You wouldn’t throw a fancy dinner party in a 7-Eleven. You wouldn’t hold a symphony concert in a subway station, or teach a meditation class on a tilt-a-whirl ride.

So why does anyone expect readers to read long articles on the Web?

Call me a traitor to my kind, but I think the World Wide Web is a terrible medium for long-form writing, precisely because of the mismatch between content and venue. The basic problem is that browsers are for browsing. Today’s commercial Web, where no morsel of exposition is more than one saccade away from a link, a logo, or an ad, is an impossible place to do any deep thinking.

No one designed this outcome. It’s just that the medium grew up so fast, evolving in less than 20 years from a hypertext file-sharing system at a European physics laboratory into today’s infinite digital bazaar. There wasn’t much time to think about whether it really made sense to translate our collective creative output into HTML, dump it onto Web servers, and pay for the whole operation with hyperlinked ads that, by their very nature, take readers away from whatever they’re trying to read.

Fortunately, there are folks scouting for ways out of this mess. Over the last few years, programmer-entrepreneurs like Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, have come up with a series of clever applications for separating or “parsing” the Web’s text from its context. This new menagerie of minimalism includes browser-based apps that zap the clutter around Web posts and replace it with a peaceful white background. It also includes mobile apps that let you store these pared-down posts for on-the-go consumption whenever you choose. And in this general category, I’d also include a few new curation services intended to spotlight contemporary and classic long-form writing and make it easier to consume.

I’ve picked 10 of my favorite reading apps and services for quick summaries on the following pages. If you’re like me and you spend a lot of time using the desktop or mobile Web, yet you also love getting lost in a long, thoughtful non-fiction article, then you’ll find some of these services to be life-changing.

But I wouldn’t say that we’ve reached an apotheosis—not by a long shot. At best, the Zen approach to repackaging Web articles is only one element of the solution, and it’s not one that will scale up very well. Already, critics are arguing that this kind of republishing is impolite at best, copyright infringement at worst. As soon as the big online publishers realize how many people are bypassing ads by saving parsed text to Instapaper and the other reading apps, they’ll freak out, the same way broadcasters did when TiVo came along. (It’s no accident that people have called the reading apps “DVRs for the Web.”)

What’s needed now are business models that would make publishers happy about providing more content in these ad-free environments. But we’re a long way from finding payment mechanisms that appeal to readers—let alone equitable ways to split up reading-app revenue between publishers, authors, developers, and platform providers, as a tussle last year between Readability and Apple illustrated (more on that below).

For now, damn the torpedoes—here’s my list of the 10 most interesting and useful reading apps and curation services. I’m going to describe the apps first, because once you understand those, the curation services will make a lot more sense. (For a single-page version of this article that you can export to one of the reading apps, click here.)

First app: Clearly.

… Next Page »

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The Web, as we’ve known it, is all about velocity. It wants you to move along. Click here! Go there! Watch this! As a result, it’s never been a great place to settle down and focus for the 30 minutes it might take you to read an 8,000-word article—the sort of long, in-depth non-fiction that made magazines like The Atlantic, Esquire, and The New Yorker famous.

But the Web is still a great medium for circulating such content, especially to readers who might never shell out for a newsstand, subscription, or digital copy of a magazine. And with the emergence of a new class of mobile and browser-based reading apps, there’s finally a more comfortable way for Internet users to enjoy this long-form writing. I’m talking about services like Instapaper, Readability, and Read It Later, which parse Web pages, zeroing in on just the article text and zapping all the ads and other clutter.

In a column tomorrow I’ll look at these apps one at a time and share some pointers about fun ways to use them. But today I want give you a deep-dive look at the newest addition to this category: an iPad app from Longform.org. If you’re an Instapaper user, you’ve no doubt heard of Longform. Brooklynites Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky originally founded the service to help commuters like themselves who wanted to fill up their Instapaper queues with good long reads—2,000 words and above—before hopping on the 2 train into Manhattan. (The company later added support for Readability and Read It Later.) Well, this Wednesday the company released a dedicated Longform app, which iPad owners can use to access not only the usual feed of articles chosen by Longform’s editors, but a more complete panoply of long-form articles pulled from the websites of 25 top-flight publications, such as The Awl, The Believer, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Foreign Policy, The New York Review of Books, and Wired.

The $4.99 app is simple, elegant, and attractive—all prerequisites, if you’re promising readers a more serene reading experience. What sets it apart from the other reading apps is the way it fetches a supply of long-form articles from the chosen publications, so users don’t have to. With apps like Instapaper, by contrast, you do the curating yourself: if you find an article on the Web that you want to read later, you click on a special Instapaper bookmarklet in your browser, and it shows up in the app. But before you can do that, of course, you have to get the bookmarklet from Instapaper’s website. That’s two steps too many for most readers, according to Lammer. “I know that to the tech press this sounds ridiculous,” Lammer says, “but Instapaper is too complicated for some people to use. We wanted to create something that … works more directly.”

I talked with Lammer yesterday to get the Longform.org origin story and to find out more about the genesis and mechanics of the new app. An edited version of our interview follows.

