windows, Office, and other products infringed on two of its patents by including virtual private networking technologies. In March 2010, VirnetX won a first round of litigation and filed another lawsuit, alleging patent infringement in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. As part of the overall settlement, Microsoft will take a license to the VirnetX patents.

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Seattle-based GameHouse, a division of RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), announced today a social gaming platform called GameHouse Fusion that lets gamers connect across social websites like Facebook and devices like mobile phones and PCs. The software platform, which could help drive multi-player game development and publishing, has support from partners including Comcast, MySpace, Qualcomm, Mattel, and PopCap Games. As part of the news today, GameHouse announced a free Facebook application that offers more than a thousand games.

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Seattle-based Verdiem is announcing today a new partnership with San Jose, CA-based Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO). Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will market and sell Verdiem’s energy management software for PCs and networked devices under Cisco’s “EnergyWise Orchestrator” brand, through its worldwide distribution network. Financial details weren’t given, but it’s an original equipment manufacturing deal, so Verdiem’s software will be built into Cisco’s products—which could make it a very promising sales strategy for Verdiem.

Verdiem makes software to help big companies, government agencies, and universities control and manage energy usage by PCs on their network. The software includes features like automatically turning off computers when they’re not in use, and turning them back on when they need to install software updates. It also includes sophisticated dashboards for monitoring energy use. The partnership with Cisco extends Verdiem’s reach to other networked devices such as Cisco IP phones, wireless access points, and edge switches.

“Extending the capabilities of Verdiem’s enterprise platform for PC power management, Cisco and Verdiem are delivering to market the first energy management solution for PCs and networked devices,” said Jeremy Jaech, Verdiem’s CEO, in a statement. Jaech added that the agreement will give businesses and organizations “a trusted, holistic solution to measure, manage and monitor both their energy consumption and carbon footprint.”

Verdiem was founded in 2001 and is venture backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and NCD Investors, among others. Jaech, the co-founder of Aldus, Visio, and Trumba, joined the company in late 2008. Last summer, Verdiem said more than 300 corporations, government agencies, and universities had used its software, and had slashed their PC energy costs by 30 to 60 percent.

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Seattle-area tech giants Amazon.com and Microsoft reported their earnings for the first three months of 2010 today, and each touted significant increases in profits compared with the same period a year ago. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) reported a quarterly profit of $4.01 billion, an increase of 35 percent over the first three months of 2009, thanks in part to sales of its Windows 7 operating system. Meanwhile, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) posted a quarterly profit of $299 million, a 68 percent increase over its first quarter of 2009, and said the Kindle e-book reader was its top-selling product. Both companies’ shares fell by a few percentage points after their earnings reports.

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Redmond, WA-based Concur Technologies (NASDAQ:CNQR) announced this week it has raised $287.5 million in convertible note debt financing, payable at an annual interest rate of 2.5 percent. The notes will mature on April 15, 2015, and will convert into equity if the stock price is above $52.35 per share, which represents a 25 percent increase over $41.88, the closing price of Concur’s common stock on March 30, 2010. Proceeds from the financing will be used for “general corporate purposes, including potential acquisitions and strategic transactions,” according to the release. Concur, which is led by CEO Steve Singh, makes online software for managing employee expenses and corporate travel. Last month, the company announced its product was among the initial set of offerings available in the new Google Apps Marketplace for businesses.

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If you watched last night’s NCAA men’s basketball championship game on the Web, or followed any of Major League Baseball’s opening day action via video on your mobile phone, then you have an idea of the market that Elemental Technologies is trying to tap.

Elemental, a Portland, OR-based video processing startup, is announcing today its most ambitious product to date: a real-time video encoding system that will let broadcasters, media companies, and cable networks stream live video to any type of device across any network. It could be a significant step toward the company’s ultimate goal of letting consumers watch video on any device. That means watching live events as the action is happening with a smooth and seamless experience, instead of getting a jittery picture or waiting for the video to load.

The new product is based on Elemental’s core approach of using off-the-shelf graphics processing units (GPUs) and smart software to do video processing much more efficiently and cheaply than conventional systems that use central processing units or specialized hardware. The difference between this and its two previous video products—a post-production system and an on-demand server—is that “Elemental Live” works in real-time as the video is being sent from a camera to the viewer’s device. The company has filed five patent applications on its technology.

“We spent a ton of time building an interface that’s really easy for anyone to use,” says Sam Blackman, the CEO and co-founder of Elemental. “The product line is fleshed out now.”

Of course, the Major League Baseballs, Turner Broadcasting Systems, and NBCs of the world already have streaming video systems in place. But they don’t always work that well, and they tend to be costly. So the question is whether Elemental can deliver much better live-video performance, such that it immediately drives up traffic and advertising revenues for these big networks. One promising sign: CBS Sports has reported that its ad revenues from streaming video are increasing without … Next Page »

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Google announced last night that it has officially opened an online store for outside developers to sell their business software applications. The Google Apps Marketplace offers cloud-based software that is integrated with Google Apps—things like Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Gmail for businesses. (That might be a record for the number of Googles in one sentence.) Developers will give Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) a 20 percent cut of each app sale, on top of paying a one-time, upfront fee of $100.

The move is widely viewed as an effort by Google to compete more strongly with the core business software sold by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). The announcement happens to come just a few days after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laid out his company’s plans for cloud-based software in a sweeping talk at the University of Washington. It also comes on the heels of Google’s acquisition of DocVerse, a collaborative software startup whose technology could help connect Google Docs with Microsoft Office.

And what about Amazon’s cloud computing platform? Thousands of startup developers use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data, and to host and manage their applications. But Google’s new app store doesn’t stop any developer from also using AWS. Rather, developers can still use AWS for back-end IT services and now market their software through Google Apps. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) itself doesn’t have a business-app marketplace, though it is rolling out mobile “active content” for consumers in its Kindle store later this year.

In fact, Google and Amazon both provide cloud “infrastructure”—software platforms for developers and companies to use as much or as little cloud-computing resources as they want, without the expense and hassle of maintaining their own servers. Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, is getting in this game as well, but it’s not entirely clear how much Microsoft intends to tie developers into its cloud products. Microsoft’s core business thinking is rooted in proprietary desktop-based software and distribution partners—which isn’t a bad model, but how well it transfers to the Web developer ecosystem remains to be seen.

Bottom line: tech startups can now use a hybrid of Amazon and Google cloud services to develop, host, and market their software. This could potentially unseat Microsoft as the king of business software—but it’s still early in the game. (Though surely Oracle, IBM, and SAP are paying close attention too.)

Meanwhile, there are 50-some apps already available in Google’s app store. Among them are products from at least three Seattle-area companies that we follow regularly:

—Concur, a Redmond, WA-based maker of corporate travel and expense management software, is offering an expense-reporting service for small businesses through the Google … Next Page »

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