For me, the critical question in our conversation was about how quickly the reading habits of Web and mobile users are changing, and what the rising popularity of the de-cluttering apps will mean for the business of publishing on the Web. The easier it gets to obtain ad-free renditions of Web content, after all, the more carefully publishers are going to have to think about whether to put that content on the Web at all—meaning the reading apps could inadvertently help to kill the very industry they feed on. But Lammer argues that the Longform app and its cousin are currently adding to overall page views, not subtracting—and that in any case, where readers want to go, publishers must follow. Read on for the nitty-gritty.

Xconomy: What possessed you and Max Linsky to get into the curation business?

Aaron Lammer: We were both Instapaper users. For both of us, getting the iPhone and starting to read on it was a pretty formative experience. I have a background in publishing and Web stuff, and Max has a background in journalism. We realized that you can burn through an Instapaper queue pretty quickly if you are commuting 45 minutes each way every day. I think it’s really a New York story, because New York is one of the few places where people spend over an hour a day underground, without a connection.

Both of us were hoarding stories, and passing them around internally in a small group. And we eventually said, … Next Page »

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This is a story about what goes on under the hood of your smartphone or tablet device. It’s also about Yahoo, the troubled Santa Clara-CA based advertising and information giant. But Yahoo doesn’t make a single mobile gadget of its own. So what’s the connection?

It turns out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has ambitious plans to help publishers get more efficient about how they push content out to mobile devices. Specifically, Yahoo wants to become the new middleman of the mobile publishing world, giving media companies software that they could use to reach users of iPhones, Android devices, Windows phones, and other gadgets without having to bow to the programming approaches favored by their powerful makers—namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

To show how the system might work, Yahoo launched a fancy personalized news app back in November called Livestand. The app lets you select feeds from Yahoo partners like Forbes and ABC News and browse their stories on customized, magazine-like pages. It’s full of nifty user-interface elements like a 3D sideways-scrolling publication gallery. So far Livestand only runs on the Apple iPad, and at first glance it’s pretty similar to Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, and a number of other social news reader apps. But Livestand’s true importance is as a demonstration of what’s coming. The unique and potentially revolutionary thing about the app is its software design: it may look and act like a native iOS app, but it’s mostly written in Javascript and HTML5, the languages of the Web.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

How Yahoo pulled this off, and what it could mean for content owners who don’t want to put all their eggs in Apple’s basket—or Google’s, or Microsoft’s—was the focus of a long Xconomy interview last week with Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect for Yahoo’s platform technology group in Sunnyvale, CA. I’d heard Fernandez-Ruiz speak before about how Yahoo is betting on HTML5—the next-generation version of the markup language underlying all Web pages—as an antidote to overreliance on proprietary operating systems like Apple’s iOS. “If you only work in iOS you are bound to the rules of iTunes,” he said at a December talk in San Francisco. “Publishers want pixel-precise, ‘Cupertino-like’ experiences—and we can do that, but also make layouts fluid,” he said.

I wanted to know more about exactly how Yahoo can do this, so I invited Fernandez-Ruiz to my office and quizzed him about the state of mobile software architecture, the role of the Platform Technology Group inside Yahoo, and the true significance of Livestand. The story he told will be eye-opening for anyone who was under the impression that the future of mobile apps is in Apple and Google’s hands alone. Those two companies may control the lion’s share of the smartphone market at the moment, but if Yahoo goes through with plans to share the tools behind Livestand with outside developers, it could help push the siloed mobile-app world back in the direction of the open Web, where no single company is able to dictate how online software and services should work.

The first thing you need to understand about Yahoo’s publishing vision is that it’s coming from the Platform Technology Group. This is the same part of the company that created and then open-sourced key technologies that are now part of the Web’s infrastructure, such as Hadoop, which allows companies to run big, distributed software systems, and YUI, a library of JavaScript tools for building rich Internet applications. Yahoo built many of these tools as part of an effort that began more than half a decade ago to reduce what Fernandez-Ruiz calls a “technical debt.” The company was weighed down by all of the separate technologies its engineers had built to support services like Yahoo Music and Yahoo Movies, and it needed a central platform. “There was a realization around that time that we had to switch the company from being vertical to being horizontal, and start creating reusable technology that we could deploy across the whole place,” he says. “That is how Hadoop got started, for example.”

Technologies created by the Platform Technology Group, such as Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), also help the company and its partners tailor content to appeal to specific users based on their demographics. Fernandez-Ruiz says click-throughs increased 300 percent after Yahoo applied C.O.R.E. to … Next Page »

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Some interesting developments in ad distribution and video this week. Needham, MA-based Extreme Reach, the maker of a video-ad platform for TV and Web, has secured more money for its growth and has made an important acquisition.

Extreme Reach said today it has closed a $9 million credit facility with TD Bank. The company also has acquired Spotlight Business Affairs, a commercial talent rights management and payment firm, for an undisclosed sum. The details sound kind of gnarly, but basically the deal means the company’s ad distribution system will be in compliance with existing talent and rights agreements.

The idea behind Extreme Reach, which started in 2008, is to help video advertisers and agencies distribute ads to TV stations, cable networks, and Web publishers—all with cutting-edge cloud-based storage and processing technology. Last September, I reported that Extreme Reach was growing fast and looking to raise a big financing round. Chief executive John Roland said at the time that the company was very profitable and had grown from 17 employees to about 90 in the previous two years, with 20 more hires and geographic expansion imminent.

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A dark day in Boston is a little darker now. Jerome Rubin, the publishing executive and inventor who co-founded the display company E Ink and helped commercialize the online database that became LexisNexis, died from a stroke on Monday in New York City, according to a report by the Associated Press. He was 86.

Rubin worked at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s, where he helped spin out Massachusetts-based E Ink, the electronic-paper company that makes the display in the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Before that, Rubin, a Harvard University alum trained in physics and law, helped launch an Ohio-based research database for lawyers in 1973. The database search and retrieval system eventually became LexisNexis, specializing in news, legal, and public records information. Harvard Magazine wrote about some of Rubin’s achievements back in 2000.

Rubin lived in Manhattan and is survived by his children, Richard Rubin and Alicia Yamin, according to the AP report.

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Boston area software and life sciences startups are starting off the new year right with a slew of financing, acquisitions, and partnerships news.

—Marlborough, MA-based Physicians Interactive Holdings received a $17 million pledge from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund to develop Web and mobile apps for connecting physicians and life sciences companies.

—Repeat biotech entrepreneurs Bob Langer and Omid Farokhzad founded a new startup, called Blend Therapeutics, along with Stephen Lippard. Blend is backed by $2.8 million from Flagship Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and NanoDimension, according a FierceBiotech report.

—Last Friday saw a number of financings, some for quirkily named startups: $4 million more for Cambridge-based GrabCAD and $4.5 million for Cambridge-based Krush, $6 million for Boston- and Nashville-based Moontoast, $8.3 million for Linkwell Health, and $4 million for Novogy.

—Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, acquired Threepress, a Boston area company focused on digital publishing tools. The price tag of the deal wasn’t disclosed.

—Woburn, MA-based LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM), which makes remote access and customer support software, paid $16.5 million to acquire Kansas-based Bold Software, a developer of technology for live-chat systems and click-to-call customer service.

—A cluster of area digital marketing startups inked deals: Newton, MA-based Neolane raised $27 million, Boston-based … Next Page »

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What is the future of electronic books and digital publishing in Boston? We might be getting a glimpse of it today.

The news is that Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, is acquiring Threepress, a Boston-area software and consulting shop specializing in tools for digital publishing. Terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but it’s probably fairly modest in size.

What makes it interesting is that it’s a story of homegrown, bootstrapped talent in a burgeoning field—e-book reading and publishing—that has finally come of age.

Safari (not to be confused with the Apple browser) provides an on-demand digital library of thousands of books and videos on software, IT, professional development, and other techie and business topics. The 10-year-old company, which has just under 100 employees, is headquartered in Sebastopol, CA. But it started in Boston, and some of its leadership team, including CEO Andrew Savikas, is based here.

As part of the Threepress acquisition, Safari is planning to move into a new office space in Boston that will have about 10 employees. “We are looking at space with room to grow,” says Savikas, an O’Reilly Media veteran. “I expect we’ll be hiring in Boston, especially on the technology side.”

Threepress is a profitable, four-person tech shop founded by Web developer Liza Daly in 2008. Daly previously worked at Digitas and iFactory, and she originally started Threepress to do consulting and build tools for academic publishers and websites. As is often the case for startups, she found an unexpected niche. [Disclosure: Daly is married to Dan Schmidt, my longtime Honest Bob bandmate.]

Daly entered the e-book world by writing Bookworm, an open-source, browser-based reading system for e-books using the EPUB format. At first, she saw books as just part of the content of academic websites. But her work got the attention of Savikas at O’Reilly Media, which decided to host Bookworm on its site in 2009. That year Savikas also recruited Daly to speak at a big … Next Page »

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In a remarkable test of will, I’m going to avoid any Thanksgiving-related puns and just dive straight into this wrapup of the past week in Xconomy Seattle’s tech headlines, covering everything from Black Friday shopping apps to the latest rumblings of possible doom from a local wireless company.

—The crew at Seattle startup Decide made the obvious leap into a full mobile app, released just as bargain-hunters were warming up for the holiday shopping frenzy. Decide is among several sites that help consumers decide whether to buy electronics, or wait for a better price. But the company, co-founded by University of Washington search expert Oren Etzioni, takes things a significant step further by employing a sophisticated price-prediction technology.

—I profiled Avalara, a Bainbridge Island-based company that sells web-based software to help merchants calculate and pay sales taxes. That’s a complicated task, with some 11,000 taxing districts of all shapes and sizes littered around the country. Avalara’s been posting impressive growth numbers, and the trend could continue as Congress, Amazon, and traditional retailers try to hash out a deal over charging sales tax on more online purchases.

—Xconomy’s Greg Huang brought us the scoop on a speech by all-star investor Brad Feld, who told entrepreneurs and angel investors at Microsoft‘s NERD Center in Cambridge, MA, that product and people should be their main focus. Feld is the co-founder of TechStars, a startup bootcamp program with a branch in Seattle. He’s also a board member and investor, through the Foundry Group, in Seattle startups BigDoor Media and Cheezburger Network.

—I looked at a recent tactical shift made by MiNeeds, a Seattle-based site that pairs users up with local service providers who bid for their business. It’s a relatively active area for Web companies to target, but MiNeeds thinks it found a significant edge in the wedding market when it decided to break those services out from the plumbers and carpenters and house painters on the main site. That was something the co-founders resisted—but, as good data geeks, they changed their minds after testing showed it was the right move.

—PaperShare opened up its doors to the public—or at least the cloud computing and virtualization slice of the public. The startup, headed by longtime server computing consultant Doug Brown and former Microsoft virtualization director David Greschler, is a new twist on the sometimes ancient websites that many professionals still use to spread technical info and industry insights.

—And finally, we had some contrasting bits of news: Clearwire, which is trying to simultaneously slow its losses and raise money for a network overhaul, publicly said it would consider delaying a big debt payment. Shares, of course, took a beating. On the other hand, Ignition’s Frank Artale led a $15 million investment in ServiceMesh, a cloud platform company in Santa Monica, CA.

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What does “Jersey Shore” star Snooki have to do with the future of online media? Plenty, it turns out.

That’s one of the surprising things I learned recently chatting with Ben Elowitz, the CEO of Seattle-based Wetpaint, a well-financed startup that’s about a year into its newest mission: Trying to reinvent how content is created and delivered online.

Elowitz is probably best known as a co-founder of online jewel-seller Blue Nile (NASDAQ: NILE). But at Wetpaint, he’s been applying some pretty heavy-duty data analysis to the previously guess-and-shoot business of supplying people with entertainment news.

That’s where Snooki comes in. Wetpaint has found that, all other things being equal, putting the diminutive party girl in the headline of a story about her addictively crass MTV reality show gives a piece of content a 10 percent traffic bump over a headline that features another cast member.

Editors and writers have been guessing at these kinds of things for ages—ever hear the term “if it bleeds, it leads”? But learning how to write punchy headlines has always been more of an art than a science. And with the business models behind media decaying before our eyes, there’s an imperative in learning how to do things a new way.

Wetpaint set out to tackle that problem by starting essentially from scratch, and bringing a heavy technology focus to understanding its audience. From focus groups to one-on-one audience sessions to real-time tracking that shows which articles are getting shared, the company is obsessed with finding just the right combinations in a socially wired world.

And it’s attracting eyeballs. “In less than a year, we’ve gone from zero to over 3 million uniques a month, all targeted females 18 to 34,” Elowitz says. “That’s a lot faster than Groupon went in their first year.”

To do it any other way, Elowitz says, would essentially mean being out of touch with your audience—a risk media probably can’t afford to take.

“Not online—audiences are too fickle. There’s too much information,” he says. “It made sense when you had one brand and you could put a 700-page Vogue on the newsstand and have it take up this visual space with few other options and competitors. But online, when everything’s a Google search or a Facebook click or a type-in term away, there’s too many other competitors crowding it for anyone to be so haughty.”

Media purists love to hate this kind of obsession with traffic and virality, arguing that it will dumb everything down to simple goofy stories that give real news and information short shrift. But Elowitz’s work has attracted the attention of big media brands like The Associated Press, where leaders are looking for new insights into how content moves online.

Here’s a few of the top themes we explored in our recent sit-down, from capital-J journalism, to Google and Facebook, to disrupting advertising:

DOCTOR vs. DJ
“In media, you have this choice of being a doctor, who writes a prescription that’s good for the patient, or you could say, ‘Hey, our job is to be a DJ and we play what the people want to hear. And they’re really different mindsets,” Elowitz says. “The challenge of hard, investigative journalism is not exactly the same as that of entertainment media, right? But I think one of the natural things is, if you can figure out how to engage an audience in some of the lighter categories, you can use the success there to fund the really noble and important things in investigative journalism.

“I’m sure there are other things we learn about the audience that are important for news and investigative journalism. But at a minimum, you can also say that when news isn’t sustainable no one wins. And pop culture is about what do people want to know about.”

The implications for hard news aren’t merely a thought experiment, either. Wetpaint’s experimental team has run some tests on how possible it could be to harness high-level Web knowledge to actually deliver quality news content.

“We look at Twitter and Facebook not just as distribution, but as content sources, too. So we can see what’s important and what are the tweets that are catching on. And we’ve even gone so far as to … Next Page »

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Continuing its strategy of rolling up niche publishing sites into a vertical media network, San Francisco-based Say Media said today that it has acquired Remodelista, a group blog and “sourcebook” on interior design and remodeling. “Remodelista has done an incredible job aligning its brand with clean, timeless and sophisticated style,” Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez said in a statement. “Their editors have established strong relationships with their readers and often use their own homes as laboratories for ideas and inspiration. In short, Remodelista is the epitome of what we look for when we acquire or partner with a new media property: passionate editors with a strong point of view and a vibrant community.” Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Push Pop Press, the San Francisco digital media production house behind the acclaimed iPad version of Al Gore’s climate change primer Our Choice, said today on its website that it has been acquired by Facebook. “Although Facebook isn’t planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories,” co-founders Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris explained in the post. The startup said that its publishing platform, which had been in private beta testing, will be shut down, and that future profits from sales of Our Choice will be donated to The Climate Reality Project.

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San Rafael, CA-based Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), whose 3D design, graphics, and engineering software is used by more than 10 million design professionals around the world, has just made a small but interesting purchase. It has acquired Instructables, a San Francisco-based community site for DIY enthusiasts started almost six years ago by Squid Labs co-founder Eric Wilhelm.

Just last week, I published a long profile of Instructables, which is home to more than 55,000 how-to articles contributed by more than 20,000 volunteer authors, on everything from electric cars to cookie recipes. So I jumped on the phone with Wilhelm early this morning to find out more.

Turns out Autodesk plans to build up the profile of its consumer group, and they’ve been looking for a company that knows how to create online communities to jumpstart the outreach effort. “They want to build tools and services for creative folks as well as design professionals,” Wilhelm says. “They are realizing the power of really engaged communities around services and products, and we are going to help them build those communities.”

That doesn’t mean the existing Instructables site is going away—far from it. “We’ll now have the resources to make some improvements to the site I know our authors and community will love,” Wilhelm said in a blog post announcing the acquisition this morning. All 24 employees of Instructables are joining Autodesk, and the company will remain in its 2nd Street digs in SoMa (only blocks from Autodesk’s San Francisco location).

The companies aren’t sharing the financial details of the acquisition, but Wilhelm says that “everybody is very happy” with the terms. Instructables had raised almost $2 million in venture financing from San Francisco-based O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, the investment fund started by O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, and Baseline Ventures, an early stage investing firm founded by former Kleiner Perkins partner and Microsoft exec Steve Anderson.

Wilhelm says that when he spoke with me for my original profile on July 15, he wasn’t able to share the fact that an acquisition was in the works. But I could tell that the question was on his mind—and in particular, that he’d been thinking about what would make Instructables an attractive purchase. “At the size we’re at, the actual revenue and earnings are not really that interesting to people who might buy us,” he said then. “The most interesting thing is … Next Page »

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People who work hard, the old saying goes, often play just as hard. But for many tech entrepreneurs, the converse is also true: all that play sometimes generates new ideas for work. That’s definitely the story behind San Francisco-based how-to site Instructables, which grew in part out of founder Eric Wilhelm’s obsession with kitesurfing.

Wilhelm took up the sport while finishing his PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT. This was 2001—before commercial gear was available, and before you could see swarms of other kitesurfers at places like San Francisco’s Crissy Field Beach every breezy afternoon. “It was perfect for an engineer because you had to build all your own equipment,” Wilhelm says. “I was sewing my own kites and building my own boards. It was very exciting, because you never knew which piece of equipment was going to fail. The Coast Guard got involved on numerous occasions.”

Wilhelm’s homemade rig provoked curiosity among the windsurfers and others at the beaches where he kited, and he says he found himself spending more and more time answering their requests for plans and drawings. “It was taking just as long to write a Web page about a kiteboard as it was to build one,” he says. “It was clear I needed an easier way to document the stuff I was doing and share it with a wider range of people.”

After grad school, Wilhelm and a few MIT friends moved west and started an Emeryville, CA-based technology incubator and consulting company called Squid Labs. One of the group’s first creations was an online documentation system to keep track of the lab’s hodgepodge of projects, from electrospun nanowires to low-cost eyeglasses. And it was that system that finally provided the solution for Wilhelm’s kitesurfing outreach challenge. In late 2005, he and a Squid Labs colleague Ryan McKinley created a public-facing version of the documentation system, filled it up with kitesurfing posts from Wilhelm’s personal blog that had been rewritten in step-wise instructional form, and voilà: Squid Labs’ first spinoff was born.

Eric Wilhelm, with Instructables' robot mascot

Today, Instructables boasts more than 2 million registered users and a collection of 55,000 how-to articles authored by more than 20,000 contributors. Wilhelm is a bona fide CEO who employs 24 editors and programmers, has raised just shy of $2 million in venture financing from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Baseline Ventures, and has guided the company to a profitable advertising- and subscription-based revenue model.

“I was kind of slow, but it occurred to me about five years after we started this that ‘Hey, we are a publisher,’” Wilhelm says. The core product at Instructables is the article collection, which covers a huge spectrum of projects from “Android-controlled Pneumatic Cannon Powered by Arduino” to “Mexican Hot Chocolate Chip Cookies.” Every article follows the same step-by-step format; the company provides contributors with a simple Web-based editing interface that allows them to upload instructional text, images, and video. The largest article categories, according to Wilhelm, are technology—including computers, software, and electronic—and “living,” which includes crafts, sewing, painting, and kids’ projects. Recipes are also popular: the single biggest Google search keyword that leads new visitors to Instructables, Wilhelm says, is “sweet potato fries.”

Despite the stepwise format of the articles, the goal at Instructables isn’t really to provide readers with every detail they’d need to reconstruct an author’s project, Wilhelm says. There’s far more emphasis on storytelling than on instruction.

“An article on ‘How to fix your sink’ is interesting to me, but ‘Why I made this haunted house’ is way more interesting,” says Wilhelm. “I am happiest when somebody comes in and is inspired to finish their own project. They might find a method or a technique that helps, but it’s more like, ‘Hey, I see that somebody did something that they’re really proud of, and now I’m going to go do something myself.’”

The crowdsourced nature of the site is key to this inspiration, Wilhelm says. Aside from a few articles written by Instructables’ editors, the whole site is created by makers, for makers. “When you come to the site it’s clear that this isn’t just a bunch of MBAs who … Next Page »

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Technology changes quickly, and sometimes, so does my own mind. In January, I wrote a dismissive column about two e-book titles tailored for the Apple iPad, Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters. My main beef was that the apps, which had been lauded by the New York Times as “superbooks,” contained more glitz than substance. With its rich multimedia capabilities, the iPad has the potential to transform the experience of reading, but these titles fell so far short of the mark that I feared they’d permanently turn off the growing number of people who would like to read books on this powerful tablet.

In the past few months, however, publishers have introduced at least three new titles that bolster my confidence in the future of iPad e-books. Ironically, only one of the three is by a living author: Al Gore’s Our Choice, a book in which the former vice president urges people to take action to combat climate change. The other two are multimedia reworkings of literary classics from the 20th century: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Together, they provide a great survey of the interactive techniques publishers can use to make a book’s core textual content much more interesting and memorable. In fact, these three titles are so good that I think the publishing industry can look to them for an early set of best practices for building tablet-based books, which I’ll attempt to outline below.

And of course, they’re fun to read. With prices ranging from $4.99 for Our Choice to $13.99 for The Waste Land, these books might seem pricey compared to the typical 99-cent mobile game. But they deserve a place in any serious iPad aficionado’s app collection.

I’m thinking now that my January column was premature. It’s easy to forget that Apple’s remarkable tablet device is only 15 months old. It takes time for designers, developers, and publishers to figure out a new platform’s strengths—and when it comes to books, they’re competing with a medium that’s had half a millennium to mature. So I think it’s natural that we’re only now seeing some real innovation in the category of standalone, “appified” e-books (as distinct from the more conventional static texts that you can easily download and read using Apple’s iBooks app or Amazon’s Kindle app).

For sheer multimedia richness, Our Choice is the standout among these three e-book apps. The book is littered with “wow” moments right from the opening screen, which shows a spinning Earth, complete with the reader’s location as a pulsing blue dot. There are slick videos, arresting full-screen photographs, and extensive narration from Gore himself. One memorable information graphic shows 2,300 years of world population statistics; as you scroll forward through the years by swiping your finger from right to left, the chart’s y axis compresses to dramatize the exponential growth since 1800.

Nearly every image, chart, and graphic in the book includes similar interactive elements, and they’re all tied together by a long, scrolling ribbon of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen that functions in place of a table of contents. It’s a tour de force in interaction design the likes of which I haven’t seen since the golden era of CD-ROM edutainment titles in the mid-1990s.

It would be wrong, of course, to focus on the multimedia bells and whistles to the exclusion of the book’s message. The app’s main text is lifted directly from the print edition of Our Choice, which first appeared in late 2009. It’s a solution-oriented sequel to Gore’s alarming 2006 film/book/lecture An Inconvenient Truth. The main point is to survey the technology and policy steps governments and their citizens must take soon if we’re to have any hope of slowing greenhouse-gas emissions and heading off catastrophic changes in world climate. If the interactive elements actually got in the way of this critical story (as they do in Alice for the iPad and Why the Net Matters) I’d be worried. But in practice, … Next Page »

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When VideoEgg bought its San Francisco neighbor Six Apart last fall and renamed the combined company Say Media, the reaction from many media watchers was, “Say what?” It wasn’t clear why a rich-media advertising network needed to own a blogging company, or what plans it had for Moveable Type and Typepad, Six Apart’s once-pioneering publishing platforms. And if you had stopped by Say Media’s website at any point in the last eight months, the company would still have looked pretty much like an ad network, albeit one whose technology supports sites with about 400 million unique visitors.

That all started to change in late May, when Say Media launched xoJane, an online magazine headed by Jane Pratt, the founding editor of the now-defunct women’s lifestyle magazines Sassy and Jane. The publication is built on a platform that Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez calls “TypePad plus” (the official name is TypePad for Publishers) and it’s the first home-grown property in what he describes as a “passion-based media company” that will specialize in matching niche online publications with the rich-media digital ads for which VideoEgg was known.

Say’s other big story of the spring was its acquisition of Dogster, Inc., the San Francisco-based creator of the leading pet-services sites Dogster and Catster. The Dogster sites haven’t yet been rebuilt on the Say Media platform, but as the company assimilates or launches more publications, the outlines of its media empire will take clearer shape, Sanchez says. “Right now we’re in this interesting flux period,” he says. “But a year from now it will be really evident from the outside where we are going, and you will really start to see more enablement of independent content creators and people building interesting niche media properties.”

Say Media CEO Matt Sanchez

In other words, Say Media is making a bid to join the ranks of technology-driven vertical media networks, alongside San Francisco-based rivals such as Glam Media, which owns Glam.com, Brash.com, Bliss.com, and Tinker.com; Federated Media, which supplies ads to a network of independent sites such as Boing Boing and GigaOm and also owns niche sites such as Foodbuzz; and Blinkx, which recently bought Burst Media, the advertising supplier for site like Cooks.com, Politico, and RuneScape. In some ways, these networks call to mind the big 20th-century magazine publishing empires like Time-Life, in that each publication has its own special voice and audience and subsists on ads from the big brands who want to reach those audiences. The difference this time around is that it’s not the editors and publishers who are assembling the empires—it’s the middlemen, the companies with the technology needed to package and distribute the ads.

For Say Media, xoJane is the pattern-setter. The site’s tagline is “where women go when they are being selfish,” and it’s full of first-person, mostly breezy articles with headlines like “Wear Your Pajamas Outside” and “My Spin Instructor Quit and I’m Kinda Freaking Out.” There are also big, interactive video ads for brands like Ford, BlackBerry, and Puma. Like Oprah’s O magazine, xoJane is loosely built around Pratt herself and her busy life; for instance, there’s a feature called “Jane’s Phone” featuring text messages, photos, and e-mails extracted directly from Pratt’s iPhone in real time. “I want this to be the no-bullshit women’s site,” Pratt said in an article in Say Media’s PDF-based house magazine—an assertion she backed up with a jarringly personal May 24 post about her history of miscarriages.

Becoming a publisher of passion-based sites like xoJane is a logical outgrowth of the “cost per engagement” or CPE advertising model that VideoEgg pioneered, according to Sanchez. Rather than charging advertisers by the impression, the way most ad networks still do, Say Media charges for … Next Page »

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A chat with the nation’s first chief technology officer was one of the highlights of the past week in tech news. Aneesh Chopra, President Barack Obama’s CTO, is in town this week for a panel discussion at the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology luncheon. He had lunch with local corporate execs yesterday, and we published this interview that touched on just a couple of the administration’s main topics: Why innovation is primed to take off in healthcare, and how the new Startup America Partnership can help the private sector develop strong infrastructure for new companies.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech news from the past week or so:

—I profiled startup Pinpoint Pickup, a towncar-booking app that has bootstrapped its way to services in seven cities. This all comes as competitors like San Francisco-based Uber get tons of press and millions in investment, all without anything near the scope of expansion that Pinpoint has achieved.

—Xconomy’s Greg Huang checked in with Charles River Ventures about the firm’s stake in Intellectual Ventures, the intellectual property machine founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Charles River Ventures has put a whopping $300 million into Intellectual Ventures. Partner Izhar Armony says more investors would get into the developing market if they weren’t convinced that IP is “a dirty world controlled by lawyers.”

—Like just about everybody in the local startup scene, I swung by the Seattle 2.0 Awards. It was an interesting mix of celebration and navel-gazing (the good kind), punctuated by an energetic keynote speech from California VC Mark Suster—lots of F-bombs, a Public Enemy reference, and even a bit of aggressive crowd control. Also featured: Rampaging mascots.

—There were a couple of acquisitions to report, both on the same day. BuzzLabs, a member of Seattle’s burgeoning social media cluster, was snapped up by CityGrid Media, a unit of Barry Diller-headed IAC. BuzzLabs works on social media monitoring, helping other companies sort through the tons of things people are saying about them online. The other deal involved Seattle’s Smashing Ideas, a 15-year-old digital media and marketing company. It was acquired by Random House, the publishing unit of Bertlesmann AG. Terms were not disclosed for either deal.

—Finally, two bits of Xconomy news. We have a recharged Facebook page, to which we’re adding photos, stories, and all the other goodies you’d expect—with more to come. And it comes with a promise: No spam. We’re selecting three of our best stories throughout the day to push through Facebook, so we won’t clog up your feed with every last tidbit. We’ve also added more horsepower to our upcoming event, “Separating Hype from Reality in Alternative Fuels.” Kelly Ogilvie from Blue Marble Energy joins folks from Harvest Power, General Biodiesel and more as we sort through the opportunities for this industry in the years ahead.

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Seattle-based digital media and marketing company Smashing Ideas has been acquired by Bertlesmann AG, which is pairing the 15-year-old company with its Random House book publishing unit. Terms were not disclosed. The companies said in a release that Smashing Ideas would keep its Seattle headquarters, along with a branch in the United Kingdom, working with current clients and continuing to recruit new ones. The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley says that means Smashing Ideas’ 70 Seattle-area employees will stay on board. Smashing Ideas has been working with Random House since last fall to develop mobile apps for books, starting with two children’s titles. Paid Content’s David Kaplan notes that Smashing Ideas’ e-publishing unit “is headed by the co-creator and developer of the Alice for the iPad,” an interactive retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Xconomy’s Wade Roush reviewed that title and some other attempts at “superbooks” earlier this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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McGraw-Hill and Pearson, the world’s two largest educational publishers, have both pitched in for a Series B financing round at Inkling, the San Francisco company founded by a former Apple manager to build interactive textbooks for the iPad.

As with Inkling’s Series A round last August, the amount of the investment wasn’t disclosed, but in an announcement today the company called it a “multi-million dollar financing.” Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, and Sherpalo Capital also participated in the round.

At the same time as it’s been fundraising from strategic partners, Inkling has also been making major strides in its negotiations for publishing rights. When Xconomy profiled Inkling in December, the company had published only six interactive textbooks, four of them from McGraw-Hill. Now the company says it has commitments from McGraw-Hill to develop iPad versions of the top 100 undergraduate titles from its higher education division. It’s also developing iPad versions of 24 business titles for MBA courses from Pearson Education, as well as medical textbooks from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, undergraduate arts and science textbooks from Pearson Education, and medical education and reference books from McGraw-Hill Professional.

A page from the Inkling title 'Music: An Apprecation" by Roger Kamien

The investments and the new commitments signify “a major endorsement from the publishing industry for the Inkling platform,” the company asserted in a press statement today. Founder and CEO Matt MacInnis, formerly a senior manager in international education at Apple, said Inkling is gaining more traction than past digital publishing efforts in education because “We build every textbook from the ground up for the iPad to create a more engaging learning experience.” Illustrations in Inkling books, for example, are often reworked as quizzes, with proper labels appearing only after students guess at the identity of each item.

“The reason we don’t have 10,000 textbooks overnight is that we don’t just plug in to the database of the publisher and suck down PDFs or XML of their existing content and put it on a screen,” MacInnis told Xconomy contributor Elise Craig for the December profile. “The iPad is not a book, and any attempt to shoehorn book content into the iPad in our mind is shortsighted folly.”

As with other types of content available for the iPad, such as music, Inkling textbooks can be purchased in chunks, a chapter at a time. Social features also allow students to access notes on the texts created by their professors or fellow students.

“Creating an interactive, higher-value e-book experience for students is central to our strategy at McGraw-Hill,” said executive Vineet Madan, vice president of McGraw-Hill Learning Ecosystems, in a statement. “We are excited to deepen our relationship with Inkling as we seek to broaden the educational tools and content available on the iPad and other mobile devices.”

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Jadedness: it’s an occupational hazard in tech journalism. Other people look at new software or gadgets and say “Wow.” I look at them and say “Hmm, needs work.”

Last weekend’s New York Times Magazine provided a case in point. Writer Virginia Heffernan reviewed 15-Minute Everyday Pilates, a video e-book from Alameda, CA-based Vook, a publishing startup I profiled last August. It was one of the most perceptive pieces I’ve read about Vook, focusing on how the embedded video in this title brought the book’s exercise instructions to life. “People have talked about book-video combos since the days of CD-ROMs, but Vook has quietly found the right content, the right software and the right distribution system,” Heffernan wrote. Right on.

But then, in the recommendations section at the end of the piece, Heffernan had this to say: “Some of the most fascinating books around aren’t books; they’re superbooks—books with so much functionality that they’re sold as apps. Consider: Alice—a beautiful Alice in Wonderland that lets you move the illustrations. Or David Eagleman’s Why the Net Matters, a book about the Internet with photos, animation and even 3D.”

Superbooks? That sounded exciting. I’ve been wondering for a long time whether the advent of the iPad and its big, beautiful, multitouch screen would inspire book and magazine publishers to go beyond their unimaginative early experiments in digital publishing. So I went right to the iTunes App Store and bought the two titles Heffernan mentioned.

And boy, am I underwhelmed.

I mean no disrespect to the creators of these two apps. It’s still early days in the tablet revolution, and book and magazine designers are just starting to figure out how to exploit the iPad interface in ways that add intellectual and aesthetic value, rather than just glitz, to the core text. So all of the criticism that’s about to follow is meant in a constructive spirit. In fact, I think it’s a compliment to the creators that they’ve built apps that are engaging enough to inspire others to ponder what’s missing. Still, as I set out to write about these apps’ shortcomings, I admit to some hesitation, because I know their creators are already dealing with plenty of fear and criticism from the opposite direction—that is, from traditional publishers with a vested interest in killing anything new or risky. Anyway, here goes.

First, Alice for the iPad. It’s an $8.99 app from Atomic Antelope, a London-based app design studio run by former CNET journalist Chris Stevens. Praised by Oprah Winfrey, no less, as an app that will “change the way kids learn,” it’s an interactive rendition of the classic Lewis Carroll book, which was first published in 1865 and is therefore securely in the public domain. That means anyone can recycle the text and illustrations without fear of the copyright police.

Alice for the iPad works well on a basic design level because it respects its source materials. The sepia palette evokes a real Victorian-era children’s book, and all of the user-interface elements, such as the next-page and back-page arrows, are appropriately unobtrusive. What gives the app its ‘Wow’ factor, though, is … Next Page »

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